by Vanessa Vale
But conversation turned to the flat tire incident. I could hear the men debating whether we’d hit a patch of ice or if there had been a nail. I glanced at Cricket, who was drying the platter I’d just handed her. My hands were deep in suds and hot water, but I grabbed an extra dish towel and wiped them off. “I want to hear this.”
She quickly finished drying and put the platter on the counter. “Me, too. The dishes can wait.”
There was no faking my curiosity, and I knew Cricket would want any updates, too. I followed her into the other room, but as she went over to sit on the arm of the couch by Archer, I went the other way and toward Ashe. He patted his lap and I sat down. I had no intention of getting it on like Penny and Boone had earlier, but sitting with Ashe was far from the same thing.
Cecily had been fussy and so Kady had taken her upstairs about a half hour ago to nurse. Since they hadn’t returned, I had to assume they were both taking a nap. Although, Cord was missing, so perhaps they were getting busy in some quiet corner of this big house.
“That guardrail and steep edge were too damned close,” Boone said, slowly shaking his head.
“Natalie, you’re teaching all of us winter driving skills come first snowfall,” Archer added, giving me a small nod.
Ashe leaned forward and kissed my temple as the others agreed.
“The mechanic can easily replace the tire and fix the back panel, but he’ll also check for any other damage,” Riley said. “Fortunately, Kady’s still on maternity leave from school, so we can drive her wherever she needs to go.”
“You’re going to have to let her go off by herself again sometime soon,” Cricket advised.
Riley shook his head. “Fuck, no. Look what happened when we did that.”
The other men murmured their agreement.
I shook my head at their caveman antics.
“I’m going to go to the bathroom,” I murmured to Ashe as I pushed off his lap. He made to stand. “Oh no. You can drive me around if that makes you feel better, but I can pee all by myself.”
I flicked my gaze to the other couch where Patrick still sat. He hadn’t joined in the conversation about the blown tire, but he hadn’t been there. Or if he had, he wasn’t saying. He was being supervised by more than a handful of men. I was safe.
Instead of returning to the great room—I wasn’t a big fan of baseball—I returned to the kitchen through the entry off the hallway. I picked up the platter Cricket had dried to put it away. Squatting down, I opened one of the low cabinets.
“You’re pretty good at driving.”
I glanced up, saw Patrick looming over me. He was handsome, but his eyes held…something. My heart skipped a beat, but I quickly put the platter away, then stood. He didn’t move back. He smelled like he’d had one too many beers.
“Thanks.” I gave him a quick fake smile. “It was pretty scary. And we were lucky.”
He slowly shook his head. “Lucky? Yeah, you and your sisters are really lucky.” He paused and I held my breath. “I mean, look at this place.”
He gestured with his hand in a big circle.
“The house is beautiful,” I agreed. I tried to skirt around him, but he stepped in my way.
“What do you want, Patrick?” I asked, trying to stay as calm as possible.
He didn’t look calm now. He looked a little drunk, a little pissed.
“Yes, Patrick, what do you want?” Sam said. Ashe stood beside him.
Patrick turned at the sound of his voice and I quickly darted around him and to Sam’s side. He was leaning against the peninsula, arms crossed. He tucked me into his side as I approached. I was thankful he was there to rescue me…and that I hadn’t had to torque Patrick’s fingers like I had Alan’s.
“What do I want?” He shook his head, ran his hands over the top of his head as if he had a migraine, messing up his blond hair. When he looked our way again, his eyes were wild. “I want what’s rightfully mine.”
“What’s rightfully yours?” Archer asked, coming into the room from the hallway as I had. His hands were at his sides, palms out.
Riley, Lee and Boone appeared at the far side of the counter, looking into the kitchen. Sutton came and stood beside me. There was no way out of the kitchen. The plan to be low key, to let Archer take care of it, appeared to be short lived. For some reason, Patrick was cracking now. Perhaps it was the beer or the talk of the accident. Or maybe he just snapped.
“Everything,” Patrick shouted.
