The Colton Ransom (20 page)
Mathilda interrupted with a reproachful tsk. “Mind your tone. He’s
Mr. Colton
to you.”
Agnes’s glare cut past Kate and narrowed on Mathilda. “As if you don’t know what he’s like.”
A chorus of chimes, low but distinctive, came through the open ground-level door.
Mathilda gazed at the door, her lips pursed. “What in the world would someone be thinking, intruding on the family at such a late hour?”
“You’re not expecting anyone?” Agnes asked.
“Of course not. Mr. Colton needs his rest. I’m afraid our late-night visitor is going to be sorely disappointed. Excuse me.” Holding her long, black skirt out of the way of the spill, Mathilda sidestepped around Agnes’s ample form and strode with neat, stiff steps down the stairs and through the door.
“I think I’d like to see who it is, myself.” Agnes shoved the dessert tray into Kate’s hands. “Go on, now, and hurry up. You think you’re too good for kitchen work? Fine. From this point forward, Mr. Colton’s meals are your responsibility. Maybe he’ll have more mercy on you than he does on the rest of us.”
* * *
Nothing had ever been handed to Levi Colton except his curse of a name.
Not love or prestige, and definitely not money.
In fact, it was a wonder his fingers retained the dexterity and sensitivity needed of a doctor given the succession of backbreaking jobs he’d toiled through to fight for the life he wanted.
For the hundredth time since he’d driven through the opulent gold-and-white entrance gate to Dead River Ranch, he asked himself the same impossible question he’d been asking the whole drive from Salt Lake City.
What the hell was he thinking, coming here?
The reason had seemed so solid that morning when he’d left his apartment. And it had nothing to do with sympathy for Gabriella, who’d burst into the hospital office he shared with the other first-year residents, with her high-end tailored clothes and porcelain features, begging him to return to Dead River Ranch, insisting that he was the key to her poor, dear father’s survival.
Return. As if he’d ever been welcomed there before. As if he would’ve set a toe on Jethro Colton’s property even if he’d been invited. He should’ve never said “never” because here he was, winding through the ranchland en route to the mansion he’d seen only in pictures.
What the hell was he thinking? Why would he go out of his way, jeopardize his standing at the hospital and place himself in Jethro’s line of fire after he’d sworn to never do so again?
“This is my last chance to look into the old man’s eyes before he dies,” he muttered in reminder as he took a corner too fast. It was the same answer, the only answer, he’d been able to come up with in the seven days since Gabriella ran from his office in tears, proclaiming, “You’re a lot like Dad. Stubborn to the end.”
The insult hit its mark. Levi had smarted for days at the comparison, stewing about all the many ways he wasn’t like Jethro and cursing Gabriella because she’d made him feel something other than indifference for the Coltons, a state of mind Levi worked diligently to maintain.
But for seven straight nights the usual dreams that haunted him were absent, replaced by his mother’s image standing beside Gabriella, both of them chanting that he was the spitting image of Jethro. As bad as him, they’d said, sneering. As corrupt and heartless. Time after time he woke drenched in sweat and breathing hard.
Last night, he’d reached his limit. Hating the way the dreams and subsequent cold sweat made him feel vulnerable, he’d pushed from the bed and taken a shower without turning on the light. The bathroom fixture was too bright for 3:00 a.m., and besides, the darkness was exciting, as if he was bucking the rules. An explorer luxuriating in an underground waterfall.
The whimsy of it almost erased the vision of his mother from his head. But not quite. The knot in his stomach wouldn’t completely ease. He braced his hands against the tile, picturing his mother, wondering how accurate his memory of her was or if it had morphed over the years into someone more beautiful, less damaged by the world. He’d have to unearth the box of photographs from storage to know for sure.
Standing there in the dark shower, thinking about her and the unsettling dreams, the eeriest feeling crept through him, as if he sensed the presence of his mother and she was trying to tell him something important.
The problem was, Levi didn’t believe in ghosts. He was a doctor, for pity’s sake. He didn’t buy for one second that his mother had returned from beyond the grave to give him a message that he was the spitting image of the man she’d obsessed over until her dying breath. She’d said that very thing repeatedly while he was growing up, and so the dreams shouldn’t have got to him as profoundly as they had. Just random memories surfacing.
Except...
Except he couldn’t shake the idea that he needed to prove the lack of resemblance once and for all. He needed to look Jethro in the eye one last time before he died.
Ludicrous because what did he think he’d see in those eyes besides Jethro’s typical arrogance and spite? He supposed regret would be too much to hope for from a man who didn’t have a soul. Then again, maybe Levi had come back to Wyoming because he knew it would infuriate Jethro to lie there helpless in a sickbed while Levi took charge.
Hadn’t that always been a fantasy of his as a little boy—that his father would need him?
