His heart hammering, Dylan prayed he wouldn’t have to call the number. Prayed that the fledgling doctor could save Hope Woods’ life...
Even though, lying in that hallway, she had confessed that she still loved the ex-husband who wanted nothing more than to see her in the ground.
Chapter 8
There was a background hum, a hiss, but it was the light that Hope first became aware of. Painful. Inescapable, as she couldn’t even close her watering eyes to get away from it. She reached up to bat clumsily at her face, to push away whatever was prying open each lid in turn.
“It’s all right, Hope,” a male voice reassured her as he gently caught her wrist. “Just checking your corneas for damage.”
Confused, she forced herself to lie still, though she could do nothing to control her shaking. Was she still at the ranch, or in a hospital, where soon, someone would come looking for her insurance and ID cards?
Remembering that “Hope Woods” had no credentials, she fought to sit up until not one but two sets of hands pushed her back down.
“Easy there.” Dylan’s voice somehow took the edge off of her panic. “Don’t fight Dr. Colton. He’s just trying to help you.”
Dr. Colton. That must mean... Blinking furiously, she blurted, “I’m—I’m not at the hospital?”
Her voice echoed strangely, muffled by... Slipping one hand free, she felt the mask strapped over both her nose and mouth.
“You’re at the ranch infirmary,” Dr. Colton told her, “but you will need to be hospitalized.” Vision still blurred, she squinted to take in the two shapes hovering above her.
“Your pulse oxygen’s much better,” explained the doctor, who had dirty-blond hair and a surprisingly young face, “and I think your eyes will be fine. The contacts you had on may have saved them.”
“C-contacts,” she rasped, her heart pounding out a frantic tattoo. “You mean—”
“Those beautiful blue eyes of yours are safe,” Dylan interjected, a warning that zinged straight through her. “You took your contacts off upstairs, remember?”
She did—sort of—but how was she going to possibly explain a total change in eye color to anyone who noticed? Some would, she was certain, for her natural eye color was a vivid hue, one that made her far more recognizable. Which meant if her ex-husband’s henchmen came around again...
She shivered at the thought, wanting desperately to warn Amanda or Dylan about the “electricians.” But she didn’t know this doctor, and though she thought she’d heard someone refer to him as Amanda’s half brother, she couldn’t take the chance of allowing her secret to spread any further.
“Still,” Dr. Colton continued, his gaze serious, “I’d feel more comfortable having a specialist take a closer look at—”
“Can’t go to the hospital.” Shaking her head rapidly, she dug her nails into her own palms. “Won’t.”
“Your lungs and trachea are burned,” explained the young doctor. “Chemically burned, most likely as a result of mixing some form of bleach with another cleaner, possibly ammonia. You created a type of chlorine gas when the—”
“Chloramine... The decomposing bleach formed hydrochloric—” She coughed, wincing at the pain in her lungs. And at the realization that she should have figured this out far earlier. “Hydrochloric acid that reacted with the ammonia and formed—”
“That’s right,” the doctor confirmed, and to her irritation, both men looked surprised.
With a shrug, she explained, “I started out studying chemistry, back before I got sidetracked.” Sidetracked by her mother’s urging her to enter the Miss New Jersey pageant.
She had gone along with it, if only because she knew how much her mother would have loved the opportunity when she was younger. And once Hope had gotten past the silliness of the idea, she’d started having fun meeting her fellow contestants and spending quality girl time with her mom. Time she wouldn’t trade for all the sashes in the world.
“You were a chemistry major?” Dylan asked.
“Try not to look so shocked, cowboy. Just because I’m—” She glanced at the young doctor, cleared her stinging throat and tried again. “Just because I’m the world’s worst maid doesn’t mean I’m terrible at everything. And I never would’ve mixed those chemicals on purpose.”
“So what’re you saying?” Dylan asked her.
Unable to compete with the hissing hum of the machine, she reached up to remove the mask from her face.
