A Lone Star Christmas (Texas Justice Book 3) Read online

  The name he’d memorized without meaning to.

  The face he’d never had a chance of forgetting.

  The woman he’d been entranced by since the first time he’d ever seen her.

  The day his father died.

  Chapter Two

  Elena was certain the detective recognized her. He’d been—was shocked too strong a word?—to see her here, but there had been recognition in his eyes, too. She herself had taken a moment to register, so rarely had she seen him not wearing the black cowboy hat that he always seemed to wear. His hair was as dark as all his siblings’, thick and unexpectedly a bit spiky on top. But the sunglasses that were always either on or slipped into his shirt pocket were there, and the rest of his personal uniform seemed the same: black jeans, boots, and shirt, although the shirt had white pearl snaps.

  She had no doubt who he was. The boy whose life had crumbled right in front of her. The boy who had stopped being a boy in the space of a few, horrible moments.

  She knew he was only thirty now, but life had etched a great deal more in his face since that day she’d first seen him. Which was no surprise, given what had happened on that day.

  She remembered it so vividly, when that good, honorable man, Steven Highwater, had been tragically struck down on the street in front of Valencia’s, the restaurant she had been working at then, and managed now. She had tried to help that day, but it had been too late the moment the big truck had hit him. She had still been sitting on the curb, soaked in the blood of a man she’d respected, when Sean Highwater had arrived at the scene. It had been a Thursday, two days before he was due to graduate from Creekbend High School, as she had herself five years before. She knew that because one of her cousins had been in his class.

  She had never seen anyone look so shattered.

  Never, until she had had to tell Marcos his father was gone. Courtesy of the treachery of a supposed ally and a roadside bomb overseas, she had become a twenty-nine-year-old widow with a five-year-old son.

  It had been this Highwater’s oldest brother, Shane—now the police chief as his father had been then—who had come to her to thank her on behalf of the family, for trying to help. She had gained even more respect for the man who had died when she saw how his eldest gave up his college schooling and came home to see to the family. Family was paramount to her, and she thought nothing could make clearer how well Steven Highwater had raised his.

  Including the man before her now.

  “Detective Highwater,” she said when he didn’t speak, but just stared.

  He seemed to snap out of whatever held him—his own memory of that awful, bloody day, perhaps, when his family had been ripped to shreds—but before he could speak Marcos had yelped, “Detective? You’re Detective Highwater, the one who solves all those cases my gran reads about?”

  To his credit, Sean Highwater looked slightly embarrassed. And so she answered for him. “He is that very one, Marcos. And yet he took the time to protect you.”

  “Wow.”

  The boy sounded awed. As well he should, given the case record of this young man. Who then spoke rather abruptly. “Marcos didn’t do anything wrong.” He grimaced, went on. “Other than scaring his grandmother and you, I mean. None of what happened in the park was his fault. I saw the whole thing, and it was the kids we brought in who were harassing him.”

  “That is good to know. So he only has one thing to atone for. Or two, if you count forcing me to leave work.” Marcos winced. She looked back at Sean. “Thank you for intervening, Detective. I realize stepping into a child’s matter is hardly your job.”

  “The people of Last Stand are my job. All of them.” He smiled then. “Just ask my brother.”

  She smiled back. His smile vanished, and she heard him take an audible breath. How very odd. “Still, you could have called someone else to deal.”

  “I was there. And…I’ve been where he was. And that was back when being a…sort of geeky kid wasn’t at all cool.”

  Marcos gave him a startled look. “You? You couldn’t ever have been a geek.”

  “You’re right. It was ‘nerd’ back then. And I was. Definitely the odd one out. Don’t believe me, ask my brothers. Either of them.”

