Changes Coming Down Read online

  Changes Coming Down

  (Changes Book 1)

  Kaje Harper

  Copyright © 2013, 2019 Kaje Harper

  Edited by Jonathan Penn

  Cover Art © 2019 Karrie Jax Cover Design – karriejax.com

  Cover Photos – Licensed stock images

  Proofread by Ashley VanBuren

  Formatting by Beaten Track Publishing – beatentrackpublishing.com

  All rights reserved. This copy is intended for the original purchaser of this e-book ONLY. No part of this e-book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without prior written permission of the author. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  Image/art disclaimer: Licensed material is being used for illustrative purposes only. Any person depicted is a model.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Content warning: For adult readers over the age of 18 only. This book contains explicit sexual situations between three men.

  For three gay men in love, opening the closet door could be a risky move.

  Sheriff Casey Barlow has a slick, media-savvy challenger out to beat him in the upcoming election. Casey’s damned good at his job, but he hasn’t kissed the right asses, and early polls suggest voters like his opponent’s style. Coming out now, let alone revealing his relationship with two men, could sink any hope of keeping his badge.

  Scott Edison has a real shot at the NHL. He’s playing the best hockey of his life. Whenever he can, he travels home to his gruff sheriff and their laid-back cowboy, but there are no out gay players in the NHL. As a rookie working his ass off to be called up, he can’t afford to make waves.

  Will Rice always figured he’d live alone, managing Graham and Annmarie Slater’s cattle ranch, but a hot, young hockey player and a compact, muscled lawman rearranged his plans. Even though he’s older and lanky and ordinary, he’s been sharing their lives and their beds. He doesn’t need to be out— isn’t sure he ever wants the Slaters to know about him. Life’s good the way things are.

  Then Graham and Annmarie are killed in a hit and run that may not be an accident. As Will grieves, and Casey investigates, the coming changes will shake all their lives.

  ** this is a re-edit and expansion of the story in the “Hunting Under Covers” anthology

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Excerpt from Changes Going On (Changes Book 2)

  About the Author

  Other Books by Kaje Harper

  Acknowledgements

  My deepest thanks to Kate, who beta read this for me despite real-life stresses and had some excellent suggestions, as she always does; to Jay Vaughn who put together the original anthology and didn’t object to me tracking her down stalkerishly to make sure about permissions for this rerelease; to author Rachel Reid who took time out from her own excellent hockey romances to check Scott’s plausibility. And to the readers who, over the years, read the first version and asked what happened next. This revision, and the sequel to come, only exist because you inspired me to give another listen to Scott, Casey, and Will.

  Chapter 1

  Sheriff Casey Barlow stared down at the lifeless bodies of Graham and Annmarie Slater, trapped in the cab of their overturned pickup, and his first thought was of Will. Jesus, this’ll hit him hard.

  The lights from his patrol car up on the road cast a surreal, flickering glow on the scene. Fresh blood looked black, pale skin became a kaleidoscope of red and blue. He could reach in there, check for pulses and confirm the deaths, but he was certain it was unnecessary. They’d clearly rolled more than once down the boulder-strewn slope. He’d seen vehicles flipped by IEDs that were less mangled than this truck. Ironic that Graham Slater had made it through two tours in ’Nam, back in the sixties, and then died violently five miles from home.

  He pulled out his phone and dialed his dispatcher. “Hey, Alanis, that guy was right. He did hear a crash. I need Jordan’s tow and the flatbed, and the ambulance service, and hell, the fire department rescue squad with the big cutters. But tell them no hurry. There’s no one alive in there.”

  Her usual bright tones sobered. “Who is it?”

  “I’ll let you know after the notification.”

  “As long as you’re not going to be notifying me…” The tightness in her voice came from having an eighteen-year-old with a fast car and not a lot of sense.

