The Coltons of Mustang Valley

And Kerry didn’t like to think about the chances of her heart remaining intact if she gave it to him a second time and he crushed it in the dirt on his way out.

Chapter 5

The patrol car wasn’t outside Kerry’s house yet when Rafe pulled into her drive. Pushing the garage remote control, he parked in her garage, turned off the Jeep and handed her the keys. Then pushed the remote to close the garage door behind them, with his truck outside at the curb.

When those blue eyes of her turned on him, brows raised like she was questioning him, yet with a hint of their connection of old, he said, “I’m not leaving you here alone. I know, you’re the trained cop with a gun and I’m just a numbers guy in expensive dress clothes, but two bodies, two sets of ears and eyes, are better than one.”

“I wasn’t going to argue with you sticking around for a bit,” she told him, reaching for the door handle. “I was going to thank you.”

She got out and led the way into the house, leaving him with his heart threatening to clog up his throat.

And then she offered him dinner. Leftover meat loaf, mashed potatoes and peas, a meal he’d have had as a young kid eating in the bunkhouse kitchen with his dad and the other cowboys, or a meal his dad might have prepared for him. Not anything he’d see on the Colton dinner table. Not unless it was hidden beneath garnishes and sauces that distinguished between cooking at home and having a chef. Or so he’d been told by Selina, Payne’s second wife, who’d never made a secret of the fact that Rafe, as an adopted Colton, was merely a fly at her picnic.

Over the years, he’d grown accustomed to the wide variety of flavors, the combinations of spices that made eating a physical pleasure, rather than something one did to stay alive. He’d grown into those tastes. To seek them out, no matter the cost, when he traveled.

But to sit at Kerry’s table with her—those leftovers were just fine. They’d taken their seats—his perpendicular to hers on two sides of her little four-seat table off to the right of her galley kitchen—when her doorbell rang. He hadn’t been particularly worried about her safety at home in her neighborhood in the middle of town. Not many would try to kill a cop in front of other Mustang Valley citizens—who were known to watch each other’s comings and goings—most particularly not in their little remote part of the Arizona desert. A lot of people carried guns for their own protection against whatever wildlife might venture into town looking for water. Most wouldn’t hesitate to pull a weapon and use it to protect one of their own.

But when the bell rang, he was right behind her as she passed through the dining room to the living room and then the tiled area before the front door.

“I’m fine, Kay,” she said, turning with a grin on her face that was quickly swept away.

He’d forgotten just how great he’d found the sound of his last name rolling off her lips as she jested with him. Said with just that same intonation.

Apparently she’d forgotten, for a second there at least, that he was a Colton now.

The knock came again, more urgently, and Kerry, with her hand at the gun she’d failed to remove when they’d returned home, looked through the peephole and then quickly opened the door.

“Lizzie, James,” she said, stepping back to let the two blue uniformed officers into her home. “Don’t tell me, the two of you are assigned to guard duty tonight?”

Lizzie shook her head. “James drew that straw,” she said, with a wry glance at her partner.

“I volunteered for it,” James corrected, his light red hair and the kind look in his hazel eyes giving the appearance of a man who could be a pushover. Rafe wasn’t so sure he liked that this would be the guy in charge of Kerry’s safety for the night until the man’s gaze turned on him and he felt the full force of the steely stare.

“Aren’t you one of the Coltons? Some kind of cousin to Spence?” the man asked. “You’re the finance wizard, right?”

“Rafe,” he said, holding out his hand, and feeling strangely self-conscious of his dust-covered expensive leather shoes as the man glanced down at his feet. “Kerry and I used to be friends, a long time ago,” he heard himself explaining. And then wondering what in the hell had compelled him to answer a question this guy hadn’t even asked.

“I knew her brother and when she told me that she thought maybe his death wasn’t an accident, I wanted to hear more.”

The man’s look hadn’t wavered from Rafe’s face and it took him a second to realize that the other two law enforcement personnel in the room were standing there, watching the exchange.

“She’s been saying that for a couple of years,” the woman Kerry had called Lizzie said. With her long dark hair, back in a ponytail at the moment, and brown eyes, she was quite pretty, even in uniform. He hoped she was stronger than she looked. “Why you just taking an interest now?” Her gaze locked on his, as well.

Kerry could jump in anytime. Save his ass. Give whatever explanation she wanted them to have.

Or he’d give his own…

“We just reconnected, since Payne’s shooting,” he said. “I had no idea Tyler’s death wasn’t an accident.”

“Until tonight, it was,” the man, James, said.

And then Lizzie piped in, “The case was closed, but now, who knows?” She shrugged. “With two bodies found dead in kind of the same manner, someone might have some questions.” When she turned to Kerry, Rafe felt like he might be off whatever hook they’d impaled him on, at least for the moment.