Wincing with bitterness at the memory of the naive, hopeful child he’d been, he crested a ridge and the estate and surrounding pastures came into view. Illuminated by the moon, white fences spread in all directions over the rambling land, dividing it into sections for the livestock.
The house itself rose in the center of the spread in grand design, looming over the grounds in absolute darkness. Not a single light was on anywhere around or inside the main house, but only flickers of brightness behind the drawn curtains—candles or flashlights—as though a power line had been cut.
Given the violent wind, it wasn’t an outlandish theory that a falling tree had taken out the ranch’s power. In the beams of his headlights, leaves danced and skittered across the circular driveway.
He stepped from the car. A gust of warm, foul-smelling summer wind shoved against the side of his body, flipping his shirt collar up and pelting his cheek with bits of dirt. Those were two things he never missed about Wyoming—the relentless wind and the odor of livestock.
Folding his collar into place, he studied the house. Thick, beige stucco walls with rows of identical windows reached up to the sky like a fortress, impenetrable and impersonal. How could anyone find comfort living in such a monstrosity? A monstrosity for a monster, he supposed.
Gabriella hadn’t said if she or either of her two sisters lived here still, but he’d bet they did. He’d bet Jethro kept his children on short leashes—the bastard son excluded, of course.
His old friend hatred crawled into his heart. He loathed that he was still quick to anger about how the old man had treated Levi and his mother. Because anger meant he cared. Why couldn’t he go numb about the past like he wanted to? If not numbness, then he’d settle for peace.
Maybe peace would finally come to him when Jethro succumbed to leukemia.
As he watched from the driveway, the place snapped into brightness. Floodlights burst to life, illuminating the driveway in blinding light. Startled, Levi jumped and gripped the car door. His heart hammering, he squinted until his eyes adjusted. Faint cheers, women’s voices, erupted on one of the upper floors.
He ducked into the car and popped the trunk, then hauled out his suitcase and medical bag. There weren’t any hotels he could stomach staying at in the town of Dead—too many of those bitter memories he hated caring about—and so his only choice besides sleeping in his car was to stay at the ranch. That was, if Jethro allowed him to.
The door was as thick and unwelcoming as the walls. He pushed the doorbell but didn’t hear a ring in response. After a few minutes of standing there, second-guessing his choice and asking himself over and over what the hell he was doing there, he raised his fist and knocked.
The door was opened by a severe-looking woman wearing a conservative black dress, her blond hair cut short, utilitarian. “May I help you, sir?”
Levi inhaled deeply.
Here we go....
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Chapter 1
“...W
e commend the soul of our
brother
departed, and we commit
his
body to the ground—earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust...”
The preacher’s voice droned on, but Willa Merris’s heart hurt too much for her to hear the rest. Her father, Senator John Merris, was dead. Truly gone. Murdered. And even though his body had been discovered nearly two weeks ago, the finality of it had waited until this exact moment to slam into her like a ton of bricks.
Despair weighed on her until she could hardly breathe. What were she and her mother going to do? He had always been the center of their universe, the two of them pale moons orbiting his brilliant life.
A thud startled her. Her mother had just tossed a tightly balled clod of red Texas clay on top of the casket. The dirt in her own hand was cold and moist, squishing out of her clenched fist. Blinded by tears, Willa tossed her clod of dirt into the hole that contained her father’s mortal remains.
She shuddered as dozens of other mourners stepped forward to toss handfuls of dirt on her father’s grave. Some of them appeared genuinely sad, but the majority ranged from indifferent to covertly satisfied to bury the bastard. She had no illusions that her father had been a saint. Far from it. He’d been a mean man in a mean business—two mean businesses—a wildcat oilman carving a fortune out of the oil sands of West Texas, and a United States senator, brawling in the halls of Congress.
A comforting arm slipped around her shoulders. She leaned into the embrace for a moment, but then caught a whiff of the aftershave and stiffened.
No. Surely not.
Horror flowed through her. That, and sheer, frozen terror. She glanced up at the sympathetic face of James Ward, the son of her father’s longtime business partner.
“Get away from me this second,” she cried. “Don’t touch me!”
The people around her jolted, shocked by her outburst. She slipped out from under Ward’s arm as he stared at her, dumbfounded. Right. Like he didn’t know exactly what she was talking about.
Flashes of his big hands tearing her clothes...viciously slapping the fight out of her...shoving her to the floor of her living room...and, oh, God, the pain of his big body slamming into hers over and over. His grunts...the maniacal gleam in his glittering blue eyes...the humiliation and utter degradation of it...
She’d wanted to die. Right there where he’d left her on the floor like some piece of tossed-off garbage. She’d wished desperately to disappear, to just cease to exist. But no such luck. Instead, her father had checked out of his mortal coil and left behind the mess of his life for her to unravel in addition to hers.
