Colton's Lethal Reunion (The Coltons 0f Mustang Valley Book 2)

by Tara Taylor Quinn

  “I think I’ll back-burner it for now,” Marlowe was saying. “Dee says that Micheline will come if asked, but no worries, either way. I like that she’s being proactive,” Marlowe added, opening up another chain of conversation.

  “I agree,” Rafe said, adding nothing more, hoping Marlowe would get the hint from his formality. She knew him well enough.

  “You’re with someone?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why didn’t you say so? You really need to get better at communicating, Rafe. I’ll talk to you later,” she said, and hung up. As did he.

  “That was Marlowe,” he said, noting the tightness around Kerry’s lips. She’d been fine until the phone call, so clearly it had upset her.

  Thing was, he understood why. He just didn’t know how to make things right. The day had been going so well.

  “She was talking about getting someone in to talk to the staff,” he said. “To help them deal with Payne’s shooting and the executive changes.” It wasn’t confidential information. And she was the cop on the case.

  He hated that he was justifying to himself what he could talk to Kerry about.

  Hated that Marlowe’s call had interrupted his time with her.

  “Might be a good idea,” Kerry said, her tone as distant as it had been that first day when he’d gone to the station to see her. More pleasant, but just as distant.

  The more time they spent together, the more he realized how much he needed to keep seeing her—and the further apart they seemed to be getting.

  “You think so?” he asked, interested in her opinion and wanting to keep her talking to him.

  She shrugged, took one hand off the wheel to adjust her rearview mirror, which had him looking behind them. A newish-looking white SUV was coming up on them, then passed them.

  “Guy’s gotta be going at least twenty over the limit,” Kerry said. “He’s lucky I’m not in a squad car. I’d radio him in.”

  Because they were out of town jurisdiction at that point, so she couldn’t pull him over? He was just glad they weren’t being run off the road.

  “I spent some time this morning going over all of the old claims that have been registered on Mustang Mountain,” she said next, almost without taking a breath in between her last sentence. “I figured we might as well start there, because a compass will take us to them. And then, once we know what we’re looking for, maybe we’ll be able to spot others,” she said. “And Dane and the chief know we’re out here. They’ll be keeping tabs on us, so we have to check in anytime we have service.”

  That was it. She was going to take care of business and ignore the rest. He got her message. Just couldn’t accept it. His time was running out.

  “Ker, you think, after this is over, we can stay in touch?” All morning long he’d been revisited by memories of her tears the night before. They made him ache in deep places he hadn’t felt since he was a kid. Places he’d thought were a figment of a lonely child’s imagination.

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” she said, staring straight ahead, both hands on the wheel again. With all the gear on her belt, she looked so tough.

  And sounded that way, too.

  It didn’t gel with the woman who’d taken his hand and climbed down into his arms the night before.

  “Why not?”

  She glanced at him, at the phone he still had in his hand. “You have to ask?”

  The question was meant to put him off. Shut him up. Whatever. It didn’t faze him.

  “Yes, I do. Because, frankly, I’m finding it hard to imagine losing this again.”

  She sucked in her lips. Pursed them. Took a sip from the water bottle in the holder. There was one there for him, too. She never traveled in the desert without her water.

  “Losing what?” Her question came just as she was turning onto Mustang Mountain Drive—such a fancy name for the one-lane, rugged road.

  “Losing you.”

  Pulling off into the first lay-by she came to, Kerry faced him. “You don’t have me, Rafe. We slept together. Maybe it was a really bad thing to do, maybe it wasn’t. It’s too late to do anything about that. But you do not have me.”

  He’d hit a sore spot. Wasn’t sure how to salve the wound. “I’d like to know I can call and you’ll answer. That you’ll call me if you want to. That we can share a meal now and then.”

  “Share a meal. Where, Rafe? In my house? Because anywhere else in town, people will just talk. It’s not like the mighty Colton board hangs out in our restaurants. And I’m guessing having me out to your house would be a no.”

  It shouldn’t be. But when he hesitated, picturing that happening, he couldn’t really see it, either. “My home is my own,” he told her anyway. “I can entertain anyone I choose to entertain.”

  “So you bring women friends there?”

  “No.” He’d never dated anyone long enough to expose her to the Colton clan.

  “I’m not going to be a woman you visit occasionally,” Kerry said. He could see the pain in her eyes. The longing. And the shard of reality, too. “And you can’t offer me any more than that. It would be suicide for me, Rafe.”

  That was the time to tell her he could offer her more. But he couldn’t picture how that would look. How it would work.

  He’d never felt so helpless in his life, looking at heaven and knowing he wasn’t going to get there. No matter how good he was. How hard he tried. It just wasn’t his to have...

  He had felt that helplessness before—twenty-three years ago, sitting in Payne Colton’s study.

  “It’s okay,” Kerry said, reaching out to run her hand along the side of his face.

  Comforting him? He’d been attempting to comfort her. To let her know that he was going to be there for her. That he wouldn’t just abandon her again.

  “I understand,” she added, her voice soft and oh so sweet.

  “Understand what?”

