Colton by Marriage

by Marie Ferrarella

  Woman didn’t have enough common sense to use a truck or Jeep, he thought in disdain. Cars like hers weren’t meant for this kind of road, didn’t she know that?

  His brother passed Susan’s car, pausing a second to exchange words Duke wasn’t able to make out at this distance.

  He thought he saw Susan blush, but that could have just been a trick of the sunlight. The next minute, she was driving again, getting closer. This was blowing his schedule to hell.

  He ran his hand through his hair, trying not to look like a wild man.

  Duke wasn’t wearing a shirt. She hadn’t thought she’d find him like this.

  Susan could feel her stomach tightening into a knot. At the same time her palms were growing damper than the weather would have warranted.

  God, but he was magnificent.

  For the length of a minute, Susan’s mind went completely blank as her eyes swept over every inch of the glistening, rock-hard body of the man standing beside the partially completed wire fence. His worn jeans were molded to his hips, dipping down below his navel—she found her breath growing progressively shorter.

  Focus, Susan, focus. The man’s got other parts you could be looking at. His face, damn it, Susan, look at his face!

  But that didn’t exactly help, either, because Duke Colton was as handsome as Lucifer had been reported to be—and most likely, she judged, his soul was probably in the same condition.

  No, that wasn’t fair, she upbraided herself. The man had come to her aid at the funeral reception. If he hadn’t been there, who knew how ugly a scene might have evolved when she tried to push Linc away? She’d loudly proclaimed that she could take care of herself, but Linc outweighed her by a good fifty pounds. He could have overpowered her if he’d really wanted to.

  And Duke hadn’t been the one to kiss her after Linc had slunk away. She was the one who had made that fateful first move.

  Duke waited until Susan was almost right there in front of him before he left the fence and walked over to her vehicle in easy, measured steps.

  “Lost?” he asked her, allowing a hint of amusement to show through.

  Preoccupied with thoughts that had caught her completely by surprise and made her even warmer than the weather had already rendered her, she hadn’t heard him. “What?”

  “Lost?” Duke repeated, then put the word into a complete sentence since her confused expression didn’t abate. “Are you lost? I’ve never seen you this far out of town.”

  There was a reason for that. She’d never been this far out of town before. There hadn’t been any need to venture out this way—until now.

  Forcing herself to pull her thoughts together, she shook her head. “Oh. No, I’m not lost. I’m looking for you.”

  Suspicion was never that far away. His eyes held hers. “Why?”

  She felt as if he was delving into her mind. “To apologize and to give you this.”

  This was a gourmet picnic basket. The general concept was something she’d been working on for a while now, attempting to sell her father on the idea of putting out a mail-order catalogue featuring some of their signature meals.

  Donald Kelley was still stubbornly holding out. He thought that shipping food through the mail was ridiculous, but her mother saw merit in the idea, so currently, the “official” word was that Kelley’s Cookhouse was in “negotiations” over the proposed project. The final verdict, Bonnie Gene insisted in that take charge-way of hers, was not in yet.

  Duke eyed the picnic basket for a long moment before finally taking it from her. “What, exactly, are you apologizing for?” he wanted to know.

  It wasn’t often that she found herself apologizing for anything. The main reason for that was that she never did anything that was out of the ordinary—or exciting. Until now.

  “The other afternoon,” she told him, lowering her eyes and suddenly becoming fascinated with the dried grass that was beneath her boots.

  “The whole afternoon, or something in particular?” Duke asked, his expression giving nothing away as he looked at her.

  He was going to make this difficult for her, she thought. She should have known he would. Duke Colton had never been an easygoing man.

  “For you feeling as if you had to come to my rescue,” she murmured, tripping over her own tongue again. He seemed to have that effect on her, she thought. But she was determined to see this through. “For me putting you on the spot by kissing you.”

