Julia scuttled back to her corner. She looked at her wrists. The lines were already there. She pressed the knife’s tip to her flesh. Harder. Harder. The blade sliced her flesh and her arm began to weep blood.
The door opened with a bang.
Reese Carpenter and Jordana Colton stood on the threshold. Both had their guns drawn.
“Put down the knife, Julia,” said Jordana, hand lifted. “You don’t want to hurt yourself or anyone else.”
“Don’t I?” Julia spit. “I hurt my mother. I killed your sister. I’m a bad person.” She shoved the knife deeper into her arm. There was a flash of pain, white-hot, and blood began to drip onto the floor, soaking into the dirty carpeting.
“My sister’s not dead,” said Jordana. “And your mother misses you. She wants you to come home—not die.”
“Momma?” Julia asked. Her resolve wavered.
She should have never let her guard down.
Before she realized that he’d moved, Reese Carpenter had Julia’s wrist tight in his grip. The flow of blood was now a trickle. She was on her feet, her back pressed to his chest. The knife lay on the ground, surrounded by a puddle of blood.
* * *
Bridgette was evaluated by Dr. Jamapal, the same physician who had seen her father only days before. The diagnosis: a mild concussion, scrapes, bruises, a cut to her scalp that needed stitching, and hypothermia from being submerged in the cold water.
Considering everything that she’d endured, Bridgette was lucky to be alive.
“I’m keeping you overnight for observation,” said the doctor. “The man who followed the ambulance, Luke Walker, is in the waiting room. Would you like to see him?”
“Sure,” said Bridgette, pushing up to sitting.
The doctor left, and a moment later the door opened. It wasn’t Luke who entered the room—it was her father. He was still a patient at the hospital and wore a robe over a set of sweats.
“Daddy?”
“Hey, honey, I heard you were here. Can I come in?”
She bit her bottom lip, stanching her tears of love and disappointment. “Of course,” she said. “I’m sorry that I haven’t stopped by this week. I feel, well, responsible for what happened. More than that, I was worried that you blamed me for your heart attack.”
“To be honest, until I heard that you’d been attacked, I did blame you. Then I realized that there’s nothing more important than you and my other kids.”
“I’ve decided to recuse myself from the investigation. I tried to be a good scientist and not let anything other than the facts form my opinions. But you and your health are important to me—as is our relationship.”
“I’m not asking you to step away from the case because of me.”
“You didn’t have to ask,” she said.
Her father sat on the edge of her bed. Rubbing a hand over his chin, he exhaled. “You know, there’s something I should probably tell you about what’s happening in town.” The door opened. Fitz Colton stopped talking.
Luke stood on the threshold. “Sorry for interrupting,” he said. “I thought you were alone.”
“I just had to check on my baby girl.”
“Well, I’m glad you’re both here,” he said. “I got a call from Jordana. She and Reese found Julia.”
“Really? Where?”
“She was hiding in the mail room of Colton Construction, just like you said.”
“Colton Construction?” her father echoed. “What in the world is happening?”
“Julia worked in the mail room, but there’s more to the story,” said Bridgette. “It sounds like there’s a lot for us to discuss.”
“Do you need a minute?” Luke asked, hooking his thumb toward the door. “I can give you some privacy.”
Bridgette’s dad stood. “I’m the one who should be going. I’ll call your mother and give her an update. I’m sure she’ll be down to visit shortly. I just wanted to see you first.”
“Daddy,” she said as he reached the door. “What was it that you wanted to tell me?”
He waved her question away. “It’ll keep. You get some rest.”
Luke moved to Bridgette’s side and took her hand in his. “How are you feeling?” he asked.
She answered his question with one of her own. “If you’ve been here, then where’s Pocco?”
“My dad stopped by and picked him up. If I know my dad, he’s probably sharing a sandwich with the dog right now.”
Bridgette laughed. “He’s a good dog. I wish he would find his forever home.”
“Funny that you’d say that. I’m pretty sure that someone plans to adopt Pocco.”
“Really? Who?”
Luke shrugged. “Me.”
“You?”
“We made a pretty good team in finding you.” He lifted her hand and placed a kiss on the inside of her wrist. “But you never answered my question. Honestly, how are you?”
“I’m sore. I’m tired. I’m thankful to be alive.” Yet, there was more to talk about than her health. “When I was in the well,” she began, “I thought there was no way I would ever get out. There were a lot of things for me to regret. The one that came to mind again and again was that I never would be able to see what the future would hold for you and me.”
“Future?” he echoed, reaching for her hand.
“I realized something important,” she said, unwilling to stop speaking now that she’d begun. “Over the years, I’d lost people I loved—the baby, Henry. I thought that the best way to avoid pain was to live behind an emotional wall. With you, I couldn’t hide. I’m happy to be alive because it gives us another chance.” She paused, bit her bottom lip. “That is if you’ll have me.”
“Bridgette, I loved you when we were kids and I’ve never stopped. All this time, there was something missing in my life. I now know what it is,” he said.
“Oh, yeah, what’s that?” she asked.
“You.”
Luke leaned forward, placing his lips on hers. The kiss was tender, loving and meant to last a lifetime.
* * *
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Prologue
She felt tired as she walked out of the office building and into the large, deserted parking lot. It felt as if she hadn’t gotten any sleep since the funeral.
Maybe that was the reason Krystyna Kowalski was having trouble shaking the feeling that someone was watching her. She hadn’t actually seen anyone following her when she’d turned around, but it was a feeling gnawing away at the pit of her stomach.
