“It wasn’t Wallace in the photo that night,” she told Beau, “don’t you see? He couldn’t have been the one who climbed that tower to plant something—maybe a money drop to pay off Russell for keeping quiet—up there as a lure. The man who did that and sabotaged the harness—or maybe he forced Russell to go up at gunpoint. We might never know for sure—except whoever did it had to have been younger, fitter, a trained climber like a—”
“You’re trained, aren’t you, Doctor?” the sheriff asked, his eyes widening as it hit him that she might be something other than a victim. “Whoever your accomplice was, you were the one they paid to get Russell up—”
“Let her finish,” Beau ordered.
“Trained like a firefighter,” Emma said.
“You lie!” bellowed a deep voice about eight feet behind her, a voice that startled her into crying out and lurching forward, her legs tangling with her crutches.
Chaos erupted, measured in the splintered fractions of a second. Shouts came at her from all sides, commands to Freeze, Shut up and Drop it colliding in the air as she went down. She caught sight of the sheriff, pulling at his sidearm, Beau lurching forward, reaching for her, and finally—as her back smacked down—Fernando Galvez, raising a weapon in the turbine’s doorway.
As Beau reached her, the air exploded. Sharp cracks of gunfire overlapped a deeper Boom!
Blood sprayed over her body. Beau’s blood, hot and bright. She screamed as he fell to his knees, his hands rising to his neck.
As she reached for him she heard the unmistakable racking of the shotgun.
Raising her hands, she looked up. “Don’t shoot! Please! I won’t tell anyone about your son!”
A sharper crack, followed by two more, split the air around her. Fernando’s head bobbed hard, the Panama hat flying. Slumping awkwardly in the doorway, the ranch manager’s body sagged and pitched forward, the shotgun falling from his hands and dark blood spreading from beneath him.
Wallace had dropped onto his knees. His arm bloody, he struggled to raise his gun hand, which he turned in the direction of the field behind them before another shot came out of nowhere and he flopped onto his side.
Panic ricocheting through her, Emma crawled to Beau. Shaking violently, he held both hands to the side of his neck as blood squeezed from beneath his fingers.
She wanted to scream her lungs out, to stop the world to tend to his wound and get help for all three men who’d been hit. But right now, the only thing that mattered was keeping Beau from being shot again by whoever had just fired on—and possibly killed—Wallace.
“We need to move, right now,” she screamed near Beau’s ear. “Get behind that door, inside the base!”
He didn’t move at first, saying only, “Tony won’t—h-hurt me.”
As this name registered, she stood, abandoning her crutches to grab at Beau’s arm, pulling on him before he slipped into shock. But no matter how she struggled, he was too far heavy for her to drag.
“Help me, Beau, or we’re both dead.”
“Antonio’s...friend. H-help.”
“Antonio,” she insisted, “is Russell’s killer!”
She looked up to see a figure rushing toward them—the same young fireman that she had just accused of murder.
* * *
“Tony would never—” Beau tried to argue. But with pain, shock and blood loss making speech nearly impossible, his mind flashed to the new car the kid had recently been seen driving, the rich white firefighter groupie girlfriend that the family hadn’t met. How suddenly unconcerned the young man seemed about the cost of a move to Dallas.
Had Fernando begun to suspect? Was that why he had turned the gun on Emma when she’d named the son he was unwilling to give up on?
It was then Beau spotted Antonio, his hand still clutching his pistol and his face a mask of desperation as he charged toward Emma.
“Tony, no!” Beau croaked out, comprehension dawning that Tony meant to silence her.
Drawing from some unknown reserve of strength, Beau surged to his feet and shoved Emma toward the shelter of the doorway. Tripping over Fernando’s body, she fell again, and Beau scrambled after her, heedless of the blood pouring from his neck.
Yanking her to her feet, he pushed her through and turned to face the threat. The young man he’d believed as good a man as his father and his older brothers, a young man who’d chosen a deadly shortcut to achieve his goals.
Now that he had shot the sheriff, it was clear that Tony wasn’t going to let anyone stand between him and the woman who had named him for the killer that he was.
“I’m s-so sorry, Mr. Kingston,” he said, his voice sounding impossibly young as he aimed his weapon straight at Beau’s chest. “I didn’t mean—I n-never w-wanted things to turn out this w-way. I wanted to prove that I could—”
“Stop this! Let him go, please,” Emma shouted, struggling to push her way past Beau. “It’s me you want. Don’t—”
“Get back, Emma,” Beau said, blocking her. Didn’t she understand that Tony had no choice except to kill them both? Unless he could find some way to—
“Don’t shoot your brother,” Emma pleaded. “Yes, that’s right. Can’t you see it in your faces? Your jaws? Your ears, your coloration? You’re both your father’s sons.”
Beau stiffened, but Antonio bellowed, “No!” and dropped his gaze to his fallen father.
Their father, if Emma had it right—who found the strength to raise his shotgun and pull the trigger one last time.