  Pretending to be inspecting the picnic basket, Duke drew back the crisp white-and-red checkered cloth and looked inside. The aroma of spicy barbecued short ribs instantly tantalized his taste buds. It mingled with the scent of fresh apple cinnamon pie and biscuits that were still warm. She must have brought them straight from the oven.

  He glanced down at her. “Still haven’t heard anything to apologize for,” he told her. “I enjoyed taking that little weasel down a couple of pegs. As for you kissing me,” his eyes slowly slid over her, “you definitely don’t have anything to apologize for in that area.”

  Trying not to grow flustered beneath his scrutiny, Susan tried again. “I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable….”

  Duke cut into her sentence. “You didn’t,” he told her simply.

  Susan cleared her throat. This wasn’t going as smoothly as she’d hoped. How was it that he made her feel more tongue-tied every time she tried to talk to him?

  “Well, anyway, I just wanted to say thank you for being so nice.”

  That made him laugh. It was a sound she didn’t recall ever hearing coming from him. She caught herself smiling in return.

  “Nobody’s ever accused me of being that,” Duke responded, more than slightly amused by the label, “but have it your way if it makes you happy.”

  Susan brushed her hands against the seat of her stone-washed jeans. She couldn’t seem to shake the nervous, unsettled feeling that insisted on running rampant through her. The fact that he was still bare-chested, still wearing jeans that dipped precariously low on his hips, didn’t help matters any. If anything, they caused her breath to back up in her lungs and practically solidify.

  Try as she might, she couldn’t seem to ignore his sun-toned muscles or his washboard abs. Her mouth felt as if it was filled with cotton as she tried to speak again. “They told me at the house that I’d find you out here. I asked,” she tacked on and then felt like an idiot for stating the obvious.

  Duke nodded at the information. “They’d be the ones to know.”

  She licked her overly dry lips and tried again. She definitely didn’t want him thinking of her as a village idiot. She normally sounded a lot brighter than this. “What are you doing out here, working out in the sun like this?”

  He was smiling now, enjoying this exchange. Ordinarily, he had no patience with flustered people, but there was something almost…cute about Susan hemming and hawing and searching for words. “Haven’t found a way to turn down the sun while I do my work.”

  She didn’t understand why he had to be out here in this heat, doing things that could just as easily be handled by a ranch hand. “Don’t you have people to do this?”

  One side of his mouth curved more than the other, giving the resulting smile a sarcastic edge. “My father thinks his sons should learn how to put in a full day’s work each day, every day. Besides,” he added, “it saves him money if we do the work.”

  She thought that was awful. “But your father’s the richest man in the county.” She realized that sounded materialistic, not to mention incredibly callous. “I mean—”

  Duke took no offense at her words. He was well aware that his father had amassed a fortune. The fact didn’t mean anything to him one way or another. It certainly didn’t make him feel as if he was entitled to a special lifestyle or to be regarded as being privileged. He believed in earning his way—and maybe he had his father to thank for that—if he were given to thanking his father.

  He saw the blush creeping up her neck. “You do get flustered a lot, don’t you?�
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  She looked embarrassed by the fact. “I’m not a people-person like my mom.”

  He didn’t think she should run herself down like that. The way she was was just fine. “No offense to your mom, but she does come on strong at times. You, on the other hand,” he continued in his off-hand manner, “come on just right.”

  Susan felt her pulse beginning to race.

  More.

  If she was being honest with herself, her pulse had started racing the instant she saw Duke’s naked chest. All sorts of thoughts kept insisting on forming, thoughts she was struggling very hard not to explore.

  Right now, she was just barely winning the battle. Emphasis on the word barely.

  She licked her lips again, fearing that they might stick together in mid sentence if she didn’t. “I—um—I’ve got to be going.”

  By now he’d reached into the basket and plucked out a short rib. He glanced into the interior. He could probably transfer the rest of the food into the cab of his truck, out of the sun, not that in this heat it would buy him much time.

  “Want the basket back?” he offered.

