Colton Baby Conspiracy (The Coltons 0f Mustang Valley Book 1) Read online

  Her head was really beginning to hurt, Marlowe thought. And it didn’t exactly help her condition any to have both her desk phone and the cell phone she had left next to it when she’d walked into the bathroom ringing like crazy now. The phones sounded as if they were jointly heralding the end of the world and doing so just slightly out of sync.

  Maybe they were, she thought darkly, still staring at the offending stick.

  “Why don’t they shut up?” she cried, helplessly putting her hands over her ears.

  As if that would stop the noise, Marlowe thought angrily.

  She rose to her feet—her legs felt oddly shaky, she realized, holding on to the wall for a moment to get her balance—and opened the bathroom door and glared accusingly at the offending phones.

  If they were both ringing like that, something had to be very, very wrong, she thought.

  Something other than an offending white stick with its glaring pink cross.

  Taking a deep breath, Marlowe made her way over to her wide custom-built desk. Part of her was hoping that the ringing would abruptly stop by the time she reached the phones.

  No such luck.

  Braced for almost anything—after all, the worst possible thing had already happened, she reasoned—Marlowe picked up her multiline desk phone. Thinking it was one of the company’s many administrative assistants on the other end, she said tersely, “Okay, this had better be good.”

  “On the contrary,” she heard her father’s deep voice rumbling against her ear, “this is very bad. And where the hell have you been? Why aren’t you answering your phone?” Payne Colton, chairman of the board of Colton Oil, demanded angrily. “Your damn phone’s been ringing off the hook. Why were you just ignoring it?”

  “Dad?” Marlowe said shakily, still looking at the stick she was clutching in her hand.

  Payne snorted. “Well, at least you still know who I am,” he retorted in disgust. “Did you forget your way to the boardroom?”

  “What?” What was he talking about? It was after five o’clock. There was no meeting scheduled this late, at least none that she recalled. “No,” she responded after a beat.

  “Well, that’s good, because that’s where the rest of us are, sitting around that big old table and twiddling our thumbs, waiting for you to make an appearance.” His voice hardened. “I sent you a text,” he snapped, the fury he was feeling now more than evident in his voice. “Didn’t you see your email?”

  No, Dad, I didn’t see my email. All I see is this big, ugly white stick that’s about to topple my whole world, Marlowe thought numbly.

  “Well, Your Highness, we’re still all waiting for you to deign to put in an appearance,” her father was saying while she was having her crisis. “So read that email I forwarded to you and get that skinny behind of yours in here. Pronto! Do you hear me?”

  Hovering over her laptop, Marlowe hit a key. The screen that was currently there gave way to another one that contained her corporate email. She scrolled up the page to the latest message to see what had set her father off like this.

  Her mouth dropped open when she got to the subject line.

  She reread the words twice.

  “Oh my Lord!”

  Her father took her shocked response to mean she had looked at the email. Or at least she had seen enough of the email to shake her up, which was good enough for his purpose.

  “All right, get in here now, Marlowe!” Payne screeched. “I’m not going to ask you again.”

  Marlowe’s knees were shaking so badly, she had to sink down into her chair. This had happened to her twice in the last fifteen minutes, she thought, feeling as if she was completely losing her grip on the immediate world.

  Despite her father’s voice reverberating in her ear with his loudly shouted demands, Marlowe opened her email, hoping that maybe the contents weren’t as bad as it initially seemed.

  It was worse. Marlowe’s head was suddenly filled with a swirling kaleidoscope of memories, all grounded in her childhood. Adventures and events that she and Asa, whom everyone called Ace, had shared as children. Ace was her big brother. He was a big brother to all of them, even to her adopted brother, Rafe. Ace didn’t care. He treated Rafe just like he was a real brother.

  That was just the way that Ace was.

  Marlowe looked back down at the email’s subject line.

  That was absolutely absurd, she thought. Who would say such a crazy thing? Who would even come up with such an idiotic idea, she silently demanded, stunned beyond words. Maybe this was the work of some competitor in an attempt to disrupt the company.

  “Marlowe? Marlowe, are you there?” Payne Colton’s deep voice thundered, bringing her back to the moment and her suddenly cold and incredibly inhospitable-feeling office.

  It took her a second to focus and come around. Thinking took another second. “Yes,” she said, breathing heavily, “I’m here, Dad.”

  “No,” her father corrected her sharply, “you’re there. I need you to come here. Now!” he declared. “Can you do that for me?” he asked his daughter sarcastically. “Can you hightail it out of your overdecorated office and get yourself to the boardroom five minutes ago?” Payne shouted.

  It wasn’t just Marlowe’s knees that were shaking now—it was all of her.

  With effort, she gripped the armrests of her chair and literally hauled herself up to her feet. Testing the strength of her legs for a second to make sure that she wouldn’t just fall flat on her face with the first step she took, Marlowe slowly moved her hands away from the armrests. By now her heart was pounding against her chest like a drumroll.

  “I’m coming,” she told her father in what seemed like a whisper.

  “What did you just say?” Payne demanded angrily. “I can’t hear you!” he declared like the marine drill sergeant that all his children, at one time or another, had felt he was.

