Chapter Two
Maddox
SLOW BURN
Performed by Zac Brown Band
I pulled back just in time, letting the fist barely graze my chin.
The movement was enough to send my Stetson flying, landing amongst the straw where it was going to get trampled.
It was the sight of my hat on the ground that pissed me off more than the fist or Willy Tate’s drunken, angry snarl as he lunged for me again.
I ducked the second shot and shoved my shoulder into his gut, taking him down to the ground with me.
The music had stopped, the customers in the bar quiet as they watched two burly men wrestle.
Several chairs were tipped over, tables were bumped, and drinks were spilled as we rolled around.
It took me one too many moves before I finally had him pinned facedown with his hands behind his back and my knee holding him in place.
“Damn it, Willy, you owe me a new hat!” I growled.
Clapping filled the air along with hoots and hollers that made my eyes roll.
“Thanks for the show!” someone in the back yelled as someone else shouted out, “Brings me back to my sheep-tying days!”
“Thanks for the help, y’all,” I said sarcastically, eyeing my brother sitting calmly on a stool at the bar with a crooked grin.
“Why, Sheriff Maddox, no one would ever presume to think you needed help.” Ryder’s grin grew, and then he had the audacity to wink at me as he raised a beer in my direction.
I barely resisted flipping him the bird as laughter erupted from him, causing his blue eyes that matched mine to crinkle at the corners.
He brushed a hand over his perfectly tousled dark-brown hair that should have been smashed flat after wearing a hat all day but instead looked like he’d stepped off the page of a damn magazine.
I was not anywhere near picture-perfect.
My dark-blond hair was standing up in places, and the stubble on my chin—a day past trendy—was dripping and sticky from the whiskey Willy had thrown at me.
The alcohol had stained my tan shirt, and our scuffle had snagged the ends of my olive-green tie, almost ripping it from my neck.
“She left me, Maddox. For a goddamn suit from Knoxville.” Willy was crying now, and it almost looked ridiculous on the six-foot-three mechanic with the hair and beard of someone who’d been lost in the wild for one too many years.
“Taking it out on everyone here isn’t going to make the pain go away, shithead,” I grumbled. “You gonna start swinging again if I get up?”
Willy shook his head. I stood and then helped the man to his feet. His sad, puppy-dog eyes were full of tears that tumbled down his cheeks.
“You going to arrest him for hitting a lawman?” Gemma asked, trying not to giggle.
My sister was sitting next to Ryder at the bar.
Her long hair was the same color as mine, but her hazel eyes were full of our brother’s laughter.
Ryder tapped her elbow with his in appreciation of the taunt she’d thrown my way.
Willy hunched his enormous shoulders. “Fuck. I forgot you’re the sheriff now.”
“I’ve been an officer of the law for damn near six years, Willy.
Hitting me before or after I’d been elected wouldn’t change a damn thing.
” I leaned down and picked up my hat, brushing it against my thigh and shoving him toward the door of McFlannigan’s.
It was the only bar in town and normally looked as Irish as my uncle who owned the place, but on Thursdays, they had two-dollar beers, line dancing, and a live band.
Uncle Phil brought hay in from the ranch to make it more Tennessee barnyard than Dublin dive .
I’d told him more than once the hay was a hazard, but as he was friends with the county health inspector, who just happened to be in one of the booths tonight with his wife, my uncle clearly didn’t have to worry about being fined.
That was the way everything in this town worked, and while I’d been able to turn a blind eye to some of it as a deputy, since I’d been elected, it had been harder to do.
The people of Winter County had put their trust in me.
Maybe it was because Sheriff Haskett had thrown his hat in my direction when he’d stepped down, or maybe it was because the Hatley family had been in Willow Creek since its inception.
Regardless, they’d taken a chance on a green twenty-seven-year-old last year, and I’d spent twelve months proving to them it had been the right choice.
Willy and I were at the door when Ryder called out, “Going to come back and have a beer with us after you get him home?”
I shook my head.
“Come on, Maddox, one drink!” Gemma called.
I had no desire to sit at the bar, shooting the shit with my siblings, after the long day I’d had.
If the bar hadn’t been mere blocks from my house when the call had come in as I walked out the station door, I would’ve let one of my deputies handle the call.
Now that I’d done my civic duty for the night, I had only one goal, and that was getting home to my girl.
I directed Willy into the passenger seat of my ancient green and rust-covered Bronco, wishing I’d driven my sheriff truck instead. But the Bronco had called to me this morning―the date dragging at me as it did every year.
The date I tried to ignore and failed miserably to do.
I got Willy tucked into the small apartment above the garage his family had owned almost as long as mine had owned the ranch and then headed to my 1950s-style bungalow two streets over.
After three years of hard work, the house was pretty much how I wanted it.
The wood siding had a fresh coat of pale-yellow paint, new black shutters edged the multi-paned windows, and a burnt-orange custom door invited you in, just like the swing tucked in the corner of the front porch .
An antique lamp on the hall table cast a gentle light onto the dark plank floors as I let myself in, and the murmur of the television in the open-space living area greeted me.
Rianne looked up from the cushy, leather couch I’d spent a small fortune on as I hung my destroyed hat on the rack by the door.
Her bright-red lips curved upward in greeting, and her dark-brown face was just starting to show signs of wrinkles even though she was as old as my grandparents.
Her black-and-white corkscrew hair was tucked beneath a vivid-blue scarf littered with pictures of baby ducks.
She had so many head wraps I thought she could wear a different one every day of the year and still have more.
“How is she?” I asked.
