Hunting the Colton Fugitive

by Colleen Thompson

  “That’s generous of her. I hope neither of you are working yourselves to death, though.”

  “Just get some sleep, and I’ve had the refrigerator at your place stocked, so you should be good to go for at least a few days. And Asher’s said he’ll see to your wing at the Triple R, whenever you’re ready to head that way,” she added, referring to their younger brother, who worked as the ranch foreman.

  Grateful anew for his siblings’ thoughtfulness, he thanked her and promised to touch base by text that evening.

  It was late afternoon before he headed out again, throwing caution to the wind and uncovering his Porsche after spotting no reporters anywhere around. As he’d hoped, the silver convertible thrummed to life without a hiccup, and Ace felt exhilarated once more having its power and speed at his command. Most of all, he loved reclaiming his independence and felt more like himself now that he was rested, clean and freshly shaven. Though his clothes were on the loose side, he found a pair of jeans that fit decently, along with a clean button-down shirt and blazer. He’d even taken time to eat one of the premade wrap-style sandwiches he found in the fridge to forestall any sisterly nagging if he happened to encounter Ainsley.

  But it wasn’t any of his siblings he ran into as he headed into a florist’s shop downtown in the hope of finding a bouquet extravagant enough to win Sierra’s forgiveness when he returned to the hospital to check on her. Instead, he had to stop short to keep from being run over by a woman charging out the front door, her chin down and her designer handbag tucked beneath one arm.

  When she drew up short, too, his breath caught, his stomach plunging with a horrifying certainty. Micheline! The so-called mother who’d rejected him from the moment of his birth.

  Grimacing, he scrambled back a step just as she looked up.

  He blinked, the breath escaping his lungs, realizing his mistake. It wasn’t Micheline at all, but another horror gaping up at him. His father’s second wife, Selina. The same Selina who’d tried to pass herself off as a concerned stepmother when hiring Sierra to bring him in to the police.

  And judging by the speed with which her look of surprise turned to thinly veiled hostility, she was no happier with this surprise encounter than he was.

  “Selina,” he said, recovering from his shock a beat more quickly. “I see you’re here ordering the flowers for that welcome-home surprise party I’m sure you’ll be throwing for me, since you’re so heavily invested in my safe return.”

  He half expected her to try to sell the lie, attempting to convince him that she’d actually cared enough about his welfare. But maybe she knew that only a stranger to the family, like Sierra, would ever buy it coming from her.

  Or perhaps his dig regarding the twenty-five grand she’d blown in the hopes of seeing him locked up was too much for Selina. Whichever was the case, she stiffened before haughtily tossing her expertly tinted light brown hair behind her shoulders. “Why, Ace, I can’t believe you’d have the nerve to show your face on the streets,” she said before looking up and down the currently vacant sidewalk. “Aren’t you terrified that people will start shouting about a dangerous fugitive on the loose, or maybe some concerned citizen will even try to take matters into his own hands, since so many of them carry concealed weapons these days.”

  A spark of gleeful menace lit her smile at this suggestion.

  Ace gave a grunt of disgust. “I’m sure you’d love it if someone shot me. It’d save you the risk of the real truth coming out at any trial, but all charges against me were dismissed.”

  She lifted her nose in the air, reminding her of how she’d looked down on him since childhood, a habit that she’d continued long after he’d grown tall enough to tower over her. “What so-called truth is that?” she asked.

  “Whatever you were trying to hide by seeing my father’s shooting pinned on me. Whether it’s that you were somehow behind it yourself, or something else is involved, I have no idea, but I—”

  “Your father was always so ridiculously proud of you,” she said, her searing gaze burning through him. “Boasted how his firstborn was so brilliant, so shrewd when it came to the business, and listen to you. Ha!” Her mocking laughter echoed beneath the awnings of the connected shops along the street. “You certainly make me glad I never wasted my precious time and energy on children.”

