Praise for Marie Ferrarella

“Expert storytelling moves the book along at a steady pace. A solidly crafted plot makes it quite entertaining.”

—RT Book Reviews on Cavanaugh Fortune

“A joy to read”

—RT Book Reviews on Christmas Cowboy Duet

“Heartwarming. That’s the way I have described every book by Marie Ferrarella that I have read.

In the Family Way engenders in me the same warm, fuzzy feeling that I have come to expect from her books.” —The Romance Reader

“Ms Ferrarella warms our hearts with her charming characters and delicious interplay.”

—RT Book Reviews on A Husband Waiting to Happen

“Ms Ferrarella creates fiery, strong-willed characters, an intense conflict and an absorbing premise no reader could possibly resist.”

—RT Book Reviews on A Match for Morgan

* * *

Be sure to check out the next books in

The Coltons of Oklahoma series.

The Coltons of Oklahoma: Family secrets always find a way to resurface …

Second Chance

Colton

Marie Ferrarella

www.millsandboon.co.uk

MARIE FERRARELLA, a USA TODAY bestselling and RITA® Award-winning author, has written two hundred and fifty books for Mills & Boon, some under the name Marie Nicole. Her romances are beloved by fans worldwide. Visit her website, www.marieferrarella.com.

To Carly Silver

and

Brave New Frontiers

Contents

Cover

Praise

Title Page

About the Author

Dedication

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Epilogue

Extract

Copyright

Prologue

There was a time when he loved coming up to this ranch. Loved riding through its fields, getting lost in its acreage.

Right now, that time seemed as if it were a million years ago. Back then he’d been a boy and this had been his ranch.

Well, his and his family’s, Ryan Colton amended silently.

Back then, the only crimes, large or small, harmless or serious, had all been made-up, part of the make-believe games he, his brothers Jack, Eric and Brett, as well as his half brother, Daniel, and his baby sister, Greta, would play.

Playing had been serious business back then.

He wished for a moment that he could go back to that point in time. Back to when innocence had been a major player in all their lives.

But a lot of things had happened since then. Jack had gotten married, become a father and then gotten divorced before he finally got it right and found Tracy. Eric had left the ranch to become a trauma surgeon at Tulsa General Hospital, where he had met Kara, the love of his life. Daniel, along with his wife Megan, and Brett and his wife, Hannah, were still here on the ranch, along with Jack, but Daniel and Brett had ideas about managing the ranch that differed from the direction that Jack had initially wanted to take. All three were currently trying to iron things out rather than clashing over methods the way they had once done.

And Greta, well, Greta was Greta. Her gift for training horses took her away from the ranch a great deal more than it once had. These days found her in Oklahoma City more than here because of her engagement to Mark Stanton. But even when she was gone, her presence seemed to just ooze out of the very shadows, as if unconsciously reminding the others that she, too, was a Colton and every bit as much a part of this ranch as they were.

As for him, well, he had gone into the Marines in search of himself. He came back still looking, except now he did it as a homicide detective with the Tulsa police department.

And it was in that capacity, as a police detective rather than a Colton sibling, that he was here now, standing in one of the Lucky C’s smaller stables, staring at a broken windowpane with blood smeared on the jagged edges.

Whose blood was it and why had they broken in? Other than defacing some of the property, he saw no reason for this. Nothing seemed to have been taken.

But it was obvious that something sinister was going on here at the Lucky C—something that seemed to call the ranch’s very name into question.

This wasn’t the first time he’d been called up to the ranch to investigate a sinister occurrence. In the past few months there had been a series of “mishaps,” for lack of a better word, Ryan thought darkly as he methodically examined the crime scene.

There’d been the fire that’d started up for no apparent reason—no faulty wiring, no carelessly discarded matches or cigarette butts—and several wanton, senseless acts of vandalism. And there was that break-in that had occurred just the other day, also with no particular rhyme or reason to it.

And then there had been that initial break-in at the main house, shortly after Greta’s engagement party, that had been the start of it all. Someone had broken in and stolen some things—and beaten his mother in the process. Beaten her senseless. Jack had been the one to find her that day. Ryan didn’t want to think about what the possible consequences of that beating could have been if he hadn’t.

As it was, Abra Colton had remained in the hospital for some time, in a coma and all but lost to all of them. He’d thought his father would come completely apart during that time.

Mercifully, his mother was out of the hospital now and back home, but when he’d finally questioned her, she’d been unable to shed any real light on what had happened to provoke that attack—or, more important, the name of the person who had attacked her. Her testimony—when his mother was finally up to giving it—had been jumbled and vague.

And then she had just shut down, saying she didn’t want to “speak of it.” Afraid for her mental state, Ryan knew better than to try to push her. So he was resigned to waiting until such time as his mother was ready to “speak of it.”

He sighed, moving slowly about this latest crime scene. His mother’s attack—and the robbery—had been the beginning. These other senseless acts of destruction had followed, but they’d left no discernible pattern.

What he was now looking at was the most recent of several lesser acts of vandalism that had befallen the family. The Lucky C, it seemed, had found itself at the very center of some strange activity—activity that just reeked of malice.

The only thing Ryan knew with certainty was that the attack, the acts that had followed, weren’t random, the way he’d initially hoped. Someone definitely had it in for his family.

The questions that were on the table now were why and who?

He knew that he was too close to this. But who had more of an incentive to solve this thing than he did? Whoever had orchestrated this had already tried—unsuccessfully, thank God—to eliminate his mother, Abra, from the family tree. He didn’t want to hang back, spinning theories and coming up empty, potentially leaving the ranch and his family wide-open for another all-out assault.

Who knew, the next time it might not just be a broken window he’d find himself dealing with, but someone’s broken neck.

This had to stop before then.

Ryan frowned. He needed to put the call in for the crime scene unit to get out here. They had a sharper eye for this sort of thing than he did. With luck and their combined efforts, he could put an end to this, whatever “this” was.

With luck.

The very phrase mocked him, but he was determined to get to the bottom of all this.

And soon.

He had to.

Chapter 1

“You’re wrong.”

Ryan Colton’s booming, resonant voice filled every available nook and cranny within the small, albeit state-of-the-art, Tulsa PD forensic lab.

“No, I’m not.”

Susie Howard, the lab’s chief forensic expert, refused to be intimidated and stood her ground, even though a part of her could understand why the homicide detective before her had balked. After all, she’d just told him that the person who had broken into and apparently vandalized one of the ranch’s stables—and was possibly responsible for the numerous vandalisms that had occurred prior to this latest one—was his sister, Greta.

But like it or not, Susie thought, evidence was evidence.

Doing her best to sound professional and remain removed—no easy feat in this case—Susie stated the obvious. “You asked me to put a rush on the DNA evidence, so I did. The sample from the Lucky C’s crime scene went to the head of the line and that’s your answer,” she told him, tapping the name that had been generated by her trusty machine after the test had been completed. Greta Colton’s prints and DNA were in the system because of the nature of her work.

Frowning, Susie withdrew her well-manicured finger. “I can’t help it if you don’t like the answer, but that’s it. The machine doesn’t lie—even if you think that I do,” she concluded, her hazel eyes narrowing as she tossed her head. A blond tendril came loose from the tightly wound bun she wore at the back of her neck as she looked up at the six-foot-two detective.

Ryan struggled to keep his temper in check. It had grown very frayed lately. Yelling wasn’t going to get him anywhere, he knew that. Especially not with Susie.

But she just couldn’t be right.