“Don’t even think of taking that off,” Dr. Colton warned. “Your lungs are very fragile. Though judging from how well you’re speaking, maybe we can forego that trip to the hospital after all.”
She sighed, allowed him to check her vitals before he turned away to jot some notes in a file.
“How do you think it might’ve happened?” Dylan asked her.
“Someone said I should try the white bottle whenever my usual cleanser didn’t work. But the one on my cart—the label was torn off it.”
“Who told you to use it?”
Hope tried to wave off his suspicion. “I was standing around with some of the other maids, rinsing our mop buckets, when I mentioned how hard it was to get off—” She swallowed painfully, her mouth full of a sharp chemical taste. “How hard it was to get the makeup off of everything in Tawny’s bathroom. Then Hilda Zimmerman suggested that I try the— She couldn’t recall the name, but somebody else remembered the color of the bottle.”
“Who said that part?”
“I’m not sure. Could’ve been...” Her face contorting, she cried out as sharp pains shot through her lungs.
Dr. Colton reappeared, telling Dylan, “That’s it. That’s enough talk for now.” Looking to Hope, he added, “If you won’t go to the hospital—”
She shook her head emphatically and said, “C-can’t. Please, don’t—” But she couldn’t manage to force out another word, or plead with him to let her speak in private to Amanda.
The doctor frowned a question at her, but it was Dylan who explained, “She can’t because she’s on the run.”
Glaring through tears, Hope mouthed the word No! Just because he’d kissed her didn’t give him the right to share her secrets without consulting her first.
“She’s a victim of domestic violence,” he continued, ignoring her growing panic, “and she’s afraid to risk her ex-husband hunting her down. He’s a powerful man with a long reach, and he could easily find her if she checked into a hospital.”
At the moment he heard the half-truth, Dr. Colton’s expression softened. “All right. I understand now. But if you’re going to stay here at the ranch, you’re going to have to do things my way.”
Relieved that Dylan hadn’t told him everything, Hope nodded her agreement. Though she still wondered who on earth had died and left him in charge of her life.
“I’ll want you right here in the infirmary where I can watch you, on complete bed rest with no talking, for at least a couple of days.”
“With her eyes covered,” Dylan put in. “She’ll definitely need to have them bandaged.”
Hope stared at him in shock.
“What are you talking about?” Colton asked him. “She doesn’t need—”
“She does,” Dylan insisted, “at least until her new colored contacts get in. When she arrived here, she had brown eyes, and the old contacts are ruined. But don’t worry, Hope. I’ll have Miss Amanda put a rush on a new pair for you off the internet.”
“So Amanda knows about this?” the doctor asked him.
Amanda. Hope reminded herself that not only her own safety might be at risk, should the phony electricians once more find—and this time recognize—her in the mansion. For everyone’s sake, she had to somehow warn her friend that Renzo’s assassins might still be here—even if it meant letting the doctor in on another facet of her secret.
Making the decision, she pointed to the pen that Dr. Colton was still holding and mimed the act of writing. But neither man was looking her way at the moment.
Gritting her teeth, she clutched his sleeve and refused to let go until he paid attention to her gestures.
This time, Dylan nodded, finally understanding, and Dr. Colton gave her a small pad of paper and his pen. With her every exhalation, a puff of steam rolled up to obscure her vision, and the faster she tried to write, the harder her hands shook.
“The shaking’s from the medication,” Dr. Colton told her. “Just slow down for a moment. Don’t try to move so quickly, and you’ll be fine.”
It was easier said than done, and Hope’s normally neat script was a mass of knotted loops and squiggles, but when she handed the note to Dylan, he frowned at it only a few moments before asking, “You’re sure about this?”
She nodded.
“What does she mean?” Colton asked, as he read over Dylan’s shoulder.
“It means I’d better damned well hurry,” Dylan told them. “I’ll fill you in when I get back.”