  Ace’s own laugh was equally devoid of humor. “I imagine any potential spawn of yours would be grateful, too, to be spared of having such a mother. I certainly know that my siblings and I cannot wait for the day when we can talk our father into seeing you for what you really are and can evict you from the ranch, Colton Oil and our lives for good.”

  “Mark my words,” she told him, “that is never going to happen. As long as he is living, your father will never dare to cross me—and I suggest that you don’t, either.”

  “Why, Selina? Why? What is it you’re holding over Dad? I know it’s certainly not affection. If you ever cared about him at all, beyond what his money and his family name could get you, those days are long over. So what is it? Are you flat-out blackmailing him, or—”

  Laughing, she turned her high-heeled shoes to walk away from him. But before she did, she tossed off a few last words, almost carelessly, over one stylishly dressed shoulder. “Wouldn’t you like to know, Ace? Wouldn’t all of you just die to...”

  * * *

  Still steaming from his encounter with Selina, Ace did his level best to tell himself the woman wasn’t worth getting rattled over. But he must’ve been more upset than he’d imagined, because as he was walking through the parking lot and into the hospital lobby with the large arrangement of white flowers he’d grabbed and purchased, thrusting his credit card at the cashier in stony silence, he couldn’t help noticing the odd looks he was getting. Enough that he began to wonder if people recognized him from news reports and wondered what the notorious Ace Colton was doing walking free.

  But no, that couldn’t be it, because the looks weren’t hostile or frightened, more...bewildered.

  Looking about himself in confusion, Ace finally caught the eye of the older woman in a volunteer’s smock sitting behind the lobby’s information desk, who at first blinked in surprise before her mouth rounded into what appeared to be an O of comprehension. Smiling discreetly, she beckoned to him with a crook of her finger.

  “Yes?” he asked her, more confused than ever as he set the arrangement on top of her desk.

  “May I ask,” she said politely, arranging her face pleasantly, “if these absolutely beautiful flowers are meant for one of our patients here?”

  “Of course they’re for a patient,” he said, his irritation boiling over. “Is it really that unusual to try to cheer someone up with a few flowers when they’re in the hospital?”

  “Not at all,” she said, arching one golden eyebrow, “but it is rather unusual for someone to walk into a hospital with an arrangement with that particular message.”

  Following the direction of her nod, he took a careful look—his first, apparently—at the front of the basket, then surprised himself with a loud bark of laughter as he finally saw his mistake.

  “Whoa, boy. If I thought I was in trouble with my—with my lady friend before,” he said, his face burning as he removed the silk banner he’d completely missed before. The one reading Rest in Peace. “I would’ve been resting in pieces if you hadn’t saved me. Thank you so much.”

  Giggling like a teenager, she waved off his gratitude. “You’re more than welcome. After all, it’s not very often we hospital volunteers get a chance to save a life.”

  After thanking her one more time, he headed for the elevator, deciding that his boneheaded mistake had at least given him the gift of a decent story to tell on himself. One he hoped to turn to his advantage, using his own chagrin to get Sierra smiling. Or laughing at him, perhaps. He didn’t care, if only it might somehow pave the way to her forgiveness.

&
nbsp; But the moment he stepped off the elevator, his stomach clenched, somehow grasping ahead of his brain that something was amiss as various personnel hurried from room to room, poking their heads into doorways, looking behind the nurses’ station and inside the supply closet.

  When Ace spotted Callum among them, he caught his breath, shocked to imagine that, even with a concussion, Sierra had managed to figure out a way around the imposing man.

  “How’d she manage it?” Ace asked him, knowing his brother was far too experienced to be easily outmaneuvered. “Because I know there’s no way you’d let an outsider take her.”

  Regret darkening his blue eyes, Callum sighed. “I’m sorry, Ace. Damned sorry. She’s slippery as a basket of eels, and about a hundred times as clever. She faked a convincing seizure and none of the medical staff answered the call button, so I ran to find help for her.”

