Colton Undercover

by Marie Ferrarella

  “Uh-huh. Well, as long as you stay alert, I can’t see the harm in that,” he said agreeably. His expression softened as he looked at her again. “And I’ve got to say, it’s really great seeing you smile again. For a few days there, I didn’t think you were ever going to look anything but devastated again. I don’t mind saying that it hurt to see you that way,”

  She was surprised to hear him say that. “I thought I was doing a good job hiding my feelings.”

  Mac laughed, shaking his head. “Hate to tell you this, but you weren’t.” Since she was in such a good mood, he thought she’d be amenable to doing something else. “Listen, I was just thinking. What if we—?”

  But Mac never got the opportunity to finish his sentence because at that moment, the front door flew open, hitting the opposite wall with a bang. Leonor’s half brother Thorne Colton came in, scowling and for all the world looking like a storm that was about to roll over the plains.

  Without Thorne saying a word to his father, his deep brown eyes immediately homed in on Leonor. “It was you, wasn’t it?” he accused. Not waiting for her to answer one way or another—he wouldn’t have believed her if she’d said no—Thorne continued his rant. “Never really thought of you as being this selfish, but then, I guess I couldn’t really have expected anything else, could I? Given who your mother is,” he concluded nastily.

  Mac was up on his feet, his usual easygoing expression gone. “Watch your tongue. And don’t forget, Livia’s your mother, too.”

  Thorne blew out an angry breath. “And how many times have I wished that wasn’t true?” Livia’s fourth born snapped. The focus of his anger widened, taking in his father as well as his half sister. “What the hell were you thinking, anyway,” he demanded, glaring at at Mac, “letting Livia lead you to her bed?”

  “That is none of your business,” Mac informed him, his voice only growing deeper as he warned his son off, “and whatever else you might think about that part of my life, you wound up being the result of that brief interlude—and no matter what else might have gone down, I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

  Mac’s frown deepened as he looked at his son. “Except, maybe, for when you come rolling through here like a clap of thunder. I want you to keep a civil tongue in your head when you talk to your sister,” his father warned.

  But Thorne was as stubborn in his own way as his father was. The only difference was their chosen decibel range.

  “Why should I when she went running off at the mouth, spilling family secrets to some jerk with a laptop and an internet byline?” Thorne demanded. His eyes narrowed into dark brown slits as he glared at Leonor. “I’m right, aren’t I? It was you who sold us all out and told whoever the hell is behind Everything’s Blogger everything about us.” He didn’t wait for her to confirm his supposition. “How much did they pay you?” he wanted to know.

  The last question stabbed her right through the heart. “It wasn’t like that,” Leonor cried.

  Thorne pretended to look aghast. “They didn’t pay you?” he asked sarcastically.

  “Enough!” Mac declared. “She doesn’t owe you an explanation,” he told his son.

  “For splattering the so-called low points of my life all over the internet, thanks to some lurid blogger?” he cried, outraged. How could his father be taking her side? That angered Thorne almost as much as what he’d just accused Leonor of. “The hell she doesn’t.”

  “Thorne!” Mac shouted. The warning note in the rancher’s voice was clear.

  Unable to take Mac fighting with his son over something that she ultimately was responsible for, Leonor raised her voice to be heard above the two men.

  “Stop!” she pleaded. When both men looked at her, she began by answering Thorne’s question, really hoping she wouldn’t break down in the middle of it. “I thought I could trust him,” Leonor retorted, anger and hurt throbbing in every syllable. She could feel tears forming as she continued. “We were supposed to get married—”

  “Married?” Mac questioned, looking at her. He looked stunned by this addition. “You left that part out,” he told her.

  Leonor inclined her head, as if conceding her error. “Sorry.”

  “You’re going to have to do better than ‘sorry,’” Thorne told her angrily.

  Doggedly, Leonor pushed on with her explanation. “I needed to talk to someone, to get everything I’d been carrying around all this time, like some kind of flesh-eating poison, off my chest.

  “People were as nasty to me as they were to you—” she began, looking at Thorne.

  His laugh was cold and dismissive. “I really doubt that.”

  “Let her finish,” Mac ordered, cutting his son off.

  Thorne scowled, but conceded. “Go ahead,” he told his sister grudgingly.

  “I needed someone to talk to,” Leonor repeated, “and he was there, ready to listen.”

  “And taking notes,” Thorne interjected nastily.

  Leonor sighed. Thorne was right, but that didn’t help anything or change it. “I didn’t know that at the time,” she told him. “I had no idea he’d wind up putting it all in a blog and selling it to the highest bidder. I thought he loved me, but he turned out to be an opportunist.”

  “If you wanted to talk so badly,” Thorne said angrily, not fully ready to accept that as an excuse, “why didn’t you come to me?”

  She looked at him. Was he kidding? They were all at odds when their mother was carted off to prison. Thorne particularly.

  “Maybe you forgot,” Leonor pointed out, “but you weren’t exactly the friendliest audience to turn to these last few years. I couldn’t talk to you.”

  He wasn’t about to let her turn this around and blame him.