Krys sighed, aware just how paranoid that would have sounded if she had said it aloud. She supposed that, examined in the light of day, it probably was.
The darkness made it more real, given the nature of the work she did. As a freelance investigative reporter, she delved into dark, hidden secrets while traveling down streets where most other people wouldn’t even dream of venturing.
But her work required her to burrow into and expose secrets that were thought to be completely buried. It was her job to cast light on paths that the key figures of her investigations thought were safely out of sight.
During the course of her investigations, Krys had heard herself being cursed, threatened with bodily harm and told more than once that she would be made to
pay for what she had so brazenly and callously done. That kind of thing had become part of her job. She accepted it as her due and even thought of it as her badge of courage. But her safety wasn’t anything she haphazardly took for granted. Krys always made sure that she took the necessary precautions. As for the rest of it, she just shrugged it off and went on her way.
But this eerie feeling had haunted her nights for the last six weeks. That was definitely something new in her life.
Even as she had sat beside her mentor’s hospital bedside, holding Ian Marshall’s hand as he lay dying, that uneasy feeling that she was being watched kept eating away at her. So much so that each time someone entered Ian’s room—usually a hospital staff member as well as an old friend coming by to pay their last respects—something inside of Krys would tighten and instantly go on the alert. She had to mentally talk herself down each time because a great many old acquaintances came by in those few weeks to see Ian—while he was still there to be seen.
But now Ian was no longer alive to distract her. He had passed away clutching her hand. She had no regrets about being there even though she had wound up missing her only sister’s wedding. She refused to leave Ian’s bedside, refused to take a chance that the man with no family would wind up dying alone while she was busy celebrating Nikola’s big day.
Nik had understood why she couldn’t come to her wedding. They were twins, and twins intuited things about one another that no one else could begin to comprehend.
But now Ian was gone and Nik was on her honeymoon with Finn Cavanaugh. Not wanting to think about how much Ian’s passing affected her, not to mention how she felt about missing Nik’s wedding, Krys threw herself back into her work with a vengeance.
In the last nine months, after doggedly following a trail that led from the middle of the country to the West Coast, she had written an intensely conclusive exposé about Alan Parker, a charming, dark-haired, rakishly handsome man who, for the purposes of her article—and the nature of his crimes—she had dubbed “Bluebeard.” The man with soulfully seductive blue eyes and a smile that Cary Grant would have envied made it his business to romance wealthy, lonely women and marry them.
According to the research she had done, there had been at least six of these women over the course of the last few years, although she had a hunch that there were more who hadn’t come to light yet. Parker separated them from their money and eventually, he separated them from the world of the living as well.
Krys had doggedly put together all the evidence until there was enough for the police to issue a warrant and arrest the man. Everything fell into place and the man the police thought of as “Bluebeard” faced certain conviction as well as prison.
But somehow, thanks to his connections, Parker managed to escape before he could be put on trial for the murders he committed.
Right now, he was out there, free to continue his spree unimpeded.
She remembered the way Parker had looked at her when he was being arrested and taken away. For one split second, the silver-tongued smooth-talker shot her a look of sheer hatred. In that moment, her blood had run absolutely cold.
By then, she was hot on the trail of her newest investigation. Weatherly Pharmaceuticals had sunk a great deal of their money into the research, development and test trials for a new wonder drug whose properties were believed to keep cancer from metastasizing and spreading to other organs. The researchers hoped to contain the disease if not drive it totally into remission.
Fifteen years in development, the drug was highly anticipated and promised to make Weatherly’s investors richer beyond their wildest dreams. The drug was, in essence, too good to be true.
For Krys, that sent up bright red flags.
Unlike her twin sister, to Krys, if something was too good to be true, she believed that it usually wasn’t—and it was her job to prove that. She was currently interviewing everyone associated with this new wonder drug, both the developers and the people who had been the drug’s test subjects. She was determined to get to the truth of the matter. If her hunch turned out to be true, there would be an awful lot of unhappy people at Weatherly Pharmaceuticals. People who she felt would go a long way to make sure they weren’t unhappy.
For her part, Krys would have never become involved in investigating something of such major proportions if she didn’t feel she was able to prove that the emperor had no clothes.
Possibly that was why she was letting her imagination run away with her, why she felt there were threats to her safety lurking around almost every corner.
Maybe she just needed to take a break, wind down, be a person again instead of strictly a driven investigative reporter with tunnel vision who was focused on only one thing.
Making her way to her car in the almost completely deserted parking lot, Krys shifted the pages and copious notes that she had accumulated and brought with her to this latest meeting. As she opened the driver’s side door, several of the pages slipped out of the pile and unceremoniously fluttered down to her feet.
“Damn,” Krys muttered, ducking her head and bending down to retrieve the errant pages.
A jolting noise just above her head, sounding like a car backfiring, screamed through the night air and effectively pierced the silence. Krys had spent enough time at gun ranges to know what that sound actually was.
And even if she hadn’t recognized it, the shattered glass raining down from just above her head onto the pavement would have cleared up the mystery for her.
Her mouth went dry.
Someone had just taken a shot at her.
Copyright © 2020 by Marie Rydzynski-Ferrarella
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ISBN-13: 9781488064203
Colton’s Secret History
Copyright © 2020 by Harlequin Books S.A.
Special thanks and acknowledgment are given to Jennifer D. Bokal for her contribution to the The Coltons of Kansas miniseries.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
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Colton's Secret History Page 22