Colton 911--Family Defender

by Tara Taylor Quinn

  He was going to have to hone his debating skills. He could see it now. And he’d thought his sisters had prepared him to hold his own.

  “The thing is, Riley, for me, one day is better than none. That’s what it comes down to. My bottom line.”

  One day is better than none. The words were like a bullet upside his head.

  “There are no guarantees in life,” she said, her tone soft now, and yet filled with conviction. “But if you open yourself to them, there are endless possibilities.”

  He was a breaker fully lit. A wave on the ocean, jumping to impossible heights. An adrenaline rush like he’d never known soared through him.

  “How do you feel about back-to-back pregnancies?” he asked. “Because if we’re going to make that family, we kind of need to get cracking.” And he wanted his children to have the comradery that he’d witnessed his siblings sharing their entire lives. A companionship that he’d never known.

  He took her grin, her hand cupping his fly, her lips on his, as a positive sign.

  And still, as hard as his penis had grown, as much as he ached, he wasn’t done yet. Who knew when he’d be able to get that kind of conversation out again. And what he had to say couldn’t wait another forty-three years. He pulled his mouth away from hers.

  “Charlize Kent, will you marry me?”

  The dark clouds in her eyes were a surprise.

  “I don’t want you asking me just because you think it’s what I want or need,” she said. “Healthy family relationships have to be based on...”

  His lips cut off the professional tone. And he hoped his tongue, his arms, the emotion inside him, would be enough to do the rest.

  When he pulled away again, he did so slowly, ready to dive back in again if the rhetoric started spilling again.

  “Hi, I’m Riley Colton,” he told her. He felt he had to reintroduce himself, since everything had changed between them. A man who most definitely didn’t go around asking women to marry him. For any reason.

  She grinned, lowered her gaze, almost shyly, and then looked back up at him.

  “Charlize Kent, will you marry me?” To his shock, the question wasn’t at all hard to ask a second time. He’d repeat it a thousand times if that was what it took.

  “Yes!” Throwing her arms around his neck, she pushed him down on the couch, tumbling on top of him, her answer resounding around them.

  One word.

  One little word.

  Out of the billions he’d heard in his lifetime.

  And it changed everything.

  Riley Colton knew he had finally met his match.

  * * *

  Don’t miss the next installation of

  Colton 911: Grand Rapids:

  Colton 911: Suspect Under Siege by Jane Godman,

  Available from Harlequin Romantic Suspense

  in August 2020!

  Keep reading for an excerpt from Exposing Colton Secrets by Marie Ferrarella.

  WE HOPE YOU ENJOYED THIS BOOK FROM

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  Exposing Colton Secrets

  by Marie Ferrarella

  Prologue

  All in all, Brooks Colton felt that he was doing rather well for himself. Oh, nowhere near as well as he might have done had he gone into the family business the way his father had wanted and expected him to, but he definitely wasn’t falling on his face the way his father had predicted he would.

  As a matter of fact, he was rather successful in his chosen field and building up a solid reputation.

  Still, Brooks sensed that his father, Fitz Colton, the head of Colton Construction, which was currently doing extremely well in its third generation of existence, was waiting for him to stop “playing PI” and get serious about his life. Colton Construction was a large and generous employer, having built many of the offices and factories in Wichita as well as in Braxville, which was where the Colton family resided.

  His father, a solid workaholic, couldn’t accept that he was very serious about being a private investigator, just like he couldn’t understand why all of his six children had gone into vocations that had to do with some form of public service rather than become part of the family business.

  As far as Brooks could tell, all five of his siblings seemed rather suited to their career choices and were quite happy with their lives. And as for him, well in true detective form, he was blessed with that little voice in his head, the one that would occasionally raise points that seemed to defy logic, but nonetheless existed, nudging at his conscience and telling him that something just didn’t seem “right.”

  Sometimes it was just a small thing. Other times it seemed to involve his whole case.

  That was what he was feeling at the moment.

  Something was “off.”

  For the most part, his cases fell under three categories. He worked missing persons cases. Those, on occasion, required working with the Braxville Police Department as a consultant. Brooks also worked cases of identity theft. And, once in a while, he took on cases that involved cheating spouses.

  Truth be told, Brooks didn’t like working those, but they did help to pay the bills on the few occasions when he found himself short on funds and needed to fill in the gaps.

  But right now, he was hearing something from his prospective client that wasn’t sitting right with him.

  “Let me get this straight,” Brooks said, interrupting the man on the other end of his phone who seemed enamored with the sound of his own voice. “You’re not currently married to this Gwen Harrison?”

  “No, I never was,” Daniel Shelton snapped, obviously irritated that he was being interrupted by “the help.”

  “But—”

  “And you’re not even engaged to this woman?” Brooks asked, wanting to make sure he hadn’t accidentally missed something.

  “No, I am not engaged to Gwen,” Daniel retorted, his irritation growing by leaps and bounds. He was unaccustomed to being interrupted and having to explain himself. “Now, one more time. Gwen moved to Braxville after I expressly told her that I didn’t want her to leave.”

