The Colton Bride

by Carla Cassidy

  She wrung her hands in obvious torment. “Oh, Miss Catherine, I’m so sorry. I can’t imagine how horrible it was for you and poor dear Allison last night. I feel so responsible for everything that happened.”

  “Nonsense,” Catherine replied and patted the woman’s shoulder. “Nobody blames you for anything that’s happened. I’m sure Chief Peters is going to get to the bottom of everything,” she assured the older woman.

  “I certainly hope so. I don’t know what to think about everything that has happened in the past couple of months. So much death...so much evil.” She shook her head with a tortured expression.

  “You do a great job around here, Mathilda. Everything is going to be just fine.”

  Mathilda nodded and then swept her hands down her skirt as if to smooth any imaginary wrinkles. “I just wanted a moment with you, to tell you how sorry I am by what you’ve suffered, and now I’d better get back to work.”

  Mathilda hurried away to do her duties and Catherine went to get something to eat. She had just finished a light lunch of cold cuts and fruit salad and was exiting the dining room when Gray found her.

  “Good afternoon,” he said, his eyes dark and his expression serious. “How are you feeling?”

  She hesitated a moment. “Sad...scared and a hundred different emotions,” she finally answered truthfully.

  He nodded, as if expecting nothing else. “Want to take a walk with me? I’ll help you with any chores that need to be done out at the petting barn.”

  “I just need to check the feed and water and I appreciate your offer,” she replied. As usual, he was dressed in jeans and a flannel shirt. What was unusual was that his jaw sported more than a five-o’clock shadow and the lines in his lean face appeared deeper than usual.

  “Not a problem. You might want to grab a jacket. It’s cool out there today.”

  “I’ll grab one on the way out.” They went out the employee entrance where there was a rack for jackets on the wall. Catherine grabbed her denim work jacket as he pulled down his worn brown leather coat. They put them on and walked into the early-afternoon sunshine.

  “You look like you were up all night,” she said once they fell into step, side by side.

  “I was. Chief Peters and his men didn’t leave here until near dawn so I just decided to help Dylan get the morning chores done after they left. Did you sleep all right?”

  “As scared as I was, as sick as I was about Allison, I’m ashamed to admit I went right to sleep and slept without dreams.”

  “Nothing to be ashamed of,” he replied. “You were obviously exhausted by everything.”

  She nodded and they walked in silence toward the stables and the petting barn. It wasn’t a tense silence, rather it felt companionable, as if neither had the need to fill an uncomfortable emptiness.

  “I’m cancelling the school class that was scheduled to come out here next week,” she said, finally breaking the quiet between them. They continued in a leisurely walk. “There’s just too much going on here for me to feel comfortable having little children around.”

  He nodded, as if to assure her that he agreed with her decision. “That’s what I want to talk about, what happened last night and the certainty that something like that is probably going to happen again.”

  “Gosh, are you trying to cheer me up?” she asked dryly, looking up at him.

  “I’m trying to be realistic. Two attempts have been made in the past week or so and I’m fairly certain there’s somebody on the inside who is working with the kidnapper. Catherine, it’s time for you to face the facts. You aren’t safe anywhere alone right now.”

  The chill of the day invaded her body. Even though he was at her side and she knew she could always depend on her sisters, she’d never felt so all alone. “I know,” she replied softly.

  She couldn’t help but notice that Gray’s gaze shot from the left to the right often and his jacket was open as if to allow easy access to his gun. It was a definite reminder that they had no idea when danger might come close again.

  For the remainder of the walk to the barn they were silent. It was a silence suddenly laced with tension, and she knew Gray wasn’t finished talking about her precarious situation.

  He stood just outside the fence as she tended to the animals. His back was to the barn and he appeared to survey the surroundings.

  Despite all of the old history between them, he made her feel safe. He was one of the few people she trusted right now and she trusted him without question.

  It didn’t take her long to take care of all her little creatures. She petted and praised, and even laughed as one of the friendly ferrets managed to grab a strand of her hair through the cage wires in an effort to get more attention.

  Finally finished with the chores, she rejoined Gray outside the fence. “Come into the stables,” he said. “We really need to talk.”

  With heavy footsteps she walked next to him. She didn’t want to talk any more about what had happened the night before. She didn’t want to think about poor Allison, who had given her life in an attempt to save Catherine.

  Still, she also knew she couldn’t just ignore the danger she was in. She couldn’t paint a pretty smile on her face and pretend that nothing bad was happening. She’d done that for too long already.

  Most of the horses were out in the pasture, leaving the stable in unusual silence. But the scent of horse and leather, of hay and male was familiar and comforting to her as she remembered the times she’d spent in here with her father or sisters.

  Gray led her to the small office he used as foreman, a tiny room with a single chair and a desk. He motioned her to the chair and she sat while he propped a hip against the desk and stared at her for a long, unsettling moment.

  “I have a plan to assure your safety, and I just want you to hear me out until I’m finished,” he finally said.

  She nodded, the muscles in her stomach tightening with a new kind of tension.

