The Pregnant Colton Bride

Chapter 2

Zane waited for the sheriff to continue, but obviously the man wanted to be coaxed.

Okay, Zane conceded. He was willing to play this game, just as long as it got him the answers he was after—and closer to finding out who had taken his stepfather.

“And what might that ‘something interesting’ be, Sheriff?” Zane asked.

Watkins slid a little more forward on his chair. As he did so, the man’s small, gray eyes all but burrowed into him, seemingly taking full measure of him.

Elbows leaning on the armrests, the sheriff laced his fingers together in front of him as if he was relating a story around a campfire.

“Well, seems that your stepdaddy was making regular withdrawals from one of his private bank accounts, making them monthly to some bank account located heaven knows where—we haven’t been able to track it down yet,” Watkins continued, drawing out the revelation as he carefully watched Zane’s face, apparently waiting for some telltale reaction. “Withdrawals to the tune of $9,999. That’s the biggest amount he could have made without attracting the government’s attention,” Watkins added as if he were talking to someone who wasn’t already aware of that fact. Everyone knew that little tidbit. Or at least everyone who was involved in finances and matters dealing with security, Zane thought impatiently.

Was the sheriff watching him for a reaction? Zane couldn’t help wonder.

Well, he had a reaction all right. It was barely contained outrage.

He resented having this sprung on him out of nowhere, apparently for effect. “How long have you known this?” Zane wanted to know.

“Just today,” Watkins answered mildly. The sheriff continued watching him the way a cat watched a mouse hole, breathless, waiting to pounce.

A few choice words rose to Zane’s tongue, but he deliberately refrained from voicing any of them. It served no purpose telling the sheriff what he thought of his coming here, trying to bait him rather than being out in the field, looking for Eldridge.

Most of all, Zane was really growing tired of playing cat and mouse.

“Regular payments?” Zane questioned.

Watkins nodded his head. “Like clockwork.”

Zane felt as if he was getting information out of the man by dribbles and drabs. “For how long?”

“Three months.” Again, the gray eyes seemed to be burrowing right into him. “Why? What are you thinking?” he asked.

“Same thing you are,” Zane answered vaguely.

It was a lie. He had a feeling, from the way Watkins was looking at him, that the sheriff was thinking a great many more things than just the one thing that had immediately struck him. Watkins might like presenting himself as being nothing more than a simple country sheriff, but under that easygoing exterior was a shrewd man, Zane decided. A man who didn’t take kindly to being made to look foolish—and an unsolved crime of this magnitude, involving such a well-known citizen like Eldridge Colton, did just that.

Appearing to hang on his every word, Watkins cocked his head, looking right back at him, the very picture of innocence. “Which is?”

Why was Watkins waiting for him to spell it out? Was the man setting some sort of a trap for him, or was he just using him as a sounding board?

“Somebody was blackmailing my stepfather,” he said, careful to use the sheriff-approved label for the man he considered his father. “Maybe the same person who kidnapped him.”

Watkins scratched his head, as if that simple action helped him absorb the words a little better. “Now, why would he kidnap your stepdaddy if Mr. Colton was making regular payments to him?” Watkins asked.

Zane knew that Watkins knew the answer as well as he did, but again, he played along, answering the question as he wondered just exactly what the sheriff was really up to. In a nutshell, was the man trying to prove his innocence, or his guilt?

Or was he just casting about, hoping he—or whoever else Watkins went on to question—would somehow trip themselves up and say the wrong thing?

He couldn’t get a handle on it. All he knew was Watkins’s rather clumsy method definitely made him feel uncomfortable.

Zane did his best to continue playing along, but his temper was really growing short. It had been this way ever since Eldridge had been taken.

“Maybe my stepfather got tired of paying the blackmailer. Or maybe the blackmailer had decided to up the ante and my stepfather said no. Or maybe,” he speculated, coming up with a third reason, “whoever was blackmailing him just got too angry at my stepfather and decided to take it out on him. I don’t know,” Zane snapped. “That’s your job.”

“Getting a mite testy, aren’t you, son?” Watkins asked.