  Marlowe took a deep breath, filling her lungs with air before she repeated the words. “I said I was coming.”

  “Then get here already!” Payne snapped.

  The next moment, the connection was abruptly terminated. Only her father’s disapproval and anger lingered in the air around her like a dark, malevolent cloud.

  This wasn’t happening, Marlowe silently insisted as she closed down her laptop.

  That done, she raced out of her office. None of it, she tried to console herself. None of this terrible stuff was happening. Not this hateful email and not that positive pregnancy test.

  It was all just a bad dream, and any second now, she was going to wake up, Marlowe promised herself. And when she did, all of this was just going to be an awful, fading memory.

  Her high heels resounded, clicking rhythmically against the highly polished marble floor as she ran down the corridor to the Colton Oil boardroom. The staccato sound seemed to mock what she had just told herself.

  Her heart fell with a thud as she reached the open boardroom door.

  It didn’t look as if she was going to wake up from this one after all.

  Chapter 2

  It was almost surreal that after all these years of being on the opposing side of every argument, Bowie Robertson couldn’t seem to be able to get thoughts of Marlowe Colton out of his head. The simple truth of it was that he hadn’t been able to stop thinking about the Colton Oil president for the last six weeks.

  At first, it had been because the woman was single-handedly responsible for what was admittedly the greatest night, bar none, of his thirty-two-year-old life.

  Granted that, for years now, he had been very aware of the fact that Marlowe Colton, with her shoulder-length mane of whitish-blond hair and a figure that wouldn’t quit, was drop-dead gorgeous. But he had also viewed the woman as the personification of an ice queen. An ice queen with nothing but cutthroat ambition running in her pretty veins.

  He had been completely blown away
to find out that the total opposite was really the case.

  Yes, he had had a great deal of champagne to drink that night, but even an entire river of alcohol wouldn’t have been able to drown his brain to the point that would get him to believe something that wasn’t really true. He would have to have been beyond utterly drunk to believe that what had actually been a sow’s ear had transformed into the proverbial silk purse.

  No, he wasn’t suffering from some sort of delusion; that had actually happened.

  But as enchanted as he’d been by the slightly vulnerable, passionate, warm, funny woman he had made love with in her oversize hotel bed, the cold reality was that it had turned out to be just another illusion, a sleight of hand with no staying power once it was viewed in the light of day.

  In fact, he had discovered that Marlowe actually did care about the environment and that she had set up awards for Colton Oil employees who created sustainable technologies and were working to make the family business more eco-friendly. That notably went against her father’s narrow-minded view, but once he had left her room and was on his way back to his own world, Bowie quickly found out just how cold and vicious Marlowe Colton could really be.

  A few short hours after they had spent what he had viewed at the time as an exceptionally passionate night together, Bowie found himself to be a marked man.

  Marked for death.

  There had been two attempts made on his life in breathtakingly short order. Right after he had left the hotel, someone driving a black SUV tried to run him over. When that attempt hadn’t been successful because he had managed to get out of the way just in time, someone tried to shoot him.

  The sound of a gunshot had been so benign that at first he thought it was a car backfiring—and then he saw the hole a bullet had made right through the car window that was less than a foot away from where he’d been standing.

  The two incidents, so close together, were just too much of a coincidence for Bowie to merely shrug off. It had to have been because of Marlowe—or someone acting on that she-devil’s orders. It was too much of a coincidence that, right after he’d slept with the enemy, someone tried to kill him...right?

  He speculated that the reason for the attempts on his life—the failed attempts, he gratefully amended—were twofold. One, the woman had obviously let her guard down that night, and since he was the one who had witnessed this drop and been on the receiving end of the consequences of that action, she undoubtedly didn’t want him telling anyone about it. The only way to ensure that didn’t happen was to have him eliminated.

  Why had she gone to such drastic lengths? She had also shared something with him that, in hindsight, would probably be considered a company secret. She was going behind her father’s back and looking into ways to make Colton Oil more eco-friendly. She hadn’t told Payne yet because she had nothing tangible to present to him, but it wouldn’t be long. All this was told to Bowie in strictest confidence. And even though he had promised to take that to his grave, Marlowe had obviously decided to hasten that scenario along and kill him. While he didn’t think her so-called “secret” was a big deal, she obviously did.

  Maybe, given time, he might have just chalked up these feelings as unnecessarily paranoid. After the second failed attempt on his life, he had deliberately kept his distance from Marlowe, avoiding all forms of contact and definitely not calling her. He even made sure to have a security detail around him at all times.

  But now, six weeks after their one wildly insatiable night of passion—as well as the two subsequent attempts on his life that had occurred—a third attempt had been made just that morning.

  This attempt had borne fruit. It hadn’t wounded him, but the bullet that had been fired killed his security guard.

  A second bullet had narrowly missed hitting Bowie himself.

  It was now painfully obvious to Bowie that lying low and avoiding contact with Marlowe wasn’t working. And ignoring the source of the problem was not making the problem go away.

  So, focusing on that, he decided that it was time for him to confront Marlowe before another attempt was made on his life. Or before anyone else wound up paying the ultimate price by being on the receiving end of a bullet that was meant for him.