  A nurse, alerted by Ace’s tone, interrupted her own search to join them near the counter, where Ace had set down the flowers. A fiftyish woman with a no-nonsense set to her jaw, she gave him a look that all but dared him to try to pin this mess on her. “Your Ms. Higgins planned her moment, clearly,” she said. “She waited until she heard the alarm. Another patient had coded just down the hall, so we all went running to help.”

  “Did she take her belongings? Her clothes?” Her car keys, he thought, recalling the Chevy still parked in the lot. Though surely, Sierra wasn’t foolish enough to try to drive it very far, he could easily imagine her using it to make a getaway before ditching it elsewhere.

  Sure enough, inside her windowless room, they found the plastic bag with her belongings missing from the storage locker. But when he went downstairs and looked outside, the Chevy remained where she had left it the previous evening.

  Perhaps she’d feared another GPS tracker, or even a bomb, considering last night’s attempt on her life. Or maybe she was still somewhere inside the hospital.

  But according to Callum, he and the hospital staff had been searching the floor for her, after positioning staff to watch both the elevator and the stairwell entry, for the past half hour.

  “And before that?” Ace demanded. “How long would she have had to get dressed and get out of here?”

  “Five or six minutes, tops,” Callum said decisively, with the nurse beside him nodding her agreement. “Things were hectic down the hall there, where that other patient coded.”

  “Wait a minute,” Ace said, his heart skipping a beat as he remembered what he’d heard about his father being transferred to this floor earlier. “What patient?”

  “I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to say,” the nurse told him. “We do have privacy laws here.”

  “What room is our father in? You can tell us that much, can’t you?”

  Chapter 13

  When Ace entered the hospital room ahead of Callum, he cried out, shock colliding with relief at seeing his father again—seeing him sitting alone in his bed with the head elevated. A blanket had been pulled to his chest and his eyelids were at half-mast as he watched a wall-mounted television playing at low volume. As a hospital benefactor, he’d been placed in a private suite with a small divided seating area for waiting family, far larger than the cramped, windowless room where Sierra had been hidden away.

  But the silver-haired family patriarch—the same Payne Colton whose tough and rugged good looks had been compared to a classic Western movie idol whose black-and-white image was now galloping across the screen on horseback—didn’t startle at Ace’s outburst. Nor did he turn his head, or even his gaze, to look in his direction.

  “Dad?” Ace’s voice broke, his vision blurring as he blinked away a hot haze of tears. Because despite the absence of the guard he’d expected to find at the door, the catch in his throat told him this was truly his father, breathing and alive, though pale and frailer—and older-looking, too, with scarcely a hint of the powerful life force that had for sixty-eight years animated his expression.

  Months after his father’s shooting, Ace spotted no obvious bandages or other evidence of the bullet wounds that had initially been the doctors’ greatest concern. But as Ace moved closer, he was able to make out a variety of tubes and an IV pole, plastic tendrils snaking around the once-formidable man.

  “I’ll just give you two a few minutes.” Callum touched Ace’s shoulder before his tone turned more serious. “Right now, though, I’m going to track down that guard who’s supposed to be on duty watching Dad’s door and give him a piece of my mind for leaving his post.”

  Ace nodded mutely, his gaze still glued to his father as he struggled to collect himself before speaking.

  “Dad, it’s me, your son, Ace.” He was shaking head to toe now, aching to reach out, to gather his father in his arms yet terrified to touch him. “I—I’ve wanted for so long to come see you, to tell you how—how much I love you—and how I’ll always—how you’ll always be the only father I—”

  At the sound of footsteps just behind him, he sharply turned his head, thinking Callum had returned already. Instead, it was the same nurse he’d just spoken to, the one with the severe, dark haircut. Only as she turned up the room’s lights, Ace noticed that her stern expression had melted into one of sympathy.

  “Go on,” she urged gently as she reached for the remote and switched off the television. “There’s a good chance he can hear you, at least, though so far his responses have been minimal.”

