Buch lesen: «The Coltons of Shadow Creek»

Chapter 1

Thanks to the special trust fund her late father had set up for her, unlike many people her age, thirty-one-year-old Leonor Colton didn’t need to work. She wanted to work. Wanted to put her art degree to use and do something that made her feel as if she was contributing in some small way to society. That was why she had initially taken that unpaid internship at the Austin Art Museum. While others might have floated along, especially since they weren’t getting paid, Leonor worked exceptionally hard. She put in long hours, coming in early and staying late, long after the museum had been closed to the public.

All this hard work managed to impress Adam Sheffield, the director who was in charge of the museum, so much so that once her internship was over, he offered her the job of assistant curator. She took it gladly and worked her way up to her current position of curator.

For a while, Leonor thought, looking back now, things had seemed as if they were going quite well for her. Better than well. She had managed to hold her head high, despite the devastating scandal that had all but ripped her family apart. Because of her mother’s arrest and subsequent conviction—something that neither she nor any of her siblings saw coming—they had gone from being at the pinnacle of Shadow Creek’s community to being objects of everyone else’s contempt.

Leonor had risen above the gossip and mean-spirited talk, ignoring it and going on with her life. She’d gotten her education—a degree in the arts—and a job she loved in her chosen field. Even her love life had taken a much-needed turn for the better.

Or so she had thought.

Up until that point, the redheaded, green-eyed Leonor had only dated sporadically and she had never had a serious relationship—possibly because of the love ’em and leave ’em example that her mother had set for all of them.

And then David Marshall had come along.

Handsome, charming and oh-so-smooth, David had completely swept her off her feet in what amounted to record time. Looking back, Leonor couldn’t believe how quickly she’d surrendered to him, taking down her barriers and opening up her heart. She must have been crazy. But from the bottom of that isolated heart, she had honestly believed that David Marshall was the man she was meant to marry.

Desperately needing to have someone to talk to and trust, in a short amount of time Leonor had completely opened herself up to him and told David not just who she was, but also made him privy to all of her family’s numerous and heretofore well-kept secrets.

It felt so wonderful to finally open up to someone, to have someone she could really talk to without being afraid of any sort of censorship or being looked down upon judgmentally.

She should have been afraid, Leonor thought ruefully now. Considering everything she had been through with her mother’s arrest, she should have been leery, not trusting.

Water under the bridge, she thought regretfully.

A few months ago, after things seemed to be going so well, she woke up one morning to find that David was not only gone from her bed, but gone, it soon became apparent, from her life, as well. And not long after that she found out that he had not only stolen her heart, but he’d taken a very large chunk of her money with him as well. No note, no explanation, not even an argument to serve as a foreshadowing of things to come.

He had just vanished without any warning.

It wasn’t the money she missed. Because of the way the trust fund had been set up, there was more than enough money left, money that David hadn’t been able to get his hands on. But she wasn’t angry about that. She was angry, hurt and confused because he had left her for no good reason.

Or so she thought.

But everything fell into place when one day she’d opened up her computer, logged onto the internet and saw that her family’s story was splashed all over the home page of Everything’s Blogger in Texas, a local gossip site.

Reading the first installment—she couldn’t pull her eyes away—Leonor felt like such a fool.

She still felt that way. All those things David had said to her—he had just been playing her, lying to her so that she would trust him and learn to confide in him, telling him all of her family’s secrets. Secrets he then turned around and sold to the blog.

Leonor felt incredibly stupid and used. And horribly crushed.

In its own way, this was as devastating to her as her mother’s arrest had been that awful, awful day over ten years ago when the law enforcement officers had descended on the sprawling mansion that she and her brothers and sisters called home.

At first, after David’s disappearance and bitter betrayal, she had sought refuge in her position at the museum. But it didn’t help her keep her mind off what a fool she had been. So she’d gone to her boss and asked Sheffield for a leave of absence in the hopes that if she went somewhere else, she’d be able to somehow pull herself together.

“I’m not losing you, am I, Leonor?” Adam Sheffield had asked, concerned as he sat with her in his office, looking at her across his cluttered desk. “Because, I don’t mind telling you, in all my years here, you’re the best curator I’ve ever had.” He’d leaned forward, lowering his voice and creating an air of privacy. “If it’s a matter of more money—”

She’d been quick to shoot that supposition down. “No, it’s not that, Mr. Sheffield. I don’t want more money.”

