Colton by Marriage Read online

  And with that, Duke’s sister slammed the door and stormed out.

  Susan closed her eyes for a moment, gathering herself together. Part of her wanted to run after Maisie, to pin the thin, fragile woman down and send for the sheriff to file a complaint.

  Not a wise move, she pointed out to herself. After all, the sheriff was one of Maisie’s brothers.

  The other part just felt sorry for Maisie. She knew that the woman had had a hard time of it, being harassed not only by the holier-than-thou people in town, but by her own father. Darius Colton allowed his daughter to live on the Colton ranch—along with her son he had never accepted into the family—but he made her pay for the so-called kindness. Made her pay for any tiny crumb he sent Maisie’s way.

  It made her eternally grateful for her own set of parents—even if her mother did tend to drive her insane with broad hints about not getting any younger and needing to get started on creating a family now, if not yesterday.

  Well, if nothing else, the Coltons were certainly not a dull lot, Susan thought. Carefully getting down on her knees, she gingerly began to gather up the shards of glass that had once been a cut-glass vase.

  That was the way Duke found her, on her knees, piling up pieces of glass onto a tissue that was spread out on the floor beside her desk. Opening the door in response to her wary “Come in,” he took one look at the mess and crouched down to help her.

  “What happened?” It was actually meant as a rhetorical question. The answer he received didn’t fall into that category.

  She took a breath before giving Duke an answer. “Your big sister had a ‘run in’ with my vase.” She grimaced. “The vase lost.”

  Duke sat back on his heels, looking at her. “My sister?” he repeated, confused. “Maisie?”

  “You have any other sisters I don’t know about?” Susan asked drolly.

  There was his half-sister Joan, a product of one of his father’s affairs, but that’s clearly not who Susan meant. Duke frowned. Deeply. This wasn’t making any sense. Why would Maisie cause a scene like this? He hadn’t even thought that his sister knew Susan. “No, but—what was she doing here?”

  Susan sighed, reliving the event in her mind. She couldn’t quite separate herself from it. It had really bothered her.

  “Telling me that you were just toying with me and that I should walk away if I knew what was good for me.” She stopped picking up pieces of glass and looked at Duke. He wasn’t reacting. “Is she right? Did you send her to warn me off?”

  She couldn’t fathom his expression as he looked at her. “Is that what you think?”

  Susan looked up toward the ceiling, thinking. And not getting anywhere. “I don’t know what to think—except that Maisie could be dangerous if she got angry enough.”

  If he were being honest, Duke would have to admit that there was part of him that agreed with Susan. There were times when he worried that Maisie might do something that couldn’t be swept under the rug or just shrugged off. Something that would go badly and backfire on her.

  But family loyalty made him feel compelled to dismiss Susan’s concerns, so out loud he said, “Maisie’s harmless. She’s just a little off at times, that’s all. But she’s been through a lot and the old man hasn’t exactly made life easy for her. He rides everyone, especially Maisie and she’s a little fragile.”

  There was merit to his argument, Susan thought. But he was missing a very significant point. He might even be blind to it, she judged. “I think Maisie’s afraid I might try to take you away from her.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” he scoffed. The shattered vase forgotten, Duke rose to his feet, not a little indignant over what he assumed that Susan was implying. “Why would Maisie think that? She’s my sister, not some woman I’ve been seeing.”

  Susan quickly stood up and placed her hand on his chest, in part to calm him, in part to keep him from leaving before she explained herself. She hadn’t meant to insult him.

  “I’m not saying that’s how you see her, but I think in Maisie’s world, things are a little…confused. She probably looks to you as someone she can trust, someone she can share her thoughts with.”

  The man might be stoic, but there was a gentleness in his manner when he mentioned his sister’s plight with their father. Her guess was that Duke didn’t want to see Maisie hurt. She liked him for that, even if Maisie had overtly threatened her.

  His eyes were angry as he promised, “I’ll have a talk with her.”

