A Baby For The Sheriff. Mary Leo

to. Fortunately for Coco, that engagement didn’t last more than a few weeks.

      Now it was Coco’s turn...the woman he was meant to be with, the woman he would love like no other, the woman for whom he was about to fulfill all her sexual fantasies in one hot night, and the woman she hoped would one day be referred to as Doctor Coco Knightly, the mayor’s wife. Her family, especially her brother, Carson, admired Russ. Carson had been sponsored by the Knightly Endowment for the Preservation of Western Culture when he had first started competing as a bronc rider in local rodeos.

      Coco had been smitten ever since Russ, and a few other cowboys, rescued a small herd of wild horses trapped up in the Teton Mountains. Russ had risked his life to go up there and lead those animals out, under severe avalanche warnings for the area.

      Ever since that moment, she thought Russ Knightly was a kindred spirit who loved and respected animals as much as she did. He was simply the bravest man alive, or at least the bravest man in Briggs, next to her brother and her dad, of course.

      “I’ve been thinking about you all day,” Russ said as he walked backward to her bedroom, pulling her along with one hand, the other caressing his glass of expensive scotch, a scotch that Coco had ordered online just for this occasion, a fifteen-year-old scotch she knew he would love.

      “Me, too,” she told him as she eagerly followed him, aroused by the mere idea of what was about to happen in her once lonely bedroom.

      She and Russ had been dating for almost two months, thanks to an official introduction by her brother, but because of her schedule and his mayoral campaign, they hadn’t found the time to take their relationship to the next level.

      Tonight, they would break through all those levels with pure lust, pure sex and pure seduction. At twenty-nine, Coco hadn’t really experienced a lot of sex, especially not the kind that Russ Knightly was noted for. She’d been too busy with her studies, volunteering and dreaming about Russ to care much about dating other guys.

      But all that was in her past now. Tonight the floodgates were open, and each time he touched her a fire ignited that she didn’t want to put out anytime soon.

      Heck, Coco had even locked her little dog, Punky, a Yorkshire terrier, in the bathroom. For some reason she couldn’t understand, Punky didn’t seem to like Russ, and growled whenever he came close to Coco.

      Well, there would be none of that tonight.

      Tonight Coco and Russ would be so close they might need the Jaws of Life to pull them apart.

      “I have plans for you, baby, plans for your body,” he muttered in a deep voice.

      She loved it when he called her baby.

      “What kind of plans?” she teased, loving how he made her feel all tingly.

      “Dirty plans that will make you blush whenever you think about our first night.”

      “I’m already blushing,” she demurely said. “And I have my own plans.”

      That was a complete fabrication. The only plans she’d had that day were how to foal a breached horse and what kind of drugs she would administer to Helen Granger’s horse, Tater, for the infection in his right front femur.

      Russ stopped, pulled her in tight and kissed her. Although Coco’s mind sometimes drifted whenever they kissed, she felt certain once they were in bed together her focus would laser in on the task at hand—not that making love to Russ was a task. What she meant was, once they were in bed together, nothing else would matter and she’d be able to surrender to the moment.

      Of course it would be that way, she told herself. He was the man she wanted to be with forever. The man she’d dreamed about, longed for and pictured as the father of her children.

      Russ Knightly was her man, her guy, her Mr. Right.

      As he pulled her in tighter and she felt the bulge of his manhood press against her body, her heart raced, and suddenly all she could think of was how this was finally going to happen. She was going to make love with her dream man. Life couldn’t get any better if it had been scripted.

      Until the doorbell rang for her animal clinic downstairs. She’d only recently, in the last eight months, finished construction on the two-thousand-foot expansion. She’d had proper ventilation installed, added to the reception area and incorporated two large pens for the livestock she inevitably took in. She’d been thinking of hiring another doctor to help out, but so far, she hadn’t made the time to begin the search...a fact she now found herself regretting.

      Russ kept his lips pressed to hers as if he hadn’t heard it.

      “I...I, um, I should get that,” she mumbled while his lips stuck to hers.

      “Not tonight. Whoever it is will go away.”

      The bell rang again.

      “Or not,” she said, trying to disengage from him. It felt as though his lips were glued to hers and she couldn’t unstick them.

      “I...really...need...to...get...that.”

      He finally stepped back and Coco swore their lips popped apart. “You’re not seriously going to leave me here like this while you answer the door.”

      He nodded down toward the bulge in his pants, which for some odd reason was no longer doing it for her. Not when she knew someone’s animal could be in crisis.

      “I’m sorry,” she said, slipping out from his embrace, “but as much as I would like to, I can’t ignore the bell. It wouldn’t be right. If someone’s trudged through all that snow and cold, I have no choice but to at least answer the door.”

      He glanced at his watch. “It’s ten o’clock at night. Nobody just brings over their sick animal at this time of night without calling first.”

      “All the more reason why I need to get that. It’s probably an emergency.”

      Coco ran a hand through her hair, placed her wineglass on the table and turned to dash down the stairs to answer the door.

      The bell rang again.

      “Persistent, aren’t they?” he said, sounding resentful.

      She turned back to him. “I’ll only be a minute. I’m sure it’s something minor and I’ll be able to fix it in no time.”

      But Coco wasn’t so sure. Usually whenever her doorbell rang this late, someone was leaving behind an unwanted or sick pet they could no longer care for. She flipped on the light switch in the stairwell and through the glass on the top half of the door caught the shadow of a woman wearing a puffy coat and hood as she walked away.

      “Oh, shoot,” she said aloud, knowing full well it was a drop-off. She already had a piglet named Jimmy, two baby goats, one puppy, two persnickety calico kittens, an adult tortoise named Tortie and two temperamental baby llamas taking shelter in her clinic. She’d find homes for all of them eventually, but at the moment, the farm animals were illegal within city limits, and if Sheriff Jet Wilson—who did everything by the book—learned about them, he’d issue her another fine on top of the last two she couldn’t afford to pay. She’d spent all her savings on the expansion.

      When she arrived at the bottom of the stairs, she grabbed the gray sweater that hung on a hook next to the door and slipped it on. Whatever was waiting for her on the other side of that door was more than likely going to require her standing out in the cold for a minute or two before she could wrangle it inside.

      Good thing she still wore her shoes, albeit three-inch heels, but shoes nonetheless.

      “Okay, what do we have this time?” she asked as she swung open the door expecting another goat or llama or...

      * * *

      SHERIFF JET WILSON fought his way back to the jail. The official white SUV, with the Briggs Sheriff’s Department logo emblazoned on the two front doors, was fishtailing at almost every turn. The snow was piling up fast now, and driving was nearing impossible.