“I’m getting to all that,” she said, slowing as a bell dinged, a red light flashed and a pair of rail crossing arms came down to block the road ahead for an approaching train. “Oh, great,” she grumbled, her hands knotting on the wheel.
“Is everything okay?” Ace asked her. “You seem a little—”
“Sure, yeah,” Sierra said dismissively. “Just eager to get you away from here and back to the free world as fast as possible.”
Shaking off the interruption, she went on to explain, “After Destiny’s disappearance, her manager had discovered evidence that she’d been laundering money for her creepy boyfriend’s drug operation—enough to send her to federal prison for at least a decade, with zero possibility of parole.”
“Sounds like a solid dose of karma, considering all the lies she’s told about me,” Ace said, not giving a damn if it made him sound bitter.
“Except Destiny wasn’t too keen on the idea,” Sierra said as the engine passed, “so she cried and pleaded and finally offered to come clean about the so-called confession. All Spencer had to do was agree not to turn her over to the feds.”
“So he made the deal?” Ace asked, absently watching as the rail cars, many of them marked with colorful graffiti, clattered along.
She nodded. “The feds would get the drug supplier, which was who they were really after, and Spencer wanted the truth. The truth about what really happened to your father. About what’s really been happening with your family since that email arrived claiming you’d been switched for the real Ace Colton soon after birth.”
His gut tightened, as it always did, at the thought that there was another version of him, his family’s missing son and brother, out there somewhere. That he’d been the cuckoo’s egg left in the nest. Though he’d been told there was a reason to believe he’d been the son of a long-missing nurse named Luella Smith, he had to wonder if anyone in his family had had any luck tracking her—or the prodigal firstborn Colton heir—down while he was gone.
But those questions, he’d known for the past month, would do nothing except drag him down a rabbit hole of misery, so he dragged his brain back to the conversation at hand.
“So what did Destiny tell him?” It must have been something pretty big, since he was sitting here with Sierra rather than killing time—or possibly dodging fists, thanks to his guard friend—behind bars.
“She said someone called out of the blue and offered her ten grand to plant the gun inside your condo when you’d be otherwise engaged. Then she was instructed to call the cops and give them the whole pillow talk story—”
“I’ve said it from the start. I never touched that woman.”
“Even she admits that now,” Sierra told him, startling as a poorly dressed, stooped man shuffled past them on the street, drinking from a longneck, partly wrapped up in a paper bag. If the suddenness of his appearance caught Ace off guard, the slip in the bounty hunter’s normally cool demeanor surprised him even more.
“That old fellow’s harmless enough. He’s always around this neighborhood,” Ace reassured her, now certain that something was amiss. “Definitely a local, if you’re still worried about your friends from—”
“Ice Veins is in the morgue, so everything’s okay now,” Sierra said in the tone of someone who might be trying to convince herself of something. “Just taking note of my surroundings.”
“Is that why you switched cars, too?” he asked, peering at her through narrowed eyes. “Or is this one just a loaner while yours is in for repairs?”
She hesitated before answering with one of her usual shrugs. “So I’m still a little keyed up. Who wouldn’t be? Some habits are harder to get past than others.”
“You’re sure it’s just a habit?”
She barked out a laugh. “Don’t you have enough to worry over? For example, this story Destiny claims she was bribed to tell, saying that you’d confessed to the shooting of your father.”
Ace scowled, quick to anger at the thought of all the damage the bank teller had done. “Why should anyone believe anything she says now—an admitted liar who launders money for drug dealers?”
“Maybe they wouldn’t, except her story checks out from her phone records, though the caller couldn’t be traced, to the timing of an anonymous initial payment to her bank account. And her prints were found inside your condo, underneath the flooring she lifted up to plant the gun.”
“The real question is who paid her? Who was willing to buy her off to do it?” As Ace’s overheated brain formed an image of his father’s second wife, the same woman who’d coughed up an even larger chunk of money to bring him in, his shaking hands clenched and twisted the cheap fabric of his baggy jail garb. “Was it—was Selina involved in this? She seems to have a penchant for using her money to cause trouble for me.”
“Or to return you to the safety of your family,” Sierra quoted, sounding as dubious as ever about the line the woman had initially fed her over the phone the day she’d first called to hire her to find Ace. “But be that as it may, Destiny swears she doesn’t know who it was. She claims the caller blocked the number and the first half of the payment posted anonymously to her account. But the voice—”
“Was it a woman’s?” he asked impatiently.
Sierra shook her head. “Male, she insisted, though she said it was rather high-pitched and younger-sounding. And now, get this. Destiny’s furious that she went to so much trouble, brought all that scrutiny down on herself, and this dude stiffed her for the second payment.”
“She knows more. She has to. Who would take a risk like that, sell those kind of lies for some strange young guy?”
“She might’ve looked and talked the part of the reliable witness, but Destiny Jones has got an expensive drug habit of her own that convinced her to take the risk in the first place,” Sierra said as the final train car crossed before them. “But the longer things went on, the more nervous the whole deal made her.”
“No wonder she took off, then, especially with her being involved in other crimes, too,” Ace said. “So what’s going to happen to her now?”