“Shorter hours, then,” he proposed, guessing at the reason behind her unanticipated request. “I know I’ve been relying on you a great deal—maybe too much—but you’re so damn good at this that—”

She’d stopped the director mid-sentence again. “Thank you, sir, but it’s not the hours, either, Mr. Sheffield.” Leonor went on to appeal to his kinder side. “I just need to get away for a while, pull myself together. I haven’t seen my family for a long time and I think it might be time to go back home for a little while.”

“But not permanently.” It was more of a request than a question. He’d looked at her nervously, obviously afraid of the answer he might get.

“No, not permanently,” Leonor replied.

In all honesty, she didn’t know if she wouldn’t just turn around and return to Austin after a few days in Shadow Creek. She didn’t know how welcome—or unwelcome—she’d be turning up in Shadow Creek after all this time and in the wake of that lurid blog exposé.

Oh, she knew that she could stay at Mac’s ranch, perhaps even indefinitely. Her former stepfather, Joseph Mackenzie, her mother’s former ranch foreman as well as the father of her half brother, Thorne, had made that perfectly clear, even before she had used some of her money to help him bail out his ranch a few years ago.

Mac had always had a special relationship with all of her mother’s children, not just with her or with his own son. Mac was a kind, decent person and the kind of man she would have really loved to have for a father, even temporarily, as was her mother’s habit.

He’d always been there for them, Leonor recalled. And he was the first one she thought of calling on when she found herself needing a place to stay while she regrouped.

“Of course you can stay here, little girl,” Mac had told her when she’d turned up on his doorstep. “Stay for as long as you want. My home is your home. Hell, it wouldn’t even be my home if it hadn’t been for you,” he reminded her.

He’d displayed no embarrassment over that admission, only extreme gratitude.

Mac picked up her suitcase as he talked, doing it effortlessly as if finding her there when he opened his front door was no big deal.

“Oh, Mac,” she cried as he put his large, still-muscular arm protectively about her shoulders and ushered her in, “I’ve made such a mess of things.”

There was nothing but sympathy in his eyes and in his manner toward her.

Even though she was going to be staying in the apartment over the stable, Mac led Livia’s daughter to the wide leather sofa in his living room and sat her down. Seeing the tears in her eyes, he pulled out his handkerchief from his back pocket and offered it to her.

“There’s nothing but death that can’t be undone,” he told Leonor matter-of-factly. “You didn’t kill anyone, did you?”

“No,” she’d said, quietly sobbing.

She wiped away her tears, but it was futile. More tears came to take their place. She felt as if she was completely made up of water.

“Then it can be fixed,” Mac had assured her. Studying her face quietly, he’d asked, “Do you want to talk about it?”

At first, Leonor had remained silent.

Mac wasn’t the kind of person to press.

But then, after a few minutes, he’d heard her say, “I trusted the wrong man.”

“Hardly anyone alive hasn’t done that at least once in their lives,” Mac told her, making it sound like a common occurrence. After a beat, Mac ventured a question. “How bad is it?”

She pressed her lips together in an effort to keep a fresh onslaught of tears back. “Bad,” she’d finally answered.

He’d smiled at her kindly. He had always viewed her first and foremost as a daughter, even if they didn’t share the same blood.

“Would it help any if I tracked this guy down and beat the living daylights out of him?”

“No.” She thought about the blog. The story, done in several vivid, lurid installments, had already been run. The rest of her siblings had probably already seen it. And probably hated her for it. Only traveling back in time could change that. “The damage has already been done.”

“Oh,” Mac had said. His deep voice rumbled out the single word, putting a huge amount of meaning behind it. “You’re talking about that internet story, aren’t you?”

Leonor’s eyes had widened as she looked at the man who had patiently taught her how to ride. The man she had always regarded as more than just her mother’s foreman, or even Thorne’s father. He had always been the single stable force in her life.

Had she disappointed him?

“You saw that?” she asked in a small, ashamed voice.

Mac had surprised her by laughing. “I’m not quite as backward as you might think. I own a laptop and sometimes, I even turn it on.”

Leonor flushed. “I didn’t mean to insult you—”

His smile was wide and all encompassing, as well as very kind. “You didn’t, little girl. I’m just teasing you. But I did see the articles,” he said, referring to the tell-all that went into great detail about not just Livia before her empire had crumbled and she’d been sent to prison, but also about each of the woman’s six children and their lives, “and I thought to myself that whoever wrote it had to have a lot of inside information about the Coltons from someone.” The look on his face registered surprise, but not condemnation. “I just never thought that the ‘someone’ was you.”