He listened intently as Lizzie told Kerry, “The chief and I headed straight up there as soon as you called it in. The rescue crew is still in the gully, getting the ranger out, but we went up the drive and couldn’t find anything, Kerry. No shell casings. No sign of anyone around. Just a broken agave arm and the boot you saw. Again, it looks like he could have jumped. But there’s a little bit stronger evidence at this point that he might have been pushed. With that boot there. We’re looking for fingerprints but don’t expect to get anything.”

“The boot obviously came off while he was being dragged,” Kerry said. “He’d have been digging his foot into the ground, trying to get a hold, to stop himself from going over, but whoever dragged him was a helluva lot stronger than he was and dragged him right out of his boot.”

“That’s what it looks like.” Lizzie’s attention was only on Kerry at that point. As if the women were friends who spoke their own language in between the words they said. The type who understood the nuances and emotions not being expressed.

“The heel of the boot was caught on a root.”

So Kerry’s hunch had been right.

Again. He wasn’t surprised. She’d always impressed him with her intuitive observations. Even as a kid.

“We’ll be going back up in the morning,” Lizzie continued. “Maybe when it’s light, we’ll see more, but for now the only thing we have is the wider tire tracks of the SUV, just as you described. We drove all the way up the hill, by the way. There was no sign of the vehicle up there, so either the guy has a hiding place where he parks it up there someplace…”

“Or he’s long gone,” Kerry finished for her. “Someone shot at us as we were leaving, which means someone was close by. He could easily have just followed us down the hill and took off as we came back to town.”

He’d already entertained the same uneasy thought. His family’s ranch was on the opposite side of town, but still out there. He didn’t like knowing there were ranch hands with families in little cabins with a crazy killer free.

“Which is why I’m going to be right outside until dawn, and people are up and about and it’s less likely that someone would get into town undetected,” James said.

“And I need to get back to the station,” Lizzie said, and then both officers looked at Rafe, as if Rafe had just been given his cue to leave.

“I’m going to hang around here,” he said, without looking at Kerry. Her friends were right there. If she wanted him out of there, he’d be gone in an instant.

“We were just sitting down to dinner,” she told the two in uniform. And then asked James, “Have you had something to eat?”

“I’ve got a cooler full out in the car,” he told her. “And a pee bottle, too.”

Rafe could have done without that piece of information.

But then the two were gone, leaving him and Kerry all alone in the watched cocoon that was her house. The awareness of what had just happened—the two of them acknowledging, in front of others, that they wanted to spend more time together that evening—simmered between them and they just stood there, on that small area of tile, looking at each other.

Kerry broke the eye contact first, heading back through the dining area and kitchen to the food gone cold. She sat anyway, as though eating a cold dinner didn’t faze her at all.

“James might look like an easygoing nice guy,” she said, scooping up mashed potatoes and then meat on the same bite. “And he is nice. He’s perfectly compliant on any occasion that warrants it, but he’s as tough as they come when he perceives a wrongdoing. Or a threat to any townspeople.”

He nodded, not sure if she was reassuring him as to their safety, or warning him in regard to hers. Should he try to make a move on her.

Despite needing her to know that as much as he longed to grab his Kerry into his arms and never let her go, he had no intention of touching her. Not when even a chaste kiss in the past had been red-hot. So he sat. Forked cold food. And ate it.

While they ate, Rafe loosened his tie, talked about all the exotic foods he’d eaten, most of which he’d enjoyed. If he’d set out to remind Kerry of the vast differences between them, he needn’t have bothered. His being a Colton was something she was never, ever going to forget.

And while he did the dishes he insisted on taking care of, she went to the restroom. She’d been holding it for a while, and hadn’t wanted to go with him in the house. Seemed way too…personal, too intimate, for what she needed him to be. Everyone peed. She just didn’t want to go do it with him there.

“You should call the hospital, check on your father,” she told him as she came back down the hall and found him standing in the dining room, glancing at her wall. She’d deliberately used the parental designation rather than Payne’s name.

“I just did,” he told her. “No change.”

She wondered who he talked to… Ace? Another sibling? Payne’s third wife, Genevieve? The spouse was always the first suspect when someone was shot, but both Genevieve and Payne’s second wife, Selina Barnes Colton, had airtight alibis: security footage from the RRR during the time of the shooting. Genevieve in the mansion, Selina walking from her car to her smaller house on the property, carrying in bags of shopping from someplace farther than Mustang Valley, based on the bags’ logos.

Weird that Selina would have gone shopping while the rest of the family dealt with the shock of Ace Colton’s surprise heritage, the knowledge that the eldest heir had been switched at birth and subsequently been stripped of his position as CEO of Colton Oil…

Her mental switch to her current case was a coping mechanism, she knew. Recognized it. Anytime things started to rattle her emotional ground, she focused on a case. Made her great at her job. And still single at thirty-six.