  “But minimal means that there’s been something, right? And he was watching TV, wasn’t he? I mean, he’s always liked old movies like that.” Ace knew that he was reaching, that Genevieve or anyone who really knew his father could’ve turned the channel on to soften the heartbreak of seeing his unfocused staring.

  When the nurse only nodded, Ace turned a pleading look back to his father. “I’m here. Right here, if you could blink—or look at me or...” He glanced again at the nurse. “Is it all right if I take his hand?”

  “You should do that,” she assured him. “Why don’t you stay with him a while? And I’ll come and notify you the moment that we’ve found Miss Higgins.”

  Ace felt a twinge of guilt, since the shock of this reunion, a reunion he had dreamed of, prayed for, yet also somehow dreaded for so long had driven every other thought from his brain. Including the reality of how much trouble Sierra could get into on her own.

  But if she spotted him looking for her, he knew damned well how she’d react, after the way he’d bound her to that bedrail. Whether she ran or hid or even tried to fight him, he’d end up no closer to gaining her cooperation...

  He would also be leaving his father here, alone and totally unguarded, a thought that filled Ace with a tingling apprehension. After all, if word had somehow gotten back to the real shooter that there had been signs that Payne Colton might be emerging from his coma, that could make him a risk to the shooter. A risk to be taken out before he could name the person who had harmed him.

  “I will stay here until my brother gets back, Nurse Martinez,” Ace agreed, finally looking at the nurse’s name tag. “But if you do find Sier—Ms. Higgins,” he corrected himself, “please, do everything you can to convince her to come back to the room for her own safety. No drugs or restraints, though. She needs to understand that we’re trying to help her.”

  “I’ll do my best,” she assured him before hurrying out and closing the room’s door behind her.

  Ace had more to say to his father—so much more—but the problems of Sierra’s disappearance and the missing guard had him worried and suspicious. What if both were somehow connected?

  Before he could press the screen, the door of the suite’s attached bathroom swung open slightly. And he spotted a pair of legs and black shoes lying on the floor inside. A man, down!

  Rushing to push the door farther open, he found the missing guard, lying motionless and bleeding profusely from the head on the tiled floor inside.

 
“Help!” Ace yelled toward the hallway. “We need help inside here!”

  At his shout, a movement caught his eye. It was the blanket, sliding down his father’s chest as he jerked, his head turning and his eyes widening.

  His own heart skipping a beat, Ace murmured, “Dad?” And heard his father make a strangled sound as he struggled to lift his hand—to point at him?

  Reading the absolute terror in his father’s eyes, Ace felt his heart break to imagine that he, recalling their last argument but perhaps not what came after, might well fear him. But with the guard lying injured, or possibly worse, on the floor behind him, there was no time to—

  His father gave another, far more urgent grunt, only this time an electric jolt of comprehension fired along Ace’s nerve endings as he realized that his dad wasn’t staring so much at as past him. Instinct taking over, Ace whirled around...

  And came face-to-face with a slightly built stranger wearing an Arizona Sun Devils sweatshirt, a man in his midtwenties with a mop of wild, dark hair. But the look in his eyes was even wilder as he aimed his shaking gun directly at Ace’s chest.

  “I’m sick of waiting for you to leave, and I’m running out of time here,” he ground out through clenched jaws, “so I guess I’ll be staging a murder-suicide instead of just finishing off what I started here today.”

  “You!” Ace roared. “You’re the man who shot my father? Who the hell even are you?” Although there was something vaguely familiar about that face. But why would he—

  “Sh-shot me!” Payne was breathing heavily, the effort to speak, after months of silence, clearly costing him. “Him—he did!”

  “Shut up, old man!” yelled the stranger, who must have been hiding around the corner in the sitting area portion of the unusually large room.

  As he shouted, his aim drifted from Ace to his father for an instant—an instant Ace seized upon to leap at the younger man.

  The gunman cried out in alarm, backpedaling to keep from being knocked off his feet as Ace slammed his shoulder and sent the gun flying. It clattered to the floor, along with the phone Ace had been holding.