Colton Family Rescue Page 6

  “We’ll pick up what you need from home, for both of you, for a few days,” he said. “Leave your car there, so it’s not obvious you’re gone. Then we’ll head to the ranch.”

  “Oh.”

  “Second thoughts” was hardly the description for what she was feeling as he took charge. She was up to at least a dozen reasons why this had been a bad idea by the time the elevator doors slid open in the subterranean parking garage. No one was going to welcome them, the opposite in fact. His mother would probably pitch a fit laced with high drama, Fowler would sneer and that nasty Marceline would be cutting and cruel as always. Another half brother, Zane, was much nicer, and although the big man was intimidating, Jolie had always thought of him as fair. But then, she’d always thought his full brother, Reid, had been a good guy, and he’d left the Dallas Police Department in disgrace over a year ago, after some corruption scandal that had ended up with his partner dead. She’d been too busy at the time to follow the case, had in fact avoided it once she realized it was truly Reid Colton involved; the last thing she needed was more in her head reminding her of T.C.

  No, the only Colton sibling she’d really bonded with had been Piper, because Piper, adopted by T.C.’s parents after her mother’s death, knew what it was like to come from nothing and to always be the outsider. But even Piper would probably hate her now, for what she’d done to her brother, adoptive or not.

  “Maybe...maybe this isn’t such a good idea,” Jolie began, but stopped as a car pulled up in front of them. A uniformed valet got out of the light blue SUV, a young man who looked fresh out of high school.

  “Vacuumed, gassed up and ready, Mr. C,” he said, leaving the driver’s door open.

  “Thanks, Jordy. How’s your dad doing?”

  The young man smiled. “Lots better, thanks, Mr. C. He said to thank you for the barbecue.”

  T.C. grinned at the kid. “When I was in the hospital last year, that was the thing I missed most.”

  “Him, too.” Jordy walked around and opened the passenger door. He also opened the back passenger door, and Jolie saw with surprise that there was a child’s booster seat already strapped in. She flicked a glance at T.C., who only shrugged.

  “Hannah is very efficient.”

  “Obviously,” she said. “But you have these just sitting around, waiting?”

  “Mrs. Alcott said to take it out of her car,” Jordy explained. “Her grandkids are off somewhere. Here you go, princess,” he added, smiling at Emma, who smiled back in obvious delight.

  “That was kind of her to even think of it.” Jolie smiled at the young valet. “And thank you for getting it in right. I always have trouble.”

  The young man grinned. “I’ve got five little brothers and sisters. I know car seats.”

  Jolie smiled, but still checked the fastening herself once Emma was inside. Then she got in herself. The valet smiled back, then tapped his forehead in a salute toward T.C. and turned and left, whistling cheerfully.

  “Nice guy,” Jolie said as T.C. got into the car.

  “Yes. He’s a good kid. Even if he does want to be a rodeo star.”

  She gave him a sideways look. “Is there a kid in Texas who hasn’t wanted that at some point?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  He said it lightly, and as if he didn’t remember at all telling her that being a professional calf roper had once been his highest ambition. That had engendered a lengthy discussion of the various rodeo sports, from bull riding to barrel racing, and the strength and skills required for each, which had morphed into a discussion of his dream to someday breed top-drawer cow horses.

  And she realized belatedly that her protest about this perhaps not being the best idea was long past, and here she was going along as if she’d never had those second, third and many more thoughts.

  He put the car in gear, and in moments they were at the driveway out onto the busy street. He gave her a questioning glance.

  “Where are we going?”

  She couldn’t seem to find any words, least of all the ones that would get her out of this situation she was now regretting she’d gotten into.

  “We live at Cliff Park,” Emma piped up from the back seat.

  Jolie nearly jumped. T.C. said nothing, but she thought his focus had suddenly sharpened. Her first thought was to hush the child, but then she wondered what she had expected. Emma was merely following her mother’s lead, so she had no reason to mistrust this man. And for all the “be wary of strangers” lessons she had given the girl, it had to be clear to even the four-year-old that this man was not a stranger. And before her mind could leap to all the ways in which he was not a stranger, she looked away from him. She didn’t want to see the expression on his face.

  “It’s changed,” she said. “There are parts that are still bad, but our neighborhood is much safer.”

  She stopped, realizing she was talking about the place where Emma had nearly been kidnapped, or worse.

  “It’s what I can afford and still get to work in less than an hour most days.” She sounded surly even to her own ears. She tried for a more even tone. “And my place has been redone. It’s really nice.”

  “Jolie.”

  It was the first time he’d said her name. She suppressed the little shiver that went through her. “What?”

  “I didn’t say anything about where you live.”

  “You didn’t have to.”

  She heard him take in a deep breath. “If we’re going to get there, I’m going to need more than just the neighborhood.”

  “Oh.”

  She gave him the address. And was startled into silence when, as he pulled out and merged into a brief break in the traffic, he tapped a button on the steering wheel and a disembodied voice said from above her head, “Select name and action.”

