Taming Jesse James

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Jesse couldn’t have heard it inside the office, but he lifted his head anyway.

His gaze locked onto hers and a slow, private smile spread over his features like the sun rising over the Salt River range.

A simple smile shouldn’t have the power to make her blush, but she could feel more color seeping into her cheeks. Still, she managed to give him a hesitant smile in return, then quickly turned away to find Janie watching the interaction with avid interest.

“Whoa. What was that all about?”

Sarah blushed harder. “What?”

“Is there something I should know about going on between you and our hunky police chief?”

“No. Of course not! I barely know the man.”

“So why is your face more red than Principal Chuck’s right now? Come on. Tell all!”

“There’s nothing to tell.” Without realizing it, she used the same curt tone she would with an unruly student. “Excuse me. I have to get to class.”

Janie’s tentative friendliness disappeared and she donned a cool mask. “Sorry for prying.”

Sarah felt a pang as she watched it disappear. She remembered her vow to make new friends and realized she was blowing it, big time. “Janie, I’m sorry. But really, nothing’s going on. Chief Harte is just…we’re just…”

“You don’t have to explain. It’s none of my business.”

“Honestly, there’s nothing to explain. I just always seem to act like an idiot around him,” she confessed.

“Don’t we all, sweetheart? What is it about big, gorgeous men that zaps our brain cells?”

The warmth had returned to Janie’s expression, Sarah saw with relief. She wanted to bask in it like a cat sprawled out in a sunbeam.

But she knew she would have to work harder to make a new friend than just a quick conversation in the hallway. Gathering her nerve, she smiled at the other teacher. “Are you on lunch duty this week?”

“No. I had my turn last week.”

“Would you like to escape the school grounds for a half hour and grab a quick bite sometime?”

If she was shocked by the invitation, Janie quickly recovered. “Sure. Just name the day.”

“How about Friday?”

“Sounds perfect.”

It was a start, Sarah thought as she walked to her classroom. And somehow, for just a moment, the water surrounding her didn’t seem quite as cold.

Jesse tuned out Up-Chuck Hendricks and watched Sarah make her slow way down the hall toward her classroom. She was still favoring her leg, he saw with concern. Her walk was just a little uneven, like a wagon rolling along with a wobbly wheel.

He shouldn’t have taken her word that everything was okay the night before. He should have insisted on hauling her to the clinic, just to check things out.

What else was he supposed to have done? He couldn’t force her to go to the doctor if she didn’t want to. He’d done what he could, sat with her as long as she would let him.

It amazed him how protective he felt toward her. Amazed him and made him a little uneasy. He tried to tell himself it was just a natural—if chauvinistic—reaction of a man in the presence of a soft, quiet, fragile woman. But deep down he knew it was more than that. For some strange reason he was fascinated by Sarah McKenzie, and had been since the day she moved to Star Valley.

He’d dreamed about her the night before.

He imagined she would be horror-struck if she knew the hot, steamy activities his subconscious had conjured up for them to do together. Hell, even he was horror-struck when he woke up and found himself hard and ready for action. She wasn’t at all his type. So why couldn’t he seem to stop thinking about her?

“Are you listening to me?”

“Sure.” He snapped his attention back to Chuck Hendricks, chagrined that he’d let himself get so distracted from the investigation by the soft, pretty Sarah McKenzie.

He also didn’t like the fact that the principal could make him feel as if he had somehow traveled twenty years back in time and was once more the troublemaker du jour in Up-Chuck’s sixth-grade class.

“What are you going to do to get to the bottom of this?” Hendricks snapped. “These criminals must be caught and punished severely. I can tell you right where to start. Corey Sylvester.”

The principal said the name with such seething animosity that a wave of sympathy for the kid washed through Jesse. He knew all too well what it was like to be at the top of Chuck’s scapegoat list.

“Why Corey?” he asked.

“It’s exactly the sort of thing he would do. After thirty-five years of teaching hooligans, I know a bad apple and I can tell you that boy is just plain rotten.”

The principal didn’t seem to notice the sudden frown and narrowed gaze of one of those former hooligans. “Besides that,” he went on, “I saw him hanging around by the jar yesterday before lunch recess. It’s the second or third time I’ve seen him there. I know he was up to no good.”

“Maybe he was putting some quarters in.”

Hendricks harrumphed as if the idea was the most ridiculous thing he’d ever heard. “I doubt it.”

Jesse felt a muscle twitch in his jaw. He would have liked to tell Up-Chuck exactly what he thought of him, but he knew that wouldn’t help him solve the case of the missing quarters. “I’ll talk to him. But I’ve got to tell you, my instincts are telling me you’re on the wrong track. I don’t think he did it. Or if he did, he couldn’t have acted alone.”

“Why not?”

