Coward, the little voice in her head taunted.
Mirabella ignored the little voice. Lately, she’d gotten good at that.
* * *
When he had first begun to work at Colton Incorporated, each time he walked into the building, Zane used to feel as if all eyes were on him. He was certain that all the employees there, from the lowest to the board of directors surrounding his stepfather, were waiting for him to fall flat on his face and fail.
Fail big-time.
He didn’t doubt that these other employees were convinced he was having everything handed to him—especially when Eldridge had promoted him to be the head of the company’s security division. They hadn’t known or realized, at least not at that point, that he’d had to prove himself. Prove himself to Eldridge and especially to himself. It wouldn’t have meant something to him otherwise.
Eventually, he did prove himself.
But it had taken him time. Time to prove himself, to prove he was there to work, to get the job done and to resolve things as fairly as possible, making decisions to the best of his ability after listening to both sides of a problem. It hadn’t been easy, but he’d done it.
In time, he’d dealt with everything from employee disputes, to embezzlement and to the ever challenging matter of internet security. He liked to feel that he did this all well. Eventually, he had his proof of that. People had begun to seek him out, to trust him to handle things fairly. To treat him with respect.
But that had all changed in the last month.
He was back to square one.
Lower than square one. Because now he couldn’t help feeling that some of the employees were looking at him and wondering if he was somehow involved in his stepfather’s disappearance.
He supposed in a way it made sense because, in reality, he was guilty of doing the very same thing each and every time he and his family gathered around the dining room table for a meal.
To the outside world, the various Colton siblings, as well as the woman who called herself their mother, did what they could to present a united front, to appear to have one another’s backs. Privately, it was another story. It seemed as if they had always been at odds with one another, breaking up into smaller factions.
While Zane was always close to his younger sister, Marceline, she and Eldridge’s oldest son, Fowler, used to go out of their way to make the three youngest Coltons, Thomas, Piper and Reid, miserable. And then there were times that the others would all gang up on Piper, a maid’s daughter, who had been adopted by Eldridge and Whitney when her mother died.
As for himself, Zane had done his best to remain out of it all, focusing instead on just proving himself to the one man who mattered.
And now he was probably included in the mix of suspects, Zane couldn’t help thinking. In these cases, the family was always the first to be suspected.
He stared at the blank screen on the computer monitor on his desk, his thoughts going in a dozen directions at once.
So far, no one had accused him of anything outright, but he had an uneasy feeling it was probably just a matter of time before that happened. Being the outsider was never something shaken off completely. The only way he could make sure he wasn’t ever accused of such a heinous crime was to find Eldridge himself.
He had a far bigger stake in this than Sheriff Watkins did. After all, for him it was personal.
It wasn’t for Watkins.
But how the hell did he go about finding his missing stepfather?
Zane felt as if he was going around in circles again, the way he had been ever since this whole thing had started.
If his father was dead, why hadn’t whoever was responsible for this just killed him on the spot? Why take him and then kill him? It didn’t make any actual sense.
And if his stepfather had been kidnapped for the usual reasons, where was the ransom note?
If he’d been taken for some other reason, as leverage or to be exchanged for something or someone, where was that call?
This whole thing wasn’t adding up, Zane thought, frustrated. It was as if Eldridge had been taken for no reason.
He got up and began pacing around his desk, exasperation and impatience growing by the moment, feeling red-hot and ready to explode.
Zane struggled to hold on to his temper.
Giving in and taking it out on the first thing handy wasn’t going to get him any closer to finding the only father he had ever known.
The best thing he could do for Eldridge—other than finding him, Zane thought ruefully—was to keep the company going in the man’s absence. The company meant everything to the patriarch. This way, when he did come back, the company would be running smoothly instead of having devolved into a state of chaos.
Zane had been doing just that for the last month—keeping his end of the company going—but it was becoming harder and harder rather than easier.
With a sigh, he planted himself back behind his desk. He needed to get something productive done.
Distracted as he reviewed which department needed his attention the most this morning, he thought he heard a noise, but discounted it—
Until it came again.
It took him a moment to realize someone was knocking on the door. Bracing his palms against the edge of his desk, Zane took in a deep breath, then let it out slowly. He couldn’t be seen losing his grip in front of the employees. Aside from something like that not inspiring confidence, it might very well be the thing which caused the better people around him to either look for another job—or circle his position like sharks, waiting for him to mess up.
Sorry, not about to do that. Not today, Zane promised. “Come in,” he called out.
The door opened and Mirabella took a couple of steps across the office’s threshold. One hand on the doorknob, she had her back up against the door. To Zane it looked as if she was trying to shrink or even disappear into the woodwork.
For just a split second, he found himself wondering about her, wondering what could cause a rather stunning woman like Mirabella to behave as if she was attempting to avoid the attention of the immediate world. Any other time or place, he would have taken an interest in the young woman, perhaps asked her a few detailed questions in order to get to the bottom of her unusual behavior.
But this wasn’t any other time. It was this time, a time of impending crisis if his stepfather wasn’t found. For the umpteenth time, he made a solemn promise to himself to find the man.