She couldn’t be.

His words were carefully measured as he spoke. “I didn’t say you were lying, but there’s always the possibility that there’s a margin of error.”

Which was what he was pinning all his hopes on now. He knew Greta, had watched her grow up. There was no reason he could come up with for why she would do something like this.

“Run the test again,” Ryan instructed, his voice leaving no room for argument. “I don’t want to tell you your job—”

“Then don’t!” Susie retorted.

Ryan continued on the subject as if she hadn’t said a single word. “But there was enough blood on that broken window to take several swabs. Run a second sample. And a third if you need to,” he added before the forensic expert could protest.

“How many do you want me to run before you accept the results?” Susie challenged.

“Just run the test again,” Ryan ordered, doing his best to remain removed from the discussion.

Fat chance of that. The woman who had just told him that the blood belonged to his sister, Greta, was the same woman he had once been seriously involved with. The same woman, after their relationship had become serious, he had deliberately cut off all ties with.

He’d been a Marine back then, home on leave, when their paths had first crossed. They had hit it off instantly—hot and heavy, and very, very serious. He spent every moment he could with her, and she with him. Neither of their families knew about their relationship because they never made time for anyone else. It was as if somehow, subconsciously, they both understood that they were on a timetable. When he received word that he was being deployed overseas again, Susie had naturally been upset, but she’d promised to wait for him no matter how long it took.

That had been the problem. The burden of having someone waiting for him, loving him and praying for his safe return, was just too much for him to carry into battle. The weight of that responsibility threatened to sap away his edge, to blur his focus, and survival depended heavily on focus.

Besides, if he didn’t make it back, he knew how that could affect the rest of Susie’s life—how it could destroy the rest of her life. He couldn’t do anything about the way his family reacted to news like that, but he could do something about Susie.

There was far too much guilt attached to their relationship for him, so he chose the simple way out. He broke things off between them—doing so in a letter rather than in person.

In effect, he had chosen the coward’s way out. He never found out how she felt about the breakup because Susie never wrote back. Eventually, he convinced himself that that was for the best and that this was the way things were meant to be. He was meant to be alone.

With that in mind, he struggled to move on, to move forward. After his honorable discharge, he wound up becoming a police detective. In the beginning, it all boiled down to a matter of putting one foot in front of the other. And somehow, while he wasn’t looking, six years managed to pass by.

He’d assumed he would never see Susie again. It got a little easier dealing with that with each year that went by.

The sight of Susie walking down the hall at the Tulsa police department one morning four years ago had completely knocked the air right out of him. But after a few seconds, he’d recovered and managed to push on.

For the past four years, they had politely but determinedly ignored one another, pretending not to be aware of the other person’s existence whenever they found themselves in the same general vicinity. His cases were such that he found he didn’t need any help from the forensic department.

But now, with the vandalism at the Lucky C amped up to a dangerous degree, Ryan resigned himself to the fact that he needed her help. Needed her training and her lab to help him solve this all-too-personal case he had taken on before things went from bad to fatal.

And now the attractive blonde who still sometimes turned up in his dreams had given him an answer that had all but left him numb and speechless. Was this her way of getting even with him for breaking up with her?

No, whatever else he might feel about Susie Howard, he knew that she had a great deal of integrity. He was allowing his imagination to run away with him, something that didn’t happen very often. He would be the first to admit that the situation had made him desperate.

He forced himself to remember that Susie wasn’t the kind of person who would let her feelings get in the way of her work—and she certainly wasn’t the type to frame an innocent person, no matter how much she might want to because she was in effect jilted by that person’s older brother.

That wasn’t the way Susie operated. Her sense of honor was something that he’d found admirable about her all those years ago.

Since he knew that Susie wasn’t responsible for the results that were damning his sister, that left Ryan clinging to the only possible excuse he had left—that somehow, the periodically calibrated forensic equipment had malfunctioned.

Susie looked as if she was going to continue staunchly refusing to rerun the test. He had to get her to reverse that position.

“Do it for me,” he requested, his voice as devoid of emotion as he could possibly render it. “Run the test again.”

“Oh, well, if it’s for you, sure, I’ll run it again.” There was more than a touch of sarcasm in Susie’s voice. “And if it wasn’t for you, I’d still run the test again, just because there seems to be some sort of doubt involved here,” she went on to add icily. “I can see why finding out that your sister vandalized the family stables might be upsetting to you, so yes, I’ll run the test again,” she informed him coldly. “Now, if you don’t mind getting out of my lab, I’ll get started on that second test.”

She turned her back on him, pretending that he was already gone.

She knew he wasn’t because she could see his distorted reflection on the surface of her mass spectrometer. The machine was facing her. Her parting words to Ryan were “I’ll have someone call you with the results once they’re in.”

When Ryan’s reflection continued to remain exactly where it was, she asked in as disinterested a voice as she could summon, “Is there anything else?”

This had to be said. He knew that. If the air wasn’t cleared between them, then she might be sorely tempted not to do her best job. He felt confident she wouldn’t manufacture evidence, but he wasn’t so sure that she’d bring her A game to the case.

“Yes,” he said after a long moment, addressing the words to the back of Susie’s head since she wasn’t turning around again, “there’s something else. I want to apologize for treating you so badly when I broke it off between us. But I did it for you, for your own good.”

She almost swung around then, almost fired at him with both barrels, calling him an idiot and a fool—and a liar. Calling him an egotist for using that pathetic excuse when the real reason he had pulled his emotional vanishing act on her was because he’d obviously been afraid of commitment.

Any first-year psychology student would have been able to tell him that.

But she didn’t swing around, didn’t give Ryan a tongue-lashing and didn’t tell him exactly what she thought. What would be the point? He had his lie, which he was holding on to for dear life, and she had moved on.

Or told herself she had.

So she remained facing her workbench, acting as if Ryan hadn’t said a single word to her about their past or its abrupt ending.

“I’ll have someone call you the minute the second results are in,” she repeated.

This time, she saw his reflection retreat and then disappear.

Heard the door to the lab close again.

Only then did she turn around on her stool. “You jerk,” Susie murmured, staring at the closed door. Her voice grew louder, more heated with every word she uttered. “You big, self-centered, blind, stupid, stupid jerk.”

“Two degrees, six years in college and that’s the best you can come up with?” Harold Gould marveled as the tall, thin lab assistant stepped out from the computer tech area where he had been working.

His white lab coat hung like a bland curtain about his all but emaciated frame, giving the impression that it would begin flapping wildly about that same frame at the first sign of a breeze.

Startled, Susie’s eyes met those of her junior assistant, who was also a lab intern. The brown eyes continued looking back at her, the assistant never flinching.

“I didn’t know anyone else was here,” Susie told the intern.

“Obviously. When I saw him walk in I was going to clear my throat in case something private was going to be said. But Colton started talking right away and it sounded kind of personal from the get-go.” The look he gave her was sympathetic. “I didn’t want to embarrass you.”

“You just wanted to eavesdrop, hoping to score some juicy gossip,” Susie countered.

She knew how the man operated. Harold Gould knew more about what was going on in the precinct after being here for a little more than three months than some of the twenty-year veterans did. It wasn’t only lab procedures that he absorbed faster than a sponge.

The painfully thin shoulders rose and fell quickly, indicating that Harold had no intention of even attempting to contest her take on the situation. They both knew he enjoyed being a font of information, both technical and private.