  “You already let go, Rafe. You moved on. These past few days...what you’re feeling...it’s just residue of long ago. It’s not real. Not part of your life.”

  “You don’t know that.” He didn’t know it.

  She nodded. “Yes, I do.”

  Her confidence pissed him off. What the hell? She wasn’t inside him. Had no idea what he was feeling. “What makes you so sure?” he asked, ready to point out the error in her ways as soon as she clued him into her thinking.

  Because whatever she thought she knew, she was wrong.

  “Because if you felt even half of the intensity I feel for you, you wouldn’t be asking me just to stay in touch, you’d be asking me to share your life with you.”

  He’d known she was wrong—just not what about. He felt the intensity. It was burning through him. Eating away at him. It just didn’t prompt the result she thought it should. Didn’t mean it wasn’t there.

  “That’s your version of it,” he said. “Or maybe it’s that what I feel is so intense it won’t let me put you in the Colton line of fire,” he said. And he immediately wanted to take the words back, too. The Coltons had their faults, their quirks, but they were good people. They were his family.

  “Payne could make life difficult for you, Kerry. With the chief.” He hated the admission. Hated that he loved a man who he believed could do that. “Not because of anything against you,” he said as he told her what he should have said the night before, when he’d told her the truth about why he’d abandoned her all those years ago. “But because he’s afraid I won’t be loyal to the Coltons if I go back to my roots. It’s like, in his mind, the only way I prove my loyalty to him, to my family, is to not look back. The only way I can be a Colton is to be a Colton. Not a Kay.”

  “I know.” Tears pooled in her eyes, but she didn’t look away. “I already figured that out,” she said. “But here’s the thing, Rafe... The way I feel about you...the way I fel
t about you then... What you didn’t get back then was that I would have been happier living in a foster home in Tucson and being in touch with you than I was living on the same ranch as you and not being able to see or talk to you.”

  Emotion tightened his throat. He had no comeback. He had nothing.

  He’d told her that he’d taken comfort from having her close all those years. Apparently he’d taken that comfort at her expense. Guilt ate at him. Topped with regret that couldn’t be assuaged. He couldn’t go back. Couldn’t change any of it.

  “I wouldn’t have sacrificed my father or Tyler that way, but if you’d have given me the choice, I’d have tried to get Dad to change jobs. Hell, I’d have been out there looking for a job for him. I might not have found one, but I’d have tried, Rafe. I’d have shared the problem with you, let you try to think of something. But you...you’d slowly been becoming one of them... All those years of living with them, seeing me on the sly...it worked for you in some convoluted way. By the time Payne caught us, you’d already converted. You were his more than mine. You didn’t even tell me what he’d said. Didn’t give us a chance to find a way to be together. I’d at least have tried, Rafe...”

  And he hadn’t. That’s what she was telling him.

  And that’s why she’d meant it when she said that, after the case was solved, she didn’t plan to see him again.

  “You moved on, Rafe,” she told him. “You accepted what came at you and you became one of them and the thought of being a Colton makes me shudder. You and I...we aren’t alike anymore. We want different things. We like different things. We value different things. You were smart enough to figure this all out when we were thirteen. You were right to move on. Now I have to, too.”

  He wanted to tell her she didn’t have to. That he’d find a solution, just like she said, but he wasn’t sure he would. Or could. He couldn’t just walk away from the Coltons. That would be as wrong as walking away from her.

  Chapter 21

  Of the five mines they found that afternoon, only two of them were still viable. They were overgrown, but if they’d stepped on them, they could have gone in. One wasn’t deep. Maybe ten feet. Straight down. The other was deeper, but the circumference had closed in over the years. No way a grown man would fit down it, let alone a grown man carrying contraband.

  Searching was going to take time. Kerry planned to take whatever time was required; if she had to search for the next year, one acre of ground at a time, she’d do so to avenge her brother’s death. Tyler, her father, they were the only family she was ever likely to have—unless by some miracle she met some great guy after she got over Rafe, fell in love and lived happily ever after.

  It was the stuff dreams were made of. She wanted to learn how to dream again. And maybe letting go of an old dream—as painful as it was—was the only way to find new ones.

  She wanted to have dinner with Rafe, too, when he offered as they got back to town, but she didn’t. Telling him she still had work to do at the station, she dropped him off at his truck and drove away before he’d taken more than a step or two.

  Dane was still at the station and she filled him in on what she’d found at the junkyard, uploading the pictures and sending them to him and the chief. It was going to be on the MVPD radar, starting immediately. Every squad car, every officer, would keep a watch on it. They were closing in on Odin Rogers. It was only a matter of time.

  “I gotta hand it to you, Kerry,” Dane said, his brows raised, giving his craggy face a handsome appeal. “You’re one hell of a detective. I’m sorry I didn’t listen to you two years ago...”

  A week ago, that apology would have lit up her world. That night she shrugged. “I could just as easily have been wrong,” she told him. But she was always going to go with her instincts.

  And she was always going to fight for where they led her.