  “Call Manny, mobile,” he said.

  “Calling,” the voice answered helpfully.

  “Is he talking to the roof, Mommy?” Emma whispered, loudly.

  “He’s making a call, honey, so we should be quiet.”

  Probably a business call, perhaps to someone he’d had to shunt off to handle this, she thought guiltily.

  “Rodriguez,” came the male voice through the speaker.

  “Hey, Manny.”

  “T.C.! Where the hell have you been? You don’t call, you don’t write, you son of a—”

  “Easy, buddy. You’re on speaker, and kick.”

  Kick? Jolie wondered.

  “Sorry. Hey, I got the tickets. Beautiful.”

  “You won that bet, fair and square.”

  “Dam—darn right I did. So, what’s up?”

  “I’ll catch up later, but right now I need a favor.”

  “You got it.”

  To Jolie’s surprise, he rattled off their address she’d just given him.

  “Hey,” the voice answered, “I just saw that. Southwest graveyard had an attempted kidnap there last night.”

  “Exactly. I’m on the way there with...the parties involved.”

  “Gutsy lady. She tackled the suspect head-on. And gave us evidence. That ski mask may not lead us to the person if she’s not already in the system, but it’ll nail her down when we do find her.”

  The unseen man’s words warmed her despite not having any idea who he was.

  T.C. said nothing except “Can you make sure it’s clear?”

  “Beat car should be in the area. They’ve got it on close watch. But I’ll make sure and get back to you.”

  “Thanks, Sarge.”

  She studied him as he drove in the ensuing silence. Her thoughts were tumbling anew, questions rolling over and over in her mind, but she wasn’t sure where to start. Or if she should start at all. After all, he was helping, he didn’t owe her even that much, let
alone explanations of every move he made.

  “Sarge?” she finally asked, thinking that at least she had a vested interest in knowing who this was.

  “Manny’s a cop with Dallas PD.”

  “You make bets with cops?”

  His gaze flicked to her for an instant, then back to the busy road. He was avoiding the freeway, she noticed, and sticking to Houston as they neared the Trinity River Greenbelt.

  “Football.”

  “Maybe we should have taken the Landry, then,” she said, referring to the freeway named after the famous football coach in a weak effort at a joke after her instinctive defensive reaction at having to tell a Colton she lived on the edge of a place once known for its crime rate.

  “We’d be going five miles an hour,” he said.

  She couldn’t argue that, so instead asked, “Kick? Also as in football?”

  “No, K. I. C.,” he spelled out. “It’s something Manny started.” He glanced at Emma in back, then back at her. “You can figure it out.”

  She thought for a moment, about what he’d interrupted when he said it, like a warning. And then she had it. “Kid in car,” she said.

  “Yep.”

  She thought about all the circumstances when police might need an acronym like that, and none of them were particularly pleasant. At the same time, she appreciated the tact of it. Back when she’d spent some time sitting in the back of police vehicles of various sorts, from the hideous night when they’d come to say her parents were dead to the time when she’d gotten caught shoplifting food out of a grocery store and taken the long ride to juvie, they’d taken little care in what they said in front of her.

  “Where did you just go?”

  He asked it softly, and she wondered what had shown in her face. Conscious of Emma in the backseat, she answered, “Just thinking about the night someone who dresses like your friend said I was going to be a regular.”

  He got it, as she’d guessed he would. “You never told me that.”

  She turned in her seat to look at him. “You’re helping us at the drop of a hat, out of the blue, after what I did, and after four years of...nothing. I figure you deserve whatever answers you want.”

  They lapsed into silence as he negotiated some traffic. Emma was also quiet, and Jolie knew she would soon recognize familiar places. She thought about reassuring the girl, but decided not to say anything that would plant the thought that there was anything bad about going home again. Time enough to deal with that if it happened.

  “Why were you in the hospital?”

  He gave her a sideways look. “What?”

  “You told the parking guy you were in the hospital last year.” Usually if a Colton ended up in the hospital, it was big news, and she’d seen nothing. She’d stopped looking by then, of course, but sometimes it was hard to miss.

  “Oh. Broken ribs.”

  “Ouch. What happened?”

  “Little territorial dispute between a couple of longhorns.”

  So he still actively worked the ranch. It didn’t surprise her, but it did please her. Not that she had any stake in how he lived. Or any right to an opinion, for that matter.

  He slowed as they neared her building. And Jolie realized belatedly he hadn’t been using GPS at all, nor had he asked her for anything beyond the address. How had he known so exactly where to go? Not like the Coltons hung out in Cliff Park. Or did the Coltons just consider the whole massive city of Dallas their oyster, and thus know it all?

  She nearly laughed at her own thought. Nobody could commit an entire city of over a million to memory.

  He flicked a glance at her as he pulled into the driveway. The stone lions that figuratively guarded the front of the building, one of the reasons she had chosen this place—Emma loved them—sat impassively staring out at the park and the small lake across the street.

  “I’m in the back, and there’s a back door,” she said.

