by Dana Nussio
Asher rushed forward. Only then could she see the burns on his upper arms where his shirt used to be.
“It’s all right, Willow. It’s going to be okay.”
A female EMT lifted the package from him, and they all unwrapped it. And there she was, her jammies dirty, her face and hair sweaty and filthy. Then Willow’s wonderful, high-strung, perfect Luna started to cry.
Chapter 24
“We have to stop meeting like this.”
Asher grinned at Willow as she stood outside the cracked curtain in Mustang Valley General’s ER department, her face still looking as if she’d seen a ghost. Earlier, when he’d emerged from her burning house, she probably thought she had.
“Are you coming in?” he asked when she didn’t.
Finally, she slid past the curtain and stepped inside, hugging herself as if she couldn’t get warm enough. If only he could take her in his arms and hold her until all those storms disappeared from her eyes. But with these bandages near his elbows, he probably shouldn’t be holding anything, even Harper, for a few days.
“Where’s Luna?” he asked.
When he gestured toward the guest chair, she stepped over and sat.
“She’s sleeping. Candace is with her. The doctors want to keep her overnight—”
Immediately, he straightened in the bed and then gritted his teeth because of the searing down his arms. “She’s okay, right?”
Her eyes still damp, she nodded. “It’s just a precaution. They want to make sure her lungs are okay. They’re getting her bed ready in the pediatric ward. I would have waited with her, but Candace thought I might need some coffee.”
“She threw you out, didn’t she?”
He hoped that would make her smile, but she only shrugged, hugging herself even tighter. Her gaze moved from the neckline of his hospital gown to the bandages on his arms.
“What did the doctor tell you?”
“These?” He gestured to the gauze. “They’re nothing. Barely more than a good sunburn. In fact, the doc’s springing me from here as soon as she gets back to sign the release forms.”
Willow lifted a brow and then stared down at his hands that were in far better shape than the upper part of his forearms.
“Oh, sorry to say your good oven mitts are toast. Or barbecue. Whichever you choose.”
“Please stop joking about it. You two could have been—”
“But we weren’t.” He shook his head to emphasize his point.
Tears welled in Willow’s already puffy eyes, and a lump formed in Asher’s throat.
“I’m sorry about your building. Do you know yet about the extent of the damage?”
She shrugged. “Candace was talking to the fire inspector before she came here. He suspects arson. He said there’s little structural damage, except the roof. The contents of the apartment? Well, at least they’re insured. We might be able to save most of the equipment in the center.”
“If someone wanted to hurt your business, then why set fire to your apartment instead of the facility?”
“I don’t know, but we were lucky.”
He rushed on to prevent them both from considering just how much worse it could have been.
“I couldn’t believe that even the outdoor stairs were still standing when the paramedics made me get in the ambulance. I was worried they would fall, so I took the interior stairs and came around the opposite side of the house.”
She nodded, yet drew her brows together, as if his explanation offered more questions than answers. Or gave her another reason to believe he’d failed her and her daughter. The lump in his throat grew larger.
“And I’m sorry... I didn’t get to her sooner,” he managed.
Her eyes were wide as she looked back at him.
“You kidding? That was amazing what you did for her. For us. Thank you so much. You didn’t have to do that.”
“Yes, I did. It was Luna.”
Clearly, she still didn’t get it. It couldn’t have mattered less to him that Luna wasn’t his child biologically. She had still become his. Asher loved her almost as much as he loved her mother.
He was tempted to tell Willow right then, his fears be damned, but something outside the cubicle must have caught her attention as she looked toward the curtain’s opening. Heavy footsteps followed.
“Knock. Knock.”
Asher sat higher in the bed. “Spencer, is that you?”
He didn’t know why he bothered asking when he recognized his cousin’s voice. They’d spent a lot of time together lately.
The sergeant pulled back the curtain and stepped inside.
“Hello, Mrs. Merrill. How’s it going, Asher?”
Spencer glanced at his arms as if to answer the question for himself and then pointed to the bandages. “Been playing with matches again?”
“Do all Coltons have to make a joke out of everything?” Willow asked.
“Sorry, ma’am.” Spencer straightened. “I’m here on business, anyway.”
“If you’ve come to ask us if we saw anything suspicious before the fire, I’m not going to be able to help you,” Asher said. “I came in through the front of the house instead of the exterior stairs to the apartment.”
“I didn’t see anything, either, before meeting Asher in the center,” Willow told him.
Spencer jotted a few notes in his tiny notebook. “I checked with the guards you had watching the house. They didn’t see anything either.”
“Hiring them was money well spent.”
His cousin shrugged. “Apparently, the arsonist came through the back.”
“So, what are you going to do now? Someone is obviously out to get Willow.” He shivered at just how close the arsonist had come to succeeding.
“Have you been able to find the connection between the events at Tender Years and the attacks on my family? There has to be something.”
“There isn’t,” Spencer said.
