Killer Colton Christmas Read online

  “You’ve never reached out to her?”

  “No need.” Marie shook her head, smoothing the brush over Brandy’s flanks. The repetitive movements soothed her, loosened her tongue. “I’ve worked through all the stages of being abandoned. There’s the fairy-tale dream of parents showing up and taking me home, lavishing love and gifts. Anger creeps in a little later, once the fairy tale dies under the weight of reality of life in the foster system. Eventually, when I hit my teens, I accepted she must have believed giving me up was the right choice. That’s all any of us can do, is make the best choice in the moment.”

  “She could have arranged an adoption or tried to keep you,” he pointed out.

  “Those were possibilities, yes.” Marie leaned into the gentleness of the horse. “It’s too easy to judge with hindsight and no real facts. I was almost adopted once.”

  She hadn’t meant to say it. Only she and the dusty records in the Dallas foster system knew about that. She’d never mentioned it to anyone before.

  “When?” He moved the brush in long strokes down the mare’s spine and Brandy huffed in pleasure.

  Marie had to agree with the horse’s sentiment. Emiliano had good hands and she’d only felt them during their daily self-defense lessons. Each time he demonstrated a hold or an escape, she battled the urge to move closer and cling to his athletic body.

  She appreciated his quiet query, and maybe that was why it was easier to answer.

  “I was four. I was the only child being fostered in that home. The woman had short blond hair,” she remembered. “Her husband was tall and would put me on his shoulders when we went to the park.” Her fingers curled now as they had then, gripping his hands for balance. “I didn’t know they’d applied for legal adoption, not until years later. My room there was pink and lavender with a white four-poster bed. Just like a princess would have. They told me I could stay with them always and I believed them. Then one night they went out and never came home.”

  “What happened?”

  “A woman came to the house and told me they weren’t coming back. I didn’t understand they were dead until much later. Hit by a drunk driver.” The memory rattled through her, the fit she’d thrown when they pulled her out of that happy princess room. “I went back into the system. It was a valuable life lesson.”

  The true, brutal lesson hadn’t sunk in until years later, when she’d been moved time and again, having been labeled “difficult.” Looking back at her first eighteen years, she knew the seeds of her difficult independence had been planted that terrible night. The biggest wish of her four-year-old heart crushed in an instant by a nightmare.

  Since she was grieving a loss she didn’t comprehend, going through it alone, her emotional volatility shouldn’t have surprised the child experts in the Dallas system. And yet. Reluctant to trust anyone, she’d done her part to embrace the label they stamped on her file.

  “How so?” Emiliano asked.

  “Pardon me?”

  His eyebrows flexed, shading his perceptive, dark eyes. “What life lesson did you learn at four years old?”

  A strange, prickling heat shimmered along her skin under that gaze. She wanted to touch the grain of the trim beard that accented his square chin. “In-independence,” she managed, though her mouth had gone dry. She licked her lips and moved out of the stall. “I learned I was the only person I could count on.”

  “Four is too young to be jaded.”

  “So says the man who grew up out here with a family rather than in the Dallas foster-care system.” His eyes turned hard, glittered with something she couldn’t quite read. She forced herself to laugh lightly, verbal self-defense against the persistent bitterness that crept up on her every damn holiday season. “You’re right—jaded came a little later.” She shrugged. “But it happens to ninety-nine percent of us eventually.”

  Closing Brandy’s stall, he joined Marie in the wide central aisle of the barn, scooping a hand through his hair and settling his hat back on his head. He whistled for Scrabble, who barked and zipped through the door to join them.

  A flash of jealousy seared her system as they walked in silence back to the house. She’d seen the family photos, noticed the soft smile on his face when his parents sent a picture of some activity on the cruise. If something went wrong in his life, he had a fallback. He had several someones to lean on and talk to who shared his history. Did he have any idea how lucky he was?

  Shame scorched her cheeks as she tried to shake off the unsettling emotions. He wasn’t any more responsible for his birth than she was for hers. Life dealt the cards. “Haven’t you ever wanted to move away from here?”

  His lips twitched. “Are you asking why I still live with my mother at thirty-five?”

  “You’re thirty-five?”

  He gave her an arch look from under the brim of his hat that quickened her pulse.

  Agent Call-Me-Emiliano Ortega still wasn’t inclined to share unless pressed. She pressed. What did she have to lose?

  “Do you feel obligated to stay on the ranch?” she asked. That sounded like a reasonable question. Better than lashing out at him for having all the stability she’d craved and been denied.

  “No,” he replied. “I did move away for a time.”

  The answer did nothing to satisfy her curiosity. He’d been tasked with protecting her and with his investigative skills he’d managed to pull out all sorts of details about her so far. “For college or the circus?” Scrabble barked and raced ahead to the house, fully aware it was almost time for her dinner. “She says circus.”

  He opened the back door and laughed. The low sound rolled over her skin, the enticing sensation gone all too quickly. “It might have qualified as a circus,” he said quietly.

  “It?”

  “My marriage.” He pegged his hat, brushed the dust from his boots. “She pulled a few neat tricks in the divorce.”

