“Wait up, ’Vette.”
God, she hated it when he called her that. She was neither a retired soldier nor a car. She stopped in the hallway without turning around to face her father.
He stepped into her field of vision and she looked up at him reluctantly. He was a big man, and she was the only one of her siblings who’d inherited nearly none of his features. They all teased her about being made of the leftovers after the rest of them were created.
“Before you go off half-cocked, there’s something you need to know,” he declared.
“What’s that?”
“As part of my plea deal, I agreed to participate in a sham arrest. The cops are hoping to draw out Dex. If he thinks I’m being charged with the murders, maybe he’ll come out of hiding.”
“You…they…what?”
“That whole business of me being arrested for the murders was an act. The press conference was a setup. I’m as eager as the next guy to see that bastard partner of mine’s sorry ass behind bars, so I agreed to help. Your mom knew in advance, but the cops wanted to be sure the rest of the family reacted in genuine surprise this morning.”
“Did Jordana know? She’s a cop.”
“Nope. Nobody but me, your mom, the district attorney and Reese. Oh, and my lawyer, of course.”
“Of course,” she echoed dryly.
But Reese had known. And he hadn’t said a thing about it to her. He’d let her go into that press conference and get blindsided, and then get jumped by a pack of rabid reporters. Her family had turned on her, her police colleagues had turned on her and he’d abandoned her to face all of their silent blame alone.
As if his casual pronouncement explained everything and made it A-OK, Fitz turned away from her and headed toward the stairs. “I’ll be down in a sec, Reese. I’m already packed.”
Packed to go where? Why now, in the middle off all these messes involving his precious company? What business could possibly be more important than being here in Braxville to support his family? All of her siblings were involved in the events of the past six months at Colton Construction in one way or another.
She looked over at Reese and asked tightly, “Where’s he going?”
“The airport.”
She huffed. “And flying to where?”
“I didn’t ask.”
“Are you lying to me?” she snapped.
“No!”
“Why should I believe you?”
“I’ve never lied to you, Yvie.”
“Hah! You sure as heck didn’t tell me about this morning’s circus.”
“That’s not lying. That’s omitting telling you something. And I did suggest there might be press present when he turned himself in.”
“Same difference.” She drew breath to lay into him more, but Fitz came downstairs just then carrying two big suitcases. As in big. The kind of bags a person could live out of for weeks or months.
Lilly rounded the corner form the kitchen and asked Fitz coldly, “Do you have everything you wanted from the house?”
“I left instructions with my assistant on where to ship the boxes in my closet.”
“Fine.” Lilly turned and left, her expression as icy as Yvette had ever seen it.
What on earth?
She stared back and forth between Fitz and Reese. “What am I missing? What’s going on?”
Fitz answered lightly, “Oh. That. Your mother and I are getting a divorce.”
“A…what?”
“Your mom will explain. I have to go. Don’t want to miss my flight. Reese? You ready to roll?”
Reese took a step toward her. “Is there a time soon when you and I can talk?”
She looked up at him frigidly. “I have nothing to say to you.”
He winced fractionally but replied evenly enough, “Fair. But I have things to say to you.”
“Like what?” she snapped.
“Not here. Not now. Be with your family tonight. Tomorrow is soon enough for what I have to say.”
Hah. As if.
Reese sighed and grabbed one of Fitz’s big suitcases. He didn’t make eye contact with her again. Fleeing the scene of the crime, was he? Along with her coward of a father? She was so speechless with shock she just stood there as the two men strode down the hall and out the back door.
The door closed, leaving behind only the distant din of her family talking and laughing as if nothing had happened. As if her family had not just imploded before her eyes.
Her feet felt like blocks of wood as she stumbled into the kitchen. Her mother and Jordana were standing side by side at the sink, rinsing dishes and loading them in the dishwasher.
“Mom?” Yvette asked in a small voice. “Dad just told me. Are you okay?”
Lilly turned around and dried her hands on a dish towel, leaning a tired hip on the counter. “I’ll be fine, darling. Really.”
“But—” she rushed forward and wrapped her arms around her mother’s waist, hugging her tightly. Still slender and athletic, her mother felt strong. Stronger than she’d expected. In fact, it ended up being her mother hugging and comforting her and not the other way around.
When the shock abated enough for Yvette to think again, she leaned back to stare up at Lilly. “What happened? Was it the arsenic thing and the murder thing?”
“Oh, honey. It’s been building for a lot longer than that. Years. Decades, really. Maybe since even before the triplets came along. Your father always loved work more than family. He has never been…emotionally available. I stayed in the marriage for you kids. And to be honest, because it was more convenient to stay than to go. But in the past six months, the situation has changed.”
“So, it was the investigations and the bodies?” Yvette pressed.
“Not exactly.” Lilly continued, her voice tightening, “I did agree to stand by your father through the arsenic investigation. His attorney felt strongly that a show of family unity would be important in gaining enough public sympathy for Fitz to avoid going to jail. But now that the whole fiasco is concluded, I’m free to move on. And that’s exactly what I plan to do.”
