Colton Family Rescue Read online

  Don’t be stupid. He’s Fowler Colton. You know what he’s capable of.

  Still, she hadn’t wanted T.C. to go see the Colton attorney for her. She was afraid that would simply bring the law down on her, but T.C. had rather sourly explained that was why he was going to this lawyer, who was as ethics-challenged as Fowler himself. Besides, he had no intention of telling Barrington he knew where she was. Which, he’d added, was why he was going alone, that and the fact that she might be seen and recognized.

  The horse’s head came up, his attention obviously caught by something to the west. She turned, and saw the small haze of dust rising in the air. Too big for a horse, she reasoned, so not one of the hands stopping by. A vehicle, then. Her nerves, already jangled, tightened up another notch. It was a long moment of tension before she could make out that it was T.C.’s vehicle. Since he was leaving Flash here, he’d had a ranch hand drive it out here this morning, then had dropped the man off back at the bunkhouse on his way into town. The pressure eased, and she could breathe again.

  Emma looked from the approaching car to her. “Mommy?”

  “What, sweetie?”

  “Do we get to stay here?”

  Get to, not have to, Jolie noticed. Flash was obviously working some equine magic.

  “For a while,” she answered. “I don’t know how long.” Or if it was a huge mistake...

  The blue SUV slowed as it got closer, and the small cloud of dust it kicked up faded away. T.C. brought it carefully to a halt beneath the tree. Fowler would have careened in and skidded to a stop, gleeful at spraying dust, dirt and rocks over everything and everyone in the vicinity. She’d seen him do it often enough. And no one dared call him on it.

  Except T.C.

  It came back to her in a rush, that day when Fowler’s reckless driving had sent up a spray of debris that had spooked a young horse T.C. had been working with. Fowler hadn’t even had a chance to get out of his expensive imported car before his brother was there and hauling him out of the vehicle by the lapels of his custom-designed suit.

  She’d been in the kitchen, only able to see the action, not hear what was being said, but obviously Fowler’s reaction to his brother’s anger hadn’t been satisfactory, because T.C. put him on the ground with a fierce punch to the jaw. And then he’d grabbed a handful of gravel and pelted him with it. By the time Fowler scrambled to his feet, red-faced and screaming at T.C., she’d been grinning. Something she’d had to stop when Fowler stormed in demanding an ice pack and thoroughly cursing out his crazy little half brother. With a lot of emphasis on the “half.”

  And later, when T.C. came in for lunch, she’d made sure it was his favorite roast beef sandwich with some of the fries he usually told them not to bother with. And she had carefully placed a small pebble on the rim of his sandwich plate. The instant he saw it his gaze shot to her face. She’d smiled. He’d smiled back. And winked.

  And so it had begun...

  She shook off the memories. She hadn’t allowed herself to think about that day for four years now. It hurt too much. And now, for the first time, she was wondering about her decision. Not that she’d had to do what she did, for Emma’s sake—she was rock-solid on that—but about what might have happened had she done as T.C. had said, trusted him enough to stand and fight.

  She drew in a deep breath. She knew what would have happened. His parents would never have backed down—Eldridge Colton hadn’t built an empire on changing his mind—and T.C. would have been right where she’d known he would end up, caught in an unbearable position. Oh, he would have fought them, she knew that. But the cost would have been horrendous, and probably would have doomed them anyway.

  He would have become bitter, and ended up questioning if it had all been worth it, and she couldn’t have borne that. Nor could she have subjected Emma to it. He would have done his best to hide it from the girl, but Emma was smart and perceptive, and eventually she would have figured it out. Someday she would have realized what he had lost, and that it was because of them.

  He got out of the SUV and headed toward them. Emma called out a happy “look at me!” greeting just as Flash whinnied a welcome, as well.

  “I am looking at you,” he said as he got to the corral fence. “And you look great up there.”

  “I slipped once,” the girl confessed.

  T.C. handed Jolie the planner without even looking at her. She wondered if he even remembered giving it to her, the birthday that seemed an eon ago.

  “What did you do?” T.C. asked the child.

  “I grabbed his mane.” She looked concerned. “Does that hurt him?”

  “Did he jump? Or snort?”

  She shook her head. “He jus’ looked at me.”

  “Then I’d say it didn’t hurt too much.”

  “I won’t do it again,” she promised solemnly.

  “How about only in emergencies,” T.C. suggested.

  “’Kay,” Emma agreed happily, throwing her arms around the horse’s neck in a hug, at least as far as she could reach.

  He would have been a great father for Emma, Jolie thought, moisture stinging her eyes. She had to look away or she was afraid she would lose the battle not to weep at their loss.

  She focused on the planner, asking without looking at him, “Did you check the date?”

  “Of course not.”

  She realized he meant he would consider that prying where he didn’t belong. She felt a pang of longing for the time when it wouldn’t have been prying, when everything she had and thought had been open to him, and when he had let her in the same way. He had answered any question, told her about things that happened in ways that made her laugh or shake her head at the so different world he lived in.

