Confessing to the Cowboy - By Carla Cassidy Page 0,80

one of the cars. She refused to leave the vehicle even to allow the emergency workers to check her for injuries. “I just want to go home,” she sobbed over and over again.

Two people had already been taken from the scene, both injured but not anything life-threatening. The cars had hit almost head-on and surprisingly it had been the people in the backseat that had been injured.

Neither of them had been wearing seat belts and one’s head bounced off the front headrest while the other had banged knees against the front seat. Thankfully the people in the front seat had been wearing their seat belts. It was a damned miracle that nobody had been killed.

Each driver was accusing the other of being in the wrong lane, and unfortunately both had moved their cars from the point of impact and off to the side of the road before Cameron had arrived.

The sleet and freezing temperature were only adding to the issues as he silently cursed the weatherman for missing the forecast on this band of icy mix that had moved into the area. The forecast had said a brief icy shower, but there had been nothing brief about the sleet that had been ongoing and appeared to have parked overhead.

He stalked over to one of the raging drivers and pulled him away from the other before they began to take swings at each other. Ed Ganger and Blair Simpson were both hotheads, and Cameron knew it wouldn’t take much more before this escalated from a traffic accident into a brawling fistfight.

When he had Ed at a safe distance away from Blair he began a quick interview of his view of the event. Larry Brooks moved to Blair and began his own discussion with the irate man.

Cameron knew how this worked. They would both have different stories and someplace in the middle of those stories would be a semblance of the truth.

What he’d like to do was get out of the nasty weather and head to the café to pick up Mary. He’d like to be curled up on the sofa in front of a roaring blaze in the fire place at his house with her in his arms.

But it was just another one of his foolish fantasies. He couldn’t leave the scene of an accident and he had a feeling the last place in the world Mary wanted to be was in his arms again.

As Adam Benson took photos of what appeared to be the point of impact between the two cars, which initially indicated that both drivers were hugging the center line, Cameron took the two driver statements with him to his car and sank into the warmth of the blowing heater.

He gave each of the statements a cursory read to make sure they had all the information needed. The reports, along with the photos they had of both cars and the road, might allow them to be able to reenact the accident to see if blame needed to be placed. At this point he considered it a weather-related accident with no specific driver to blame. They could each contact their own insurance companies and figure it all out.

He got back out of the car, grateful that both vehicles remained drivable, thus negating the need for a tow truck.

With the sleet getting more intense, he sent both drivers on their way, one heading to the hospital to check on their passengers and the other, with the sobbing Wilma, home.

All the other men who were on traffic duty left to patrol the streets while Cameron headed back to the office. He’d write up a quick report and then head to the café to pick up Mary and get her back to his place.

A half an hour later he was seated at his desk, his report written, but his thoughts drifting into painful territory. He couldn’t be the son that his parents wanted. He couldn’t be the man for Mary and he couldn’t be the sheriff who caught the bad guy. Talk about feeling like a failure.

He tried to turn his thoughts around. He could twist and turn himself inside out and he would never be Bobby. It wasn’t his fault that his father was trapped in an abyss of grief even after two years. He could only hope that with more time his father would eventually come around and realize Cameron’s worth as a son...as a man.

Mary was a heartbreak that would take some time to heal. He’d entertained dreams of