Yvette studied Lilly intently. Her mother looked almost transparent she was stretched so thin. She stepped forward once more to embrace her mother. “Oh, Mom. I’m so sorry.”
Lilly accepted the hug but turned away soon enough, her eyes suspiciously moist, and left the kitchen.
“Way to go, Yvette,” Jordana muttered, hurrying after Lilly.
She stood alone in the kitchen feeling like a heel for making her mom cry. She’d been trying to comfort Lilly. But as usual, she’d zigged when she should have zagged with her family. She purely sucked at being a Colton.
“Hey, kiddo. Why the long face?”
Uncle Shep. On cue. There to look out for her when no one else saw her.
“Oh, Uncle Shep. Mom just told me about the divorce. You do know that just because your brother is divorcing my mom, you’ll still always be family, right?”
He smiled crookedly at her. “You always did have a giant heart. Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine. I’m just worried about your mother. She’s been through so much…”
She reached out and gave Shep’s hands a squeeze. “You’ll be there for her, won’t you?”
“If she’ll let me.”
“She loves you to death. Of course, she’ll let you,” Yvette assured him.
A strange look flashed through her uncle’s dark brown eyes. She couldn’t tell if it was hope or something else altogether, more akin to chagrin. “Go be with your mom and your brothers and sisters. I’m going to head back to the carriage house and not intrude tonight.”
“But—”
He turned her by the shoulders and gave her a little push toward the living room. “Go.”
CHAPTER 11
Saturday morning dawn
ed gray and damp, the clouds low and pregnant with snow. The forecast was for more snow, and possibly lots of it, starting in late morning. Perfect. She could get to the lab, hunker down, and as the weather deteriorated, nobody would be dropping by to bother her. Nobody, as in Reese.
She finished going through the evidence collected from the Dexter house without finding a single thing of interest, let alone anything that pointed at Markus Dexter as a murderer. But it wasn’t as if the guy was going to keep around the blunt object he’d killed two people with after all these years.
She continued working on cracking the codes he’d used for his address books and managed to decipher about half of them. It was clear the man had a thriving nightlife. An almost continuous string of initials dotted his evenings, many with late-night meeting times beside them. How could his wife have had no idea he was going out so much to meet other women?
She ate the lunch she’d packed for herself and finished up her final report on the arsenic investigation in the afternoon. Her final findings were moot now that the plea deal with her father was complete, and she could’ve just written up a few paragraphs and called it good. But she finished the job to the best of her ability anyway. She’d always believed any job worth doing was worth doing well.
Ugh. She was starting to act like Reese. His persnickety procedures were rubbing off on her. She corrected herself: she’d been careful and professional long before he’d come along and tried to tell her how to do her job, thank you very much.
At long last, the two big work tables in her lab were cleared off. All the Dexter evidence was sorted, labeled, cataloged and shelved. The samples from the arsenic investigation were analyzed and packed up, and she was even done with the massive collection of files from Dexter’s office. Well satisfied that order had finally been restored in her lab and in her life, she closed up shop, turned off the computers and lights and headed home.
She was surprised to realize it was nearly eight at night and that close to a foot of snow had fallen since this morning. Man. Kansas was really getting clobbered this winter. More snow was falling lazily now, thick enough to be pretty but not a blizzard.
The parking lot was blanketed in a thick layer of white, and her little car looked like an overfrosted cupcake with mounds of snow on the hood and roof. She wasn’t even going to be able to start it and defrost the windows until she cleared the snow away from her tailpipe.
She trudged around the back of her car and bent down to start pulling snow away from her car’s exhaust with her mittened hands.
The shadow came at her fast, a flash of black out of the corner of her eye, barreling at her in snow-muffled silence. She started to turn. Started to fling up her hands. Started to shout. But the attacker was on her too fast, tackling her hard and driving her to the ground.
It turned out that the snow wasn’t thick enough to cushion her from slamming hard into the pavement beneath. Her shoulder hit hard and her head snapped to the side, slamming into the concrete with enough force to make her jaw ache from the impact.
She saw stars, dazed.
The weight on top of her was massive, and she tried to draw a breath, but nothing happened. Her diaphragm was paralyzed, the breath knocked out of her. Panic shot through her as she sucked ineffectively at the cold air. The stars turned into bright lights before her eyes and then narrowed down to a gray tunnel.
“Bitch,” a male voice snarled.
She vaguely saw something dark and long—an arm maybe—lift up over her and then swing down fast toward her face. She managed to turn her face away from the blow, but the impact caught her over her ear on the left side of the head.
The explosion of pain inside her skull was absolutely excruciating. So that was what it felt like to have her head split open like a melon.
Blackness rushed toward her. Blessed oblivion, and she embraced it. Anything to escape the spearing agony roaring through her head.
And then there was only darkness and silence.
