Excerpt of Cowboy Cop by Rachel Lee

"We have to work together. You don't have to like me."

Clint Calloway didn't even glance up when Dakota Winston spoke. His attention remained fixed on the small piles of matchsticks in front of him, and on the street below his window. She might have been talking to a deaf man.

"Look, Clint, it's apparent you don't like having me for your partner," she continued earnestly. "I guess I can understand that. You're an experienced detective and I'm just a rookie." A female rookie. The unspoken adjective, seemed to vibrate in the air.

He still didn't respond, just reached out with one blunt fingertip to move a matchstick across the blotter on his desk, placing it in another group. Dakota had been watching him do that periodically since they had started working together two days ago. She couldn't imagine what he was doing with those matchsticks, and when she asked, he wouldn't answer. All she knew for certain was that the end of each of them had been painted a different color. It was clear to her that they represented something, but he wasn't going to enlighten her. That was just another of the man's frustrating characteristics, and he had quite a few of them.

The matchstick, tipped in red, joined a different pile. Then Clint turned his head a fraction of an inch and studied the street to his left. His cubicle was in a corner of the police station and had two windows, the one in front of him overlooking Center Avenue, the other overlooking Coyote Path. Dakota figured that absolutely nothing on this corner of Whitehorn, Montana, escaped Clint Calloway's attention. Not that too terribly much seemed to happen down there. Leaning forward a little, she looked over his shoulder at the dress shop, the beauty salon, the sagging McManus Hotel and the Dogie Diner. Other shops and vacant storefronts were visible, stretching along both streets for a block or two, until the residential areas began. Nothing out there to hold anyone's attention for long.

"Look," she said to Clint's back, "I'm a fast learner. Just tell me what you want me to do and I'll do it. If I mess up, I want to hear that, too. I really want to be a good cop."

Not even that drew a response. Her sense of frustration was overwhelming, but there didn't seem to be a thing she could do about it. If this man didn't speak a single word to her throughout the time they were paired, she'd just have to live with it. She had too much to prove and was too new at this business to make a stink about anything a respected veteran detective might do. If she complained, she'd be labeled a pain in the neck, never mind that it was Clint who was being the pain.

So she bit back any further words and tried to find another way to handle this. The only thing she could come up with was to shut her mouth and try to be the best damn cop this guy had ever worked with. It was a tall order for a rookie, and she knew it, but he sure wasn't leaving her any other alternatives.

The seconds dragged by. He moved another matchstick. Then, slowly, he turned his head a little and asked, "Are you through?"

Her cheeks heated. "Yes."

"Then let's get some things clear here. I don't like you. I'm not going to like you. You can work your butt off trying to be a good cop, but you aren't going to make it. Women shouldn't be cops. They get too tangled up in their feelings and mess things up. This job calls for a cool head, not emotional reactions to everything."

"I—"

He cut her off ruthlessly. "I've been listening to your drivel, now you can listen to mine. What I think about women cops doesn't matter. Fact is, I got saddled with you because you're a rookie and need supervision and I have to put up with it or get fired. So I'm stuck with you and you're stuck with me. Just keep your mouth shut, do what I tell you and stay out of my way."

Anger blossomed inside her, but it was tempered by the fact that she had already suspected these were his feelings. Getting them out in the open this way merely saved her from having to wonder about it. He was a male chauvinist. Fine. He wasn't the first she'd met and he wouldn't be the last. If his objection to her was simply that she was a woman, she could handle it, and prove him wrong in the process. She certainly wasn't going to slink away with her tail tucked between her legs.

"Great," she managed to say steadily. "I prefer to know where I stand."

"Now you know." His voice was deep and as rough as gravel, which suited his appearance. Built solidly, he looked tough, invincible, like the kind of guy you'd want beside you in a fight. She'd heard he'd earned that toughness as a kid on the wrong side of the tracks. She could only imagine what that must have been like for him, but she was willing to excuse some rough edges as a result of it.

His gray-green eyes were stormy as they raked over her, and she found herself thinking that he had the raw, ragged good looks of a successful alley cat. There were faint scars on his knuckles, mementos of any number of fistfights, she supposed, and his nose had an interesting little bend in it, probably from contact with someone's fist. An old scar bisected one of his dark eyebrows, giving him a satiric appearance.

The look he gave her was distinctly male, that of a man measuring a woman and evaluating her sexual attributes. Dakota had received plenty of those looks in her life and had learned to ignore them, but this time she felt an almost overwhelming urge to fold her arms across her breasts. Instead she pressed her fingertips into the sides of her thighs and resisted the urge to clench her hands into fists. Act relaxed, she told herself. Don't let this guy know he can get to you.

Evidently it worked. His gray-green eyes became hooded and he looked toward his desk. He pointed to a stack of thick manila folders. "These are our open cases. Start reading."

"I thought we were supposed to be looking for Jennifer McCallum's kidnapper."

He made an impatient sound. "The kid was kidnapped a week ago. We haven't a damn thing to go on. No ransom demand has been made, and nobody saw a thing. Rule of thumb is that after forty-eight hours the trail is ice and the kid's chances are slim. If we're going to accomplish anything at all now, we have to use our brains, Ms. Winston. If you have one, familiarize it with the case."

"Why you son of a—" She caught herself and bit the word off, glaring at him.

"If you can't stand the heat, get back in the kitchen." He pointed again to the stack of files. "Start reading all the unsolved cases. You'll be no damn good to me if you're not ready to work on any of them when opportunities arise."

