The Colton Heir

by Colleen Thompson

  She didn’t say a word, only stared straight ahead, the misery rolling off her in waves as black as midnight.

  He sat on the bale beside her and saw how wet her face was. Trying again to get some reaction, he asked, “Didn’t you hear me call you?”

  Once more, no response.

  Worry contracted low in his gut. Worry that she might have cracked under the strain of starting over in another new place. Could she have taken something to ease her stress?

  He enfolded her ice-cold hand in his warm one. “Hope, you need to answer.” His voice dropped to an urgent whisper. “Aurora?”

  Her spine straightening, she jerked her head toward him and sucked in a startled breath. “Dylan? I didn’t hear you. Didn’t—” Pulling her hand from his, she patted the jacket. “This is—this is yours?”

  “You looked so cold,” he said quietly. “Are you all right? You haven’t taken a sedative or something, have you?”

  “No. Of course not. Why would you think—”

  “Well, for one thing, you were wound up so tight this morning that you nearly shot me. Then you’re not at dinner, and when I come looking for you, I find you nearly catatonic.”

  “I’m not on drugs, if that’s what you’re thinking. I just needed—I needed someplace private.” Her hands shook as she pulled off the jacket and handed it back to him. “Here. You take this back. You’ll need it.”

  “I cut my teeth on Wyoming winters. A little early frost won’t kill me,” he said. “So put the jacket back on, and tell me, what was it that upset you enough to bring you out here like this? Was someone bothering you again while you were working?” If so, he swore he would damn well put a stop to it.

  “It’s not that,” she said, teeth chattering as she slipped her arms inside the jacket’s sleeves. “And thank you. The cold kind of crept up on me, but now that you mention it, I really am chilled. Maybe we should go in.”

  “Tell me first,” he said, catching her arm when she started to get up. “What is it? What’s happened?”

  “You mean, besides having my whole life in ruins, hit men on my trail and an ex-husband who knows I’m the only thing standing between him and freedom?”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, realizing that just as he might be soon, she’d been ripped out of her own life. Ripped away from everything she’d ever thought she was.

  Another sniffle followed, then a spill of bitter words. “And to think I loved that man once—or loved the man I thought he was. And now he’s—he’s—”

  “He’s what, Hope? You can tell me.”

  “He’s had my father k-killed. The only family I had left.”

  As she choked out the words, she fell apart completely, her sobs coming in soft gasps, as if she’d gotten in the habit of muffling her tears. Gathering her to him, Dylan stroked her hair, her back.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said, and though he’d soothed a thousand animals, he felt clumsy and inadequate against this woman’s pain and grief. Grief that he identified with all too closely.

  When the worst of it was over, he reached into the pocket of the jacket she was wearing and came up with a clean bandanna, which he used to blot the tears from her face.

  “Th-thank you,” she said, faltering through a sad smile. “And I’m sorry if I got your shirt all wet. Tough guy or not, you were probably cold enough already.”

  “Not now I’m not,” he said, liking the feel of her in his arms. Liking it far too much. Her tight curves were getting to him, her clean floral scent making it difficult to breathe, reminding his body painfully how long it had been since he’d been this close to a woman. And how wonderful it would be to shed his pain, to lose himself inside—

  He let go of her, embarrassed by his physical reaction. Told himself to have some decency. She’d just found out about her father’s death, for heaven’s sake, and here he was thinking about leaning her back on the bales and taking advantage of her grief.

  As the blood returned to his brain, sanity flooded back. She had to have found out about her father somehow—in some way that might have put all of them in danger. “You didn’t risk a phone call, did you? Or an internet search, maybe?”

  “No, of course not. I just— I was cleaning Tawny’s room, and it was splashed across her computer. An old photo from my pageant days—”

  “Your picture?” he asked, alarmed to think that others on the ranch might see it, including a few that he could think of who wouldn’t lose a moment trying to figure out how to profit from her presence. Whether the result was blackmail or a phone call to some sleazy tabloid publication, Hope would be in danger. She could be in danger anywhere.