  Lizzie and James came in just as she was getting ready to leave, and Lizzie asked her to head over to the bar for a beer. It was the last thing she wanted—to be in public, to be with anyone who knew her and to drink a beer, which was exactly why she accepted. Growing up with her father’s drinking, and later, dealing with Tyler’s drug abuse, she’d always gone light on imbibing, but she could take down a couple of beers without going over her blood alcohol limit to still operate vehicles legally. She’d had herself tested, while she drank, just to be sure.

  When Lizzie suggested they get a booth, and dinner, she was glad that she’d came. And after an hour of her friend’s company, she was more than glad.

  Lizzie had to notice she wasn’t her usual carefree self. Kerry wasn’t cracking jokes or complaining about Dane’s superiority complex. She didn’t tell her friend about the older detective’s apology. Nor did Lizzie pry. She knew Kerry had been spending time with Rafe Colton. Though she knew nothing of their history, the fact that he had spent the night at Kerry’s house—three nights in a row—was worth discussion. Lizzie was friend enough to leave it alone.

  But as they were paying their bill, getting ready to leave, Lizzie, still in her dark blue uniform and black shoes, looked across at her. “You okay?”

  She might have crumbled. The night before. Yesterday. But not anymore. “No. But I’m going to be,” she said, because she was who she was. The woman who handled what came to her. And went on to have a purpose and make life better.

  As soon as she pulled into her drive, walked in her door, she knew why she’d gone out with Lizzie. She’d been putting off the inevitable. The sense of loss. Of excruciating loneliness. He’d only been there with her three nights and yet it was like he owned the place.

  Because home was where the heart was and he owned her heart.

  For the moment.

  Just for the moment. She was in the process of reclaiming it. Taking her life back.

  So thinking, she drew a hot bubble bath. Lit candles. Found an instrumental channel she could stream, set her Bluetooth speaker on the bathroom counter.

  And soaked while she cried her heart out.

  * * *

  Rafe was ready to head out. Nine o’clock was late enough that by the time he got to his house, went through the mail, checked to make certain that nothing had spoiled in the refrigerator the past few days and had a shower, it would be late enough for him to lie in bed and watch television with a hope of drifting off.

  He hadn’t had all that much sleep the past three nights. But suspected he’d been more rested than he was going to be in the morning. After three nights with Kerry, his own bed, even for all its luxurious comforts, wasn’t calling to him.

  Neither was filling out his weekly household chores list, but it had to be done. He’d had a reminder email from the staff at the mansion who took care of such things. They’d empty his refrigerator, too, when they cleaned, except that he’d specifically asked them not to do so. Quirky, he knew, but he wanted to be in charge of his own refrigerator. A throwback to the days of being a Kay and being allowed to just walk up and get food whenever he wanted. Growing up at the mansion, he hadn’t been allowed to hang out in the kitchen. Funny how some things stuck with you.

  He was just finishing his very short list—having been gone so much—when the cleaning woman passed by his opened door for the third time.

  Waiting on him to vacate so she could finish and go home?

  “You can come in,” he called out to her. “I’m done here.” As he spoke he sent a text to Callum, letting him know he was ready to head out. Kerry had been insistent when she’d dropped him off that evening that someone escort him home. Still in her Jeep, he called his ex-SEAL younger brother to arrange the details. Callum, who was spending most of his time at the hospital with his mother, had accepted the request without question. Rafe knew Callum was getting antsy, hanging out with them in little Mustang Valley when his days generally involved traveling all over the world to protect princesses and dignitaries.

  Maybe if
Callum had been home, protecting his own, his father wouldn’t have been shot.

  The thought came from out of the blue. And was immediately rejected as grossly unfair. Rafe admired the hell out of Callum.

  Hard to believe that less than a week ago Payne had been the one working late in the Colton Oil executive offices and had been shot. An entire lifetime had passed in the days in between.

  The cleaning lady, he didn’t know her name, had dusted his end tables, the bookshelves, and was bringing in her vacuum.

  “Were you working the night of the shooting?” he asked. A Colton Oil cleaner had found Payne.

  She nodded, adjusted her vacuum cord. Stepped on the machine to release the handle for easy maneuvering.

  Hands in his pockets, Rafe moved closer. He couldn’t go to the woman’s home, try to get a testimony from her—that would be tampering—but he could speak to an employee at work.

  “Do you know the woman who found him?” he asked—even then, not able to say the words “my father.”

  The woman’s nod was jerky. She glanced at him and away.

  “But she had no idea who the shooter was...right?” He had no business asking. Just needed to know...

  She shook her head. “Like Joanne told the detective this morning, she has no idea who it was...”

  “She spoke to a detective this morning?” he asked, more alert as he heard the unexpected news.

  “Yes. Detective Wilder. She came to Joanne’s house. She told her everything, Mr. Colton. We’ll both help in any way we can...”

  Quickly assuring the woman that he had no doubt about her motives, he grabbed his keys and went down to wait for Callum.

  Kerry had interviewed the cleaning lady that day and hadn’t even mentioned it to him. Not that she had to. But he wasn’t a suspect. The members of his family were the victims. She could have kept him apprised.

  She was pulling away from him. He already knew that. This was further proof of it and hurt more than he would have expected. More than it should have.