“Do the math, Chuck.” His smile would have curdled milk, but his former teacher didn’t seem to notice. “Corey weighs no more than sixty-five pounds. A jar with six thousand quarters would weigh a whole lot more than that. He wouldn’t even be able to wrestle it onto a dolly by himself, let alone push the thing out of the building.”

He paused to give the information time to sink through Hendricks’s thick skull. “Then you have the matter of getting it out of here. You think he could haul a dolly weighing that much all the way to his house?”

“Well, he probably had help. Most likely that troublemaking Connor kid. You’ll probably find both of them spending the loot all over town on any manner of illegal—not to mention immoral—activity.”

Yeah. Paying for booze and hookers with quarters always went over real well. “Thanks for all the leads. I’ll do my best to get the money back for the kids.”

The principal sniffed. “I sincerely hope you do.”

Jesse sighed. Having Chuck on his case over this was going to be a major pain in the keister until he found the culprits.

Chapter 5

He managed to put off talking to Corey Sylvester for nearly two hours.

Finally he had to admit that he had nobody left to interview. He had talked to the janitor and the assistant principal, to several of the faculty members and the custodial staff. He had interviewed the residents of the three houses across the street from the school to see if any of them had heard or seen anything in the night, and he had Lou notifying local merchants and banks to give him a buzz if anybody brought in an unusual number of quarters.

He had half a mind to wrap up the initial canvas right now and forget about Corey Sylvester. It stuck in his craw that he had to treat the kid like a suspect just because Chuck Hendricks had decided to peg him as that year’s scapegoat.

Jesse knew how it felt to be the kid everybody looked to when trouble broke out. He knew what it was like to be blamed any time anything came missing, to be sent to the principal’s office for something he didn’t have a thing to do with, to know that most people figured you would never amount to much.

He knew the deep sense of injustice a ten-year-old can experience at being unjustly accused.

He loved his older brother, but he had to admit he’d been a tough act to follow in school. Matt had been every teacher’s dream. The best athlete, the best student. Trustworthy, loyal and all the rest of the Boy Scout mumbo jumbo.

Jesse, on the other hand, had struggled in school. He’d been a whiz at math, but words on a page just never seemed to fit together right for him. Reading and spelling had always been torture, right on into high school. In his frustration, maybe he’d developed a bad attitude about school, but that didn’t mean he’d been a bad kid.

After a while, he’d got so tired of trying and failing to measure up to Matt’s example that it had seemed easier to just give up and sink to everybody’s expectations.

While his parents had still been alive, he had managed to stay out of serious trouble just because he knew how his mom’s face would crumple and his dad would look at him with that terrible look of disappointment. After they’d died, everything had changed and he’d become all Chuck predicted for him.

He hated having to feed the principal’s stereotypes about Corey Sylvester by interviewing the kid, especially when he was trying to find out what was going on with him. But Hendricks had said he’d seen the kid by the coin jar. What kind of a cop would he be if he ignored a possible lead, just because the source of that lead was a bitter, humorless man who had no business working with children?

He had a duty to follow up, and he had worked hard the past three years to prove he was the kind of police chief who tried his best to meet his obligations.

At least he could make the interrogation as subtle as possible. And on the upside, pulling Corey out of class would give him a chance to see Sarah McKenzie again.

While he had been busy chasing down nonexistent leads to the theft, the students had descended on Salt River Elementary. Up and down the hallway he could hear the low murmur of voices in classrooms, the squeak of chalk on chalkboards, the rustling of paper.

As he passed each doorway on the way to Sarah’s room, he could see teachers lecturing in the front of their classes and students bent over their work.

Walking the hallways brought memories, thick and fast, of his own school years. This was a different school than the one he’d attended. The board of education had bonded for a new building ten years earlier and demolished the crumbling old brick two-story structure to build this modern new school, with its brown brick and carpeted walls.

It might be a different building, but it smelled just as he remembered from his own school years, a jumbled mix of wet paper and paste and chalk, all mingling with the yeasty scent of baking rolls that floated out from the cafeteria.

Ms. McKenzie’s classroom was the last one on the right. He smiled at the whimsical welcome sign over her door, featuring a bird knocking at the door of an elaborate birdhouse.

He could hear her musical voice from inside and he paused for a moment to listen. She was talking in that soft, sexy voice about fractions. Despite the benign subject matter, her voice somehow managed to twine through his insides like some voracious vine.

How could he get so turned on by a shy schoolteacher talking about fractions, in a building full of kids?

He watched her through the little square window set into her door, trying to figure out her appeal. She was soft and pretty in a pale blue short-sleeve sweater set and a floral skirt. Her sun-streaked hair was held back on the side by some kind of clip thing, but it fell long and luxurious to the center of her back, just inviting a man to bury his hands in it.

And that mouth. Full and lush and soft enough to make even a priest have to spend a few extra minutes in confession.