“The way I figure it, I’m aiming all the authority I need at you right now.” She jerked her gun a smidgeon higher. “But you’re right. This isn’t usually the way I work. And in your case, there’s no need to think of me as the enemy. I’m here to help you, Asa.”
“It’s Ace,” he corrected—unnecessarily, since she knew full well from her research that no one ever called him by his given name. “And I don’t know which part of that story is the most convincing, the part where you break in here aiming a gun at me or maybe it’s when you said you were about to turn me in to the police to be arrested.”
Frowning, Sierra reminded herself that Ace Colton was, for her, a means to an end. She didn’t have to like him—plus, he was wanted for attempted murder. “I’ve been hired by a member of your family interested in bringing you home so the best possible defense can be arranged for the pending charges.”
“I’ve been through all that with my sister.” He grimaced as if the memory pained him. “I know Ainsley means well, but with someone intent on setting me up to take the fall for our father’s shooting—”
“Ainsley?” Sierra shook her head. “It wasn’t her who sent me, or any of your siblings. It was your stepmother.”
“My stepmother? You can’t mean Genevieve? Why would she, when she thinks I’ve shot her husband?”
“No, not your father’s current wife. The other one. Selina Barnes Colton was the woman who—”
“Selina? Are you out of your mind?” Ace erupted, rocketing to his feet so quickly that Sierra shrank back, abruptly reassessing her earlier assumptions about the soft, rich man she’d thought to find here, a previously pampered forty-year-old heir who’d been unable to accept the abruptness of his change in status. “That woman doesn’t want to help me. She’s never wanted anything except to feather her own nest and—Hell, for all I know, she’s the one who shot my father and tried to pin it on me in the first place.”
“Sit down right now,” Sierra ordered, pointing the gun squarely at his chest. “Or so help me, I will make your stepmother very sorry that she didn’t specify that I had to return you in one piece to collect the bounty.”
“She’d throw you a party if you shot me. Believe me, from the moment she weaseled her way into the family, that woman has never, for a single moment, had anyone’s best interests but her own in mind.” Ace shook his head, his eyes darkening with fury. “Marrying my dad after my mother died and playing our stepmother for a hot five minutes was only a means to an end for her and nothing more.”
“So she was never the maternal type? That’s what you’re saying?”
Ace scoffed and waved the question off, bitterness twisting his expression. “She might’ve had my father fooled at one time—and for all I know, she still has something on him, considering how she’s managed to hold on to her job at Colton Oil and the nice house he built for her on ranch property—but believe me, she’s not fooling anybody else.”
Sierra caught her breath, recalling her own suspicions. The rational, rehearsed-sounding explanations the polished businesswoman had given, along with the outsized bounty Selina had offered, hadn’t jibed with the raw avarice gleaming in the cool depths of her eyes.
Ordinarily, Sierra would have asked more questions. Or even trusted her instincts and walked away from the highly irregular agreement. But the truth was, she’d been desperate, more than desperate, and the deal, coming when it had, had seemed like a miracle from heaven. Or from whatever Great Beyond accepted broken-down gambling addicts like her father.
“She’s never given a damn about any of my father’s children,” Ace said. “For her, it’s always been about getting her hooks into the family fortune. And I promise you, whatever she’s paying you to do is part of the next round in her game plan, because she has to know that we’ll toss her off the property in a minute if my father—if he—”
He stopped himself abruptly, his forehead creasing with worry. Sinking back down to the sofa, he asked quietly, “Tell me I haven’t missed something while I’ve been stuck here, that my father hasn’t—that he isn’t worse. Or even—I keep checking online when I’m able, but I know that sometimes, in cases like these, the hospitals and police withhold information.”
“As far as I know,” she said, “there’s been no change in his condition.”
He sighed, some of the tension draining from his face. “Thank God for that.”
“I suppose you’re sorry then, about what happened,” she said, reminded of how many times she’d heard such sentiments from killers in the past. Maybe, she supposed, they even meant what they were saying. But in her world decent people didn’t shoot or stab or strangle the people they loved when they got angry. They didn’t leave them grievously wounded while they fled like cowards from the consequence of their actions.
“Of course I’m sorry someone did this to him. Did this to all of us,” Ace blurted, his deep voice shaking with emotion. “I didn’t hurt my father. I never...no matter how upset we both were—you have to believe me.”
She shrugged a shoulder. “No offense, Ace, but I’m not really the person you need to waste your breath convincing. You’ll get an attorney, I imagine a first-rate one with all your money, and he or she will—”
“I love my dad,” he insisted, his dark gaze never wavering. “I always will, and he’ll always be the man I think of, the ideal I’d want to emulate, should I ever get the chance to be a father.”
Though she was well aware that Payne Colton wasn’t Ace’s biological father, it struck her that Ace’s words still resonated in a way that his stepmother’s hadn’t. But Sierra had run across plenty of people who were perfectly capable of harming a family member and then pretending—even to themselves—that it had never happened. Or praying that the victim would pull through so the charges they themselves faced would be limited to assault rather than murder.
“You’ll get your chance later to explain all this,” she assured him, eager to move things along. Yet, she couldn’t stop thinking of how he’d said, should I ever get the chance to be a father. Her conscience prickled but didn’t stop her from reminding him, “I still have to take you in now.”
He shook his head. “You can’t. Don’t you understand? Selina only wants me dragged in to take the heat off her. Or she’s setting me up somehow. Probably planning some accident to take me out before I ever go to trial.”
“If that’s really the case,” Sierra assured him, “you’re better off in jail. I’ll see you get there safely.”
“I’m safer here, where I can keep working on finding the real shooter and figuring out exactly who’s behind all this.”
“I hate to break it to you, but that ship has sailed.” Sierra lifted her chin. “Even if I wanted to pretend I’d never seen you, when I take on a contract, I deliver.”
“If it’s professional pride,” Ace said, “what pride could there be in doing the bidding of a conniving schemer like Selina?”
“Listen, Colton, I’ve just met you. And even you have to admit, you’ve got a lot of very compelling reasons to lie your head off at this point.”