He swiveled his chair back to face his desk, pointedly dismissing her. Dakota clamped down on her anger, her teeth clenched so tightly that her jaw ached. Keeping her movements deliberate so as not to reveal the depth of her anger, she picked up the stack of files and carried them to her desk. Two days with Detective Clint Calloway and she was ready to commit murder. She wondered what she'd be ready to do in another couple of days. Wipe out the entire station?

But at her own desk, away from the source of her anger, she calmed down swiftly and began to think. She couldn't keep on getting this upset by his provocation or she was going to seriously mess up…which was probably what he was hoping for. Once she messed up, he'd be justified in asking that she be assigned to someone else.

And while that might be a whole lot more comfortable, the bottom line was that she didn't want to mess up, and she wanted to work with Clint Calloway. He had a reputation for being a maverick, a not quite by-the-book and almost psychically talented investigator. That meant he knew tricks she wanted to learn, that he had a way of viewing problems that could be really useful for her to know. Skills that could someday set her apart the way Clint Calloway was set apart. She always was driven to be the best at anything she attempted.

So she had to hang on to her temper and endure whatever hazing he gave her. She had to prove to everyone that she had what it took, sort of a trial by fire. She'd expected some of this, of course. Women cops weren't rare by any means these days, but they still weren't entirely welcome, and would probably never be welcomed at all by some policemen. She'd suffered from some of that attitude at the academy, and even a little of it in college when her classmates in criminal justice had learned of her desire to join law enforcement. She'd certainly suffered from it during her two years with the Miles City force. Clint Calloway was just a more blatant expression of an outdated attitude. She could handle it. She could handle him.

Reaching out, she snagged the first file and began to read about the abduction of a three-year-old child named Jennifer.

Sometimes, thought Clint Calloway, he was positively sure that the gods hated him. There could be absolutely no other reason why he had found himself saddled with both an un-solvable kidnapping and a female partner within the short space of a week.

The "Baby Jennifer" kidnapping—as everyone in White-horn was referring to it—ought to be enough karma for one man. He shouldn't be forced to sit here, staring out a window at the quiet street below, wondering what awful fate had befallen a little girl with a cherub's face. He shouldn't have to sit here and bear the weight of responsibility for finding her when he hadn't a clue as to what had happened to her.

The whole damn thing was gnawing at his guts with a persistence that was keeping him up most of the night. Terrible things happened to sweet little girls in this awful world, and well he knew it. The scariest thing was that there had been no ransom demand. The kidnapping had followed so fast on the heels of the discovery that Jennifer was the illegitimate child of rich old Jeremiah Kincaid that it was impossible to believe she had been taken for any other reason. But no ransom had been demanded, no attempt had been made to contact the child's distraught adoptive parents.

And then, to make the kidnapping even more horrible— as if it weren't already just about the most horrible thing that could be—the police had been told by an attorney that Baby Jennifer wouldn't have inherited a dime. Jeremiah's estate had long since been settled in probate, and left at his direction to his son Dugin. "After-discovered heirs," as the lawyer had described the little girl, had no claim at this late date. Clint himself was one of those "after-discovered heirs" of Jeremiah Kincaid, and the news had given him a blessed sense of relief. Bad enough to find out that his unknown father had been someone he had loathed all his life, without finding himself the recipient of any of the old man's wealth. Bad enough to have to live down all the looks and all the speculation again. Seemed like he'd been doing that his entire life.

But little Jennifer was another problem, and the lack of inheritance raised some thorny questions about her fate. If someone had kidnapped her, thinking she stood to inherit, why hadn't he or she—they—demanded any money? Had they found out the little girl had no claim? The possibility made Clint's stomach knot, because then Jennifer would be useless to them, and they might well have killed her.

For at least the hundredth time in the past week, he wished Jeremiah Kincaid were still alive so he could get his hands around the old reprobate's throat. Somebody should have castrated that man fifty years ago.

But nobody had, so little Jennifer McCallum had been kidnapped. At least Clint was presuming that to be the motivation. Somebody with a grudge against Jennifer's adoptive parents might have conceived of this, too. Her father, Sterling McCallum, being a police officer and a damn fine detective, certainly had his share of enemies. But a revenge motive seemed farfetched compared to greed. If someone had wanted revenge on McCallum, shooting him would have made more sense than this.

But then who said a bad guy had to make sense?

Clint looked down at the matchsticks on the desk before him, but saw no useful pattern in them. It wasn't the first time he'd had the feeling that something more than met the eye was going on in this county, but so far he hadn't a single fact to substantiate it.

His big mistake, he found himself thinking, was wanting to be a detective. He should have stayed in uniform. At least then he'd had the satisfaction of a quick solution to most of the problems he had encountered. Now… now cases dragged on for months or years, and some never got solved.

And then there was Dakota Winston. Yep, the gods must hate him. Had she been anyone else, he'd have been glad to spend time with her. She was a beautiful young woman, with a delicate appearance that made an enticing contrast to her straightforward manner. All feminine without any of the affectations that drove him nuts, she had dark hair and blue eyes, the bluest, most attention-grabbing eyes he'd ever seen. She was probably a great date and a fantastic lay… but he absolutely did not want her for a partner.

In the first place, she hadn't been a cop all that long and she'd only hired on in Whitehorn two months before her promotion to detective. Clint had a sneaking suspicion that her family's influence had had something to do with her quick promotion. The Montana Winstons, he had learned long ago, weren't afraid to buy what they wanted. Oh, the sheriff, Judd Hensley, wasn't a man who could be bought, but he was a politician, and politicians had a slightly different view of things than career cops did. Still, Clint didn't hold Judd responsible, except for not putting his foot down about it. The promotion committee that made the decision to make Dakota Winston a detective took the full blame for this one, but Judd could have flatly refused to approved the placement. Which he hadn't.