  “As far as I’m concerned you have two choices that will help keep you safe from harm. The first is that you go away from here. You leave and go someplace where nobody can find you, where nobody knows your name. It would be like you were in the Witness Protection Program. Nobody could know where you were, not even your sisters. You just disappear until somebody gets to the bottom of everything that has been going on here and it’s safe for you to return.”

  “That’s not happening,” she replied firmly. There was no way she was leaving her home, leaving her sisters and being all alone for the duration of however long it took to clean up the mess of crimes that had taken place here at the ranch.

  Besides, she wasn’t going anywhere as long as her father was on his deathbed. She didn’t want to be holed away someplace without being able to tell him a final goodbye if and when his time came.

  “No,” she said. “There has to be another way. Did Chief Peters and his men get anything from my room last night? Anything he can use to find out who came in to get me?”

  Gray hesitated a moment and then shook his head, his sensual lips pressed together in a grim line. “No hair, no fibers, not a single fingerprint on or around the window.”

  “Well, you can take the option of me going undercover someplace off the table. I’m not going anywhere.”

  “That’s what I thought you would say. And that brings me to the second option, which I’ve already mentioned to you before and you blew me off.” He hesitated a moment and then continued, “Marry me.”

  He held up a hand to stop her instant protest. “Hear me out, Catherine. It would be a marriage in name only, a temporary marriage until we both feel any danger to you has passed and then we get a simple divorce and move on with our lives. We stick together like glue. A marriage will allow me to sleep in your suite, and I’ll go with you wherever you need to go and you go with me when I do chores or whatever. It’s the only way to assure you and your baby are safe. You need me to be by your side every minute of the day and night.”

  His eyes nar
rowed with a dangerous glint. “Nobody will get close to you without coming through me, and I’ll make sure that doesn’t happen.”

  Catherine’s head reeled with his proposition. “But nobody would believe that it’s a real marriage.”

  “We can make everyone believe that it’s real,” he replied. “We just tell people that for the past six months we’ve been carrying on a secret affair and now we’ve decided to make it public and legal. There are plenty of folks around here who would remember that we had something going together years ago, it’s not such a stretch that we would get together again, and we just have to be good actors to make people believe that’s what happened.”

  She gazed at him for a long moment, wondering why she was even thinking about agreeing to his incredible proposition.

  “Why did you leave, Gray? Why did you just disappear from the ranch, from my life nine years ago?” It was a question that had burned inside her for a long time and she realized she couldn’t seriously consider this proposal of his without knowing what had happened in their past.

  “We were just a couple of kids, still wet behind the ears.” His gaze left her face and focused someplace over her shoulder. “First love, teenage fantasies.” He looked at her once again, his eyes dark and unreadable. “What we had wasn’t real or lasting. It was just the lust and the wonder of young love. I did you a favor by leaving here and letting you get on with your adult life.”

  “It didn’t feel like a favor at the time,” she said softly, remembering the aching pain he’d left behind. She wasn’t completely satisfied with his answer. However, there were certainly bigger issues at the moment.

  “Water under the bridge, right?” he said. “We can’t go backward, Catherine. We need to figure things out here and now. We need to make sure that you’re covered at all times and the only way I can do that is if you marry me and I have a legitimate reason to be at your side 24/7. We can have a ceremony Saturday at the little chapel. Mr. Black can do the honors and since it’s not a genuine marriage of love, we don’t need all the bells and whistles.”

  Even though she knew everything he said was true, for some reason his words created both a twinge of pain and a wistful yearning inside her.

  This wasn’t the way it was supposed to be for her. She’d always dreamed of a beautiful wedding with a man she loved more than life itself. Instead she was pregnant by a man she never intended to invite back into her life and being offered a marriage of convenience to a man she’d once loved in order to save her life.

  She felt trapped, as if no matter what choice she made it would be the wrong thing to do. As crazy as it sounded, this scheme of Gray’s felt like the sanest option she had at the moment.

  Gray remained silent, allowing her to process all the pros and cons of his suggestion and any alternative plans she might come up with on her own.

  She had no plans of her own and she knew something had to change. She could hire a full-time bodyguard, but she’d never completely trust that whoever she hired couldn’t be bought off or swayed by the temptation of a cut in a ransom reward.

  “Okay,” she finally said tremulously. “We’ll do it your way.” Her heart thumped unsteadily because she wasn’t sure if this mock marriage was her salvation or the absolute worst mistake she would ever make in her life.

  * * *

  Allison’s funeral was on Wednesday in the small cemetery in Dead. Although most of the Coltons and staff attended, along with several members of the police force of Dead, it was a sad affair.

  Allison had no family to attend. She’d never known her father and her mother had passed away a year before. The people she worked for, the people she worked with at the ranch, had become her family.

  Horace Black, an ordained minister who lived with his wife in a small log cabin on the Colton property, would be performing the solemn ceremony. His wife, Bernice, stood beside him. She worked as a laundress at the ranch, her domain the lowest level of the house. She was rarely seen and Gray didn’t think he’d heard her say more than ten words in all the years he’d spent at the ranch.

  Bernice might be rarely seen or heard, but that didn’t keep the rest of the staff from occasionally gossiping about the solidly built woman with the long gray ponytail.