The man might be a couple of decades older than he was, but Zane wasn’t about to stand being talked down to like this.

“I don’t know. Am I?” he challenged. “What would you be like if it was your father who’d been kidnapped?”

“Stepfather,” Watkins corrected, a little of his folksy cadence slipping away.

Zane had had just about enough of this. “How about we just call him Eldridge?” he proposed in an exasperated tone. “Would that suit you?”

“Doesn’t matter what suits me, Mr. Colton,” Watkins replied calmly. “I’m just a lowly elected official of the county, trying to do his job.” His eyes narrowed ever so slightly as they pinned Zane in place. “You wouldn’t happen to know who was on the receiving end of these regular payments, now, would you?” he asked, his tone halfway between being solicitous and friendly.

“I haven’t a clue,” Zane responded tersely. And then he reversed the tables. “Do you?”

“Not yet,” Watkins replied honestly. “But I aim to find out. You hear anything, Mr. Colton, I expect you to let me know,” the sheriff said in a mild voice as he rose to his feet.

Zane knew he was being put on notice but he went out of his way to maintain a friendly tone. “Can I expect the same from you?”

Watkins inclined his head as if it was a wait-and-see situation.

“If I can,” the sheriff replied.

Which translated to a big, fat No, Zane realized. The sheriff was not in the business of sharing. The only reason Watkins had come to him with this business of regular bank account withdrawals was to see his reaction to the news.

The sheriff was on a fishing expedition and he was looking to catch himself a big fish whose last name was Colton, Zane thought. He obviously believed that someone within the family had abducted Eldridge.

But why?

It wasn’t as if there was a dearth of suspects outside of the family. Eldridge Colton had made his share of enemies in his youth.

Taking great pains to make sure none of his thoughts were registering on his face, Zane rose to his feet less than a beat after the sheriff had gained his. Then, rounding his desk, he walked the man to his office door.

“Thanks for stopping by, Sheriff,” he said in the friendliest voice he could muster, “and for keeping me in the loop.”

Watkins’s eyes met his. Again, the sheriff’s were unreadable. His lips spread just a little in what passed for a smile. An exceedingly shallow smile. “Count on it.”

Zane felt as if he was once again being put on notice. This wasn’t the first conversation he’d had with the sheriff, nor was it the first time he’d had the impression that Watkins would have been more than thrilled to pin this all on him—or at least on someone in his family.

All that meant, Zane thought as he shook the sheriff’s hand and then watched the man walk away, was that he was going to have to get really serious about doing some intense investigating of his own.

His priorities converged with the sheriff’s only insofar as wanting to solve the mystery of Eldridge’s disappearance. Their paths diverged immediately after that because the sheriff suspected him while he, of course, knew he wasn’t the one responsible for his father’s disappearance.

He might have been at the house the morning of the abduction—they’d all been at the house that morning, it was everyone’s customary starting point every Monday morning—but he hadn’t gone anywhere near his father’s room until after Moira had screamed because she’d found the blood.

He’d told Watkins as much, and the sheriff might have nodded when he heard that part, but Zane strongly suspected the man wasn’t really convinced—and wouldn’t be until the real kidnapper was caught and confessed to the crime.

Until, Zane silently emphasized, not if.

Feeling momentarily overwhelmed, Zane suppressed a sigh.

“Is everything all right, Mr. Colton?”

Zane roused himself. Lost in thought, he hadn’t realized he was still standing by his open door, staring after the departing sheriff, rather than going back to his desk.

“Not yet,” he admitted, his voice a bit vague.

Looking at Mirabella, he flashed a quick smile in his administrative assistant’s direction because she had expressed an interest in his well-being.

These days, a lot of people went out of their way to avoid him rather than be faced with having to find words of comfort and encouragement.

“But it will be,” he concluded.

Mirabella pressed her lips together. Her stomach was suddenly rebelling again. Clenching one fist at her side, she struggled to exercise some sort of control over the queasy feeling. After all, she couldn’t very well just dash off to the ladies’ room in the middle of his sentence. Besides, Zane looked so lost for a moment, her heart went out to him.