I startled at his sudden intensity.
“You seem upset,” Archer said. His tone was slow. Even. While he wasn’t wearing his uniform, he was all sheriff. “Why don’t you tell us what you mean?”
Patrick shook his head, glanced at the floor, then back at Archer.
“This house, the land, the money is mine. Mine!”
Sam’s hand flexed around my waist.
“Why is it yours?” Archer prodded.
“Because Aiden Steele’s my father, too!”
Holy shit. Patrick was my half-brother? Out of the six of us, he’d be the youngest, even younger than Penny by a few years. He had to be twenty or so. Maybe twenty-one.
“There was no mention of you in the will,” Riley said. Everyone turned to look at him.
Patrick’s eyes narrowed and his cheeks reddened. “Yes, I’m fucking aware of that. Why do you think they have all the money and I don’t?” He pointed at me as if I represented all the Steele sisters.
“Why aren’t you mentioned in the will, Patrick?” Archer asked.
He spun about, faced Archer. “Because he told me I was a worthless sack of shit.” I gasped and his feral eyes looked to me. “That’s right, daddy dearest didn’t like me.”
“Why is that?” Archer asked. He was prodding Patrick, getting him to talk, but he was also directing the conversation, getting him to go where he wanted. I had no idea where that was, but it seemed he had an idea. It was as if he knew something, something big and was trying to get Patrick to admit to it. Perhaps my seeing him right after the tire blew was the puzzle piece Archer had been looking for.
“He never saw me. Never paid me any attention. Hell, I got the job here just to be close to him, but he didn’t even recognize me.” He laughed. “I’m his son and he didn’t recognize me! So I killed that cow. That got his attention.”
“You broke open the fence and let the stud horse in with the mares in the paddock,” Sutton added from beside me.
“That was a good one, too, right? If they’re going to fuck, why keep them apart?”
A sound of disgust came from Sutton’s throat, but he said nothing. Didn’t even move. He was in charge of the horses here, but I wasn’t familiar with what that entailed. And I had no idea why getting a stud horse in with a bunch of mares was bad, but it sounded like it was.
“You sabotaged shit to what, get Aiden’s attention?” Jamison asked.
“He figured out it was me and he confronted me. I told him the truth, that I was his son. That he’d fucked my mother and left her to slave over two jobs just to support us. That he’d known she was pregnant and abandoned us both. And then…then, he said a man who stoops to killing and putting horses in danger isn’t worth being his son.”
Patrick was insane. He’d killed a cow to get his dad’s attention.
“I’ve known Aiden a long time,” Jamison said. “He was a grumpy fucker, but he would never have left a woman pregnant and alone. He might not have married her, but he’d have done right by her.”
“My mother said—”
“Maybe your mother’s a liar,” Archer snapped.
That only enraged Patrick even more. Had it been intentional?
“Fuck you! And Aiden Steele can just rot in his grave.”
“A grave you put him in. Right?”
The room was dead silent because of Archer’s words. Only Patrick’s riled breathing could be heard.
Patrick killed my father? Our father? Had Archer known? No, but he was figuring it out pretty d
arn fast.
Patrick grinned then. Widely. Wickedly. Oh shit. He had killed Aiden Steele.
“Let’s just say it wasn’t a heart attack that knocked him off the horse.”
“Oh fuck,” Sam murmured. He pushed me back behind him now that we knew Patrick wasn’t just a ranch hand. He was a murderer.
14
NATALIE
* * *
“You killed him because you hated him,” Archer continued. “And you killed him because you wanted everything he had. If he wasn’t going to give you love, you’d take everything else, right?”
“Exactly. He didn’t want anything to do with me. He wouldn’t tell anyone I was his son.”
“So you took what he wouldn’t give you.”
Patrick nodded. “That’s right. I earned it! It’s mine.”
“But then you found out it wasn’t just you who inherited the land, but five sisters.”
Patrick spun about, put his hands on the counter. Everyone stared at his back, watched, waited. I didn’t even think anyone was breathing.
