Trusting that Tyler

  Masterson County, Volume 6

  Calle J. Brookes

  Published by Calle J. Brookes, 2021.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Trusting that Tyler (Masterson County, #6)

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 1

  She’d need her shoes if she had to run. She didn’t have her shoes. That was one of the first thoughts in her head—she’d need her shoes, if she had to run.

  Judith Hopewell grabbed her cell phone and shoved it into her pocket.

  There was glass everywhere. She cut the side of her foot when she stepped on the glass when it had shattered, not even five feet from where she sat.

  Jude told herself not to panic.

  She told herself it was just the storm. A branch through her far front window.

  Except there was no branch on her hardwood floor.

  The middle window in her living room shattered next. Right before her eyes. Someone yelled.

  Yelled her name.

  It took her a precious moment to realize it was someone out there doing this. Deliberately.

  Yelling that she was a stupid bitch. That she would pay for what she had done.

  She acted. Immediately. Instinctively.

  Just like she’d practiced.

  Jude ran—toward the back door. Her neighbors were back there. If she could make it to the neighbors’ she’d find help; the sheriff’s mother lived right behind her. Maybe...maybe the sheriff would be there. He and his brothers often visited their mother. She could find help there.

  There was a retired army general living behind her, too. He...would probably help her, too. If no one was there, she’d just keep running into she made it to town.

  There was a reason she’d bought a house two blocks from Main Street.

  Jude hit the back door, no thought of stopping for shoes in her mind now.

  Someone beat her there. She could see his shadow out there, on her back porch.

  She could hear him yelling. Screaming. At her.

  Calling her name again. Saying he was coming for her. Saying she couldn’t escape him, no matter what.

  That she would never get away from him.

  She was his.

  She bolted toward the guest bedroom instead. There was a hidden attic door there. She’d made certain it was hidden so well only she and the man who had sold her the house would ever even know about it. A part of her had always known she’d need a place to hide in her own home.

  That man she’d bought it from was a former police officer, and a nice man. With two beautiful babies and a wife equally as nice. Her secret was...safe.

  She could hide and be safe.

  She had hidden before.

  When Bryan would come home, would be angry. When nothing she had done had made things better.

  It had taken then nineteen-year-old Jude eight months to save enough money to leave him. She’d been blessed when he’d died in an accident on a military base hundreds of miles away instead.

  Jude had never forgotten the fear.

  She pulled down the access door of the guest room closet, then the ladder, praying she’d have time to get up there and hide. Praying she hadn’t left a blood trail through the hallway. She had dark carpet throughout the house to ensure that very thing.

  She prayed she was quiet enough, too.

  When closed, the panel looked like a regular ceiling tile. But she had modified it herself to be different.

  To be safe.

  She pulled her body into the small attic space. She’d even practiced doing this before. When the memories would get to be too much.

  She closed it behind her. If he burned her home, she had a portable fire ladder bought for that very possibility, next to the small attic vent.

  It was a small exit but was just wide enough. Jude would fit.

  She’d checked that, too. More than once.

  Jude would never be trapped in her own home ever again.

  She had her cell phone. She had food and water in the attic. She had an escape route. She was as safe as she could be.

  Jude dialed 911, but she knew the truth. There were only a handful of deputies in this county, and only a handful of WHP officers who covered all the Masterson region.

  She could very well be waiting for a long time.

  Jude wasn’t going anywhere. She was going to stay in her safe spot until help came to her this time.

  She wasn’t afraid to call for help any longer.

  Therapy had gone a long way to helping her fight the past.

  The dispatcher required her to stay on the line. Jude complied, as quietly as she could.

  She had no idea if someone was in her house. Jude wasn’t stupid enough to check. She was staying right where she was. Until the sheriff or a deputy arrived to tell her it was safe.

  She told that to the dispatcher. That she was in as safe a place as she could be right then. She wasn’t moving around, wasn’t making any unnecessary noise. She was just hiding. Waiting for them to rescue her.

  Fighting the memories.

  Before...there had been no one to rescue her. Not on the military base where Bryan was so well-liked and she was just his far-too-young bride with no one she could fully trust.

  She hadn’t belonged. Bryan had used that against her time and time again.

  Not that he’d needed to—Jude had never fully belonged anywhere before.

  She’d been preparing to rescue herself back then. She’d gotten lucky he’d died before he could finally make good on his threats to kill her if she ever left him.

  She didn’t know if she’d get lucky a second time.

  Almost thirty minutes later, she saw the flashing red and blues through the attic vent. The dispatcher reported that the sheriff and one of his deputies was inside and it was safe for her to come out. She told the dispatcher she’d be coming out of the guest bathroom—but she never told her where she had hidden.

  Jude never would.

  That was her secret to keep.

  Someone opened the bathroom door quickly. Someone tall and strong and... familiar.