  Another memory flashed through Elena’s mind, of her mother’s sixtieth birthday in January. They had had the family gathering at Valencia’s, which they had closed for the private occasion, but to the amusement of all her mother had insisted on stopping at the Last Stand Saloon for a nightcap. Not for the alcohol, she insisted—although she also said Slater Highwater made the best Tequila Sunrise in Texas because, she had informed them loftily, he made his own grenadine instead of using the fructose-loaded bottled variety—but for the history. She wanted to honor their Tejano ancestor, who had stood here with the Texians to hold off an army, on his own sixtieth birthday.

  But the memory that came to her now was something she had heard that night, something the expert saloonkeeper had said about his younger brother.

  Sean’s been a genius with puzzles since he was four. And police cases are just another sort of puzzle. That’s why he’s so good at it, why he solves cases no one else can.

  So she supposed it could be true that he’d been a nerd. Although looking at the man who stood before them, tall, lean-hipped, broad-shouldered with those ice-blue eyes that were a different shade than any of the other Highwaters’, it was hard to picture him as anything other than the attractive, rather sexy adult male he was now.

  She nearly flushed at her own thought. Where on earth had that come from?

  He turned from Marcos to look at her again. With those eyes.

  “We made quite a production out of this, Mrs. de la Cova,” he said.

  “Elena, please.” At his furrowed brow she added the usual explanation. “My mother is also Maria, so I go by Elena to avoid confusion.”

  After a second’s hesitation he nodded, but she noticed he did not speak the name when he went on. “I think those kids still may be young enough for the lesson to take. But it’s up to you and Marcos what we do from here.”

  “Our options?” She managed to ask it steadily, although she was still inwardly a bit rattled by her unexpected reaction to him.

  “We pursue it, although there’s every likelihood nothing will come of it because of their age and that it was fairly minor, with no real injury done.”

  “Thanks to you.”

  Again he shrugged, the nonverbal equivalent of Just doing my job, ma’am, she supposed.

  “Or,” he went on, “we call in their parents to pick them up and hope that and the ride to the station in the back of a police car, thinking they’ve been arrested, is enough to take some of the bully out of them.”

  “Marcos?” she asked.

  “Let ’em go,” he muttered, staring at his toes before he looked up at Sean and added, “Like you said, that’s sweeter.”

  The detective gave the boy a rather lopsided—and quite charming—smile. “You just think of that, every time you see them. But I suggest you stay quiet about what happened, that way they’ll have a good reason to leave you alone, so you don’t tell.”

  “You agree, then?” she asked the detective.

  “I don’t know their parents, so I don’t know if they’ll have the same effect you do, but I think we should start there.”

  “All right.”

  He bent down to where he was eye level with her son. He pulled a card out of his pocket and handed it to Marcos. “You have any more trouble with those clowns, you call me, or have someone call me.” He pointed at the fierce-looking warrior depicted on the boy’s sweatshirt. “I’ll come down on them like him,” he finished.

  Marcos grinned at that, and Elena welcomed it despite the scare he’d caused both her and her mother. But she would deal with that when she got him home. Or she would leave it to her mother, who could still put the fear of God into just about anyone.

  “Hey, buddy,” the detective was saying now, “why don’t you head do
wn to the end of the hall, to the break room. There’s a fridge in there with some Cokes and juice. Grab one—” he caught himself and glanced at her before going on “—of whatever you’re allowed, and take a seat while I talk to your mom.”

  Marcos looked at her. She nodded, and he scampered off.

  She smiled. “Very nice save, Detective.”

  He shrugged again, and this time his smile was a little sheepish. “I’m a little slow on the parental uptake sometimes.”

  She couldn’t help herself, the way he put it made her laugh. But then he gave her a look serious enough that it faded. “What?”

  “If any bruises or marks turn up tomorrow—I already checked him now, and he looks fine—please let me know. I’d like them documented just in case we need it later.”

  The thought of her little boy—for to her he was still that, and likely ever would be—hurt made her shiver. It was an effort to simply nod and say, “All right.” Then she asked, “Was that really the reason for this attack? His shirt and size?”

