by Lisa Childs
* * *
He’d found her easily enough. But he couldn’t take out her or her daughter here—outside the damn Red Ridge Police Department. Hell, after that bitch had shot him, he could barely raise his arm.
Blood trickled yet from the wound, soaking into his already saturated sleeve. He needed medical attention. But he’d have to find it somewhere other than a hospital or doctor’s office. RRPD would have someone watching those places, waiting for him.
Damn the timing...
The park had looked deserted. He hadn’t noticed anyone else around—until he’d heard the dog bark. Then he’d seen the little girl—but not before she had watched him fire those shots into that thieving dealer’s chest. Did she understand what she’d witnessed?
She was old enough that she probably did. And because he hadn’t known anyone else was around, he hadn’t had his hood up or glasses on then. So she would be able to identify and testify against him. And so would her damn cop mama.
But that wasn’t going to happen.
She and her mother were not going to live long enough to bring him down.
Chapter 2
Noooo...
Not now. Not ever...
Juliette had determined long ago that she would never see Blake Colton again. Even though she had heard that he’d recently returned to Red Ridge, she hadn’t thought that she would actually run into him. It wasn’t as if she worked at the Colton Plaza Hotel anymore.
And she hadn’t expected him to show up at the Red Ridge Police Department.
What was he doing here—now?
She froze as their gazes locked. She should have been running instead—running away from him with Pandora. But she hesitated too long before stepping through that door. And his gaze went from her face to her daughter’s.
While there was no mistaking that Pandora was her biological child, the little girl’s blond hair was darker than Juliette’s—more a dark gold like Blake’s. Pandora’s eyes were green instead of blue. Green like her father’s eyes that stared at her now, widening with shock. She also had the same dimple in her left cheek that he had, but since neither was smiling now, it was just a small dimple and not the deep dent it became when they grinned.
Pandora wasn’t grinning, though. She was sobbing; she hadn’t stopped since the man had come after them despite Juliette’s assurances that they were safe now. Juliette didn’t feel safe, though.
Pandora must not have, either, because she buried her face in Juliette’s neck, hiding from the handsome stranger who held the door for them. But she’d done that too late. He’d already seen the little girl just like he’d seen Juliette.
And from the expression crossing his handsome face, Juliette could tell that he’d recognized her despite the nearly five years that had passed. From the way he was staring at Pandora, with his brow furrowed as if he was doing math in his head, he might have also realized that the child in her arms could be his.
No. They were not safe.
He turned back to Juliette, and the look in his green eyes chilled her nearly as much as the look in the killer’s dark eyes had. She shivered.
“It’s you—” he murmured “—isn’t it?”
She shook her head in denial. “I—I don’t know what you’re talking about...”
His eyes narrowed with skepticism and suspicion. “It is you. And she...” He raised his hand as if to reach for Pandora.
But Juliette spun around, keeping her child away from him. “She’s just witnessed a crime,” she said, her voice cracking with regret and fear that her poor little girl had had to see what she had. A murder...
“I can’t do this now,” she told him. But before she could rush through those doors and get away from him, someone rushed out.
Like Juliette, the woman was clad in a RRPD uniform, her brown eyes dark with concern.
“Oh, my God,” Elle Gage exclaimed. “I just heard what happened. Are you all right?” She focused on the little girl. “Is Pandora?”
“Pandora...” Blake murmured the name, drawing Elle’s attention to him.
She gasped. “You—you’re Blake Colton,” she said. Then she glanced at Juliette. She was the only one who knew—the only one Juliette had trusted with the truth. “Were you at the park, too?” she asked him.
Blake’s brow furrowed. “Park?” He turned toward Juliette. “Is that where the crime happened?”
She nodded. “I need to complete the report.” But that wasn’t all she wanted to do. She wanted to make sure she had a safe place for her daughter. Pandora needed protection from at least one man—the one who’d sworn she would die. She might need protecting from this one, too, if he had realized that he was Pandora’s father.
“But I need to talk to you,” he said through teeth gritted with frustration and anger.
* * *
Elle reached for Pandora, extricating the little girl from Juliette’s arms. “Come here, sweetheart,” she said. “Let you, me, and Sasha get something to eat and drink...” She took the beagle’s leash from Juliette’s hand, too, and with a crook of her neck gestured at Blake. Since she’d learned he’d returned to town a couple of days ago, she’d been urging Juliette to talk to him.
But there really was no time. Not now...
Fear pounded in her heart as she watched her friend walk away with her daughter. She’d nearly lost her just a short time ago—at the park. If Juliette hadn’t shot the man in the shoulder...
If she hadn’t wounded him, he would have killed them both. She just had to convince her boss of the same. She had no time to deal with Blake Colton. But when she moved to follow Elle and Pandora, he caught her. Wrapping his big hand around her arm, he held her back.
Her skin tingled from his touch. It had been so long. But she could still remember how it felt...how he’d touched her that night...
She jerked her arm from his grasp. Just as he’d spoken through gritted teeth, she did the same. “I. Cannot. Do. This. Now.”
