The Law and Ginny Marlow Read online

  Table of Contents

  Cover Page

  Dear Reader

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Dear Reader

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  Books by Marie Ferrarella

  Copyright

  Dear Reader,

  The lure of the West is as strong today as it was a hundred years or more ago, when the wagon trains headed in that direction. I know I can’t resist a cowboy. And when he’s also a sheriff…! So is it any wonder that heroine Ginny Marlow finds herself inextricably entwined—and loving it!—with Quint Cutler? In The Law and Ginny Marlow, the latest in award-winner Marie Ferrarella’s miniseries THE CUTLERS OF THE SHADY LADY RANCH, you’ll see what happens when a quick trip out west turns into a lifetime of wide open spaces. You’ll also be sorry there’s only one more book to go in this wonderful family’s story.

  And if you’ve been following our cross-line miniseries FOLLOW THAT BABY—or even if you haven’t—you’ve got a treat in store with Christie Ridgway’s The Millionaire and the Pregnant Pauper. This homegrown Yours Truly star tells a romp of a tale—and takes you one book closer to the discovery of the missing Wentworth heir. Have a good time now, and next month travel to Silhouette Intimate Moments to see how the saga ends.

  Have fun, and don’t forget to come back next month for two more fun and fabulous books all about meeting—and marrying!—Mr. Right.

  Yours,

  Leslie J. Wainger

  Executive Senior Editor

  Please address questions and book requests to:

  Silhouette Reader Service

  U.S.: 3010 Walden Ave., P.O. Box 1325, Buffalo, NY 14269

  Canadian: P.O. Box 609, Fort Erie, Ont. L2A 5X3

  The Law and Ginny Marlow

  Marie Ferrarella

  To Emmy,

  For all the joy you brought.

  Dear Reader,

  I’ve always thought that there was something very sexy about a small-town sheriff putting himself on the line to protect his town. Sheriff Quint Cutler doesn’t have to worry about any “bad guys” doing harm to the citizens of his town, Serendipity, Montana. But he does have to worry about a certain dark-haired, sharp lady lawyer laying claim to his heart—against her own will, as it turns out.

  Geneva Marlow thought she was coming to Serendipity to rescue her sister; she had no idea that she was rescuing her heart from being doomed to a life of loneliness in the bargain. Orphaned long before her mother died, Ginny has always turned a brave face to the world and shouldered more than her share of responsibilities. Coming up against Quint Cutler and entering the warm world of the Cutler family reminded her of everything she was missing. Everything she wouldn’t be missing if she only let love into her world.

  Here’s hoping you’ve found love in your world. Thank you for reading and being my audience.

  Love,

  1

  “You have my little sister in your jail.”

  The declaration, coming from behind him, took Sheriff Quintin Cutler by surprise. Carly, his deputy, was out to lunch and Quint had thought himself alone in the small three-room jailhouse. Alone, save for the teenager cooling her heels and her attitude in the cell at the rear of the building.

  The woman’s voice sounded both angry and accusing. It also sounded like hot honey mixed with just the right amount of bourbon to go down smooth on a cold winter’s night. It was the kind of voice that gave a man pause and made him try to visualize the sort of woman who would go with it.

  She definitely wasn’t from around here. He knew most of the people who lived in and around Serendipity, the small Montana town he’d been sheriff of these past four years. The second of five, Quint had always taken things at his own pace. He allowed himself a single moment to conjure up an image before he turned around to face reality and, most likely, disappointment. In a perfect world, the owner of the voice would be tall, he decided, on the slim side and sexier than he’d once thought those models in lingerie catalogs were.

  Quint turned away from the bulletin board and the batch of new posters he was putting up. Pictures of runaways, every one of them. Sometimes it didn’t seem quite real to him, all those kids taking off. Taking on a world that was, in all probability, a great deal tougher than anything they’d ever come across or imagined, just because there’d probably been some minor blowup at home.

  The girl he had in the cell in back was a runaway. Not as hopeless, not as dirty as some he’d encountered, but a definite runaway. He knew the signs. Her sister’s timing impressed him. Though she’d been in town a couple of days, the girl had only been in his cell for a matter of a few hours.

  Finally looking at the owner of the voice, he smiled to himself.

  Damn, but he was good, Quint thought. Looked like some things were meant to be perfect after all. The woman who stood in his office, her fisted hands on her designer-covered, shapely hips, was as close to the vision he’d imaged as anything could be. Maybe a little bit better. She had medium-length dark brown hair that curled and swirled about her face like warm waves of water and eyes the color of emeralds at first light.

  Right now, those emeralds were shooting sparks at him. He figured if they’d been bullets, he would have been dead by now.

  But he would have gone with a smile. She was, as his father liked to say, one hell of a looker.

  Quint raised an eyebrow, noting the air of barely harnessed impatience mingled with frustration about the woman. Fresh from some big city, he judged, and hell-bent to get back.

  “You mean the little girl who was caught stealing from Joe Taylor’s general store this morning?” In sharp contrast to hers, his own voice was calm as he put the question to her.

  Geneva Marlow raised her chin. It almost looked as if she was on the attack, Quint thought.