  “No!” she heard herself saying a bit too forcefully. Calm down, Susan. “I mean, that’s yours. A token of my appreciation.”

  She’d said that already, hadn’t she? Or had she? She couldn’t remember. It was as if he’d just played jump rope with her brain and absolutely everything was tied up in a huge, tangled knot.

  Duke nodded. “It’s good,” he told her, holding the short rib aloft. “But I considered any debt already paid by your first token of appreciation.”

  Confused, she was about to ask what token he was talking about when it hit her. He was referring to when she’d kissed him.

  Pleased, embarrassed and breathless, she could only smile in response. Widely.

  The next moment, she was back in the car and driving away. Quickly. She thought it was definitely safer that way. Otherwise, she ran the risk of ruining the moment by tripping over her own tongue. Again.

  Chapter 7

  Going to the county seat to officially file Mark Walsh’s autopsy report with the court had taken longer than Wes had expected. He didn’t mind. There was a certain rush that came from knowing that he could finally—finally—get Damien free, and he savored it.

  He’d known all along in his gut that Damien hadn’t killed that worthless SOB.

  Granted, he could have saved himself a lot of time if he had called the information in over the phone or started the ball rolling via the computer, but Wes had always favored the personal touch. In this highly technical electronic age, he felt that human contact was greatly underestimated. It was easy enough to ignore an e-mail or a phone message, but not so easy to ignore a man standing outside your office door, his hat in his hand. The gun strapped to his thigh didn’t exactly hurt, either.

  But doing it in person had caused him to be rather late getting back to Honey Creek. He’d been gone the better part of the day and a growling stomach was now plaintively asking him to stop in town for dinner before ultimately heading toward the ranch and the small house where he lived.

  The old sheriff, he knew, would have put notifying Jolene Walsh off until some time tomorrow, tending to his own needs first. After all, as Duke had said, it wasn’t like telling Jolene that her husband was dead was actually going to be much of a surprise to the woman. And there certainly wasn’t anything to mourn over. Everyone in town felt that Mark Walsh had been a nasty-tempered womanizer who’d had an ugly penchant for young girls. Moreover, Walsh made no secret of the fact that he’d treated Jolene more like an indentured servant than a wife throughout their marriage.

  There hadn’t been a single redeeming quality about the man. He hadn’t even been smart, just lucky. Lucky that he had picked the right man to run his company.

  His CFO, Craig Warner, was and always had been the real brains behind Walsh Enterprises. It was Warner, not Walsh, who had turned the relatively small brewery located right outside of town into a nationally known brand to be reckoned with.

  But somewhere along the line, Walsh must have stumbled across a cache of brains no one else knew he had acquired. How else had he managed to fake his own death and pull it off all these years, hiding somewhere in the vicinity? Someone had finally done away with the man, but it had taken them fifteen years to do it.

  But why, Wes couldn’t help wondering, had the original murder been faked to begin with? What was Walsh trying to accomplish?

  And what was he missing?

  Tired, resigned to his duty, Wes brought his vehicle to a stop before the Walsh farmhouse. Jolene had gone on living there after her husband had been murdered. The first time, Wes added silently.

  It was late and he was hungry, but it just wouldn’t seem right to him if he put this off until morning. She had a right to know about this latest, bizarre twist and the sooner Jolene Walsh was informed of this actual murder of her husband, the sooner she could begin to get over it. Or so he hoped.

  There were several lights on in the large, rambling house. Walsh wouldn’t have recognized the place if he’d had occasion to stumble into it, Wes mused. Five years after the man’s supposed death, Jolene had had some major renovations done to the house, utilizing some of the profits that the business was bringing in.

  Jolene had become a different woman since Walsh had vanished from her life, Wes thought. More cheerful and vibrant. She smiled a lot these days and there was a light in her eyes that hadn’t been there when Walsh was around. It was good to see her that way.

  This was going to knock her and Craig for a loop, Wes thought, wishing he didn’t have to be the one to break this to the woman. But he couldn’t very well postpone it or shirk his duty.

