Sam didn’t trust himself to say anything. Instead, he turned away and this time reached the door. “I’ll get back to you,” he said again, not even bothering to turn around.
“Don’t take too long,” Matthew called after him.
The senior Colton remained sitting at the table they had just shared. He didn’t trust his legs to support him and he refused to show any signs of physical weakness around his son. Despite his age and his condition, he refused to relinquish his image. Image was everything in his narcissistic world.
“Hey, another girl could meet her end while you’re thinking things over,” he called after his son. “Wouldn’t want that on your conscience now, would you, boy?”
Even in this dire situation, with perhaps six months to live, perhaps less, apparently Matthew could still find enjoyment in taunting him, in using the extreme distress of others to bolster his own situation and sense of importance.
“A lot you care,” Sam shot back.
The laugh was nasty, cold, and so like his father. “You’re right. I don’t.”
A fresh rage swept over Sam. For two cents—less—he’d just keep walking and never come back. But as he had told himself before, this wasn’t about him. It was about his poor mother, who after all these years still didn’t have a place of eternal rest.
And it was about some nameless, faceless young woman who had her whole life in front of her and had absolutely no idea that life might come to a jarring, extremely painful end within a matter of days—if not hours.
Sam was hell-bent on stopping the murderer and as much as it killed him, he needed his father to do it.
And that meant he had to come back. Come back and play the game Matthew Colton required of him. If he didn’t, he and his siblings would never know where their mother’s remains currently were, and equally as bad, there was the strong possibility that several more young women would meet their untimely end.
Squaring his shoulders, Sam kept walking, cursing his father, and the fate that had bonded them in this macabre fashion, in his heart.
Chapter 10
In deference to Sam’s private nature, Zoe refrained from saying anything when they left the prison.
As they made their way back to his car, she could feel Sam seething and struggling to come to terms with what had gone down during his conversation with his father in the prison’s visitation room. Even so, she refrained from saying anything until they were seated inside his vehicle.
But she really hated seeing him having to go through this.
Just how much more could he be expected to take? Zoe wondered, her protective instincts rising to the surface. His mother had been taken from him at a young age, his father had literally torn his family apart, the woman he thought was carrying his child had deliberately deceived him for her own gain and now his father was attempting to play him, dangling much-wanted information in front of his face as if it was some sort of a carrot. To what end, no one could really guess.
Certainly not her, Zoe thought, waiting for Sam to get into the car on his side.
Pulling her seat belt out and around her waist, she then reached over to slip the metal tongue into its slot and looked at the man she had silently loved since forever.
Zoe broke her silence.
“Sam, you can’t let him get to you.”
Sam’s eyes narrowed as he glared in her direction. He jabbed his key into the ignition. “Did I ask you for your opinion?” he demanded hotly, still smarting from the fact that he had no choice in this matter with his father. He was going to have to go along with Matthew’s manipulative game.
He hated not having a choice.
“No,” she replied quietly. Zoe shifted in her seat and faced forward, looking, without seeing, through the windshield.
Ashamed of the way he’d just jumped all over her when all she had done was try to be there for him—never mind that he hadn’t asked her to—Sam felt a sharp jab of guilt rip right through him.
“Sorry,” Sam mumbled his apology, and then immediately went on the defensive. “But what makes you think he got to me?”
In his somewhat biased opinion, he had done his best to sound indifferent to his father’s ramblings, and when that didn’t have the desired effect, he’d just stepped back and let the old man talk without bothering to answer him. How was that letting Matthew get to him? At least visibly?
“Well, for one thing, I seem to have lost all feeling in my fingers,” Zoe informed him quietly, looking down at her hand, which was now captured in a vise lock in his.
Somehow, without thinking, he’d taken hold of her hand again. Not only that, but he obviously must have squeezed it, channeling his feeling through the grip he’d exhibited, holding her fingers virtual prisoners in his hand. No wonder she thought something was wrong.
Instantly he released Zoe’s hand and then looked at it. He saw what she was talking about. The fingers on that hand all looked rather red and he could see they were all but pulsating.
“I did that?”
She smiled at the wonder in his voice. “Well, they weren’t like that before,” she said without putting the blame on his doorstep.
He sighed. He’d let Matthew get to him and that in itself really annoyed him. “Sorry.”
Zoe merely nodded, indicating her tacit forgiveness. “I understand.”
Now that was just a lot of bull, he thought irritably. She could be sympathetic, but there was no way she could even remotely understand what he’d been through and what he was going through.
“No, I don’t think that you do,” he contradicted, his voice low, dangerous, even as he tried to temper it. “You had a normal childhood. You weren’t made to feel like some kind of a freak, an outcast, because your father killed your mother.” He thought of Josie. “You didn’t hear your little sister shrieking in fear as she was being dragged off, away from the only family she’d ever known—the way we were all dragged away from each other eventually.”