“Yeah, well, there’s that, too,” he agreed, and then he tried to set her mind at ease. “Don’t worry, I don’t have any time to talk to anyone so this isn’t going into the rumor mill. And besides, I might be had for a song when it comes to certain things, but don’t ever doubt my loyalty.”

She liked Harold and was fairly certain that his heart was in the right place. But she’d paid the price for blind faith before and that had made her leery. Harold could just be offering her pretty words to distract her, Susie thought. “If it does hit the rumor mill, I’ll know who to come after.”

A small, amused smile played across all but nonexistent lips. “Should I be shaking in my shoes now—or wait until later?” he asked her.

“Later,” she told him. “We have work to do now.” She glanced again at the closed door. “I’m going to have you run the DNA test on the blood this time.”

“Really run the test, or...?” He raised one eyebrow, leaving the rest of the sentence unspoken but definitely understood.

Susie wanted to make one thing perfectly clear even as she cut the intern some slack because he was, after all, still relatively new.

“We don’t do ‘or’ here, Harold. We don’t even think about ‘or.’ Just one tiny instance—or even the hint of that kind of impropriety—and everything we’ve ever done here is going to be viewed as suspect and called into question. The amount of work that would be generated by something like that would be astronomical. Have I made that clear enough for you?”

She didn’t want to come off as sounding belligerent, but there should be no question about how procedures were conducted.

“Just kidding, boss lady,” Harold told her, raising his hands as a sign of surrender.

“I know. But it doesn’t hurt to reiterate how we do things out loud every so often so that we don’t ever lose sight of our function here. Because it only has to happen once and suddenly, we’ll get our walking papers and be out on the street.”

“Understood,” Harold assured her. “But even so, you could stand to improve your vocabulary,” he told her. “I could work up a whole host of multiple-syllable expletives you could hurl at yon studly homicide detective the next time your paths cross. You don’t want to be caught unarmed, do you? Or worse, tongue-tied?” he concluded, pretending to shiver at the very thought of that happening.

“You miss the salient point. I don’t want our paths crossing, period,” she said, getting to the heart of the matter.

“For that even to be a remote possibility at this police precinct, one of you is going to have to put in for a transfer. Like, to a different city.” Harold’s shallow complexion seemed to brighten instantly as he thought over possibilities. “Do I get a vote as to which one of you should go?”

She wasn’t about to feed the intern any more straight lines. Given half a chance, the man could go on talking for hours, like a windup toy whose spring had somehow malfunctioned and while she liked him and felt he did have a great deal of potential, she definitely didn’t want to encourage him, especially not when there was work to do.

“Just do the test, Harold,” Susie requested.

The lab intern saluted her comically as he said, “I hear and obey, my liege.”

Susie rolled her eyes as she got back to her work.

* * *

Susie couldn’t be right, Ryan stubbornly thought as he got back into his car. Starting it up, he pulled out of his parking spot, turned the sedan around and headed back to the Lucky C.

The forensic team, obviously, had come and gone. They had a reputation for being very thorough. Although he had been the one to initially call them in to see if he had missed something, he wanted to go back and go over the latest crime scene one more time to see if perhaps they had missed something this time around.

It was worth a shot. What did he have to lose?

Especially when he stood to gain so much more if he was right and Susie wasn’t.

What he wanted to do with this latest return trip to the Lucky C was find something that would negate what Susie was claiming: that that was Greta’s blood at the crime scene. That it was Greta’s blood that was all over the jagged edges of the broken window.

What possible reason could Greta have for vandalizing the family ranch?

If his sister had a grievance—which would have been news to him—she would have gone to talk to whomever she had the issue with.

Talk to them, not deface their property. For heaven sakes, if anything, Greta had become even closer to the family—certainly closer to their mother—ever since she’d gotten engaged. Greta and their mother were busy planning Greta’s wedding. She wouldn’t just suddenly turn on her mother like that, despite any bizarre tales of hormonal bridezillas to the contrary.

Still, he knew how conscientious Susie was. She wouldn’t have just haphazardly conducted that DNA test, or allowed it to become contaminated.

Yet how could her findings be right?

Ryan felt a surge of anger flare up within his chest, anger where his heart was supposed to be.

Try as he might, he couldn’t come up with a way that both he and Susie could be right. One of them had to be wrong and he found the idea that it was him really upsetting. Not because he had any kind of a problem with his ego—he’d been wrong before, most notably when he’d deployed back overseas and cut Susie loose like that, as if she was some inconvenience instead of someone he had found himself caring for deeply—but because that would mean that there was something seriously bad going on with Greta.

He knew Greta. His sister wasn’t a criminal. And she didn’t harbor some dark side that none of them were aware of. That was just plain ridiculous.

Leaning over, Ryan switched on the radio. The car was instantly filled with the strains of music, instrumental music meant to promote and instill a sense of peace into what was usually a hectic day. He’d never needed it more than he did now.

If he couldn’t find evidence at the crime scene that could point him in another direction—the right direction—he was going to have to call his sister and question her about the events that had been transpiring here at the ranch. He wasn’t looking forward to that because, despite his attempts to keep to himself, he found that he was rather transparent when he was dealing with his family. And once he started questioning Greta about the strange events at the ranch and she realized what he was getting at, there would be a breach between them.

And most likely, between him and the rest of the family, as well. Greta was, after all, the baby of the family, as well as the only girl. Brothers tended to be protective of their little sisters.

Hell, he felt that way, too. But he was also a homicide detective and he had a job to do, a sworn duty to get to the bottom of things and to bring the guilty parties in as well as to protect the innocent ones.

“Damn it, Greta, I sure hope that you’re innocent—for both our sakes,” he murmured.

And then, because it wasn’t affecting him, he turned the music up louder, hoping to be in a better, calmer frame of mind by the time he got back to the Lucky C.

Hoping, but being realistic enough to know that hope alone didn’t change a damn thing no matter how much someone might want it to.

Chapter 2

Ryan isn’t going to like this.

The thought echoed over and over again in Susie’s head as she looked down at the results from the latest DNA test. It was the third such test she’d authorized and this one she’d again done herself. She knew she was wasting her own time, not to mention the lab’s precious resources, just to make doubly sure—or triply sure as the case was—that the final results were the same as what had already been concluded the first and second times the test had been run.

There was no mistaking the findings. It was Greta Colton’s blood that had been found along the edges of the broken glass from the vandalized stable. It wasn’t just a vague familial match, which would have meant that the blood might have belonged to a family member, like Big J or one of Greta’s brothers. The match she was looking at was dead-on.

The blood belonged to Greta.

There wasn’t a single trace of anyone else’s blood on the jagged broken glass. No accomplice, no one else’s blood on the scene.

Only Greta’s.

Greta had been the one, for whatever reason, who had broken into the stables via the window instead of going in through the door, which as far as she knew, had been Greta’s normal custom.

What the hell was going on here?

Why would Greta be breaking into the stables through the window? It just didn’t make any sense.

Far from happy, Susie blew out a breath. Much as she really would have preferred coming up with a different conclusion, she had definitely nailed down the who. Now it was up to Ryan to find out the why.

Ryan definitely wasn’t going to be happy.

“That did not sound like a good sigh.”

Perched on a stool against the equipment-laden counter, Susie managed to swivel her stool around to face the doorway. She knew who she would be looking at before she was actually turned around. Nobody else’s voice undulated under her skin the way his had.

The way it still did.

Water under the bridge, remember? Water under the bridge. You’ve moved on. So keep moving, Susie told herself fiercely, albeit silently. Ryan no longer figured into her life, except professionally.