  Standing on the front porch, Wes rang the doorbell. Then rang it again when no one answered.

  He was about to try one more time before calling it a night when the door suddenly opened. Mark Walsh’s widow—rightfully called that now, he couldn’t help thinking—was standing in the doorway, her slender body wrapped in a cream-colored robe that went all the way down to her ankles. Her long hair was free of its confining pins and flowed over her shoulders and down her back like a red sea.

  Warm amber eyes looked at him in confusion a beat before fear entered them. She was a mother and thought like one.

  “Is it one of the children?” she asked. She had four, the youngest of whom, Jared, was twenty-five and hardly a child, but to Jolene, they would always be her children no matter how many decades they had tucked under their belts. And she would always worry about them.

  “No, ma’am,” Wes said respectfully, removing his hat. Uncomfortable, he ran the rim through his hands. “I’m afraid I’ve got some really strange news.”

  She hesitated for a moment, as if debating the invitation she was about to extend to him, then moved aside from the doorway. “Would you like to come in, Sheriff?”

  He didn’t plan on staying long. He had no desire to see how this news was going to affect her once the shock of it faded. “Maybe it’d be better if I didn’t.” He took a short breath. “Mrs. Walsh, your husband’s body turned up in the creek the other day.”

  She stared at him as if the words he was saying were not computing.

  “Turned up?” she echoed. “Turned up from where?” Horror entered her expressive eyes. “You don’t mean to tell me that someone dug up his body and—”

  “No, ma’am, I don’t mean to say that. According to the county coroner, Mark Walsh has only been dead for five days.”

  Stunned, Jolene’s mouth dropped open. “But we buried Mark almost sixteen years ago. He was definitely dead.” It had been a closed-casket service. Whoever had killed her husband had done it in a rage, beating him to death and rendering him almost unrecognizable, except for his clothes and the watch on his wrist. The watch that she had given him on their last anniversary. “How is this possible?”

  He tried to give her a reassuring smile. “Well, we buried somebody sixteen years ago, but
it wasn’t your husband.” Wes made a mental note to have that body exhumed and an identification made—if possible—to see who had been buried there. “I’m really sorry to be the one to have to tell you this,” he apologized.

  Jolene looked as if the air had been completely siphoned out of her lungs and she couldn’t draw enough in to replace it. For a second, he was afraid she was going to pass out. Jolene clung to the doorjamb.

  “You’re just doing your job,” she murmured, her thoughts apparently scattering like buckshot fired at random into the air. “Do you want me to come down to make a positive I.D.?” she asked in a small voice. It was obvious that she really had no desire to take on the ordeal, but would if she had to.

  “No, ma’am, there’s no need.” He was glad he could at least spare her that. “The coroner’s already made a positive identification, using your husband’s dental records. I just wanted you to hear it from me before word starts spreading in town.” She looked at him blankly, as if she couldn’t begin to understand what he was telling her. “Boyd Arnold was the one who found the body in the creek,” he explained. “And it’s only a matter of time before he lets it slip to someone. Boyd’s not exactly a man who can keep a secret.”

  Jolene nodded, seeming not altogether sure what she was nodding about. “Do you have any idea who did it?”

  “That’s what I aim to find out, ma’am,” Wes told her politely.

  Horror returned to her expressive eyes as her thought processes finally widened just a little. “Oh, my God, Sheriff, your brother, he’s been in prison all this time for killing Mark. We have to—”

  He anticipated her next words and appreciated the fact that Jolene could think of Damien’s situation when she was still basically in shock over what he’d just told her.

  “I’ve already started the process of getting him released from prison,” Wes assured the woman. “Again, I am sorry to have to put you through this.”

  “It’s not your fault, Sheriff.” Pale, shaken, Jolene began to close the door, retreating into her home. She felt as if she was in the middle of a bad dream. One that would continue when she woke up. “Thank you for coming to let me know,” she murmured.