Sam was right, Zoe thought. She hadn’t gone through any of that. But it didn’t lessen her feelings of empathy even by an iota.
But she didn’t want to argue the point. That would only aggravate him and her goal was to calm the man down, not get him even more worked up than he already was at this point.
“I just meant I can understand your being angry and hurt even if I didn’t have the same things happen to me,” she explained patiently.
Her manner—and her obvious forgiveness of his brusque manner—just made him feel guilty again. But she knew he was like this. Why did she continue trying to push this conversation with him, as if it was something they could eventually come to some sort of an agreement about? Why didn’t she just give up and go?
“Why are you sticking around, Zoe?” he asked her out loud. “I keep jumping down your throat. Why are you sticking around?” he repeated.
“Because you need somebody,” she answered simply. “You’re angry and in your present state, you’re not likely to make many friends, so I thought I’d be that friend for now.”
“I don’t need any friends,” he informed her. And then his tone softened. He’d been convinced they didn’t make people like that anymore, and yet here she was.
Finally starting the car and then peeling out of the space, he glanced at her for a moment before looking back at the road. “You know you should run for the hills, don’t you?”
He caught her grin in the rearview mirror when he glanced up. There was something almost stirringly appealing about it.
“Sorry,” she told him, “I never was very bright.”
Sam had no idea what possessed him. Why he suddenly veered to the side of the road, threw the transmission into Park and pulled up the handbrake even though the vehicle continued to idle impatiently, shuddering and all but bucking as it expressed its need to ge
t back on the road.
But he did.
And when he did, and Zoe looked at him with a silent, uncertain question in her eyes, he took her face between his hands and without a single word to precede his action or to warn her of what was coming, he pressed his lips against hers.
Hard.
Maybe it was his need for some sort of human contact after having maintained that barbed wire fencing around his emotions for so long. Maybe it was because in a world of self-serving people, Zoe was the only truly genuine person he had come across in so many years, he couldn’t remember the last time that he had, and that made her rare.
Or maybe, just maybe, it was the only way he felt he had to scare her away and make her run from him while she still could.
Whatever the reason that motivated him to do what he did, he discovered an entirely different reaction waiting to ensnare him on the other side of that one lone, unplanned action.
The incredible sweetness of Zoe’s mouth pulled him in, made him step outside himself, outside his anger, and just experience the closest thing to purity he had ever encountered.
He had kissed her so abruptly, in part, to shake her up and he had wound up being the one who was shaken. Hastily ending the kiss as suddenly as it had been initiated, he pulled back, stunned and momentarily speechless as he stared at her.
What the hell had he just gone and done—besides complicate things exponentially and open himself up to a whole host of things he neither wanted nor knew how to deal with?
What the hell was I thinking? that same voice demanded in his head.
That was just the problem. Maybe for that small increment of time, he had stopped thinking altogether and had just gone with pure, instinctive reactions.
“I’m taking you home,” he growled, gunning the car’s engine.
She knew he didn’t believe in talking and she wasn’t about to press him for some long discussion about what had just happened. But she wasn’t about to just be tossed aside like some inconsequential gum wrapper, either.
“Sam—”
“Not another word,” he warned, his voice low, raspy as he struggled to get himself under control. “Not another damn word, or I can’t be held responsible for what happens next.”
“You’d never hurt me,” Zoe told him, her own voice soft, like spring raindrops against a window pane.
She seemed a lot more confident of that than he was. “Don’t be so damn sure,” Sam bit off.
“But I am.”
There was no hesitation in her voice, no coyness either. She wasn’t like anyone he had ever known and that confused the hell out of him.
Sam’s hands tightened so hard on the wheel, he came close to losing control of the vehicle. Right now, this moment, he wanted nothing more than to just lose himself in this woman who seemed to be everything good that was no longer in his life.
But he knew it would be a mistake—for him and especially for her.
So he kept driving, staring straight ahead at the road and forcing himself to think of nothing more than getting the next clue, finding the next piece of the puzzle.
And most of all, what to say to convince his siblings to play Matthew’s game.
As if reading his mind despite the blanket of silence that had descended on her side of the vehicle, Zoe said, “I can help you convince them.”
Caught off guard and surprised by what she was telling him, he spared Zoe a quick glance—anything more might just have him careening off the road again and he wasn’t the type to make the same mistake twice.
“Them? Who are you talking about?” he asked almost belligerently, thinking his manner would frighten her away from the subject and make her forget about any half-baked offer she was making.
But he was beginning to see that once her course was set, this new, different Zoe wasn’t about to be derailed, at least not easily.
“Your brothers and Annabel. I could help you convince them to go along with your father’s so-called ‘rules of the game.’”
Even the term sounded full of itself—that was Matthew Colton all the way, Sam thought angrily. Completely full of himself.