  “Maybe that was because I could never understand how you could still love that woman after everything she’d done. She never once thought about how her actions would reflect on us or affect us. Hell, she never once thought about us, period,” he reminded his sister angrily. “Yet you went running off to visit her in prison every chance you got,” he said scornfully.

  Her temper flared. Leonor gritted her teeth together as she ground out an answer to his accusation. “Because nobody else did.”

  “There was a reason for that!” Thorne pointed out in exasperation. “The woman is evil.” Fury had temporarily robbed him of breath. When he got it back, he asked his sister, “Was she grooming you to follow in her footsteps? Was that it, Lennie? Was that why you sold us out like that? Are you helping her now?”

  Stunned, Leonor couldn’t find the words to answer her brother, to defend herself. What hurt most of all was that Thorne felt she had to.

  Mac came to her rescue. “That’s enough, Thorne!” he shouted. “I want you to apologize to your sister.”

  There was cold fury on Thorne’s face. “Why should I?” he demanded.

  Thorne was furious and he felt he had every right to be. His father was blind when it came to Leonor and his other half sisters, but women could be even more evil and deadlier than men. His mother was living proof of that, he thought darkly.

  “Because she doesn’t deserve to be treated so disrespectfully,” Mac informed his son. “Because if it wasn’t for her, neither one of us would be standing here right now!”

  Thorne had no idea what his father was talking about. “What’s that supposed to mean?” he demanded.

  “It’s nothing,” Leonor said quickly. She knew what Mac was going to say and she didn’t want him to. This was a private matter between the two of them, not something she’d done for any sort of credit or recognition.

  But Mac wasn’t about to allow Leonor’s generosity to go unnoted any longer. Thorne needed to know just the sort of person his sister was.

  “It’s not ‘nothing,’” Mac told her. “And it’s about time people knew how you came through.” H
e shifted his eyes toward his son. “When the bank was breathing down my neck a few years ago, threatening me with foreclosure because I’d had a run of bad luck and missed a few payments, Leonor used her own money to help bail me out. She paid off the bank.” There was gratitude in his eyes when he looked at her. “If she hadn’t done that, it would have gone up for sale.”

  Completely stunned in the face of this information, Thorne could only stare at his father. “You never said anything.”

  “Not the kind of thing a man likes to advertise,” Mac replied flatly. “It wasn’t my finest moment. But it definitely was Leonor’s,” he added, looking significantly at her.

  Thorne blew out a breath, completely caught off guard. It was his turn to look contrite. “I didn’t know,” he said to his sister.

  “You weren’t supposed to know,” Leonor said simply. “I didn’t do it because I wanted people to have something nice to say about me. I did it because your father needed help and this was my small way of paying him back for all the times he was there for all of us. For me,” she added with affection as she looked at the tall, strapping, dark-skinned rancher. “In a way, you’re the parent the rest of us never had,” she told Mac.

  Mac smiled at her. “You made it easy.” And then he turned his attention toward his son. “You want to apologize to her?”

  He made it sound like an option, but Thorne knew that it wasn’t. And, given what he’d just found out, his father was right. He did owe Leonor an apology. Not for being angry about the blog—she hadn’t denied being responsible for that—but for losing his temper with her like that. No matter how angry he was, she didn’t deserve to have him ranting at her like that, especially not after she’d helped his father the way she had.

  Apologies weren’t exactly his specialty and this one was no exception. He went with something positive rather than dwelling on the negative. “Thanks for helping Dad out.”

  “Like I said, it was the least I could do.” Leonor shrugged as if it had been no big deal—because, to her, it hadn’t been. The far bigger deal would have been to just ignore Mac’s plight and move on as if there was nothing wrong. “And I did have the money.”

  “But you didn’t have to use it,” Mac pointed out.

  He wasn’t a man who took anything for granted. Life was hard and he knew that better than a lot of people. He had no really high expectations, but when the occasional pleasant surprise came his way, he was grateful to be able to experience it.

  Leonor looked at the rancher. To her way of thinking, there had never been a choice. It was a matter of doing the right thing, or not being able to live with her conscience if she had chosen to close her eyes and just walk away.

  “Yes, I did,” she told him quietly.

  “Okay,” Thorne conceded. “I take back everything I just said to you,” he told Leonor. “You didn’t sell us out. But what are we going to do about this character who sold the info to the blog?”

  “You ignore him,” Mac said, addressing his words to both of them, just in case his son was getting Leonor all fired up about the man again. He wanted her to let go of her anger over this—permanently.

  Thorne was not keen on his father’s input.

  “That doesn’t seem right after what they wrote,” Thorne protested.

  Mac shook his head. His son was missing the point here. “You go after him in any way, even if it’s just to carry on an online war, and all you’ve done is succeeded in getting more people to pay attention to this jackass’s blog. If you want a story to die, the way you kill it is ignore it until it eventually runs out of fuel and burns itself out.”

  “What if it doesn’t burn itself out?” Thorne challenged.

  Mac was unwavering in his response. “It will. All things die eventually. Yesterday’s news is just that, yesterday’s news. Unless, like a scab, you keep scratching at it and making it bleed. Then somebody pays attention to it.”