  “No one you know well,” he assured her. He gave her the GPS coordinates for this particular bend in the road and hung up. Then for a minute, he battled with his conscience. Regulations said he shouldn’t tell anyone until the Slaters’ grandson in Iowa was notified, but this hit too damned close to home. The first responders would know, and he didn’t want Will to find out from social media. He touched the top of his contact list.

  “Casey, hey.” Scott’s tone was clearly an attempt at low and sexy. “Why are you over there on the phone and not here, getting into my bed?”

  “I got a call. A car crash. Fatal.”

  “Oh, God. Who?” When Casey needed a moment and a breath to answer, Scott’s tone rose. “Not Will, oh please, not…”

  “Stop. It’s not Will, but it is the Slaters. Both of them. So listen up.”

  “Yessir. Oh, shit, Graham and Annmarie?”

  Casey sighed. “Yeah. I want you to go out to the ranch and see Will. Tell him about the Slaters and—”

  “You want me to tell Will?”

  “I’d rather tell him myself, but by the time I get clear of this it’ll be hours from now, and someone else may let the news out. I want one of us there with him when he hears it.”

  “They were like his parents. He’ll be hurting. And… what about the ranch?”

  Yeah. What about it? Will was the foreman on the Slaters’ large ranch. These days, he basically ran the thing, but he didn’t own one inch of it. Their only relative was the grandson, who was a city boy. Landon Slater spent his rare visits wrinkling his nose at the smell of manure and complaining about the noise the ranch hands made in the mornings. He’d surely sell the place as soon as he could.

  Casey said, “That’s a worry for tomorrow. Tonight, you go to Will and tell him the folks he loved like a second mom and dad are dead. And then you hold him, if he’ll let you.”

  Scott’s voice was small and thin. “You’d be better at this. Much better.”

  “But I can’t be there, so he needs you.” With an effort, he kept the frustration he was feeling out of his voice. He wanted to be there for Will. Scott was ten years younger than either him or Will, and this was asking a lot of their beloved Scotty, but Casey knew he’d step up to it. “Drive carefully.” Please. That was his nightmare, to one day come on a scene like this and find one of his men in that mass of twisted metal. “Get him somewhere private and just say it. You can’t break it easy. There is no easy for this.”

  That was a lesson learned hard, over in the Sandbox. A bullet, or a bomb, and a friend was gone and there was no easy letdown. Dead was dead. You just had to say it and then live with it.

  “Okay. I’ll do the best as I can. But Casey, please, try to com
e out to the ranch as soon as you get free?”

  “Of course.” The wail of an approaching siren threatened to drown him out, but he had time to say. “Tell Will I’ll be there the minute I’m done tonight.” Then he tapped the phone off and scrambled back up the embankment to meet the EMTs.

  It took an hour, five guys, and some heavy-duty equipment to free the bodies from the wreckage. The newest of the firehouse guys was off in the bushes, heaving. Casey helped a paramedic get Annmarie’s body wrapped and secured to go up the embankment, while Gordon was being loaded into the ambulance above.

  “Helluva thing,” the EMT said. “And I’ve seen a few.”

  “Yeah.”

  Behind Casey, another voice said, “Wow. That’s a shame.”

  Casey spun around. “Todd.”

  “Casey.” Todd Kensington gave him a cool glance.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Learning more about the job.” Todd gave Casey a toothy smile. The flashing lights colored his teeth purple. Casey frowned. How much nerve did it take to say that to the guy you were hoping to beat out for sheriff in the upcoming election? Of course, Todd never lacked that kind of confidence.

  “Right now, you’re a civilian, and you need to stay up on the road.”

  “Come on, Casey. Don’t be like that. You know I have the election sewn up. Surely you want to ease the transition here.”

  “The election’s four days away. Maybe the people of this county will see how little actual experience you have, and vote for me.”

  “Maybe.” Todd could afford that breezy tone. He was right in saying he seemed to have the vote locked up.

