by Cindy Dees
Rachel groaned. She’d forgotten her promise to go with Carly to shop for a dress for the big celebration of the high school’s hundredth anniversary, which was scheduled for next weekend in conjunction with the school’s homecoming celebration.
“You forgot, didn’t you?” Carly accused.
“No, no, I’ll see you at three. But right now I have to go back to the hardware store and get more parts for my toilet.”
“Hoping to see your favorite Colton brother again?”
“When they’re having snowball fights in hell,” she retorted. She slammed the phone down on Carly’s laughter and snatched up her car keys in high irritation.
Finn threw his car keys down in high irritation. He remembered now why he hated Honey Creek so damned much.
His older brother, Damien, finished off his sandwich and commented, “Funny how you can want worse than anything in the world to get back home. And then you get here, and in under a week, you’d do anything to get away.”
Finn rolled his eyes. Nothing like being compared to a recent ex-con and the analogy working. Especially since he’d been working like crazy for the last fifteen years to recover the family reputation from Damien’s murder conviction. He dropped a brown paper bag from the hardware store onto the kitchen table. “Here are your fence fasteners. Need some help installing ’em?”
Damien shrugged. “Sure. If you don’t mind getting those lily-white doctor hands dirty.”
Finn scowled. “I grew up working a ranch. I didn’t go completely soft in medical school.”
“We’ll see.”
An hour later, Finn was forced to admit that compared to his massively muscled brother, he qualified as a bonified sissy. But the sweat felt good. They were restringing the barbed wire along the south pasture fence. His hands were probably going to be blistered and torn tonight, but he wasn’t about to complain after the lily-white doctor-hand crack.
Seeing Rachel Grant again had rattled him bad. He needed to get out and do something physical. Something strenuous that would distract him from memories of her. He’d loved her once upon a time. Been dead sure she was the one for him. And then she’d up and—
“Hey! Watch it!” Damien exclaimed.
Finn pulled up short, swearing. He’d almost whacked off his brother’s hand with the sledgehammer.
“How ’bout I take that?” Damien suggested warily. “In fact, why don’t we take a break and go get a bite to eat? Maisie made chili this morning.”
As a bribe, it was good one. His oldest sibling might be nosy and overbearing, but the woman made a pot of chili that could put hair on a guy’s chest. He stomped into the mud room of the main house a few minutes later. The warmth inside felt good after the hint of winter in the air outside.
“Hey, boys,” Maisie called. “Pull up a chair.”
Damien led the way into the enormous gourmet kitchen. “Watch out for him—” he hooked a thumb in Finn’s direction “—Honey Creek’s already getting on his nerves.”
Maisie commented slyly, “The way I hear it, it’s someone in Honey Creek who’s getting on his nerves.”
Finn’s head jerked up. How did she do that? That woman knew more gossip faster than anyone he’d ever met. And she wasn’t afraid to use it to get exactly what she wanted. Or to manipulate and hurt the people around her. She saw herself as the real matriarch of the clan in lieu of their reclusive and withdrawn mother and, as such, responsible for shaping and controlling the lives of everyone named Colton in Honey Creek. Maisie had been one of the reasons he’d bailed out of town as soon as he could after high school.
He moved over to the stove and served up two bowls of steaming chili. He plunked one down on the table in front of Damien and sat down beside his brother to dig into the other bowl.
He heard arguing somewhere nearby and looked up. Damien’s twin brother, Duke, and their father, Darius, were going at it about something to do with the sale of this year’s beef steers. Those two seemed to be arguing a lot since he’d gotten back two days before. Not that he had any intention of getting involved, but Duke seemed to have the right of it most of the time. But then, Darius always had been a dyed-in-the-wool bastard. A hard man taming a hard land.
Maisie sat down across from him. “So tell me. How’d your meeting with that Jezebel go?”
No need to ask who she was talking about. Maisie always had called Rachel “that Jezebel.” He also knew Maisie would badger him until he told her exactly what she wanted to know.
