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Colton by Marriage
Marie Ferrarella
Colton by
Marriage
Marie Ferrarella
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
Table of Contents
Cover (#u2ee557e8-cdec-56f7-b235-5745139d69b4)
Title Page (#ud6d40c20-768a-54b4-a1a5-e9f3bcbce1cd)
About the Author (#u0cf056c5-cbaa-5579-bc9f-8a8fbe0d9f53)
Prologue (#u279008d5-cd5b-501e-a630-62b8a9a22541)
Dedication (#uddafe930-dad3-542f-9a4c-d4cba9f15892)
Chapter One (#ub17b073b-cce7-5d21-af28-8e2e8fd906ec)
Chapter Two (#u53150223-3fb7-5258-b8ec-b9da8a678562)
Chapter Three (#u9e1926f4-8fba-5ce4-b1de-3c5bf2730bee)
Chapter Four (#u705d3e39-ccba-5680-805f-290f841d9ef0)
Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
Dear Reader,
Welcome to The Coltons of Montana! Prepare for total immersion in the events of Honey Creek, Montana, a small town dominated by three diverse families: the Coltons, branches of which have appeared in previous miniseries; the Walshes, owners of a famous brewery and keepers of a secret that is about to explode; and the Kelleys, owners of a famous barbeque steakhouse chain.
In this story, I focus on Duke Colton, a stoic rancher of few words who just happens to be related to the current sitting President of the United states, Joe Colton (a man readers met in the last Coltons series) and Susan Kelley, the perpetually optimistic girl-next-door who runs the catering side of her father’s restaurant. Oh, did I happen to mention there’s also the second murder of a man who was killed fifteen years ago?
Interested? Well then, come along for a wild ride.
As ever, I thank you for reading and from the bottom of my heart, I wish you someone to love who loves you back.
All the best,
Marie Ferrarella
About the Author
USA TODAY bestselling and RITA Award-winning author MARIE FERRARELLA has written almost two hundred books for silhouette and Harlequin, some under the name of Marie Nicole. Her romances are beloved by fans worldwide. Visit her website at www.marieferrarella.com.
To Bonnie G. Smith.
Thank you for having
such a wonderful daughter.
Prologue
“It’s here, Sheriff.” Unable to contain his excitement, Boyd Arnold all but hopped up and down as he pointed toward the murky body of water. “I saw it right here, in the creek, when Blackie ran into the water and I chased him out.”
Blackie was what Boyd called his black Labrador retriever. Naming the dog Blackie had been the only unimaginative thing Boyd had ever done. Aside from that one example of dullness, the small-time rancher had an incredibly healthy imagination.
Some people claimed that it was a mite too healthy. At one time or another, Boyd had sworn he’d seen a ghost crossing his field, watched in awe as a UFO landed near Honey Creek, the body of water that the town had been named after, and now he was claiming to have seen a dead body in that very same creek.
As the town’s recently elected sheriff, thirty-three-year-old Wes Colton would have liked just to have dismissed Boyd’s newest tall tale as another figment of the man’s overworked imagination. But, because he was the recently elected sheriff of Honey Creek, he couldn’t. He was too new at the job to point to a gut feeling about things and so he was legally bound to check out each and every story involving wrongdoing no matter how improbable or wild it sounded.
Dead bodies were not the norm in Honey Creek. Most likely someone had dumped a mannequin in the creek in order to play a trick on the gullible Boyd. He hadn’t put a name to the so-called body when he’d come running into the office earlier, tripping over his tongue as if it had grown to three times its size as he tried to say what it was he saw.
“Was it a woman, Boyd?” Wes asked now, trying to find the humor in the situation, although, he had to admit, between the heat and the humidity, his sense of humor was in extremely short supply today. Local opinion had it that a woman of the inflatable variety would be the only way Boyd would be able to find any female companionship at all.
Wes would have much rather been in his air-conditioned office, going over paperwork—something he usually disliked and a lot of which the last sheriff had left as payback for Wes winning the post away from him—than facing the prospect of walking through the water searching for a nonexistent body.
“I think it was a man. Tell the truth, Sheriff, I didn’t stick around long enough to find out. Never can tell when you might come across one of them zombie types, or those body-snatchers, you know.”
Wes looked at him. Boyd’s eyes were all but bulging out. The man was actually serious. He shook his head. “Boyd, you want my advice? You’ve got to stop renting those old horror movies. You’ve got a vivid enough imagination as it is.”
“This wasn’t my imagination, Sheriff,” Boyd insisted stubbornly with feeling. “This was a real live dead person.”
Wes didn’t bother pointing out the blatant contradiction in terms. Instead, he stood at the edge of the creek and looked around.
There was nothing but the sound of mosquitoes settling in for an afternoon feed.
A lot of mosquitoes, judging by the sound of it.
It was going to be a miserable summer, Wes thought. Just as he began to turn toward Boyd to tell the rancher that he must have been mistaken about the location of this “body,” something caught Wes’s eye.
Flies.
An inordinate number of flies.
Mosquitoes weren’t making that noise, it was flies.
Flies tended to swarm around rotting meat and waste. Most likely it was the latter, but Wes had a strong feeling that he wasn’t going to be free of Boyd until he at least checked out what the insects were swarming around.
“There, Sheriff, look there,” Boyd cried excitedly, pointing to something that appeared to be three-quarters submerged in the creek.
Something that had attracted the huge number of flies.