  And now she felt like a heel for prying. “I’m sorry.” Hanging up her jacket, she toed off her dusty sneakers.

  “You really need boots,” he said abruptly, his gaze on her socks.

  She glanced back at him. “A few days ago we agreed I wouldn’t be here long enough to break them in.”

  He scowled. “If you’re going to ride, it should be in the right gear.” He went to the refrigerator for a beer. “We’ll go into town tomorrow and take care of it.”

  “Fine.” Why argue? In truth, she’d appreciate a break from the ranch. Her imagination was running amok with Emiliano as her primary source of conversation and Ace the occasional relief.

  She was learning something new every day and fighting the sensation she’d thought she’d outgrown. As a kid, she used to look around and imagine herself fitting into other people’s lives. Lives where lovers held hands, friends shared inside jokes, and the people in a home knew that the house they left in the morning would be the same house they returned to at night.

  She’d longed to come home to a kitchen like this one, where an after-school snack came with genuine interest and she received warm hugs from a mother who wanted to keep her children close and safe forever. Lost in the fantasy, she felt a strong hand on her shoulder, heard her name spoken softly by someone who sounded as if they cared.

  “Marie?”

  She turned toward Emiliano’s voice. He was standing so close, concern in his eyes and tenderness in his touch. Oh, how she yearned for the connection with him to be more than target and guardian. Trembling, she backed away, before she did something completely inappropriate. Like leap into his arms.

  Knowing he’d catch her stirred up more longing. If only she could blame her desire for him on hormones and proximity. It was so much more. She found his steady confidence as appealing as his chiseled jaw, warm gaze and fit form.

  And she’d repaid him by dredging up a painful memory. “I didn’
t mean to pry,” she said in a rush. “About your wife.”

  “Ex-wife,” he corrected her coolly.

  “Right.” The appetite she’d worked up during the riding lesson had evaporated. The idea of putting any food in her stomach while it twisted with wistfulness for things that had never been, could never be, made her queasy. “If you’ll excuse me, I’ll just, um...” She gave him a wide berth.

  He wouldn’t let her help with the investigation and had yet to return her electronics so she could keep up with anything outside this small pocket of the world. She rushed back to the guest room and the aching familiarity of being a temporary resident in a home she’d never be invited to call her own.

  * * *

  Emiliano watched her go, frustrated with both of them. She was holding back, but it wasn’t at all what he’d expected her to be hiding. Her entire childhood—as a foster kid—was bottled up behind that dimpled smile and the big doe eyes. Although her scars were hidden, he had no doubt the cuts had gone deep.

  Not knowing how to ease that wounded expression, he fed Scrabble, checked in by text message with Ace and piled thick slices of brown bread high with leftovers. Alone at the table, wishing she’d join him, he tried to separate the CDO from the woman, the woman from the investigation.

  Failed.

  The facts of her childhood as a foster kid were detailed in the background check his team assembled. She’d put herself through college and worked her way into that prime office space at Colton, Incorporated.

  “Independent, not difficult,” he murmured in Scrabble’s direction. The dog stretched out on her belly near his chair. Her chin rested on her paws and her gaze remained vigilant for any wayward crumb he might drop.

  “I won the jackpot with you,” he said. Marie hadn’t had anyone. “She won you over quick enough.”

  Scrabble cocked her head. The dog was one of the few females he trusted after Beth played him for a fool. He should have laid it out for Marie in the same matter-of-fact tone she’d used when relating that tragic failed adoption. His failed marriage was old news. And yes, it had been essential to have a home, a place where he could retreat and rebuild from those mistakes.

  He couldn’t wrap his head around the idea of going through any disaster without his parents and brother at his back. Though he wouldn’t cut short his parents’ cruise or call Dario home from his freelance assignment, part of him wished they were all here to show Marie how strong a family could be.

  Finished with his meal, he cleared his plate and made a detour to Scrabble’s bowl, dropping in the bit of crust he’d saved for her.

  Filling a glass with water, he headed for the study, where his and Marie’s laptops waited for another night’s effort. Maybe this time he’d get a lead rather than a hollow dead end. Instead of searching for online clues to the Cohort’s leader, Sulla, he wound up digging into old records at the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services website. In theory, he could be searching for an old enemy of Marie’s turned Cohort Princeps, except he doubted she had enemies. Whether or not she was a difficult foster kid, she didn’t have a criminal record as an adult, and nothing in the court system suggested she had a sealed juvenile record. It made him ache, thinking of her as a little girl struggling to find her place.

  Being part of the FBI meant he knew the low depravity to which people could sink. The foster system did good work, but every organization had its share of bad seeds. Had Marie been hurt along the way? The idea of her being that kind of statistic put an uncomfortable pinch between his shoulder blades.

  She’d been in the system from birth, until they kicked her out at eighteen. She was born in the spring; he wondered where she’d lived during that summer before moving into college.

  Independence. She wrapped it around her like armor.

  He appreciated tenacity, and yet everyone needed someone. Like she needed him to resolve the Cohort threat so she could get back to her life.

