by B. J Daniels
“That isn’t necessary,” Landon said.
“It wouldn’t be the same anyway,” Sierra said.
“I suggest you not use the glasses if they mean that much to you,” Landon said through gritted teeth. “I’m going to bed. Can I see you up?” he asked his sister.
Sierra started to protest but Landon cut her off. “I haven’t had hardly any time with my sister.”
“That’s because we are all trying to get this house ready for paying guests,” Sierra snapped. “Not to mention your sister has been spending all her time with that cowboy.”
Landon shot his wife a look that made her clamp her lips shut, then he and Alexa turned and left.
As they started up the stairs, Alexa looked back. Sierra hadn’t touched her wine. The others had left their glasses untouched on the coffee table. She and Landon were almost to the top of the stairs when they heard a crash. Alexa looked back to see that Sierra had thrown the nearly empty wine bottle against the stone fireplace.
Landon’s jaw tightened, but he didn’t look back.
“I KNOW WHAT YOU’RE GOING to say,” Landon said once they were in Alexa’s room, the door closed.
A light breeze played at the curtains at the open French doors, the air cool, stars glittering in the huge velvet sky.
Alexa hadn’t realized how late it was. Her eyelids felt like sandpaper and she felt tired all over. “I doubt that,” she said and plopped down onto the loveseat, too exhausted to stand any longer.
“Sierra is young and headstrong and…” He met his sister’s gaze. “Spoiled.”
Alexa kept silent. Her brother was intelligent. He had to see that it was more than that.
“What is it you want me to say?” she asked finally.
He chuckled. “Tell me I didn’t make a mistake.”
She looked up at him and sadly shook her head. “I love you so much.”
“I know.”
“I just want you to be happy.”
“I know,” he said as he lowered himself to the chair opposite the loveseat. “I realize now I had a lot of reasons for inviting you here, all of them selfish.”
“You were right. There is something going on in this house,” Alexa said. “But it isn’t the spirits you’re worried about, is it?”
“Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and Sierra is gone from our bed,” he said slowly. “When I ask her about it, she says she has trouble sleeping and likes wandering through the house at night because it’s quiet.”
“Do you believe her?” Alexa asked.
“I want to.” He rubbed the back of his neck, looking as exhausted as she felt. “I haven’t wanted to tell Sierra, but I don’t want to run a bed-and-breakfast.”
It surprised Alexa that he was finally being honest with her. “Why haven’t you told her?”
He shook his head. “She seems so set on this…. I don’t want to break her heart.”
Too bad Sierra didn’t feel the same way about him. “You’re afraid if it came down to an ultimatum, she would choose the house.”
He nodded, then let out a humorless laugh. “Says a lot about my faith in my wife.”
“Says more about her feelings for…” Alexa was going to say “you.” But quickly changed it to “this house.”
“It’s all she has,” Landon said. “She’s never had anything that she can call her own since she was a girl.”
“She has you.”
He smiled at that.
“Has she talked to you about her past? Her father?”
“I know he killed himself.”
“Did you know that he also bilked a lot of money out of his investors?” She saw her brother start to defend the man. “The feds were about to arrest him when he killed himself.”
Landon sighed and sank back into his chair. “That explains a lot, huh.”
“The money was never recovered.”
He looked up in surprise and she nodded.
“I believe he hid it in this house, and I’m not the only one who believes that. Someone has been looking for it. I think they might have found it.”
Landon stared at her. “Sierra?”
“Maybe. It’s millions of dollars. Are you sure she ever really planned to open a bed-and-breakfast? Or was it just a way to look for the money without anyone suspecting?”
He shook his head. “If Sierra found the money, why wouldn’t she…” His voice trailed off as he realized why his wife wouldn’t have told him. “What am I going to do, Alexa?”
“I can’t tell you what to do, but I think you need to talk to her, tell her how you feel.” She almost added, “Find out where she really goes at night,” but bit her tongue. “You need to resolve this. Once you’re honest with her, maybe she’ll be honest with you and you’ll know what to do.”
He rose to his feet to leave.
“But Landon, be careful. I’m worried about these accidents you’ve been having.”
A sadness washed over his features. “I wondered if she’d married me for my money. Yes, sis, it did cross my mind. But if she now has millions…”
“Or someone else in this house does.” She could see he hadn’t thought of that.
“You be careful too,” he said, suddenly looking worried.
“We both need to get out of here,” Alexa said. “Maybe we should go—” She was going to say “tonight” but he cut her off with a shake of his head. “Tomorrow.”
She couldn’t hide her relief. “Tomorrow.” As he left, she prayed tomorrow would be soon enough.
MARSHALL MENTALLY KICKED himself all the way back to his house. He shouldn’t have accused Alexa’s brother, knowing how protective she was of him.
He went over their last words to each other with every step he took on the way across the pasture toward home.
“You’re that sure he isn’t involved in whatever this is?” he’d asked. He could see that she hadn’t wanted to believe it, but she had a blind side to her when it came to her brother.
“Why would he get me here if that was true?”