There was no way around not getting his newly cleaned uniform dirty, Wes thought. Resigning himself to the unpleasant ordeal, Honey Creek’s newly minted sheriff waded in.
Annoyance vanished as he drew closer to what the flies were laying claim to.
“Damn, but I think you’re right, Boyd. That does look like a body,” Wes declared. Forgetting about his uniform, he went in deeper. Whatever it was was only a few feet away.
“See, I told you!” Boyd crowed, happy to be vindicated. He was grinning from ear to ear like a little kid on Christmas morning. His expression was in sharp contrast to the sheriff’s. The latter had become deadly serious.
It appeared to be a dead body all right. Did it belong to some vagrant who’d been passing through when he’d arbitrarily picked Honey Creek to die?
Or had someone dumped a body here from one of the neighboring towns? And if so, which one?
Bracing himself, Wes turned the body over so that he could view the face before he dragged the corpse out.
When he flipped the dead man over, his breath stopped in his lungs. The man had a single bullet in the middle of his forehead and he was missing half his face.
But the other half could still be made out.
At the same moment, unable to stay back, Boyd peered over his shoulder. The rancher’s eyes grew huge and he cried out, “It’s Mark Walsh!” No sooner was the name out of his mouth than questions and contradictions occurred to Boyd. “But he’s dead.” Confused, Boyd stared at Wes, waiting for him to say something that made sense out of this. “How can he look that fresh? He’s been dead fifteen years!”
“Apparently Walsh wasn’t as dead as we thought he was,” Wes told him.
It was extremely difficult for Wes to maintain his decorum, not to mention an even voice, when all he could think of was that finally, after all these years, his brother was going to get out of jail.
Because Damien Colton had been convicted of a murder that had never happened.
Until now.
Chapter 1
Duke Colton didn’t know what made him look in that direction, but once he did, he couldn’t look away. Even though he wanted to.
Moreover, he wanted to keep walking. To pretend that he hadn’t seen her, especially not like that.
Susan Kelley’s head was still down, her short, dark-blond hair almost acting like a curtain, and she seemed oblivious to the world around her as she sat on the bench to the side of the hospital entrance, tears sliding down her flawless cheeks.
Duke reasoned that it would have been very easy either to turn on his heel and walk in another direction, or just to pick up speed, look straight ahead and get the hell out of there before the Kelley girl looked up.
Especially since she seemed so withdrawn and lost to the world.
He’d be doing her a favor, Duke told himself, if he just ignored this pretty heart-wrenching display of sadness. Nobody liked looking this vulnerable. God knew that he wouldn’t.
Not that he would actually cry in public—or private for that matter. When he came right down to it, Duke was fairly certain that he couldn’t cry, period. No matter what the situation was.
Hell, he’d pretty much been the last word in stoic. But then, he thought, he’d had to be, seeing as how things hadn’t exactly gone all that well in his life—or his family’s life—up to this point.
Every instinct he had told Duke he should be moving fast, getting out of Susan’s range of vision. Now. Yet it was as if his feet had been dipped in some kind of super-strong glue.
He couldn’t make them move.
He was lingering. Why, he couldn’t even begin to speculate. It wasn’t as though he was one of those people who was bolstered by other people’s displays of unhappiness. He’d never believed in that old adage about misery loving company. When he came right down to it, he’d never had much use for misery, his own or anybody else’s. For the most part, he liked keeping a low profile and staying out of the way.
And he sure as hell had no idea what to do when confronted with a woman’s tears—other than running for the hills, face averted and feigning ignorance of the occurrence. He’d never lay claim to being one of those guys who knew what to say in a regular situation, much less one where he was front-row center to a woman’s tear-stained face. But this was Susan.
Susan Kelley. He’d watched Susan grow up from an awkward little girl to an outgoing, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed little charmer who somehow managed to be completely oblivious to the fact that she was as beautiful as all get out.
Susan was the one who cheered people up. She never cried. Not that he was much of an expert on what Susan did or didn’t do. He just heard things. The way a man survived was to keep his eyes and his ears open, and his mouth shut.
Ever since his twin brother Damien was hauled off to jail because everyone in town believed he had killed Mark Walsh, Duke saw little to no reason to socialize with the people in Honey Creek. And Walsh was no angel. Most people had hated him. The truth of it was, if ever someone had deserved being killed, it was Walsh. Mark Walsh was nasty, bad-tempered and he cheated on his wife every opportunity he got. And Walsh and Damien had had words, hot words, over Walsh’s daughter, Lucy.
Even so, Damien hadn’t killed him.
Duke frowned as, for a moment, fifteen years melted away. He remembered watching the prison bars slam, separating him from Damien. He didn’t know who had killed that evil-tempered waste of human flesh, but he would have bet his life that it wasn’t Damien.
Now, like a magnet, his green eyes were riveted to Susan.
Damn it, what was she crying about?
He blew out an impatient breath. A woman who was that shaken up about something shouldn’t be sitting by herself like that. Someone should be with her, saying something. He didn’t know what, but something. Something comforting.
Duke looked around, hoping to ease his conscience—and not feel guilty about his desire to get away—by seeing someone approaching the sobbing little blonde.
There was no one.
She was sitting by herself, as alone as he’d ever seen anyone on this earth. As alone as he felt a great deal of the time.
Damn it, he didn’t want to be in this position. Didn’t want to have to go over.
