Colton Family Rescue Read online

  “It’s not that they don’t believe her, it’s that she’s able to give so little to go on. And no one else saw a woman in the area. Plus, a crime like this isn’t usually the way a woman would go about a murder. But I heard John Eckhart caught the case. He’s a good detective, one of the best. He’ll—”

  “Liddy,” Emma said suddenly.

  Jolie looked at the child on her lap. “What, honey?”

  “Her eyes were like Liddy’s.”

  Officer Wilcox looked at Jolie, clearly puzzled.

  “Lydia,” Jolie explained. “She’s an anime character Emma loves.” Her brow furrowed, and then she smoothed back Emma’s tousled hair. “Do you mean the color, honey?”

  “Green.”

  “Well, now,” Officer Wilcox said with a wide smile. “That’s brilliant, Emma.”

  The flicker of a smile curved Emma’s mouth. Wilcox was obviously a very kind woman. Jolie gave a brief, silent thanks, as she always did, to Art Reagan, the beat cop who’d pulled her out of a morass of trouble and helped set her on a better path. And who had kept her from forever being wary of anyone who wore the uniform and badge. It was he who’d gotten her the job at the Colton Valley Ranch. He was distantly related to Bettina Morely, the cook there, and she’d given Jolie the chance on his say-so.

  She felt a sudden burst of longing, something she hadn’t felt—hadn’t allowed herself to feel—in a very long time. A longing for the safety and happiness and hope she’d felt for that idyllic and painfully short time. Right now especially for the safety. And for the man who’d made her feel that way, that she—and her little girl—would be safe. She wanted more than anything to feel that way again.

  She yanked her frazzled brain off that fruitless path.

  “Do you know who she is?” Jolie asked. Was, she amended silently, grimly.

  “Can’t say yet.” Officer Wilcox looked up, assessing her.

  “What?”

  “Just thinking...”

  “What?” Jolie asked again. When the woman hesitated, she added, “My little girl has witnessed an awful crime, and was threatened herself.”

  “Might have been worse, if you hadn’t gotten there so quickly.”

  Jolie didn’t need the woman to remind her the killer could have broken a car window and gotten to Emma. That her little girl could have been killed right then. She suppressed a shudder and went on.

  “You know what witnessing something like this could do to her,” Jolie said. Probably leave her with an indelible, lifetime, horrible memory long term, and likely nightmares and skittishness or worse short term. None of which she wanted to say aloud in front of Emma, for fear it might plant the ideas. But she was guessing this officer would understand that; she seemed a very perceptive and insightful sort. And she was a mom. “If she can deal with that, I can deal with whatever you’re thinking.”

  Officer Wilcox glanced over her shoulder to where the van was finally pulling away. Then she looked back at Jolie, rather intently. “She was about five foot eight, I’d say a hundred and twenty-five pounds. Long dark hair. Gray eyes.”

  Jolie’s breath caught as it registered. She went very still as her gaze shifted to the departing van. Her arms tightened around Emma, enough so the girl made a little sound of protest. She made herself ease up, tried to suppress the shiver that went through her.

  Five-eight. A hundred twenty-five pounds. Long dark hair. Gray eyes.

  Wilcox could have been describing her.

  * * *

  “She came back for more money, of course.”

  T.C. barely heard his brother’s gloating words. He was staring out at the city he loved, the city he’d thought Jolie long gone from. In truth, he’d half suspected she was long gone from Texas altogether. But perhaps he should have known better; he’d been Texas born and bred just as she had, and the blood of Texians ran in her veins just as it did in his. They might succeed elsewhere, might even flourish, but there would always be a part of them that longed for this unique, amazing place.

  “I told the cops she has a huge motive. I’ll bet the old man turned her down when she came at him for more money, and she killed him.”

  T.C. knew Fowler wanted him to react, so he kept his mouth shut.

