“Then pick up a damned phone. Ask anybody in the family. They’ll all tell you the same thing about that woman. She’s clearly up to something. And she means to destroy me, or maybe the whole family, to get it.”
Not my circus, not my monkeys, Sierra told herself, recalling one of her father’s favorite proverbs. No matter how compelling a case Ace Colton made, or how ridiculously hot he looked doing it, it didn’t change that fact.
But there was something in his expression—or maybe it was guilt over the secret she’d learned before coming to look for him, the secret she was keeping from him—that had her explaining, “It’s nothing personal, but you’re not the only one with father issues. And mine are about to get a whole lot messier if I don’t deliver you and collect the bounty Selina promised me tonight.”
“What could possibly be messier than having a framed man—or maybe even a dead one—on your conscience?”
She scowled, her stomach souring at the reminder of her most pressing problem.
“Losing a leg to my father’s loan shark,” she said bluntl
y, “all because he’s hell-bent on making an example out of me.”
* * *
As tough a customer as the bounty hunter holding him at gunpoint appeared to be, Ace couldn’t miss the flicker of fear in the depths of her green eyes warring with her apparent need to appear strong.
Yet, he sensed an opening, too, like a hairline fault in a rock face that would allow a skilled climber a toehold.
Praying that he wouldn’t plummet, he tried, “Your father’s loan shark? How’s that work?”
She tensed visibly, bristling at the question. “I don’t owe you some longwinded explanation. It’s enough that I tell you we’re going to—”
“You’re right.” He shrugged. “I don’t need a damned thing. But it looks to me like you could use to tell it. And why not to me? After all, who am I but some attempted murder suspect with a bounty on his head?”
Having said his piece, he fell silent, giving her the space to work it out for herself. If he failed, he had lost nothing. But if she opened up to him, he figured he might find some avenue to somehow talk his way out of this mess.
“You know, you’re not the only one who loves your old man,” she said accusingly before her voice went husky with emotion. “I loved mine, too, still do, God rest his stubborn soul. He taught me everything I know about the bounty hunting business, most of what I know about men. And everything I’ve learned about picking up on human weakness. The problem was, he was stone blind to his own.”
“We’ve all got our blind spots,” Ace said. He’d erupted in anger after his world had crumbled instead of using his head and working harder to figure out whatever angle the woman who’d apparently switched him at birth had been playing.
“Part of it was Vegas,” she continued, “that whole world where I grew up, and the cash, the flash and the high rollers he was always drawn to, especially after my mom left us. By the time I realized he was keeping everything afloat, even feeding the two of us, on borrowed money, he owed a small fortune. I did my best to help out, worked my tail off in the family business to pay down the debt, got him into a gambling rehab program, but it only got worse and worse until...”
Sighing heavily, she reached up to pinch the bridge of her nose, the gun drooping a little in her right hand.
Ace wondered if she might eventually drop her guard enough for him to turn the tables.
“For a while,” she continued, “it really seemed like things might work out. He was doing better. We were—until the cancer got bad.”
“I’m sorry,” he said reflexively, unable to keep his mind from going back, however briefly, to the hell of losing his mother when he and his siblings were just kids. Though Sierra was a woman grown, it sounded as if she had no other family, no one else at all, to lean on.
She nodded in reply. “The worse the news from his doctors, the more he needed an outlet for his stress—and the more convinced he became that he was on the brink of scoring that one big win that would finally turn everything around. It was so infuriating, listening to him claiming he was doing it for me when he was only making things worse.”
Ace told himself he’d been alone for too damned long, getting sucked into her story this way. “I totally get that. Ainsley and our siblings could never understand our father’s addiction to Selina. His refusal to banish her from our lives, no matter what she did.”
“By the time my father died,” Sierra continued, her gaze so distant that it made him wonder if she’d even heard him, “he owed doctors, the hospital—but the worst was the hundreds of thousands, with interest compounding daily, he had on the books of the most cutthroat loan shark in Nevada.”
“But those debts were your father’s,” Ace said, trying not to let her catch him watching her gun hand droop a little farther, “not yours.”
“Try telling Ice Veins that.”
“Ice Veins?” Ace shook his head. “You’re kidding. The name sounds like something out of some old gangster movie. With cases of machine guns and crates of bootleg whiskey.”
Sierra shrugged. “You don’t get a reputation like his by being subtle. Or reasonable, either. You would think he’d like to keep me in one piece just to keep his payments coming, but he took offense last month—extreme offense—when I refused to turn loose a bail jumper named Eddie Harris who happened to be his favorite nephew.”
“Maybe under the circumstances you should’ve considered—”
She shook her head, a hard, emerald fire sparking in her eyes as the gun twitched back to its full, upright position. “My dad might’ve owed the guy, but that doesn’t mean that Ice Veins owns me. And I’m not letting a homicide suspect, no matter who he is, walk for anybody. Especially not someone like Eddie, who’s been accused of other killings in the past.”