  “A twelve-year-old photo—I look completely different,” she assured him. “But there was a headline...” Her voice quavered, and her eyes closed. “Father of Missing Beauty Queen Found Dead in Burned Home.”

  “I’m sorry.” He remembered the first hours of his own grief, remembered friends looking as helpless and stricken as he felt now, each of them wishing there were better words, stronger words to show compassion. “Very sorry he’s gone—”

  “Because of me, I know it.”

  “You’re sure? Did you click through and read the article?”

  She nodded. “I did. I had to, but it just said the cause of death is still under investigation. And the fire in his house, too. He’d just moved to Florida last winter. He loved to fish and play golf. I thought he’d be safe there if I stayed away from him. I thought— I should have realized that when Renzo couldn’t get to me, he’d punish me by...”

  Hearing her quiet gasps, he took her hand in his and filed away the ex-husband’s first name for future reference. “You don’t know that. Not for certain. It could’ve been an accident—”

  Her gaze shot up to meet his. “Don’t patronize me, Dylan. It’s all my fault. I know it. Sometimes, I wish I’d never found out about my husband’s family business. Wish I could go back to living in blissful ignorance.”

  He thought of his own hunger to learn the truth about his mother’s background. “Do you? Do you really?”

  She considered for a moment. “No, I don’t. It’s just...a year ago, I was so happy. So in love. I had lots of friends, good friends who supported me when my mom lost her remission. And I still had my dad.”

  “Were the two of you close?” he asked.

  Her sigh was heavy with regret. “Not as close as I wish. My father had his fishing, his golf and his club friends. I always knew he loved me, but—why did I never take the time to know him better?”

  He gave her hand a squeeze. “I know what you mean. I’ve been asking myself that same question lately.”

  After a long silence, she ventured, “I heard about your mother. When I passed by the kitchen, the cook and her two helpers were talking. Talking about you.”

  “Yeah,” he said cautiously, the hair rising behind his neck. Though she had seemingly been cleared, there had been whispers about the head cook, Agnes Barlow. Dark suspicions that she might be the mastermind behind the recent crimes. Though Dylan, who’d known her for decades, couldn’t bring himself to believe it, he wondered what else a careful listener might overhear inside the mansion.

  “They said your mom was murdered, right here on the ranch this summer. I’m sorry for your loss, too. But maybe you could tell me. Does the pain—does it ever get...where you can swallow without feeling like there’s a razor blade stuck in your throat? Where you can eat or breathe or smile?”

  He decided she deserved the truth, no matter how tough it was. “It comes and goes. Sometimes you’ll forget, for a few minutes or an hour. Then it all comes crashing down, how there’s no going back. And no way in the damned world to undo what’s happened.”

  He felt the warmth of her sigh against his skin.

  “Worst part is,” he added, “that, like you with your father, I have a lot of questions about my mother’s death. And so far, I’m not liking any of the answers.”

  “Tell me, Dylan,” she whispered. “Pl
ease. I need something else in my head besides my own guilt and anger. Otherwise, I’m likely to get on the first plane out of Cheyenne and fly back to give interviews—tell the media, tell the whole world everything I found out.”

  “What was that?” he asked her. “Who was this man you married?”

  “A successful businessman, I thought. Well regarded, generous.”

  “Who was he really?” Dylan asked her.

  “A scheming, murderous monster.” She pulled her hand from his, her voice shaking with anger. “One I owe it to my father to do everything I can to stop.”

  When she started to her feet, he grabbed her arm and pulled her back down. “You can’t do that, Hope. Can’t go charging in and let him kill you, too.” Though she hadn’t told him who this “Renzo” was, Dylan had heard more than enough to know the man would find a way to get to her if she resurfaced.

  “Let go of me.”