  Bernice had one brown eye and one that was milky and opaque. The younger staff believed because of her milky eye she could see spirits and ghostly things and they were spooked whenever they had to go to the basement and interact with Bernice.

  As Horace began the ceremony, Gray glanced at Catherine standing by his side. It had been two days since she’d agreed to marry him. The past two nights Catherine had stayed in Amanda’s suite, and she would continue to do so until Saturday night when he would officially become her husband.

  There was no pleasure at Catherine’s capitulation to his plan. This marriage was nothing more than a ploy to keep her safe until the police or somebody could figure out who was behind all the deaths and crimes taking place on the ranch.

  He had no illusion about their relationship being anything but what it was now...employer and employee. The little bit of history they shared was long gone and the new relationship they forged would be based on nothing permanent or emotional, and when it was safe, they’d walk away from each other to find their futures separately.

  His gaze lingered on her. She was clad in a black dress and a matching overcoat. Most of the time she was stunning in black, but today it wasn’t her color.

  The darkness leeched all the color from her face, leaving her unusually pale. Her hair was clipped severely at the nape of her neck, and her delicate features were taut with grief as Horace wound down the short ceremony.

  When it was finished, everyone milled around despite the cold temperature. As Catherine moved to speak to Gabby and Trevor, Gray made his way toward Chief Peters.

  “Chief,” he said in greeting to the man who looked as if he hadn’t slept in weeks.

  “Gray.” The dark-haired fortyish man nodded. “Sad affair today, but then you’ve been through this before with Jenny Burke.”

  Gray nodded. “I hope you’re better at getting to the bottom of things than the former chief of police was.”

  Harry sighed with obvious disgust. “Drucker left behind false statements, dummied-up reports and a mess of things that all need to be checked out and reexamined. The first thing I did when I took office was fire the two inept officers he had on his payroll. Karen Locke and Pierce Deluca have left the building and have been replaced by a couple of sharp men I’m hoping I can count on to be better than efficient at their jobs.”

  “And they are?” Gray asked, wanting to know as many players as possible in the small town of Dead who might interact with the people at the ranch.

  “Officer Mike Harriman and Patrick Carter. Neither of them is from Dead. I hired them from out of state so that I’d know they came in clean with no ties to anyone at Dead or the Dead River Ranch. Hell, going through the reports of everything that has happened I could use my entire force just out at the ranch to investigate a variety of crimes. Unfortunately I’ve got a town to protect, as well.”

  His gaze moved across the cemetery where Catherine stood between her sisters. “I’m assuming you’re doing everything possible to keep her safe from another attempt?”

  “I’m marrying her on Saturday. From that moment on she won’t leave my side.” An unexpected emotion rose up inside of him, momentarily catching him off guard as Harry looked at him in surprise.

  “I didn’t see that coming.”

  Gray smiled. “A lot of people didn’t see it coming, but Catherine and I have been in love for a long time. We’d planned to eventually get married but after what happened we moved up our plans. Whoever is after her will have to come through me and I won’t hesitate to shoot to kill anyone who tries to take her or harm her.”

  Harry seemed like a decent man, but Gray intended to play his cards close to his chest and wasn’t about to admit to anyone that the marriage was nothing m
ore than a scheme in hopes of keeping trouble away from the pretty blonde heiress. The lie to the chief tripped effortlessly off his lips.

  Still, Gray needed to build a relationship with Peters as he didn’t know when he might need him. Despite everything that had happened in the past four days, Gray hadn’t forgotten that he’d promised Dylan to look into all the information Mia and Jagger had discovered about his mother’s past.

  Mia and Jagger hadn’t been the only ones asking questions. Katie McCord, a pastry chef and now Levi’s fiancée, had been warned to stop asking questions about Faye Frick, Dylan’s mother.

  There was no question there were secrets surrounding the woman who had worked for years as governess, secrets that somebody didn’t want uncovered. Gray was determined to do what he could to help his friend discover those secrets and finally get answers that would give Dylan some peace.

  “Congratulations on the upcoming wedding,” Harry said, “and I’m sure we’ll be in touch about less pleasant things if history is any indication.”

  As Sheriff Peters ambled away toward a group of his officers, Gray walked back to where Catherine stood with her sisters.

  “I still can’t believe the two of you fooled all of us for so long,” Amanda said, her gaze speculative as it lingered on him. “I know the two of you were crazy about each other when you were young, but Cath never said a word about you guys reconnecting.” She turned her gaze to Catherine, whose pale cheeks filled with a hint of color.

  Gray slung an arm around her slender shoulders and pulled her closer against him. “We just didn’t want to tell anyone until we were certain things were going to work out.”

  “Here I’ve been spending all this time planning what I thought was the next wedding on the ranch, and Cath is sneaking one in before me,” Gabby said.

  Gray knew it was difficult for Catherine to lie to her sisters about the truth of their wedding, but he’d insisted that it was vital that nobody know the truth except the two of them. He wanted no gossip to escape, no hint that this was just a ploy in an effort to keep Catherine safe.