She was desperate to make Mac understand that she hadn’t revealed any of it for personal gain or, heaven forbid, for any sort of monetary reward. “He tricked me, Mac. He made me think that he cared about me. I would have never said a single word if I’d known that he was going to use it to spread it all over the internet.”

Mac nodded understandingly. “I kinda figured that,” he told her.

There was absolutely not a single iota of judgment in the man’s deep voice.

Leonor pressed her lips together, and then raised her tear-filled eyes to his. “I thought he loved me,” she confessed, her voice almost trembling. “I thought I could tell him anything. He told me I could tell him anything.”

“I just bet he did,” Mac replied, doing his best to keep his anger in check. “You sure you don’t want me to track him down and beat him up for you?” This time, as Mac clenched his hands into fists beside him on the sofa, he was only half kidding.

“I don’t want you getting into trouble on my account,” Leonor told him.

“Might do us both some good,” he pointed out, coaxing her just the tiniest bit.

Leonor looked up at him quizzically. She knew why he thought it would do her some good, but Mac? She didn’t quite understand why he would say that.

“Why you?”

“Because I don’t like anyone hurting you,” he told her simply.

She felt her heart swell. She really needed to hear that, she thought.

“Thank you, Mac.” She returned his smile, wondering how she could possibly convey to the man how grateful she was to have him in her life. “Letting me stay here for a while is all I need.”

She sighed and put her arms around Mac—or tried to. There was more of the big man than her arms could possibly encompass.

Mac laughed softly—she’d always thought of his laugh as such a comforting sound—and embraced her.

“Like I said, stay as long as you like. I want you to think of this as your home,” he told her again without any fanfare.

That had been four days ago. So, here she was, Leonor thought, hiding out at Mac’s ranch, doing her best to pull herself together and regroup enough to be able to face each of her siblings, preferably individually, so she could field their questions and get them to hear her out and see her side.

She needed to have them forgive her, if not today, then eventually. Forgive her and see that she was as much of a victim in all this as they were, because they might be resentful to see their names and their lives shockingly dramatized online in a cheap effort at sensationalism. But David had used her to do this to them and she was not only suffering the same fate as they were, she was also suffering because someone she loved and believed loved her had done this, using her as a means to an end. And in the bargain, making her family look at her as a traitor. She’d reported him to the police, but he had hidden the money well and it was a case of her word against his. Things looked rather bleak from every standpoint.

She had trouble battling the hopelessness that kept insisting on encroaching on her state of mind. But if she hoped to ever win back her family, she had to keep that feeling at bay.

* * *

Well, this was unexpected, Josh thought, checking his email the moment he checked into the bed and breakfast when he arrived in Shadow Creek.

Leonor Colton had taken a leave of absence from the museum.

Josh frowned. He had gone undercover, taking on the identity of a billionaire with a keen interest in art and the museum, in order to become a person of interest to Leonor so that he could get closer to her, and now she’d taken a leave of absence. Josh shook his head. This was going to be trickier than he thought.

Well, it was too late to switch identities again because in this day and age everyone’s “backstory” could be checked out on the internet in a matter of minutes, and his was already a matter of record. That was thanks to Jeremy Bailey, the IT wizard in the San Antonio field office who had whipped up this identity for him. Jeremy had even created a Facebook page for him, cleverly backdated with photographs of an ex-wife and a number of parties and fund-raisers—all art-oriented—that he’d attended in the past.

Josh pulled up the page on his laptop now, wondering who the woman posing as his ex-wife was. Whoever Jeremy had used, the woman was a little too flashy for him, he mused. He preferred more classy women, women whose brains were stuffed to full capacity instead of just their closets.

So far, Josh hadn’t met anyone who could hold his interest for more than a few dates, but then, in defense of all the women he had ever gone out with, he’d never had the time to properly pursue a relationship.

For one thing, he had moved around a lot, transferring to different field offices whenever new opportunities arose. Single, with no family, he had nothing to keep him anchored to any one place.

With him, it was always the next case that piqued his interest.

But at the moment, it wasn’t the next one that did it. It was this one.

He had set his sights on bringing Livia Colton in, and to do that, he had already decided that he was going to have to get close to Leonor. Some of the circumstances might have changed, but the bottom line was still the same.

He just needed to do a little rewriting to make it ultimately work and he was nothing, he thought, smiling to himself, if not creatively flexible.

“You’re going down, Livia Colton,” he promised. “And so’s your daughter if she’s in on this.”

He got to work.