An Accidental Family. Darlene Graham

discrepancies to clear up. The name Howard gnawed at him.

      Even as he mulled over the situation, his thoughts, and his eyes, kept straying back to Rainey Chapman. The woman was a surprise. Not because of her stunning good looks. The surprise was how he felt in her presence.

      In his days as a rodeo champion he’d grown accustomed to women hanging around. And cops, he’d quickly discovered, had to practically beat ’em off with a stick. Women from as far away as Muskogee and Tulsa seemed to gravitate to him. Nice woman with pretty hair and soft voices. Interesting, smart, independent women. Reporters. Politicians. Teachers. Nurses. Other cops. All of them were, as far as Seth was concerned, attractive. As he and Lane used to say, “pretty little things.” But none of them had that spark, that something unique enough to hold his heart. He supposed that was because none of them knew the real Seth. He’d never told a single one of them the truth about what tortured him, what kept him awake nights. And he wasn’t of a mind to share.

      Deep down inside, he harbored the conviction that getting all tangled up with a woman, telling her the truth about what drove him, might even require him to change. What woman would want a man who was driven by vengeance? But Seth had no intention of giving up his quest. Certainly not now, when he was within striking distance.

      But even so, as he watched Rainey’s movements in the cozy glow of the lantern, he felt the kind of keyed-up fascination that he thought he had left behind with his youth. Not since KayAnn, in fact, had Seth seen a woman this gorgeous. But KayAnn was trouble. Unlike his brother, Seth had had the sense to resist KayAnn’s blatantly female charms. And every time he tried to talk sense to Lane, they’d ended up fighting about it, until finally the subject of KayAnn Rawls became sorely off-limits. Only when he’d read the diary he found in Lane’s things after his death did Seth begin to understand his brother’s obsessive protectiveness of KayAnn. And only now, looking at Rainey Chapman, could he imagine feeling the same way himself.

      He refocused his mind on the problem. Before this woman had “turned into his hand” up on Purney’s Mountain, he reminded himself ruefully, he had been within inches of realizing a seven-year-old goal—eradicating the Slaughters from the face of the earth.

      And it had been a very long seven years.

      When his uncle Tack had stopped Seth in the midst of settling atop a big Brahma in the loading chute at Bullnanza, Seth had been a reckless and cocky twenty-two-year-old bull rider, and nothing like his brother. Back then, he had lived a life that was as wild and selfish as the devil. That very night he had been about to take the big prize.