  He gave a half shake of his head. “Most of it, I think. Some things never change at that age, I’m afraid. Especially with kids who…have no imagination. They don’t understand kids who do.”

  “I suppose I should consider it progress that it was not because of his heritage and ethnicity.”

  Detective Highwater went very still. “If I thought that was the motive, they’d already be on their way to juvenile detention.”

  She lifted a brow at him. “That was rather…vehement.”

  “Your family has been here as long as anyone, and longer than most. You’ve got an ancestor on that plaque outside the saloon. And he took a chance on this town when few did, he and his family staying on when others left after the battle. You and yours deserve the respect of Last Stand.”

  She stared at him. It was true her family was of some standing in town, but she hadn’t expected him to even know the details, let alone state them so…passionately. And now that he had, she who was rarely at a loss for words didn’t quite know what to say. Finally, she went with the simple truth.

  “My thanks again, Detective Highwater. For what you did today, and what you just said.”

  Elena spent the walk out to her car, a chastened Marcos at her side still clutching the can of Coke, wondering exactly what the detective had meant by that “I don’t know if they’ll have the same effect you do” remark, and savoring what else he’d said, about her family. She thought about it until they were in the car and Marcos was belted into the passenger seat.

  “He’s really cool,” Marcos said.

  Indeed. “It was very good of him to help you.”

  “He really scared those guys, after they knocked me down.”

  “I know.” Detective Highwater had orchestrated quite the show, to teach a clearly badly needed lesson. For the sake of an eleven-year-old boy.

  “He even deputized me!”

  She blinked at that, and as they pulled up to the red light at Main Street she looked at him. “What?”

  “He deputized me, and had me take a picture of those guys. Because he had to use both hands to hang on to the worst two.”

  “I see.”

  The boy’s gleeful expression faltered slightly. “He didn’t like what I did, though. To Gran.”

  “Nor did I,” she said rather sternly.

  Marcos gave her a troubled look, his cinnamon brown eyes so like his father’s. “I just thought about how bored I was, since I couldn’t play my game while Gran was sleeping.” He lowered his gaze to his hands. “I didn’t think about it that way, until he said it like that. That I left Gran to worry about me, when she was sick.”

  One more point for the detective. Yes, the boy she remembered—that stunned, scared, heartbroken boy—had become a man. Quite a man.

  The light changed, and she had to turn her attention back to driving. Which was just as well, for she had just realized something. That she had gone from thinking of him as Detective Highwater to Sean…and then back to detective again. And the change back had happened after she had had that startling reaction to him as a man.

  A very sexy man.

  It wasn’t hard to figure out that, even subconsciously, she was distancing herself. It wasn’t really a habit, because she wasn’t usually attracted. To any man, so deep was her grief, even after six years.

  And the thought of those years reminded her she was five years older than him, and he would no doubt be hideously embarrassed if he had any idea of how she’d reacted to him. Fortunately, those six years of pretending to be fine when inside she was crumbling had, if nothing else, polished her ability to present a calm exterior.

  Chapter Three

  Sean Highwater sank into the chair at his desk. You’d think he’d run a marathon, the way his heart was hammering.

  She was still the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen.

  And she did the craziest things to him, without even trying.

  For years after that awful day he’d tried to put her out of his mind. But those first moments when he’d gotten there and seen the debris of the accident, seen her sitting on the curb with his father’s blood on her clothes, her hands, heard someone consoling her that she had tried to save him, seen the tears glistening in those dark, bottomless eyes, were etched into his mind as if with sweet, searing acid. The horror and the beauty had both crashed into him so hard that it seemed they would ever be intertwined.

  He had managed for a while to write it off to the overwhelming emotions of that day and the days that followed. But as the years went on, he realized that putting it out of his mind would never, ever happen. He hadn’t—a fact he’d been thankful for later—gotten there in time to see his father lying dead in the street. But he had gotten there in time to see her. And she was inextricably linked to that day.