  Leonor shivered. “A bleeding scab. Not exactly the most appealing image,” she said.

  “Maybe not,” Mac agreed. “But that doesn’t make it any less accurate.” And then he took a deep breath, his barrel chest expanding impressively. He considered this topic to be over. “I just bought two new stallions and they were delivered this morning.” He looked from Leonor to his son. “You two up for a trip to the stable to meet the new arrivals?”

  She’d always loved horses. It was the best part of her childhood. She couldn’t think of anything she would have liked better than to see the stallions that Mac had purchased.

  “Count me in,” she told Mac.

  Thorne paused. The fire had settled down in his veins. “Yeah, me, too,” Thorne said.

  “Well, what are you waiting for?” Mac wanted to know. He crossed to the front door, beckoning them to follow him. “Let’s go!”

  Chapter 5

  Leonor wasn’t in the habit of deliberately ignoring her cell phone. In Austin, even when she wasn’t actually at work, it was on 24/7 in case her boss needed to get in contact with her regarding one detail or another concerning the museum’s operation.

  She’d taken her leave of absence because of David’s devastating betrayal, and the same day that she had left Austin, she started turning her phone off at night. From there, it was a short hop to generally ignoring her cell during the day. The moment she drove into Shadow Creek, she’d turned off the ringer and the few times that she had felt her phone pulsing, indicating either a call or a text message, she didn’t bother picking up—or even looking at it to see whose call she was ignoring.

  Her main focus right now was healing.

  For all intents and purposes, because of the abyss she had slipped into when she arrived on Mac’s doorstep, the outside world had been dead to her. But slowly, with Mac’s encouragement, she’d begun to come around and was once again rejoining the human race.

  It didn’t hurt to have her relationship with Thorne reestablished. And that lunch yesterday that had come about because Mac had urged her to get out of the house and off the ranch had caused her to tap into her people skills once more.

  She was finally beginning to feel alive again, Leonor thought.

  Which, she recognized, was a fortunate turn of events because the first call she decided to answer on her cell phone came from Sheffield.

  Going out onto the front porch for a little privacy, she swiped her finger along the screen, allowing her cell to go into an active mode.

  Rather than offering a customary greeting, in the interests of saving her boss time and effort, Leonor got right down to business and said, “I don’t think that I’m really ready just yet to come back to work, Mr. Sheffield.”

  “I see that going home hasn’t managed to countrify you,” the museum director commented drolly.

  She realized that she’d jumped the gun—and should have allowed the museum director to speak first before she launched into her little speech.

  “I’m sorry,” she apologized. “I thought that was why you were calling—to find out if I was coming back.”

  “Well of course I’d welcome that sooner rather than later, but I did tell you to take your time,” the director reminded her. There was some reluctance evident in his voice. “But I’m not calling you about that, Leonor. I’m calling to give you a heads-up.”

  She wasn’t sure just what the director was talking about. Leonor didn’t know whether to just brace herself or be worried. Doing her best to sound relatively calm, she asked, “About what?”

  “There’s a billionaire by the name of Joshua Pendergrass headed your way. I’d like you to...” Sheffield paused for a moment, as if searching for the best way to phrase what he wanted her to do. “Get on his good side,” Sheffield finally said, hoping the words were vague enough for her to read whatever she needed to into them.

  Leonor smiled to herself. Funny how t
hings turned out, she thought. “I believe that I might already have done that.”

  “You mean he’s in Shallow Creek already?” Sheffield asked, surprised.

  “Shadow Creek,” Leonor corrected tactfully, not for the first time.

  It seemed to her that the director had a mental block when it came to getting the name of the small town right. She would be the first to admit that, outside of being the place where the federal agents had captured her mother, there was nothing that could be considered memorable about the town.

  “And yes,” she told the museum director, “he is.”

  “You’ve made his acquaintance?” Sheffield didn’t bother hiding the eager note in his voice.

  That sounded so formal. The man might be a billionaire, but there had been nothing “formal” about their first meeting. Or, for that matter, the lunch that followed.

  “I...um...ran into him at a restaurant yesterday.”

  “And?” Sheffield wanted to know, urging her to share details.

  On a hunch, Leonor decided not to say anything about eating with the man. Instead, she said, “And we exchanged a few words.”

  “You realize that he’s an art collector.” Sheffield sounded as if he could barely contain himself. She’d never heard him sound this way before, but then she was aware that the museum was having a rather tough time of it lately. Donations to the museum had been sparse this quarter, causing some belt tightening to take place.

  “Those were some of the words we exchanged,” Leonor acknowledged.

  “Wonderful!” She almost expected Sheffield to burst into applause. Struggling to contain his excitement, the director told her, “I’ve got it on good authority that he’s interested in finding a museum he feels will do his art collection justice. And, if it turns out that he’s happy with what we can do to highlight it, I’m sure that we’ll be able to get the man to make a sizable donation to the museum.”

  “That sounds good,” Leonor replied.

  She knew that she undoubtedly sounded subdued to the director, but she really wasn’t certain what it was that Sheffield was looking to hear from her.