He answered irritably, “We didn’t have a meeting. I bumped into her in the hardware store.” Amusement flashed through his gut at the recollection of her crawling for the door as fast as she could go. Her pert little derriere had been wiggling tantalizingly, and her wheat-blond hair had been falling down all around her face. Which was maybe just as well; it had partially hidden the sexy blush staining her cheeks.
“Come on. You know I’ll find out everything anyway,” Maisie said.
He sighed. Like it or not, she was right. “That’s all there was to it. I saw Rachel, she saw me, she walked out. I bought Damien’s fasteners and came home.”
“You men. No sense of a good story. I swear, we’ll never get on The Dr. Sophie Show unless I do all the work.” She scowled and pressed, “What was she wearing? How did she look at you? Did she throw herself at you? Did she look like she’s still scheming to land herself a Colton?”
Actually, Rachel had looked pissed. Although he didn’t see why she had any right to be angry. She was the one who’d betrayed him and wrecked what they had between them. He supposed he did have Maisie to thank for finding out the truth about her before he’d gone and done anything dumb like propose to Rachel. How could she have—
He broke off the bitter train of thought. Her betrayal had happened a lifetime ago, when they were both kids. It was time to let it go. Beyond time. He was so over her. And as long as he was home in Honey Creek, he damned well planned to stay over her.
Chapter 2
Rachel’s heart wasn’t in shopping today. Not only was she still badly shaken after having seen Finn, but watching Carly spend money when she didn’t have a dime to spare kind of sucked. Edna down at the Goodwill store had spotted a perfect dress for her a few weeks back and had offered to alter it to fit her slender frame, and for that Rachel was grateful. But she didn’t dare dream of a day when she could waltz into a fancy department store like her cousin and buy a nice dress for a party. Not until her mother passed away and the nursing home bills quit coming. And as hard as it was to cover those bills, she dreaded them stopping even worse. Her mother was all she had left.
She felt guilty for secretly counting the days until her mother finally slipped away. But her mom was the only thing holding her in Honey Creek. Ever since they’d found out the summer after Rachel’s sophomore year in high school that her mom had early-onset Alzheimer’s disease, she’d been trapped here. Her dad had already had his first heart attack by then, and there was no question of Rachel going away to college. He needed her to stay home to help out with her mom.
Not that she was complaining. Well, not too much, at any rate. She loved her folks. They’d been a close-knit trio, and she’d been willing to set aside her big dreams of seeing the world for her parents. And after Finn had left, taking their dreams of escaping Honey Creek together with him, it had been easier to reconcile herself to sticking around.
But sometimes she imagined what it would have been like to travel. To see Paris and Rome and the Great Pyramids of Egypt. Heck, at this point, she’d be thrilled to see Denver or Las Vegas.
If only she knew why he’d dumped her like he had, so publicly and cruelly. The worst of it was that everyone else in town followed his lead and blamed her for whatever had broken them up. Nobody seemed to know exactly why Finn did such an abrupt one-eighty about her, but she was a girl from the poor side of town, and he was Honey Creek royalty. Clearly the whole thing must have somehow been her fault.
It was no consolation knowi
ng that it wouldn’t be much longer before she was free to leave. Her mother’s health was fragile, and truth be told, her mother was so far gone into Alzheimer’s she usually had no idea who Rachel was. She could probably leave town and go start a new life somewhere else and her mother wouldn’t know the difference. But she’d know. And unlike Finn Colton, she wasn’t the kind of person who turned her back on the people she loved.
“Oh!” Carly exclaimed. “There it is!”
Rachel looked up, startled. Her cousin was making a beeline for the far display case. Must’ve spotted the perfect dress. Carly might be a ditz, but the girl had impeccable taste in clothes. Rachel tagged along behind, wondering if it were the little black number or the dramatic red dress that had caught Carly’s eye.
Another woman was closing in from their right, and Rachel watched in amusement as both Carly and the other woman reached for the black dress at the same time.
“You take it.”
“No, you take it.”