  The man’s high-handed tone was really beginning to irritate Brooks, but more than that, he didn’t care for his character. He was not about to help Shelton track down his former girlfriend or whatever the woman was to him.

  “And she didn’t live with you or have you paying the rent for her apartment?” At this point, Brooks was certain he was just going over what he felt was established fact.

  “What the hell difference can that possibly make to you doing your job?” Shelton demanded angrily.

  It was obvious to Brooks that the man expected to be obeyed, not get into a debate over this with someone Shelton obviously considered beneath him.

  “The difference is that if you didn’t enter into any sort of an arrangement with this woman, then you have no expectations of her obediently coming when you call,” Brooks informed the man, biting back a few choicer remarks. Most likely they would have been lost on someone like Shelton.

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?” the angry voice on the other end demanded.

  “It means, Mr. Shelton, that I’m not taking the case, which in turn means I won’t track down this woman for you. A woman who is within her rights to go off and live her life as she sees fit, not as you see fit,” Brooks concluded.

  “You’re turning me down?” Shelton asked, his voice rising and growing shrill. “Listen, you sanctimonious, two-bit jerk—”

  “Goodbye, Mr. Shelton. Very nice not doing business with you,” Brooks said just before he disconnected the call.

  Brooks took a deep breath as he put
his phone back down on his desk. He wasn’t so well-off that he could afford to just turn down jobs at will, but he had his principles. Besides, there was just something about this particular one that told him it was all wrong.

  So much so that he did feel he needed to track down this Ms. Gwen Harrison, not for Daniel Shelton but to warn her that the man was looking for her. Brooks was certain that Shelton could very well go on to hire someone else to find her. And then, who knows? He didn’t want that on his conscience.

  From the information he had gotten from the overbearing man, Brooks was confident that he could find this woman with a minimum of effort. After all, he knew Braxville like the back of his hand. Ordinarily, since he had turned down this job, he would have walked away. But that same little voice that told him something was off about Shelton’s scenario also made him realize that if anything did happen to this Gwen Harrison, a newly transplanted elementary schoolteacher, he would wind up feeling guilty as hell because he hadn’t warned the woman.

  And considering the impatient urgency he’d heard in Daniel Shelton’s voice, Brooks figured he didn’t have that much time to lose. Daniel Shelton had struck him as an angry man who didn’t just let matters drop if they didn’t go his way. Instead, Shelton gave every indication that he focused on getting revenge.

  This Gwen Harrison needed to be warned.

  Copyright © 2020 by Harlequin Books S.A.

  Keep reading for an excerpt from No One Saw by Beverly Long.

  No One Saw

  by Beverly Long

  One

  With a week’s worth of mail in one hand, A.L. McKittridge unlocked his apartment door with the other. Then he dragged his carry-on suitcase inside, almost tripping over Felix, who had uncharacteristically left his spot by the window where the late afternoon sun poured in. He tossed the collection of envelopes and free weekly newspapers onto his kitchen table and bent down to scratch his cat. “You must have missed me,” he said. “Wasn’t Rena nice to you?”

  His partner had sent a text every day. Always a picture. Felix eating. Felix taking a dump. Felix giving himself a bath. No messages. Just visual confirmation that all was well while he was off in sunny California, taking a vacation for the first time in four years.

  I can take care of your damn cat, she’d insisted. And while he hadn’t wanted to bother her because she’d have plenty to do picking up the slack at work, she was the only one he felt he could ask. His ex-wife Jacqui would have said no. His just turned seventeen-year-old daughter, Traci, would have been willing but he hadn’t liked the idea of her coming round to an empty apartment on her own.

  Baywood, Wisconsin—population fifty thousand and change—was generally pretty safe but he didn’t believe in taking chances. Not with Traci’s safety. She’d been back in school for just a week. Her senior year. How the hell was that even possible? College was less than a year away.

  No wonder his knees ached. He was getting old.

  Or maybe it was flying coach for four hours. But the trip had been worth it. Tess had wanted to see the ocean. Wanted to face her nemesis, she’d claimed. And she’d been a champ. Had stood on the beach where less than a year earlier, she’d almost died after a shark had ripped off a sizable portion of her left arm. Had lifted her pretty face to the wind and stared out into the vast Pacific.

  She hadn’t surfed. Said she wasn’t ready for that yet. But he was pretty confident that she’d gotten the closure that she’d been looking for. She’d slept almost the entire flight home, her head resting on A.L.’s shoulder. On the hour-plus drive from Madison to Baywood, she’d been awake but quiet. When he’d dropped her off at her house, she hadn’t asked him in.

  He wasn’t offended. He’d have said no anyway. After a week together, they could probably both benefit from a little space. Their relationship was just months old and while the sex was great and the conversation even better, neither of them wanted to screw it up by jumping in too fast or too deep.

  Now he had groceries to buy and laundry to do. It was back to work tomorrow. He grabbed the handle of his suitcase and was halfway down the hall when his cell rang. He looked at the number. Rena. Probably wanted to make sure he was home and Felix-watch was over. “McKittridge,” he answered.

