Colton Baby Conspiracy

And now this stick and its menacing, mocking pink cross were exacting a price for those frivolous few hours of passion she had spent.

A price she had never, even in her wildest dreams, been prepared to face up to and pay.

That wasn’t to say that she didn’t want children. She did, Marlowe thought. She did want children. But just not now.

And definitely not with him.

They hadn’t even spoken a single word to each other since that fateful night, as if silence was actually an acceptable way of denying that those few hours of unabashed passionate consorting—of wild, consensual lovemaking—had ever happened.

But not talking about it, not acknowledging that it took place, was not a way of wiping that night’s existence out of the annals of time. The pregnancy test clearly testified that it had happened, she thought ruefully, frowning at the offending mark on the white stick. And that, in turn, had most definitely produced a consequence. A very big consequence.

Marlowe felt her throat closing up. What the hell was she going to do now?

The question throbbed insistently over and over again in her brain. But no matter how many times she asked herself, she came up with the same answer.

She didn’t know.

She had absolutely not even a glimmer of an idea what she was going to do about this.

The only thing that she did know was that her father was going to see this pregnancy—and how it came about—as nothing short of a personal betrayal of him of the first order.

“I wasn’t thinking of you at the time, Dad,” Marlowe whispered to the man who wasn’t there in person but was somehow always around Colton Oil headquarters in spirit. Payne Colton was the reason behind everything she did.

The truth of the matter was that her father had always been a very strong presence in her life, influencing, in one way or another, her every move, practically her every thought.

But not that night.

That night the intrusive spirit of Payne Colton had been utterly absent. At least, he had been by the time she and Bowie Robertson, drunk on champagne and each other, had gone up to her suite at the Dales Inn.

The Dales Inn was the only hotel in town, and coincidentally it was also where the green energy conference was being held.

To someone viewing this from the outside, with everything that was going against them—feuding fathers, rival companies—that night she and Bowie might have come across as a modern-day Romeo and Juliet. Except, once the dust had settled again, they were much more like the Hatfields and the McCoys, but with the Coltons focusing on drilling oil wells and the Robertsons worrying about environmental impact.

She sighed, holding her head with one hand. There was no happy ending in sight here.

But then, she remembered, there hadn’t been one for Romeo and Juliet, either.

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.”