  “Don’t yell at her, Duke,” Susan cautioned, in case what she’d just told him caused his temper to flare. “I think your sister is really scared.” She paused for a moment, debating, then decided that Duke had a right to know what she suspected had happened. “I also think she saw us.”

  Duke’s gaze grew very dark as he stared at her. “Saw us?” he echoed.

  Now what was Susan talking about? Women were way too complicated, never coming right out and saying what was on their minds. They had to hint, to skirt around the words until a guy’s head got painfully dizzy. “Yes, saw us,” Susan emphasized meaningfully, her eyes on his.

  Because his mind didn’t work that way, for a moment he didn’t know what Susan meant by that cryptic phrase. And then it hit him.

  “Oh.”

  Anger over having his privacy invaded battled with the general compassion he normally felt for his sister. He’d always cut her a lot of slack, especially after Damien had been sent to prison.

  “Hell,” he sighed, shaking his head, “now I really am going to have a talk with her.” One hand on the doorknob, he was about to leave when Susan called his name.

  “Duke?”

  He stopped abruptly, his mind already back at the main house. “What?”

  “What are you doing here?” Susan wanted to know. When he looked at her blankly, she became a little more specific. “You don’t usually come into town,” she pointed out. Was this a casual visit, or was there something more behind it? She knew which way she would have wanted it. She tried not to sound too eager as she asked, “Why did you come by my office?”

  “I was in town on an errand.” It seemed rather foolish now to say that he’d just wanted to see her. To see if he’d just imagined the whole thing back at the ranch the other day or if the sight of her actually could make his stomach feel as if it was at the center of a Boy Scout knot-tying jamboree. “Thought I’d stop by,” he mumbled.

  Damn, but this wasn’t him, Duke thought in disgust at his own behavior. He was never tongue-tied. He was quiet by choice, not out of necessity to keep from sounding like some kind of babbling idiot. And yet, this bit of a thing had him tripping over his own tongue, badly messing with his thought processes. What was it about her that made him act like a village idiot?

  Pushing all thoughts of Maisie aside, Susan smiled at him as she drew closer.

  “I’m glad you did,” she told him. “Are you hungry?” she asked him, suddenly thinking of it. Glancing over her shoulder at the small refrigerator where she kept all sorts of samples for her catering business, Susan made him an offer. “If you are, I could just whip up something for you to nibble on, take the edge off.”

  What he found himself wanting to nibble on required no special preparation by Susan. All she had to do was stand there.

  Where the hell had that come from?

  The next moment, stifling an annoyed sigh, Duke mentally shook his head. It was official. He had become certifiably crazy. And all it had taken was two consecutive rolls in the proverbial hay with the Kelley girl.

  Maybe this dropping by wasn’t such a good idea. He didn’t like discovering that he had these needs knocking around inside him. At least, not to this extent. He’d known he was attracted to her, but he’d figured he could keep it under control.

  Time to go. “No thanks,” he muttered, begging off. “I’m good.”

  Yes, you are, Susan thought, then realized that she could probably go straight to hell for what she was thinking right now.

  C
learing her throat, she nodded in response to what he’d just said to her. “Well, thanks for stopping by. It was nice seeing you again.”

  “Yeah, well…” For the second time, he began leaving the office, his hand on the doorknob, ready to pull it shut behind him and make good his escape. He was almost home free when the words seemed to escape of their own volition. “You free tonight?”

  Her mother had taught her that it was never a good thing to appear to be too available because that made it seem as if no one else wanted her. But no one else did, other than Linc and there was no way she wanted even to entertain that thought. Besides, her mother was a big one for playing games. Playing games had never held any appeal to her. And to that end, she just wasn’t any good at it. Lies had a way of tripping her up.

  “I’m free,” she told him. “Why?” She crossed her fingers behind her back, hoping that the reason he was asking was because he wanted to see her.

