The Pregnant Colton Bride

For just a split second, he found himself wondering about her, wondering what could cause a rather stunning woman like Mirabella to behave as if she was attempting to avoid the attention of the immediate world. Any other time or place, he would have taken an interest in the young woman, perhaps asked her a few detailed questions in order to get to the bottom of her unusual behavior.

But this wasn’t any other time. It was this time, a time of impending crisis if his stepfather wasn’t found. For the umpteenth time, he made a solemn promise to himself to find the man.

Failure was not an option.

“Sheriff Watkins is here to see you, Mr. Colton,” Mirabella informed him.

Instantly alert, Zane half rose behind his desk. “Send him in, Mirabella,” he instructed.

The sheriff, a well-built, imposing man in his early fifties, took his time walking in. His gray eyes scanned the room, missing nothing. Polite, soft-spoken, he was nonetheless not a person to be trifled with.

A show of respect had Troy Watkins carrying his well-worn Stetson in his hand rather than wearing it. There were surprisingly few traces of gray in his dark hair, given the nature of his work combined with his age.

The expression on his sun-wrinkled face was stern, but then he’d never been known for smiling much. This morning was apparently no exception.

“Take a seat, Sheriff,” Zane invited, gesturing toward the chair closest to his desk.

Watkins did so, but he looked as if he wasn’t comfortable about it. Nor did he look as if he was comfortable in his present surroundings. He was a man most at ease when he was moving about in wide-open spaces. In his eyes, crowded cities were just necessary evils to be endured, not something to aspire to.

“What brings you here, Sheriff?” Zane asked, then immediately attached another, far more anxious question to the first one. “Did you find my father?”

“You mean your stepdaddy,” Watkins corrected. “Gotta be accurate at all times, you know. If a man can’t be accurate when it comes to the little details, it means that man’s going to be careless when it comes to the big things.”

He really wasn’t in the mood for a lecture. What he wanted were answers. But snapping the sheriff’s head off wouldn’t get him anywhere. Zane tamped down his impatience and rephrased his question.

“Did you find my stepfather, Sheriff?”

“No,” Watkins answered. He ran his fingers along the inside of his hat, turning the Stetson around in a slow circle. He raised his gray eyes to meet Zane’s dark ones. “But I did find something interesting.”

Chapter 2 (#ulink_0b8a138b-c027-585e-b6dd-b4d096418f95)

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?”