Rafe was right behind Kerry as she raced out the front door. He didn’t have a gun in his hand, as she did, but he had a sharp eye. The street was quiet. Serene.
He didn’t say a word as he looked around one corner of the house, following her example as she’d looked around the other. He peered under some flowering bushes that lined the front of her home. Walked to the sidewalk out front. Didn’t find so much as a footprint.
And neither did she, as she told him after she’d checked both neighboring yards and her own backyard in case the culprit was hiding close by.
She was already on the phone to the station by the time they headed back inside, and Rafe heard her say she’d write up the report and log the brick as evidence before sending it to forensics.
If he didn’t know her, he’d assume she was 100 percent on the job, focused and unaffected by having just had the front of her house shattered, leaving a gaping hole that made her living room open to the outside elements.
She was focused, but she wasn’t unaffected. He saw the unease in the way the blue of her eyes deepened.
Her next call was to someone who agreed to come out within the hour to get the front window boarded up.
“He thinks he can have a new window in later today,” she told Rafe as she hung up from the call. He had calls to make as well, but needed to make sure she was okay, first.
Cop or no, she lived alone and had just been vandalized.
Whether or not seeing her was forbidden to him, he couldn’t keep pretending he didn’t care for her. The way his heart was pounding at the thought that she could have been hurt—not because he could have been—was right there in his face. Kerry was...special.
And not just because they’d had sex. Spent the night in each other’s arms. He’d done that with other women.
None of them made him feel the way she did.
He wasn’t just walking away.
“It’s a standard size for houses around here, so he has one in stock,” she added, putting her phone down on the dining room table and opening one of the files on Odin Rogers.
His cue to go.
He read it clearly.
“I’m going home to shower, but then I’ll be back in town,” he told her. “To see Payne, and with all that’s been going on, I’ve got some work to catch up on at the office.” The oil was drilled, bought and sold whether the boss was lying in a coma or sitting at his desk. “But I’m volunteering to help you on this, Kerry. Whatever you need...even if it’s just an ear to run things by as you think it all through...”
He was referring to her brother, but would do anything he could to help figure out who wanted Payne dead, too. Any of the family would.
“You are not helping me anymore,” she said, her tone tense as she swung around to face him. “I never should have taken you up there to begin with. Now you’re a target, too, and I’ll never forgive myself if something happens to you because I put you in danger. You and your family already have enough to deal with.”
The force with which she spewed her words moved him so much it took a few seconds to respond. Regardless of circumstances between them, she cared.
But then, the passion in her lovemaking the night before had already given him that much.
They both cared. And it wasn’t enough.
The sad story of their lives.
“I was compared to a cartoon character. Richie Rich,” he said with a shrug and a poor attempt at a grin. “But I already planned on hiring a private security detail...”
“Right, because the Coltons have the funds to do such things. I should have already thought of that. I’m glad.”
He saw her swallow heavily between her first and second sentence and noted the brief lack of professionalism in the way she gestured wildly with her hands, as well as the hint of bitterness that came and went from her expression.
He chose to pass them by.
“So you’ll let me help?”
“No.” She turned back to the table filled with details of her investigation. “Whoever killed my brother, and the ranger, is worried about what I might know. And, now you, too, clearly. The deeper I delve, the more worried he’s going to get.”
“Can’t get any worse for me than it already is,” he told her, walking around to face her across the table. “He won’t have any way of knowing whether you update me or not. Or whether or not I’m going to hire a private detective to see what he can sniff out. I’m already in, Kerry.”
Her glance wasn’t as discouraging as it had been. He got that she didn’t want him in danger. He got even more that, after the night they’d spent, she had to push him away. Hard.
He didn’t get why he couldn’t just step back and let it happen.
But he knew for certain that he was in as deep as it got.
And staying in.
At least until they caught her brother’s killer.
After Rafe left, Kerry mentally reviewed the evidence. Three days after Payne Colton got shot, a ranger was killed and her life was threatened. These three felonies—along with the murder of Bowie Robertson’s bodyguard and the attempted murders of Robertson and Rafe’s sister—were more crimes than their little town with its few officers and detectives usually saw in a year. And that didn’t include the attempts on Bowie Robertson’s life over the previous weeks.
She’d been looking into Tyler’s death for the whole two years, but the day that Rafe Colton got involved, someone died and she and Rafe were targeted.
And that came right after an attempt on his adoptive father’s life.
Was she losing perspective by thinking that the two incidents could be related?
Tyler had grown up on Payne’s property. Was the killer someone who either worked for Colton Oil or Rattlesnake Ridge Ranch? Was Payne’s shooter the same person? Someone Tyler might have known as “Big B”?
She didn’t think so. The attempt on Payne’s life had come right after the family had made the shocking discovery that Ace Colton had been switched at birth. That he wasn’t a Colton at all. Right after he’d been fired as CEO of the family’s multibillion-dollar company.
