Free The Lawman Meets His Bride by Meagan McKinney

long gravel drive.
    “Those Feds think they’re such a fox-eared tribe,”Hazel went on. “City whippersnappers, that’s all they are. They can’t get their cappuccino and croissants up in the mountains. They’ll soon get bored with us rural hicks and give it up.”
    Despite her nervous apprehension, Constance had to smile at Hazel’s let-the-devil-take-’em attitude. Very few things could put a ripple in Hazel’s calm veneer.
    “I don’t see the gray car now anyway,” Constance remarked. “Maybe they gave up when I went home.”
    When she glanced in the rearview mirror to check for the sedan, she winced at her reflection.
    “I still look like I just rolled out of bed,” she carped. “And I’ve been up for seven hours.”
    Hazel gave a skeptical snort. “Connie Adams, are you fishing for compliments? A paid-off mortgage doesn’t look as pretty as you! All you have to do to look good is run a comb through your hair. Good looks are a gift of nature when you’re young—they’re a carefully constructed illusion for an old roadster like me.”
    “Now who’s fishing?” Constance teased. “If you’re an ‘old roadster,’ Hazel, then you must be a Bentley.”
    The two friends shared a laugh. The spry seventy-five-year-old coquettishly patted her silver chignon. “I am quite devastating, aren’t I?”
    The afternoon had turned into a beauty, a brilliant ball of sun stuck high in the sky as if pegged there. Hazel’s Lazy M cattle ranch occupied the exact center of verdant Mystery Valley, several thousand choice acres of lush pasture criss-crossed by creeks and runoff streams.
    “This Quinn Loudon fellow,” Hazel remarked,“has evidently dropped off the face of the earth. I caught the latest news just before you came over. They flashed a photo of him on the screen. You didn’t tell me he was such a looker.”
    “We weren’t exactly on a date,” Constance quipped wryly. But her face sobered when she added, “So he’s still missing?”
    “Connie, he must be running like a river when the snow melts. He’s still at large in spite of a three-state dragnet. Even the Royal Mounties have been alerted in Alberta and Saskatchewan. I’d say he must be a resourceful young man. That, or else maybe he’s bled to death somewhere.”
    At these last words, a jolt of dread shot through Constance. Something in her face must have given away her concern—she could feel Hazel’s shrewd gaze studying her.
    “From everything you’ve told me,” Hazel added, “this young man doesn’t sound like an out-and-out criminal. He puts me in mind of those wild young fools folks around here used to call ‘harum-scarum’—more wild and reckless than criminal. The way A. J. Clayburn used to be before I got him and—”
    Hazel caught herself just in time. “I mean, before Jacquelyn Rousseaux tamed him and got him good and married.”
    Any other time Constance might have grinned at Hazel’s slip. For some time she had suspected the crafty old dame of secretly engineering the marriage of rodeo star A.J. and Mystery Gazette reporter Jacquelyn.
    But for some reason, Hazel’s comment about “harum-scarum” men made her recall her carelessremark to Loudon, the one about how his “true colors” were showing.
    “It’s the strangest thing,” she confessed to Hazel. “I mean, Quinn Loudon wronged me. My God, he even stole my Jeep! Yet…somehow I feel that it’s just the opposite. That somehow I was unfair to him.”
    “Face it, girl,” Hazel assured her. “We both know that men are good at sailing under false colors. Look how Doug Huntington bamboozled both of us. I dang near ordered you to go out with him, remember? Still…now and again one comes along with a good reason for being tricky.”
    Hazel’s tone, for that final remark, made Constance give her a searching look. Hazel’s brisk and cheerful eagerness to face the future could inspire others half her age. But there was also a shrewd nature lurking behind