Colton by Marriage Read online

  “All right,” she agreed docilely, the agitation leaving her as quickly, as suddenly, as it had come. Subdued, she followed him outside to the street like some obedient pet.

  About to open the passenger side of his police vehicle for her, Wes happened to look across the street, to the side entrance of Kelley’s Cookhouse. He saw Duke walking out of the restaurant and heading toward his truck.

  Wes saw his way out.

  “C’mon, Maisie,” he urged, “I think I just found you a ride home.”

  His sister looked at him blankly as he took hold of her arm and propelled her down the street. “I thought you said you were taking me home.”

  “I was, but then I’d have to come back.” But Duke didn’t, he thought. Duke was going home.

  His brother had already started up his truck. Waving, Wes hurriedly put himself directly in Duke’s path. The latter was forced to pick up his hand brake again and turn his engine off.

  Now what? Duke wondered.

  He stuck his head out through the driver’s-side window, looking at Wes. “From what I recollect, they issued you a bulletproof vest when you took this job, not a car-proof vest. You got a death wish, Sheriff?”

  Wes came around to Duke’s side of the cab. “I need you to get Maisie home.”

  Duke scowled as he looked at his sister. “Maisie.” There was no inflection whatsoever in his voice, no way of telling what he was thinking.

  “Yeah, Maisie.” And then, because he was the sheriff, he had to ask. “Something wrong?”

  Maybe Duke knew the reason why Maisie seemed to be on the verge of hysteria this afternoon. Was it really only about the discovery of Mark Walsh’s body—something that was upsetting a lot of people—or was there something else going on? And why was Duke looking at their sister that way? Was he missing something?

  Duke suppressed an annoyed sigh. He was not about to tell Wes that their sister had threatened Susan. Even if he wasn’t the sheriff, Wes would want to know why Maisie was behaving that way. What was going on—or not going on—between him and Susan was nobody’s business but his—and maybe Susan’s, he added silently. There was no way he was going to talk about it with anyone.

  “No, nothing’s wrong,” Duke said. His eyes shifted toward his sister who was hanging back. “Get in, Maisie,” he told her.

  Maisie looked a little hesitant; her initial smile when she’d seen Duke had all but vanished. But when Wes opened the passenger-side door for her, she got into the truck’s cab docilely.

  Securing the door, Wes crossed back around to Duke’s side. Once next to his brother, he lowered his voice and said, “Something about my finding Walsh’s body in the creek has her spooked.” He paused for a second, debating whether to add the last part. But he decided it couldn’t hurt. “Go easy on her.”

  “I have for the last fifteen years,” Duke told his brother.

  And maybe that was the problem, Duke thought. Maybe he’d gone too easy on Maisie and that had eventually allowed her to slip into a place where he couldn’t readily reach her. Maybe if he’d made her behave a little more responsibly, he’d have done them both a favor.

  They were going to have a little talk, he and Maisie, and get things straightened out, Duke promised himself. Once and for all.

  Duke started up his truck again and pulled away without saying another word to Wes.

  “You don’t have to worry about Maisie anymore,” Duke told Susan that evening when she opened the door to admit him to her home. A man who believed in getting down to business, he’d skipped a mundane greeting in favor of setting her mind at ease as he walked into the Kelley guest house.

  Susan did her best to look composed and nonchalant—not like someone who’d spent the last forty-five minutes two steps away from the front door waiting for Duke to finally arrive.

  Duke wasn’t late, she was just very early. “Oh?” That came out sounding a little too high, she upbraided herself as she closed the door behind him. He could probably tell she was nervous.

  Duke looked around the living room. The house was neat, tidy, with sleek, simple lines. With just enough frills to make him think of her. But then he’d noticed that, lately, a lot of things made him think of her.

  “Yeah,” he responded. “I had a talk with Maisie.” He’d used the time it took him to get his sister back to the main house to his advantage. And Maisie had listened solemnly—and crossed her heart. “She promised not to bother you anymore.”