  Ginny was, though she tried to hide it, also on just this side of frantic, having worried herself sick about Jenny. That didn’t put her in the most reasonable frame of mind as she faced the sheriff.

  She didn’t like this man’s attitude. That laid-back pose wasn’t fooling her. Experienced, she smelled a shakedown coming on. She was surprised he hadn’t asked the question with his hand out.

  “I mean my sister, Jennifer Marlow, who has been sitting in your jail, according to a reliable witness, since eight this morning.”

  The evenness of her own voice surprised her, given the state her nerves were in. Ginny had been haunted by the thought that she’d never see Jenny again, all because of a stupid argument over an even stupider boy who, Ginny had maintained, was a horrible influence on her sister. She’d been right, but right was a poor consolation to coming home and finding that her sister had taken off for parts unknown rather than be separated from Kyle.

  Quint’s smile, like his words, was deliberately slow in making its appearance. He could see that it irritated her. She made him think of a prize stallion, pawing the ground, raring to run him over.

  “Reliable witness,” Quint echoed innocently. He knew exactly who she was referring to. “You must mean Jeremiah Stone.”

  That Jeremiah was a character, Quint thought. Jeremiah Stone was Serendipity’s resident philosopher and all-round busybody. He spent his days sitting just outside of Taylor’s General Store, whittling, rocking and talking to anyone who chanced to walk by. Man, woman, child or beast, it made no matter to him. If they had ears, he’d talk to them. Jeremiah was practically a fixture, watching the comings and goings of everyone in Serendipity. He’d been retired as long as Quint or anyone in town could remember, although no one was real
ly sure from what since no one could recall ever seeing Jeremiah put in a day’s work anywhere.

  “Yes.” Ginny had gotten the man’s name and more information than she’d needed when she stopped to talk to him. Agitated though she was, she’d recorded all the pertinent particulars on the back pages of her planner.

  She wanted to make sure there were no delays in getting Jenny out. She hadn’t counted on a sheriff who spoke as if each word was costing him a portion of his paycheck. “I spoke with Mr. Stone before coming here.”

  Quint nodded. The woman must have had someone else track her sister. She was far too neat and pressed to have been on the road herself, conducting the search. “Well, he steered you right. We’ve got a Jenny Marlow in the back, in one of the cells.”

  As Ginny opened her mouth to ask for the terms of Jenny’s release, the sheriff took out several packages of cupcakes from his middle desk drawer and tossed them on his desk. Ginny looked at him questioningly.

  “She tried to walk out without paying for these.” Quint shook his head. He had no doubts that this was what Jenny was subsisting on. “Nothing but sugar here. With a diet like that, no wonder the girl’s bouncing off the walls in there.”

  Ginny felt the last of her valued patience shredding. Jenny was hers to find fault with, not this two-bit sheriff who sounded as if he hadn’t managed to wander into the latter half of the century yet. Ginny’s eyes narrowed. “Most likely what has her bouncing off the walls is the injustice of being held in jail for something so minor.”

  The sheriff raised his eyes to hers. Ginny found she couldn’t readily draw them away. “How much should she have stolen before you’d think it was major?”

  Had she been in a more reasonable frame of mind, she would have allowed that she deserved that. Stealing was stealing and she’d never condoned it. But the past few weeks had left her almost sleepless and exceptionally high-strung. She wasn’t thinking as clearly as she might have been, but she wasn’t about to admit it to the likes of him.

  Temper had her setting her mouth hard. “That’s not the point, Sheriff.”

  He nodded. “You’re right. The point is—can’t do the time, don’t do the crime.”

  Ginny rolled her eyes. If she’d had time to get breakfast this morning before dashing to make the plane that brought her here from L.A. after she’d gotten Carmichael’s phone call saying the detective had located Jenny, it would be in danger of coming up.

  “Oh, please, spare me. We’re looking at three dollars’ worth of goods.”

  “Two-fifty,” Quint corrected her amiably. He ignored the dark look she gave him. “They were on sale.”

  “Whatever.” Exasperated with him, angry at Jenny for putting her through hell and angrier at herself for somehow failing Jenny and making her take this drastic step to begin with, Ginny took her wallet out of her shoulder bag. She jerked out the first bill she came to, glanced to see what it was, then held it out to him. It was a five. “I’ll pay full price—with interest. Now if you’ll just let her go—”

  The woman was accustomed to getting her way, Quint judged. He was beginning to see the origins of the problem between her and her sister. Quint made no attempt to reach for the money.

  Instead, he sat on the edge of his desk, his hands folded in front of him as if he had all the time in the world. “’Fraid I can’t do that.”

  “Why not?”

  Her eyes narrowed. Ginny knew exactly why not. These small-town officers of the law were all alike. Officers of the law, that was laughable. More like abusers of the law. This sheriff was no different than the one in the town where she and Jenny had lived the first part of their lives. Smoke Tree, Arizona, a town that could easily fit into anyone’s back pocket. He had been just out for what he could get, legally or otherwise. Dealings with Sheriff Dewey had left a very bad taste in her mouth. One that would last her a lifetime.

