The Mccaffertys: Matt

The McCaffertys: MATT

Matt has never met a woman who wouldn’t succumb to the McCafferty charm. But beautiful Kelly Dillinger, the cop assigned to his sister’s hit-and-run case, proves indifferent to his attention. Her all-business attitude pricks his ego…and fires up his blood. The more she resists, the more determined he becomes to break down her defenses. Matt might think that law enforcement is no place for a lady, but he might soon find himself making a plea for passion.

Praise for Lisa Jackson

“Provocative prose, an irresistible plot and finely crafted characters make up Jackson’s latest contemporary sizzler.”

—Publishers Weekly on Wishes

“Lisa Jackson takes my breath away.”

—New York Times bestselling author Linda Lael Miller

COLD BLOODED

“Set a bare six months after the shocking events of Hot Blooded, Cold Blooded grabs you by the throat from page one and does not let you off the edge of your seat for a moment after that.” —Romance At Its Best

“Taking up where last year’s phenomenal Hot Blooded left off, Cold Blooded is a tight, romantic, edge-of-your-seat thriller.” —Romantic Times BOOKclub

“Cold Blooded is an exciting serial killer thriller…an entertaining tale.” —BookBrowser

“Crisp dialogue, a multilayered plot and a carefully measured pace build suspense in this chilling read that earns the WordWeaving Award for Excellence.”

—Wordweaving.com

THE NIGHT BEFORE

“Lisa Jackson pulls out all the stops in this brilliantly conceived, chilling, twisted psychological thriller that contains murder, mental illness, incest, love and hope. The Night Before is a page-turner that will have you racing toward the finish.” —Reader to Reader

The Night Before “will keep the brightest mystery buff guessing who done it. A typical thriller is a meander through a dust bowl compared to The Night Before’s tumult down a rocky mountainside.” —Affaire de Coeur

“Jackson’s newest suspense keeps you riveted until the very end.”

—Old Book Barn Gazette

“A thrilling roller coaster of emotions, betrayals, murder, dark secrets and horrifying sins that will enthrall the reader. The author is a master when it comes to romantic thrillers…Lisa Jackson sets her own standards [in] women’s fiction today, weaving her magic and providing us with literary works of art.”

—The Road to Romance

“An exciting romantic psychological suspense filled with plenty of twists.”

—Allreaders.com

WHISPERS

“Author Lisa Jackson delivers a tour de force performance with this dynamic and complicated tale of love, greed and murder. This is Ms. Jackson at her very best.”

—Romantic Times BOOKclub

“What a story! This is a perfectly put together, complex story with more than one relationship and mystery going on…a perfect meld of past and present. I loved it!”

—Rendezvous

“There are hints of Romeo and Juliet when children from two small-town feuding families fall in love. Characters are fully realized, multi-faceted and dynamic…the plot is full of subtle intrigues, forbidden passions and long-kept secrets that culminate in an explosive climax. Author Lisa Jackson has delivered another must-read romantic suspense novel.” —Gothic Journal

The McCaffertys: Matt

Lisa Jackson

www.millsandboon.co.uk

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Other classics from Lisa Jackson and HQN Books

Strangers two-in-one suspense collection featuring “Mystery Man” and “Obsession”

Tears of Pride

The McCaffertys: Thorne

The McCaffertys: Slade

Best Kept Lies: Randi McCafferty’s Story

Dear Reader,

I think this is a fabulous idea! HQN is republishing one of my most popular series: THE McCAFFERTYS.

When the first book of the miniseries, The McCaffertys: Thorne, first came out, I received a lot of letters and tons of e-mail asking questions about the McCafferty brothers and their wayward younger sister. With each new book in the series, I received more and more mail. The sexy, irreverent McCafferty brothers were extremely popular. And I can see why. I fell in love with each of these men who were tough, rugged and dedicated to their family and strong Montana ranching roots.

In each of the books one McCafferty brother discovers true love while trying to protect his younger sister and solve the mystery surrounding her baby. The series was finally complete with Best Kept Lies: Randi McCafferty’s Story. The mystery surrounding the paternity of Randi McCafferty’s baby and the danger facing the McCafferty clan is wrapped up in the final book, where eventually Randi, too, discovers love everlasting for her and her son.