  What a woman said was one thing, what she did was another, Susan thought. But she didn’t want to spoil the evening by getting into any kind of a discussion about his sister’s possible future behavior. So she offered him a bright smile and pretended that she thought everything was going to be just peachy from then on.

  “That’s good.” She knew she should just drop it here, but there was a part of her that was a fighter. That didn’t just lie down and wait for the steam roller to come by and finish the job. So she said, “Does that mean she’ll stop leaving dead flowers and nasty notes too?”

  He looked at her sharply. “You got more?”

  She pressed her lips together and nodded. “I got more.”

  Damn it, who the hell was stalking her? He didn’t like thinking that she could be in danger. This was Honey Creek. Things like this didn’t happen here—until they did, he thought darkly. Like with Walsh.

  “Well, they’re not from Maisie,” he told her, measuring his words slowly. “I took her home from town and left her sleeping in her room. Jeremy’s looking after her,” he added.

  Though no one would have guessed it, he couldn’t help feeling sorry for his nephew. The poor kid had been dealt one hell of a hand. No father, a mother who was only half there mentally and a grandfather whose dislike for the boy was all but tangible whenever the two were in the same room together.

  He and his brothers did what they could to make Jeremy feel that he was part of the family, but it wasn’t easy when Darius was just as determined to make Jeremy feel like an outsider subsisting solely on the old man’s charity.

  “Anyone else in my family you think is sending them?” he asked her archly.

  She bristled slightly. “I didn’t mean to sound as if I was focusing on your family,” she apologized. “But this has me a little shaken up. There’s no reason for anyone to be sending me dead roses and threatening notes, but they still keep on coming.”

  He heard the distress in her voice, even though she struggled to hide just how nervous this was making her. Nobody was going to hurt her if he had anything to say about it.

  “For my money I still think it’s that Hayes character,” he told her, then repeated his offer. “You want me to talk to him?”

  She shook her head. “It’s not Linc. He wouldn’t do something like this.” She was certain of it. They were friends, good friends. He wouldn’t resort to this kind of mental torture.

  Duke didn’t quite see it that way. “’Fraid you’ve got a lot more faith in Hayes than I do. Let me take the latest note and the last batch of flowers with me when I leave. I’ll bring them over to Wes tomorrow, see if he’s gotten anywhere with his investigation.”

  Susan wondered if he realized the significance of his offer. In case the small detail eluded him, she pointed it out. “That means you’ll have to admit to seeing me. Are you ready to do that?”

  Duke knew a challenge when he saw one. And Susan, whether she knew it or not, was definitely challenging him. Calling him out.

  “Woman, I’ve been on my own for a lot of years,” he told her. “I don’t have to ask anyone’s permission to do anything I want to do.” He left the rest unsaid and let her fill in the blanks.

  “What about your father?” she asked. “Don’t you have to run things by him?”

  She’d heard that the patriarch of the Colton clan could make life a living hell for anyone who crossed him. He was a strict man who demanded allegiance and obedience from the people he dealt with, especially from his own family.

 
“Only when it comes to things that concern the ranch,” he allowed. And there was a reason for that. “The ranch is his. My life is mine. Any other questions or things you’d like to clear up?”

  She had to admit she felt a little more at ease. Susan smiled at him. “Can’t think of a thing.”

  “All right, then let’s go,” he prodded. It was getting late and he’d promised her dinner in town. When she made no move to follow him out the door, Duke raised one eyebrow. “Change your mind?”

  “Only about where we’re eating,” she replied. He raised his eyebrow even higher. “I thought maybe we could eat in. I threw some things together,” she explained, then stopped, wondering if maybe she was taking too much for granted or sending out the wrong signals again. This creating a relationship was hard work. Worth it, but hard work.

  Duke asked, “Edible things?”

  He was teasing her. Susan didn’t bother attempting to hide her smile. She considered herself a very good cook, having inherited her father’s natural instincts for creating epicurean miracles.