* * *
As Dylan headed for the service entrance, he prayed that Hope was right, that the man she’d recognized hadn’t had a clue who she was. Maybe her disguise was better than he’d first imagined, or the thugs searching for her had been so focused on finding the sleek blonde princess they were looking for that it had never occurred to them to look for her among the mansion’s staff.
But then again, it was altogether possible they had only been pretending not to know her...and that they were planting an explosive somewhere in the mansion. An explosive that, as with the car bomb back in Iowa and yesterday’s fire in Florida, could kill not only their intended target, but anyone and everyone who might be in the way.
As adrenaline spiked through him, he wondered, should he recruit help to search the mansion? Betray Hope’s confidence to stop what might turn out to be a bloodbath? Surely, the safety of everyone who lived and worked here trumped one woman’s secrets. But what if Hope was wrong? If the scrawled note she’d written had been based on a hallucination rather than reality?
He pictured her lying in the upstairs hallway, her back arched and her body racked with tremors. Worried as she’d been about her ex-husband’s people tracking her here to kill her as they had her father, was it possible her oxygen-starved brain had manufactured their appearance?
He hesitated for a moment, then decided he would look into this himself before stirring up more trouble by prematurely sounding the alarm. On his way to the rear entrance, he followed the yeasty scent of baking bread to the nearby kitchen, where Agnes and her assistants were working.
“Excuse me,” he said, his stomach growling as Agnes pulled a pan of fresh rolls from the oven. “Has anyone seen the electricians yet this morning? With Mr. Black gone, I’ve been asked to check on how they’re coming.”
Clearly, none of the kitchen staff had yet heard about Hope, for rather than asking what had happened, the red-haired cook set the pan down on the stovetop, her round face scrunching as she considered. “Have you checked the basement, where all the trouble is? Or was it your nose that led you here, as usual, when I’m baking?”
He tilted a smile at her. “You know me better than I know myself. But I really do need to find those two workers. Did you see them head down?”
“I think I did.” Though she would have bitten the head off any other cowboy who dared to ask for one, Agnes tore one steaming roll apart from the others and pulled it open before adding a generous yellow dollop of butter for him. “At any rate, they walked right past here.”
Dylan wondered if the two might be downstairs at this very moment, rigging the electrical panel for a deadlier explosion. But the more he thought about it, the more ridiculous the idea sounded. Why would two professionals risk killing dozens, with no certainty whatsoever that their quarry wouldn’t escape?
Before he could grab the roll on his way to check them out just in case, Kate McCord, the pretty pastry chef he’d known a few years, gave a shake of her dark curls.
“They’re gone already,” she told Agnes. “When you stepped out for a moment, I saw both of them leaving.”
“Leaving?” Agnes fisted a hand on one broad hip, her face reddening. “You aren’t telling me those lazy lumps are out on a lunch break while we’re all left to shiver in the darkness?”
With a humming generator just outside the noon-bright window and mostly gas appliances, the kitchen was by far the warmest, best-lit spot in the house, but Dylan was far too interested in hearing Kate’s response to point that out.
“I assured them we’d gladly feed them lunch,” she said, “but they said they’d have to run back to town to pick up some part they needed. Something about an oscill-regulator, I think.”
“A what?” While Dylan was no expert in such things, Mr. Black had taught him enough over the years that he was almost positive that no such device existed.
“I’m sure it was the oscill-regulator.” Kate gave a little shrug. “Whatever on earth that is.”
“What exactly did these guys look like?”
Kate described the two large men wearing coveralls and work boots. Neither sounded like anyone he’d seen on the ranch before.
“Did you happen to see the vehicle they left in?” he asked her.
She thought for a moment before nodding. “I saw a white van backing out, with Elite Electrical on the side. Why? Is that important?”
“I’ll let you know. Thanks, Kate,” he said, forgetting about food as he rushed toward the service entrance. As he stepped outside, a silver van was just pulling into an empty space in the small lot. Had Katie been mistaken on its color? Were these the same two workers, already returning?