  Casey wasn’t sure how that’d happened. He’d been the sheriff for four years now, and he thought he’d done well. He’d pulled dangerous drivers off the road, arrested a variety of vandals and drunk fighters and tweakers, and a few burglars. He’d located more than one meth lab and jailed the bastards, even if he’d twice had to call the State boys in to help clean up. He’d kept Fourth of July parades safe. He’d put one abusive husband away, although not three others he’d really like to see behind bars. His department was small, just him and a dozen deputies, but he ran it clean and everyone who called for help got it.

  Admittedly, he wasn’t a people person. He’d overheard himself being called cold and short-tempered. And okay, he probably shouldn’t have done… several things. Shouldn’t have yelled at Mrs. Turnbull for letting her ill-tempered spaniel run loose and bite the neighbor’s gardener. Shouldn’t have lost it when the mayor tried to walk his DUI son out of jail. Shouldn’t have turned a fire hose on someone for a ghoulish comment when the Fraziers’ place burned.

  Shouldn’t have laughed when Scotty tried to tell him that campaigns nowadays were run on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram, even in these small towns.

  Todd was a people person. Most Likely to Succeed in their high school yearbook, where Casey frowned from the back of the group pictures, slogging along and waiting for the day he could join up and leave home. Todd went to college, and then law school and the prosecutor’s office. Casey went overseas as a Marine MP. Now they were both back, and Todd was still Mr. Popular, and Casey was still hiding behind his work. Which Todd was going to take away from him with that damned smile.

  “Either way, I have four days and you’re slowing this down,” he growled.

  Todd raised his hands, gave a humorously pained glance to the EMT, then backed off.

  Casey refused to watch where he went. The best thing to do with a guy who was a pain in the ass was to ignore him until he either went away or escalated to where you could make a legitimate move. Not that he could afford to make any move against Todd.

  The EMT said, “He ain’t seen what you and me have seen.”

  It was unexpected reassurance. Casey had to wince though, when the guy followed that with, “He’s gonna be a pretty crappy sheriff compared to what you’ve been.”

  What could he say to that? He settled for, “Thanks.”

  Once the bodies were gone in the ambulance, siren silent and lights off, they turned to the problem of getting the truck up the slope and onto the flatbed. As they struggled with the winch and the sagging, scraping bits of metal, he was aware of Todd standing off next to his brand-new Ford pickup. The “Kensington for Sheriff” and American flag bumper stickers seemed to mock Casey. His own personal vehicle was an old, undecorated Toyota Tundra. Scott said the tweets praising Todd’s patriotic buying habits were probably campaign sock-puppets, but that every bit counted.

  Casey forced his attention back to the job at hand, before he ended up with crushed fingers. When they had the distorted pickup on the flatbed, Casey walked around it, frowning to himself.

  Jordan, the best local mechanic, joined him. “Hell of a mess.”

  “Yeah.” He reached up to touch what had been a back fender. It was dented, warped, scraped, and oddly colored.

  “Looks like the old guy must’ve backed into something real hard.” Jordan scraped a nail over the smear of green on the gray paint. “Looks automotive. Maybe he hit his John Deere. Old Slater had to’ve been seventy. Maybe he was drivin’ careless.”

  “Maybe.” It was too dark to see much. Casey said, “Take it to your shop and lock the mess in one of the bays. I’ll want to look at it in the morning.”

  “What’s to look at?”

  “If I knew that, I wouldn’t have to wait till morning.” He hesitated, but Jordan was the nearest thing to an accident investigator he had. “Does this look, um, odd to you? This accident? The amount of damage?” Because the more time he spent here, the less sense it made. “I can’t see Graham Slater barreling down this road at eighty miles an hour. If anything, he was a slow driver. To flip the truck all the way over the rail and not just roll it but crush it the way it is? There was a lot of force.”

  Jordan shrugged. “I’ve seen a lot of weird shit. A car in an accident and one side’s crushed and the other is picture perfect. Or a rollover where all we had to fix was one side-view mirror.”