Failure was not an option.
“Sheriff Watkins is here to see you, Mr. Colton,” Mirabella informed him.
Instantly alert, Zane half rose behind his desk. “Send him in, Mirabella,” he instructed.
The sheriff, a well-built, imposing man in his early fifties, took his time walking in. His gray eyes scanned the room, missing nothing. Polite, soft-spoken, he was nonetheless not a person to be trifled with.
A show of respect had Troy Watkins carrying his well-worn Stetson in his hand rather than wearing it. There were surprisingly few traces of gray in his dark hair, given the nature of his work combined with his age.
The expression on his sun-wrinkled face was stern, but then he’d never been known for smiling much. This morning was apparently no exception.
“Take a seat, Sheriff,” Zane invited, gesturing toward the chair closest to his desk.
Watkins did so, but he looked as if he wasn’t comfortable about it. Nor did he look as if he was comfortable in his present surroundings. He was a man most at ease when he was moving about in wide-open spaces. In his eyes, crowded cities were just necessary evils to be endured, not something to aspire to.
“What brings you here, Sheriff?” Zane asked, then immediately attached another, far more anxious question to the first one. “Did you find my father?”
“You mean your stepdaddy,” Watkins corrected. “Gotta be accurate at all times, you know. If a man can’t be accurate when it comes to the little details, it means that man’s going to be careless when it comes to th
e big things.”
He really wasn’t in the mood for a lecture. What he wanted were answers. But snapping the sheriff’s head off wouldn’t get him anywhere. Zane tamped down his impatience and rephrased his question.
“Did you find my stepfather, Sheriff?”
“No,” Watkins answered. He ran his fingers along the inside of his hat, turning the Stetson around in a slow circle. He raised his gray eyes to meet Zane’s dark ones. “But I did find something interesting.”
Chapter 2
Zane waited for the sheriff to continue, but obviously the man wanted to be coaxed.
Okay, Zane conceded. He was willing to play this game, just as long as it got him the answers he was after—and closer to finding out who had taken his stepfather.
“And what might that ‘something interesting’ be, Sheriff?” Zane asked.
Watkins slid a little more forward on his chair. As he did so, the man’s small, gray eyes all but burrowed into him, seemingly taking full measure of him.
Elbows leaning on the armrests, the sheriff laced his fingers together in front of him as if he was relating a story around a campfire.
“Well, seems that your stepdaddy was making regular withdrawals from one of his private bank accounts, making them monthly to some bank account located heaven knows where—we haven’t been able to track it down yet,” Watkins continued, drawing out the revelation as he carefully watched Zane’s face, apparently waiting for some telltale reaction. “Withdrawals to the tune of $9,999. That’s the biggest amount he could have made without attracting the government’s attention,” Watkins added as if he were talking to someone who wasn’t already aware of that fact. Everyone knew that little tidbit. Or at least everyone who was involved in finances and matters dealing with security, Zane thought impatiently.
Was the sheriff watching him for a reaction? Zane couldn’t help wonder.
Well, he had a reaction all right. It was barely contained outrage.
He resented having this sprung on him out of nowhere, apparently for effect. “How long have you known this?” Zane wanted to know.
“Just today,” Watkins answered mildly. The sheriff continued watching him the way a cat watched a mouse hole, breathless, waiting to pounce.
A few choice words rose to Zane’s tongue, but he deliberately refrained from voicing any of them. It served no purpose telling the sheriff what he thought of his coming here, trying to bait him rather than being out in the field, looking for Eldridge.
Most of all, Zane was really growing tired of playing cat and mouse.
“Regular payments?” Zane questioned.
Watkins nodded his head. “Like clockwork.”
Zane felt as if he was getting information out of the man by dribbles and drabs. “For how long?”
“Three months.” Again, the gray eyes seemed to be burrowing right into him. “Why? What are you thinking?” he asked.
“Same thing you are,” Zane answered vaguely.
It was a lie. He had a feeling, from the way Watkins was looking at him, that the sheriff was thinking a great many more things than just the one thing that had immediately struck him. Watkins might like presenting himself as being nothing more than a simple country sheriff, but under that easygoing exterior was a shrewd man, Zane decided. A man who didn’t take kindly to being made to look foolish—and an unsolved crime of this magnitude, involving such a well-known citizen like Eldridge Colton, did just that.
Appearing to hang on his every word, Watkins cocked his head, looking right back at him, the very picture of innocence. “Which is?”
Why was Watkins waiting for him to spell it out? Was the man setting some sort of a trap for him, or was he just using him as a sounding board?
“Somebody was blackmailing my stepfather,” he said, careful to use the sheriff-approved label for the man he considered his father. “Maybe the same person who kidnapped him.”
Watkins scratched his head, as if that simple action helped him absorb the words a little better. “Now, why would he kidnap your stepdaddy if Mr. Colton was making regular payments to him?” Watkins asked.
Zane knew that Watkins knew the answer as well as he did, but again, he played along, answering the question as he wondered just exactly what the sheriff was really up to. In a nutshell, was the man trying to prove his innocence, or his guilt?