Asher had just been getting on a roll with his suspicions, but at the sergeant’s words, he stopped.
“How can you be sure?”
“What do you know?”
Willow’s words trampled his.
Spencer held his hands wide. “Because we have a suspect in custody. Arrested right outside the house in the crowd of onlookers. He confessed.”
Willow came up from her seat. “Who is it? How do I know him? Why would he want to hurt my business? Or us?”
Spencer held out his hands, palms down, and lowered them, signaling for them to calm down. “The suspect’s name is Alan Hunter. Ring a bell?”
She shook her head, squinting. “Should I know him?”
“I don’t think so. As far as we can tell, Alan didn’t so much want to hurt you as he wanted to please her.”
“Her? I don’t understand. Why would a woman want to hurt me?” She stopped and tilted her head to the side. “Wait. Was she an angry former client? Did she leave the reviews?”
“That’s what Detective Kerry Wilder is trying to find out right now. We have Ms. Williams in custody.”
“Ms. Williams?”
Willow repeated the name is if testing it against her memory bank and making no connection.
“Her name is Audrey Williams. Does that ring a bell?”
The color drained from Willow’s face, and she dropped down in the chair again, her eyes closed, her hands forming a steeple beneath her nose.
Asher wished he could climb out of that ridiculous bed and take her in his arms. He didn’t care if the local police sergeant was there to witness it.
“You know her, don’t you?”
She nodded with her lids still shut.
“Was she a parent of one of your charges?”
This time she shook her head and opened her eyes. The look of misery in them gave him a good guess.
“She was one of the women your ex cheated with, wasn’t she?”
Willow shrugged. “I insisted that he break up with her or get out. At least that time, he agreed.”
“And she blamed you.”
Willow gripped her head in her hands. “This was all my fault. I should have told him to go be with her then, but I’d just found out I was pregnant, and I thought I needed him.”
Asher jerked his hands wide, his arms stinging again beneath the bandages.
“No, you’re wrong. None of this was your fault.” He lowered his hands, but he couldn’t keep from fisting them on top of the blanket. “And you never needed him. For anything.”
Until Spencer cleared his throat, Asher had forgotten he was even in the room.
“Mr. Hunter told the whole story, and it lines up with yours. Ms. Williams blamed Willow for Xavier ending the relationship. It didn’t seem to matter to her that they later divorced. She didn’t seem to be aware that he is deceased. She appeared shocked.”
“She did all those things to us because he broke it off with her?” Willow asked.
“I never said it made sense. She recruited Hunter for her plan of revenge. A technical genius who could do things like hack into the Department of Health Services website to file a bogus complaint and override the Clamor app’s security system to destroy a business.”
Asher shook his head. “After everything, can you believe that none of the suspicious incidents at your business were related to the equally strange ones affecting my family? Well, except for the switch.”
“Yeah. Except for that.”
Willow smiled, and then the expression seemed to drain from her face. She glanced at Spencer.
“Then what about the fire?”
“Hunter must have realized he was being used, and her pressuring him into it must have been the last straw for him. As poorly as the arson was executed, he must have wanted to be caught, so he could turn her in, too.”
Willow leaped to her feet, hugging herself as tightly as she had earlier. “He did it to get back at her? Didn’t he realize he could have killed my baby and my—”
She stopped herself and shot a glance first at Spencer and then at Asher.
He battled to keep a straight face and lost. “Your...?”
A pair of white running shoes appeared beneath the curtain, and soon a young nurse peeked around it. “Excuse me, Mrs. Merrill? Mrs. Hill told me I would find you here. We’re ready to move Luna into her room.”
Asher’s doctor appeared behind the nurse, her white coat hanging open, a chart in her hands. “This room is getting full. Too full.”
“I agree,” Spencer said as he stepped toward the opening in the curtain. “I was just on my way out, Doctor.”
The nurse gestured for Willow to follow her.
The doctor addressed Asher. “Now, that’s better. Let’s get you—”
Asher lifted a finger to ask her to wait.
“Willow? Hold up.”
She glanced back. “I have to get to Luna.”
“I know you do.”
But as she swiveled to go again, he spoke to her back. “But it sounds like we need to talk.”
She looked over once more, her tongue slipping out to dab her lips. “We will. Soon.”
Chapter 25
Asher tromped through the house’s main entryway on his way to his wing, not caring that Neda would yell at him for not taking off his work boots before crossing the tiles she’d just waxed. He needed to get to Harper, not only because he couldn’t stand to be away from her since the fire but also since he needed to relieve whichever staff or family member was taking a turn babysitting her.
Though Luna was already out of the hospital and staying with her mom at Candace’s house, Tender Years would be closed for a few more weeks for repairs. After five days, he couldn’t help wondering how he and his daughter had survived before he’d enrolled her there. The same could be said for his time away from Willow, but he needed to give her a few days to process how her ex still had been able to hurt her, even from the grave.