The railroad arms rose slowly, allowing Sierra to finally cross the tracks.
“They’re holding her for the time being for possession, filing a false police report and whatever else they can come up with,” she said. “There’ll be additional charges, too, based on her breaking and entering your condo and planting the weapon.”
“After everything she put me through, I ought to sue her, too,” Ace said. “But it doesn’t sound like she’d be worth the effort.”
“I suspect you’re right about that,” Sierra said, “though at this point, no one could blame you for wanting to rain down some righteous retribution. Honestly, just thinking about the whole mess is enough to make me wish I’d slugged her harder.”
“You punched her?”
“Yeah,” Sierra said. “Right in front of Spencer, too, it turned out, who wasn’t amused in the least, but I seriously thought the lying little hustler might’ve been reaching for a gun.”
“I take it she wasn’t.”
“Oops. My bad,” Sierra said, a smile in her voice.
In no mood for levity, Ace said, “When I find out who’s really responsible for what she did, who gave her that gun to leave inside my condo, they’ll have damned more than a little retribution coming their way, I can tell you.”
Nodding, Sierra glanced his way. “Not to change the subject, but I need to make a quick stop.” She nodded in the direction of a small Mexican cantina, a humble hole-in-the-wall strip center where Ace hadn’t gone in years.
“Ah, I’m not really in the mood to eat,” he said, unable to imagine facing the stares of other people who’d been reading about him in the paper or hearing about him on the evening news.
“I figured as much,” she said, “which is why I phoned in an order for us right before you c
ame out. Just hang tight. I’ll be right back. Then I’ll get you over to the lodge where I’m staying, where you can shave and shower and change into the clothes your brother Grayson brought over for me.”
“You had—” Ace shook his head, surprised, since the two hadn’t been especially close through the years. “Grayson knew you were planning to shanghai me, too?”
Pulling into the parking lot, Sierra nodded. “Actually, it was his idea in the first place. He understood how overwhelmed you might feel, and that you might need to prepare yourself before Ainsley and the others sprung your pregnant daughter on you. So he asked if maybe I could stick around a little while and help out. He seems like a good guy, and I could spare an extra day, so—”
“I’ll be sure to thank him for that,” Ace said, touched by his brother’s thoughtfulness. “And thank you, too, for delaying your trip back to Vegas. I know you must be eager to get back to your life.”
“I—ah—I’ll be right out,” said the bounty hunter, her green eyes avoiding his at the mention of her home city.
But not before he spotted the unease in them, the tell, as he’d learned to think of such things in the world of high-stakes business negotiations. It was yet another hint that Sierra Madden remained nervous. Though he imagined that anyone might suffer some level of fallout—or even PTSD—considering the brutality she’d suffered at the hands of her father’s loan shark and his henchman, he hoped like hell it wasn’t more than that.
Chapter 8
Just as Sierra had suspected, Ace must have been far hungrier than he had imagined. Though the chicken enchilada plates had cooled by the time he’d showered and changed into the clothing his brother had sent with her, he shoveled in forkfuls as if he hadn’t truly tasted food in weeks. Which, she suspected from the loose fit of his storm-gray Henley shirt and jeans and the hollows of his freshly shaven cheeks, might well be the case.
“I don’t understand,” he said. “Why’d you bring me all the way out here instead of just heading for my condo?”
“Because if reporters catch wind that you’ve been released, I knew they’d be both there and at the entrance of the family ranch with camera crews. You know how those vultures are.”
“All too well, unfortunately,” he said, hating the thought of appearing in the media looking like a hunted animal. “Is that why you rented this place?” he asked, looking around the clean but rustic paneled room in the once-popular family lodge resort, with its faded drapes and dated cowboy-and-cactus decor and location miles from town.
She shook her head. “I’ve been staying out here all along. It’s quiet, and it suits me.”
“There are a lot more modern places with better amenities, closer to everything.”
“I see more than enough generic chain motels in my line of work as it is,” she told him. “And empty as this place is this time of year, it had a great deal on the rates.”
He looked at her suspiciously, as if he sensed the half-truth of her statement. That rather than choosing this place for its old-time Western vibe and low off-season prices, she’d been more focused on finding the most out-of-the-way location possible—one with a room affording a view of the only road allowing access. She’d been grateful, too, to find the manager willing to accept a cash payment and not look too hard at the fake ID she’d presented upon check-in. But clearly, the older woman must have noticed, for when Sierra had turned down a room with a great view of the scenic foothills, asking instead for one that overlooked the road, the eyes behind the manager’s half glasses had softened, and she’d quickly said, Of course, dear. I understand completely, before patting Sierra’s hand with her own short, plump fingers.
As she closed the disposable container on her own half-eaten dinner, Sierra felt a twinge, suspecting the woman believed her to be fleeing an abusive spouse or lover—but if it helped to keep her safe from whomever Ice Veins’s nephew, Eddie, may have sent gunning for her, she was willing to let the misperception stand.
“Seems like a lot of driving back and forth to save a few bucks,” Ace pressed.
Irritated by the doubt in his voice, she snapped, “We weren’t all born rich as your branch of the Coltons,” before realizing what she’d just said.
