Colton by Marriage

by Marie Ferrarella

  Nonetheless, he had a feeling it was going to take him a long time to work out all these anger issues he had going on inside of him.

  “How much longer do I have to stay here?” he wanted to know. “And why isn’t Wes here, telling me all this himself?”

  “Cut the guy a little slack, Damien,” Duke said. “He’s been seeing everyone he can, trying to cut through the red tape and get you released. He’s always been on your side, right from the start.” Duke could see how restless Damien was, so he added, “There are forms to file and procedures to follow. Nothing is ever simple.”

  “Throwing me into jail was,” Damien said bitterly.

  Damien told him what they could do with the procedures and the forms. Duke laughed shortly under his breath, then advised, “You better can that kind of talk for a while, Damien. Don’t give anyone an excuse to drag their feet about letting you out of here.”

  The veins in Damien’s neck stood out as he gripped the phone more tightly. “They owe me.”

  “No argument,” Duke answered, his voice low, soothing. “But you can’t start to collect if you do something to get your tail thrown back into prison. You’re a free man in name only right now. Hold your peace until the rest of it catches up.” His eyes held Damien’s, clearly issuing a warning. “Hear me?”

  Damien blew out a long, frustrated breath. “I hear you.” And then the barest hint of a smile crept across his lips as the reality of it all began to sink in. “I’m really getting out?”

  “You’re really getting out,” Duke assured him, feeling a great deal of relief himself.

  “How about that,” Damien said more to himself than his brother. And then he looked at his twin. “What’s the old man say?”

  Darius Colton’s expression hadn’t changed an iota when Wes had told him about the new development. Instead, he’d merely nodded and then said that he could use the extra set of hands.

  Damien stared at his twin. He would have thought, after all this time, that their father would have registered some kind of positive emotion. “That’s it?” he pressed.

  For Damien’s sake, Duke wished that there had been more. But he wasn’t going to lie about it. It would only come back to bite him in the end. “That’s it. He never was much of a talker,” Duke reminded him.

  His father hadn’t come to see Damien once in all the years that he’d been confined. “Not much of a father, either,” Damien bit off.

  Duke shrugged. It was what it was. There wasn’t anything he could do or say to change things. “Yeah, but we already knew that.”

  Oh, God, not again.

  The thought echoed in Susan’s brain the moment she saw the dead roses on the mat outside the private entrance to her catering business. She’d gotten the wilted flowers before but hadn’t thought anything of it. She’d thought it was someone’s idea of a bad joke.

  Preoccupied with the challenging feat of keeping an ice sculpture frozen and firm in the middle of a July heat wave long enough to look good at a reception, she hadn’t seen the bouquet on the ground until she’d stepped on the roses and heard them crunching under her shoes.

  Startled, she’d backed up and saw what was left of them. And the envelope lying next to them. It was the type of envelope that was used for greeting cards. But if this was like the two other times, there was no greeting card inside. Instead, there was probably a note. A note written in childish block letters that made no sense to her.

  Taking a deep breath, Susan stooped down and picked up the bouquet and the envelope. Steeling herself, she opened the envelope.

  Sure enough, there was a folded piece of paper tucked inside it. Taking it out, she unfolded the paper. Uneven block letters spelled out another threat, similar to the one that she’d received yesterday.

  DEAD FLOWERS FOR A DEAD WOMAN.

  The warning might have been downright scary if it didn’t make her so mad. She held the note up to the light. And what do you know, the Coltons’ watermark.

  It wasn’t Linc. As aggressive as he’d become lately, he was too smitten to pull something like this. It wasn’t his style. She knew exactly who was behind this. It was just the kind of thing he’d do.

  Duke.

  But why?

  Just what was he trying to pull? Was this his obscure way of saying that he thought she was childish, as childish as the block letters in the message? Or was he trying to get her to back off? But back off from what? From expressing a few feelings about the current state of affairs regarding his brother? She was only trying to be neighborly.

  Just what the hell did Duke Colton think he was doing?

  The more Susan thought about it, the angrier she became.

  While she willingly acknowledged that she might not be the bravest soul God had ever created, she was definitely not about to be intimidated by rotting flowers and stupid, enigmatic notes that sounded more deranged than anything else.

  It was damn well time to put a stop to this before she found herself knee-deep in dead roses and dried-up thorns.

  Still clutching the flowers, she marched to the kitchen’s threshold.

  Since this was between meals and there was no one else around, she told her father. “I’m going out, Dad.”

  Donald Kelley had his back to her. He was still experimenting with the new sauce he was determined to create. Currently, he was on his sixth theme and variation of the new recipe, and he barely acknowledged that he’d heard her.

  “That’s nice. Have fun,” Donald muttered. Reaching for the long yellow tablet he’d been making all his notations on, he crossed out an ingredient near the bottom of the list.

  Susan doubted that her father had actually heard what she’d said.

  But her father wasn’t a problem right now. Duke was. Duke Colton was insulting her with these childish notes and bouquets of dead roses. It had to be him. Who else could it be? She had every intention of putting a stop to this behavior—and give him a piece of her mind while she was at it.

