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Carson could feel Judson Colton watching his every move.
“I’d rather stay up here, thank you,” Serena answered. “She didn’t do it, you know,” she told Carson. “Demi’s not capable of killing anyone.”
Serena was entitled to her opinion, he thought, even though it was naive. “You’d be surprised what people are capable of if they’re pushed hard enough,” Carson told her.
“There is a limit,” Serena insisted.
“If you say so,” he replied, complete disinterest in his voice.
His attention was focused on Justice who was moving around Serena’s room with growing agitation. Suddenly, Justice became alert and ran up to the walk-in closet. He began pawing at the door.
Carson looked over his shoulder at Serena, disappointment clearly registering on his face. “Not here, huh?”
“No, she’s not,” Serena insisted, crossing the room to her closet.
Carson waved her back. Taking out his weapon, he pointed it at the closet door and then threw it open. Justice ran in and immediately nosed the hot-pink sweater on the closet floor. The German shepherd moved the sweater over toward his master.
Picking it up, Carson held the sweater aloft and looked accusingly at Serena.
“I said I saw her yesterday,” Serena pointed out. “Demi must have dropped her sweater here when I wasn’t paying attention. I never said she wasn’t here yesterday, only that she’s not here now—and she isn’t,” Serena insisted.
Drawn by all the commotion and the headlights from the police vehicles when they drove to the house, Serena’s brother Anders, who lived in a cabin on the property and worked as the Double C foreman, came into his sister’s bedroom.
“Serena’s right. Demi was here at the house yesterday afternoon, but she left and she hasn’t been back since. Trust me, I can’t abide that little bounty hunter, and I’d tell you if she was here. But she’s not,” Anders said with finality.
“And neither one of you would know where she went or might consider going if she was running from the police?” Carson pressed.
Serena and her brother answered his question in unison.
“No.”
Chapter 4 (#ud8ea1179-31b4-57ed-86d9-ba0aa098905b)
“Here.” Carson shoved the hot-pink sweater over to Anders. “Take this and put it somewhere, will you? The scent is throwing my dog off.”
Anders frowned at the sweater Carson had just shoved into his hand. “Sorry. Hot pink’s not my color.”
Carson wasn’t amused by the foreman’s dry wit, not when he was trying to find his brother’s killer.
“Just get rid of it for now. As long as that’s around, Justice can’t home in on anything else Demi might have left behind that could wind up proving useful.”
Muttering something about not being an errand boy under his breath and looking none too happy about having Carson on the premises, Anders took the sweater and marched out of Serena’s suite. Wadding the sweater up, he tossed it into the linen closet that was down the hall and shut the door.
Carson looked back at his dog. Now that the offending piece of clothing was gone, Justice became totally docile.
“C’mon, boy, keep on looking,” he urged his German shepherd partner. “Seek!”
Responding to the command, Justice quickly covered the remainder of the upper floor, moving from one area to another, but nothing seemed to spark a reaction from the dog. Nothing caused him to behave as if he had detected any telltale scent that indicated that the woman he was hunting was hiding somewhere on the floor or had even left anything else behind.
Serena kept her distance but still followed the detective, shadowing him step for step. For now, Lora was cooperating and went on dozing.
Coming back through the adjacent nursery, Carson made his way into Serena’s oversize bedroom. His eyes met hers.
“See, I told you she wasn’t here,” Serena told him. When his face remained totally impassive, she heard herself insisting. “You’re looking for the wrong person, Detective. Demi didn’t kill Bo. There’s got to be some kind of mistake.”
About to leave her suite and go back downstairs, Carson stopped abruptly. Justice skidded to a stop next to him.
“My brother’s dead. He wrote Demi’s name in his own blood on the asphalt right above his head. Her necklace was found at the crime scene, and there’s a witness who said he saw Demi running away from the area some fifteen minutes before Bo’s body was found in the parking lot. From what I can see, the only mistake here was made by Demi,” he informed Serena curtly, doing his best to hold his anger in check.
Part of the anger he was experiencing was because of the crime itself and part of it was due to the fact that having seen Serena holding her baby like that when he’d first entered had stirred up painful memories for him, memories he wanted to leave buried.
Serena shook her head, refusing to buy into the scenario that Demi had killed her ex-boyfriend in some sort of a fit of misguided jealousy. That was not the Demi she had come to know.
“Look,” she began, trying to talk some sense into the detective, “I admit that it looks bad right now—”
Carson barely managed to keep a dismissive oath from escaping his lips.
Serena didn’t seem to notice as she forged on. “There’s no way that the Demi Colton I know is a killer. Yes, she has a temper, but she wouldn’t kill anyone, especially not her ex-boyfriend.”
Carson looked at her sharply. What wasn’t she telling him?