Anger sparking in his eyes, he fired back, “You mean you haven’t profited enough off my pain lately?”
She groaned, her face burned as if she’d been slapped. “I wasn’t thinking about—about the real circumstances of your birth before I spoke. Forgive me.”
Nodding, he blew out an audible breath. “Only if you’ll accept my apology for being an ungrateful ass, too. Frankly, if you’d’ve taken twice that off Selina, I would’ve been fine with it. Or at least I would now, knowing she’s getting nothing for her twenty-five thousand dollars—”
“Nothing but a whole lot of questions, I suspect,” Sierra said, wondering if he really meant it. “I’m betting that Spencer will be looking hard at her as the potential source of that payoff to Destiny.”
“But Destiny said the caller who hired her to lie and plant that gun was male, and younger.”
“If that woman’s a reliable source, I’m a Dallas debutante,” Sierra said. “Besides, who’s to say that your stepmother—I mean your father’s second wife—couldn’t have disguised her voice? A woman’s voice and a young male’s really aren’t so far off, are they?”
“I suppose it’s possible,” Ace agreed. “Though why would Selina frame me, unless she’d shot my father herself? And why would she want to do that, since it would jeopardize whatever sweetheart deal she’s had going to keep her job with the company and her home on ranch grounds all these years?”
Shaking her head, Sierra said, “We’re not going to figure it out now. But there’s an extra burrito inside the bag there. Want it? You look like you’re still hungry.”
“I’m good, but thanks. And thanks for thinking of it,” he said. “I haven’t had much in the way of an appetite this past month. Especially after I was taken into custody, not knowing the family was all convinced I’d—Did you know the ballistics came back as a match on that gun? The one found inside my condo? My attorney told me—”
She nodded. “Yes, I heard that. That’s how they got the warrant for your arrest, I’m told.”
“So all this time, my stepmother, Genevieve, the people I grew up thinking were my siblings—they had to have been convinced that that was why I’d taken off. That I’d really been the one to shoot him.”
“They didn’t all believe it,” she tried to reassure him. But the haunted look on Ace’s face, still marked with fading bruises, told her he didn’t buy it. And that he was as nervous, in his own way, about his reunion with his family as she was about returning to her home in Las Vegas.
“Do you think they’ll accept now,” he asked, setting down his fork as he saw her noticing its shaking, “that Destiny was paid off to set me up? Or will they still figure I’m just a bastard who resents their birthright? Do you think they’ll ever dare trust me again?”
Rising from her chair, she went to him. With the lightest of touches, she stroked the side of his face, running her hand over the barely discernible bump where she’d struck him that first night they had met. “They’re waiting for you right now, Ace,” she said quietly. “Waiting to welcome you back into the fold. Maybe not all of them—they don’t want to overwhelm you—but it’ll be a start. And don’t forget, your daughter’s there, too, with the man in her life. A daughter your siblings have already more than half-convinced to love you, sight unseen.”
“Love me?” He shook his head. “How could—but she hasn’t even met me, can’t know anything about me except the fact I was a deadbeat father—”
“Not by choice, right? You didn’t know, were never told—”
“I should’ve—”
“Cut yourself a little slack?” she asked. “After all, you were seventeen.”
“And she’s not so much older than that herself now, right? A young woman who’s heard only that I’m some kind of jailbird. A man who fled arrest after shooting his own father following his firing.”
Sierra shook her head and then dropped her hand to squeeze his shoulder. “A man who fled a frame-up to find justice. And something tells me there’ve been other stories, too. Stories about the man they all grew up with, the one who’s stood by them through thick and thin. The man they’ll always love as a brother—”
“But I’m not their brother, as you pointed out,” he said bitterly. “Just someone who happened to be around while we were all coming of age.”
“What’s family anyway?” she asked. “Is it somebody like my mom—or your own biological mother, whoever she might really be—who took off with no forwarding address and never looked back or made contact? Or is it the people who were there for us...like my dad, as flawed as he was, or the high school coach who steered me into a youth boxing program when he saw I was spiraling toward big trouble? Or what about the sister who hired you a lawyer and the brother who might not always know the right words but worried over picking you out the right clothes and grabbing your favorite boots to wear for your homecoming today? I can tell you which people I’d pick out, if I had the damned luxury of those kind of choices. If I had anyone at all left on the planet who cared half as much for me.”
Coming to his feet, Ace caught the hand she’d touched him with in his, his gaze fierce as words had been as he drew her into his arms. “You must really be something in the ring, Sierra Madden. Because when it comes to speaking the truth, you certainly don’t pull a lot of punches, do you?”
Her heartbeat quickened, her stomach swooping as he leaned toward her, hesitating long enough to lock in on her gaze, an unspoken question forming in the depths of his brown eyes. The downy hairs along her forearms and the back of her neck rose in answer, and a delicious rush of heat burned away every other thought but the imperative to close the space between them, to push her lips against his in a manner that removed all doubt of what she had no business wanting but ached for with a hunger that had caught her wholly by surprise.
Hunting the Colton Fugitive Page 10
