“Maybe you ought to sit down before you fall down.” Sierra’s voice faded to a distant echo, worry threaded through it.
Swallowing hard, Ace righted the chair he’d toppled before sagging into the seat. But his mind was blazing with another face, with a name that struck like a bolt from the blue. Allegra. Allegra. “That girl. That summer... How could I have been so—” Face burning, he looked up at Sierra, miserable to think of what he’d done. And what he’d missed out on because of it. “Why wouldn’t she have told me, given me a chance to—She never said a word. I don’t understand this.”
Sierra took a seat as well, saying nothing to absolve or encourage a confession. But the story spilled out of him anyway, too raw to keep inside.
“I was seventeen. We both were. I’m not even sure now,” he admitted, “other than it was just a summer fling.”
Ace caught the look she slid his way, read the disgust in it. Or maybe he was only seeing his own judgment of his teenage self reflected in her eyes.
“You’re absolutely right,” he said bitterly. “I was a jerk, a stupid kid who got caught up in the magic of summer and a few heady hours of freedom. What was the harm? I remember thinking. No one would ever find out.”
Laughing bitterly, he added, “Joke was on me, I guess, since I never heard from her again.”
“But you didn’t reach out to her, either?”
Swallowing hard, he shook his head. “I never imagined there was any need to. I never suspected for a minute. But her—not a phone call, not even a postcard. If she had, I would have...”
He stopped short, knowing for a certainty how the man he was now, the person he’d grown into, would have responded to such a bombshell, especially after learning such a painful lesson about the real meaning of family. But back then, as a callow youth mostly wrapped up in his ambition and his pleasures, he couldn’t say for certain—to his great shame—that he would have done right by the girl he’d barely known. Still... “Why didn’t she at least give me the chance?”
“You can ask her daughter—your daughter—when you meet her,” Sierra said, handing him her cell with the photo of the young blonde woman with eyes as green as Allegra’s had been still on the screen. “It’s why Nova came to Mustang Valley. To find you.”
Swallowing hard, Ace nodded, feeling gutted. Emptied of the remnants of the man he’d left behind when he’d fled whomever was plotting to frame him for a crime he had not committed. Yet, along with the grief of that loss, he felt something more, as well. The dim glow of hope, a lone star emerging in the bleakest twilight.
“I might not’ve been the man I should’ve been back then, with her mother,” he said, his throat tightening and his thumb caressing the image on the phone’s screen. “But I swear to you, as long as there’s any shot of my becoming a—a real father to this Nova and being there for her and her child, I’ll do whatever it takes to make that happen.”
Chapter 4
Though Sierra had met Ace only hours before, she believed him absolutely when he’d claimed he hadn’t known. No way was he faking the roughness of his voice, the hint of dampness in his brown eyes. He’d been well and truly knocked out by the news she’d shared with him. News he had clearly accepted once he’d seen the photo.
Looking at the image of Nova, Sierra had some inkling as to why.
“Coloring’s not the same,” she said, “but I think your daughter looks like you quite a bit, too.”
“The poor girl.” Ace’s laugh was as awkward as she might expect for a man who’d been under such a strain for months on end.
“Hey, I didn’t say she’d inherited your three-days’ growth,” Sierra teased, barely stopping herself in time to keep from playfully reaching out to brush his jaw. “But the shape of the eyes, her cheekbones—believe me, she could do a lot worse. In person, you’ll see she’s even lovelier than this photo—”
“Yes, I will see,” Ace said, capturing her hand in his before she could move away. “Once we’ve proved my innocence so I can go home.”
“You need to let go of me right now,” she warned, her heart crowding into her throat and her body freezing. Except for her free hand, which reached down toward the boot holster...only to find it empty.
The breath deserted her lungs. She must have lost the little spray gun somewhere after nailing the bald creep in the face. Mind rifling through the equipment she’d had on her when she’d set out early this evening, she realized that the only resources that remained were the zip ties attached to her belt and her fighting skills. But with her muscles quivering with fatigue and her coordination off, she didn’t like her chances of subduing the far larger Ace in any kind of physical confrontation...
Raising his palms, he said, “You aren’t—you aren’t scared I’d hurt you, are you? Because I thought—aren’t we a team now, Sierra? Can’t we be? I’ll give you the money like I promised, to take care of your troubles and then we—”
She rose from the chair and took a step back to give herself more distance. Breathing space to remind herself why she’d come tonight. And what this man was to her. He was a means to an end: her own survival. No matter how drawn she was to him, or how sympathetic to his situation. “There can’t be any we,” she corrected, with a curt shake of her head. “After we finish our transaction, I drop you back off at your bunker and we forget we ever met. Then, if you’re very lucky, those guys will never connect the two of us. Never have any reason to think the cowboy who shot one of Ice Veins’s thugs might be some missing Colton.”
His gaze dialed in on her. “Do you really think you’re going to be safe, Sierra? That this Ice Veins and his thugs are going to drop this after we get him his payoff?”
There he went again, using the word we even after she’d warned him off. Just as he’d gone on speaking of paying off Ice Veins even though Ace must surely know by now that she could no longer force him to honor the bargain they had struck. What was his angle in all this? Did he imagine if he solved her problem, she’d feel obligated to find a way to fix his?
“I don’t know.” Her anxiety ratcheted higher. Because what she’d said about forgetting they’d ever met—she already knew that part was a lie. She wasn’t likely to forget him or what he was doing for her, whatever his reasons. “Since I crossed his nephew, Ice Veins has been looking for an excuse to make an example out of me. And now, with one of his enforcers shot? Odds are I’ll never get clear of him, not even if I personally hand him over a stack of cash with a big fat bow around it. But there’s no reason in the world for me to take you down with me.”
Ace had troubles enough, but he also had a real shot at finding out who had set him up and hurt his father, and there were people in his life who still cared deeply about his welfare. Along with that, he had a daughter, and soon a grandchild, whom he deserved the chance to get to know.
“So what’ll you do then, with the money?” Ace asked, worry lines etched into his handsome face.
“I’m not sure. Maybe try to call him, work things out directly. Or could be that going on the run’s my better option,” she said, wondering which, if either, was more likely to raise her life expectancy from hours or maybe days to years.