  He nodded and continued driving toward the back corner of the building before stopping.

  Unable to resist, she asked “How did you know right where to go?”

  He gave a one-shouldered shrug. “I’ve looked over some maps of the area.”

  “I’ve looked at maps of a lot of places, but I haven’t committed them to memory.”

  He let out a breath. “We’ve...been involved here a bit.”

  “Involved?” It hit her then. “In the rehabbing of the neighborhood?”

  “Yes.”

  The quirk of fate bit deep. And she knew the answer before she even asked the question. “Let me guess...including this building?”

  “Among others.”

  “How’d you get your brother to agree to that?” Fowler had little interest in helping the less fortunate areas of the city.

  “I showed him the results we got in Uptown.”

  She should have figured Colton Inc. would have been involved in the shift from questionable to upscale of the Uptown area of Dallas. And that success would be impossible to argue with, even for Fowler Colton.

  “I thought you were in charge of the ranch?”

  “I am. But I keep up with the other projects. We all try to, so we can step in if necessary.” He grimaced. “Dad’s orders. He always thought Fowler might tick off the wrong person one day.”

  And instead, Eldridge might have.

  She guessed that thought was behind his expression, and there seemed no point in bringing up the obvious. So she stuck with the topic at hand.

  “Do you really think the same can happen for Cliff Park?”

  “I do. It’s going to take a lot of time and effort, but it can be done.”

  She believed him. If he said it could be done, it could. Her faith in his judgment—except perhaps in women—had never wavered. But she didn’t know whether to be glad or not.

  “My rent’s going to go up,” she said rather glumly as she opened the car door. He got out as well, and she could feel him watching her as she opened the back door and got Emma. The girl was looking at the familiar building as if she wasn’t quite sure how to feel.

  “Make sure you bring some jeans, Emma,” he said to the girl conversationally. “You’ll need them if you’re going to ride a horse.”

  The girl’s eyes widened. “Really?”

  And that, simply all thought of what had happened last night seemed to vanish, and the child couldn’t wait to get in and grab her things.

  “Thank you,” Jolie said to him when they were inside and the girl ran ahead to their door.

  “Figured she might be a little wary, after what happened.”

  That he’d even thought of it made her feel oddly tight inside. But she shouldn’t have been surprised. T.C. had never been the kind of man to blame an innocent for someone else’s actions.

  Not even when the woman he loved—or thought he did—walked out on him for a stack of cold, hard cash.

  Chapter 8

  The rehabbers had done a good job, T.C. thought.

  But Jolie had done a better one. She’d made the small apartment a charming, homey place. Cool blues and greens predominated, good choices for the Texas heat. None of the furniture appeared new, but it was all well cared for, and if the pieces didn’t match, they at least fit. He liked the effect, with each piece unique.

  And he liked the way the wooden floors gleamed, and the small but updated kitchen sparkled, the stone counters gleaming like the new appliances. It was tidy and efficient, as was the whole place.

  He especially liked the painting of a huge expanse of hill country Texas bluebonnets that adorned one wall. It evoked everything he loved about this one-of-a-kind state he called home.

  Emma had apparently inherited her mother’s tidy tendencies, for the only toys he saw were a doll carefully placed on one of the two uphols
tered chairs, and a pony with an improbably bright-colored mane and tail. A large stack of children’s picture books sat by the chair occupied by the doll. He had a sudden vision of Jolie sitting there with Emma on her lap, reading those books to the child. It made his gut knot, in the same way it used to when he would hear her telling the baby a story as she went to sleep at night. A story she was far too young to understand, but Jolie didn’t care; she wanted her daughter to love to read when she got old enough, and she’d told him once that it started with loving stories. T.C. got the point, even approved, but he had suspected it had been the lulling sound and safety of her mother’s voice that did it. She—

  His thoughts cut off when he spotted the boarded up window in the alcove off the living room, realized that was how the woman who tried to grab Emma had gotten in. And suddenly he was questioning the wisdom of coming back here at all. The sight of the broken window right above the window seat where the child apparently slept somehow made it all vividly real in a way Jolie’s forced calm during her recitation of what had happened had not.

  “I should have just sent someone to get what you needed,” he said, his jaw tight.

  Jolie paused in gathering clothes from the drawers beneath the seat, while Emma named each item as her mother placed it in her small backpack. She shook her head as she met his gaze.

  “No,” she said. “One stranger in our home is enough.”

  “Hardly the same intent.”

  “Still,” Jolie said, turning back to her task.

  He’d forgotten that about her. Forgotten she’d grown up with so little that she’d tended to be protective of what she had. Forgotten how much he’d wanted to heal that part of her, until she never worried again about not having enough, or losing what she had.

  Except when she was throwing it away. Selling it out for cash.

  Was it true that she’d never touched the money? Once, he would have sworn she wouldn’t lie to him. But that was before he’d realized their entire life together had been a lie.

  “She promised to do the same to Emma. To make her life hell, to make sure she always knew she didn’t belong, she wasn’t welcome, she was unworthy and despised.”