The kind of trouble Tyler had been in was nowhere near the same league.
And the danger she and Rafe were in wasn’t, either.
Which was why she didn’t answer his call later that morning, only listening to his voice mail because it could have something to do with his father’s case.
His father. Maybe if she thought of Payne that way often enough, her adjustment to the present would be easier.
He’d just been calling to check in. Asked her to call him back.
She didn’t.
Instead she did her job, going with Dane to have a talk with Odin Rogers at his residence. The vest and pocket watch might have looked good on the supposed drug dealer if his paunch didn’t strain buttons and the chain of the watch wasn’t stretched to capacity across his girth. The man really should be in the hair gel business, given how much slime he had pasting long strands of what hair he had left over bald patches. When they asked him about any business he might have in the mountains, if he was ever up Mustang Mountain Drive, asked him about people he knew, he was as innocently ignorant as always to their faces. So she asked him about sources for his wealth. He hadn’t had a job in the valley for as long as she could remember.
He claimed to be independently wealthy from investments he’d made with an inheritance he’d received from a life insurance policy when his father died.
Right. If life insurance came in the guise of inherited contracts in the illegal weapons trade or drug business. As close to the southern border as they were, such goings-on were not merely suspicions, but a known way of life.
Catching them, proving things, was another story. Just when they’d think they were onto something a deal would be made to catch a bigger fish. But not this time.
Kerry wasn’t into fishing for size. She wanted the man stopped and brought to justice.
She and Dane were just leaving the man on his porch when Kerry noticed a pair of boots sitting under a bench by the door. Not freshly shined fancy ones like Odin was currently wearing, but a used pair with the same worn-down heel on the right boot as the pair he currently wore. Because Odin walked with a slight limp.
It wasn’t the slight tilt to the heel that interested her, however. It was the cactus needle sticking out slightly from the back of it. An agave needle. Distinctive not only for their poisonous properties, and for the tequila that came from the plant they protected, those needles were also sharp enough to puncture a throat. Or a boot heel.
There’d been a broken agave arm right by where the ranger had gone off the cliff the night before. The break hadn’t been brand-new, clearly hadn’t been a casualty of the ranger’s death, but she’d sidestepped it to avoid being pricked by one of those needles...
Odin Rogers had been up on that mountain.
She couldn’t prove it. Odin would say he’d stepped on the needle elsewhere. Agave plants could be from all over. She sure wouldn’t be given a warrant to confiscate the boot based on a needle when she had no other proof that Odin Rogers was involved.
Her fellow officers might think, again, that she was too close to the case, was stretching reality to avenge her brother’s death.
But she knew. Odin might not have killed her brother, but he was involved in whatever was going on up on that mountain. He was involved in having her brother killed.
For the moment, it was information she was going to keep to herself.
Rafe made it to his house and into the shower without anyone knowing he hadn’t been home. And his privacy was one of the reasons he’d insisted on moving out of the mansion and into his own home. He’d never learned to be comfortable living with so many people coming and going and knowing who was coming and going.
In dark pants that had been hanging in his closetful of similar clothing—all bagged from the cleaners—a freshly laundered and pressed white shirt, and black-and-white tie, he arrived at Colton Oil fifteen minutes before the board meeting scheduled for ten that morning.
He’d hoped to have more to give the family regarding Payne’s attempted murder. He also had a list of financials to go over with those of his siblings who were fellow board members and their ex-stepmother, Selina Barnes Colton, the firm’s Vice President and Public Relations Director. Why Payne kept his ex-wife on the board, he had no idea, especially since Selina was a bit bitchy most of the time, but as with most things Payne Colton, it wasn’t his job to question.
Still, he was dreading the meeting, when, generally, he got a bit of a kick out of them. Rafe, a foreman’s son, sitting on the board of a billion-dollar company. Such an unlikely event. Just like him, the unlikely heir. He’d seen Payne’s will. He wasn’t set to inherit an amount equal to the rest of Payne’s biological children, but he’d one day be a very rich man.
Richie Rich. Did whoever had thrown that brick in Kerry’s window that morning have something to do with shooting Payne?
The thought sickened him. As did the idea of having to sit through a Selina presentation that would be passing out edicts to them all regarding the presentation of Payne’s shooting to whoever asked, in whatever manner she’d deemed best for the company. She was decent at her job. She just took far too much delight in ordering Payne’s kids around.
He wasn’t in the mood to take orders from anyone. Except Kerry Wilder.
All he really wanted to do was lie in the hammock he’d strung by the house, right in the place where he’d kissed Kerry the one and only time before last night, and relive the night he’d just spent in her bed. Going over and over every movement of her body, and his, every sensation. Cataloging them so he wouldn’t ever lose one single second of those memories.