CEO Thorne McCafferty has returned to Grand Hope, Montana, and the Flying M Ranch intent on taking charge of the situation with his sister. Once he’s assured that Randi and her baby are healthy, he plans to cut and run, but that’s before he meets beautiful Dr. Nicole Stevenson, a woman he knew as a girl but barely remembers. For the first time in his life Thorne’s about to lose control…

Rancher Matt McCafferty doesn’t believe he could be interested in a professional woman of any kind, least of all a cop. But during the investigation of his sister’s hit-and-run accident, he runs into a spitfire of a detective in Kelly Dillinger. Then his mind, his heart and his life changes…

Maverick Slade McCafferty never expected to run across Jamie Parsons again. The last time he saw her she was a young girl, one who had willingly given him her innocence. Now she’s all grown up, a no-nonsense lawyer who won’t give him the time of day. Or so she thinks.

Headstrong reporter Randi McCafferty doesn’t want, need, or accept a bodyguard, but her brothers have hired Kurt Striker to watch her back. Kurt doesn’t seem too thrilled with the job either, but as the danger mounts, the tension and unspoken passion ignite, just as a killer is ready to strike.

I’ve posted excerpts from the books on my Web site and I even have a new contest and drawing to celebrate THE McCAFFERTYS. So visit me at www.lisajackson.com and sign up. You just might win an autographed Lisa Jackson classic!

I hope you love the McCaffertys as much as I do!

Lisa Jackson

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

EPILOGUE

PROLOGUE

Early May

“You miserable piece of horseflesh,” Matt McCafferty growled as he climbed to his feet, dusted the back of his jeans and glowered at the wild-eyed Appaloosa colt. There was a reason the damned beast was named Diablo Rojo, the orneriest two-year-old on the Flying M Ranch. A challenge. In all his thirty-seven years, Matt had never met a horse he couldn’t tame. But he was having second thoughts about Red Devil. Major ones. The horse had spirit. Fire. Not easily tamed. Like a lot of women Matt had run across. “Okay, you bastard, let’s start over.”

He reached down and picked up his hat. Slapping it hard against his thigh, he squinted into the lowering Montana sun as it started its slow descent behind the western hills. “You and I, Devil, we’re gonna come to a reckoning and we’re gonna do it this afternoon.”

The colt tossed his fiery head and snorted noisily, then lifted his damned tail like a banner and trotted along the far fence line, the empty saddle on his back creaking mockingly. Damned fool horse. Matt squared his hat on his head. “It isn’t over,” he assured the snorting animal.

“It may as well be.”

Matt froze at the sound of his father’s voice. Turning on the worn heel of his boot, he watched as Juanita pushed John Randall’s wheelchair across the parking lot separating the rambling, two-storied ranch house from the series of connecting paddocks that surrounded the stables. Matt didn’t harbor much love for his bastard of a father, but he couldn’t help feel an ounce of pity for the once-robust man now confined to “the damned contraption,” as he referred to the chair.

John Randall’s sparse white hair caught in the wind and his skin was pale and thin, but there was still a spark in his blue eyes. And he loved this spread. More than he loved anything, including his children.

“I tried to talk him out of this,” Juanita reprimanded as she parked the wheelchair near the fence where Harold, John Randall’s partially crippled old springer spaniel, had settled into a patch of shade thrown by a lone pine tree. “But you know how it is. He is too terco…stubborn, for his own good.”

“And it’s served me well,” the old man said as he used the sun-bleached rails of the fence to pull himself to his full height. Lord, he was thin—too thin. His jeans and plaid shirt hung loosely from his once-robust frame. But he managed a tough-as-old-leather smile as he leaned over the top bar and watched his middle son.

“Maybe you can talk some sense into him,” Juanita said, sending Matt a worried glance and muttering something about loco, prideful men.

“I doubt it. I never could before.”