It still didn’t make sense to him why the woman had blamed Xavier’s rejection on Willow, even after their divorce. Jilted lovers didn’t have to make sense, he guessed. Would it have made a difference if Audrey had known earlier that Xavier was dead? Somehow, he doubted it.
Asher had been giving Willow time to puzzle through the situation, but his waiting time was nearly up. At least he hadn’t been forced to pass any of his other siblings or Jace in the hall. He couldn’t take more questions. His ranch hands had gotten so bad that he’d volunteered to ride the fences earlier to be alone.
Asher paused outside the entrance to his suite. He wanted time to paste on a smile, so he could spend some quality time with his little girl. He didn’t want to admit that he needed to see one of her amazing smiles as much as she required a father who could protect her. Even now he wasn’t certain he could do that for her. If someone had gotten to Luna in her own home, how long would it be before someone reached his child in hers?
He pushed the door open.
“Is that you, Asher?” Dulcie called out as she emerged from the nursery carrying the baby. “Someone’s been waiting for her daddy.”
Harper squealed as she stretched her arms out to him.
Asher started toward her, but at the scream coming from downstairs, he froze.
“What was that?” Dulcie rushed toward the hall.
“No!” He lowered his voice. “Take Harper and hide. I’ll go see what happened.”
Turning, he stopped again, reached in his pocket and tossed his phone to the cook. “Call 911.”
As he ran down the grand stairway from the third floor to the second, he tried not to think about how recently he’d asked another woman to make that same call. Was someone else he loved in danger? Would he be too late to help this time?
When he glanced in both directions on the second-floor landing, he started down again. “Who screamed? Where are you?’
“It’s me, Asher.”
“Mom?”
“In here.”
She seemed to be calling from her suite, so he raced inside. From her scream, he would have expected blood or at least bruises. But from the look of the carefully decorated and always immaculate master bedroom, his mother was the only thing there that hadn’t been touched. Dresser drawers lay upside down, their contents scattered across the floor. Her mattress had been flipped off the bed. Even her antique hand mirror had been shattered on the bathroom tile.
“We’ve been robbed.”
He didn’t bother telling her how obvious that was. “How did they get inside?”
Asher took in the pile of handled boutique bags on the bed. “Were you out shopping?”
“Just for a few hours.”
“That’s all it took. How did they get past Jace?”
“Do you think the thugs overpowered him?”
He shook his head. “I didn’t see any sign of a struggle, at least at the front door. He probably just stepped away.”
Come to think of it, he hadn’t seen Jace all afternoon. That he’d been relieved not to have to deal with his possible brother’s questions earlier only made him feel guilty now. Where was he?
“Well, what about the alarm system? Was it on?”
She shook her head. “I don’t remember if I set it.”
But he already knew that answer. They often left it off during the day when staff and family members were regularly coming and going.
“Do you think they’re still in the house?”
Asher shook his head. “No. Whoever broke in is long gone by now.”
“Who do you think could have done this?”
“I don’t know.” Was it the person who’d shot his father or involved Willow and him in a bogus baby-switch myster
y? Maybe it was the suspect who called in a bomb threat or who let Triple R cattle escape. Could one individual have accomplished so many crimes without dying from exhaustion?
He scanned the top of his mother’s dresser, but the bric-a-brac that was usually there had been swiped to the floor.
“What did they get?”
His mother rushed into her side of the his-and-hers closets and dressing room and pushed aside the sliding wall that covered the safe. By the time he reached her, she was already putting in the combination. She pulled open the door, moved jewelry boxes around and then sighed.
“The burglar didn’t make it in here. My good jewelry is fine. But I had some expensive pieces on the dresser. They’re all gone along with some cash I had lying on top.”
“Cash, Mom? Really?”
“I trust our staff. Implicitly. At least I did.” She returned to the main room. “We should call the police.”
“I already had Dulcie call from upstairs, but we’d better let them know it’s not a murder or an active-shooter incident they’re coming into.” He reached out his hand. “Give me your phone.”
She grabbed her purse off the bed and handed her cell to him.
“At least you remembered to take this with you , or it would already be gone and wiped back to factory settings by now.”
He dialed the emergency dispatcher to let police know that though an officer was still needed, the situation at the Triple R wasn’t critical. Then he dialed his own phone to let Dulcie know she could bring Harper out.
Just as the cook handed his daughter into his arms in the entryway, Marlowe came through the front door, followed by Grayson.
“What’s going on this time?” Grayson asked immediately.
Marlowe planted her hands on her hips. “Yeah, what now?”
“Better check your suites,” Asher told them. “We’ve been robbed.”
Grayson climbed the stairs to the second floor. After handing Harper to his mother, Asher took the elevator with Marlowe to the third. Like in their parents’ suite, Marlowe’s drawers had been emptied on the floor. She rushed over to her bedside dresser that was still intact.