  Duke knew he was voluntarily putting a noose around his neck, but he assured himself that he could remove it at any time and would, once he grew tired of Susan. But for now, he was very far from being tired of her. “I was thinking maybe I could come by, pick you up and we could go out to eat.”

  He liked the way a smile came to her eyes when he asked her out. It was almost as if he could feel the warmth. “Sounds good to me.”

  He did his best to appear as if he was indifferent to the actual outcome. It was rather adolescent of him, but this was a brand-new place he found himself traveling through. “So if I come by, you’ll be there?”

  “That better be ‘when,’ not ‘if,’” she informed him, doing her best to sound serious and not letting him hear the way her heart was pounding, “and yes I’ll be there when you come by. Oh, by the way, I’m staying in the guest house behind the main house.”

  Duke nodded. He understood how that was. There were amenities that were hard to give up, but they weren’t worth trading hard-won independence for, either. A compromise was the best way to go. “All the comforts of home without having them underfoot.”

  She didn’t really consider her parents being “underfoot” but it was too early in this budding whatever-it-was to admit that to him outright. He might look down at her for that.

  “Something like that,” she answered vaguely.

  He nodded, not pressing the issue. “Seven o’clock sound all right to you?”

  “Seven o’clock sounds fine.” Hesitating, Susan knew she’d have no peace about the evening ahead unless she asked. “Maisie won’t be coming with you, will she?”

  “Don’t worry,” he assured her. “She’ll be staying home tonight. Even if I have to tie her to a chair,” he promised.

  “You don’t have to go to those drastic measures,” she told him. But secretly, the thought of knowing that Maisie would be unable to suddenly pop up and ruin their evening was rather appealing, not to mention comforting. “Just make sure she doesn’t know where you’re going—and with whom.”

  He looked at her closely. “She really did spook you, didn’t she?”

  Susan was going to say no, because that sounded braver, but it was also a lie. So she shrugged, trying her best to look casual. “Let’s just say I’m not used to being threatened.”

  “Don’t worry, you won’t have to get used to it. It won’t happen again,” he promised.

  There was definitely something of the knight in shining armor about the dusty cattle rancher, Susan thought with a smile, watching him leave.

  Chapter 12

  “Is it true?”

  Wes hadn’t heard the door to the sheriff’s office open, had been too preoccupied working at his desk to even hear anyone come in.

  Only in office for a little more than a year and it was already looking as if every unaccounted-for piece of paper in the county had somehow found its way to his desk, presumably to die. A man had to have access to a thirty-hour day—without any sleep—in order to do this job properly and still take care of all this annoying paperwork, he thought darkly.

  Right about now, Wes was convinced that he would welcome any distraction to take him away from these damn reports he needed to file. But when he looked up to see his sister standing before his desk, looking every bit like a commercial seeking pledges of money for food for a starving third-world country, he wasn’t quite so sure about welcoming any distraction.

  Maisie, at forty, was his older sister—as well as his only sister—but there were a lot of times when he felt as if he were the older one, not Maisie. These days there was something of the waif about her. Seeing her like that usually brought out his protective instincts.

  But dealing with Maisie took a great deal of patience, which in turn meant a great deal of time, and time was something he was rather short on right now. As sheriff of Honey Creek he had a murder with a twist on his hands and the sooner he got to the bottom of it, the sooner life in this small town would go back to normal. Back to people engaging in harmless gossip instead of looking at one another with suspicion and uneasiness. Too many people were heading to the hardware store to buy deadbolts for their doors, something that had been, heretofore, unheard of in Honey Creek.

  Maisie’s thin but still beautiful face was now a mask of consternation. Wes couldn’t even begin to guess why.

  His first thought was that whatever had brought her here to him might have something to do with her son, his nephew Jeremy. Or maybe with their father.

  And just possibly, both.

  His guess turned out to be wrong.

  “Is what true?” he finally asked her when she didn’t elaborate.

  Maisie drew in a shaky breath, as if that would somehow help her push out the next words she needed to say. “Is it true that Mark Walsh came back from the dead?”