  Dewey owned half the town outright and blackmailed the other half into submission. Knowing him was one of the things that had sent her into law in the first place. People like that had to be put in their place. It was only when corporate law beckoned, promising to help her pay off her mountain of a school loan more quickly, that she’d put her principles on hold. For a while.

  “Do you want more money?”

  “How much money would you be willing to give?” In spite of his question, the planes of his broad, chiseled face appeared completely innocent.

  She knew it.

  It was a scam, just as she’d thought. And this man in front of her, all six-two or -three of him, with the dark blond hair that brushed against the top of his collar and the shiny tin star, was nothing more than a con artist. Just like Dewey. If she had the time, she’d have him up on charges so fast, his gorgeous head would be spinning.

  But she didn’t have the time. She really didn’t even have the time to come here and pick Jenny up. But it wasn’t something she felt she could trust anyone else to do. Handling Jenny was not an easy matter. Even she was failing miserably at it and she loved Jenny more than anything in the world.

  “All right, I have—” Ginny didn’t bother pausing to count the money in her wallet, she knew exactly what she’d brought with her. Cash, rather than plastic because cash was what people trusted in small towns like this. “Five hundred dollars in here.” Extracting the bills, she slapped them down on his desk. “Is that enough to buy my sister’s freedom?”

  Quint let out a low whistle. There were ten fifty-dollar bills practically fanned out on his stained blotter. “That’s a lot of money to be carrying around.” Apparently this woman believed she could solve everything with money. He wondered if she ever sat down and talked to her sister, or if she’d just thrown money at any problem that had arisen in hopes that it would just fade away beneath the weight of the bills. “Someone might rob you if they knew you were running around with that much money.”

  Someone already has, Ginny thought “I know.” Her eyes deliberately fixed on his for a moment. “Now will you open the cell and let her out?”

  Quint picked up the bills, arranged them in a neat pile, then handed them back to the woman. “No.”

  Ginny stared at the bills. “What?” What was his game? Did he think he could shake her down for more?

  “No.” Quint enunciated the single word slowly, then smiled at her. “Better?”

  Anger, barely contained before, all but exploded now inside Ginny. She’d spent the past two and a half weeks alternating between being worried half out of her mind about Jenny and being furious with her for having done something so stupid. Ginny was in no mood for whatever this man had up his sleeve.

  “No, it’s not better,” she informed him tersely. “And what do you mean, no?” She held the money out to him, giving him one last chance.

  He acted as if she’d already put the bills away. “No means no. It’s really not that hard a word to figure out,” he said conversationally. “Not like antidisestablishmentarianism.” The grin, had she been more receptive, would have been engaging. But as it was, it was merely incredibly provoking to her. As was he. “Now there’s a word that never made any sense to me. Just something I figure they thought up to—”

  He was going to go on talking forever, wasn’t he? The last thin thread of patience she had left snapped. “Forgive me, Sheriff, but I really don’t care to hear about your philosophy on words. I’m hot, I’m tired, I’ve driven across half this state trying to get to my sister and all I want to do is take her and get out of here.” The look in her eyes dared him to say no again. “Now, are you going to let her out or not?”

  Acting as if he were selecting an appetizer from a tray being offered him, Quint chose the word he wanted out of her question. “‘Not.’”

  Ginny could have screamed and very nearly did. She struggled to hold on to her temper. Maybe if she pretended she was in court, facing a worthy adversary, instead of in a small-town jailhouse, staring up at a man who was the very definition of maddening, she might stand a better chan
ce at controlling her temper.

  “Why?”

  Quint crossed his arms before him. “Your sister, ma’am, has a bad attitude.”

  That was the second time he’d addressed her with that pseudopoliteness. She wasn’t buying it. “My name isn’t ma’am.”

  He nodded. “I don’t rightly know what your name is, seeing as how you never introduced yourself before making accusations.”

  Ginny gritted her teeth together. “It wasn’t an accusation, it was a fact. My sister is in your jail. Now, are you or aren’t you going to let her out?”

  Quint was beginning to suspect she could shoot lightning bolts out of those eyes of hers if she wanted. The angrier she grew, the calmer he became. Someone had to maintain the balance here, he thought. “Strictly speaking, it isn’t my jail, it’s—”

  “I don’t care!”

  Ginny pressed her lips together. Shouting wasn’t going to get her anywhere. She knew that, would have been the first to point that out, under different circumstances. But it was just that her nerves were in tatters. She was under an extreme amount of pressure to return to L.A. Lately it felt as if her self-control was being peeled away from her inch by inch, like the skin of a banana. The firm, representing Twain Dynamics, had one of its biggest cases coming to court and Leary, the senior partner, was counting on her to make a good showing. She didn’t have time to waste exchanging words with this infuriating man.

  Ginny took a second to collect herself. She had no idea why Jenny wanted to hurt her this way, but whatever her sister’s reasons were, she didn’t want Jenny running around out on her own. At seventeen, Jenny was still a minor, and as far from being an adult emotionally as a cow was from dancing the lead in Swan Lake. The trouble Jenny had gotten herself into in this two-by-four town clearly underscored her point.

  Ginny took a deep breath then let it out slowly, and tried to look as contrite as she could allow herself to be under the circumstances.