  She had only later realized what a risk that was, for a Colton. How so many tried to get inside so they could use the Colton name or wealth for their own ends. She couldn’t imagine living like that, never knowing for sure if someone had an ulterior motive. How had he ever believed in her, a mere kitchen worker? How had he ever decided she wasn’t one of them, the hangers-on, the climbers of various sorts?

  “What?” he asked, looking at her quizzically.

  “Just wondering,” she said softly, “why you ever trusted me. Not to be one of the multitude who just wanted what they could get from a Colton.”

  His expression changed, tightened, as if he were questioning that himself. “So, tell me,” he said after a moment, “how is what you did different from what one of them would do?”

  She didn’t answer. They’d been here before. She just looked at Emma, who was now busily trying to tie strands of Flash’s mane into a bow.

  She heard T.C. let out a breath. “Maybe it was just rebellion,” he muttered offhandedly. “I knew what my parents thought, so of course I had to think the opposite.”

  Jolie’s own breath stopped in her throat. For some reason this had never occurred to her, that this might be the reason behind...them. She knew he had truly cared for her, she couldn’t doubt that, but had he chosen her out of some kind of youthful mutiny?

  “Thanks,” she said, her voice unbearably tight. “For shattering the memories.” Even as she said it she told herself it was no more than she deserved. But that didn’t ease the pain.

  “I think you did that.”

  He was right, but that didn’t lessen this particular sting. “I may have had to make a horrible choice that destroyed us, but I never doubted that we’d been real. That’s what made it horrible.”

  “Mommy?”

  Emma was looking at them with concern, and she realized the child had picked up on the emotional current that had rippled to life between them.

  “It’s okay, sweetie. It’s just one of those grown-up things you don’t have to worry about.”

  The girl looked from her to T.C., then back. “Don�
��t wanna grow up,” she said decisively.

  “Amen,” T.C. muttered.

  Emma seemed to accept that and go back to cooing over her newly beloved Flash, but Jolie stayed unsettled for the rest of the afternoon. The only bright spot in the gloom came when she’d checked her datebook and found that, as she’d thought, the seventh had been the date of the governor’s fund-raiser at the hotel. She’d worked the banquet room kitchen that night, seven hours straight, with any number of witnesses who could swear she’d been there doing cleanup with them at the time Eldridge Colton went missing.

  “Good,” T.C. said when she’d told him. “Make a list for the sheriff, and that should be that.”

  He said it like it was any other business or ranch chore that needed to be done. At this point she wasn’t sure why he was staying. They weren’t speaking much, and what he’d said before hovered between them.

  At least, in her mind it did. She wasn’t sure what he was thinking about. Early on, it had been a joke between them that every time she thought he’d gone quiet because he was having second thoughts about their relationship, he’d really been pondering when to have the blacksmith come out, since it took a good week to get through all the Colton horses that needed to be shod.

  Emma resisted going to sleep that night. She fretted, fussed, even whined, which she rarely did. Thinking perhaps the child was sensing her own mood, she tucked her into the bed and stepped out onto the porch. With an effort, she did it without glancing at T.C., who was in the reading chair, making notes about something.

  She stared out into the twilight, rubbing up and down her arms as if it were chilly, when in fact she doubted it had dropped below seventy degrees yet. The cold, she knew, was still coming from inside her, and had nothing to do with actual temperature and everything to do with pain and loss and broken memories.

  She didn’t know how long she’d been out here when she heard it. But her chest tightened almost unbearably as the sound of a rich baritone voice reached her, singing a quiet, sweet folk lullaby. A Texas song, one she’d heard so often, but never more sweetly than in his unexpectedly beautiful voice. The words washed over her, bringing back the times she’d heard him sing it to Emma when she was just a babe in his arms.

  “...when you wake, you shall have, all the pretty little horses, blacks and bays, dapple and gray...”

  She remembered the times she’d told him he’d missed his calling, that he could have been a singer. He’d laughed, saying he had neither the urge nor the drive to make it in that particular world.

  She couldn’t help herself, she got up and looked inside. He was seated on the edge of the bed, rubbing Emma’s back as he sang to her. She knew the scene wouldn’t be believed by those who only knew him by reputation. And she also knew this proved he’d spoken the truth before, that no matter the situation between them, he would ever and always care for Emma.

  The relief of that was almost overwhelming. All the time and pain seemed to vanish in that instant, vanquished by a man singing to a child. She sagged against the doorjamb as she listened and watched, storing every second of this precious vision away against the inevitable time when they would be without him again.

  He stopped, and she stifled an instinctive protest. Only then did she realize Emma had gone to sleep, just as she always had when he did this for her.

  He stood up, turned and saw her in the doorway. Something flashed across his face, in his eyes, something intense, almost fierce. And hot.

  She knew what it was. Knew she wasn’t the only one who remembered the times he had sung Emma soundly to sleep so they could steal away for some very private time.

  And there it was, alive and crackling between them.

