Colton Baby Rescue

by Marie Ferrarella

  Serena decided to wait to tell the woman about the aborted kidnapping after she had a chance to get some coffee into her system.

  So all she said in response now was, “Well, we’re still here.”

  Alma nodded, looking pleased. “Yes, so I see. There’s a pot of fresh coffee downstairs,” she told Serena.

  “Music to my ears, Alma,” Serena responded.

  Obviously thinking that the two were about to go downstairs to the kitchen, the housekeeper offered, “If you give me a moment, I’ll get Sally up to make you breakfast.”

  But Serena waved away the suggestion. “No, don’t bother. Let Sally sleep in for once. I can handle breakfast for the detective and myself,” Serena told the housekeeper.

  “Are you sure, Miss Serena?” Alma asked.

  “I’m sure,” she told the housekeeper. “As long as you watch Lora for me.”

  “Consider it done,” Alma answered with pleased enthusiasm.

  “Should I be worried?” Carson asked Serena as they went downstairs.

  Reaching the landing, Serena went on to the kitchen. The house seemed almost eerily quiet to her. She was accustomed to hearing her mother’s voice raised in displeasure, ordering someone around.

  “Only if you get me angry when I have a frying pan in my hand,” Serena replied. “But if you’re referring to my cooking, I haven’t poisoned anyone yet.”

  It was hard for him to believe that a pampered Colton was serious about making breakfast. “I didn’t know you cooked.”

  “Lots of things about me you don’t know,” she answered. Opening one of the refrigerator doors, she took out four eggs. “I don’t like being waited on,” she went on, “so I learned how to cook.”

  Putting the eggs on the counter, she paused as she reached for some bread. And then it occurred to her that she had just assumed what he wanted for breakfast without asking.

  Turning toward Carson now, she remedied the situation. “I didn’t ask you. Eggs and toast okay, or do you want something else? I can make pancakes or waffles, or—”

  “Eggs and toast will be fine,” he answered before she could go through an entire litany of all the different things that came under the heading of breakfast.

  “Eggs and toast, it is,” Serena agreed. “How do you want your eggs?”

  He’d already told her last night that he was generally indifferent to food. “Any way but raw.”

  Serena laughed in response.

  He wasn’t aware that he’d said anything amusing. “What’s so funny?”

  She shook her head. She supposed that the man just didn’t see it. “Anyone who didn’t know you would say you were easy.”

  So far, he still didn’t see what was so amusing to Serena. “I am easy.”

  She put four slices into the toaster, adjusting the lever for medium.

  “You keep telling yourself that, Carson.”

  “I am easy,” Carson stressed. “I have few requirements.” Serena handed him a cup of black coffee. He accepted it automatically. “One of which is that I don’t like being lied to.”

  She stopped pouring coffee into her mug and turned to look at him. Was he deliberately being enigmatic, or was he just fishing for a response from her? “Are you saying I did?”

  Carson raised one eyebrow, his gaze pinning hers. “Did you?”

  Serena never flinched or looked away. Instead, she raised her chin defiantly and told him, “No.”

  Carson decided to believe her—unless she gave him reason not to. “Then we should keep it that way,” he told her.

  “No problem here.” She took a long sip of her coffee, then turned her attention to preparing the rest of the breakfast. “By the way, does that go both ways?”

  “Are you asking me if I lied to you?” Carson wanted to know.

  Two could play at this vague game of his. “I am.”

  His voice was dead serious as he answered her. “I didn’t.”

  Maybe she was just being naively foolish, but she believed him. Or maybe she just wanted to feel that there was someone on her side. “Looks like everything’s just coming up roses between us then,” she responded. And then she saw him grin. “What?”

  “That strange, ungodly sound that you’re hearing are dead Coltons and Gages, collectively rolling over in their graves,” he said.

  Buttering the slices of toast that had just popped up, she laughed. “They would, wouldn’t they? You know, I kind of like that idea, doing something to cause past generations of Coltons and Gages to roll over in their graves.

  “I always thought the idea of a family feud was the stupidest waste of time imaginable,” she continued. “That sort of thing belongs to the Hatfields and the McCoys, not to people who live in the twenty-first century,” Serena said as she scrambled the four eggs together in a large frying pan. Looking at the pan, she grinned. “My mother would be horrified if she saw me making a Gage breakfast in our kitchen. Hell, she’d be horrified if she saw me making breakfast, period, but especially for a Gage,” she told him.

  “I said you didn’t have to,” he reminded her.

  Detective or not, the man could be very dense, Serena thought. “You’re missing the point,” she told him.

  “I guess I am,” he was willing to admit. “Educate me. What is the point?”

  She lowered the temperature under the frying pan. “That two intelligent families feuding over something that happened between two people decades ago is stupid and anyone with half a brain should definitely not allow themselves to be pulled into this feud.”

  “Do I qualify as someone with half a brain?” he wanted to know, amused by her description.

  Still scrambling the eggs, Serena looked at him. “At least half,” she deadpanned.

  “Thanks.”