  “Where are you?”

  “Home.”

  “Oh, thank God.”

  He let go of his suitcase handle. Something was wrong. “What’s up?” he asked.

  “We’ve got a missing kid. Five-year-old female. Lakeside Learning Center.”

  Missing kid. Fuck. He glanced at his watch. Just after 6:00. That meant they had less than two hours of daylight left. “I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

  * * *

  The Lakeside Learning Center on Oak Avenue had a fancier name than building. It was a two-story building with brown clapboard siding on the first floor and tan vinyl siding on the second. There wasn’t a lake in sight.

  The backyard was fenced with something a bit nicer than chain link but not much. Inside the fence was standard playground equipment: several small plastic playhouses, a sandbox on legs and a swing set. The building was located at the end of the block in a mixed-use zone. Across from the front door and on the left were single-person homes. To the right, directly across Wacker Avenue, was a sandwich shop, and kitty-corner was a psychic who could only see the future on Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

  A.L. took all this in as he beached his SUV in a no parking zone. Stepped over the yellow tape and made a quick stop to sign in with the cop who was at the door. The guy’s job was to ensure that there was a record of everybody who entered and exited the crime scene.

  Once he was inside, his first impression was that the inside was much better than the outside. The interior had been gutted, erasing all signs that this had once been the downstairs of a 1960s two-story home. There was a large open space to his right. On the far wall hung a big-screen television and on the wall directly opposite the front door were rows of shelves, four high, stacked with books, games and small toys.

  It was painted in a cheery yellow and white and the floor was a light gray tile. There was plenty of natural light coming through the front windows. The hallway he was standing in ran the entire length of the building and ended in a back door.

  There was a small office area to his left. The door was open and there was a desk with a couple guest chairs. The space looked no bigger than ten feet by ten feet and was currently empty.

  He sent Rena a text. Here.

  A door at the far end of the hallway opened and Rena and a woman, middle-aged and white, dressed in khaki pants and a dark green button-down shirt, appeared. Rena waved at him and led the woman in his direction. “This is my partner, Detective McKittridge,” she said to the woman. She looked at A.L. “Alice Quest. Owner and director of Lakeside Learning Center.”

  A.L. extended a hand to the woman. She shook it without saying anything.

  “If you can excuse us,” Rena said to the woman. “I’d like to take a minute and bring Detective McKittridge up to speed.”

  Alice nodded and stepped into the office. She pulled the door shut but not all the way. Rena motioned for A.L. to follow her. She crossed the big room and stopped under the television.

  “What do we have?” he asked.

  “Emma Whitman is a five-year-old female who has attended Lakeside Learning Center for the last two years. Her grandmother, Elaine Broadstreet, drops her off on Mondays and Wednesdays between 7:15 and 7:30.”

  Today was Wednesday. “Did that happen today?”

  “I have this secondhand, via her son-in-law who spoke to her minutes before I got here. It did.”

  The hair on the back of A.L.’s neck stood up. When Traci had been little, she’d gone to day care. Not at Lakeside Learning Center. Her place had been bigger. “How many kids are here?” he asked.

  “Forty. No one younger than three. No one
older than five. They have two rooms, twenty kids to a room. Threes and early fours in one room. Older fours and fives in the other. Two staff members in each room. So four teachers. And a cook who works a few hours midday. And then there’s Alice. She fills in when a staff member needs a break or if someone is ill.”

  Small operation. That didn’t mean bad. “Where are the other staff?”

  “Majority of the kids get picked up by 5:30. According to Alice, she covers the center by herself from 5:30 to 6:00 most days to save on payroll costs. Emma Whitman is generally one of the last ones to be picked up. Everybody else was gone tonight and she’d already locked the outside door around 5:45 when the father pulled up and pounded on the door. At first, she assumed that somebody else had already picked up Emma. But once Troy called his wife and the grandmother, the only other people allowed to pick her up, she called Kara Wiese, one of Emma’s teachers, who said that Emma hadn’t been there all day. That was the first time Alice had thought about the fact that the parents had not reported an absence. She’d been covering for an ill staff member in the classroom that Emma is not assigned to.”

  Perfect fucking storm.

  “She quickly called the other two teachers and the cook, everyone who’d worked today, just to verify that nobody had seen Emma. When they hadn’t, she called the police,” Rena said. “Officers Pink and Taylor responded and secured the scene and began a room-by-room search. I arrived at the same time as Leah Whitman, mother of Emma Whitman.”

  “When the parent or grandparent or whoever drops off, do they deliver that child to the assigned room?”

  “I asked that. Alice said that’s what they want to have happen. But there are times, when a parent is in a hurry, that they will leave the child in this general area.” She waved her hand toward the front door. “When they do that, they are supposed to do two things. One, sign a clipboard that normally hangs there,” she said, pointing to the wall, right outside the office door, “and two, make sure they connect to a staff person, that somebody knows there is a child who needs to be escorted to his or her room.”