01 Storm Peak Read Online Free

support George Parker and his wife, let alone their three boys. As a result, Jesse had taken a job on the Torrens spread when he was twelve, spending his time before and after school riding, herding, cleaning out barns, mending tack, fencing and branding. He and Lee, an only child, became inseparable.
    Inevitably, as they grew older, their relationship turned into something more than friendship. They were both attractive, healthy young people, constantly in each other’s company, and it happened without either of them even realizing that it had.
    When he was eighteen and she was seventeen, there had been a brief and intense physical relationship between them, clandestine and highly satisfying to both parties. Then Jesse, appalled that he had, in his own eyes, betrayed Martin Torrens trust, ended it. He mumbled apologies to Lee and resigned, unable to meet her father’s gaze. Martin, of course, was no fool and had a pretty shrewd idea what was going on. In fact, he would have been delighted to welcome Jesse into his family. But the boy was young and Torrens felt he should see something of the world before he settled down. Above all, he didn’t want Jesse to feel he was trapped into a permanent relationship with Lee. Gravely, he wished him well and let him leave and Jesse headed for Denver, where he joined the Denver PD.
    Lee was devastated. The following year, in an unthinking counterpoint to Jesse’s move, she became a deputy with the Routt County Sheriff’s Department. Reece Colson, the county’s long serving sheriff, soon began referring to her as “the best man I’ve got.” Lee could ride, ski, shoot and track better than any of the men on the force. She was an ideal choice as a law enforcement officer in the vast open spaces and wild mountains of Routt County.
    When Reece hung up his star and gunbelt in 1991, Lee was long established as his principal deputy, with an impressive record of arrests. She was a natural successor to the slow talking, heavily built sheriff. She won the election without any competition, and had continued to do so ever since.
    As sheriff, she had learned the details of the tragic shooting in Wheat Ridge. She’d watched unhappily as Jesse returned to Steamboat Springs and settled into his current, directionless life. By winter he worked on the local ski patrol, refusing to take any position of responsibility or any organizational role. In the summers, he worked on construction projects or as a casual ranch hand around Yampa Valley. She and Jesse were still friends, of course. But there was a guarded reserve about him now in all his relationships. Nobody was allowed to get too close. Time after time, Lee yearned to take him in her arms and tell him everything was all right and help him get back on track. She could see a fine man drifting aimlessly through his life. She knew he’d been one of Denver PD’s brightest homicide detectives. Now he was barely one rung up from a ski bum, hiding from the world. Worse, she thought, he was hiding from himself.
    Jesse sat silently. But his brain was racing. The wound that Lee had described had rung a bell with him. He’d seen wounds like that before. Still, he’d wait till he’d had a good sight of the corpse before he committed himself. Maybe he was wrong.
    He sensed the occasional glances Lee shot his way as they drove. He smiled ruefully to himself.
    They’d stayed in touch in the years he’d spent in Denver. She went down for his wedding to Abby, then, later, spent hours on the phone letting him talk out the details of the divorce. They’d see each other on weekends when he drove up to Steamboat to ski. They’d swap stories of cases and investigations the way cops do everywhere.
    And never, not once, in all those years, did either of them mention the time when they had been lovers.
    So in light of that, it bothered Jesse somewhat these days that the images of that time kept recurring to him at the most unlikely and inconvenient times.
    And