Doing her best to collect herself and look every inch the forensic expert that she was, Susie replied, “It wasn’t. And it definitely won’t be from your point of view.”

Ryan’s gut tightened. He knew what was coming and he braced himself—or tried to. “The DNA—”

Susie had never been one to prolong a verdict for the sake of dramatic effect. With distasteful news, it was best to get it out as quickly as possible and move on.

“—is still Greta’s,” she said, completing his sentence. “I’m sorry, Ryan. I had the test run a total of three times using three different samples from three different areas on the broken glass. I ran two of the tests and had someone else run another one.” To back herself up, Susie held up the three separate printouts that had resulted. “It came out the same each and every time. It’s Greta’s DNA. The blood found at the scene belongs to your sister.”

Ryan took the printouts from her and stared at the results on the top sheet. The findings on the two sheets beneath it were identical.

He felt as if someone had driven a knife into his stomach—and was still twisting it.

“There has to be an explanation,” he insisted, talking more to himself than to the woman perched on the stool.

“Ask her,” Susie suggested matter-of-factly. When Ryan looked down at her with confusion in his eyes, as if he had suddenly realized that he wasn’t alone in the room, she said, “If you really think that this doesn’t make sense, then ask her why she broke the stable window. Maybe she didn’t do it to get into the stables. Maybe there’s another plausible reason why the window was broken.” And why the stables were vandalized, she added silently.

“You don’t believe that,” he said, going by the expression on her face.

Susie shrugged away his observation. “What I believe—or don’t believe—isn’t the point here. I’m the forensic expert, you’re the detective. It’s up to you to take what I give you and arrange it into some sort of a complete picture that gives you the plausible answers you’re looking for.”

It almost sounded cut-and-dried—but he knew from experience nothing ever was.

He frowned, looking down at the printout Susie had given him. “This doesn’t give me any answers, just more questions.”

“It’s a start,” she told him crisply. “Use it to help you get those answers.”

“So now you’re telling me my job?” he asked, recalling that she had accused him of doing the same yesterday. He wasn’t being defensive, he told himself, just curious to see what the woman would say if he asked. “What is this, a demonstration of ‘turnabout is fair play’?”

Maybe she shouldn’t have said anything to him, Susie thought. She’d run the tests, done her job and given him the results. It was now up to him to work with what he had. Her part in this was over. She had to keep telling herself that, keep reminding herself to keep her distance, even though something inside her still insisted on holding out the hope that...

That nothing, Susie upbraided herself. There was nothing between them anymore except for business. He’d seen to that.

“Just trying to make the results more palatable for you, Detective Colton,” she told him.

Ryan winced. He could almost feel the frost encrusted around her words. “Ouch. That’s pretty formal. But I guess I deserve that.”

Yes, you do. That and a hell of a lot more, she added silently. “See, you’re detecting already,” she told him, doing her best to keep distancing herself from Ryan. She knew if she didn’t, if she allowed just a crack to open up, no matter how small, he’d somehow seep into her system, and just like that she’d be vulnerable all over again. In danger of having her heart ripped out again. She’d been down that route once and had no desire to revisit it. “Now, if you don’t mind, I’ve got cases other than yours all clamoring for my time...” She allowed her voice to drift off as she deliberately made a show of getting back to work.

“No. Sure. Thanks.” The single-word sentences came out of his mouth in staccato fashion, as if he was firing each word one by one, pausing in between each.

She heard Ryan begin to walk toward the exit. This was where she was supposed to continue looking down at the work on her desk, the work she was already supposed to have finished but had moved aside so that she could run those additional DNA tests in hopes of finding another suspect, one that wasn’t Ryan’s sister.

All she had to do was hold out a total of thirty seconds. Fifty, tops, and he would be gone, Susie told herself.

There was really no need for her to say anything more to the man than she’d already said.

No need at all—except, perhaps, to satisfy her own curiosity about a man she had once believed herself to be madly in love with.

Once?

Hell, you’re still in love with him, you big idiot. You think you would’ve learned by now, Susie upbraided herself, annoyed at her own lack of discipline, not to mention a certain dearth of self-respect.

But for her internal lectures never took, no matter how driven they were by common sense, and she found herself turning all the way around on her stool. She was just in time to see Ryan about to step over the threshold, out into the hall.

Two more seconds and she’d be home free.

One—

“So what are you going to do?” she heard herself asking Ryan.

Apparently already lost in thought, Ryan jerked his head up. He’d heard her voice, but not the words that she’d said. “What?”

“So what are you going to do?” Susie repeated, enunciating each word.

Ryan crossed back over the threshold, but only took a couple of steps toward her before he stopped. He had to admit he was surprised that she was interested enough to ask him that. “I’m going to call Greta and do just what you suggested. I’m going to ask her what she was doing in the stable and why she had to break the window in order to get in.”

Susie thought for a moment. “Your sister’s a horse trainer, isn’t she?”

He was surprised that Susie had taken the time to find that out. It wasn’t as if they ran in the same circles these days. And back when they were together, their worlds had contained only each other, to the exclusion of everyone else. That meant family members, as well.

“Best in the business,” Ryan confirmed.

“Maybe she was passing by the stable at that hour for some reason, looked in and thought she saw smoke coming from the stable. Or maybe she thought she saw a horse in distress. The fastest way from point A to point B is still a straight line.” She shrugged carelessly, unable to come up with any better explanations at the moment. “Maybe that was why she broke the window.”

Although he appreciated her effort, he thought that Susie was definitely reaching. “And she didn’t stick around to tell anyone what she did?” Ryan asked skeptically.

Susie took her theory to the next step. “She was probably too embarrassed about breaking the window for no reason so she didn’t hang around, waiting for someone from the family to hear her out. Most likely, she’s just working up the nerve to answer for what she did. Nobody likes to admit that they made a mistake or acted rashly,” she pointed out.

They were talking about his sister, and Susie was giving him ammunition to defend Greta’s actions, but he really wasn’t convinced.

“I suppose that sounds plausible enough,” he allowed. “But I’ll believe it when I hear it from Greta’s own lips. Last I heard, she’s not even supposed to be in Tulsa right now.”

“Well, she might not be, but her blood certainly is,” Susie said, indicating the printouts he was holding. “I don’t have to point out that you can’t have one without the other.”

“Unless someone’s trying to frame you,” Ryan said as the idea suddenly occurred to him. The only thing that wasn’t occurring to him was why someone would go to the sort of trouble that actually framing his sister would require.

But even as he began to vaguely entertain the idea, he saw Susie shaking her head.

Exasperation seeped into his tone. “What?” he asked.

She had to stop him before he got carried away with the idea he seemed to be embracing. “If someone for some obscure reason actually did manage to have a sample of your sister’s blood—and I’m talking about enough to smear on the jagged edges of the window—it would have started to coagulate in a vial. There are certain characteristics of stored blood that would have shown up in the blood workup that was done. They didn’t,” she informed him flatly. “This blood was fresh when it came in contact with the broken glass.”

“I was afraid of that,” he murmured, again more to himself than to her.

Susie’s slender shoulders rose and fell, not in a show of indifference, but to signify that some things just couldn’t be changed no matter how much one might want them to be different.

“So, go back to your initial plan,” she told him.

“Which was?” he asked, wanting to see what Susie thought his plan had been.

“You said you were going to go question your sister and ask Greta what she was doing there at that time of night. Ask her why she thought it was necessary to break into stables that she could have just as easily accessed the proper way—through the door.”