“Was this about Mr. Eldridge?” she asked Zane quietly.

“Yes, it was,” he replied.

Her eyes immediately widened and he caught himself thinking, despite the quagmire he found himself in, that her pale brown eyes looked beautiful.

Not the time, he admonished himself. Besides, the woman works for you, you’re not supposed to think of her that way.

A glimmer of fear had frozen on her face. “The sheriff didn’t come to tell you...” She couldn’t bring herself to finish the sentence.

She didn’t need to. He could see Mirabella was thinking the worst. Zane immediately cut his assistant short, putting her mind at ease.

“No, he didn’t,” Zane told her. “It seems that there’s just been another puzzle piece added to this mix.”

“Oh.” The single word escaped her lips, indicating she had no idea if this was good news or bad.

Mirabella wasn’t asking him any questions and normally, he would have been grateful for that and wouldn’t have volunteered anything. But today, this minute, filled to the brim with a host of tumultuous emotions, he found himself needing to talk to someone. His concern about his stepfather’s ultimate welfare was eating away at him and he didn’t know who to talk to, who to really trust.

There was something almost sweetly honest about the woman who quietly took care of all the myriad small details that went into making his job run as smoothly as it did.

In all the time they had worked together, there’d been no slipups. Mirabella was good at her job.

In the blink of an eye, she went from administrative assistant to temporary confidante.

“It’s come to the sheriff’s attention that someone might have been blackmailing my father,” Zane told her without fanfare or hemming and hawing.

There was concern on Mirabella’s delicate, heart-shaped face. Not a rush to judgment, not a quick, terse correction to remind him that Eldridge Colton was his stepfather, not his flesh-and-blood father.

Zane wasn’t much of a talker, but he found Mirabella extremely easy to talk to. It was almost as if her very expression coaxed the words out of his mouth—and the weight off his shoulders.

“Blackmail?” she repeated in a small, hushed voice that almost vibrated with horrified disbelief. “Mr. Eldridge? Are you sure?”

Zane sighed, scrubbing his hand over his face. “Right now, Belle, I’m not sure of anything. But the sheriff came to tell me that one of my father’s bank accounts was experiencing regular withdrawals once a month.”

“Where were the withdrawals going?” Mirabella wanted to know. Who could be doing such an awful thing, blackmailing that sweet old man?

“That is what I intend to find out. Belle, get me—” He stopped talking and looked at her as if he hadn’t really seen her today. “Are you feeling all right, Belle?” he asked.

No, I feel as if my stomach is being twisted inside out and it’s all going to be coming up into my throat at any second, she thought, desperately trying to hold it together.

It was her own fault, she upbraided herself. She was the one asking questions, detaining Zane. She should have just nodded and withdrawn, pretending to go back to her desk. This way she could really be hurrying off to the ladies’ room, praying it was unoccupied. The last thing she needed was to have someone overhearing her throwing up and offering to take her to the company nurse.

“I’m fine, sir,” she told him, hoping she sounded convincing.

No, she wasn’t, Zane observed. She wasn’t fine. His administrative assistant looked very pale and it made him feel guilty. She was undoubtedly concerned about his father’s well-being and reacting to what he’d just told her. Images of blackmailers and the way some might handle a situation that wasn’t to their liking didn’t exactly create calming scenarios.

He shouldn’t have said anything to her.

Feeling responsible for making her feel this way, Zane took her hand in his in a gesture of comfort.

“Don’t worry,” he assured her, “he’ll be all right.”

Mirabella looked at her boss, confused even as she found herself reacting to the gentle way he was holding her hand.

There’d never been any physical contact between them before. Despite the nausea gripping her, something else was going on as well, something faint, but compelling nonetheless. She had no idea where this was coming from or why it seemed to momentarily supersede everything else.

This assault on her hormones she experienced because of the baby had literally knocked out all the rules. She quite frankly didn’t know what to expect from herself from one minute to the next.

Right now, all she could think about was telling Zane how totally attracted to him she was. It was a real struggle not to. Almost as much of a struggle as it was to keep down whatever was threatening to purge itself right this minute.