  “Jude? It’s me, Joel Masterson. It’s safe. You can come out now,” the sheriff’s voice was the most beautiful sound she had ever heard.

  She’d had thirty minutes to pull her composure around her shoulders. To prepare. To put on a professional front befitting the head of the social services department of Masterson County.

  Jude could handle this. She knew she could.

  She had handled far worse before.

  Chapter 2

  It took a day and a half for the sheriff’s office to give her the go-ahead to get someone in to do estimates about fixing the damage. By noon two days after the vandal had smashed all three of her front windows and the window of her backdoor—which he’d opened and left swinging in the wind, taunting her with what he could have done—Jude had a tall, handsome man in a tool belt standing next to the sheriff.

  They’d arrived together, the sheriff to supposedly check on her. The contractor because he was reported to be the best—and most affordable—in the county, according to the woman at the bookstore that Jude considered a friend.

  The sheriff was a nice man that she’d met many times before, with a wonderful family—including Nikki, from the bookstore, who was the first cousin of his wife.

  She strongly suspected the sheriff’s mother had made him be there for her today. Rhea had checked on her twice at the inn since the damage had been done.

  The other man was someone she had seen in town on occasion, but she had never truly met.

  Jude very rarely spoke to strange men she encountered around town. It was far too dangerous to do that, in her experience.

  That was a mistake she would never make again.

  Not just because of Bryan. She had...almost done something she would have regretted.

  In Masterson.

  With a man who looked a great deal like the contractor currently discussing windows with the sheriff, actually.

  The contractor reminded her of someone, but when he introduced himself as a Tyler—cousin to the sheriff’s wife—it clicked. Of course.

  There were a lot of Tyler men around Masterson County. It was very easy to confuse them.

  He wasn’t the one Tyler man she had met—close and personal. This one was named Martin, and he resembled that other Tyler enough that it disconcerted her.

  Rattled her more than she wanted to admit.

  She had been trying to forget him.

  Jude reminded herself that it had been only one kiss. One kiss, on her front porch, with the rain pouring down around her after a surprise dinner she had never imagined having.

  Just one kiss. That Tyler had probably kissed dozens of women in his life.

  Nothing earth shattering. Nothing that should make her feel this awkward. It had just been an interlude. The contractor didn’t act like he recognized her, either. That was good.

  Not that she would have expected him to, but...Michael Tyler had kissed her, promised to call, and then never had.

  Men like that—well, she suspected they liked to talk. She’d seen it before. Seen the damage words could do. How rumors and lies could ruin people’s lives, even today.

  Telling lies about her to his friends had been something Bryan was particularly good at doing. He had done everything he could to isolate her.

  So that she would

be completely dependent on him. Only him.

  Michael Tyler had made what he’d wanted that night very, very clear.

  She wasn’t going to forget that any time soon.

  But neither would she judge every Tyler she met against that man. The Tyler women she’d met had all been wonderful, nice, friendly people. She and Nikki had plans next month to go to a book expo together. She’d met the sheriff’s sister-in-law Perci when she’d adopted a beautiful little girl. Jude had been the case worker.

  Michael Tyler was the only Tyler who she had met she couldn’t get out of her head, though.

  Jude stepped inside the kitchen with Martin and the sheriff, getting an estimate on how much it would cost to replace her entire back door and the front windows. And the locks. They had just about finished when the phone rang.

  The landline.

  She very rarely used it; it had come bundled with her internet. She hadn’t even given the number to anyone but Linsey, her colleague and Nikki so she and the other woman could make plans for the book expo. It was her first plans outside of work since moving to Masterson two and a half years ago.

  She’d been looking forward to it, looking forward to making real connections with someone for once.

  The voice on the answering machine changed everything.

  “Bitch. You’ll pay for what you did to him. Did your husband ever give you what you deserved? I will...I’ll show you what Bryan never did...”

  Jude started shaking, as the sheriff let out a low curse. One echoed by the contractor. The two men were staring at her.

  She just stared back as what the caller said sank in. Someone was coming for her. And that someone knew about Bryan.

  Jude froze. She just froze. One of the men wrapped his fingers around her elbow and led her to a chair. Her favorite kitchen chair.

  “Take a deep breath, Jude. You’re safe here with me, honey,” the sheriff said. She looked up into his beautiful eyes. She’d seen him with his wife a hundred times now. He always had love in his eyes for her. And there had never been a suspicious bruise on Phoebe Masterson Jude had ever seen. They’d just had a baby recently, too. They were happy.

  People could marry and be happy. She knew that.

  He was staring at her. So was Martin.

  “I—I—” What was she supposed to say? To do? Jude straightened her shoulders as what she was letting herself think slammed into her. She wasn’t a wimp and she wasn’t going to be a victim again. This...this wishy-washy mess in her kitchen was not her. Not any longer. She firmed her spine and her spirit, and looked at the two men. “I don’t know who that was. I haven’t spoken to anyone who knew me or my late husband in five years.”