Susie was right of course. But the more he thought about it, the more this proposed conversation with Greta was not going to be a conversation that he was looking forward to. Added to that was the fact that Greta had been a little jumpy since their mother had been found battered and beaten.

In the past couple of months his normally cheerful little sister had become increasingly uneasy, at times acting almost paranoid, and questioning her about the acts of vandalism and the break-in at the Lucky C was definitely not going to help the situation or Greta’s frame of mind, he thought.

He could feel Susie’s eyes on him, as if scrutinizing his very thought process. What she said next all but confirmed his suspicions.

“Maybe you should take another family member with you when you go to question her,” Susie suggested.

Susie pressed her lips together. She knew she should just keep out of this. After all, the man had all but callously torn her heart right out of her chest without so much as a warning shot. She owed him nothing.

But even so, the look on his face had her feeling for him. She knew that if she were in his place, confronting this sort of situation, she would feel awful.

Memories from the past tried to break through, memories of a time when they were each other’s entire world.

But that was then, this was now, she reminded herself. She had to get a grip on her emotions. They had absolutely no place here.

“Thanks,” he said, surprised that Susie would even bother to attempt to give him helpful suggestions, given their past. “But that’s not a good idea. If I take one of my brothers with me, Greta will think we’re ganging up on her. She’s been on edge ever since our mother was attacked.” He remembered being called to the scene by his frantic father and racing to his mother’s side. The whole episode was vividly imprinted on his mind.

“Just before she slipped into an unconscious state, when I asked my mother who did this to her, she just stared at me and then started to cry. I couldn’t get her to say anything or even indicate whether or not she had seen the attacker’s face. She slipped into a coma right after that.

“When she finally came out of her coma, every time Greta was anywhere near her, my mother looked, I don’t know, spooked I guess is the best word for it. As for Greta, she just looked uncomfortable—and hurt.” He shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know what to make of any of it.”

For a moment Susie forgot that she wasn’t supposed to be talking to Ryan beyond uttering a few monosyllabic responses. All she saw was an all-too-human homicide detective, torn between job responsibilities and familial loyalties—a fellow human being in need of some kind of support.

That was the Ryan she was talking to.

“If not another family member, maybe you could take another female with you to be supportive of Greta as well as you,” she proposed.

“You?” Ryan asked in surprise. Was she actually offering to come with him to question Greta?

Susie shrugged. She had painted herself into a corner with that one, she thought. The focus wasn’t supposed to be on her but on the situation—and the crime. She’d meant the suggestion in a general way, but there was no denying that she was a female.

“I do qualify for the category,” she was forced to admit, almost against her will.

Ryan smiled then, remembering a time prior to the breakup he had engineered. A time when everything had seemed perfect despite the claim the service had on him. Remembering a very small island of time when he had been in love, and had just allowed things to “be” without any in-depth analysis.

“If memory serves me, you more than qualify—and thanks for offering—but this is something I have to do on my own,” he told her. “I think that the less people Greta sees when I arrive, the better this whole situation might work out.”

Or at least that was what he hoped.

Susie didn’t know if he was just being protective of his sister, or if Ryan was once again dismissing her wholesale out of his life.

In either case, she told herself, her conscience was clear. Despite the extenuating circumstances, she’d offered to do the right thing. That she had done so was not negated by his refusal of her offer. It just made her square with him.

“Suit yourself,” she responded, doing what she could to sound indifferent. “You always know best.”

The last part had sounded incredibly cold as well as formal and withdrawn to his ear. Whatever bridge they had crossed a moment ago was now officially uncrossed again and they were back to their initial corners. They were once again on the opposite sides of the fence, the words opposite sides all but ten feet tall with neon lights dancing around them.

He didn’t have time for this, didn’t have time to deal with any regrets, small or, in this case, large. What was done was done and he had to focus on the present. Just possibly, he had a sister to bring back to the fold. A sister that he had to take care not to alienate as he tried to subtly question her about her part—if she had played a part—in these bizarre, random attacks of vandalism and destruction that were occurring on the ranch.

A sister who just might never forgive him if she proved to be innocent of any wrongdoing and thought that he was accusing her of the exact opposite.

There were times when he scolded himself for not having chosen a simpler, easier path in life. But everyone had to follow their strengths, he reasoned, and his involved ferreting out the truth and taking down the bad guys.

“Thanks for all your help,” he said to Susie as he started to leave again.

She looked up at him. “I’m sure you don’t mean that, but you’re welcome.”

He was about to take exception with the way she had phrased that—it sounded as if she had stopped just short of calling him a liar—but he caught himself just in time. There was no point in attempting to contradict her point of view about the immediate matter at hand. She had a right to her opinion, even if she was dead wrong. Because he had meant what he’d just said.

He was deliberately wasting time. Every minute he stood here was another minute that he was delaying the inevitable because it was going to be, at best, awkward and uncomfortable. He didn’t want to think about what it would be like at its worst.

Squaring his shoulders, he left the lab. He needed to get this over with. Now.

And then, he thought as he went down the corridor, he could move on to something else.

Hopefully more successfully than the last time he’d told himself he was moving on.

He sincerely doubted that he could do any worse.

Chapter 3

Ryan knew that as an investigating detective with the Tulsa PD, even if he was questioning his own sister, because he was doing it in reference to a current active case he was working on, it was in everyone’s best interest to keep things businesslike and official. Among other things, that meant that he should be making this call from the phone on his desk at the precinct, not from his personal cell phone while he was sitting in his car.

He supposed that he could argue that he was doing it for the quiet, because the precinct was usually almost too noisy to allow anyone to hear themselves think. But the truth of the matter was that his real reason for making the call from inside his vehicle was that he didn’t want to be overheard.

It was bad enough that he had to ask his sister painful, probing questions like this without having everyone within a ten-foot radius hearing him asking. He was a Colton. One of the Coltons. The family that had, through absolutely no fault of their own, their very own serial killer in their family tree, thanks to his father’s brother, Matthew.

Granted, it all had happened a long time ago and his uncle had been locked away in prison for a while now, but he was well aware of the fact that people loved to point an accusing finger and watch people of prominence come tumbling down. They loved watching their fallen-from-grace sinners every bit as much as they loved cheering on their saints and heroes.

Sometimes even more so.

He wanted no part in supplying those people with any sort of ammunition, especially if there did actually turn out to be a reasonable excuse for all this.

He supposed a tiny part of him hadn’t turned cynical yet and still believed in miracles.

So he sat in his vehicle, trying not to notice how stuffy it seemed with the windows rolled up and his doors locked, and he called his sister’s number.

After a short delay, he heard the cell phone start to ring. Waiting for Greta to answer her phone, Ryan counted off the number of times her cell rang. After four, her voice mail kicked in. Impatient, he was about to terminate the call and try again in a couple of minutes when he heard Greta’s breathless voice as she came on the line.

“Hello?”

Rather than relax, he felt his shoulders stiffen. “Greta? It’s me. Ryan.”

“Hi.” And then he heard her ask guardedly, “What’s up?”

Was that just his imagination—or her guilty conscience stepping up? “I’m coming up to the ranch to see you.”

He heard her laugh softly. “Well, you can come up to the ranch, but you won’t see me.”

Was he tipping her off with this call? Was she planning on taking off? He needed more to work with. “Why?” he asked.