“Five sisters who you didn’t even know existed. If you had, you wouldn’t have killed him, right? I mean, why would you want to share the inheritance with five women?”
Archer talked as if we were in an interrogation room, not a kitchen.
“They ruined everything. Everything!” Patrick spun about and stepped toward me, eyes narrowed, nostrils flaring. There was no way he’d get to me through Ashe, Sam and Sutton, but I still flinched back. He was beyond mad, he was eaten up by it. Crazed.
“Aiden Steele never told me about you. He never put you in his will,” Riley added. He was the lawyer and knew things none of us did. “Which means, you get nothing.”
“Not unless all of the sisters are dead,” Archer continued.
“DNA would prove I was his son. That it was all mine. I’d get it all!”
“So you tossed spikes onto the road. What did you do, wait for them to come up the road? I mean, you couldn’t have just put them out at any time. You didn’t want to kill the wrong people.”
Patrick rubbed his hands together. “Binoculars. That SUV’s like an aircraft carrier. Can’t miss it on that straightaway.”
“But you missed a spike when you stopped to pick them up after the tire blew.”
“And they didn’t go over the guardrail on the bend.”
“That wasn’t the first time you tried to harm one of the women, is it?” Archer asked.
Penny wheedled her way in beside Jamison and he tucked her into his side. Close. Cricket settled in next to Lee as Sarah stood with Wilder and King behind the others. While they didn’t have a front row seat, they couldn’t miss what was going on.
Patrick’s eyes lit up and he started to talk. It was as if he had to tell us everything, that he’d held these secrets in for so long, that he seemed proud of his activities.
“I didn’t have to do a thing for Kady. Hell, she had a fucking hit man after her. Unfortunately, he wasn’t successful in his task. Penny was almost a success. That guy at the bar made contact and—”
“He was going to take her out the back door of the Silky Spur and rape her,” Jamison growled. Penny turned her face into his chest, hugged him.
Patrick shrugged. “Yeah, and you thought our lack of escort to the restroom was because we lacked gentlemanly traits.” He laughed. God, it gave me chills. “More like I wanted her to suffer. Sarah though, well, no one knew she even existed. It was pretty hard to try and kill someone who was a secret. Then she was married to King and Wilder and impossible to get to.”
Jamison’s jaw clenched and he tugged Penny even closer. She was crying now, silently, but tears streamed down her cheeks.
“And Cricket?” Archer asked, his voice deep, barely hanging on by a thread now that he asked after his woman.
“It wasn’t too hard to get that idiot to camp out in her apartment.”
I was amazed by Archer’s restraint, that he didn’t kill him but instead only punched Patrick in the face. Blood spurted from his nose as the impact rocked him back, slamming into the edge of the counter. It seemed Archer had heard enough. He pulled his cell phone from his shirt pocket, tossed it to Sutton who caught it easily.
When I glanced at it, I saw Archer had been recording the whole thing.
Archer tugged Patrick’s hand behind his back, pressed his head down into the counter as he kicked his feet apart and frisked him.
“Get me the cuffs out of my truck,” Archer snapped, keeping his attention squarely on Patrick. His breathing was ragged, his cheeks flushed. I heard heavy footfall behind us, the front door open.
“Patrick Monaghan, you’re under arrest. You have the right to remain silent, you so much as fucking blink, the—”
As Archer read him his rights—with a little extra—I turned my face into Sam’s chest. He was warm and strong, his scent familiar and my mind recognized it as safety. He was my anchor and so was Ashe. He led me out of the kitchen and into the great room. Tipping up my chin, he made me look at him. “Are you all right?”
I licked my lips. “Stunned.”
King returned with the handcuffs and walked past us into the kitchen.
“I called 9-1-1 a few minutes ago,” Cord said, his arm around Kady who held Cecily. “I’m sure someone else has, too. They’ll be here in a few.”
“We missed most of it,” Kady added, looking disappointed.
I stared at her for a second, stunned, then I burst out laughing.
“Only you, Kady. Only you.”