  “Don’t mention it,” she managed to say before the grin won out, curving her mouth. “Get a couple of plates from the cupboard, will you?”

  There was no shortage of cupboards and cabinets in the large kitchen. He could be opening and closing doors for several minutes.

  “You want to point me in the right direction?” he asked.

  Responding, Serena moved the frying pan off the active burner. “Typical male,” she commented with amusement. Hands on his shoulders, she literally pointed Carson toward the cupboard that held the everyday dishes. “That one,” she told him.

  He knew it was his imagination, but he could swear that he felt the warmth from her hands coming through his shirt, seeping into his shoulders. The warmth found its way into his system, spreading out through all of him.

  He hadn’t been with a woman since Lisa had died, and for some reason, he was acutely aware of that lack right at this moment. Aware of the fact that it had been eating away at him, bit by bit, from the first time he had laid eyes on her.

  “Are you all right?” Serena asked when he made no move toward the cupboard.

  “Yeah.” Carson forced himself to shake off the feeling that was taking hold of him and got the plates she’d requested. He placed them on the counter. “Just wondering why anyone would need this many cabinets, that’s all.”

  “That’s an easy one to answer,” she told him, dividing the eggs between the two plates. The mansion belonged to her mother when her father had married her and Joanelle was responsible for every part of its decor. “For show.”

  Chapter 15

  “For show?” Carson repeated as Serena took her seat at the table.

  He thought he understood what she was saying, but he wanted to make sure he wasn’t assuming too much, so he waited for a little clarification.

  And Serena had no problem giving it. “It is my mother’s life ambition to make every other living person be in total awe and envy of her—and she won’t rest until that happens.” As far as she was concerned, her mother’s attitude was deplorable, but she
wasn’t about to say it out loud.

  Joanelle Colton’s shallowness was nothing new as far as Carson was concerned. He shrugged, paying far more attention to his bracing cup of coffee than to the conversation.

  After taking a long sip, he quipped, “I guess everyone should have a goal in life.”

  “Well, the baby and I definitely put a crimp in her goal,” she commented more to herself than to Carson as she quickly consumed her breakfast. She had a full day ahead of her and she needed to get to it.

  Carson, however, seemed to have other ideas. Serena was about to get up when he asked her another question.

  “Earlier, you said that Demi didn’t need to kidnap your daughter. What did you mean by that?” The way she had phrased it—as well as her tone of voice—had been preying on his mind.

  That had been a slip on her part, Serena thought. She shouldn’t have said anything.

  She shrugged now, trying to dismiss the whole thing. “Oh, you know. The usual.”

  “No,” he answered, not about to let the matter go so easily. “I don’t know. Enlighten me.” As he looked at her across the table, Carson once again had the distinct feeling that there was something she wasn’t telling him. “Serena, if you’re holding something back, I need to know. What is it you’re not telling me?” he pressed. “You used the word need before. Was that just you talking a mile a minute, trying to find a way to make me stop looking at Demi as a suspect, or was there something more to this? I know that she took a lot of cash with her, but that doesn’t mean she has enough to fund being on the run.”

  When Serena made no answer, it just reinforced the idea that he was on to something. “Why did you say she didn’t need to kidnap your baby? Oh wait—you mean because she’s pregnant herself.”

  He was crowding her and Serena lost her temper. “Exactly. She’s going to have one of her own,” she snapped. “That’s all I meant. The idea of her kidnapping Lora for ransom is ludicrous and never would have occurred to me.”

  Serena stared up at the kitchen’s vaulted ceiling, searching for strength.

  “As I already asked, please don’t say anything to anyone,” she implored, looking into his eyes, trying to make contact with his soul—if he had one. “Demi didn’t want anyone else to know. She only told me because she thought that I’d understand since I’d just gone through the same thing myself.”

  Carson looked at her, debating whether or not he was buying this. He hadn’t told Finn, despite the pregnancy speaking to motive, no matter what Serena had said in opposition about how Demi wouldn’t kill her child’s father. Maybe because he wasn’t sure yet if Demi was really pregnant at all. For reasons of her own, Serena might have made up the pregnancy to get him to feel sorry for Demi or go easier on her cousin.

  For the moment, he decided to go along with Serena’s story. “And she was sure that Bo was the father?”

  Serena nodded. “Yes.”

  He waited, but Serena didn’t say anything further. Instead, she reached over and gathered his empty plate, then stacked it on top of hers.

  Carson put his hand over hers, stopping her from getting up with the plates.

  “You said he didn’t know about the baby.”

  “Right. Demi didn’t want to tell him yet. He was marrying someone else. She didn’t want to look as if she was trying to get him to call off the wedding and marry her instead. She didn’t want him to marry her. Demi told me she had finally come to her senses and realized that Bo was loathsome—no offense.”

  “None taken.” Serena wasn’t giving voice to anything that hadn’t crossed his mind about his brother more than once.

  Serena went on to tell the detective, “Demi told me that she wouldn’t marry Bo if he was dipped in gold and covered with diamonds.”

  He wondered if Demi had laid it on a little thick to cover her tracks. “Pretty harsh words for the father of her baby,” Carson observed.