“Why do you think?” Not waiting for him to respond, she gave him the answer to her own question. “Because I’m not at the ranch. I’m not in Tulsa at all. I’m back in Oklahoma City.”

Ryan frowned to himself. Ever since Greta had gotten engaged, she’d spent more and more of her time in Oklahoma City, where her fiancé lived. She’d even taken on horse training jobs there.

“I thought you’d stick around the ranch for a while, you know, because of Mother.”

There was silence on the other end of the line and for a moment, he thought that the call had been dropped. But then Greta said, “Yes, well, I wasn’t really doing her any good just hanging around the house. Especially since she kept looking at me as if she was afraid of me. As if she thought I was going to do something to her. I don’t know what’s with that,” Greta complained, sounding as if she was at a complete loss.

“Did you ask her about it?” Ryan asked.

“Yes. But when I asked her why she was looking at me like that,” Greta went on, obviously upset about the matter, “she denied it.”

“So what’s the problem?”

He heard Greta sigh. “I got the feeling she denied it because she was afraid if she didn’t, I’d do something to her.”

He couldn’t believe that things between his mother and sister had actually degenerated down to this, but then Abra was prone to mood swings. “You’re imagining things, Greta.”

He heard Greta sigh. “I suppose that maybe I am, but just the other day she asked me if I was doing any recreational drugs. Me, who’s never taken anything stronger than an aspirin. I think that beating Mother took might have been even more serious than any of us suspected.”

It was Ryan’s turn to sigh. No one was more frustrated about not being able to find whoever had hurt his mother than he was. But right now, he had the break-in to deal with.

The break-in with the evidence mounting against Greta. There had to be an explanation for all this, he thought, but he needed to talk to her in person to get at the truth.

Growing up, Greta had been a tomboy almost in self-defense. She’d been outnumbered by her brothers five to one and had learned to hold her own at a very early age. At five-nine she was tall and willowy, and at first glance, very feminine.

But she was also tough to the point that he was certain no one could easily push her around. As far as he knew, his sister didn’t really have much of a temper, but then he supposed everyone could be pushed to their limit. What was Greta’s limit? he couldn’t help wondering.

Was there something that could push Greta over the edge?

His thought process suddenly took him in a very new direction, almost against his will. What if, for some reason, their mother had suddenly taken exception to Greta’s pending marriage to Mark Stanton? Handsome and glibly charming, it was no secret that the younger brother of the president of Stanton Oil got by on his looks, not his work ethic. Maybe, despite the fact that she had been instrumental in throwing Greta and Mark an engagement party—their father always left such things to his wife—Abra had told Greta to slow down and think things through and Greta had balked. One thing could have had led to another and—

And what? Ryan silently demanded. Greta had had a complete reversal in personality and gone ballistic on their mother? That account just didn’t fly for him.

None of this was making any sense to him—and he was getting one hell of a headache just reviewing all the various details over and over again in his head.

“Ryan? Are you still there?” The stress in Greta’s voice broke through his thoughts.

“What?” Embarrassed, he flushed. Luckily there was no one to see him. “Yeah, I’m still here, Greta. How long have you been in Oklahoma City?” he asked her abruptly, changing direction.

He heard her hesitate. Was she thinking, or...?

“A couple of weeks or so,” Greta finally answered. “Why?”

Ryan suppressed his sigh. “Which is it? A couple of weeks? Or ‘so’?”

“Three weeks,” she replied more specifically, irritation evident in her voice. “Just what’s this all about, Ryan?”

He didn’t address her question. Instead, he asked her another one of his own. “So you weren’t there—at the ranch—yesterday morning? Or the night before?”

“No, I already told you,” she replied, annoyed. “I was here, working. Why are you asking me all these weird questions?” she asked. And then, as if she had a premonition about what was happening, she asked, “Ryan, what’s going on?”

He gave her the unvarnished details. “Someone broke into the stables early yesterday morning.”

“That’s awful,” she cried, upset. And then realization entered her voice, as did abject horror. “Wait, why would you think that it was me?”

Maybe he should have refrained from telling her this until later, but Greta was his sister and he had to give her every benefit of the doubt. “Because one of the windows had been deliberately broken and there was blood on the jagged edges.”

Even as she said the words, she couldn’t really get herself to believe it. It was there in her voice as she asked in stunned disbelief, “My blood?”

He had never hated sharing a piece of information more than this. “Yes.”

She felt as if she had slipped into some sort of parallel universe, one that was not bound by the laws of reason—or reality for that matter.

Stunned, she protested, “That’s not possible,” because she couldn’t see how it could be. “What reason would I have to break into the stable, going through a window for heaven’s sake?” she demanded.

“I don’t know, Greta. That’s what I’m trying to find out,” he told her wearily. “The DNA test that came back from the lab was conclusive.”

“Then you need better equipment—or better people doing the test—because the results they came up with are wrong. I wasn’t there,” Greta insisted heatedly one more time. “I was here, in Oklahoma City, working with the horses.”

Ryan paused for a moment, hating what he had to ask. But this was protocol, not something personal—even though he knew that Greta would take it that way. And in her place, he would have felt the same way. “Can anyone vouch for you?”

“The horses aren’t talking,” she snapped at him in exasperation.

“I didn’t think so,” he replied, hoping to inject a tiny trace of humor into the extremely awkward exchange. “How about the rancher who hired you?”

“Sorry, no help in that quarter,” she informed her brother coldly. “He’s away on business. Apparently he trusts me because I’ve got free access to his ranch while he’s away so I can come and go at will.”

Ryan took no offense at the attitude that had slipped into his sister’s voice. If someone had been listening to their exchange, it would sound as if he was trying to break Greta down.

“How about Mark?” he asked hopefully. Personally, he didn’t care for his sister’s intended, but maybe the man could prove good for something. Maybe he could provide the alibi that Greta needed. “Is he—”

Greta cut him off. “Mark’s just away. I don’t know where he is.”

What she didn’t say was that her fiancé had been rather flaky of late, not showing up when he said he would, being secretive whenever he did show up. She had a very uneasy feeling that the second she had agreed to marry him, Mark had decided he no longer had to be on his best behavior.

But none of this was something she wanted to share with her family, especially since someone had almost killed her mother, and apparently her police detective brother thought that she might be the one who was responsible for that.

Ryan jumped on the last thing she’d said like a hungry dog on his first bone after suffering a week of deprivation. “What do you mean you don’t know where he is?”

Greta’s tone became entirely defensive. It was obvious that she was tired of having to defend herself. “Just what I said. He’s my fiancé, Ryan, not my pet. I don’t keep track of him when he’s ‘off leash,’” she informed her brother heatedly.

Ryan felt he would have had to have been deaf to have missed her hostility. Not that he could blame her. Again, he supposed he’d feel the same way in her place if she’d all but accused him of hurting their mother and then began questioning him about vandalizing the family ranch.

The Lucky C was their father’s pride and joy. Big J treated the ranch as if it was actually an entity unto itself, as human as the rest of them—at times, maybe even more so.

Much as he hated to admit it, he had lost control of this conversation. All he’d wanted to do was arrange to get together with Greta to have this discussion face-to-face and it had veered completely off track. He had no idea how to smooth things over, only that he had to do it in order to get something to work with.

Pausing, he searched for words. But before they could come to him, his cell buzzed, announcing a second call was attempting to come in.

The phrase “saved by the bell” suddenly occurred to him.

“Hold on a minute, Greta, I’ve got another call coming in.”

He could almost hear her sign of relief. “Take your call, Ryan. I’ve got to go,” she told him a beat before the line went dead.

