Colton's Cinderella Bride. Lisa Childs
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“You could have found me,” he insisted. His family was in Red Ridge. They’d known where he was.
She tensed now and glared back at him. “You could have found me—even without knowing.”
“I tried,” he admitted. “You slipped out in the middle of the night, and I didn’t even know your last name. Hell, right now I’m not sure you gave me your right first name, Juliette.”
She flinched.
And he wondered. Had she told him anything that was the truth?
“Juliette is my real name,” she said.
Someone from inside the police department called it now. She glanced back toward the building. “I—I need to go,” she said. But when she started forward, he caught her arm again—stopping her.
“No—” He’d spent five years wondering what had happened to her. Where she was... He wasn’t just going to let her walk away from him again.
“She needs me,” Juliette said.
And he felt once again like she’d struck him. The child needed her mother. She didn’t even know she had a father. Unless Juliette had passed off another man as the little girl’s daddy. Blake glanced down at the hand of the arm he held—her left hand. Her fingers were bare of any rings. She wasn’t married or engaged now.
But a lot could have happened over the last nearly five years. She might have had a husband. Hell, he’d thought she might have on their night together, and that was why she’d slipped away like she had, so nobody would spot them together.
She hadn’t worn a ring then either, though. So maybe, as a cop, she’d just decided not to wear one.
How had she afforded that beautiful gown—those shoes and earrings—on a cop’s salary—if she’d even been a cop back then? She looked younger now, without makeup, than she’d looked that night.
“Let me go,” she said—once again through gritted teeth. She had beautiful teeth and lips and features...
He’d started to believe that he’d romanticized her and that night over the years. That she couldn’t have been nearly as beautiful as he’d thought she was. He’d been wrong—about romanticizing it.
She was also stressed and afraid, her face pale and eyes wide with fear.
“I will let you go,” he agreed because he had no choice. Her daughter—their daughter—needed her.
Before the little girl had hidden her face in her mother’s neck, Blake had noticed her tears and, worse than that, her fear. His gut churned again—with a sense of helplessness even worse than when Patience had told him about his sister Layla’s predicament.
“But you’re going to come to my suite later,” he told her.
Her eyes narrowed as if she thought he expected a repeat of that long-ago night. Of what had happened over and over that night...
His pulse leaped at the thought, but he was too angry with her to ever want her again. So he clarified, “Just to talk.”
Someone called her name a second time, and she tugged free of him. But as she stepped through those open doors to the lobby, she turned back and nodded.
“I’m staying in the same suite as I was that night,” he told her.
Color rushed back into her pale face, and she nodded again. She would be there. Eventually. But he suspected it might be a while before she could make it.
Still reeling from what he’d just learned, he no longer wanted to talk to his cousin—the police chief. Blake didn’t want to step into that police department where she and their daughter were.
He just wanted to be alone. He wanted to think and process and deal with all the emotions gripping him. The anger, the shock, the fear...
His daughter had witnessed a crime of some sort, and from the way both she and her mother had acted, they were definitely frightened.
Could they be in danger? Could he lose his child just as he had finally discovered her existence?
* * *
“He’s back?” Fenwick Colton already knew that his son had returned to Red Ridge. The concierge at the Colton Plaza Hotel had confirmed that Blake had checked into a suite on the twenty-first floor a couple of days ago. But Fenwick hadn’t seen him. And he sure as hell hadn’t heard from him.
Patience, Fenwick’s daughter and Blake’s half sister, nodded in reply, but she had to understand what he was really asking. Why hadn’t Blake come to see him?
The boy was Fenwick’s only son. They should have been close. Fenwick had had primary custody of him, since a hyper boy had been more than his jet-setting mother had wanted to handle. But the kid had always acted like he couldn’t stand to be near him. And as if to prove it, he’d spent the past five years living in other countries. Maybe that was just because he was like his mother, though.
“Why is he back?” Fenwick asked his daughter.
Patience lowered her head slightly, and her dark bangs shielded her dark eyes. She was staring down at her desk in her office at the Red Ridge K9 training center. If he wanted to talk to his daughter, he usually had to come to the training center, where she worked as a veterinarian. It was the same with Bea; he would have had to go to the bridal shop to see her. At least Gemma visited him, but it was usually to ask for money.
He ran his hands over his tailored suit, plucking a strand of dog hair from the expensive fabric. Then he touched his hair, making sure the blond piece hadn’t slipped. As mayor of Red Ridge, he had to make sure he always looked good. “You called him,” he surmised.
“I had to,” she said, and her voice was sharp with resentment. Patience didn’t understand business like Layla did. Like Blake did...
“He’s not going to help,” Fenwick said. It wasn’t a question. He knew that with just as much certainty as he knew that Blake had returned to Red Ridge.
Patience looked up from her desk now. “He might. He will,” she persisted, but she sounded more like she was trying to convince herself than she was him. “Why else did he come home?”
That was what worried Fenwick. If Blake hadn’t come back to help his family, then he probably had another reason—a personal reason—for returning to Red Ridge.
“You shouldn’t have called him,” Fenwick admonished her.
“He’s your son,” she said. “My brother. He deserved to hear what’s going on with the family from one of us.”
Fenwick suspected the media had probably beaten Patience to the punch, though. Coltons were news. And a Colton scandal was even bigger news.
Damn his reprobate cousin Rusty and his equally disreputable kids for causing such a scandal. But it went beyond a scandal. Rusty’s daughter Demi was a murderer. Evidence and witnesses proved—to him, at least—that she was the psycho killing grooms-to-be because she’d been dumped by her own one-week fiancé. Of course a Colton being a killer wasn’t news. Other Colton family members—very distant family members out of state—had committed murder, as well.
Fenwick didn’t know what he might be forced to do if Layla wasn’t able to carry out their plan of marrying to save the company. This damn Groom Killer nonsense was threatening their livelihood. But now that might not be all that was threatened.
“You shouldn’t have called him,” Fenwick repeated, “because you might have put him in danger.”
Patience’s dark eyes narrowed. “What are you talking about?”
“This maniac,” Fenwick said, “is killing grooms. Men.” He was a little scared for himself—not that he had any intention of getting married again. Three times was more than enough.