AUSTIN TRUMBALL STOOD under the sickly green fluorescent lighting of a Wyoming truck-stop diner waiting for a table, with the devil eating a hole through his belly. He shouldn’t have waited so long to stop for lunch.
The smell of charbroiled burgers and greasy fries seeped into his hair and clothes. Short-order cooks called for servers to pick up orders. Waitresses yelled back, “Hold your horses,” or “Coming!” Not-so-nimble fingers slid into Austin’s back pocket and lifted his wallet.
The brazen act carried out so clumsily startled a laugh out of him.
Not only did the pathetic amateur lack skills, he had no idea he’d just robbed a cop.
Austin walked like one, talked like one, scoped out his surroundings like one, but the thief had failed to scope him out. Big mistake.
Leaning forward, he murmured to his buddy Finn, “Be right back,” and spun around just as a boy ran out the front door. Austin followed without calling. The biggest mistake people made was screaming they’d been robbed or yelling to the thief to stop. What sense was there in warning a criminal you were coming after him?
Outside, a flash of dark clothing rounded the far corner of the building.
Light-footed, Austin followed around to the back.
The boy stood beside a Dumpster that reeked of garbage left sitting too long in the sun. He stuffed Austin’s credit cards into his pockets and tossed the wallet into the bin. It hit the side and bounced onto the asphalt. Good thing, or Austin would be tossing the boy into the trash to fish it out.
The kid wasn’t even smart enough to watch his back, but actually stood and counted the money instead of hightailing it out of there. No shortage of stupid here.
Using the stealth he’d learned on the job, Austin snuck up right behind the boy just as he breathed, “Two hundred dollars,” as though he’d won the lottery. The boy was young; his voice hadn’t even dropped yet. Austin shook his head, disgusted with today’s youth. Or with their parents. What would drive someone so young out of his home, onto the road and into a life of crime?
The boy’s skinny neck peeked out from beneath a dusty baseball cap, narrow enough that Austin would have sworn he could circle it with his hands. The thought made him realize just how vulnerable this kid actually was.
Didn’t matter. The boy had robbed him. He was going to jail.
Austin grabbed the back of the kid’s hoodie. The thief let out a high-pitched yelp. “Who—?”
“That’s my hard-earned cash you’re counting.” Austin shook the boy.
“Crap on a broomstick.” Kid couldn’t even swear properly yet. Truly pathetic.
Austin spun him around then dropped his hand from the shirt. His jaw dropped, too. This was no green kid, definitely not a thirteen-or fourteen-year-old boy, but a twenty-something woman.
A woman?
After that observation came another one more interesting, considering she was such a poor thief. This woman had been around; she was pretty, but in a hard-knocks seen-too-much kind of way, skin baked by the sun, jaw defiant. Certainly no pushover.
The bill of her baseball cap shaded her eyes. A person’s eyes, Austin had learned, said everything about them. He needed to see hers. He knocked the hat from her head. Startled pale blue eyes shadowed with darkness dominated a hungry face.
“Hey,” she yelled and caught the cap before it hit the ground.
He had time only for impressions—high cheekbones, full lips, roughly shorn black hair to match coal-black eyebrows arched like birds’ wings ready to take flight—before she came to life, exploding like a Thoroughbred out of the gate.
She was fast. He was faster, and snagged her sleeve before she got far. The fabric tore in his hand, but he managed to grasp her arm.
“Noooo.” Desperation rode shotgun with terror in her scream. “Let me go. I won’t do it again.”
“Damn right you won’t, lady. You’re going to jail.”
The second she realized she wouldn’t get far—he was six-one, after all, and she all of five-five, if that—those big hollow eyes filled with more panic than Austin could remember seeing in anyone. In his hometown of Ordinary, Montana, they had homeless people, those who were needy, but this level of despair was something else altogether.
She bared her teeth like an animal, came alive in his arms and fought like a keening cyclone, elbows and knees everywhere at once.
“You aren’t going anywhere,” he said, calm because he had control. “I can read you like a book.” An autobiography. By the time Austin had turned twelve, he’d perfected the fight-or-flight response to a fine art, until one good man had tamed him, and another had given him a stable home, even if only briefly.
The woman cast her eyes about, looking for escape. There was none. He’d backed her in between the wall and the Dumpster. She growled and clawed his face.
“Enough!” he shouted, grasping her forearms and spinning her around so her back was against his torso, her wrists locked in one of his hands. He’d been gentle so far because he hadn’t wanted to risk cracking one of her bird bones, but nobody scratched him and got away with it.
He swiped his stinging cheek. Blood dotted his palm. That was a piss-off.
“Listen, stop fighting me. I’m bigger and stronger and this is going my way.”
“I won’t go to jail.” The raw anguish in her voice struck a chord with him—panic used to be both his best friend and his worst enemy—but he ignored it. This thief was getting what she deserved.
“How much would you have charged on my credit cards if I hadn’t felt you taking my wallet?”
“Nothing. I needed cash for food.”
“Then why didn’t you throw them away with the wallet?”
“What?” She sounded surprised. “You actually want some other stranger picking them up and using them?”
“You trying to tell me you pocketed my cards so no one else would use them?” How naive did she think he was?
“Yes.”
“You think I’m stupid? That I’ll believe that crap?”
Her slight frame bowed away from him like a willow branch, as though she could break free just on the strength of her willpower. Despite her weakness, her helplessness in his arms, tension resonated in her. She might be down, but she wasn’t out. Not yet, but he could tell how close she was to the end from the tremor that ran through her body as though she’d just run a marathon. Her legs shook and he was holding up much of her weight. What there was of it.
He admired her fight, her unwillingness to give in, even if he wouldn’t cut her a break.
“Let go.” She strained against his hold.
He didn’t budge. “Nope. You just broke the law, lady. Where I come from, we punish people for their mistakes.”
“I didn’t have a choice.”
“Everyone has choices. You just have to make the right ones.”
“Spoken like a man who’s never wanted anything.” Her bitterness rang loud and clear. “You’ve obviously never been starving.”
He thought of how many times Cash Kavenagh, when he’d still been sheriff of Ordinary and Austin’s Big Brother, had caught Austin Dumpster-diving behind both the restaurant and the diner on Main Street scrambling for leftovers. Austin’s stomach had been so hollow he’d thought he would die if he couldn’t find something, anything, to cram into his mouth.
More times than he