  “As if what Mom and Dad gave her back then to stay away from you wasn’t enough. Greedy little bi—”

  “Shut the hell up, Fowler.”

  He knew the instant he said it, it was a mistake. And Fowler proved him right by practically crowing. “Ha! I knew it, you fool. I knew you’d never gotten over that little slut!”

  T.C. spun around to stare at his brother. When he spoke, his voice was as cold as a rare Texas snow. “It’s going to take you longer to get over the bones I’m going to break if you don’t get your ass out of here.”

  They were nearly the same height, but T.C. was younger, stronger, and tougher—those parties Fowler tended toward, not to mention the overindulgences, softened a man—and they both knew it. They’d been involved in enough brawls growing up, and a few after that, that there was little doubt who would be left standing. Besides, Fowler no longer got his own hands dirty. He paid others to do his dirty work for him.

  Like someone to kidnap, or even kill, his own father?

  T.C. tried to quash the thought, but at this point he had few illusions about his family, in particular his ruthless brother.

  “Really?” Fowler said in that superior tone he adopted when someone called him on his obnoxiousness. “Resorting to physical abuse now?”

  “It’s more honest than your kind of abuse,” T.C. said, knowing he’d won the instant he heard the shift in attitude. In a moment Fowler would raise his nose and sniff, as if of course he was far above such tactics. When it happened, T.C. nearly laughed aloud. His brother was nothing if not predictable.

  Fowler left without another word. T.C. sat back down, and the sound of the desk chair shifting seemed abnormally loud in the quiet after their outburst.

  In typical Fowler fashion, he left the office door standing open. T.C. stared at it, thinking he should get up and close it, but in that moment even that simple action was beyond him. And then Hannah was there at the doorway, glancing in only long enough to roll her eyes expressively before pulling it shut for him. A thought jabbed at him; given Fowler’s penchant for revenge, the passive-aggressive kind, he wondered how he was treating Hannah. He’d have to ask, because he doubted the assistant would complain. He was going to give her that raise, whether or not she wanted or needed it, T.C. thought.

  He turned back to the windows, to the view he’d been contemplating before his brother burst in. It looked no different. There had been no change in the buildings, the reflections of the Texas sun on the glass edifices, the orb on the tower was still there.

  And yet it felt entirely different.

  How could the knowledge of the presence of one person among the million-plus that populated Dallas proper change everything? How could the thought that Jolie was here now make even the bright Texas sun seem different?

  Why was she here? Had she ever even left at all? Could she have been within reach, even, as he went about his life, went about Colton business? Fowler said he’d seen her, and he rarely left the Central Business District unless it was for some party or function, and T.C. would have known about that. No, his brother liked to stay where he could tell himself he was an uncrowned prince of industry, with frequent jaunts to Austin to walk the halls of power, as if he needed to prove to himself just how much weight the Colton name carried. But he hadn’t made one of those trips for a couple of weeks, and he’d obviously seen Jolie recently.

  Maybe even today.

  Damn, he should have asked him where. But that would have given Fowler more satisfaction than he was willing to provide.

  Besides, what did it matter where he’d seen her?
It wasn’t like suddenly finding out she was still here changed anything. Fowler might as well have seen her in Antarctica. She’d still taken money to abandon him and what they’d built together. She’d destroyed their future. In the end, to take the money and run had been her choice. She hadn’t even loved him enough to tell him face-to-face.

  And she’d taken sweet, precious little Emma with her.

  Emma.

  She’d be...four years old now. Halfway to five. He tried to picture the sunny little girl who had so captured his heart. What was she like? He had little contact with small children, so his only measure was trying to remember what his little sister Piper had been like then, when he was seven and she four. She had chattered, made wild leaps of imagination and pestered him with the question “why?” about seemingly everything, but that was about all he remembered.

  “The old man turned her down when she came at him for more money, and she killed him.”