He turned on Zoe and challenged, “And just why the hell would you be any better at convincing them than I would?”
“You’re family,” she pointed out without any bravado. “Sometimes, it’s easier to say no to family, but if someone outside that close-knit circle asks for a favor, then it’s considered and most likely, it gets granted. As almost all law enforcement agents, your siblings are public servants and as such, they’re obligated to listen to the public.
“I can also make it personal,” she went on. “You’re hunting my sister’s killer and I both need and want answers. There’s only one way that could possibly happen. If they go along and play Matthew’s game, I could very well get those answers.”
He was clearly impressed by her persuasive reasoning. This was a side of her he had never even suspected existed.
“Is that what you learn, being a librarian?” he asked, thinking of all those reference books she was surrounded with.
“No, that’s what I learned, being a person,” Zoe corrected.
Determined, only a few minutes ago, to cut her loose and keep her away from anything that had to do with this mess that was his life, Sam began to waver about his position.
To give Zoe her due, he supposed she was making sense. And, when he came right down to it, it wasn’t as if he couldn’t use the assistance. He knew how everyone else felt about dealing with the old man—just slightly more open to it than to dealing with the plague.
When he came to a stop at a red light, Sam gave the woman he was beginning to realize he really didn’t know at all a long, hard look.
“You know, I used to think of you as a pushover, that you were easily swayed by everyone else’s opinions. I’m beginning to think maybe I should really reassess that image.”
“Maybe you should,” she agreed with more than a hint of a triumphant—not to mention secretly relieved—smile curving her generous mouth.
“But for now, until I can get everyone together again,” Sam went on, “I’m still going to drop you off at your home.”
Zoe nodded. She actually wanted to remain with him, to help him in the investigation in any possible way she could, but she knew she couldn’t protest every little thing he proposed that she was less than thrilled with.
Zoe knew the value of picking her battles and this one was just going to have to fall by the wayside—at least for now.
* * *
To his surprise, Sam managed to get all his brothers and his sister together in order to report the outcome of his prison visit and he did it within just a couple of hours.
Then, though he was having second thoughts about it, he remained true to his word and allowed Zoe to join them. But only on the condition that she kept quiet unless it looked as if he really needed—and wanted—her help in convincing his siblings to go along with Matthew’s rather bizarre demands.
In effect, Zoe was his plan B.
Just before he got started, Sam told the others she would be sitting in on this. Everyone was polite and greeted her accordingly, obviously waiting for either Sam or her to explain things further.
But Zoe said nothing—as she had already agreed—and Sam launched into his narrative, giving every indication he was less than pleased about the way things had turned out.
Everyone quickly forgot Zoe was there, as hurt, angry feelings flared around the room.
Ethan was the first to put it into words.
“I don’t like it,” he protested heatedly. “This makes that old SOB feel as if he’s the one holding all the cards.” Bitterness twisted his mouth as he thought of the past, of coming home and seeing his mother lying there, dead, while Matthew hovered over her, painting that sick
bull’s eye on her forehead. “All these years, we’ve been asking him where Mother’s buried and he ignored us, acting like we were all less than nothing—just sand fleas biting at his ankles. And now, all of a sudden he gets handed a medical death sentence, so he wants to play, because he gets to say ‘Jump’ and we get to say, ‘How high?’”
Ethan shook his head, all but shutting down right in front of the others. “No, count me out. I’m not doing this. I’m not going to feed that monster’s ego. Tell him to find someone else to torture.”
Zoe looked around the room, seeing the same sentiment written on the faces of Sam’s other siblings. Glancing in his direction, she saw no indication Sam wanted her to say anything.
But this wasn’t going to go well from here and she couldn’t just sit by and say nothing. Not when this was so important.
“Maybe it’s not his ego you’re feeding,” she finally interjected, her quiet voice a marked contrast to the Colton crew’s steadily rising voices.
Sam’s head jerked in her direction. “Not now, Zoe,” he warned, thinking she was only going to succeed in getting everyone angrier.
But Zoe stubbornly persisted. “Maybe it’s Matthew’s need to reconnect before he dies that’s motivating him to make this strange arrangement.”
“What are you talking about?” Ethan demanded while the others looked in her direction, curious to hear what she had to say next.
Sam’s protective instincts spiked, but he refrained from saying anything, wanting to see what Zoe would say in response.
She felt as if she had treaded on shaky ground, but she was determined to get her thoughts across. It was important to Sam and to the others that they see the matter the way she did. She had the right amount of distance from the situation to be able to see more than they did. For one thing, she had never been wounded by the senior Colton the way they had.
“Matthew’s dying and he knows he only has a few months to live. He also knows his family wants nothing to do with him, but now, in the last days of his life, he realizes that maybe he’s more like other people than he’d want to admit—he wants to see his family, to have someone mourn his passing.
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