So she forced herself to smile, desperately hoping she wasn’t going to start sweating—which she knew would only lead to more questions.

Instead, she said, “I know everything will be all right because you’ll find Mr. Eldridge, I know you will.”

“First thing I’m going to find,” Zane told her, releasing her hand and turning toward his desk, “is exactly where and to whom these monthly withdrawals are going.”

Though everything within her screamed to leave right this second while she still could, before risking embarrassment, Mirabella had to ask, “The sheriff really didn’t tell you?”

“The sheriff indicated he didn’t know.” Whether or not that was the truth he didn’t know, but he was going with that assumption for now. “He said something about it going into an untraceable bank account.”

Which could very well be the truth. Despite the fact that this was the age of the hacker and people who were versed in all sorts of internet sleight of hand, not everyone was a cyber expert.

Be that as it may, Zane had the feeling the sheriff was not the country bumpkin he wanted everyone to believe him to be. That was just to throw everyone off their game and cause them to let slip things they might not have around someone they considered to be more savvy.

Whatever the case, right now he didn’t have the time to spend trying to figure the sheriff out. He needed to track down exactly where Eldridge’s withdrawals were going and just who was on the receiving end of those withdrawals.

And just as important, he needed to find out why. Just what was his father being blackmailed about?

“Will there be anything else, Mr. Colton?” Mirabella asked, really struggling not to allow her breakfast to come up.

“No, not right now,” he replied, looking away. And then he looked up again. “Wait,” he called after her.

Her back now to him, Mirabella didn’t turn around. Instead, she pressed her hand against her chest. She was going to start heaving any second.

A rather breathless “Yes?” was really all she could manage in the way of a reply.

“Get me Meyer Stanley on the phone,” he requested, addressing the words to her back.

Meyer was his recently transferred IT wizard, the man who could track down absolutely anything via the internet. If Meyer couldn’t find something, then it didn’t exist.

Mirabella remained where she was, with her back still facing him. Rather than turning around or even verbally responding to the request, Mirabella merely nodded her head and then held up one hand in the air, jiggling it as if to confirm she had heard him and she would get the man’s number immediately.

Then, before he could say anything further—or had a chance to inquire after her health again because she was behaving so oddly—Mirabella all but fled the room, pulling the door closed behind her.

Leaving Zane to stare at it in utter, albeit fleeting, bewilderment.

The next moment his mind was back on his stepfather and the mysterious monthly withdrawals. Things were becoming much more complicated.

Just what the hell was going on here?

Chapter 3

His IT wizard still hadn’t gotten back to him, but then, Meyer had only been given the assignment a little more than a day ago, Zane reminded himself. Even wizardry took time.

He took comfort in the fact that nothing was ever totally untraceable. Tracking something down through cyberspace wasn’t impossible, just exceedingly time-consuming and tricky, requiring a great deal of patience, especially if they were dealing with an expert. He would be the first to admit that.

Even so, a restlessness was threatening to completely undo Zane if he didn’t get out of the office for at least a little while and hit the field himself. If, in the interim, Meyer came up with anything, the man knew enough to make sure to reach him on his cell phone. These days it felt as if his phone was another appendage, never out of reach.

As he walked out of his office, habit had Zane glancing at Mirabella’s desk.

She wasn’t there.

Lately, whenever he passed her desk, either on his way in or out of his office, he’d noticed that more than half the time, the woman wasn’t at her desk. Was she ill the way he’d suspected yesterday?

Pausing for a moment, Zane tried to remember if he’d heard anything about a bug going around the office lately, but came up empty. If he were being totally honest with himself, he was rather oblivious to common everyday occurrences lately. Everything in life as he normally knew it had taken a distant backseat to his stepfather’s disappearance.

Even so, bug or not, the next time their paths crossed, he was going to confront Mirabella about his suspicions again, and this time he wasn’t going to allow her to just shrug them off. He both appreciated and understood the woman’s dedication to her job, but he didn’t want her coming in if she was feeling ill. There was such a thing as carrying dedication too far.

