Colton Undercover

by Marie Ferrarella

  “What does that mean?” Leonor asked. “That she took care of ‘him’? Took care of who?”

  Josh thought of putting it off, of telling her about Barret and what he’d learned when she was stronger and up to hearing it.

  But the news broadcasts were full of this latest development in the ongoing Colton saga—it seemed like people just couldn’t get enough of this sensationalism—and he didn’t want Leonor hearing it from some slicked-down, overpaid, plastic news anchor.

  He knew he had to be the one to tell her.

  “Well, they were ruling it a suicide, but with this new piece of information, I’d say it looks like Livia killed Barret Hartman.”

  “She killed him?” Leonor cried, shocked. “Why? Why would Livia kill RJ’s son?”

  “Because Barret was trying to kill you.” Since he’d started this, he wanted Leonor to have all the facts. “Actually, Barret hired someone to kill you—three times,” he added. “Apparently he wasn’t any better at hiring a hit man than he was at ‘finding himself.’” Josh recalled the words Barret’s mother had used at lunch the other day when she was making excuses for his rude behavior.

  Leonor’s eyes filled with tears as she thought of the grief that her older brother and his family had to be going through right at this moment. None of this was making any sense to her.

  “But why would Barret want to hurt me?” she wanted to know.

  “Not hurt, kill,” Josh corrected. “And it all boils down to jealousy and resentment. You had half the money he felt belonged to his father and ultimately, to him. In focusing on trying to get you killed, he didn’t have to face up to the fact that he was an exceedingly poor excuse for a human being, a waste of skin who had never managed to accomplish a single worthwhile thing. And now, apparently, it turns out that he couldn’t even hire a capable hit man. Something that I am very happy about.”

  Unable to help himself, he kissed the top of Leonor’s head, gratitude flooding his heart.

  Afraid that he would be tempted to really kiss her, Josh sat back in his chair.

  “Did Livia say anything else while she was here?” he asked.

  Leonor struggled to think for a moment, but coherence was getting progressively more difficult for her. Finally, a snatch of something came to her.

  “I think I heard her say something to the effect that I was the only one who was ever worth a damn.”

  Josh laughed softly in response. “That does sound like her.”

  Leonor ran the tip of her tongue along her lips. They felt incredibly dry and it was getting harder and harder for her to talk. But she needed to tell him this. “Could you leave that out?”

  He thought that was rather an odd request. He would have thought that the minute display of sentiment would have made her proud.

  “What?”

  Exhaustion was descending over her. She struggled to keep out of its grip just a little longer. “If you’re writing a report, could you leave that part out?” she repeated.

  It didn’t seem to have any hidden meaning or deep significance to anything that was going on, so he had no problem going along with her wishes.

  “All right, if that’s what you want. But why?” he wanted to know.

  “I don’t want one of my brothers or sisters to accidentally come across that, you know, if that somehow got leaked to the press.” She struggled, looking for words to make him understand. “I mean, we all suspected that Livia had no feelings for any of us, that she didn’t love us or care about us—”

  “Apparently she did about you,” he interjected. Why else would the woman come out of hiding to eliminate Barret? No matter how invincible she thought she was, she did run the risk of getting caught.

  Leonor shook her head, or at least thought she did. “I don’t want that distinction. I don’t want that to set me apart from the others. And most of all, I don’t want my brothers and sisters thinking that Livia actually could love, but she chose not to love them.”

  “But to love you.” Josh said what he knew was on her mind.

  This time she did manage to shake her head. The room seemed to spin for a moment before settling down. “That’s not love. What she did, she did because what Barret did offended her sense of self, that someone had the audacity to try to have one of her offspring eliminated.”

  Things began coming back to her, colliding in her brain as she tried to put them in order.

  “There were rumors of Livia being seen in Vegas when Knox’s son, Cody, was kidnapped. Cody turned up, safe and sound, and his kidnapper was found dead. That was probably her handiwork, too. She’s got a thing about maintaining the Colton name.”

  Leonor shrugged, or tried to. Too late, she remembered her wound. Sharp, razor-edged pains sliced through her upper torso, making her wince.

  She caught her lip between her teeth, trying to keep from crying out in pain.

  “Let me call for the nurse, ask her to give you a sedative.” Josh reached for the call button.

  “No,” Leonor begged. She tried to reach his arm, to stop him, but her fingers just brushed against the air, falling short. “Don’t call her.” The words came out in short, measured, urgent gasps. “Please. I don’t want to get a sedative. All I need is you staying here with me, talking to me.”

  “Is that your polite way of saying I put you to sleep?” Josh asked with a laugh.

  “No.” She breathed heavily. “That’s my way of saying that you make me feel like I’m safe. And if I feel safe, then maybe I can fall asleep—if you stay here long enough.”

  Josh wasn’t convinced. He hated seeing her in pain. “I still think that a sedative would be the better way to go.” As he said that, the forensics team he’d called entered the room. “Especially with these guys poking around, making noise.”