Frustrated, Ryan blew out a breath. He’d just been about to tell her to remain on the line but she had hung up before he had the chance.

He tried not to read anything incriminating into Greta’s quick and abrupt withdrawal. If need be, he’d get Susie’s rather annoying intern to pinpoint Greta’s exact location to make doubly sure that his sister was actually where she said she was. Armed with that information, he could determine just where she was staying so he could drive to Oklahoma City and bring his sister back if he needed to.

He hated this.

What he hated even more was that he had a very strong hunch that “needed to” was going to turn out to be a reality, and soon.

Very soon.

“Colton,” he announced as he took the incoming call.

“You better get out here, boy,” a shaken voice instructed him.

For one isolated moment, Ryan didn’t recognize the voice. But he could be forgiven for that since he had never heard his father sounding this way. Stunned. Numb. And battling complete disbelief—as well as sounding just the tiniest bit fearful.

“Dad?” Ryan asked, still only half-certain that he was right.

“Yeah, it’s me.” His father’s voice, usually so bombastic and full of life, sounded incredibly old. “Get out here as quick as you can, Ryan. And come alone,” his father added, emphasizing the last word.

“More vandalism?” Ryan asked wearily. He’d had just about enough drama to last for a while.

“No,” his father snapped, dismissing the question as inconsequential. “It’s bad.”

Okay, Ryan thought. This sounded serious. And personal. He could only think of one thing that would prompt his father to evaluate the situation this way. “Is it Mother?” he asked, even as he prayed—something he hadn’t done in more years than he could remember—that it wasn’t.

“No. No, it’s not Abra,” his father was quick to say. “But you have to get out here.”

The urgency in his father’s voice was unnerving. There was a time when their father had them all intimidated. John Colton was a big man who cast a large shadow and had a voice like gravel.

“Then what is it?” Ryan asked. Now that he thought about it, his father almost sounded spooked. If this didn’t involve his mother, why did his father sound like he was frightened?

“Damn it, Ryan, I can’t talk about this over the phone. What good is it having a police detective in the family if I have to argue with you every time I need you to handle something for me? Just get out here, Ryan,” his father ordered. “Now.”

He knew better than to think that his father was playing games. Something else had happened on the ranch and rather than wasting time trying to get his father to tell him what was going on, he needed to see this for himself.

“Where’s ‘here,’ Dad?” he asked.

“The ranch, of course,” Big J retorted. “You suddenly gone dumb on me?”

Ryan didn’t bother answering that. “It’s big ranch, Dad. Where on the ranch? The main house, the Cabin, what?”

The main house was where his parents lived, along with Brett, his wife and Greta when she was in Tulsa. Jack, his wife and his son lived in what had once been the main house until the new one had been built, while Daniel and Megan lived in what everyone just referred to as “the Cabin.” That, too, was located on the ranch.

“Come to the bunkhouse,” his father instructed in a voice that was almost eerily still.

After terminating the call, Ryan tossed his cell phone onto the passenger seat and started up his vehicle.

Given the situation, the logical thing would have been to bring backup with him, especially since his father had sounded so shaken up, an unusual state of affairs when it came to Big J.

But since his father had also been adamant no one else come to the ranch to see this—whatever “this” was—except for him, Ryan felt as if he had to go with his father’s instincts.

Besides, his instincts told him to play this very close to his vest—at least until he knew what the hell was going on.

Ryan paused only long enough to reach into his glove compartment to take out his vehicle’s emergency-light attachment. Switching it on, he placed the whirling red and yellow lights onto his roof, securing it. Once he had, he hit the gas and took off.

* * *

Ryan did between eighty and ninety all the way to the ranch, something he would have loved to have done as a teenager. He would have enjoyed it a lot more then than now.

Once he reached the ranch, he took the long way around to the bunkhouse, passing all the other buildings just in case his father had been addled when he’d told him where to go. Ryan assumed that if that was the case, he would see his father standing in front of whatever structure he’d actually meant to direct him toward.

But Big J was not out in front of the main house.

Or the old main house.

Or the Cabin.

The process of elimination told him that his father had really meant to direct him to the bunkhouse.

Why was his father being so melodramatic? Was this actually just another break-in, complete with its own acts of vandalism?

This was definitely getting old, Ryan thought as he headed toward the bunkhouse.

His father was waiting for him out front.

Ryan could make out the lines etched in his father’s face. They were evident even at this distance.

After pulling up in front of the bunkhouse, Ryan got out of his vehicle. Maybe this wouldn’t be as bad as his father was making it sound.

“Okay, what’s the big emergency?” Ryan asked his father as he approached.

“This way,” was all his father said as he gestured for Ryan to follow him into the bunkhouse.

“What the hell is all this mystery about?” Ryan asked impatiently.

“You’ll see,” Big J told him grimly.

Walking behind his father as they entered the building, Ryan thought that he was pretty much prepared for anything.

But he was wrong.

Chapter 4

There was a dead man lying on his back in the center of the bunkhouse floor, a drying pool of blood beneath him, a surprised look frozen on his young face.

Whatever he had expected to find when his father had summoned him, deliberately refraining from giving him any details, it definitely hadn’t been this.

Ryan felt as if he was moving in slow motion as he circled the prone body of the young cowboy with the conspicuous hole in his chest. He was careful not to step into or otherwise disturb the wide pool of blood that had had at least several hours to seep out of the man’s body.

Only after he had completely circumvented the ranch hand’s—Kurt Rodgers’s—earthly remains did Ryan squat down beside him.

Rodgers’s complexion was already beginning to take on a grayish pallor. That, and the condition of the blood on the floor, indicated that the cowboy had been dead for a while.

Even so, Ryan pulled out the handkerchief he had tucked into the back pocket of his jeans and gingerly felt along the cowboy’s throat and neck for any sign of a pulse.

There was none.

He hadn’t really expected one, but there was always that wild, outside chance that the man might have somehow still been clinging to life. Ryan felt he couldn’t rule that possibility out until he’d made absolutely sure.

Ryan caught himself thinking that the victim—a fairly recent hire who had an affinity for horses and had helped Greta and Daniel train the ranch’s horses—looked awfully young.

Just yesterday, Kurt’s whole life had been ahead of him. And now, it wasn’t.

Ryan was aware that his father had crept closer during the cursory exam and now hovered around him, peering over his shoulder. “That’s Kurt Rodgers,” Big J said.

Ryan didn’t bother looking his way. “I know who it is, Dad.”

Big J shrugged in response. “It’s just that lately, unless you’re investigating something going on at the Lucky C, you’re never here.”

Rising, Ryan pocketed his handkerchief. Irritation filled his voice. “I said I know who it is. Sorry,” he apologized the next moment.

He wasn’t annoyed with his father but with this latest, far more serious turn of events. Was this just a random murder or one that involved his family?

“It’s just that checking out a dead body in my family’s bunkhouse isn’t exactly something I ever expected to be doing.” Taking a breath, he looked around the otherwise empty bunkhouse. “Who found him?”

“Brett,” his father answered. At twenty-eight, Brett was the youngest of the Colton brothers. “Near as I can figure, he was coming in from one of his late-night work sessions,” Big J explained. “Boy was all white when he came and got me—I couldn’t sleep and was in the study,” his father added as an afterthought. “Brett looked like he’d seen a ghost or something.”

“Or something,” Ryan repeated, stifling a frustrated sigh. “Was anyone else with him at the time?” Ryan asked.