He had hated to ask, but he’d felt he had to. “You say your brother inherited a lot of money. I assume you did too.” He took her silence for a yes. “Who inherits if you die?”
He had seen the fear that leaped to her eyes for just an instant.
“My brother wouldn’t—”
“But his wife would?”
She had looked at him, opened her mouth and closed it again then left him standing there as she headed back to that damned house.
He’d wanted to go after her, drag her into his arms and kiss some sense into her. But he’d known how well that would have gone over. He wanted desperately to keep her safe, but one of the reasons he loved her was that she never took the easy way out.
Loved her. The thought made him stumble and almost fall just yards from his house.
He swore. He’d always considered himself a reasonable man. Falling in love at the bat of an eye wasn’t reasonable. Falling in love with a total stranger… Maybe worse, a woman whom he knew saw things he never wanted to know about.
He shook his head. As much as he wanted to deny it, he’d fallen in love with that woman.
Turning, he looked back at the house and knew he was no longer a reasonable man. He’d fallen in love with this woman in the bat of an eye and it scared the hell out of him.
The question now was, what was he going to do about it?
ALEXA JUST WANTED TO FALL into the bed and sleep until noon. Tomorrow she would pack and leave—as soon as she was sure Landon was leaving as well.
But tonight, she just wanted to close her eyes in dreamless sleep.
Unfortunately, her mind had something else to say about that. She kept thinking of the tunnel, the cage, the missing bricks where someone had been looking for something—and Marshall.
She hated that she’d left things so badly with him. She hated worse admitting that what he’d said had scared her, because she’d feared he might be right. She’d seen how Landon was around S
ierra. How he had overlooked whatever his wife had been up to in the middle of the night. And how he hadn’t told his wife how he really felt about this house’s future.
Not that Alexa believed for a moment that Sierra had any intention of making Wellington Manor a bed-and-breakfast. All of Sierra’s love for this house was nothing more than a ruse. Once she retrieved her father’s stolen money, she would be out of here in a heartbeat. Not even her great-great-grandmother’s crystal could keep that girl in this house. Again.
Unable to sleep, Alexa got up, pulled on her robe and opened her bedroom door. The hallway was empty. There wasn’t a sound other than the sounds old houses always made.
Taking her key, she locked her room, thinking how foolish that was, given that anyone with a skeleton key could get in any room in this house.
Pocketing her key, she headed downstairs to the kitchen. She needed something to help her sleep. No milk and cookies, thank you.
In the kitchen, she found a loaf of half-eaten bread, cut herself a slice then found peanut butter, her favorite, and huckleberry jam. She made herself a peanut-butter sandwich and washed it down with a glass of orange juice from the fridge.
Tomorrow she would apologize to Marshall. That and the sandwich made her feel better. Alexa thought that she might be able to sleep now. As she quietly left the kitchen and started for the stairs, she looked down the hallway to the servants’ quarters—and saw Sierra coming out of Jayden’s room.
Just then the old clock on the mantel struck two in the morning, making her jump. She ducked back under the stairs, plastering herself against the wall.
She could hear Sierra coming down the hallway. She prayed that her sister-in-law would go up the stairs, but of course Sierra would do just the opposite.
Sierra walked right past her and into the kitchen. Alexa let out the breath she’d been holding as she heard her sister-in-law getting something from the refrigerator.
Curious where Sierra was headed next, Alexa moved into the space under the stairs so she was better hidden.
A few minutes later, Sierra came out of the kitchen with two bottles of beer. She padded back down the hallway. At Jayden’s door, she didn’t knock but simply opened it and, glancing back toward the living room, stepped inside and closed the door after her.
Alexa felt sick to her stomach. She knew Sierra must have been the woman she saw with Jayden, first arguing, then in his arms. She’d seen her coming out of his room the other time, Sierra’s hair a mess, in her robe. How much more evidence did she need?
Landon needed to know the truth. It would make it much easier for him to leave Sierra, to leave this house.
But as much as Alexa wanted her brother away from Sierra and this house, she couldn’t bring herself to tell him tonight. She suspected he now realized that Sierra had probably been lying to him about a lot of things. Alexa had to let him handle this his own way.
So why didn’t he go looking for his wife on those nights when he woke to find her gone? Because he knew what he’d discover and he wasn’t ready to face it yet.
Alexa waited until she was sure Sierra wouldn’t be coming back out of Jayden’s room, before hurrying back up the stairs to her room.
She unlocked the door, stepped in and locked the door behind her. For a moment she merely studied the room. It didn’t appear anyone had been in here since she’d left.
Walking over to the bureau against the wall, she moved to the end of it and then, putting her weight into it, shoved the bureau across the floor.
She didn’t care about the noise it made, figuring no one would hear anyway, given that everyone was in their own wings.
Once she had it blocking the door, she stripped off her robe and tumbled into the bed. She fell into a deep sleep—until she was awakened by her greatest fear. Her mother was standing by her bed.
ALEXA WOKE WITH A START, half expecting to see her mother standing beside her bed. It had been just a dream, she told herself, and yet she shuddered at the memory as she looked around the room and realized it was still dark outside. Glancing at the clock, she saw that she’d only been asleep for less than an hour.