* * *
Reese straightened up, leaning on the snow shovel for a second to catch his breath. The streetlights cast soft pink circles of light, and the heavy blanket of white lit the night with a soft glow that was beautiful and quiet. He loved the silence of a good snowfall.
He’d already finished shoveling his driveway and that of his neighbor across the road, an elderly widow. He’d just made a quick run across his driveway again with the shovel to push aside the inch of snow that had fallen while he was working on Mrs. Weintraub’s drive. He went on call at midnight and needed to be able to get his truck out of his garage by then.
The vigorous exercise had helped work off some of his frustration at Yvie for being unreasonable last night. He reminded himself that she had good reason to be mad at him for not telling her about the sham press conference. He really wished he could have been the one to tell her it had all been an act. Fitz hadn’t been exactly gentle or sensitive about breaking that news to her. But it was what it was. All he could do now was get her to listen to his sincere apology and do everything in his power to make it up to her until she forgave him.
It didn’t help matters that her old man had sprung the news of his divorce from Lilly on her like that, either. He really wished he could’ve been there to comfort Yvette last night, but she wanted nothing to do with him at the moment.
It looked like the snow was letting up a little. He hoped Yvie was okay, that she’d remembered to go shopping and lay in groceries before this storm hit. The forecast was for as much as a couple of feet of snow, all told. The town was going to be completely snowed in soon—assuming it wasn’t already.
He was tempted to run by her place to check on her, but she’d been so mad at him last night he figured he’d better give her a day or two to cool off before he tried to reason with her. A passionate woman, she was.
That, and he suspected some of her ire last night was directed at her father and not actually at him. He probably ought to let her sort that out on her own. One thing he knew, though. Unlike her old man, he was not about to abandon her.
He’d never liked Fitz Colton much—the guy had strutted around acting all self-important and as if he was the sole benefactor of the entire town for as long as Reese could remember. Granted, Colton Construction had provided a lot of jobs over the years. But that didn’t make Fitz some kind of hero to Braxville.
This latest move of Fitz’s, though—divorcing his wife and leaving his family to face the fallout of his screwups—that was massively selfish. A serious jerk move.
How was Yvette even his daughter? She was nothing at all like him—
His phone vibrated inside his coat. Crud. The department wasn’t so overwhelmed that it was already having to call him in, was it? It was barely nine o’clock.
He pulled out his phone and stared at the caller ID in a combination of shock and profound relief. Yvette was calling. Thank goodness.
“Hey, Yvie. I’m so glad you called—”
“It’s not Yvette. This is Lilly Colton. Is this Detective Carpenter?”
Alarm slammed into him. Why was Yvette’s mother using Yvie’s phone? Something bad had happened, as sure as he was standing here. Oh, God. Not Yvie.
“Yes. This is Detective Carpenter. What’s wrong?” he asked sharply. “Why are you calling me on Yvette’s phone? Where are you? Where is she?”
“I’m at the hospital. Yvette was brought in a little while ago. You might want to come down here.”
He was already sprinting for his garage, slipping and sliding on the fine sheen of snow left over from shoveling the drive. “What happened? Is she okay? How bad is it?”
“We don’t know much. She’s unconscious. She appears to have suffered blows to her head.”
Blows, plural? What the hell? His detective radar fired off hard. Had she been attacked? An image of Olivia Harrison’s desiccated body flashed into his head, the entir
e back of her skull bashed in. And that was when the panic hit him. He asked with faint hope, “Did she fall?”
Lilly’s voice lowered, and it sounded as if she was cupping her hand around the phone. “The ER doc thinks someone hit her. That’s why I’m asking you to come down here. I think maybe the police should get involved.”
He leaped into his truck and it roared to life. “I’ll be there in fifteen minutes. I’m already pulling out of my driveway.”
“Then hang up and drive carefully. I’ll meet you in the ER waiting room and take you back.”
The strain in Lilly’s voice was palpable. It was bad, indeed, if an experienced nurse like her was that freaked out.
It was all he could do not to floor the gas pedal as he made his way across town to the hospital. Only the deep snow and impaired visibility held him even close to the speed limit.
Yvie attacked? By whom? Where? How? How bad was it? Unlike in television, he knew that most people regained consciousness relatively quickly after being knocked out. But she’d been out long enough to be found and brought to the hospital. And she was still unconscious. That was not good. Not good at all.
Hang on, Yvie. Don’t you die on me. And then he started praying.
He parked outside the hospital and ran, slipping and sliding, to the emergency room. When he burst through the doors, he immediately spotted Lilly waiting by the double doors leading to the examining rooms. Without a word, she turned and swiped her identification card to unlock the doors.
He followed her swiftly down a hallway to a small room full of quietly beeping monitors. In a bed in the middle of all kinds of equipment lay Yvie, small and pale, covered in tubes and electrodes.
His heart literally skipped a beat. If there was any way he could trade places with her right now, he’d do it in an instant.
Harlequin Romantic Suspense December 2020 Box Set Page 38
