“Selina? Are you out of your mind?” Ace erupted, rocketing to his feet so quickly that Sierra shrank back, abruptly reassessing her earlier assumptions about the soft, rich man she’d thought to find here, a previously pampered forty-year-old heir who’d been unable to accept the abruptness of his change in status. “That woman doesn’t want to help me. She’s never wanted anything except to feather her own nest and—Hell, for all I know, she’s the one who shot my father and tried to pin it on me in the first place.”
“Sit down right now,” Sierra ordered, pointing the gun squarely at his chest. “Or so help me, I will make your stepmother very sorry that she didn’t specify that I had to return you in one piece to collect the bounty.”
“She’d throw you a party if you shot me. Believe me, from the moment she weaseled her way into the family, that woman has never, for a single moment, had anyone’s best interests but her own in mind.” Ace shook his head, his eyes darkening with fury. “Marrying my dad after my mother died and playing our stepmother for a hot five minutes was only a means to an end for her and nothing more.”
“So she was never the maternal type? That’s what you’re saying?”
Ace scoffed and waved the question off, bitterness twisting his expression. “She might’ve had my father fooled at one time—and for all I know, she still has something on him, considering how she’s managed to hold on to her job at Colton Oil and the nice house he built for her on ranch property—but believe me, she’s not fooling anybody else.”
Sierra caught her breath, recalling her own suspicions. The rational, rehearsed-sounding explanations the polished businesswoman had given, along with the outsized bounty Selina had offered, hadn’t jibed with the raw avarice gleaming in the cool depths of her eyes.
Ordinarily, Sierra would have asked more questions. Or even trusted her instincts and walked away from the highly irregular agreement. But the truth was, she’d been desperate, more than desperate, and the deal, coming when it had, had seemed like a miracle from heaven. Or from whatever Great Beyond accepted broken-down gambling addicts like her father.
“She’s never given a damn about any of my father’s children,” Ace said. “For her, it’s always been about getting her hooks into the family fortune. And I promise you, whatever she’s paying you to do is part of the next round in her game plan, because she has to know that we’ll toss her off the property in a minute if my father—if he—”
He stopped himself abruptly, his forehead creasing with worry. Sinking back down to the sofa, he asked quietly, “Tell me I haven’t missed something while I’ve been stuck here, that my father hasn’t—that he isn’t worse. Or even—I keep checking online when I’m able, but I know that sometimes, in cases like these, the hospitals and police withhold information.”
“As far as I know,” she said, “there’s been no change in his condition.”
He sighed, some of the tension draining from his face. “Thank God for that.”
“I suppose you’re sorry then, about what happened,” she said, reminded of how many times she’d heard such sentiments from killers in the past. Maybe, she supposed, they even meant what they were saying. But in her world decent people didn’t shoot or stab or strangle the people they loved when they got angry. They didn’t leave them grievously wounded while they fled like cowards from the consequence of their actions.
“Of course I’m sorry someone did this to him. Did this to all of us,” Ace blurted, his deep voice shaking with emotion. “I didn’t hurt my father. I never...no matter how upset we both were—you have to believe me.”
She shrugged a shoulder. “No offense, Ace, but I’m not really the person you need to waste your breath convincing. You’ll get an attorney, I imagine a first-rate one with all your money, and he or she will—”
“I love my dad,” he insisted, his dark gaze never wavering. “I always will, and he’ll always be the man I think of, the ideal I’d want to emulate, should I ever get the chance to be a father.”
Though she was well aware that Payne Colton wasn’t Ace’s biological father, it struck her that Ace’s words still resonated in a way that his stepmother’s hadn’t. But Sierra had run across plenty of people who were perfectly capable of harming a family member and then pretending—even to themselves—that it had never happened. Or praying that the victim would pull through so the charges they themselves faced would be limited to assault rather than murder.
“You’ll get your chance later to explain all this,” she assured him, eager to move things along. Yet, she couldn’t stop thinking of how he’d said, should I ever get the chance to be a father. Her conscience prickled but didn’t stop her from reminding him, “I still have to take you in now.”
He shook his head. “You can’t. Don’t you understand? Selina only wants me dragged in to take the heat off her. Or she’s setting me up somehow. Probably planning some accident to take me out before I ever go to trial.”
“If that’s really the case,” Sierra assured him, “you’re better off in jail. I’ll see you get there safely.”
“I’m safer here, where I can keep working on finding the real shooter and figuring out exactly who’s behind all this.”
“I hate to break it to you, but that ship has sailed.” Sierra lifted her chin. “Even if I wanted to pretend I’d never seen you, when I take on a contract, I deliver.”
“If it’s professional pride,” Ace said, “what pride could there be in doing the bidding of a conniving schemer like Selina?”
“Listen, Colton, I’ve just met you. And even you have to admit, you’ve got a lot of very compelling reasons to lie your head off at this point.”
“Then pick up a damned phone. Ask anybody in the family. They’ll all tell you the same thing about that woman. She’s clearly up to something. And she means to destroy me, or maybe the whole family, to get it.”