The older McCafferty waved Juanita off. “I’m fine. Needed some fresh air. Now I want to talk to Matt. He’ll bring me inside when we’re through.”

Juanita didn’t seem convinced, but Matt nodded. “I think I can handle him,” he said to the woman who had helped raise him. Clucking her tongue at the absurdity of the situation, Juanita bustled off to the house, the only home Matt had known growing up.

“That one,” John Randall said, hitching his chin back to the wayward colt. “He’ll give ya a run for your money.” He slid a knowing glance at his second-born. “Like a lot of women.”

Matt was irritated. He wiped the sweat from his forehead and swatted at a horsefly that got a little too close for comfort. “Is that what you came all the way out here to say to me, the reason you had Juanita push you outside?”

“Nope.” With an effort the older man dug into the pocket of his jeans. “I got somethin’ here for ya.”

“What?” Matt was instantly suspicious. His father’s gifts never came without a price.

“Somethin’I want ya to have—oh, here we go.” John Randall withdrew a big silver buckle that winked in the bright Montana sun. Inlaid upon the flat surface was a gold bucking bronco, still as shiny as the day John Randall had won it at a rodeo in Canada more than fifty years earlier. He dropped it into his son’s calloused hand.

“You used to wear this all the time,” Matt observed, his jaw growing tight.

“Yep. Reminded me of my piss-and-vinegar years.” John Randall settled back in his wheelchair, and his eyes clouded a bit. “Good years,” he added thoughtfully, then squinted upward to stare at his son. “I don’t have much longer on this earth, boy,” he said, and before Matt could protest, his father raised a big-knuckled hand to silence him. “We both know it so there’s no sense in arguin’ the facts. The man upstairs, he’s about to call me home…that is, if the devil don’t take me first.”

Matt clenched his jaw. Didn’t say a word. Waited.

“I already spoke to Thorne about the fact that I’m dyin’, and seein’ as you’re the next in line, I thought I’d talk to you next. Slade…well, I’ll catch up to him soon. Now, I know I’ve made mistakes in my life, the good Lord knows I failed your mother….”

Matt didn’t comment, didn’t want to even think about the bleak time when John Randall took up with a much younger woman, divorced his wife and introduced his three sons to Penelope, “Penny” Henley, who would become their stepmother and give them all a half sister whom none of them wanted to begin with.

“I have a lot of regrets about all that,” John Randall said over the sigh of the wind, “but it’s all water under the bridge now since both Larissa and Penny are dead.” He rubbed his jaw and cleared his throat. “Never thought I’d bury two wives.”

“A wife and an ex-wife,” Matt clarified.

The old man’s thin lips pursed, but he didn’t argue. “What I want from you—from all my children—is grandchildren. You know that. It’s an old man’s dream, I know, but it’s only natural. I’d like to go to my grave in peace with the knowledge that you’ll find yourself a good woman and settle down, have a family, and that the McCafferty name will go on for a few more generations.”

“There’s lots of time—”

“Not for me, there ain’t!” John Randall snapped.

Feeling as if he was being manipulated for the umpteenth time by his father, Matt tried to hand the buckle back. “If this is some kind of bribe or deal or—”

“No bribe.” The old man spit in disgust. “I want you to have that buckle because it means something to me, and since you rode rodeo a few years back, I thought you might appreciate it.” He wagged a finger at the buckle. “Turn it over.”

Matt flipped the smooth piece of metal and read the engraving on the backside. “To my cowboy. Love forever, Larissa.” His throat closed for a minute when he thought of his mother with her shiny black hair and laughing brown eyes, which had saddened over the years of her marriage. From a free spirit, she’d become imprisoned on this ranch and had sought her own kind of solace and peace that she’d never found in the bottles she’d hidden in the old house she’d grown to despise.

Matt’s gut twisted. He missed her. Bad. And the old man had wronged her. There were just no two ways about it.

“Larissa had it engraved after I won it. Hell, she was a fool for me back then.” The wrinkles around John Randall’s mouth and eyes deepened with sadness, and there was a tiny shadow of guilt that chased across his eyes. “So, now I want you to have it, Matthew.”