  “Very.”

  That was good enough for him. Duke took his hat off and let it fall onto the cushion of the wide, padded leather sofa to his right.

  “Talked me into it,” he told her.

  His eyes caught hers. He felt something stirring inside him. Anticipation. It surprised him and he savored it for a moment. In so many ways, Charlene had been superior to Susan. Experienced, clever and worldly, she’d been a woman in every sense of the word. And yet, there was something about Susan, something that pulled him to her, that had him looking forward to being with her, more than he’d ever looked forward to being with Charlene. Who would have thought—?

  “This way,” he continued pointedly, “we won’t have to go so far or wait so long for dessert.”

  Dessert. Was that what he was calling it? Or was she reading too much into his words? Too much because she desperately wanted him to mean that he wanted her. Wanted to believe that he had planned the evening around dinner and lovemaking.

  Because she’d thought of nothing else since he’d asked her about her plans when he came to her office earlier today.

  “Come this way,” she invited. Turning on her heel, she led him into her small dining room.

  Duke entertained himself by watching the way Susan’s trim hips moved as she walked ahead of him. It reminded him of a prize show pony he’d once owned, a gift from his grandfather when he’d been a young boy. The pony had had the same classy lines, the same proud gait as Susan did now. It had been a thing of beauty to watch when it ran, he recalled.

  Just like Susan was a thing of beauty to behold when she was in his arms. Making love with him.

  Wow.

  He hadn’t realized he was even capable of having thoughts like that. Susan was definitely bringing out the best in him, he mused. Making him want to be a better man. For her.

  He found himself hoping she hadn’t made very much for dinner because whatever was on the table wasn’t going to whet his appetite one-tenth as much as the taste of her mouth would.

  And that was what he craved right now. Her. But she’d gone to all this trouble, it wasn’t right to ask her to skip it because he was having trouble holding back his more basic appetites.

  “Sit down,” she told him. “This won’t take long, I promise.”

  “Need any help?” he offered, raising his voice so that it would carry into the kitchen.

  Her back to him, Susan’s mouth curved in pure pleasure. She would never have believed that Duke Colton would actually offer to help out in the kitchen. As a matter of fact, she would have been fairly certain that Duke didn’t even know what to do in a kitchen. You just never knew, did you?

  “No, everything’s fine,” she answered, tossing the words over her shoulder. “All you have to do is sit there and enjoy yourself.”

  Susan’s casual instruction brought an actual grin to Duke’s lips before he could think to stop it.

  He fully intended to, he thought. He fully intended to.

  Chapter 13

  Susan sighed.

  She finally put down her pen and gave up her flimsy pretense that she hadn’t noticed the looks Bonnie Gene had been giving her each time the woman walked by the open office door. Which was frequently this morning. Susan had lost count at eleven.

  “All right, Mother, what is it?”

  Bonnie Gene had already gone by and had to backtrack her steps in order to present herself in the doorway.

  “What’s what, dear?” her mother asked innocently.

  The stage had lost one hell of a performer when her mother had decided not to pursue an acting career, Susan thought.

  “You know perfectly well ‘what’s what,’” Susan insisted. “You must have walked by my office about a dozen times this morning. And each time, you looked in with that self-satisfied smile of yours.” When her mother raised a quizzical eyebrow, Susan continued to elaborate. “You know, the one you always wear whenever you place first in the annual pie-baking contest.”

  “I always place first in the pie-baking contest,” Bonnie Gene informed her regally. “Unless the judges were being bribed that year or had their taste buds surgically removed.”

  Susan stopped her mother before she could get carried away. “Don’t change the subject.”

  Another innocent look graced Bonnie Gene’s face as she placed a hand delicately against her still very firm bosom. “I thought that was the subject.”

  Okay, Susan thought, we could go around like this indefinitely. She worded her question more precisely. “Mother, why do you keep looking in at me?”