Not my circus, not my monkeys, Sierra told herself, recalling one of her father’s favorite proverbs. No matter how compelling a case Ace Colton made, or how ridiculously hot he looked doing it, it didn’t change that fact.
But there was something in his expression—or maybe it was guilt over the secret she’d learned before coming to look for him, the secret she was keeping from him—that had her explaining, “It’s nothing personal, but you’re not the only one with father issues. And mine are about to get a whole lot messier if I don’t deliver you and collect the bounty Selina promised me tonight.”
“What could possibly be messier than having a framed man—or maybe even a dead one—on your conscience?”
She scowled, her stomach souring at the reminder of her most pressing problem.
“Losing a leg to my father’s loan shark,” she said bluntly, “all because he’s hell-bent on making an example out of me.”
* * *
As tough a customer as the bounty hunter holding him at gunpoint appeared to be, Ace couldn’t miss the flicker of fear in the depths of her green eyes warring with her apparent need to appear strong.
Yet, he sensed an opening, too, like a hairline fault in a rock face that would allow a skilled climber a toehold.
Praying that he wouldn’t plummet, he tried, “Your father’s loan shark? How’s that work?”
She tensed visibly, bristling at the question. “I don’t owe you some longwinded explanation. It’s enough that I tell you we’re going to—”
“You’re right.” He shrugged. “I don’t need a damned thing. But it looks to me like you could use to tell it. And why not to me? After all, who am I but some attempted murder suspect with a bounty on his head?”
Having said his piece, he fell silent, giving her the space to work it out for herself. If he failed, he had lost nothing. But if she opened up to him, he figured he might find some avenue to somehow talk his way out of this mess.
“You know, you’re not the only one who loves your old man,” she
said accusingly before her voice went husky with emotion. “I loved mine, too, still do, God rest his stubborn soul. He taught me everything I know about the bounty hunting business, most of what I know about men. And everything I’ve learned about picking up on human weakness. The problem was, he was stone blind to his own.”
“We’ve all got our blind spots,” Ace said. He’d erupted in anger after his world had crumbled instead of using his head and working harder to figure out whatever angle the woman who’d apparently switched him at birth had been playing.
“Part of it was Vegas,” she continued, “that whole world where I grew up, and the cash, the flash and the high rollers he was always drawn to, especially after my mom left us. By the time I realized he was keeping everything afloat, even feeding the two of us, on borrowed money, he owed a small fortune. I did my best to help out, worked my tail off in the family business to pay down the debt, got him into a gambling rehab program, but it only got worse and worse until...”
Sighing heavily, she reached up to pinch the bridge of her nose, the gun drooping a little in her right hand.
Ace wondered if she might eventually drop her guard enough for him to turn the tables.
“For a while,” she continued, “it really seemed like things might work out. He was doing better. We were—until the cancer got bad.”
“I’m sorry,” he said reflexively, unable to keep his mind from going back, however briefly, to the hell of losing his mother when he and his siblings were just kids. Though Sierra was a woman grown, it sounded as if she had no other family, no one else at all, to lean on.
She nodded in reply. “The worse the news from his doctors, the more he needed an outlet for his stress—and the more convinced he became that he was on the brink of scoring that one big win that would finally turn everything around. It was so infuriating, listening to him claiming he was doing it for me when he was only making things worse.”
Ace told himself he’d been alone for too damned long, getting sucked into her story this way. “I totally get that. Ainsley and our siblings could never understand our father’s addiction to Selina. His refusal to banish her from our lives, no matter what she did.”
“By the time my father died,” Sierra continued, her gaze so distant that it made him wonder if she’d even heard him, “he owed doctors, the hospital—but the worst was the hundreds of thousands, with interest compounding daily, he had on the books of the most cutthroat loan shark in Nevada.”
“But those debts were your father’s,” Ace said, trying not to let her catch him watching her gun hand droop a little farther, “not yours.”
“Try telling Ice Veins that.”
“Ice Veins?” Ace shook his head. “You’re kidding. The name sounds like something out of some old gangster movie. With cases of machine guns and crates of bootleg whiskey.”
Sierra shrugged. “You don’t get a reputation like his by being subtle. Or reasonable, either. You would think he’d like to keep me in one piece just to keep his payments coming, but he took offense last month—extreme offense—when I refused to turn loose a bail jumper named Eddie Harris who happened to be his favorite nephew.”
“Maybe under the circumstances you should’ve considered—”
She shook her head, a hard, emerald fire sparking in her eyes as the gun twitched back to its full, upright position. “My dad might’ve owed the guy, but that doesn’t mean that Ice Veins owns me. And I’m not letting a homicide suspect, no matter who he is, walk for anybody. Especially not someone like Eddie, who’s been accused of other killings in the past.”
Ace’s heart fell. Because that was all he would ever be to the beautiful Sierra Madden. Another scumbag suspect to be handed over. Why would you even care what this woman thinks?
“Immediately after that,” she said, “Ice Veins called in the rest of my note, said I needed to pay off the final chunk by two days ago, or he was going to personally see to it that I came up a leg short.”