“Why?” he questioned.
Did Demi’s cousin know something that he didn’t know, or was she just being protective of the other woman? Was it simply a matter of solidarity between women, or whatever it was called, or was there something more to Serena’s certainty, because she did look pretty certain?
Serena began to say something else, then stopped herself at the last moment, saying only, “Because she just wouldn’t, that’s all.”
Carson looked at the chief’s sister closely. She knew something. Something she wasn’t telling him, he thought. His gut was telling him that he was right. But he couldn’t exactly browbeat her into admitting what she was trying to hide.
He was just going to have to keep an eye on the chief’s sister, he decided.
Just then, the baby began to fuss.
“Shh.” Serena soothed her daughter. She started rocking the child, doing her best to lull Lora back to sleep.
But Lora wouldn’t settle down. The fussing became louder.
Glancing up, Serena was going to excuse herself when she saw the strange look on the detective’s face. In her estimation he looked to be in some sort of pain or distress. Sympathy instantly stirred within her. She hated seeing pain of any kind.
She had to be losing her mind, feeling sympathy for a man who seemed so bent on arresting her cousin. It was obvious that he had already convicted Demi without a trial and looked more than willing to drag Demi to jail.
However, despite all this, for some strange reason, she was moved by the underlying distress she saw in his eyes.
“Is something wrong, Detective Gage?” She waited for him to respond, but he didn’t seem to hear her despite their close proximity. “Detective Gage?” she said more loudly.
Suddenly realizing that she was talking to him, Carson looked at the chief’s sister. She seemed to be waiting for him to respond to something she’d obviously said.
“What?” he all but snapped.
The man was in no danger of winning a congeniality award, Serena thought. “I asked you if something was wrong.”
Damn it, Carson upbraided himself, he was going to have to work on his poker face. “You mean other than the obvious?”
Serena mentally threw up her hands. This was hopeless. Why did she even care if something was bothering this boorish man who had come stomping into her house, disrupting everyone without displaying so much as an iota of remorse that he was doing it. Never mind that her brother had led this invasion into her parents’ home, she felt better blaming the detective for this than blaming Finn.
“Never mind,” she told Carson, changing topics. “I have to see to my baby, if it’s all right with you,” she said, a mild touch of sarcasm breaking through.
Rather than say anything in response, Carson just waved her back to her quarters.
Serena’s voice was fairly dripping with ice as she said, “Thank you.”
With that she turned on her bare heel to walk back into her suite.
“Let’s go, Justice,” Carson said to the dog, steering the animal toward the stairs.
Keeping a tight hold on the dog’s leash, Carson walked out of the house quickly, a man doing his best to outrun memories he found far too painful to coexist with.
Once outside, he saw the other members of the K-9 team. Not wanting to be faced with unnecessary questions, he forced himself to relax just a little.
“Anything?” Carson asked the man closest to him, Jim Kline.
Jim, paired with a jet-black German shepherd whimsically named Snow, shook his head. “If that woman’s anywhere on the property, she’s crawled down into a gopher hole and pulled the hole down after her,” the man answered him.
Finn came over to join them. Carson noticed that the chief looked as disappointed as he felt.
“Okay, men, everybody back to the station. We’re calling it a night and getting a fresh start in the morning.” The chief glanced over in his direction. “You, too, Gage,” he ordered, obviously expecting an argument from Carson.
And he got it. “I’m not tired, Chief,” Carson protested, ready to keep going.
“Good for you,” Finn said sarcastically. “Maybe when you get a chance, you can tell the rest of us what kind of vitamins you’re on. But for now, I’m still the chief, and I still call the shots. We’re going back to the station, end of discussion,” Finn repeated, this time more forcefully. He left absolutely no room for even so much as a sliver of an argument.
Resigned, Carson crossed over to his vehicle and opened the rear door to let Justice in. Shutting the door again, he opened the driver’s side and got into the car himself.
He felt all wound up. Talking to Serena Colton while she was wearing that frilly, flimsy nightgown beneath a robe that wouldn’t stay closed hadn’t exactly helped his state of mind, either.
Carson shut the image out. It only got in the way of his thoughts. And despite being dragged through the wringer physically and emotionally, he sincerely doubted he was going to get any sleep tonight.
Biting off an oath, Carson started up his car and headed toward the police station.
* * *
Serena could tell that the rest of her family was still up. From the sound of the raised, angry voices wafting up the stairs, they were going on about this sudden, unexpected turn of events and how furious her father and mother were that Finn hadn’t seen his way to leaving them out of this investigation strictly on the strength of the fact that they were his family.
Instead, Finn had actually treated them like he would anyone else, rousing them out of their beds just because he felt it was his duty to go over the entire grounds, looking for a woman her parents felt had no business being on the family ranch in the first place.