“We need to talk,” he insisted.
She knew it was true and not just because Elle had been badgering her to seek him out. She knew it was the right thing to do. But at the moment she needed to be with her daughter—needed to see for herself that her child stayed safe.
“She’s mine, isn’t she?” he asked, and his voice cracked slightly with the emotions making his green eyes dark.
Her reply stuck in her throat, choking her.
“She’s the right age,” he continued as if he was trying to convince himself. “And she looks like me...”
Juliette felt like she had when she’d stared into the barrel of the killer’s gun. Trapped. Terrified. Desperate...
* * *
Frustration gripped Blake, twisting his gut into tight knots. He wanted to shake her, but when he reached for her again, she flinched as if she expected him to hurt her. He wouldn’t have, of course—despite his feelings. But he dropped his hand back to his side.
“Tell me,” he said, badgering her like she was a reluctant witness on the stand. “Tell me if she’s mine.”
“Yes!” she exclaimed, as if her patience had snapped. Or perhaps it was her conscience. “She’s yours.”
He expelled a sharp breath, like she’d punched him in the gut. All these years he’d spent thinking about her and about that night, he had never once considered that she might have gotten pregnant—that they might have made a child together. He was a father.
Anger coursed through him now, replacing the shock. “How—how could...”
Her lips curved into a slight smile. “The usual way...”
He glared at her. “How could you keep her from me?”
Her face flushed now, but she just stared at him with those damn beautiful eyes of hers.
“How could you?” he asked. “For years?”
“I—I—” she stammer
ed. “You left Red Ridge right after...”
“You could have found me,” he insisted. His family was in Red Ridge. They’d known where he was.
She tensed now and glared back at him. “You could have found me—even without knowing.”
“I tried,” he admitted. “You slipped out in the middle of the night, and I didn’t even know your last name. Hell, right now I’m not sure you gave me your right first name, Juliette.”
She flinched.
And he wondered. Had she told him anything that was the truth?
“Juliette is my real name,” she said.
Someone from inside the police department called it now. She glanced back toward the building. “I—I need to go,” she said. But when she started forward, he caught her arm again—stopping her.
“No—” He’d spent five years wondering what had happened to her. Where she was... He wasn’t just going to let her walk away from him again.
“She needs me,” Juliette said.
And he felt once again like she’d struck him. The child needed her mother. She didn’t even know she had a father. Unless Juliette had passed off another man as the little girl’s daddy. Blake glanced down at the hand of the arm he held—her left hand. Her fingers were bare of any rings. She wasn’t married or engaged now.
But a lot could have happened over the last nearly five years. She might have had a husband. Hell, he’d thought she might have on their night together, and that was why she’d slipped away like she had, so nobody would spot them together.
She hadn’t worn a ring then either, though. So maybe, as a cop, she’d just decided not to wear one.
How had she afforded that beautiful gown—those shoes and earrings—on a cop’s salary—if she’d even been a cop back then? She looked younger now, without makeup, than she’d looked that night.
“Let me go,” she said—once again through gritted teeth. She had beautiful teeth and lips and features...
He’d started to believe that he’d romanticized her and that night over the years. That she couldn’t have been nearly as beautiful as he’d thought she was. He’d been wrong—about romanticizing it.
She was also stressed and afraid, her face pale and eyes wide with fear.
“I will let you go,” he agreed because he had no choice. Her daughter—their daughter—needed her.
Before the little girl had hidden her face in her mother’s neck, Blake had noticed her tears and, worse than that, her fear. His gut churned again—with a sense of helplessness even worse than when Patience had told him about his sister Layla’s predicament.
“But you’re going to come to my suite later,” he told her.
Her eyes narrowed as if she thought he expected a repeat of that long-ago night. Of what had happened over and over that night...
His pulse leaped at the thought, but he was too angry with her to ever want her again. So he clarified, “Just to talk.”
Someone called her name a second time, and she tugged free of him. But as she stepped through those open doors to the lobby, she turned back and nodded.
“I’m staying in the same suite as I was that night,” he told her.
Color rushed back into her pale face, and she nodded again. She would be there. Eventually. But he suspected it might be a while before she could make it.
Still reeling from what he’d just learned, he no longer wanted to talk to his cousin—the police chief. Blake didn’t want to step into that police department where she and their daughter were.
He just wanted to be alone. He wanted to think and process and deal with all the emotions gripping him. The anger, the shock, the fear...
His daughter had witnessed a crime of some sort, and from the way both she and her mother had acted, they were definitely frightened.
Could they be in danger? Could he lose his child just as he had finally discovered her existence?
* * *
“He’s back?” Fenwick Colton already knew that his son had returned to Red Ridge. The concierge at the Colton Plaza Hotel had confirmed that Blake had checked into a suite on the twenty-first floor a couple of days ago. But Fenwick hadn’t seen him. And he sure as hell hadn’t heard from him.
Patience, Fenwick’s daughter and Blake’s half sister, nodded in reply, but she had to understand what he was really asking. Why hadn’t Blake come to see him?