“Like always. Pretending to sleep but really waiting for you,” she said, turning off the TV and rising.
She was wearing soft jeans and a long tunic top, looking far more casual than she ever had as my third-grade teacher.
When I’d been a rowdy eight-year-old, I’d adored her, and now that she’d turned in her teacher badge and taken on helping me, I loved her almost as much as I loved my mama.
“You smell like a liquor cabinet.” Rianne’s nose squished up, but there was a smile on her lips.
I sighed, ran my hand over my half-assed, alcohol-soaked beard, and grimaced.
“Had to pull Willy out of McFlannigan’s before he tore it apart.”
Rianne’s face fell. “Aw, he’s taking the loss of his woman pretty hard.”
I nodded. It was why I’d tucked him at home instead of locking him up in a cell at the station.
I knew what it felt like to watch your woman drive away.
The agony I’d felt didn’t make me want to bleed out on the floor anymore, but the reminder on this day, more than any other, made the hurt tumble through me as if it had happened yesterday instead of a decade ago.
Rianne gathered her things, and I walked her to the door.
“Try to get some rest tomorrow, and I’ll see you on Sunday,” she said before leaving.
I was technically off the clock for a whole day, but that never meant much when you were one of only twelve people holding down the only law enforcement agency in the county.
We didn’t have a lot of crime in Willow Creek, but we did have a lot of work.
On any given day, I might be helping round up stray chickens one moment and taking beer from underage kids at the lake the next.
The biggest pain in my ass was the motorcycle club, The West Gears, who used their headquarters up in the mountains right at the county line to deal drugs and store stolen merchandise.
The Gears were the reason I was dead on my feet tonight after a day of hunting them down.
I headed down the hall, feet stalling as I passed Mila’s door.
She’d expect me to crawl into bed with her, and I didn’t want to do that smelling like whiskey, so I continued on to the one room I hadn’t let Mama or my sisters help decorate.
Instead, the main bedroom reflected me like almost no other part of the house.
It was full of dark woods, navy linens, and black-and-white photographs of the lake and the ranch.
I locked my weapon away in the gun safe, showered in the bathroom filled with teak woods and blue linens, and then changed into sweats and a long-sleeve T-shirt before padding on bare feet back to Mila’s room.
I turned the knob as quietly as possible in a vain hope that she might actually be asleep but chuckled to myself when I saw her dart her head under the covers.
Her room looked like a rainbow had thrown up in it.
She was obsessed with them. She’d even convinced me to paint her white headboard in rainbow stripes.
Between that, her four pastel-colored nightlights, and the pile of stuffed unicorns that filled an armchair in the corner, it felt like walking into a cartoon world.
I crossed the faux-fur white rug and stood looking down at the rainbow comforter that shed glitter like it was a cat changing seasons.
“Oh good, Mila is asleep. I don’t have to read The Day the Unicorns Saved the World for the one-thousandth time,” I said softly.
The covers were thrown back, and beautiful wheat-colored eyes stared at me under thick brows that were almost black and contrasted with the honey-blonde hair spiraling in waves around her round face. “I’m not sleeping, Daddy! You have to read it, or I’ll be up all night.”
There was a little whine to her sweet voice and a pout to her lips that made my mouth twitch. I sighed dramatically, looked up at the ceiling, and pretended to contemplate the fate of my life before pulling the book from her nightstand.
“Scootch over,” I said as if this wasn’t our nightly routine.
She pulled back her covers and moved to the side as I slid in with her.
Her tiny, five-year-old body curled up against me, and I put one arm around her, holding her tight.
She smelled like the berry shampoo Mama had bought for her birthday, and she had on a pair of fuzzy, pink-striped pajamas that had been from my sister.
Her body was warm and her tiny hand soft as she placed it on my arm.
My heart filled to near bursting just by having her there.
“How was your day?” I asked.
“I learned that the letter L says lllll like in lion, and that five and two more is seven. Seven is my birthday number, so Mrs. Randall let me use the butterfly pointer and lead the class in the alphabet song.”
Kindergarten. My baby had started kindergarten at the end of August. I hadn’t expected it to be as hard as it had been to drop her off at school and walk away.
I mean, I’d been leaving her every day for the four years of her life that she’d been mine.
But there was something different about leaving her with Rianne versus taking her into a classroom full of kids who I couldn’t guarantee would be nice and adults who were strangers.
I’d run the name of the principal and every teacher at the school to make sure there weren’t any scumbags hiding in the system, even when I knew the state wouldn’t have given certificates to criminals.
I’d sort of gone off my rocker for a day or two.
The only thing that made it easier was knowing Mila liked being there.
“That sounds like a really good day,” I told her.
“Yeah. But Missy wouldn’t give me a turn with the hula hoop.
” She pouted, and every vein in my body tightened.
The need to protect her, even from other five-year-olds, was a strange sensation.
There was a time in my life when I hadn’t wanted to be a dad, when I’d promised another blonde-haired girl that we wouldn’t have kids because she was adamantly opposed to having them.
“I’ll buy you your own damn hula hoop tomorrow,” I told her, voice gruff with emotions. She giggled .
“You cussed again, Daddy. You owe me another dollar for the cuss jar.”
I smiled with my lips against her hair. She’d have enough money in that jar to go to college if I wasn’t careful. The thought of her being grown up and going away to college threatened to rip some more at the scars that had already cracked open today.
I pushed the pain away, opened the book, and started reading as my girl snuggled deeper into my chest. My heart expanded until it was quadruple the size it should have been. This was perfect. I didn’t need anything else in my life but this.