  “Hey, you asked us here, remember?” Roy Conway reminded Josh. He set his case down out of the way.

  “I know.”

  As quickly as possible, Josh explained why he had called them in. He needed to prove that Livia Colton had been here within the last few hours.

  “You think she’s still in the hospital somewhere?” Conway asked dubiously.

  Josh sincerely doubted it. Livia Colton was too smart for that. “No, but at least it’s a start in tracking her down.”

  “Famous last words,” Conway said sarcastically. “If that woman doesn’t want to be found, she’s not going to be found. This isn’t your average, run-of-the-mill simple-minded crook we’re talking about. Don’t forget,” Conway said, lowering his voice as if to keep Leonor from hearing. “This lady built an empire.”

  Josh glanced over toward Leonor and saw that she had finally fallen back to sleep. “Funny thing about empires. They all wound up crumbling, no matter who they belonged to.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” Conway said. “All right, people, let’s get to work.”

  With that, the forensic team began dusting for prints.

  Chapter 20

  “Try the blinds,” Josh urged. When the head of the forensic team looked at him quizzically, Josh explained. “Leonor said that her mother might have pulled the blinds down. Maybe she wasn’t careful and left behind at least a partial.”

  Nodding, Conway personally dusted the blinds for prints.

  “Got a partial,” the crime scene investigator announced several minutes later. Not wanting to get ahead of himself, he tempered his words. “It could belong to anyone.”

  “Then again, it could belong to Livia Colton,” Josh countered.

  Conway offered a ghost of a smile as he nodded. “There is that.”

  Taking the partial, Conway ran the print right then and there on his portable scanner. Livia’s fingerprints had been in the system for over ten years, so finding a match, if there was one to be found, would not be a difficult ma
tter.

  “And we have a winner,” Conway declared. Raising his eyes from the device he had used to match the partial, he looked up at Josh. “I gotta say, somebody up there must love you.”

  “I just live right,” Josh quipped, then grew serious as he asked for a formal confirmation. “Then Livia Colton was here?”

  Conway put the device carefully away. “Unless someone made off with her thumb, yeah, Livia Colton was here. Hell of a nervy woman,” he commented.

  “No argument,” Josh agreed. “Pull everything you can from the surveillance cameras located on this floor and the first floor for the last five hours. Put all your people in the lab to work to see if they can find anyone who looks like Livia Colton entering this room. My guess is that Colton was probably dressed as a nurse. The guard outside Leonor’s room said a nurse went in with medication on a tray. He didn’t think anything of it at the time. Maybe it was her.”

  “You got it,” Conway told him.

  The forensic leader left with his team. There were enough samples packed in their cases to keep them busy for at least the next few days.

  * * *

  She woke up to find Josh sitting in the chair beside her bed. Slightly rumpled in appearance, he looked as if he’d been there all night.

  Leonor took a deep breath, waiting to see if he would disappear, or if she actually saw him. Josh remained in the chair.

  “You’re still here.”

  The instant he heard her voice, he sat up and focused entirely on her.

  And then he smiled. “Looks that way.” He could feel his stiff, aching body protesting as he shifted in the chair.

  That he was still here surprised her. After all, he had to know that she was on her way to recovery. “Don’t you have a job to go to?”

  He lightly ran his hand over her hair. She was conscious and there was a little bit of color in her face. When he thought of what could have been the outcome the other night, his blood ran cold.

  “Right now,” he told her, “watching over you is my job. By the way, some of the members of your family have been here, but you slept through that. I’ll have the nurse call them, tell them you’re conscious now.”

  But Leonor was still focused on the first part of his answer. “You’re wasting your time if you think Livia’s going to come back here. She’s not,” Leonor told him. She knew how her mother operated. The woman was devoid of maternal sentiments. “She delivered her message and now she’s moved on.”

  “I know that.”

  Careful examination of the surveillance tapes had shown a woman matching Livia’s description leaving the hospital via the rear loading dock fifteen minutes after she had been seen entering Leonor’s room disguised as a nurse. There was no evidence that the woman ever came back.

  Leonor didn’t understand. “Then why are you still here?”

  “Because you’re still here,” he told her simply. As a rule, Josh had never been an emotional man. But then, he had never been in love before and being in love, he’d found, had changed all the rules. “You almost died the other evening. I don’t want to take a chance of that happening again.”

  Her brain still felt somewhat fuzzy. Had she missed something, she wondered. “Didn’t you kill the hit man at the museum the other night?”

  “Yes, I did.” He was only sorry that he hadn’t been able to get the man alive—and make him suffer for everything he had done to Leonor.

  “And the man behind all that—” Her voice quavered for a moment before she forced herself to go on. “Barret,” she finally managed to get out, “was—” Leonor paused for a moment before finally finding a word she could utter. “Eliminated.”

  Josh’s eyes never left hers. Shouldn’t she be getting more rest? Talking about this couldn’t be any good for her. “He was.”

  She drew in a shaky breath and continued. “So if the threat had been neutralized and you’re not waiting for Livia to pop up again, I don’t understand. Why are you still here?” she wanted to know. “Shouldn’t you be following up a new lead, tailing after someone else who can lead you to Livia?”