  Bonnie Gene crossed the threshold, her smile rivaling the summer sun outside. “Because you’re my lovely daughter—”

  “Mother!” Susan cried far more sharply than she would have ordinarily, impatience shimmering around the single name. “Come clean. What’s going on?”

  Bonnie Gene adopted a more serious demeanor. “I should be asking you that.”

  “You could,” Susan allowed, feeling her patience being stripped away. “If you explained what you meant by your question.”

  “Don’t play innocent with me, my darling.” Bonnie Gene looked at her daughter pointedly, having lingered on the word innocent a beat longer than the rest of her sentence. “The time for that is past, thank goodness. All right, all right,” she declared, giving up the last shred of pretense as Susan began to get up from her chair. “I can’t stand not knowing any longer.”

  “Not knowing what?” Susan cried, completely frustrated. What was it that her mother was carrying on about? It couldn’t possibly be about her and—

  “How things are going with you and Duke Colton.”

  Oh, God, it was about her and Duke.

  In response, Susan turned a lighter shade of pale and sank back down in her chair. She’d been afraid of this.

  “What are you talking about?” she finally asked in a small, still, disembodied voice that didn’t seem to belong to her.

  With a superior air, one hand fisted at her hip, Bonnie Gene tossed her head, sending her hair flying jauntily over her shoulder. “Oh, come now, Susan, you didn’t really think that you could keep this to yourself, did you?”

  In retrospect, Susan supposed that had been pretty stupid of her. Her mother had eyes like a hawk and the sensory perception of a bat; all in all, a pretty frightening combination. Especially since it meant that nothing ever seemed to escape her attention.

  “I had hopes,” Susan murmured, almost to herself. She raised her eyes and blew out a breath, bracing herself for the answer to the question she was about to ask. “Who else knows?”

  Bonnie Gene laughed. She staked out a place for herself on the corner of Susan’s desk and leaned over to be closer to her youngest.

  “An easier question to answer, my love, is who else doesn’t know. I must say though, I’ve had my work cut out for me.”

  “Your work?” Susan echoed, really lost this time. What was her mother ta
lking about now?

  “Yes.” Bonnie Gene looked at Susan as if completely surprised that she didn’t understand. “Defending your choice. Defending Duke,” she finally stressed.

  “There is no ‘choice,’ Mother,” Susan informed Bonnie Gene, knowing that she really didn’t have a leg to stand on. She had chosen Duke. The problem was, as of yet, she had no idea how the man really felt about her. There were no terms of endearment coming from him, no little gifts now that she had ruled out that those awful flowers had been from him.

  For all she knew, Duke was just seeing her because he had no one better within easy access at the moment. She knew that making herself available to him if she believed that made her seem like a pathetic woman, but she couldn’t help it. She was so very attracted to Duke, she would accept him on almost any terms as long as it meant that the evening would end with them sharing passion. When she was away from him, she was counting off minutes in her head until they were together again.

  But that was by no means something she wanted her mother—or anyone else for that matter—to know. At least, not until she knew how Duke felt about her.

  And for that matter, maybe it was better that she didn’t know how he felt. She was more than a little aware that the truth could be very painful.

  “And exactly what do you mean defending Duke?” Susan suddenly asked, replaying her mother’s words in her head.

  Bonnie Gene rolled her eyes dramatically. “Well, I can’t begin to tell you how many people have come up to me, wanting to know what a nice girl like you is doing with a man the likes of Duke Colton. If I hear one more ‘concerned’ citizen tell me about Charlene’s suicide after Duke broke it off with her, I’ll scream—if I don’t throw up first.”

  Susan squared her shoulders, indignation shining in her eyes. She resented the gossipmongers having a field day with Duke’s past behavior, and they were all missing a very salient point.

  “Duke broke it off with Charlene when he found out she was married. He told me that he would have never been involved with her in the first place if he’d known that she wasn’t single.” In her eyes, he had done the right thing, the honorable thing. Why couldn’t anyone else see that?