  She tried to jerk free, but he held fast, saying, “You’re not thinking straight now. You’ve had a shock, a huge blow—”

  “So distract me, Dylan,” she whispered, her voice too close to breaking. “Tell me, what have you found out about your mother that’s upset you? Because if I don’t get my mind off what I’ve done, I’m leaving. I’m packing my things up and calling a cab right away.”

  Finding a taxi to come all the way out to the ranch after dark would be damned near impossible, but Dylan couldn’t find it in himself to refuse her. Maybe because her pain and anger reminded him so sharply of his own, or maybe it was because he needed a sounding board, someone to hear him out who was a stranger to the ranch’s caste system and its people.

  Whichever was the case, he soon found himself talking, barely noticing how still and cold the air was growing. Barely noticing anything as the pent-up words came, first in awkward clumps, and then as steadily and relentlessly as a February snow.

  * * *

  “So let me see if I have this right,” she said. “You found out that your mother—who may not have been your biological mother after all—killed a woman when you were just a baby? Who?”

  “Might have killed her,” he stressed. “Her name was Desiree Beal. She was a sister to Jethro’s first wife, Brittany—”

  “The missing Colton baby’s mother?” she asked, trying her best to follow along.

  “Right. First, though, Brittany left Jethro and her baby, then got herself killed driving drunk.”

  He spoke in an oddly flat voice, but Hope would swear she felt the walled-off scorn behind it, the pain of a rejection he wasn’t ready to contemplate, let alone acknowledge.

  “Maybe Brittany was aware she had a problem and didn’t want to put her own child at risk,” Hope suggested, painfully aware that things weren’t always as they appeared.

  Dylan gave a noncommittal shrug before adding, “A couple of months later, Brittany’s kid disappears from the ranch, and no one ever finds a trace. Except that not long afterward, Desiree shows up looking for work in Jackson, a little tourist town way up in the northwest corner of the state. The diner she applied to was managed by my mother, who was apparently calling herself Faye Donner at the time.”

  “Her maiden name?”

  “There’s no record she was ever married, but according to another waitress who once worked there, Faye felt sorry for Desiree on account of the baby she had with her and her story about being widowed. She even had the wedding ring to prove it.”

  Hope frowned, marking it all down on her mental scorecard. “So Faye—your mother—hires this woman, who later turns up dead. Robbed and murdered in the diner parking lot just before the baby she had with her and your mother both disappear.”

  “That’s what I can’t wrap my head around. I’m supposed to believe that my mom, who was the sweetest, gentlest woman I’ve ever met, was a kidnapper, or maybe even a killer? She would never do it. Never. That wasn’t the woman that I knew.”

  “Everybody has a breaking point,” Hope ventured. “What if she were trying to protect someone, or even save her own life?”

  When he was quiet for a few seconds, she took it as permission to continue. “Maybe she found the baby in danger after the robber murdered Desiree.”

  “She would’ve turned him in to the authorities,” he insisted, “would’ve done the right thing.”

  “What if she thought the ‘right thing’ was keeping this baby out of the system and with someone who had already come to love him?”

  “Or maybe Desiree had already gotten rid of this baby somehow before she was killed,” Dylan said. “It’s a terrible thought, but she might’ve done away with the Colton baby out of fear that she would be caught and imprisoned. Kidnappers panic sometimes.”

  “There’s another possibility, as well. What if Faye somehow figured out that the baby wasn’t really Desiree’s? Maybe there was some kind of confrontation.”

  “What are you suggesting?” he asked.

  “That if Faye really was the person who killed Desiree, it could have, must have, been self-defense. After all, didn’t your mother lose her life protecting another infant?”

  “That can’t be right,” he argued, “because if it were, why on earth would Faye Frick show up here, of all places, months later, with the same story about being widowed and a baby in her arms?”

  “With you,” she whispered, and whether it was the darkness or the cold or the bond of grief between them, she moved closer, reminding herself that she still wore his jacket. That she could, at the very least, share some of her warmth.