Chapter 21
All he knew, obliterated. Shattered in a hail of gunfire, a waterfall of intermingled blood. Beau’s, Fernando’s and, most of all, Antonio’s, as the blast from his father’s shotgun, aimed upward at nearly point-blank range, blew out the juncture of the twenty-year-old’s hip and thigh.
Beau lay in the dimness of his hospital room, clinging to the raft of painkillers he’d been given. The screams replayed in his mind, the desperate, all-too-brief cries not of a monster, but of a young man barely getting started, confused by how things could have taken this ungodly turn.
My half brother—could it be true? And did that mean Fernando was my—Did he even guess? Or had he known all along, while he’d advised Beau, taught him and watched his cousins call him bastard while his legal father’s contempt had torn his soul to ribbons?
As questions spun through his brain, Beau squeezed his eyelids tighter, his throat tightening and his stomach contracting to a hard knot.
“Hey, are you awake in there?” a soft voice said beside him. Emma’s...
He forced his eyes open, and relief flooded through him, gratitude to see her rising from a bedside chair in a room softly lit by sunlight filtering through the window’s shade. Though she appeared unhurt, clean and wearing a fresh set of clothing, there was no disguising the fatigue and strain in her pale face.
She leaned to kiss his forehead and then insisted on getting him fresh water. “I’m so glad you’ve finally come around. It’s been two days, Beau. Two of the longest days of my entire life.”
“Days?” He fought to push himself upright, but the room spun and pain surged where the movement pulled at his wound.
“Easy there.” She gently pushed him back down, careful not to disturb the tubes sticking into his arms. “The transfusions helped, but you still have a ways to go to get your strength back.”
“My family—are they—?”
“They’ve been here day and night, waiting, praying. When the doctors said the surgery to repair the artery in your neck was a success and you were out of danger, I finally convinced your aunt to take the boys home so all of them could get some rest.”
He felt a pang, imagining how terrified Cort and Leland must have been, thinking of their mother. Thinking what he’d put them and his poor aunt through with his terrible miscalculation about meeting Wallace at the turbine.<
br />
He heard the shots again. The screaming. Feared that he would always hear them.
After easing the dryness in his throat, he ignored Emma’s queries about how he was feeling.
“Fernando?” he asked. Please, God. I have so many questions.
She shook her head and squeezed his hand. “I’m sorry, Beau. Fernando and Antonio—they were both gone before help arrived. But Wallace—your cousin was taken to San Antonio for spinal surgery. He may not walk again, but I’m told he’ll survive—and he’s facing charges as soon as he’s sufficiently recovered.”
“They’re—they’re both dead?” Beau echoed, stuck on the first news she’d broken.
“I’m so sor—”
“Because you barged in after I sent you away—” at the thought of how close he’d come to watching her die, too, fear and grief roared through him, morphing into anger “—and flat-out accused Fernando’s son of murdering—”
“I had no idea he was hiding there,” she said, her voice thick with emotion. “No idea that either he was or his father—”
My father...
“Of course you didn’t know. You couldn’t have,” he said, his head clearing as it came back to him how both armed men had been hidden on his orders. “Instead of yelling at you, I should be thanking you for—for saving my life.”
She shook her head, deflecting. “Not me. You’re a strong man, and you must’ve had an angel on your side, to catch only the smallest portion of that shotgun blast in your neck.”
“My angel, yes...” If Beau lived a hundred years, he knew he would never forget seeing her rise, covered in his blood and Tony’s. Shaking off her shock, she’d kicked away all three men’s weapons before calling 911. Afterward, she’d rushed to Beau’s truck to retrieve the first aid kit there, which she’d used to pack his wound before...
The rest faded into murky grayness, a windswept void where the rhythmic rush of the turbine deepened into the thrum of a medical helicopter’s blades.
“Lieutenant Williams has been here,” Emma said. “He tells me that as the result of an interagency investigation, several arrests have been made. Two top executives from Green Horizons, which has a history of padding the pockets of local law enforcement wherever the company’s projects started running into trouble.”
“So they really were paying off Wallace?”
“It started with some pretty low-key influence peddling, the campaign contributions your ex-partner discovered that were meant to convince the sheriff to look the other way whenever the occasional violation came up. Lieutenant Williams discovered some incriminating communications referencing one of their employees getting pulled over for expired plates—and caught with a bunch of bloody carcasses of hawks and eagles wrapped up in his back seat.”
“But Wallace wouldn’t have turned a blind eye toward murder.”
“Apparently not, which is why they upped the ante after Russell decided to try his hand at blackmail—the state techs found the proof after they opened up his laptop.” Emma rubbed her temples, her eyes filling with regret at her student’s fateful choice. “Then Green Horizons came up with the golden ticket to buy the sheriff’s cooperation—”
“That phony will.”
She nodded. “The lawyer Pinckney and his master forger client are both in custody.”
“So how did Tony get mixed up in all this? He was just a young guy with big dreams.” Beau still couldn’t wrap his head around it.
“Big enough that he was always training, trying to get a leg up on other big-city firefighter candidates, which led him to start climbing the turbines with a couple of gung-ho Green Horizons techs—who must’ve realized how hard up he was for money. And how eager to prove he wasn’t afraid of anything.”
