Page 1 of The Sheriff's Baby

Chapter One

The sound instantly woke Deputy Joelle McCullough, but it took her a moment to realize it hadn’t been part of the dream.

The nightmare.

There were no blasts of gunshots that had killed her father. No, this had been a clicking sound like that of someone shutting a vehicle door.

Rubbing her eyes to help her focus, Joelle checked her phone for the time. Just past 2:00 a.m., which meant it wasn’t anywhere near a normal visiting hour. Added to that, she wasn’t exactly on the beaten path since her house was a good mile outside of her hometown of Saddle Ridge with no other houses within sight of hers.

There were no texts from her three siblings or any of her friends. None either from anyone at the Saddle Ridge Sheriff’s Office where she’d been a deputy for seven years now. So, no alerts from anyone she knew well enough to contact her before just showing up at her place, but it could be a neighbor coming to her for help.

Everyone in Saddle Ridge knew where she lived, knew that she was a cop. That meant this could be some kind of emergency that had warranted a face-to-face rather than a call or text.

She threw back the covers, immediately reaching for her Glock 22 that she kept on the nightstand. Grabbing her firearm when off duty hadn’t always been her automatic response. Not until five months ago when her father had been gunned down at his home. Since then, things had changed.

Everythinghad changed.

And Joelle no longer trusted that a neighbor’s emergency—or whatever this was—wouldn’t end in gunfire. Her father hadn’t been armed when he’d answered his door that night. He obviously hadn’t been alarmed that whoever had come calling was there to kill him.

She couldn’t make the same mistake.

It was the reason she’d had a top-notch security system installed, and it was turned on and armed. If anyone attempted to get in through a door or window, the alarms would start blaring, and the security company and the sheriff’s office would be alerted. Most importantly,shewould be alerted, and she could use her cop’s training to put a stop to a threat.

Despite the urgency and worry building inside her, Joelle took her time getting out of bed. She’d learned the hard way that standing too quickly would make her lightheaded.

One of the side effects of being five months pregnant.

She ran her hand over her stomach, trying to soothe the baby’s sudden fluttering. Not hard kicks. Not yet, anyway. Just soft stirrings that reminded her of the precious cargo she was carrying. Reminding her again of why she couldn’t risk what’d happened to her father.

Once her heartbeat had steadied enough so that it was no longer thrumming in her ears, Joelle listened for any other sounds. Nothing except for the hum of the air conditioner and the spring breeze rattling through some of the tree branches outside her house.

She went to the front window and peered out, but it took her a moment to spot the vehicle. A black car that she didn’t recognize. It was parked not in her driveway but off to the side beneath a pair of towering oaks. The headlights weren’t on, and the door was indeed shut.

There was no sign of the driver.

Because of the angle of the parked car, Joelle couldn’t see the license plates, and she didn’t waste time figuring out what was going on. Not with every one of her cop’s instincts now telling her that something was wrong. She stepped to the side of the window so that she wouldn’t be seen or in the line of fire, and made a call to the Saddle Ridge dispatcher.

“This is Deputy Joelle McCullough,” she said, keeping her voice at a whisper just in case the driver of that vehicle was close enough to hear her. “I need backup at my house.”

She wasn’t sure who was on night duty at the sheriff’s office, but it wouldn’t be her brother Slater. He was staying the night in San Antonio, a thirty-minute drive away, since he was on the schedule to testify at a trial. If Slater had been in town, she would have called him directly since he lived just up the road from her.

After she’d done a thorough visual sweep of the front exterior of her house, Joelle went to her kitchen window to check the backyard. Thankfully, there was a full moon to give her some visibility, but there were also plenty of trees and shrubs dotting the five acres she owned. Lots of places for someone to hide if that’s what a person wanted to do to try to get back at a cop.

She wasn’t aware of anyone specifically who wanted to end her life or get revenge on her, but her father’s killer was still unknown and at large. Since no one was certain of the reason her dad had been gunned down, she might be on the killer’s hit list, too.

With her phone in her left hand and the Glock still gripped in her right, Joelle stayed positioned to the side of the kitchen window while she continued to watch and listen. Nothing.

And that in itself was troubling.

If this was someone she knew, they would have already come to the door or made themselves known. Added to that, the person would have parked in front of her house and not off to the side like that.

The minutes crawled by until Joelle saw the slash of headlights as they turned into her driveway. Backup, no doubt. She didn’t breathe easier, though, because she needed to let the responding deputy know there was someone out there, maybe someone waiting to fire shots.

She hurried back to the front and silently cursed when she glanced out the front window and recognized the dark blue truck. Not a deputy but rather Sheriff Duncan Holder. Once, he’d been a fellow deputy but had been elected sheriff after her father’s death.

Duncan was also the father of her unborn child.

As always, she got a serious jolt of conflicted feelings whenever she laid eyes on Duncan. Memories. Heat. Guilt. Grief. A bundle of raw nerves mixed with the old attraction that Joelle wished wasn’t there.

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