  She avoided looking at the tall man with Michael Tyler’s eyes.

  He was just there to fix her windows, for heaven sake. Not learn about the most painful, intimate details of her life.

  It wasn’t one of the most humiliating moments she’d ever experienced, but it wasn’t exactly walking in daisies, either. She expelled a breath.

  She could get through this.

  “Do you have someplace else you can go for a while, until I hunt this guy down?”

  “What can you legally do, even if you find him?” She knew the stalking laws—the damage to her windows wasn’t enough to warrant real jail time. Not in an overloaded system, in a crime where no one got hurt. A slap on the wrist was the most likely outcome for the man responsible. Community service for a weekend or two.

  And years of nightmares for her.

  She had seen enough of the legal system since beginning her work with family services to know the real truth. Even though the sheriff wanted to help her—there wasn’t much he could do.

  “I have here, Sheriff. I don’t have any close friends in the county. I’m friendly with a few people, including your mother and Nikki at the bookstore. That’s it. I have no family—anywhere.” Jude held her head up with pride. She’d accepted long ago that she was pretty well destined to go through life completely alone. At twenty-seven that was a lesson she’d learned long ago—and it had sunk in hard.

  These past few days had just reiterated it.

  “You can’t stay here. I don’t have any deputies to spare right now,” the sheriff said, bluntly. “You can go back to the inn, or stay with a friend, or—”

  “I won’t put others in danger. This is most likely someone I’ve angered through the job, sheriff. We both know I’m not exactly well liked in certain circles around Masterson. Occupational hazard.” Something else she had accepted. It was just the way it was. If sometimes that meant she was pushed aside a bit, well, Jude could handle that.

  She was preventing others from going through the hells she had. That was worth sacrifice.

  “She can come home with me,” the stranger in her kitchen said, abruptly. He’d heard every word on the answering machine, to her shame. Now he and the sheriff knew what she had been trying to forget. “No one on the planet would expect she’d be out there at our ranch. It would buy you a few days, Joel. And my brothers and I know how to keep her safe.”

  He turned to her, looking very much like the man she hadn’t been able to get out of her head, the man she had looked for around Masterson for three weeks, until she’d told herself to stop being stupid.

  Even if Michael Tyler had called her like he’d promised he would, Jude wouldn’t have ever let anything come from it.

  She just hadn’t been able to forget him. He’d been a hint of what she could have had, but never had. On a particularly low day for her. He had been there.

  Now she couldn’t get him out of her head. And here was a man looking at her with the same eyes.

  Hard to get past that.

  No one had ever actually kissed her like he cared about her as well. That was what had shocked her most that night. That he hadn’t just been taking from her what he wanted. She’d thought Michael had cared about what she’d thought.

  It was the novelty of it all, that night. She’d been alone and in need of rescuing. For the first time in her life, someone had been there to do that rescuing.

  She’d fallen hard for the romance of it all.

  But he had just been using her, too. For some reason. After the kiss they’d shared, he’d wanted nothing more to do with her. Hard for a woman to trust a man like that.

  Or the one in front of her, who looked so much like him. “Thank you for the offer, but I couldn—”

  “Go with Martin, Jude. You have my word you’ll be perfectly safe. I’d send my wife or any of my sisters-in-law or my own mother with him in the same situation. You’ll be safe there. At least for a few nights. Give me time to track down the caller, see what we can find about who did this. You can’t stay here right now; it just isn’t safe. Either that or come home with me and Phoebe. We have a spare room.”

  Phoebe—who had just had a baby. No.

  Jude would never risk someone else for her own safety. Especially someone who had a family who loved her. But the sheriff had a stubborn look she recognized—his mother looked just like that sometimes, when she was getting pushy.

  She knew he would keep pushing. Knew she would eventually say yes.

  “What do you say? Come home with me and my brothers while Joel finds the guy responsible for this mess. I can guarantee we’re all housebroken.” Martin said, gently, as the tall man who had dropped him off before running over to another job site pulled into her driveway, a brand-new back door in the bed of his truck. For her house.

  He’d introduced himself as Chandler, Martin’s younger brother. And he’d told her he liked the color choices of her kitchen, said he was getting ready to remodel his own to make the layout more efficient—and so he can put in a larger oven. Something so simple.

  “Come home with us,” Martin said, almost coaxingly. His brother’s face showed his surprise. Jude knew it was just a matter of time until he knew, too. “We’ll keep you safe, as long as you need it. I promise. You can count on me. When a Tyler gives their word, it means something.”

  Jude looked at him, trying to figure out if he meant it.

  All she saw was kindness—and determination.

  It was either this man who she didn’t know or the sheriff. With his wife and brand-new baby to protect.

  For what must have been the millionth time in her life—Jude felt like she had no real choice. Someone else was making the important decisions for her—and she had no real option but to go along.

 

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