  But in her heart, she knew that it was only an excuse. That after so many lonely months, months where her secrets had left her too afraid, too anxious, to forge a single real connection, she was starved for the comfort of a simple human touch. Especially tonight, when she’d never needed it more.

  “Yeah, me,” he acknowledged. “But I couldn’t possibly be—”

  “Maybe not,” she allowed, mostly because he needed to hear it. “Faye could have had her own child, though the timing’s—”

  “She lied to me about my father,” he admitted, “said he was a cowboy at a dude ranch out in Cody, that he’d died in a bad fall from his horse not long before I was born. I’d always figured I inherited my need to work with animals from him, that it was in my blood. Except that no one at the Bar None had ever heard of my ‘dad.’ It seems the man never existed.”

  “Could she have come up with that part because—forgive the suggestion—she’d found herself pregnant out of wedlock?” Hope asked. “Maybe she was involved with someone she couldn’t talk about, a married man, or even someone with a checkered past. She could have made up the rest, could have kept your birth from others in order to protect you.”

  “I plan to drive out to Jackson to do more research, but there’s no birth record on file under either her maiden or her ‘married’ name. And if what this waitress who worked there told my friends on the phone is true, she always made a big fuss over any kids the customers brought in, but she never even had a boyfriend, much less...”

  “She could have adopted,” Hope offered, though even to her ears, the idea sounded like a long shot for a single woman. But not impossible.

  “I’ve gone through all my mother’s things. The birth certificate I used to get my social-security card and driver’s license? Turns out it’s a fake. And there’s no adoption paperwork, no baby pictures of me, either, not from my first year.”

  “What if the adoption was informal? From a friend in trouble or a family member, maybe even a teenage waitress from her diner who wanted to keep things quiet?” Hope said, remembering what it had felt like to need to grasp those final straws. To fight off a truth so huge it might’ve drowned her, if she hadn’t found her own way to float past her denial.

  But at what cost?

  Dylan blew out a long breath. “Then what really happened to Desiree’s child? According to the sheriff up in Jackson, there was no record of any baby being found after Desiree Beal’s murder. No unidentified small bodi
es found within that time frame, either, thank God.”

  “So let’s suppose, just for the sake of argument, that child was...that you’re Cole Colton.”

  She felt him tense beside her, every muscle tightened.

  “I’m no damned Colton. I can’t be. Because if my mother knew I was Jethro’s son, why wouldn’t she report it? Or at least give her boss back his child?”

  Hope ran her fingertips across the back of his hands, the soft pads skating over the rough bumps of his knuckles. “Maybe she was afraid, afraid that she’d be charged with Desiree’s murder. Or maybe she came here with the best intentions. She meant to give you up when she came, but by then it was too late.”

  “What do you mean, too late?”

  “She’d already fallen in love with the child she’d always wanted.” Shoving aside her own fears, she touched his strong jaw, slightly prickly with the light beard of a day’s growth. “With the son of her heart, the baby boy she called Dylan. With you.”

  He grasped her wrist roughly, then began to shove it away from the hard planes of his face. But in the span of that split second, his eyes caught hers and something flared to life between them, something as bright and hot as the stall was dim and cold.

  A silence filled the narrow space, a stillness so complete, she heard the rush of her own blood, the stutter of her heart. She’d gone too far, presumed too much, she realized. Angered a man so much larger and more powerful, a man she’d never met before this morning.

  Yet it wasn’t fury radiating from his gaze now, but a brand of hunger that sent a shock of pure anticipation streaking through her.

  Turning her wrist over, he ran his callused thumb along the delicate, pale skin there, focused his whole being on the tiny spot, so exposed and vulnerable. She shivered, her every nerve ending tingling with awareness...and a memory of his bare chest, all hard muscle and deep tan, as if he sometimes stripped to the waist when working with the animals.

  It was enough to make her mouth go dust dry, to remind her with a jolt that once upon a time, she’d loved the act of making love...and that that part of her life need not be over.