Or was he just casting about, hoping he—or whoever else Watkins went on to question—would somehow trip themselves up and say the wrong thing?
He couldn’t get a handle on it. All he knew was Watkins’s rather clumsy method definitely made him feel uncomfortable.
Zane did his best to continue playing along, but his temper was really growing short. It had been this way ever since Eldridge had been taken.
“Maybe my stepfather got tired of paying the blackmailer. Or maybe the blackmailer had decided to up the ante and my stepfather said no. Or maybe,” he speculated, coming up with a third reason, “whoever was blackmailing him just got too angry at my stepfather and decided to take it out on him. I don’t know,” Zane snapped. “That’s your job.”
“Getting a mite testy, aren’t you, son?” Watkins asked.
The man might be a couple of decades older than he was, but Zane wasn’t about to stand being talked down to like this.
“I don’t know. Am I?” he challenged. “What would you be like if it was your father who’d been kidnapped?”
“Stepfather,” Watkins corrected, a little of his folksy cadence slipping away.
Zane had had just about enough of this. “How about we just call him Eldridge?” he proposed in an exasperated tone. “Would that suit you?”
“Doesn’t matter what suits me, Mr. Colton,” Watkins replied calmly. “I’m just a lowly elected official of the county, trying to do his job.” His eyes narrowed ever so slightly as they pinned Zane in place. “You wouldn’t happen to know who was on the receiving end of these regular payments, now, would you?” he asked, his tone halfway between being solicitous and friendly.
“I haven’t a clue,” Zane responded tersely. And then he reversed the tables. “Do you?”
“Not yet,” Watkins replied honestly. “But I aim to find out. You hear anything, Mr. Colton, I expect you to let me know,” the sheriff said in a mild voice as he rose to his feet.
Zane knew he was being put on notice but he went out of his way to maintain a friendly tone. “Can I expect the same from you?”
Watkins inclined his head as if it was a wait-and-see situation.
“If I can,” the sheriff replied.
Which translated to a big, fat No, Zane realized. The sheriff was not in the business of sharing. The only reason Watkins had come to him with this business of regular bank account withdrawals was to see his reaction to the news.
The sheriff was on a fishing expedition and he was looking to catch himself a big fish whose last name was Colton, Zane thought. He obviously believed that someone within the family had abducted Eldridge.
But why?
It wasn’t as if there was a dearth of suspects outside of the family. Eldridge Colton had made his share of enemies in his youth.
Taking great pains to make sure none of his thoughts were registering on his face, Zane rose to his feet less than a beat after the sheriff had gained his. Then, rounding his desk, he walked the man to his office door.
“Thanks for stopping by, Sheriff,” he said in the friendliest voice he could muster, “and for keeping me in the loop.”
Watkins’s eyes met his. Again, the sheriff’s were unreadable. His lips spread just a little in what passed for a smile. An exceedingly shallow smile. “Count on it.”
Zane felt as if he was once again being put on notice. This wasn’t the first conversation he’d had with the sheriff, nor was it the first time he’d had the impression that Watkins would have been more than thrilled to pin this all on him—or at least on someone in his family.
All that meant, Zane thought as he shook the sheriff’s hand and
then watched the man walk away, was that he was going to have to get really serious about doing some intense investigating of his own.
His priorities converged with the sheriff’s only insofar as wanting to solve the mystery of Eldridge’s disappearance. Their paths diverged immediately after that because the sheriff suspected him while he, of course, knew he wasn’t the one responsible for his father’s disappearance.
He might have been at the house the morning of the abduction—they’d all been at the house that morning, it was everyone’s customary starting point every Monday morning—but he hadn’t gone anywhere near his father’s room until after Moira had screamed because she’d found the blood.
He’d told Watkins as much, and the sheriff might have nodded when he heard that part, but Zane strongly suspected the man wasn’t really convinced—and wouldn’t be until the real kidnapper was caught and confessed to the crime.
Until, Zane silently emphasized, not if.
Feeling momentarily overwhelmed, Zane suppressed a sigh.
“Is everything all right, Mr. Colton?”
Zane roused himself. Lost in thought, he hadn’t realized he was still standing by his open door, staring after the departing sheriff, rather than going back to his desk.
“Not yet,” he admitted, his voice a bit vague.
Looking at Mirabella, he flashed a quick smile in his administrative assistant’s direction because she had expressed an interest in his well-being.
These days, a lot of people went out of their way to avoid him rather than be faced with having to find words of comfort and encouragement.
“But it will be,” he concluded.
Mirabella pressed her lips together. Her stomach was suddenly rebelling again. Clenching one fist at her side, she struggled to exercise some sort of control over the queasy feeling. After all, she couldn’t very well just dash off to the ladies’ room in the middle of his sentence. Besides, Zane looked so lost for a moment, her heart went out to him.
“Was this about Mr. Eldridge?” she asked Zane quietly.
“Yes, it was,” he replied.
Her eyes immediately widened and he caught himself thinking, despite the quagmire he found himself in, that her pale brown eyes looked beautiful.
The Pregnant Colton Bride Page 2
