Colton's Lethal Reunion

Of course, the perp could have already exited the drive, a minute or two after they did. With all of the turns in the road, she wouldn’t have known if the black SUV she’d seen was right behind them or not. He could have waited until her Jeep was out of sight and then turned in the opposite direction. Away from town. He could be long gone.

Still, she’d intended to drop off Rafe and head back out there to explore at least the lower part of the mountain drive, but the chief had other ideas.

For the moment, she’d been ordered to stand down. Worse, he was sending a patrol car to sit outside her home for the rest of the night.

She’d been shot at. End of story.

Except that it wasn’t.

“Who’s out there?” she asked Rafe, completely frustrated as she hung up the phone. She wasn’t good at inactivity. “And why?” Her whole life, the way she’d dealt with stress was by taking action. Same for combatting fear. You met it head-on. Dealt with it. You didn’t hide in your home behind other officers at your front line.

“And what in the hell is going on up that mountain?” she asked when her first question received no answer.

“You asked him about guns and implied something about drugs,” Rafe said slowly, his gaze focused on the road in front of them, as though he wasn’t going to relax a muscle until they’d made the last five miles into town. “You really think that there’s something big going on,” he continued.

“Big enough to warrant killing Tyler,” she said. “I know my brother wasn’t involved in anything illegal that last year, but before that?” She hated that the question even had to be out there.

“It’s possible he just stumbled into something,” she continued, thinking out loud more than anything. “Tyler, I mean. But…you saw the photos from Tyler’s fall,” she said.

What she was about to say was the fact most on her mind at the moment. And the one she left out of her verbal report to the chief. Someone else might notice. They might not. For the moment, until she could think, she was keeping silent.

Rafe’s nod was short. Succinct.

“Same way the head was bent back beneath the body…there’s no way two falls could end up with the body landing so closely the same.”

“Unless the bodies were held, probably by the neck, and then pushed in exactly the same way,” Rafe said, earning her respect. He was right there with her.

Just as she’d have expected her best friend from long ago to be.

“I’m not getting why the ranger was killed,” she said, less than a minute later. The town’s lights were up ahead. Still another mile or so away. “He clearly wasn’t out there protecting us. To the contrary, he wanted us gone. Like he was protecting something else.”

She was back to the drugs and guns. She couldn’t get off them, which told her that she was likely on the right path.

One that led, somehow, to Odin Rogers.

“Could be some kind of turf war and we drove into the middle of it.”

“I need to get back up there and find the casings from the shots that were fired. To run ballistics on the guns.”

Luckily they had a small crime lab right there in Mustang Valley, donated years ago by the Coltons.

“From what I heard of your conversation, you’ve been told to stay home for the rest of the night.”

“That doesn’t please me,” she said. But she knew better than to disobey the chief’s orders. He was chief for a reason. He knew the area. He knew his job. And she valued hers.

“I wonder if whoever killed the ranger was with him when he approached us? He had to get up there somehow and we never heard or saw another vehicle. Alvin walked up to us, walked away. Maybe whoever was driving the black SUV had parked the vehicle farther down and then followed the ranger up. Could be that person heard me asking Alvin about Tyler’s death. But then he’d know that the guy was a jerk. Warned us off. Why would that get him killed?”

Rafe’s shake of the head was brief. They’d entered Mustang Valley proper and he’d slowed to the speed limit.

“Whatever is going on must be big since it was worth killing not one, but two men over it.”

She glanced at him. “You believe Tyler was murdered.”

His quick glance thawed a small piece of her heart. “I trusted your instincts to begin with, but after this…it’s clear you were right, Kerry. The problem is, how are we going to prove it?”

There was that “we” again.

The two of them. A team. Just as she’d once imagined they’d be.

But it was only for a moment.

Because, ultimately, nothing between them had changed. She couldn’t trust him to have her back when life returned to normal and the Colton money and power became an issue again. Couldn’t trust him to stick around.

And Kerry didn’t like to think about the chances of her heart remaining intact if she gave it to him a second time and he crushed it in the dirt on his way out.

Chapter 5 (#u77d6010c-28a7-581c-bd9d-514e726300e5)

The patrol car wasn’t outside Kerry’s house yet when Rafe pulled into her drive. Pushing the garage remote control, he parked in her garage, turned off the Jeep and handed her the keys. Then pushed the remote to close the garage door behind them, with his truck outside at the curb.

When those blue eyes of her turned on him, brows raised like she was questioning him, yet with a hint of their connection of old, he said, “I’m not leaving you here alone. I know, you’re the trained cop with a gun and I’m just a numbers guy in expensive dress clothes, but two bodies, two sets of ears and eyes, are better than one.”

“I wasn’t going to argue with you sticking around for a bit,” she told him, reaching for the door handle. “I was going to thank you.”

She got out and led the way into the house, leaving him with his heart threatening to clog up his throat.

And then she offered him dinner. Leftover meat loaf, mashed potatoes and peas, a meal he’d have had as a young kid eating in the bunkhouse kitchen with his dad and the other cowboys, or a meal his dad might have prepared for him. Not anything he’d see on the Colton dinner table. Not unless it was hidden beneath garnishes and sauces that distinguished between cooking at home and having a chef. Or so he’d been told by Selina, Payne’s second wife, who’d never made a secret of the fact that Rafe, as an adopted Colton, was merely a fly at her picnic.

Over the years, he’d grown accustomed to the wide variety of flavors, the combinations of spices that made eating a physical pleasure, rather than something one did to stay alive. He’d grown into those tastes. To seek them out, no matter the cost, when he traveled.

But to sit at Kerry’s table with her—those leftovers were just fine. They’d taken their seats—his perpendicular to hers on two sides of her little four-seat table off to the right of her galley kitchen—when her doorbell rang. He hadn’t been particularly worried about her safety at home in her neighborhood in the middle of town. Not many would try to kill a cop in front of other Mustang Valley citizens—who were known to watch each other’s comings and goings—most particularly not in their little remote part of the Arizona desert. A lot of people carried guns for their own protection against whatever wildlife might venture into town looking for water. Most wouldn’t hesitate to pull a weapon and use it to protect one of their own.

But when the bell rang, he was right behind her as she passed through the dining room to the living room and then the tiled area before the front door.

“I’m fine, Kay,” she said, turning with a grin on her face that was quickly swept away.

He’d forgotten just how great he’d found the sound of his last name rolling off her lips as she jested with him. Said with just that same intonation.

Apparently she’d forgotten, for a second there at least, that he was a Colton now.

The knock came again, more urgently, and Kerry, with her hand at the gun she’d failed to remove when they’d returned home, looked through the peephole and then quickly opened the door.

“Lizzie, James,” she said, stepping back to let the two blue uniformed officers into her home. “Don’t tell me, the two of you are assigned to guard duty tonight?”

Lizzie shook her head. “James drew that straw,” she said, with a wry glance at her partner.

“I volunteered for it,” James corrected, his light red hair and the kind look in his hazel eyes giving the appearance of a man who could be a pushover. Rafe wasn’t so sure he liked that this would be the guy in charge of Kerry’s safety for the night until the man’s gaze turned on him and he felt the full force of the steely stare.

“Aren’t you one of the Coltons? Some kind of cousin to Spence?” the man asked. “You’re the finance wizard, right?”