“A leg? He threatened to cut off your leg?”
“Smash it, sever it, shoot it... I didn’t ask for the specifics. All I know is I won’t be working, or making further payments, without two good legs to stand on. Which means I’m a dead woman if I can’t come up with the twenty-five thousand dollars that Selina promised me for bringing you back to your family.”
Twenty-five thousand dollars? Selina clearly wanted him back—and no doubt, locked up—in a big way, if she was willing to cough up that kind of cash. And it was crystal clear that the bounty hunter wasn’t about to—and couldn’t—set him free with her own health, possibly her life, hanging in the balance.
“So what if I told you,” he said, weighing the possibilities, “I’d be willing to pay you that same twenty-five grand. Get this gangster off your back forever, if you’ll only—”
“You have the money here?” she asked, the skin crinkling around her nose. “Just lying around this bunker?”
“Well, no,” he claimed. A knee-jerk reaction, when the truth was more complicated. And far too dangerous to share with a woman with a gun and such a pressing need. “Not exactly, but—”
“But nothing. I haven’t been in this business for a dozen years without having desperate fugitives try to buy me off before. I suppose you think I’m dumb enough to take a personal check?”
He made a scoffing sound, thinking quickly about how would be the best way to do this without guaranteeing that he turned his bunker hideaway into his tomb. Because he might feel for Sierra’s predicament, might even find her sexy, with those big green eyes and that tight little body that could so handily knock him on his ass, but he’d be a fool to trust the woman with his life.
“You can handle an online transfer, can’t you?” he asked. “I can’t access my accounts from here. We’ll need to get well away so I can use my cell without leading the authorities straight here.”
He’d been fantasizing for weeks about returning to the surface. Feeling the wind whispering against his skin, smelling the fresh scents of the underbrush and seeing the outlines of the foothills, along with the variegated greens of the foliage at this elevation. But he knew that the moment he powered it up again, his phone would ping the nearest cell towers. And surely the police would be working with his telecom provider, waiting to spring into action the moment they could get a bead on his location.
She looked doubtful. “I don’t know, Ace. If I’m seen anywhere with you and I don’t turn you in like I agreed to—”
“It’s not like I can afford to take that kind of a chance, either,” he said. “That’s why I took the precaution of stocking this place with some things I might need in case I had to disguise myself.”
“You sure you’re only a first-time fugitive?” Amusement quirked the corners of her mouth. “Because you’ve really done a first-rate job on your prepping.”
He snorted and shrugged. “It’s the CEO in me. I’ve always been a big believer in the value of insurance. Let’s see if I have anything here in my bag of tricks that might work as a disguise for you, too.”
Pulling a duffel from one of the boxes on the shelves, he reached to unzip it.
“Not so fast,” she warned. “Push that over to me first, will you? Slowly.”
Looking up at her, he said, “Listen, I can assure you that you’re holding the only gun I had with me in the bunker.”
Red-blond brows, a shade darker than her hair, rose. “Forgive me if I need to make sure you haven’t planted a little insurance elsewhere.”
As she squatted down and checked through the bag’s contents, he said, “If I give you the money for this loan shark, I’ll need your promise you won’t lead the police to my bunker’s entrance.”
Sierra pulled out a cowboy hat, followed by an oversize snap-buttoned shirt and a pair of Western boots. “And you’re willing to take me at my word on that?”
He offered a half smile. �
��If you won’t sell out your honor for a man like Ice Veins, I have some hope, maybe this much—” he pinched his fingers about a half inch apart “—that you won’t do a woman like Selina such a favor.”
“I’ll tell you what,” Sierra offered. “You drop that money into my account, and I’ll make myself scarce. I promise. I’ll take off for Vegas before sunup. And I won’t volunteer any help to the police with their investigation.”
“But if you’re brought in and questioned?”
She huffed out her disbelief. “You aren’t seriously asking me to outright lie to the cops for you? Come on, Colton. I’ve already told you what I will do. What I can do if I want to keep my license.”
He stared a challenge at her, certain that all he’d have to do was wait before his silence and the lure of desperately needed money would convince her to give up even more. It was a tactic that had worked for him more often than not during business negotiations.
But it was clear from Sierra’s expression that she wasn’t falling for it. Clear enough that he dropped the idea of sweetening the deal with an additional sum of money almost as quickly as it occurred.
“You’ve heard my terms.” She rose from her seat, the gun held firmly in her hand. “So are we still dealing? Or do we make the drive to the police station instead?”
He sighed, realizing that trusting in this deal—and whatever luck the universe might have on offer—remained his best shot to steer clear of whatever his loving stepmother was plotting. It was his best chance, too, to buy himself the time to figure out whether Selina might be somehow linked to the woman who had apparently switched him with the real Colton heir—or his father’s shooter.
“All right, then,” he agreed. “Let’s do this disguise thing.”
“Just don’t make any quick moves or do anything you haven’t vetted with me first,” Sierra warned him, “or your particular get-up may involve an eye patch and extra bandaging...”
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Shielded in the Shadows Page 24