Matt’s fingers tightened over the sharp edges of the buckle, but he didn’t say a word. Couldn’t.

“And I want me some grandbabies. That’s not too much for an old man to ask.”

“I’m not married.”

“Then get yourself hitched.” His father gave him a head-to-toe once-over. “Fine, strappin’ man like you shouldn’t have too much trouble.”

“Maybe I don’t believe in marriage.”

“Then maybe you’re a fool.”

Matt traced the silhouette of the bucking bronco with one finger. “It could be I learned from the best.”

“So unlearn it,” John Randall ordered, just as he always did. His way or the highway. Matt had chosen the latter.

“I’ve got me a horse to break,” he said. “And my own place to run.”

“I was hopin’ you’d be stayin’ on.” There was a hint of desperation in his father’s voice, but Matt stood firm. There was just too much water under the damned bridge—muddy, treacherous water fed by a swift current of lies and deceit, the kind of water a man could slowly drown in. Matt had come to the ranch to mend some emotional fences with the old man and to help the foreman, Larry Todd, for a week or so, but his own spread, a few hundred acres close to the Idaho border, needed his attention.

“I can’t, Dad,” he said finally as he followed the path of a wasp as it flew toward the back porch. “Maybe it’s time to get you inside.”

“For God’s sake, don’t try to mollycoddle me, son. It’s not like I’m gonna catch my death out here today.” John Randall folded his hands in his lap and looked between the old slats of the fence to the hard pan of the paddock where the Appaloosa, still wearing an empty saddle, pawed the ground, kicking up dust. “I’ll watch while you try to break him. It’ll be interesting to see who’ll win. You or Diablo.”

Matt lifted a disbelieving eyebrow. “You sure?”

“Ye-up.”

“Fine.” Matt squared his hat on his head and climbed over the fence. “But it’s not gonna be much of a contest,” he said, more to the horse than the man who had sired him. He strode forward with renewed determination, his eyes fixed on the Appaloosa’s sleek muscles that quivered as he approached. Few things in life beat Matt McCafferty.

A high-strung colt wasn’t one of them.

Nor was his father.

Nope. His weakness, if he had one, was women. Fiery-tempered, bullheaded women in particular. The kind he avoided like the plague.

And now his father wanted him to find a woman, tie the knot and start raising a passel of babies.

He nearly laughed as he reached for the reins, and Diablo had the nerve to snort defiantly.

No way in hell was Matt McCafferty getting married. Not today, not tomorrow, not ever. That’s just the way it was.

CHAPTER ONE

The following November

She’d met him before.

Too many times to count.

That didn’t mean she had to like him.

No, sir.

As far as Detective Kelly Dillinger was concerned, Matt McCafferty was just plain bad news. Pure and simple, cut from the same biased, sanctimonious, self-serving cloth as his brothers and his bastard of a father before him.

But that didn’t mean he didn’t look good. If you liked the rough-and-tumble, tough-as-rawhide cowboy type, Matt McCafferty was the man for you. His rugged appeal was legendary in Grand Hope. He and his older and younger brothers had been considered the best catches in the entire county for years. But Kelly prided herself on being different from most of the women who wanted to swoon whenever they heard the McCafferty name.

So they were handsome.

So they were sexy.

So they had money.

So what?

These days their reputations had tarnished a bit, notoriety had taken its toll, and the oldest of the lot, Thorne, was rumored to be losing his status as an eligible bachelor and marrying a local woman doctor.

Not so the second brother, Matt. The one, it seemed, she was going to have to deal with right now.

He was muscling open the door to the Grand Hope office of the sheriff’s department with one broad shoulder and bringing with him a rush of frigid winter air and snowflakes that melted instantly the minute they encountered the sixty-eight degrees maintained by a wheezing furnace hidden somewhere in the basement of this ancient brick building.

Matt McCafferty. Great. Just…damned great. She already had a headache and was up to her eyeballs in paperwork, a ream of which could be applied to the McCafferty case—no, make that cases, plural—alone. But she couldn’t ignore him, either. She stared through the glass of her enclosed office and saw him stride across the yellowing linoleum floor, barely stopping at the gate that separated the reception area from the office, then sweep past the receptionist on a cloud of self-righteous fury. Kelly disliked the man on sight, but then she had her own personal ax to grind when it came to the McCaffertys.