  “Demi had caught him cheating on her more than once and, don’t forget, they’d broken up,” Serena reminded him. “Bo being the baby’s father was just an unforeseen accident.”

  He saw the pregnancy in a slightly different light. “Certainly gives her motive to kill Bo.”

  He was back to that again? Serena rolled her eyes in exasperation. “Only if she’d wanted something from him, which she didn’t. All Demi wanted before Bo went and got himself killed was just to have her baby and make a life for the two of them.”

  “Well, the simplest thing for Demi to do would be just to—”

  Serena knew what he was going to say. He was going to say that Demi should do what her mother had told her to do when she had to tell her parents that she was pregnant. She cut Carson short before he was able to finish his sentence.

  “No, that’s not the ‘simplest thing’ for some women,” she informed Carson, annoyed that he’d even think to suggest it. “For some women, that would be the worst course of action to take. Besides,” she passionately maintained, “it’s a baby, not a mistake.”

  Taking a breath, she forced herself to calm down. “But all that aside, you can see why she wouldn’t want to kidnap my baby. She’s already got one on the way to worry about.”

  “Yes, but a sizable ransom would go a long way to helping her raise that baby,” Carson reminded her again.

  “Except for one thing,” Serena countered.

  “What’s that?”

  “I already offered to give Demi money to see her through this, and she turned me down,” she told the detective. “She wouldn’t just turn around and then kidnap my baby.”

  He really did want to believe this scenario she’d just told him. “All right, let’s just say that for now, you’ve convinced me—”

  “Let’s,” Serena agreed, a semblance of a relieved smile curving her mouth.

  There were other avenues to explore regarding the foiled kidnapping. For now, he went that route. “Do you have any enemies who would want to get back at you by kidnapping Lora?”

  “I’m sorry to disappoint you but I don’t have any enemies, period,” she told him. “At least,” she qualified, “none that I’m aware of.”

  Given her personality, he tended to believe that was true. He tried something else. “How about the baby’s father?”

  The smile vanished and her face sobered, darkening like a sky just before a winter storm rolled in. “What about him?”

  “Would he kidnap Lora?” he asked. “You know, because he wants full custody of her?” He was familiar with cases like that and they left a bad taste in his mouth, but that didn’t change the fact that they existed. “If you give me his name and where I can find him, I’ll go question him, see if we can rule him out.”

  “I’ll give you his name,” she willingly agreed, “At least the one he gave me, but it’s an alias,” she told him. “And I have no idea where you can find him. Besides, even if you could find him, you’d be wasting your time asking him if he tried to kidnap Lora.”

  “And why is that?” Before she answered him, Carson read between the lines. “You’re telling me he doesn’t want to be a father?”

  Serena’s laugh was totally without a drop of humor. “I don’t know what he wants to be, other than a full-time thief.” She took the dishes over to the sink and began rinsing them.

  Carson came up behind her. “You know you’re going to have to give me more details than that,” he told her.

  She didn’t look at Carson at first. She just braced her hands against the sink, desperately trying to center herself. “You’re not going to be satisfied until you make me wind up spilling my insides to you, are you?”

  His tone softened just a little. “I have no interest in your private life, Serena, but there’s more at stake here than just your pride,” he told her.

  Serena closed her eyes for a moment, trying to separate herself from the words she was about to say.
And then she turned around to tell Carson what he was waiting to hear.

  “I was out of town at one of the region’s bigger horse auctions. We were both bidding on the same horses. When I outbid him, he asked if he could buy me a beer to celebrate. A number of beers and whiskeys later, we were in my room, discussing the finer points of a horse’s flanks,” she said wryly.

  “The next morning, I woke up to find that he was gone, along with all the cash in my wallet and my credit cards.” She tried her best to keep the edge of bitterness out of her voice, but some of it came through. “I thought that was the worst of it—until three months later when I found that I was pregnant. And, like I said, the name he gave me was an alias so there was no way I could get in touch with him and tell him that he was about to become a father. He probably still doesn’t know—and that’s fine with me.”

  Offering comfort had never been something he was good at. Right now, Carson found himself wishing that it was. “I’m sorry.”

  She raised her eyes to his. “For asking?”

  “No,” he said honestly, “for what you went through.”

  That caused her to instantly rally—and grow slightly defensive. “Don’t be. Lora’s the most important person in my life and if I hadn’t gone through all that, she wouldn’t be here. She’s my silver lining.”

  He took his cue from that. “I’m sure she is. And I’m going to keep you both safe.” He said it matter-of-factly, but it was a promise, one that he intended to stand by.

  “Thank you for that,” she told him, her voice growing a little raspy. “If I ever lost her, I don’t know what I’d do or how I’d ever recover from that.”

  The very thought of that happening caused tears to form in her eyes. Serena was immediately embarrassed about being so vulnerable in front of someone, especially in front of the detective.

  “Sorry, you don’t need to have me carrying on like a hysterical female. Go about doing whatever you’re supposed to be doing,” she told him, turning away so Carson wouldn’t see the tears that she couldn’t seem to stop from falling.