Two men climbed out of the Elite Electrical vehicle, one of them a dark-skinned, middle-aged man whose belly strained his coveralls and the other a younger, slimmer version, so similar in appearance that he had to be the man’s son. As Dylan approached, the younger man, who couldn’t have been older than twenty, opened the back of the silver van, while the older walked up and offered Dylan a worn and callused hand. “Sorry we’re so late getting here this morning. We always hate keeping Mr. Colton waiting, but we had to run to Laramie to pick up the only one of these panels Junior here could track down in the state.”
Dylan shook his hand and introduced himself, realizing the man, who passed him a card bearing a greasy fingerprint and the words Leon Nelson, Elite Electrical, looked familiar. Probably because Nelson had been coming to the ranch to deal with various electrical concerns for years.
“Mr. Colton appreciates you sending that other team out earlier,” Dylan said, to test his working theory.
“What other team?” Nelson’s dark brow crinkled. “Our only other unit’s out wiring a new commercial project going in next to the—”
“Driving a white van?” Dylan interrupted.
“No, sir,” Nelson told him, sounding adamant. “My brother Emmett drives a silver one, just like this, only it has a magnetic sign on the side.”
“So what do you know about a white van that came here earlier, with that same logo?” Dylan pointed to the side of the van and noticed the son looking at him from around the open rear gate....
He noticed, too, how Junior avoided eye contact, his dark brown eyes shifting nervously.
Leon Nelson shook his head emphatically. “We don’t own a white van, and I’d swear on the nearest Bible my brother’s working on that new service station back in town.”
“They left not long before you got here. You didn’t pass a white van on the way here?”
“No, sir, Mr. Frick. Like I told you, I did not,” Leon said hotly. “If somebody else was out there this morning, they’re nothing but poachers—out to steal my service contract with Dead River Ranch.”
“They certainly didn’t impress anybody by walking all through the mansion and then leaving to pick up an ‘oscill-regulator.’”
Leon’s gaze narrowed, and he cut a look toward his son, who quickly ducked back behind the van.
“They weren’t here to fix any power, and they certainly weren’t electricians,” Leon told Dylan. “Sounds like they were a couple of low-life thieves, out to case the place to rob it later.”
“Low-life thieves with one of your magnetic signs on their van’s side,” Dylan ground out. “Which has me wondering exactly what the connection might be.”
Once more, Leon glanced toward the rear of the van, his expression anguished. “Son, you might as well come on out and tell me what you know about this. Whatever it is, we’ll find a way to straighten things out, just like we did the last time.”
The metallic rattling of tools was their only answer.
“Son?” the father called. “I asked you to explain this. Now, don’t you figure you owe me at least that much after all we’ve been through?”
When Junior didn’t respond, Dylan stepped around the back of the van. And barely ducked in time to avoid the huge wrench swinging toward his head.
“Junior, no!” the father shouted. “Whatever it is, it isn’t worth this.”
His face a frozen grimace, the son advanced on Dylan and took an even more determined swing. This time, Dylan blocked it and slammed his lighter, younger opponent just beneath the breastbone. With a grunted exhalation, the air exploded from Junior’s lungs and he staggered.
“Please don’t hurt him,” begged the father.
But with the son still clutching the wrench, Dylan had no choice but to hammer him a second time, striking both his jaw and shoulder.
As fights went, it was the kind that Dylan liked best: short and heavily weighted in his favor. Junior made one last, desperate swing for Dylan before the wrench clattered to the ground and the younger man went to his knees. An instant later, he fell to his side, where he lay holding his midsection and struggling for breath.
With one booted foot, Dylan kicked the wrench out of the younger man’s reach. “You’ll be all right in a second, son. Wind’s just knocked out of you, that’s all.”
The elder Nelson knelt beside his son and shook him. “What did you do, boy? What did you do with the extra sign? Because if you’ve cost me my best customer, I swear on your mother’s grave I’m finished with you.”
The Colton Heir Page 10