Rachel finally caught up and suggested diplomatically, “Why don’t you both try it on, and whoever it looks best on can have it?”
Laughing, the other two women dragged her into the dressing room to act as judge. Like she’d know fashion if it reached out and bit her. Her whole adult life had been a financial scramble, first to work herself through college online and have enough left over to give her folks a little money, then to help her folks fix up the house and now to pay for her mom’s medical bills. What clothes she didn’t make for herself she picked up at the Goodwill store, mostly. Of course, because she was a volunteer, she got dibs on the best stuff before it went out on the sales floor. Still. Just call her Secondhand Rose.
Carly disappeared into the dressing room first. The other woman turned out to be the chatty type and struck up a conversation. “Do you live here in Bozeman?”
“No. We live in Honey Creek. It’s about twenty miles south of here as the crow flies.”
“Oh!” the woman exclaimed. “I’ve heard of it! One of the doctors at the hospital is from there. I’m a nurse down at Bozemen Regional.”
Rachel’s stomach dropped to her feet. She had an idea she knew exactly which doctor her impromptu companion was talking about. Desperate to distract her, Rachel asked, “So, what’s the special occasion you’re shopping for?”
“A first date. With this cute radiologist. He just divorced his wife and is very lonely, if you catch my drift.”
Rachel smiled. “Sounds like fun.”
“So. Do you know Dr. Colton? I mean, to hear him talk about it, Honey Creek’s about the size of a postage stamp. He says everyone knows everyone else.”
Rachel nodded ruefully. “He’s right. And yes, I went to school with Finn.”
“Oh, do tell! He’s so private. None of the nurses know much about him. Gimme the dirt.”
Rachel winced. Nothing like being the dirt in someone’s past. “There’s not much to tell.” She paused, and then she couldn’t resist adding, “So, what’s he up to these days? Is he married? Kids?”
“Lord, no. If he wasn’t so…well, manly…we’d all think he was gay. He never dates. Says he has no time for it. But we nurses think someone broke his heart.”
Great. She was dirt and a heartbreaker. But something fluttered deep inside her. He’d never gotten seriously involved with anyone else? Funny, that. She commented lightly, “Huh. I’d have thought the girls would’ve been hanging all over him. He was considered to be a good catch in Honey Creek.”
The nurse laughed gaily. “Oh, he’s got women hanging all over him, and he’s a good catch in Bozeman, too. Thing is, he just doesn’t seem interested. That is, assuming he doesn’t have some secret relationship that none of us know about. But, it’s pretty hard to hide your personal life in a hospital. We spend so much time working together, especially down in the E.R., you pretty much know everything about everybody.”
So. No perfect wife and no two point two perfect kids yet, eh? What was the guy waiting for? He’d talked about wanting a family of his own when they’d been dating. Of course, in his defense, she’d heard that medical school was grueling. Maybe he just hadn’t had time yet to get on with starting a family. Well, she wished him luck. With someone emphatically not her. She’d had enough of Colton-style rejection.
“What do you think?” Carly asked. She came out of the changing room and twirled in the clingy black dress.
The nurse laughed. “It’s not even a contest. That dress was made for you. I’m not even trying it on. I’ll go find another one.”
Carly hugged the woman. “C’mon. I’ll help you. I have a great eye for fashion. I saw a red satin number that would be a knockout with your hair color…”
Rachel sat in the deserted dressing room. A few plastic hangers and straight pins littered the corners. Why was she so depressed to hear about Finn’s single state? Maybe because it highlighted her own lack of a love life. At least he was still a good catch. Truth be told, she’d never been a good catch, and everyone had thought their dating in high school was an anomaly to begin with.
His older sister, Maisie, had called her a phase. Said that Rachel was Finn’s rebellion against what all his family and friends knew to be the right kind of girl for him. Yup—dirt, a heartbreaker and the anti-girlfriend. That was her.
“Raych? You gonna sit there all day?”
She looked up, startled. “Oh. Uhh, no. I’m coming.”