There was fire in McCafferty’s brown eyes and anger in his tight, blade-thin lips and the stubborn set of his damnably square jaw. Yep, cut from the same cloth as the others, she thought as she climbed to her feet and opened the door to the office at the same time as he was about to pound on the scarred oak panels.

“Mr. McCafferty.” She feigned a smile. “A pleasure to see you again.”

“Cut the bull,” he said without preamble.

“Okay.” He was blunt if nothing else. “Why don’t you come in…” But he’d already crossed the threshold and was inside the small glassed-in room, pacing the short distance from one wall to the other.

Stella Gamble, the plump, nervous receptionist, had abandoned her post and was fidgeting at the door, her bright red fingernails catching light from the humming fluorescent tubing overhead. “I tried to stop him, really I did,” she said, shaking her head as her tight blond curls bounced around her flushed cheeks. “He wouldn’t listen.”

“A family trait.”

“I’m sorry—”

“It’s all right, Stella. Relax. I needed to talk to one of the McCafferty brothers, anyway,” Kelly assured her, though that was stretching the truth quite a bit. A conversation with Thorne, Slade or especially Matt wasn’t on her agenda right this minute, not when Nathaniel Biggs was calling every two hours, certain that someone had stolen his prize bull last night, Perry Carmichael had reported an odd aura suspended over the copse of oak trees behind his machine shed out on Old Dupont Road and Dora Haines was missing again, probably wandering around the foothills in nineteen-degree weather with a storm threatening to blast in from the Bitterroots by nightfall. Not that the McCafferty case wasn’t important—it just wasn’t the only one she was working on. “Don’t worry about it,” she said to Stella. “I’ll talk to Mr. McCafferty.”

“No one should get by me,” the receptionist said, blinking rapidly.

“You’re right, they shouldn’t,” Kelly agreed, and glared at the uninvited guest. “But, as I said, I need to talk to him, anyway, and I don’t think he’s dangerous.”

“Don’t count on it,” McCafferty countered. Standing near the file cabinet, he looked as if he could spit nails.

The phone rang loudly at Stella’s desk.

“I’ll deal with this,” Kelly said as the receptionist hurried back to her desk and immediately donned her headset.

Kelly closed the door behind her and snapped the blinds shut for privacy, as she didn’t want any of the deputies witnessing the dressing-down that was simmering in the air of her postage-stamp-size office.

“Have a seat,” she offered, sweeping off the files that were stacked in the single chair on the visitor’s side of her metal desk.

He didn’t move, but those eyes followed her as she plopped into her ancient desk chair. “I’m tired of getting the runaround,” he announced through lips that barely moved.

“The runaround?”

“Yep.” He planted his hands between her in-basket and the computer monitor glowing from one corner of the desk and leaned across the reports that were strewn in front of her. “I want answers, dammit. My sister’s been in a coma for over a month because of an accident that I believe is the result of someone running her Jeep off the road, and you people, you people, are doing nothing to find out what happened to her. For all we know someone tried to kill her that day and they won’t stop until they finish the job!”

“That’s just speculation,” Kelly reminded him, the short fuse on her temper igniting. There was a chance that Randi McCafferty’s rig had been forced off the road up in Glacier Park. With no witnesses it was hard to say. But the sheriff’s department was checking into every possibility. “We’re trying to locate another vehicle if one is involved. So far, we haven’t found one.”

“It’s been over a month, for crying out loud,” he said as she sat on the corner of her desk, watching a battery of emotions cross his face. Anger. Determination. Frustration. And more—a fleck of fear darkened his brown eyes. Fear wasn’t an emotion she considered when thinking of any of the roguish, tough-as-rawhide McCafferty men. The three brothers, like their father, had always appeared an intrepid, fearless lot. “And over two weeks have passed since Thorne’s plane went down. You think that was an accident, too?”