“Honey,” Ward murmured, “you’re overwrought. Let me drive you home. Put you to bed.”
Overwrought?
Something inside her cracked. She’d show him overwrought! “Get away from me!” she screeched.
Backpedaling from him with her hands outstretched to fend him off, she registered vaguely how everyone had gone stock-still around her. It was as if time had stopped with everyone in funny poses, staring at her slack-jawed as if she’d grown a second head.
“I swear, if you lay a hand on me again, I’ll kill you!” she shouted at Ward in rage she didn’t even know she had inside her. “Do you hear me? I’ll kill you!”
The vignette unfroze all at once with a rush of reaching hands and concerned faces closing in on her like macabre, black-clad clowns. Camera bulbs flashed, cell phones whipped out to arm’s length, pointed at her. Even the local news reporter frantically gestured at her cameraman to get all this on film.
Appalled, humiliated and so irrationally furious she scared herself, Willa batted away the hands, shoved through the crowd and broke into a stumbling half run toward her car. The grass and her high-heeled shoes were a lethal combination and she nearly broke her neck before she fetched up hard against her car door breathing heavily. She felt dirty. A driving compulsion to wash away the feel of James Ward’s filthy touch overwhelmed her. She had to get home. Take a hot shower. Scrub herself clean.
Willa stabbed at the car’s ignition button and nearly ran down the news reporter as she accelerated away from her father’s disaster of a funeral, frantic to escape this nightmare from which there was no waking.
* * *
Gabe Dawson watched the slender, black-veiled woman race away from John Merris’s grave. What was that all about? He hadn’t been close enough to hear the commotion, but it had been hard to miss. An angry buzz of gossip hummed around him...something about the senator’s daughter threatening to kill someone....
Quiet little Willa Merris? Alarm blossomed in his gut. Was she in danger? The girl he remembered wouldn’t say boo to a mouse. But then, he hadn’t seen her in over a decade. She’d been a skinny, awkward teen the last time he’d visited the Merris home. Before his falling out with John Merris. Before the two of them became mortal enemies.
At least Willa’s outburst had drawn the attention of the rumormongers away from his arrival at the funeral. As it was, he was sure to be topic number one in the gossip columns for showing up at John Merris’s grave. He would probably be accused of coming here to gloat. In point of fact, he hadn’t wished the old man dead. Plenty of suffering and failure, yes. But not death.
The preacher mumbled a few more words into the suddenly circuslike atmosphere, but no one was paying attention. Seeming to sense it, the minister cut short and wrapped up the graveside service with unseemly haste. Gabe watched in sardonic amusement as the good ladies of Vengeance, Texas, wasted no time texting and calling their friends to report the latest scandal surrounding the lurid death of John Merris.
Vultures.
He jolted as a microphone materialized under his nose. “Have you got any comment on Willa Merris’s outburst, Mr. Dawson? You’re Senator Merris’s former business partner, are you not?” a female reporter demanded.
She looked as avidly entertained as the vultures. More so.
“No comment,” he growled. He strode away from the woman, but she walk-ran beside him, continuing to shove that damned microphone in front of him.
“What do you have to say about John Merris’s murder? Some people are saying you’re more pleased than anyone that the senator is dead. Is it true you two had a violent argument just a few weeks ago?”
He stonily ignored the reporter and her sleazy innuendos.
“Is it true that the police have asked you not to leave town, and that you’re a person of interest in the senator’s murder?”
He stopped at that, turned slowly and gave her the flat, pitiless stare that had earned him his reputation as a hard man among hard men. The reporter recoiled from him with a huff. Smart girl.
“What did you say your name was?” he called after her as she stomped away from him.
She half turned and snapped, “Paula Craddock. KVXT News. Are you going to give me a statement?”
“Nope. Just wanted to know who to sic my lawyers on the next time you harass me.”
The journalist’s gaze narrowed to a threatening glare.
Yeah, whatever. Better women than she had tried to get a rise out of him over the years. But he wasn’t the founder and CEO of a billion-dollar oil conglomerate for nothing. He chewed up and spit out self-serving leeches like her for breakfast.
Meanwhile, the alarm in his gut refused to quiet. What had caused Willa Merris to blow up at her own father’s funeral? She and her mother were always the souls of decorum, quiet props in the background of Senator Merris’s many public appearances. Willa had been trained practically from birth how not to draw attention to herself. It was unthinkable that she would cause a scene, ever, let alone in public, in front of the press, and most definitely not at a somber occasion like this.
What had gotten into her?
Worry for the unpleasant conversation he had yet to have with young Willa flashed through his head. Maybe he should wait awhile to break his own bad news to her and her mother. But it wasn’t like there was ever going to be a good time to tell them John Merris’s last, nasty little secret.
He sighed. Lord, this was going to suck. He might as well go find Willa Merris now and make her misery complete.