“So when do I get to see this secret dress you’ve found for the homecoming dance?” Carly asked as they walked out of the mall.
Rachel rolled her eyes. “We’re not in high school anymore, you know.”
“Aww, come on. Don’t be a spoilsport. With the hundredth anniversary of the school and all, everyone’s coming back for homecoming.”
Rachel grimaced. At the moment, a party sounded about as much fun as a root canal. She replied reluctantly, “My dress is a surprise.”
“Fine. Have it your way. Maybe if you’re lucky, Finn will stick around long enough to go to the dance.”
“Oh, Lord. Can I just slit my wrists now?”
Carly laughed. “You’ve got it all wrong. This dance is your chance to show the jerk what he’s missing. It’s all about revenge, girlfriend.”
She sighed. “If only I had your killer instinct.”
“Stick with me, kid. We’ll have you kicking men in the teeth in no time.”
There was only one man she wanted to kick in the teeth. And now that Carly mentioned it, the thought of sashaying into that dance and telling him to go to hell made her feel distinctly better.
But by Monday morning, Rachel’s bravado had mostly faded. Another set of bills had come in from the nursing home and she’d had to empty her bank account to cover them. Thank God she’d landed this job at Walsh Enterprises. Craig Warner, the chief financial officer, had actually been more interested in her accounting degree than her tarnished reputation and past association with the Coltons. Her next paycheck would arrive this Friday, and then, good Lord willing, she’d be able to start digging out of the mountain of medical bills.
“Good morning, Miss Grant.”
She looked up as Craig Warner himself walked through the cubicle farm that housed Walsh Enterprises’ accountants and bookkeepers. He paused beside hers. “Good morning, sir.”
“How’s the new job coming?”
“Just fine. I’m so grateful to be here.”
The older man smiled warmly. “We’re glad, too, Miss Grant. Let me know if you have any questions. My door’s always open.”
Enthusiastically, she dived into the financial records of Walsh’s oil-drilling venture. Craig had asked her to audit the account with the expectation that she would take over responsibility for it afterward.
She’d been working for an hour or so when she ran into the first snag. Several of the reported numbers didn’t add up to the receipts and original billing documents. Who’d been responsible for maintaining this account? She flipped to the back of the file and
frowned. Whoever had signed these papers had done so in a completely illegible scrawl. No telling who’d managed the account. She flipped farther back into the earlier records. Still that indecipherable scribble. Until fifteen years ago. Then a signature jumped off the page at her as clear as a bell. Mark Walsh.
Walsh, as in the founder of Walsh Enterprises. The same Mark Walsh who’d been found murdered only weeks ago. A chill shivered down her spine. How creepy was that, looking at the signature of a dead man? His hand had formed those letters on this very paper.
She went back to the more recent documents and corrected the error. Good thing she’d spotted it before the IRS had. It was the sort of mistake in reporting profits that could’ve triggered a companywide tax audit. Relieved, she moved on with the review.
By the time she found the third major discrepancy, she was certain she wasn’t looking at simple math errors. Something was wrong with this account. She double- and triple-checked her numbers against the original documents. There was no doubt about it. Somebody had lied like a big dog about how much money this oil-drilling company had made. Over the years, millions of dollars appeared to have been skimmed off the actual income.
What to do? Now that he was tragically dead, was Mark Walsh a sacred cow? Would she be fired if she uncovered evidence that maybe he’d been involved in embezzlement? Who had continued the skimming of monies after he’d supposedly died the first time? Had someone within Walsh Enterprises been in league with Mark Walsh to steal money for him? Had this been where Walsh had gotten funds to continue his secret existence elsewhere for the past fifteen years?
His family had already been through so much. And now to heap criminal accusations on top of his murder? Oh, Lord, she needed this job so bad. The last thing she wanted to do was rock the boat. And it couldn’t possibly help that for most of her life her name had been closely associated with the Coltons. There hadn’t been any love lost between the Walshes and Coltons since even before Mark Walsh’s first murder, the one supposedly at the hands of Damien Colton.