Beau’s heart broke a little more. “Including jumping you, after the memorial service?”
She nodded. “The lieutenant says his blood type matched the splotch that was found on my clothing from that night, and his prints were on the weapons and photo from the storage shed, too. Green Horizons really wanted to convince me to leave town and back off Russell’s murder, but they were afraid that if I turned up dead, too, the kind of outside authorities they couldn’t pay off were sure to come down on their heads. That was their biggest fear, you see, because the wind farm on your spread isn’t their only project that’s come under scrutiny just lately.”
“So they decided to terrorize you instead,” he realized.
She shrugged. “It must’ve seemed like the perfect plan after Wallace told them my ex was threatening me, especially after he went missing.”
“Jeremy’s in jail now?”
“For the time being, yes, for violating the terms of his parole and for tearing up the bar where my student Lucie works in Austin. Once he’s released, his family’s promised to get him into a supervised residential rehab program for his issues.”
“Good news for you.”
“I hope so, but the fact remains that he had nothing to do with anything that happened here.”
“So the snakes placed in your room—that was Tony also?”
“His prints were on that box, too.”
Beau realized Tony could have learned to disable the security systems at both the equipment shed and the mansion during the years he’d spent tagging along, learning the business while his father worked.
Our father... The very thought still left Beau reeling. Or could Emma have been wrong about that? A resemblance—what did it prove? Didn’t his Sicilian great-grandfather’s photo prove that?
Beau decided he didn’t need or want to know, because he refused to allow whoever he was, whatever he’d become, to be defined by the actions of others instead of what he made of this life he’d been given. How he treated others, what he built and how he loved.
“I know it’s a lot to process,” Emma said gently, “but right now you should focus on resting, getting better.”
“I’ve been down too damned long already.” He elevated the head of the bed, an action that sent fresh waves of dizziness breaking over him.
“You nearly died.” She squeezed his hand. “Another half inch to the left, and—You have no idea how frightened I was out there, how terrified I was that I would never get to tell you how I—”
“Except you did,” he said as it came back to him, those terrible moments when she’d crouched over him, the pressure of her hand on a wad of bandages the only thing preventing the life from leaking from him. His vision might have darkened, but he’d heard the tears in her voice. Her fierce determination. You’re not leaving me, Beau Kingston. You’re not going anywhere without ever hearing me say how much I love you.
“I heard you out there, heard you in that moment when I figured everything was lost. My life, my chance to raise my kids and make something of my legacy, the people that lay bleeding, dying all around me. And I thought—I thought if you could take a chance on coming back for me, could risk your life fighting to save me after the things I’d said, the way I’d hurt you—I feel like a world-class fool, believing for a second that those emails could’ve been yours.”
“Shh.” Sniffling, she leaned closer, the light, sweet scents of soap, shampoo and something he recognized as uniquely Emma—something he could never get enough of—wafting toward him. “Please don’t beat yourself up for that. You couldn’t have guessed that Green Horizons would get so desperate to discredit me, they’d find a way to hack into my—”
“I was scared to death I’d die right there, before I could tell you how very sorry I am for the way I hurt you. When I took a second look, I knew damned well I’d made a terrible mistake. And I was as sure as any man alive that a woman who’d already had the precious gift of her trust destroyed once would never in a million years give me another shot.”
“You were right before, Beau, back in the ravine that day you said that I know who you are. I know yo
u. And if I didn’t think that you were worth it, I wouldn’t have gone back, just like I wouldn’t have begged an extra week before I have to go back to start my new semester—”
“No, Emma. Please stay here. Stay with me.”
“Beau—”
“I love you—I’m in love. With you. With every single thing about you, from your passion to your courage to the way you never seem to know when to back down from a fight. And I want more of that, of you—even though I know I’m being selfish.”
“You are the least selfish person I have ever known.”
“You’re wrong there. I am being selfish. Because I don’t know what my life will be—whether with Green Horizons’ crimes exposed, I’ll be running what I can salvage of my ranch or supervising its dismantlement and then looking for some other way to earn my living. I’m not asking you to give up your life in Austin and stay with the rich ranching heir who runs Kingston County. I’m asking you to stay with me, simply because I know damned well that whatever I end up with, whether it’s the mansion my great-grandfather built, a house somewhere in the suburbs or a ramshackle log cabin on the edge of nowhere, holed up with our family, it’ll be a paradise if I have you by my side.”
“Oh, Beau,” Emma said as she wrapped her arms around him. “You had me at ‘our family.’ It’s all I ever needed...to be right there in the thick of it, with you.”
Chapter 22
Seven months later
Of all the things Emma had expected, three days before they were scheduled to be out of the mansion ahead of the ranch’s sale, Beau’s suggestion that they get out for a short drive had been the last.
“But the packers will be here any minute,” she said, exasperated to see him looking all fresh and crisp and handsome as the devil after a meeting with his attorney, where they’d been hashing out final terms of a deal to save as many local jobs as possible, while she was a hot mess from boxing some of the boys’ things while they were at school. “I can’t just drop everything and—”
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