  The sooner the better, she thought, storming out to her car.

  A head full of steam and indignation propelling her, Susan was torn as where to go first in order to locate Duke. As luck would have it, she actually found him in the first place she looked.

  Wanting to cover all bases, at the last minute, rather than going to the main house on the ranch, she’d decided to stop at his house first since it was actually closer. She’d stopped her car right in front of the front door, got out and rang his doorbell. She gave him to the count of ten.

  He opened the door when she got to six.

  Duke’s face registered a trace of surprise when he saw her. His sister, Maisie, had said that she might be stopping by and that was who he had expected to see on his doorstep, not a five-foot-ten caterer whose brown eyes were all but shooting lightning at him.

  Before he could ask Susan what had brought her out to the Colton ranch for a second time in such a short period of time, she yelled “Here!” and threw what looked like a bouquet of flowers way past their prime at his feet.

  Dried petals rained right and left, marking the passage before the bouquet landed.

  Duke glanced down at the all but denuded bouquet and then back up at her.

  “I don’t remember asking for dead flowers,” he said in a voice as dry as the flowers.

  “Don’t try to be funny!” Susan retorted angrily, her arms crossed before her.

  “All right, how about confused?” he suggested. What the hell was going on? Susan was acting as crazy, as unstable as his older sister Maisie was. He toed the bouquet. More petals came loose. “Why’d you just throw those things at me?”

  Duke was behaving as if he’d actually never seen the bouquet before. Maybe the man should become an actor, she thought sarcastically. “Because you left them on my doorstep.”

  Her answer only confused things more, not less. “I don’t believe in wasting money,” he told her. “But if I did decide to give you flowers, trust me, I could afford ones that weren’t so dam
n shriveled up.”

  She drew herself up indignantly. He was lying to her face, wasn’t her?

  Or was he?

  She began to vacillate ever so slightly. Her eyes on his, she asked, “You’re telling me you didn’t leave those flowers on my doorstep?”

  “I’m telling you I didn’t leave those flowers on your doorstep,” he echoed.

  He saw no reason to plead his case any further. If Susan had half a brain—and he was fairly confident that the youngest of the Kelleys was a very intelligent young woman—she would realize that there was no reason for him to do something so bizarre.

  A little of Susan’s fire abated. “What about the note?”

  “What note?” he challenged.

  Digging the last missive she’d received out of her purse, she held it up in front of his face. “This note.”

  Taking the note out of her hand, Duke held it at the proper distance so that he was able to read it. When he did, he frowned and folded it up, then handed it back to her.

  “I didn’t write this,” he informed her flatly.

  She was beginning to believe him, but she couldn’t just capitulate and back away. He might be a very good liar. She knew she wasn’t experienced enough when it came to men to tell the difference.

  “If you didn’t write this, then who did?” she challenged.

  Outwardly, her bravado remained intact, but inwardly, she knew she was beginning to lose ground. Embarrassment was starting to take hold.

  He paused for exactly one second, thinking. “My first guess would be Linc.”

  “Linc?” she echoed incredulously. “Why would he keep sending me dead flowers?” she asked, not wanting to go there. She and Linc had been friends forever. If he actually was the one sending her these horrid bouquets, that meant that he wasn’t the kind of person she thought he was. And that meant that she was completely incapable of judging anyone’s character.

  “Why would I?” Duke countered, then suddenly realized what she’d just said. “This isn’t the first time you’ve gotten dead flowers?”

  She shook her head, her straight blond hair swinging back and forth, mimicking the motion. “No. I got a bouquet of rotting roses yesterday, and one the day before that. They each had notes like this one.”

  Once was a stupid prank. Twice was something more. Three times meant that there was a dangerous person on the other end of those notes. She could very well need protection. “Have you gone to Wes about this?” Duke wanted to know.

  She was beginning to get nervous. If Duke wasn’t sending the flowers as some kind of nasty prank, then who was? She refused to think it was Linc. She’d just seen him yesterday and aside from seeming a little morose, he was the same old Linc. He couldn’t be the one sending these notes.

  “No, I haven’t,” she said quietly.

  “Maybe you should.”

  She looked uneasy, he thought. He hadn’t meant to scare her, but on the other hand, Susan should be aware that this might be more than just some really stupid joke. If it did turn out to be that spineless Linc character, he was going to beat the tar out of him.

  The chores and his father’s obsession with having all his offspring working from sunup to sundown could wait. He felt responsible for the sliver of fear he saw entering her eyes.

  After reaching into the house for his hat, he closed the door. “C’mon, I’ll go with you.”

  It was an offer she couldn’t refuse.

  Chapter 9

  Wes had sat quietly, unconsciously rocking ever so slightly in his chair as he listened to what the young woman his brother had brought in to see him had to say.

  He could feel the hairs at the back of his head rising. Wes didn’t like what he was hearing.

  “And this isn’t the first time you’ve found a note like this on your doorstep?” he asked her, indicating the envelope in the center of his desk. Taking a handkerchief, he turned the envelope over, not that he expected to notice anything now that neither he nor the other two people in the room hadn’t up until now.