“I made another call, too,” Rafe said, still facing the wall plastered with the last ten years of Tyler’s life. “To a government attorney who works with the Forest Service. I asked for a fast track on any warrant or request that may come through for Grant Alvin’s employment record, or for anything else pertaining to anyone working that mountain.”

To show her how powerful he was? To push his weight around?

He turned and her gaze hooked up with the depth of emotion in those so-familiar blue eyes of his. He’d called because he cared.

Because he was committed to helping her find out what had happened to Tyler. She got the message. He was going to help and then he’d be going back to his real life—the one where he could pick up the phone and call a US attorney after eight o’clock at night.

She made a note of that, too.

“I had no idea it was going to be so hard, seeing you again.” The longing in his words, barely above a whisper, shot through her with the force of a blast.

She couldn’t go down that road again. “It’s a little weird, yeah, but fine, too,” she said, arranging folders on the table.

“I used to watch you.” He’d put his hands in his pockets and was standing there not bothering to hide the glistening in his eyes. “After you’d get home from school, you’d get on Annabelle and ride out to our hill. Every day, when you’d disappear out of sight, I’d pretend I was out there with you…”

“Don’t, Rafe.” He’d watched her? It could be creepy. But it was Rafe. Needing her.

Just as she’d needed him.

Even in their separation they’d been together? The idea soothed her.

And nothing had changed.

“I’d sit up in my room and picture you out there with someone else. Someone who would love you as much as I did, and not leave you…”

Picturing the thirteen-year-old man-child he’d been, all alone in his room at the mansion—she even knew which window to picture since she’d looked up to it often enough over the years—she didn’t want to care.

He’d made his choice. But…

“Payne Colton’s a powerful man.” She gave him what little leeway she’d been able to find for him over the years. For the young Rafe, that was. “You were a kid with no other family. It would have been suicide to challenge him over a girl at that age,” she said.

He swallowed so hard she noticed his Adam’s apple bobbing.

And she thought of the eighteen years after he’d no longer been a kid and still hadn’t even bothered to call. To send her a card. To acknowledge she existed.

“You were right to stay away,” she said then. Because clarity was a wonderful thing when it came loaded in truth. And a total bitch, too, with the pain it brought. “It would have hurt too badly to be in touch with our lives so completely different.”

They might inhabit the same twenty-mile radius of the universe, but their worlds were so distant they’d done so without ever running into each other. Stone-cold truth.

“Tonight…when that shot rang out…when I thought at first that you’d been shot…” She looked at him. She should never have looked at him. “You’re in my heart, Kerry. You’re there. Exactly where you’ve always been. As much as you’ve always been. I just need you to know that.”

For a brief second, her spirit soared. She was young again. With a heart filled with hope and possibility. With plans. With a heart that knew how to dream. And then reality hit. Him standing there in his expensive clothes, in front of a wall filled with her brother’s murder details.

She wasn’t the only one who’d been hurt by Rafe’s defection. And he hadn’t said a word about coming back, either. About being friends in the future.

Because he couldn’t. She got that. He’d been a Colton for too long. His family depended on him, and he on them, too, she figured: whether he liked that or not.

She wanted to tell him that he was in her heart, too, but that door wasn’t open. Not even a little bit. Her secrets had been shut away for so long, she wasn’t even sure what was in there anymore.

Didn’t really want to know.

“When I got back from college, I moved out of the mansion,” he told her. “I built a house…”

“You don’t live in the mansion?”

But that’s where she’d been picturing him. In the present. But in the past, too. All those years, every time she’d driven out that way, she’d always looked out in the distance and pictured him up on the third floor, in a corner room separate from his other siblings. He’d used to describe the place to her: all the bathrooms, the carpeting so thick you don’t hear steps when you walk…

“I built my own place…” he was saying again, and she stopped him.

“Had it built, you mean.”

He wasn’t in the mansion. She had no idea where he lived. Couldn’t picture his home, but it shouldn’t matter.

She just didn’t like that kind of surprise. Some things were meant to stay neatly in their place.

“I hired help, yes, but I did as much of the work myself as I could,” he told her, surprising her. “It took me over a year.” He stood there, meeting her gaze, holding on to her with it, like he needed her to see inside him.

She wasn’t going to look. Didn’t he get that? He’d taken away that right, once. She wasn’t going to let him take it from her again.

And couldn’t live with it and not live with him.

“I built it on our land, Kerry. Our spot on the other side of the hill behind the barn.”

No. He. Did. Not.

He was living on the one acre in the world that was sacred to her? The one that had sustained her during her years with him, allowing them to be friends unseen, and the ones after him, too. The one place in the world where she’d always been able to find solace?

She’d cried more tears in that dust and dirt than she’d cried since. Ever.

Not at her father’s funeral. And not at Tyler’s, either.

She’d cried more for Rafe than for either of the men who were family to her.

And she couldn’t do this. She wasn’t that girl anymore. He’d killed her.

“You broke my heart, Rafe.”

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