Big J guessed at what his son was really asking him. “You mean was Hannah with him? If she was, she took off before anyone else saw her. As far as I know, he was alone when he saw Rodgers lying there like that.” He shook his head sadly as he looked down at his murdered employee.

Ryan absently nodded, jotting down key points from his father’s statement. “Where’s Brett now?”

“At the house, most likely trying to steady his nerves.” A vague shrug accompanied his father’s words, as if he wasn’t a hundred percent certain that his youngest son was still where he just said he was. “I gave him my best Kentucky bourbon.”

Ryan rolled his eyes. “Great, just what I need. An intoxicated witness to question.”

“He’s not a witness,” Big J countered defensively, as if the term was somehow tainted, or would taint anyone it came in contact with. “He’s your brother.”

Ryan didn’t see why that fact should create a discrepancy in the description. “Who was also the first one who found the body, that makes him a witness—of the scene, since he wasn’t here for the commission of the crime.” Ryan assumed that his father would have said as much if Brett had seen who had killed the ranch hand. “Was there anyone else here at the time?” he asked, rephrasing his previous question.

“Like I said, not that I saw,” Big J answered. “I called you the minute I saw Rodgers lying there like that.”

Ryan pressed his lips together, far from happy about this turn of events—or the predicament it would most likely put him in. What if, for some reason, another one of his siblings was behind this, or at least somehow connected to this?

It hadn’t been a great week for family relations, he couldn’t help thinking.

Reaching into his other back pocket, Ryan pulled out his cell phone. As he did so, he waved his father back. “You can’t be here right now.”

Full, bushy eyebrows drew together over Big J’s patrician nose. “Why not?” the big man demanded, for the moment sounding every bit like his former, larger-than-life self. “This is my bunkhouse, boy.”

“Nobody’s disputing that, Dad,” Ryan replied. “But right now it’s my crime scene, and until it’s processed, that tops your claim to it.”

“Possession’s nine-tenths of the law and I’ve got the deed, boy.” Although he was proud of his sons, Big J was not about to be easily usurped. He was the head of the family. “Okay, okay,” Big J said, raising his hands defensively when Ryan looked at him darkly, giving no sign of backing down. “I’ll get on out.”

John Colton began to do just that when he stopped suddenly to take a closer look at his son’s face, as if he was trying to gauge the gravity of what was transpiring on his property.

“Should I be calling Preston?” he asked, referring to David Preston, the fifty-year-old lawyer who he kept on retainer to handle any legal matters involving either him or his family.

“Not yet, Dad. But it wouldn’t hurt to let him know what’s going on,” Ryan told him.

His father began to say something in response to that, but Ryan raised his hand, stopping him. The phone on the other end of the call he was making had stopped ringing and had been picked up.

A melodic, albeit preoccupied female voice announced, “Crime lab.”

Susie.

Because his father was standing not that far off, despite his instructions to the contrary, Ryan addressed the woman he had called—the woman he had once made love to with abandon—formally.

“This is Detective Ryan Colton. I need the CSI unit to come out to the Lucky C.”

The impatient exhale echoed in his ear as he heard Susie say, “Look, I understand how you feel, Colton, but we just don’t have time to run a fourth DNA test on that broken window,” she told him in a voice that declared that there would be no further discussions on the matter.

“This isn’t about the broken window,” Ryan said sharply, cutting in before she had the opportunity to continue.

There was a long pause on the other end, as if the forensic expert was debating whether or not she believed him. “Then what?” she finally asked.

“We’ve got a body at the bunkhouse,” he answered grimly.

“Do you know who it is?” she asked him.

Ryan thought he heard rustling on the other end of the line, like she was getting her evidence case together to bring to the crime scene. “Yeah, it’s one of the ranch hands, a relatively new hire named Kurt Rodgers.”

“Are there signs of a struggle?” Susie asked.

Ryan turned around to look at the area around the cowboy’s body. The only thing that appeared out of place was Rodgers’s body itself—and the pool of blood beneath it, that went without saying. Nothing else seemed to be disturbed.

“From all indications, he didn’t see whatever it was coming,” Ryan answered. “Send your people out here.”

“Right away,” she promised, snapping the locks on her case.

Ryan thought that was the end of their conversation and was about to terminate the call when he heard Susie’s voice.

“Ryan?”

He put the phone back up to his ear. “Yeah?” He saw his father looking at him, as if Big J was trying to ascertain what was going on.

Her voice softened just a touch as she told him, “I’m sorry.”

Ryan didn’t have to ask about what. He knew. Susie was telling him that she was sorry he was going through this. It was hard enough investigating a murder, but when the murder took place on his own family’s ranch, that added an extra dimension to the case. A dimension that made it almost too delicate to work on, at least for him.

“Thanks,” he told her, adding, “Me, too.”

With that, Ryan ended the call and tucked his cell phone back into his pocket. He knew he was going to have to call his boss, Boyd Benson, who was the Tulsa chief of police, and tell him what was going on. The man wouldn’t be happy about this. But then, in all fairness, he had no idea what did make the police chief happy. Benson’s regular expression was a dour one. Ryan couldn’t recall ever seeing the man smile, not even at one of the Christmas parties.

Now that he thought about it, he’d never seen the man actually attend a Christmas party. The chief was fair and honest, but not exactly a pleasure to get along with.

Ryan put off calling Benson for a few minutes, giving himself time to nail down exactly what he would tell his boss when he called him. Benson preferred having the maximum amount of information delivered to him using the minimum number of words.

“‘You, too’ what?” Big J asked the moment he saw his son putting his phone away.

Caught off guard, Ryan could only eye his father quizzically. “What?”

“That person you called, the one you told to send that crime scene unit of yours out here, you said ‘me, too’ when he or she said something to you,” Big J said. “I’m just asking what you were talking about.”

He supposed it would do no harm to fill his father in on something that was innocuous. “The forensic expert said she was sorry you were going through this.” Okay, so he had reworded it, but he thought it might make the situation a bit more palatable for his father if Big J thought the head of the crime lab sympathized. “And just so you understand, it isn’t my crime scene unit. It’s the police department’s crime scene unit.”

“But you’re part of the police department, aren’t you?” his father pressed doggedly.

Ryan could see where this was going. Nonetheless, he played along. “You know I am.”

“Then it’s your crime scene unit,” Big J concluded triumphantly.

Ryan paused. It wasn’t very hard to read between the lines. “Dad, this isn’t a matter of you and I being on opposite sides of this investigation.”

Big J became defensive. “Yeah, I know. I was the one who called you and told you to come here in the first place, remember?”

“Yes, Dad,” Ryan replied, doing his best to remain patient, or at least to sound as if he was being patient. “I remember.” There were times when he wished he’d never left the Marines. He had a feeling that this would soon be one of those times. “I’m going to tape off the crime scene and then talk to Brett,” he told his father, knowing that the man wanted to be kept abreast of everything that was going on.

Though it was far from standard procedure, he was trying his best to keep Big J informed, hoping that would be enough to keep his father in the background rather than hovering front and center.

“But this is the bunkhouse,” Big J protested. “You can’t go ‘taping’ it off. I’ve got people sleeping here at night.”

He really felt as if they were butting heads at every turn. And the man wasn’t dumb. He knew better, yet he kept challenging him.

“You’re going to have to make other arrangements for them for the time being, Dad. I’ll try to get this processed as soon as possible, but until that happens, your ranch hands are going to have to sleep somewhere else.”

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