I pulled her in for a hug, careful of Cecily.
The kitchen was full with most of the men ensuring Patrick didn’t get away. It was one thing to be the nut job who killed Aiden Steele, but it was another entirely to want to kill their women. That crossed the line for them, I was sure, and no doubt considered killing Patrick because of it justifiable homicide.
Sarah, Penny and Cricket joined us so we stood in a tight circle.
“This is insane,” Sarah said, glancing toward the kitchen. “We have a half-brother who’s obviously criminally insane who killed our father and tried to kill all of us for the money. If he’d just come forward, said he was one of Aiden Steele’s kids, too, I’d have shared it with him.”
“Me, too,” Cricket added.
Kady, Penny and I nodded.
Fussing came from the other side of the room and Penny broke off to go get Locke from where he’d been sleeping in his car seat. He’d slept through everything. She returned with him over her shoulder. He stared at us wide-eyed, yet still sleepy, content to be in his mother’s arms.
“That man, at the bar that night, I’d thought he was just a handsy jerk,” Penny recounted. I didn’t know the story, but it could have been bad. “But after what Patrick said, he’d sent him to hurt me.” She shivered and Sarah wrapped her arms around her. “Patrick was there, in the bar, too. We’d even driven together, had drinks. Danced. God, if Jamison and Boone hadn’t showed up.”
“You’re fine. We’re all fine,” Cricket reassured. “We can’t think about all of that or we’ll never sleep at night. Let’s think about…Natalie!”
I frowned at Cricket’s surprisingly Kady-like outburst. “Me?”
All four of my sisters eyed me. Cord, Sam and Ashe, too.
“Yes, you. This probably wasn’t good to help the cause for you sticking around, but you’ve got to stay here in Barlow. I mean, we’re sisters and we’ve literally survived a lot together.”
It was true. We had. In a matter of days, they were the crazy family I’d heard about—minus the crazy half-brother—and never knew I’d missed.
“I’m staying,” I replied immediately.
The women pounced on me, pulling me into a group hug that was happy laughing and shedding some tears. Locke fussed. “But you’re not the top reason why I’m staying. Sorry,” I said through the big hug. I pulled back and turned to face Ashe and Sam.
“You two are the reason why I want to stay.” I looked a
t them, met their eyes. Held. They’d looked at me just like this in the hallway of the restaurant in Boston. Eagerness, hope. Intense interest. But there was something more now, too. Love.
“If the offer still stands, I want to—”
Ashe had me in his arms, his lips on mine before I could finish. I vaguely heard more whoops and excitement, but the kiss was just too good.
And when Ashe was done, or maybe before he was, Sam tugged me into his arms and his lips were on mine next.
“Get a room,” Cord said, his tone joking.
Sam pulled back and smiled down at me.
God, I wanted them.
“I know I said I wouldn’t fuck you with others around, but, well…I need you.” I took Ashe’s hand, then Sam’s. “Now.”
Sam looked around.
“Not the coffee table!” Cricket called.
“The door in the office has seen a lot of action. It’s a little hard against your back though,” Penny advised.
“The laundry room works pretty well,” Kady added.
God, was there anywhere in the house someone hadn’t had sex?
“Upstairs,” Ashe said, tugging me toward the hallway. “A coffee table’s fine, so is a door. Never tried a washing machine, but I do like a bed.”
“Have fun!” Sarah called out.
I glanced at Sam, whose gaze was so hot I was surprised it didn’t singe off my clothes. “Desperate times call for desperate pleasures.”
* * *
ASHE
* * *
I wanted to go in and beat the shit out of Patrick, but the line was long. After everyone else had their turn, I doubted there would be much left. With over ten witnesses of him confessing to not only killing Aiden Steele, but to attempted murder on all five women and two babies and…
I gritted my teeth, took a breath as I pulled Natalie up the stairs. Everyone was fine. Patrick was being taken care of. The other women had their men nearby. Sam and I had Natalie and we were never letting her go. Not now that she said she was staying.