The boy was Fenwick’s only son. They should have been close. Fenwick had had primary custody of him, since a hyper boy had been more than his jet-setting mother had wanted to handle. But the kid had always acted like he couldn’t stand to be near him. And as if to prove it, he’d spent the past five years living in other countries. Maybe that was just because he was like his mother, though.
“Why is he back?” Fenwick asked his daughter.
Patience lowered her head slightly, and her dark bangs shielded her dark eyes. She was staring down at her desk in her office at the Red Ridge K9 training center. If he wanted to talk to his daughter, he usually had to come to the training center, where she worked as a veterinarian. It was the same with Bea; he would have had to go to the bridal shop to see her. At least Gemma visited him, but it was usually to ask for money.
He ran his hands over his tailored suit, plucking a strand of dog hair from the expensive fabric. Then he touched his hair, making sure the blond piece hadn’t slipped. As mayor of Red Ridge, he had to make sure he always looked good. “You called him,” he surmised.
“I had to,” she said, and her voice was sharp with resentment. Patience didn’t understand business like Layla did. Like Blake did...
“He’s not going to help,” Fenwick said. It wasn’t a question. He knew that with just as much certainty as he knew that Blake had returned to Red Ridge.
Patience looked up from her desk now. “He might. He will,” she persisted, but she sounded more like she was trying to convince herself than she was him. “Why else did he come home?”
That was what worried Fenwick. If Blake hadn’t come back to help his family, then he probably had another reason—a personal reason—for returning to Red Ridge.
“You shouldn’t have called him,” Fenwick admonished her.
“He’s your son,” she said. “My brother. He deserved to hear what’s going on with the family from one of us.”
Fenwick suspected the media had probably beaten Patience to the punch, though. Coltons were news. And a Colton scandal was even bigger news.
Damn his reprobate cousin Rusty and his equally disreputable kids for causing such a scandal. But it went beyond a scandal. Rusty’s daughter Demi was a murderer. Evidence and witnesses proved—to him, at least—that she was the psycho killing grooms-to-be because she’d been dumped by her own one-week fiancé. Of course a Colton being a killer wasn’t news. Other Colton family members—very distant family members out of state—had committed murder, as well.
Fenwick didn’t know what he might be forced to do if Layla wasn’t able to carry out their plan of marrying to save the company. This damn Groom Killer nonsense was threatening their livelihood. But now that might not be all that was threatened.
“You shouldn’t have called him,” Fenwick repeated, “because you might have put him in danger.”
Patience’s dark eyes narrowed. “What are you talking about?”
“This maniac,” Fenwick said, “is killing grooms. Men.” He was a little scared for himself—not that he had any intention of getting married again. Three times was more than enough. And he had more fun dating than he’d ever had being married.
“Blake isn’t engaged,” Patience said. “He’s not marrying anyone. He didn’t even have a serious girlfriend when he did live at home. So I doubt there’s anyone in Red Ridge he would be tempted to propose to.”
Fenwick wished he could trust that. “Couples are afraid to go public. Engagements have been canceled. Everyone is
afraid of the Groom Killer. But that hasn’t stopped anyone from coupling up in private.”
He could think of at least six new couples in Red Ridge—some damn unlikely couples.
“And you know your brother,” Fenwick continued. “If anyone tells that stubborn kid not to do something, he’s twice as determined to do it.”
Like build his own damn company. Fenwick had told the boy not to do it, that he didn’t have what it took. Hell, he’d been fresh out of graduate school with his MBA and had no real business experience when he’d begun his “start-up.” But Blake had had to go out and prove him wrong.
He was so damn stubborn it would be just like him to try to prove Fenwick wrong now about getting engaged. But then he wouldn’t be risking just some money.
He would be risking his life.
Chapter 3
Juliette sat on one of the chairs in the row outside the chief’s office. She’d given her report and she had helped Pandora give hers as well as a description of the shooter to Detective Carson Gage who would be working the murder case.
The last thing the Red Ridge Police Department could handle right now was another murder investigation. They were already spread so thin with the Groom Killer murders and the suspected criminal activities of the Larson twins. Did the RRPD have enough resources left to protect Pandora? That was what Juliette wanted to know, what she waited outside the chief’s office to discuss with him.
But of course, Finn Colton was busy. So busy that she had to wait. The receptionist was busy, as well, taking one call after another. Usually they would have had time to talk while Juliette waited to see the chief. She would have asked Lorelei about her teenage kids, and Lorelei would have asked about Pandora.
Elle was with Pandora, coloring pictures in the conference room and trying to get her to eat the pizza she’d ordered for them. Elle was a good friend.
The only person Juliette had told about that night nearly five years ago. The night she’d felt like Cinderella being invited to the ball.
The invitation she’d received had come in the form of a tip from a hotel guest. Juliette had been cleaning the woman’s room all week. She’d sought Juliette out a couple of times for more towels, to restock the minibar, and she’d talked to her like Juliette was a person and not just a maid. The woman had compelled Juliette to confide in her about working two jobs to pay off her late mother’s medical bills and tuition for community college.