  No. Not Jolie. Not the woman whose laugh could light up an entire room. Sure, she’d had a rough start in life and had gotten tangled up with some unsavory people, but she’d changed all that. For Emma, she’d remade her life. She would never intentionally hurt anyone. She just wouldn’t.

  Would she? Could he really say this when she’d done just that, and for the most venal of reasons—money?

  He spun the chair around, turning his back on the city that held the one woman he’d never been able to let go of.

  * * *

  “Don’t wanna go sleepy time.”

  Emma mumbled it against Jolie’s side as she sat on the wide window seat in the study alcove that served as the girl’s bedroom in the small apartment. The nearly full moon shone in through the large window, something the girl normally enjoyed, but not tonight.

  “I know,” Jolie said. She could only imagine what kind of nightmares the girl might be afraid of, and rightfully so. She’d thought of keeping Emma with her, but had had second thoughts that that might plant the idea of her having bad dreams, or worse, not being safe in her own bed.

  “What if I see her?”

  “Then I’ll be right here.”

  “You won’t let her get me?”

  “Never ever.”

  That seemed to comfort the girl. She snuggled closer. “I don’t like her. She looked at me mean.”

  “It’s all right,” Jolie began, automatically soothing before the sense of the child’s words sank in. Until now, it had always been the woman was mean-looking. But this...

  “She looked at you?”

  “When she saw me. In the car.”

  The killer had seen Emma? Knew Emma had seen her? Jolie had to steady herself. “Did she come toward you? Toward the car?”

  Emma nodded. “But I wasn’t scared, Mommy. ’Cuz you locked the door. She couldn’t get me. She ran away and you came.”

  Jolie hugged the girl even closer, her mind racing but her heart outpacing it.

  “Did she ever actually touch the car?” she asked, some vague idea of fingerprints stirring in the tiny portion of her brain that wasn’t flooded with panic.

  Emma shook her head. “She ran away,” the girl repeated.

  She could have killed my baby! She had a gun...why didn’t she just shoot...thank God, but why didn’t she... Emma is small. Maybe she couldn’t see her...that’s why she came toward the car...if I hadn’t come back when I did...why on earth did I leave her alone, even for seconds...? Never, ever again...

  The horror was building rapidly inside her, and mixed with a healthy dose of self-condemnation, she knew the child would sense it at any moment. She already seemed to be waking up rather than winding down for sleep. Jolie fought down the roiling emotions. “Put your head on the pillow, sweetie.”

  Reluctantly the child did so. “Sing me the song,” she said.

  Jolie’s breath caught. She hadn’t asked for it in a while. How odd—or perhaps not—that she asked for it today, the same day her own foolish brain had been so full of the man who had first sung it to her, surprising Jolie with his deep, beautiful voice gone soft and sweet as he sang—wonderfully, she thought—the song of all the pretty little horses to the babe in his arms.

  She often wondered if Emma remembered, too. If she remembered him. Or if somehow the song had just lodged in her memory and she didn’t associate it with anyone in particular; she just liked it.

  Her own voice wasn’t nearly as good, or as strong, as T. C. Colton’s, and she hated the way singing it brought him so close in her mind, but tonight she wasn’t surprised it was what Emma wanted.

  She tried, although she was shaken. She managed enough that her daughter relaxed into sleep. Grateful, both that Emma had gone to sleep and Jolie was able to stop the song that brought such painful memories, she stayed put for a long time. Finally she stood, but she knew her focus would be on Emma all night, in case the child did have those nightmares she herself feared.

  She called the police, getting a weary-sounding woman who was nevertheless polite, and if not comforting, at least reassuring. The woman would forward along the information—that the killer had seen the only witness—to the people handling the murder case first thing. She also took down Jolie’s address, assuring her they would keep her location on close patrol check.

  Far from sleep, she busied herself around the small apartment, gathering dirty clothes for washing, putting her day planner—the one she clung to for several reasons, including the man who had given it to her—in a desk drawer and assembling Emma’s lunch for tomorrow. If she had the choice, the girl wouldn’t go anywhere near the day care. But Jolie didn’t want to make things worse by freaking out and have Emma sense it and become more frightened herself. And she had to work, so she had little choice.