  Still, he dug deeper into her past, found her foster families and searched the names for any complaints. There was a picture of the couple who’d applied for adoption and been killed by a drunk driver. Had Marie ever seen it? He closed his eyes at the unfairness of life. After that, each subsequent relocation was blamed on a foster family’s circumstances, her increasing reluctance to participate or connect with a family. Finding no criminal complaints wasn’t much relief. He knew how often sexual assaults went unreported.

  He worked for hours, researching the woman and eventually the hacktivists who’d painted a target on her back. There had to be a connection. The digital media outlets, both reputable and scandal-oriented, were still clamoring for Livia Colton, attempting to expose her criminal associates and insisting on transparency from the law-enforcement agencies hunting her.

  In demanding Marie’s resignation and restitution, as if she’d personally harmed the public trust, the Cohort had only chosen to get transparent about the things it could twist to its advantage.

  Maybe it could, if it focused on exposing Livia rather than dragging down Marie. There was no public listing of Livia’s birth date or social security number, no chat room dedicated to Livia’s demise if she were spotted. Yes, data mining posed risks, but Livia Colton posed far more risks than Marie did. He sent Dashwood an email confirming his conclusion that Marie had no association with the Cohort or the hack on the company. He was getting to know her better with each passing day and she’d been right to call herself a perfectionist. The emails between her and Hugh Barrington were circumstantial. Anyone capable of the hack they were investigating could have injected those into the system to raise suspicion and sympathy, further riling the local Principes against her. Emiliano was confident that if Marie ever did go to the dark side of computing, she wouldn’t make that kind of mistake.

  While his boss would accept and trust his deductions about Marie, it would be best for everyone if he could find how those emails had landed in her sent-mail folder. He went to work, baffled when he discovered he’d been sent in circles. This hacker was good.

  In keeping with what had become a distasteful habit, he returned to the message board devoted to brainstorming ideas to Silence the CDO. After the xylazine theft, he wasn’t surprised to see that option show up in one of the many contrived scenarios that ended badly for Marie. Per his last contact with the sheriff, the horse tranquilizer hadn’t been used in any other crimes nearby. Tonight’s newest claim was a post that Marie had been sighted in Shadow Creek. Confirming the IP address was local, he stared at it uneasily. He forwarded the information to the team, hopeful they could uncover a physical address. It was too risky for him to take on that task while Marie was under his protection.

  He glanced at the clock, surprised he’d worked until nearly midnight. Shutting down both laptops, he stowed them in the locked drawer and headed out, startled to realize Scrabble wasn’t at his feet.

  She must have deserted him for Marie again. This was getting ridiculous. Scrabble was his dog and he didn’t appreciate her switching sides.

  When his ex-wife had left him broke and reeling, he’d floundered for months, ashamed that he’d been foolish enough to believe Beth’s convoluted lies about their finances, ignoring all the signs and warnings. His parents had welcomed him home, no questions asked, only an open invitation to share his troubles when he was ready.

  He hadn’t shared much of anything. What could he have said that would make any of them feel better? Instead, he’d diligently applied himself to taking his life in a new direction and eventually landed on his feet with the FBI. At the time, Scrabble had been a sort of welcome-home gift from his father, one of whose clients needed to place an unexpected litter of high-quality, energetic corgi pups. They’d clapped eyes on each other and been together ever since. That little dog had wormed her way into his heart, reminding him how good real affection, loyalty and love could feel.

 
Until now. He called her name quietly, worrying a bit when she didn’t come running. It was time for her to go out before they went to bed and she knew the routine. Striding toward the bedrooms, he slowed when he saw the guest door cracked open, a soft glow spilling into the dim hallway.

  Awkwardly, he paused at the door and knocked softly. “Marie?”

  She didn’t answer him, either. He put a hand on his gun, feeling ridiculous. If she’d been attacked, he would’ve heard the window break, the alarm sound, her scream or Scrabble barking.

  Forcing himself to relax, he leaned around the door and stared. Marie was curled up on top of the covers, her hands under the pillow by her chin. Scrabble had tucked her little body right next to Marie’s back and stared at him with a someone-had-to-be-here expression in her eyes.

  Scrabble had never slept anywhere other than his room. Even when he had to be away on an assignment, his parents and Ace said she always slept on his bed.

  He raised his chin and whispered a command. His dog glanced away from him. He was torn between amusement and frustration. She’d never shown a fickle side. “You need to go out,” he whispered, tiptoeing to the bed and gathering her into his arms.

  Marie stirred, but didn’t wake. What would he have said if she had? Holding Scrabble with one arm, he flipped the bedspread over Marie so she wouldn’t get chilled in the night and left her room, closing the door behind him.

  When he and Scrabble returned from her outing, she stopped at Marie’s closed door and sat down, staring up at him.

  He kept walking. “Come on.”

  She woofed softly and held her ground.

  “Seriously?”

  She gave a little whine that, given time, could turn into a whistle that would wake up Marie.

  “What if she’d rather be alone?”

  She tipped her head to the side, then booped the door with her nose.

  “Fine.” He walked back and unlatched the door. If Scrabble wanted to be with Marie, she’d have to do the rest on her own. He wasn’t going to give the woman under his protection any reason to doubt his motives or integrity.