  That would be the logical assumption, except for one thing. “I asked Arroyo to give the assignment to another special agent.” He spoke carefully, his eyes never leaving her face. “And then I asked him for a leave of absence.”

  “Arroyo?” she questioned. Should she know that name? She was drawing a blank, Leonor thought.

  He flashed her a smile, realizing that he might not have mentioned the man’s name before. “He’s the assistant director at the Bureau and my immediate supervisor.”

  “Oh.” She thought for a moment, trying to organize the information he’d just given her. “I bet he wasn’t happy.”

  Josh laughed drily. “That’s putting it very diplomatically.”

  She realized the kind of repercussions Josh’s request had to have had. “Aren’t you afraid of what this could do to your career?”

  He took her hand in his. She felt so frail he couldn’t help thinking. “I don’t care about my career. What I care about most is right here in this room.” Since he’d admitted that, Josh decided to go for broke. “I know that because I lied to you about who I was, it’s going to take you a long time to trust me again, but I was hoping that if I stuck around long enough, you might see your way to—”

  “You don’t know as much as you think you do,” Leonor interjected, cutting him short.

  She was putting him in his place, wasn’t she? “I refuse to think that it’s hopeless—”

  “That’s not what I said,” she pointed out. She spoke slowly, trying not to run out of energy until they understood each another. “What I said is that you don’t know as much as you think you do.”

  She saw the puzzled look on his face and did her best to explain. “Yes, you lied to me, but then, when I questioned you, you told me the truth and that took courage. I might have been angry that you misrepresented yourself but at bottom, I can understand why you did what you did. You had a job to do. You wanted to capture a dangerous fugitive.” There was no other phrase she could use to describe the woman who had given her life and a great deal of baggage. “And you had to follow up any lead you thought you might have. I can’t fault you for trying to do your job.”

  In view of everything, he felt that was exceedingly generous of Leonor. Another woman might have held his actions against him and told him to get lost.

  “Then you think that you could eventually bring yourself to trust me?” he asked, mentally crossing his fingers.

  “With my life,” she told him honestly with a warm laugh.

  The corners of Josh’s mouth curved. “Your life, huh?”

  Her eyes were smiling as she softly confirmed, “My life.”

  Her reply made him feel almost giddy. She forgave him. He could feel a great weight being lifted off his shoulders. “Well, I know exactly where I want you to spend that life.”

  “Oh?” she asked, then gamely wanted to know, “And where’s that?”

  “With me.”

  There went her pulse again, she thought, feeling it accelerating. “Exactly what are you proposing?”

  He took her hand in his again. “That’s exactly it. I’m proposing.”

  Leonor could feel her jaw slacken and practically drop open, “To whom?” she asked cautiously, afraid of letting her thoughts run away with her.

  “To you.” His hands locked over hers, he drew them against his chest. “Leonor Colton, will you marry me?”

  She was hearing the words, but somehow, they weren’t penetrating. “You’re serious?”

  “Never more so in my whole life,” he told her solemnly.

  Stunned, Leonor could only stare at him for a long moment, speechless. When she finally did find her tongue, she tried to talk.

  “I—” S
he got no further because Josh wouldn’t let her.

  Afraid she would turn him down, Josh talked quickly. “You don’t have to give me an answer right now. I just want you to promise that you’ll think about it. And while you’re thinking about it, think about a couple of other things, too.”

  Josh had managed to arouse her curiosity. “Such as?” she asked.

  “Such as, while you were in a coma, I had my old partner track down that no-good lowlife who stole your money and caused you so much grief with your family by splashing intimate details of their lives all over the internet, thanks to his insatiable avarice and desire for personal gain.”

  Leonor stared at him, dumbfound. “You found David?” she cried in disbelief. Why would he do that? “I never want to see that man again!” She began to cough. Raising her voice had irritated her throat.

  He poured her a glass of water from the pitcher she had by her bed, then offered it to her.

  She took the glass in both hands and drank, before giving it back to him.

  “I don’t blame you,” he told her, setting the glass down next to the pitcher. “Don’t worry. You won’t have to see him. But you might want to know that he’s under arrest and on his way to prison for stealing your money,” he told her with a satisfied smile. “The good news is, the scum still had most of your money.”

  That was a surprise. She’d expected David to go through it, spending it on expensive toys that fed his ego.

  “You recovered my money?” she asked in disbelief.

  Josh nodded. “Consider it a bonus for what I put you through.”

  She didn’t want him feeling guilty. “Josh, really, I don’t—”

  “I’m not finished,” he told her, interrupting. “I still have something else to tell you.”

  She had no idea where this was going. Amusement curved the corners of her mouth. “Go ahead.”

  “I’ve decided that if you say yes to my proposal,” he told her, closely watching her reaction to what he was about to say, “I’m going to resign from the Bureau.”

  She didn’t want him doing that. “But you love being an FBI special agent,” she protested.