Maybe he should pay attention to his own philosophy, Zane silently lectured himself. Investigations belonged in the hands of investigators, not in the hands of relatives who were too close to the situation to be impartial detectives.

That might be true, he wordlessly granted the next moment, but who had the bigger stake in finding his father, some worn-out sheriff or someone who cared whether or not Eldridge Colton lived or died? Zane knew the answer to that.

Turning down the hall, he was on his way to the elevator when he caught a glimpse of Mirabella emerging from the ladies’ room. To his recollection she was looking even paler than she had earlier this morning which was an ash-gray theme and variation on how pale she’d appeared yesterday.

As she approached, he saw his administrative assistant was wiping her forehead with the wadded up handkerchief she had in her hand.

For a split second, he thought of just giving Mirabella her privacy and merely nodding as he passed, telling her that he was planning on being out of the office for the next hour or so.

But, although Zane believed in allotting people their own space, he didn’t believe in avoiding situations—even if they were awkward—not if those situations needed to be dealt with.

And this one, in his opinion, obviously did.

So rather than keep on walking, Zane made a point of stopping directly in front of his administrative assistant, a six-foot-three-inch roadblock that was bent on keeping her from returning to her desk until he’d gotten a few answers.

Placing his hands on either side of her shoulders, Zane looked directly into her eyes and voiced his concern without beating around the bush.

“Tell me the truth, Belle. Were you just in there—” he nodded toward the ladies’ room “—being sick?”

For a second, Mirabella stopped breathing. Oh Lord, did he suspect? She’d been so careful to keep her retching as quiet as possible, afraid anyone coming into the ladies’ room might overhear her and put two and two together. From there it was only a very short leap to the status of office gossip.

Her mind raced to come up with a plausible response. Feeling weak and unsteady on her legs, not to mention feeling as if she’d thrown up the entire meager contents of her wretched stomach, going all the way back to yesterday’s breakfast, Mirabella did her best to look as if she had absolutely no idea what her boss was talking about.

She assumed a mystified expression. “What do you mean by ‘sick’?”

“Sick,” Zane repeated, as if saying the word with emphasis somehow made it clearer for her. “You know, feverish, under the weather, maybe even sweating.” He deliberately looked at the wadded-up handkerchief in her hand, then added, “And throwing up.”

Her eyes instantly widened. “I haven’t been throwing up,” she denied so quickly he could almost feel the breeze created by her words.

“Okay, I believe you,” he said in a calming voice, although, to be honest, he really didn’t believe her. “It’s just that while I really appreciate your dedication and having someone I can rely on, that someone isn’t going to do me any good if she’s going to wind up working herself into a hospital bed—or worse,” he told her. His eyes held Mirabella’s as he went on to ask, “Am I making myself understood?”

Mirabella pressed her lips together, struggling to look as if everything was all right instead of in a state of almost complete upheaval. “Yes, sir.”

She looked like the picture of innocence, but he had a feeling he really wasn’t getting through to her. He’d never met a redheaded woman yet who, politely or not, wasn’t stubborn beyond words.

Still, he pressed on. “And if you need to go home and go to bed in order to get better, I want you to go do just that.”

Going to bed was what got me into this situation to begin with, Mirabella couldn’t help thinking ruefully.

Out loud, she told Zane, “That’s very kind of you, Mr. Colton, but I’m fine.”

“Belle,” Zane began, hesitating for a moment before finally continuing, “forgive me for being blunt here, but you really don’t look fine.”

She looked away and shrugged. “Bad hair day,” she murmured.

“Your hair is beautiful as always,” Zane said like a man who had no idea he was paying a woman a compliment instead of just simply stating what to him was an obvious fact. “Your face, however looks really pale.”

She became a tad defensive when she heard that. “I’m a redhead, it comes with the territory,” she said, wishing he would stop being so nice and just walk away like any normal, self-absorbed boss.

But he wasn’t a normal, self-absorbed boss, which was why, despite her best efforts not to, she found herself being so strongly attracted to him.