Serena let them go on venting, having absolutely no desire to get involved by sticking up for Finn. Her parents were going to carry on like this no matter what she said.
Besides, right now her main duty was to her daughter. The ongoing commotion had eventually agitated Lora, and she wanted to get the baby to fall back to sleep.
The corners of her mouth curved in an ironic smile as she looked down at the infant in her arms. Funny how a little being who hadn’t even existed a short three months ago had so quickly become the very center of her universe. The very center of her heart.
Since the very first moment Lora had drawn breath, Serena felt obliged to protect the baby and care for her, doing everything in her power to make the world around Lora as safe and inviting for the infant as was humanly possible.
These last few months, her focus had been strictly and entirely on Lora. She had long since divorced her mind from any and all thoughts that even remotely had anything to do with Lora’s conception or the man who had so cavalierly—and unwittingly—fathered her.
It had all been one huge mistake.
She had met Mark, whose last name she never learned, at a horse auction. The atmosphere at the auction had been fast paced and extremely charged thanks to all the large amounts of money that were changing hands.
Representing the Double C Ranch and caught up in the excitement, Serena had broken all her own rules that day—and that night. She had allowed the devastatingly handsome, charming stranger bidding next to her to wine and dine her and somewhere amid the champagne-filled evening, they had wound up going back to her sinfully overpriced hotel room where they had made extremely passionate love. Exhausted from the activity and the alcohol, she had fallen asleep after that.
She had woken up suddenly in the middle of the night. When she did, Serena found herself alone, a broken condom on the floor bearing testimony to her drastically out-of-character misstep. Managing to pull herself together and taking stock of the situation, she discovered that the money in her wallet as well as her credit cards were gone, along with her lover.
Canceling the cards immediately, she still wasn’t fast enough to get ahead of the damage. Her one-night stand had cost her several thousand dollars, racked up in the space of what she found out was an hour. The man worked fast.
It was a very bitter pill for her to swallow, but she felt that there was an upside to it. She’d learned a valuable lesson from that one night and swore never to put herself in that sort of stupid situation again. Never to blindly trust anyone again.
Moreover, she made herself a promise that she was through with men and that she was going to devote herself strictly to raising horses, something she was good at and understood.
That was what she planned.
Life, however, she discovered, had other plans for her. Her first and only one-night stand had yielded a completely unplanned by-product.
She’d got pregnant.
That had thrown her entire world out of kilter. It took Serena a while to gather her courage together to break the news to her parents. That turned out to be one of the worst experiences of her life. They reacted exactly as she had feared that they would. Her father had railed at her, absolutely furious that she had got herself in this sort of “situation,” while her mother, an incredible snob from the day she was born, carried on about the shame she had brought on the family.
Joanelle accused her of being no better than her trashy relatives who hailed from the two lesser branches of the family. The only ones in the family who were there for her and gave her their support were her brothers, Finn and Anders.
She also received support from a very unlikely quarter. Her cousin Demi Colton. She and Demi had never been really friendly, given the branches of the family they came from. But Demi had done her a favor involving one of the ranch hands about a year ago. That had earned her cousin a soft spot in Serena’s heart.
And then, when she found herself pregnant, with her parents pushing for her to “eliminate” her “shame,” it was Demi, surprisingly enough, who had come out on her side. Demi told her that she should do whatever she felt she should as long as that decision ultimately meant that she was being true to herself.
At that point, Serena did some very deep soul-searching. Ultimately, she had decided to have her baby. Seeing that her mind was made up, her brothers gave her their full support. However, it was Demi she found herself turning toward and talking with when times got rough.
She wasn’t ordinarily the type who needed constant bolstering and reinforcement, but having Demi to talk to, however sporadically, wound up making a world of difference to her. Serena truly believed that it was what had kept her sane during the low points of this new experience she found herself going through.
Because Demi had been good to her when she didn’t need to be, Serena wasn’t about to turn her back on her cousin just because a tall, good-looking detective wanted to play judge, jury and executioner when it came to her cousin. Demi had obviously fled the area without ever coming to her, but if she had, if Demi had come to her and asked for money or a place to hide, she would have never hesitated in either case.
She believed that Demi was entitled to a fair shake. Most of all, she believed in Demi.
“I wish you would have come to me,” she whispered into the darkness. “I wish you would have let me help you. You shouldn’t be alone like this. Not now. Especially with the police department after you.”
Serena sighed, feeling helpless and desperately wanting to do something to negate that.
Lora began making a noise, her little lips suddenly moving against her shoulder. She was clearly hunting for something.
Three months “on the job” as a mother had taught Serena exactly what her daughter was after.