But something had brought her out of a deep sleep so abruptly that she found herself sitting up in the bed, her heart pounding. The nightmare? No.
A name.
She blinked. Bates. She remembered why it had seemed so familiar. It was one of the two names she’d seen on the burned papers she’d retrieved from Sierra’s fireplace.
At the time, the papers had appeared to be financial documents. But that hadn’t meant anything to Alexa because she hadn’t known about J. A. Wellington bilking all those investors out of their money.
One of those investors had been named Bates.
She grabbed for her phone, found the number of the reporter she’d spoken with and quickly called him.
After apologizing for the early hour, she said, “I need to know if there is a Bates on the list of investors that Wellington cheated.”
“Just a minute.” He came back on the line a few moments later. “Bates. Yep. Harold and Carol Bates.”
Carolina’s parents, she recalled from Carolina’s wedding announcement. The father had been deceased.
Alexa’s heart pounded. “Can you tell me if any of these names are on the list?” She read off the names of the other occupants of the house. “Sorry.”
She frowned, remembering the other name on the burned sheet of paper from the fire. “What about a Welch?”
“I don’t see a Welch.”
She wasn’t sure whether she should be relieved or not that none of the other people in the house appeared to have ties to J. A. Wellington. “There isn’t a Farrell?”
“Nope.” He’d already told her, but she’d had to ask again.
“Isn’t it possible J. A. spent all the money?”
He laughed. “Trust me, he didn’t spend it or the feds would have known.”
She thought of Carolina’s parents. “These people who lost their money were already wealthy, right?”
“Nope. They were middle-class and lower-income people who couldn’t afford to lose their life’s savings. He destroyed a lot of families.”
“If that is true, how was he able to accumulate millions?”
“Apparently he was good at investing their money, showing them large enough returns to keep them from withdrawing their funds. Look, I don’t know where you’re going with this, but if there is a story here…”
“Don’t worry, I’ll make sure you get it,” she said, thanked him and hung up.
She had to see Carolina. The only way to put a stop to all this was to expose what was going on. It was too much of a coincidence that Carolina just happened to be the daughter of parents who had been cheated by Wellington.
Carolina either suspected the ill-gotten money was here or thought Sierra’s interest in the house meant she knew where her father had hidden it.
The question was, did Sierra know that Carolina’s family was one of the ones bilked by her father? Las Vegas was large enough that Sierra might not have known Carolina.
It explained what Carolina was doing here, but what if she wasn’t the only one in the house after the money? What about her husband, Gigi and Devlin, and Jayden? And why, if Sierra was after the money for herself, had she invited these people to the house?
Alexa realized that Carolina might be after more than the money—she could be set on revenge.
She quickly dressed, desperately needing to talk to Carolina. But as she started down the hall, she heard voices downstairs. The moment she walked into the kitchen, she realized something had happened. Everyone but Carolina was sitting around the table with long faces.
“What’s going on?” she asked and thought for a moment they weren’t going to tell her.
“Carolina and Archer had another fight,” Landon said. “Carolina’s catching a ride to Billings today instead of waiting for a flight out.”
She saw then that Archer was dabbing at his bleedin
g nose with a napkin. “The bitch hit me.”
“Don’t talk about Carolina like that,” Gigi snapped. “She’s upset.”
“I’m upset,” Archer snapped back. His face was also scratched. “But I’m sick of her acting like I’m a big disappointment to her.”
“Where is she?” Alexa asked.
“Up in our room, but I wouldn’t go up there if I were you,” Archer said. “She said she wanted to be left alone.”
Alexa just bet she did. Carolina had found the perfect way to make her exit with the money and without anyone suspecting what she was up to.
Taking the stairs two at a time, she hurried down the hall toward Carolina and Archer’s room. She was almost to the door when she heard the raised voices.
“How did you get in here?” Carolina said, sounding surprised and angry, and Alexa realized with a start, fear. “I want to be left alone.”
She heard something heavy hit the floor with a crash, muffling the other person’s voice.
“Are you crazy? Don’t come near me.” There was panic in Carolina’s voice. “Stay back!”
Alexa remembered what she’d seen in Carolina’s future and grabbed the doorknob. Locked. She struggled to get her key from her pocket as she heard something else hit the floor then Carolina’s scream. She fumbled the key into the lock and turned it. The lock clicked and as she started to turn the knob, she heard another bloodcurdling scream from Carolina and the horrible sound of glass shattering.
She shoved the door and it swung in as Carolina’s scream ended in a thud beyond the gaping hole where the window had been.
The room was empty. Where had the person Carolina had been arguing with gone?
Alexa rushed to the window to stare down into the darkness. She could make out a crumpled shape far below. She started to turn, to run downstairs to get help, even though she knew Carolina was beyond help.
But before she could move, she heard a panel slide open in the wall and was grabbed from behind, a wet cloth clamped down over her mouth and nose. No! The room began to dim and then the lights went out. As she slumped to the floor, her last thought was of Marshall.