  “Still.” He glanced around. Something was setting off his spider senses, and he’d learned the hard way not to ignore that feeling.

  “I’ll come back and have a look in the morning if you want,” Jordan offered. “Check the road for marks up here, after I look at the truck.”

  “Yeah. That’d be good.”

  “I’m gonna miss doing this. When Mr. Stuck-up is sheriff, I bet he won’t be listening to the opinion of any high school dropout mechanic. You’ve been great.”

  Casey thought about taking offense at the “when” part of that. In the end, he just said, “Thanks.” Again. He’d be so glad when the election was over.

  ***

  Scott Edison shoved his phone in his jeans pocket and ran his hand over his hair. Not that he could do much with the short cut he wore during the hockey season, but it was habit. Shit. Fuck. Motherfucking hell with a side order of son-of-a-bitch.

  He’d gotten into town an hour ago, looking forward to reconnecting with his guys. Hot, intense Casey and sweet, mellow Will. After a month with nothing but long-distance calls and his imagination, he was finally back in Kansas, with three days carved out of his schedule to remind them all how good they were together. He wondered every day how he got so lucky.

  But this apparently wasn’t his lucky day. Instead of losing himself in Casey’s strong hands, and then both of them heading out to see Will after evening chores, he was going to spend his rare free time breaking Will’s heart.

  And way to go, making this all about yourself.

  Snorting in self-disgust, he pushed off the bed and stood. He was half-naked, his shirt open to frame his chest, a calculated display of some of the toned muscle he knew Casey liked. Now he buttoned it with unsteady fingers.

  The Slaters were dead. He’d been lucky enough at twenty-three to not lose anyone he loved yet. It was so unfair that Will, who’d lost his real family early in some painful not-to-be-discussed way, now had to fac
e the deaths of the new family he’d adopted as his own.

  Merde. Câlis. Tabarnac. The colorful swearwords of his French-speaking teammates didn’t help any either. He dug clean socks out of a drawer, found his sneakers under the bed, and headed out.

  It was cold for the beginning of November, and before he’d even started the car, he was regretting grabbing his lightest leather jacket. Habit, because he knew Will liked the way he looked in it, but that would hardly matter tonight. He cranked the heater and practiced phrases as he drove.

  “I have something to tell you…”

  “Casey called me and wanted me to… asked if I would…”

  “We should go inside and…”

  Goddamn it.

  The drive out to the ranch took about twenty minutes. Long enough for him to decide that he wasn’t ever going to find the right words. Also long enough to decide that the first thing out of his mouth needed to be “Casey’s okay.” Because he’d bet that Will also had nightmares where someone showed up unexpectedly, looking stunned, and said, “I have bad news about Casey…” Just like he’d clutched for a moment when Casey had said someone was dead and then stopped. For an instant he’d pictured life without Will, and it’d been like a punch to the heart.

  The news he was delivering was awful, but at least it wasn’t that news.

  The road past the gates of the Tri-Cross ranch was rough. With the ease of long practice, he pulled left around the washout by the big oak and slowed near the hill, watching for the potholes that got filled every spring and hollowed out again in the freeze and thaw of winter. The bounce of the suspension was familiar. How many times had he done this drive in the last couple years? Lots, but never enough.

  There were still lights on in the barn and the bunkhouse. The Slaters’ big house was dark and quiet.

  It would stay that way now.

  Scott pulled into the parking area and turned the engine off. For a minute he sat there. He could hear a couple of the hands in the barn, joking back and forth as they tossed down hay bales from the loft. The dogs lay in the long grass near the barn door, snoozing in the spill of yellow light. They’d barely glanced his way before returning to their nap, familiar with the sound of his Camaro. Off in the quiet night, he could hear the fluttering hum of the wind generator, the soft whicker of horses, the creak of some hinge in need of oiling. All the sounds of Will’s home.