  Out of respect for the night they had shared, he’d wound up behaving like a coward, not confronting Marlowe about their time together and the subsequent attempts on his life. That in itself was something that, to Bowie, was even worse than death.

  Death was quick and final, but the label of being a coward carried with it a stigma that could haunt him until the end of his days. He was not about to allow that to happen.

  It was time, Bowie decided, to confront the lioness in her den and get this whole thing out in the open.

  * * *

  Marlowe entered the boardroom, crossing the threshold on legs that still didn’t quite feel as if they belonged to her.

  She was no longer clinging to the hope that this was all just a bad dream, but she had to admit that the scenario still didn’t feel as if it was real.

  Marlowe took in the immediate scene within the room. Her father was right. The rest of board was already there, and they were obviously waiting for her.

  Looking around, she quickly scanned all their faces. Her father; Ace; her half sister, company attorney Ainsley; and CFO Rafe all looked to be stricken to varying degrees. The only member of the board who did not look stricken was Selina Barnes Colton, the company VP and director of public relations, and coincidentally, her father’s second—and mercifully ex—wife.

  Not only was Selina not stricken looking, but if Marlowe hadn’t known any better, the auburn-haired viper seemed to be almost gleeful about this potentially dire situation threatening to unravel right before them.

  Marlowe had never liked Selina. None of her siblings ever really had, she’d discovered years ago. But truthfully she had never disliked the snide, smug woman more than she did right at this very moment. Why her father insisted on keeping his ex-wife not just with the company but actually serving on the board, giving her an equal voice when it came to decisions, was totally beyond her.

  The air in the boardroom was exceedingly tense. Out of the corner of her eye, Marlowe could see that her father was waiting for her to take her seat, so she did.

  Only then did Payne speak. The anger vibrating in his voice was impossible to miss.

  “Now that we’re all here, let me take this opportunity to say that this email, sent by a quivering coward who didn’t even have the nerve to sign his own name, is a complete and utter fabricated lie. It’s obviously a pathetic stunt pulled by some spineless, sniveling jackass who is trying to derail our company in any possible way that he can.”

  Listening, Rafe could clearly barely contain himself. “Of course it’s a lie,” he cried, agreeing. “But how can it possibly be able to derail a billion-dollar company? Even if what this jerk is claiming was true—which it isn’t—who cares?” he demanded. Rafe glanced at the man who was the center of this ridiculous email. “Ace is a Colton, blood or not. Right?” he said, looking at Payne.

  To Rafe, it was a rhetorical question that didn’t even need or expect an answer.

  But the opportunity was far too good to waste, so Selina was more than happy to offer an answer to her former stepson’s question.

  “Not to throw water on your theory,” Payne’s ex-wife murmured in a just barely audible voice. “But you, Rafe, of all people, being adopted the way you were by Payne and his kind late first wife,” Selina continued, her voice fairly dripping with a false sweetness as she circled back to her point, “should know that blood is everything when it comes to being a Colton.”

  Although there was a smile on the woman’s face, her eyes were cruel and ice-cold, looking not unlike those belonging to a cobra just before its fatal strike.

  “What are you talking about?” Rafe asked. “What is she talking about
?” he repeated, turning toward the other people on the board for an answer.

  When his gaze landed on Ainsley, the woman shifted uncomfortably. Marlowe knew the last thing Ainsley would want to do was side with Selina, especially against someone she actually considered family. In this particular case, however, as odious as it seemed, apparently the law was on the woman’s side.

  Clearing her throat and avoiding looking at either Ace or Selina, Ainsley told the others, “The reason it would derail the company is because on page one, paragraph two of the Colton Oil bylaws, it clearly states that the company CEO must be a Colton by blood only.”

  Okay, enough was enough. Incensed, Ace shot to his feet.

  “This is crazy,” he declared, using, Marlowe thought, the exact same phrasing she had when she’d seen the results of her pregnancy test.

  This was crazy. They couldn’t oust Ace from the board, Marlowe thought. He belonged on it.

  And yet...

  “This ridiculous email is a lie,” Ace was saying. “A total fabrication meant to send shock waves through our entire company and undermine its very structure. I’m a Colton! I was born a Colton and I’ll always be a Colton.” He looked at his father. Though it wasn’t in his nature to ask for any sort of help or backup, this one time he made an exception. “Tell them, Dad.”

  It wasn’t a plea, it was a request for the older man’s verification about his birthright.

  Payne nodded so hard, his thick silver-gray hair shook and fell into his eyes.

  “Of course it’s a lie!” he declared with a fierceness that defied opposition. “Ace is my son. I was right there, in the delivery room, the day that he was born,” Payne said, looking directly at his oldest son. “Of course, he wasn’t quite this big at the time,” he added with a small, dry chuckle. “As a matter of fact,” Payne recalled, “he was pretty frail. Everyone in the hospital, myself included, thought it was a Christmas miracle that he even survived. But he did survive. Not just survive—he managed to thrive almost overnight,” Payne recalled with a nearly tangible wave of nostalgia. “And now just look at him!” the family patriarch cried.