  “I wasn’t scared, Mommy. ’Cuz you locked the door. She couldn’t get me.”

  A shudder went through her. She felt the crash coming and quickly put everything away. She returned to the living area, where she pulled Emma’s favorite item, the big bluebonnet-blue chair, over toward the alcove where she could hear easily. She sank down into the cushioned softness, only then letting it all wash over her.

  For a long time she simply sat there, shaking. She felt as if the ceiling fan were turned on, although it wasn’t. She thought of getting up and checking the thermostat, but she knew what she’d see. It might be October, but this was Texas; it was hardly cold. The chill was in her, not the room.

  Emma. Her precious baby, the only thing that really, truly mattered in her world.

  She drew her feet up, curled her legs under her and settled in. She wasn’t going anywhere tonight. She would doze here. She didn’t want to go too deeply asleep in case Emma awoke, frightened.

  She only wished she had a way to turn off her tumbling thoughts. But it was impossible to avoid the harsh reality; her little girl had witnessed a green-eyed woman kill another woman in cold blood, and the killer knew it. Jolie wondered if this would leave her child forever terrified of green eyes.

  A vision of other green eyes, those belonging to the man she had hoped to spend her life with, drifted through her tangled mind. Funny how eyes that were so cool and dismissive in his mother, Whitney Colton, could be so different in him. His gaze had been sometimes amused, sometimes thoughtful, occasionally angry, but always powerfully male. And never, ever cold in the way his mother’s had been the day she had insisted Jolie was nowhere good enough for her son, and ordered her off Colton Valley Ranch.

  She yanked her thoughts out of that well-worn track, even as she acknowledged the irony that thinking about her daughter seeing a murder was the only thing powerful enough to do it.

  That, and the fact that the victim bore a distinct resemblance to herself. Although that was merely an afterthought to her. Everything was, except her little girl’s safety.

  At last she slipped into fretful sleep, a
nd it was she who had the nightmares, images of the lifeless woman whose name she didn’t even know, lying in a pool of blood, staring at the cloudless sky. In the dreamworld, she could only move in slow motion, as if she were underwater, despite her desperation to get to her daughter. When she finally got to the car and opened the door, Emma turned to look at her. She was also drenched in blood.

  Emma screamed.

  Jolie jolted awake. For a split second, not even a breath’s time, she thought she’d dreamed it.

  Emma screamed again.

  Jolie erupted out of the chair and headed for her daughter at a run, ready to soothe her child from the nightmare she’d probably had. In the next instant, something snapped in her brain and time slowed to a crawl.

  There was someone there. All in black. He had Emma. Was dragging her toward the window he’d somehow gotten in through. The child was kicking wildly. Screaming when she could twist her mouth free of the hand covering it. The black-clad shape froze as light from the other room slashed across the floor. Something in the black-gloved hand glinted.

  A knife.

  The sight propelled Jolie into furious action. She ran, hard. Lowered her shoulder and dived at the black figure. All three went to the hardwood floor.

  “Fight!” she cried out to Emma. Just as she’d taught her, the girl doubled her kicking, elbowing and clawing. She caught Jolie once by accident, but Jolie didn’t care. She was too focused on wrenching the would-be kidnapper off her little girl.

  The would-be kidnapper who was, she realized with a little shock, a woman.

  Simultaneously the woman pulled free, releasing Emma. Jolie had the ski mask she’d been wearing clutched in her hand. But before she could get a look at her, she was gone through the pried-open window. All Jolie could say for sure was that she’d been female, and maybe blond.

  “Mommy!”

  Jolie rolled over to Emma, and scooped up the terrified child. “It’s all right, baby, it’s all right.”

  But it wasn’t. She knew it wasn’t. Because there was only one person that woman could be.