“Hey, Rafe.” Marlowe, in all her petite, whitish-blond-haired beauty had arrived. The consummate professional. And one of his favorite siblings. He’d had a rough time the month before, when her life had been threatened. There’d been nothing he could do but watch out for her and trust that the guy would be caught. He’d always felt closer to Marlowe. As a kid, she’d been the one to seek his opinion at the dinner table. Offer him more potatoes. She’d not only supported him when he’d gone to Payne with his request to build his own place on RRR property, but she’d helped with some of the interior design choices, and getting things set up, too.
She’d visited his place the most over the years. He couldn’t be happier for her now that she was engaged to be married to a man she loved, and expecting her first child.
“Hey,” he said, wanting to tell her that his entire world had changed. And at the same time not wanting anyone else to know.
She’d barely poured herself a cup of coffee before the others came in, each one bursting into the space with their own brand of arrival, and all with an eye to getting down to business.
It was Marlowe’s first board meeting as CEO, but she handled the call to order as though she’d done it a million times before—nothing about her demeanor that morning would clue anyone in to the fact she was newly pregnant and newly engaged. She was all Colton.
The first order of business had been one they’d all been waiting for—a report from Colton Oil’s IT specialist and department director, Daniel Okowski—about the mysterious email that had outed Ace to the board.
Rafe knew it wasn’t going to be good when the man stood up and said, “I need to give you all a brief dark web rundown.”
His fellow board members clearly shared his dread when they all looked at each other and then back at the tall, thin, black-spectacled man, who at thirty-eight was older than both Rafe and Marlowe.
“The dark web runs similar to the web with which you’re all familiar, but using a specially encrypted software. One example is called Tor—which stands for The Onion Router—and is aptly named because what this software does is route everything that comes through it through different layers all over the world, making things virtually impossible to trace.”
Rafe knew the news wasn’t going to be good. Daniel went on to tell them that the email that had come into all of the board member’s inboxes, telling them that Ace was not a biological Colton, had been sent through the dark web and had therefore been untraceable.
“Damn.” He wasn’t sure who, of the four seated board members, had whispered the word. Maybe Ainsley, second-oldest heir and Colton Oil’s lead legal counsel. Could have been Marlowe or Selina, for all Rafe could tell. He just knew he seconded the sentiment.
And wished Ace was in the room. The man had his moments, but he was honest in his business dealings. And always knew how to keep things on an even keel. No matter what—at least in Rafe’s opinion.
Based on Ace’s outburst to his father after Payne had removed him from the board, Kerry and some of the others might not agree with his assessment.
“I move that this board track down the real Ace Colton.” Selina didn’t miss a beat.
Ainsley frowned, tapping a pen against the empty legal pad in front of her. Marlowe, after a brief, but clearly irritated, look at her ex-stepmother, looked to Rafe and Ainsley, “Do I have a second?”
They were two people short—Ace and Payne. Rafe felt the weight of their absence as he thought over Selina’s declaration. Genevieve had Payne’s proxy and they could get it if they needed it.
Looking for the real Colton heir opened a Pandora’s box that none of them, other than Selina, apparently, wanted unlocked. Not only was it disloyal to Ace, but according to Colton Oil bylaws, the CEO of the company had to be a biological heir. The real Ace could have legal grounds to come in and take over. Possibly try to change the company’s direction. Take the money and run.
“I need a second for the motion before we can open the floor for discussion,” Marlowe said.
“I second, but let the record show that it’s only so that we can discuss,” Ainsley said.
Fifteen minutes of Marlowe, Ainsley and Rafe trying to find a logical reason not to vote to hire someone to find the man who’d been switched as a baby with Ace, ended up with Marlowe calling for a vote and having it be unanimous. In favor of starting the search.
Ace was their brother. Their leader.
But someone else knew he wasn’t a Colton. Someone knew more about them than they did. And it appeared that that someone had been willing to see Payne dead over the news.
They all knew Ace didn’t shoot their father—even if they had no evidence.
And the fact that Payne was shot right on the heels of that email and the DNA test that had proven Ace not to be a biological Colton was too much of a coincidence for any of them to think that the two weren’t related.
Since they couldn’t find who sent the email, they were going to have to find who was behind the baby switching. Marlowe and Callum had already met with a hospital administrator, but the nursery and birth records from the day of the kidnapping had all been burned in the fire that broke out that long ago morning. So who knew that Ace wasn’t the somewhat sickly child that Tessa Colton had given birth to that night in the wee hours before Christmas morning? And how did that information lead them to who wanted the Colton board to know that Ace wasn’t really one of them?
Who wanted both Ace and Payne out of the way?
And why?
Rafe had no answers.
But he fully believed they had to do whatever it took to find that person.
Just as he knew that he was going to give everything he had to helping Kerry find out who’d killed her brother.
After walking out on their love as he had, it was just something he had to do.