  He crossed the room in three long strides, grasped her arms. He took another step, propelling them back out onto the porch, never taking his eyes off her. Heat blasted through her, making the earlier chill a silly phantom.

  And then his mouth was on hers, fierce, demanding, and her heart leaped with the joy of sweet recognition. This man, only this man, had been able to do this to her with merely a kiss, wake her entire being to prepare for the soaring flight she had only ever taken with him. And if there were murky, less than sweet motivations behind it, if the pure, scorching response was tainted by what she had done, by what had happened now, by what he had just said, then so be it.

  He was a bottom-line kind of guy, and she’d known that all along. She’d expected that her payment would come due. And in that moment, with him looking down at her with such heat and need in his eyes, with the memories of how it had been between them sending an echoing need along every nerve in her body, the only thing she could think was that she would pay it.

  Gladly.

  Chapter 21

  How had he survived these years without her? How had he convinced himself this had been less than it was?

  The instant his lips touched hers, it was as if the four years since he’d done it last had vanished. Fire erupted, his body slammed to attention and his breath jammed up in his throat.

  He pulled her against him, hard. Deepened the kiss, probing, aching even more when she gave him access and he ran his tongue over the even ridge of her teeth. She tasted him in turn, the barest brush, and he felt it down to his toes.

  Back then he’d never really tried to understand why it was this woman, and only this woman, who could rev him up so much and so fast; he’d just been happy he’d found her.

  Now he was face-to-face—and body-to-body—with the reality that nothing had changed, that she still had that power. And the long absence had only intensified it.

  He could feel every inch of her against him, and was unable to resist the need to slide his hands over her even as he still kissed her. He found his favorite spot, that indentation of waist above her hip that seemed made for his hands. Then he slipped his hands farther, cupping her and pressing her against his fiercely aroused body.

  At last he broke the kiss, but only to say on a gasp, “Jolie.” It was all he could get out.

  “Yes.”

  It was a breathy, low-pitched reply, and it sent another burst of heat through him, along nerves already brought to roaring life by that kiss. Under normal circumstances he knew exactly how he’d interpret that yes. But things were far from normal right now. And he wanted no mistakes or misunderstandings, not now, not between them. “Yes to what?”

  “I knew this time would come.”

  He wasn’t sure he liked that. “That sure of yourself?”

  She shook her head. “That sure of our...chemistry. Even if...”

  “Even if what?”

  She let out a tiny sigh. “Even if the rest was never real.”

  He drew back, frowning. “Never real? How can you say that?”

  She blinked. “I didn’t. You did.”

  “I never said that.” He was genuinely puzzled, and more than a little stung that she would say he had.

  “You said the entire time we spent together was a lie.”

  “I meant you were lying,” he said, just managing to stop himself from the humiliating admission that everything he had felt then had been 100 percent real.

  “Then how about, ‘Maybe it was just rebellion. I knew what my parents thought, so of course I had to think the opposite’?” she quoted back to him.

  It was his turn to blink. Because he had said that—damn, how did she remember things word for word like that?—but he hadn’t meant it like she was saying it. “But that was just about my parents.”

  “That you took up with me just to rebel against your parents is only about them?”

  “No, I—” He broke off, shoved a hand through his hair in exasperation, took a deep breath and tried again. “I won’t deny it might have spurred me in your direction.”

  Her mouth—that luscious, beautiful mouth—quirked up at one c
orner. “Thanks for not lying about it.”

  He grimaced. “Once I got to know you, it didn’t matter anymore.”

  This was insane, he thought, wondering why he was defending a casual comment that had been nothing more than idle musing. And to her, the woman who had walked out. She was the one who’d left, so why the hell did it matter to her if it had been real in the first place?

  But he found it mattered to him that she could even doubt it. Which was also insane, because it wasn’t like they were going to pick up where they’d left off. He was doing this for Emma, that was all.

  Of course, none of that explained why he’d gone into overdrive the moment he touched her.

  Chemistry, she’d said. Well, they certainly had that. And then some. Together they’d been hotter than a Texas summer. And his gut—and body parts somewhat lower—were telling him they still were.

  “Look, it was a throwaway, Jolie. I was focused on your alibi, and how to present it to the cops so you could get out from under Fowler’s crazy. Emma didn’t need to lose her mother after all she’s been through.”

  She smiled at him then. It was a soft, loving expression, and even though he knew it was at just the mention of the daughter she clearly loved more than herself, he couldn’t help remembering the days when she had looked the same way at him.

  “I know you did it—are doing it—for Emma. And I will always thank you for that.”

  Something dark and nasty stabbed at him then. “Wait. Did you say yes just now because of that?”

  “I owe you—”

  “You owe me nothing,” he snapped, stung more than he would have thought possible that she would consent because she thought she owed it to him. Stung more than he should be, he realized. After all, she didn’t matter to him anymore, did she? But if that was true, why was he so ticked off?

  “But I—”

  She stopped when he abruptly let go of her. “So,” he said, pulling back and crossing his arms over his chest as he stared down at her, “you’ve resorted to that, have you? Paying debts with your body?”