  Susan set her mouth grimly before she shook her head. “No.”

  “She already told you that,” Duke reminded his brother impatiently. He’d taken a seat beside Susan in front of Wes’s desk, but it was obvious that he would have felt more comfortable standing, as if he had better control over a situation if he was on his feet.

  “Just double-checking the facts, Duke,” Wes replied mildly. He wondered if there was ever going to be a point where Duke wouldn’t think of him as his little brother but as a sheriff first. Probably not. Wes directed his next question to Donald and Bonnie Gene Kelly’s youngest offspring. “Do you still have the other notes somewhere?”

  Susan knotted her hands in her lap and shook her head. “No. I threw them away along with the flowers.” She realized now that she should have hung onto them, just in case. But it had never occurred to her that the person sending this was dangerous. “I thought it was only a stupid prank.”

  Wes’s face remained expressionless but he nodded, taking the information in. “So what changed your mind?”

  “I didn’t change it,” Susan contradicted. “I just got fed up and mad.”

  Wes continued making notes in the small spiral pad he always kept on his person, replacing it only when he filled one. He wrote in pen so that the notes wouldn’t fade away before he needed them.

  Eventually, the pad would find its way into a file. A real file rather than a virtual one. Computers were for law-enforcement agents who had to contend with crime in the big cities and had a lot of information to deal with. In comparison to those places, Honey Creek seemed like a hick town.

  A hick town with a murderer and a possible stalker, Wes reminded himself. He finished writing down what Susan was saying and couldn’t help wondering what else would crawl out from under the rocks while he was sheriff.

  “Any particular reason you thought Duke was the one sending you the notes and flowers?” he wanted to know, sparing his brother a quick, sidelong glance.

  Susan drew herself up, like a schoolgirl in a classroom when things like posture and radiating a positive attitude mattered. “Not now, no.”

  “But before?” he coaxed sympathetically.

  Slim shoulders rose and fell beneath the bright pink-and-white-striped tank top. She actually did look more like a girl in high school than the successful head of the catering division of Kelley’s Cookhouse.

  “I thought it was Duke’s way of saying I was acting like a kid,” she murmured. Looking back, she realized that her reasoning didn’t make any real sense. But admittedly, she wasn’t thinking as clearly as she normally did, what with dealing with Miranda’s death and viewing life through new, sobered eyes.

  “Now that you don’t think that it’s Duke anymore, do you have any new thoughts about who might be sending you these threats and dried flowers?” Wes asked gently, as if he was trying to coax words out of a witness who had just been intimidated.

  Susan began to shake her head because she really couldn’t think of anyone this nasty, but Duke interrupted anything she might have to say. “You should check out that Lincoln character,” he suggested. There was no uncertainty in his voice.

  There was only one person with that first name around the area, but Wes asked anyway, wanting to make sure. “You mean Lincoln Hayes?” When his brother nodded his response, Wes continued questioning him. “What makes you think that Lincoln Hayes is behind this?”

  “It’s not Linc,” Susan interjected before Duke could respond.

  Duke ignored her. The woman was too soft. She probably wouldn’t want to think the worst of Satan. Seeing the skeptical look on Wes’s face, he gave his brother what he felt was proof. “I caught him trying to force himself on her,” he nodded toward Susan, “after the funeral.”

  Susan waved her hand at the statement, dismissing it. “Linc has this notion that we should give dating another chance. I told him it wasn’t going to work. He thought it would.” Duke snorted his contempt
for the man. She slid forward on her chair and tapped the envelope that she’d brought in to the sheriff. “That’s not Linc’s handwriting.”

  “He write you notes in block letters often?” Duke asked her sarcastically.

  Why was it that this rancher with the hard body could get to her faster than any other human being on the face of the earth? She’d never met anyone else who could scramble her emotions so quickly, making her run hot then cold within the space of a few moments.

  “No, but—”

  His point made, Duke looked at his brother. “I’d check it out if I were you,” he repeated firmly to Wes. “See if there’re any fingerprints on the envelope or the note that belong to Hayes.”

  Wes raised his eyes to Duke’s, his patience stretched to what he figured was his limit. “I know what to do, Duke.”

  “Just makin’ suggestions,” Duke replied.

  That was, Wes knew, as close to an apology as he would ever hear from Duke. Rather than comment, he merely nodded, then turned to Susan again.

  “Anything else you can think of?” he asked her. “Something Linc or someone else might have said that would make you think that they were the one sending you these threats?”

  Coming up empty, Susan shook her head. “Nothing comes to mind.”

  “That’s all right,” he told her sympathetically. “Give it some time. And if something does come to you, give me a call,” Wes instructed. He debated his next words, then said them—just in case. “It’s probably harmless—a prank like you said—but for a while,” he told her, offering her an encouraging smile, “I wouldn’t go anywhere alone if I were you.”

  Instead of the expected fearfulness, Duke was surprised to see anger entering Susan Kelley’s expressive eyes. She tossed her head, once again sending her short, straight blond hair swinging back and forth about her chin.