  That pulled him up short. Where the hell had that come from? There just seemed to be no end to the annoyances this dead man could stir up. “Who told you that?”

  Her thin shoulders scratched the air in a hapless shrug. “I heard talk. They said that you found Mark Walsh in the creek.” Maisie paused, clearly waiting for him to confirm or deny the statement.

  Wes folded his hands on top of the opened report on his desk and looked into his older sister’s eyes. “I did.”

  Maisie stifled a strange, hapless little noise. “Then he did come back from the dead.”

  She began to tremble visibly, her busy fingers going to her lips as if they could help her find the right words to say next. But only small frightened sounds escaped.

  Getting up, Wes abandoned the tiresome work that was spread over the surface of his desk. He considered his sister’s peace of mind—or what he was about to coax forward—to be far more important than filing something on time.

  Rounding his desk, Wes came over to where Maisie was standing and put his arm around her shoulders in an effort to comfort her. Maisie responded to kind voices and a soft touch.

  “No, Maisie, Mark Walsh didn’t come back from the dead,” he told her in a firm, gentle voice.

  But it didn’t help. She pulled away from him, her aquamarine eyes wide and frightened. “But we buried him. There was a casket and a body and they were buried,” she insisted, her voice bordering on hysteria. “Fifteen years ago, they were buried. I saw it.”

  “It was someone else—” Wes began, still patient. His voice was low, soothing. Damn, he wished Duke was here. Duke always seemed to be able to manage her better than the rest of them could.

  “Who?” Maisie wanted to know, almost begging to be convinced she was wrong. If she was wrong, if Mark hadn’t come back from the dead to haunt her, then the nightmares she was afraid of wouldn’t start again, the way they had when Mark was first buried.

  “I don’t know,” Wes told her wearily, “but it wasn’t Walsh.” He tried talking to her the way he would to anyone else. To a stable person. “I’m having the first body exhumed to try to see if we can determine who it was.” No one else had been reported missing at the time, so for now, he still held to his drifter-
in-the-wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time theory.

  It was obvious that Maisie was desperately trying to come to terms with what had happened. “But that body you found in the creek, that was Mark?”

  “Yes, Maisie, that was Mark Walsh.”

  Just when he thought he’d made her understand, she suddenly challenged him. “How do you know that was Mark Walsh?”

  He supposed it was a fair enough question. He did his best to hang onto his patience. “The county medical examiner matched up Walsh’s dental records with the man we fished out of the creek.”

  Maisie blew out another shaky breath, her eyes never leaving her brother. “And he’s really dead?”

  Wes tried to give her an encouraging smile. “He’s really dead.”

  She still looked fearful, still unable to believe what he was telling her.

  “You’re sure?” Clutching at his shirt with her damp fingers, she implored him to convince her. “You’re really sure it’s him? And that he’s dead?”

  Very gently, he separated her fingers from his shirt. “Maisie, what’s this all about?” An uneasy feeling undulated through him. Could his sister have had something to so with Walsh’s death? She did seem unhinged at times and there was no way to gauge what was going on in her head.

  She didn’t answer his question, she just repeated her own. “Are you sure, Wes?” she pressed, enunciating each word.

  “I’m sure. There’s no mistake this time. It is Mark Walsh and he’s dead.” Still holding her hands in his, Wes looked into her eyes, trying to make sense out of what was going on. “Maisie, why are you so agitated about this?”

  “I don’t want the nightmares to start again,” she said, more to herself or to someone who wasn’t in the room than in response to his question. For a moment, Maisie looked as if she was going to cry, but then she raised her head defiantly, as if issuing a challenge to that same nonexistent person. “Not again.”

  Wes did what he could to reassure her. He really didn’t have time for this. “They won’t,” he promised her. “Everything’s going to be fine, Maisie. Just fine. Look, why don’t I take you home? You’re too upset right now to be alone.”