  Yet at the same time she stirred him like no woman ever had. At eighteen, that hadn’t been surprising. That she still did, years later, with no personal contact at all, was.

  Usually he simply avoided her whenever he could. Last Stand was a small town, but not so small that avoiding someone was impossible. Of course it didn’t help that he loved Tex-Mex food and her family had the best place in town for it, so in the beginning he had just dodged her work shifts.

  But then she took over managing the place, and seemed to be there whenever they were open. That had been what had gotten him in trouble today, when it came down to it. Because he’d turned to asking Sage to pick him up takeout whenever she was going there, and it hadn’t taken her long—she was a smart girl—to figure out why he never wanted to go himself. At first she’d written it off to that horrible day, but then one year at the rodeo parade, when Elena rode in traditional Mexican costume, looking utterly regal and untouchable, the teenaged Sage was too smart to miss the way he looked at her.

  She had teased him about it at first, until she saw how seriously it had gotten to him, and realized it was all tied up in that day that had nearly destroyed their family. He supposed it was a mark of progress that Sage felt as if she could set him up as she had today. It was partly his own fault, for never asking the kid his last name. And since he’d been so proficient at avoiding Elena de la Cova, he’d had no idea what her son looked like these days.

  De la Cova. Yeah, don’t forget that, Highwater. She was married to a freaking hero who died fighting for his country. And by all accounts she still mourned him. He believed it, given he never saw her—which he couldn’t avoid in Last Stand, although he’d managed to keep it at a distance—wearing anything but black.

  Not that she didn’t look incredible in it. He’d gotten a glimpse of her at Minna Herdmann’s birthday gathering, before the accident that had marred that day, and the apparently common feminine phrase “little black dress” suddenly made sense to him. Because the little black dress she wore that day about took the top of his head off. There had been nothing overtly sexy about it, it hadn’t been particularly short, or low-cut, but it had fit her tall, graceful bod
y like a glove, and the high heels she’d worn curved her legs in a way that had sent him to the bar looking for a tequila shooter. Something, anything to combat the fire that burst to life in him every time he saw her.

  And if there was anything more laughable than the nerdy kid she made him feel like yearning after the unattainable queen, he couldn’t think of it.

  “Why is our sister sitting in dispatch grinning her head off?”

  Sean blinked, came out of his pitiful reverie to look at his brother, who was leaning against the doorjamb, legs crossed at the ankles.

  “How would I know?” he answered, although he knew perfectly well.

  “She said to ask you.”

  “What are you even doing here? I thought you and Lily were headed for San Antonio to see her mom.”

  “We are. I just stopped in to check on things.”

  Never let it be said the Last Stand police chief wasn’t as dedicated to his job as anyone else on the department. More than once he’d come in to work a beat, or even answer phones to give someone else a day off they needed for something special or urgent. Sean was here himself for that reason, to give two of the other detectives with family visiting for the holiday the day off, but he would bet there weren’t many chiefs who would do it.

  “And,” Shane added with a poorly disguised grin, “to drop off this info from Fort Worth for you. They’re looking forward to your visit in three weeks.”

  “Damn.” He’d been hoping something would save him. Giving a seminar might not be at the top of his I-don’t-ever-want-to-do-that list, but it was definitely in the top five. But the department there seemed determined to have him after he’d tracked down the robbery/homicide suspect they’d spent weeks searching for.

  “We’ll try and survive without you for three days,” Shane teased.

  Sean made a face at him. “Why don’t you go see if you can end up in another viral video?”

  He figured that was a good way to cut this short; Shane was still irked that a video taken during the rodeo this year, of him putting on a blistering calf-roping performance, had hit the internet. Sean suspected Slater, given the new peace between them thanks to Joey. It had gone viral just like the others that had already given the police chief of Last Stand a fame—and sex-symbol status—he’d never wanted.