Читать книгу Her Colton P.i. - Amelia Autin - Страница 11

Chapter 4

“You...you said you believed me about the McCays,” Holly managed, despite the way her heart was pounding so hard she could barely breathe.

Chris tucked his phone back in his pocket. “I do.”

“Then why... What were you telling my father-in-law? It sounded like you—”

He cut her off. “Just throwing him off the scent, Holly. I had to tell him something, and part of the truth is better than an outright lie—I did track you to Grand Prairie...after I’d already located you in Rosewood. And I wasn’t lying...you did move on to Irving after you left Grand Prairie. But you only stayed there two weeks, too.”

“How do know that?” Her voice was barely above a whisper.

One corner of his mouth curved upward in a half smile. “I told you, I’m damned good at what I do. After Irving you moved to Mansfield, then Arlington. After Arlington you stayed almost a month in Lake Worth before you moved here.”

He walked toward her as he said this, and she backed away on trembling legs, clutching Ian and Jamie as if they were talismans. I was so careful, she thought feverishly. How could he know all that?

She hadn’t realized she’d spoken aloud until Chris gave her an “are you kidding me?” look and said, “You make a lousy criminal, Holly. But that’s a compliment, not an insult.”

When Holly bumped into the hallway wall outside the bedroom doorway, she realized she was trapped. But all Chris did was take Ian from her, hefting him under one arm like a football and gently swinging him until Ian laughed at the game. “Time for your nap, bud,” Chris told him. “You and your brother.” His blue eyes met Holly’s brown ones, and there was a gentleness in his face. An honesty she couldn’t help but believe. “I’m not going to hurt you, Holly. Ever. And I’d never do anything to hurt your sons.”

* * *

Holly was so mentally exhausted and emotionally drained that after she read the twins a story, sang them two songs and tucked them up in their cribs, she lay down on the bed, telling herself she’d rest for just a moment. Then she’d unpack their suitcases, wash the lunch dishes, put away the dry-goods groceries she and Chris had bought and decide what to make for dinner. But before she realized it, she was out like a light.

At first her dreams were of happier times, when the twins were newborns and Grant was there. He’d been so proud and nervous at the same time, like most new fathers. Then her dreams segued into nightmares, starting with the devastating news of Grant’s death...the lawyers trying to probate Grant’s will and the McCays attempting to contest it...followed swiftly by the McCays trying to seize custody of the twins, along with control of the trust Grant had set up for his sons. A dazed and bereft Holly had been forced to fight, not only for custody and to carry out Grant’s last wishes but for her good name, too.

That time in her life had been a waking nightmare. She’d won the preliminary battles in the courts and thought she was finally on firm ground...until those three close calls. Any one of them could have been an accident, but three? After the last one, when she’d shown up at the McCays’ house shaken and trembling to pick up the twins, she’d sensed the McCays’ surprise...that she was still alive. And she’d known in that instant they were trying to kill her.

In the way of dreams, Holly suddenly found herself at the Rosewood Rooming House with Chris. He was holding her, but not the way he had in real life. This time his strong arms were surrounding her in comforting fashion as he pressed her head against the solid wall of his oh-so-warm chest and promised her she was safe. “I won’t let them hurt you,” he said, referring to her in-laws. “And I won’t let them get custody of Ian and Jamie.”

The sense of relief she felt was incredible, and all out of proportion to her real life. Holly didn’t subscribe to the theory that a woman couldn’t take care of herself, that she needed a man to look after her. She was a software engineer, for goodness’ sake! She’d supported herself after her missionary parents had been killed in one of their trips to South America—leaving very little in the way of life insurance—and had put herself through college. After graduation she’d held down a challenging job for NASA at the Johnson Space Center in Clear Lake City, Texas, before she’d taken maternity leave when the twins were born. She didn’t need “rescuing” from her life...as a general rule.

But that was before the McCays had tried to kill her. The situation she found herself in now was so totally outside her experience, so much like one of the thrillers Grant had loved to read but that Holly had always avoided, that she recognized she couldn’t do it all on her own. Single mother? Check. Guardian of her children’s financial future? Check. Putting attempted murderers behind bars? Not so much.

Maybe that was why when Chris had held Holly in the shelter of his arms in her dream and promised she and the boys were safe, she’d believed him...because she wanted to believe him. Because she needed to believe him.

Then he’d kissed her.

No one had ever kissed her that way, with an intensity that shattered everything she’d thought she knew about men and women. Chris’s kiss exploded through her body, as if she were gunpowder and he were a lighted match. He was hard everywhere she was soft, and it made her want to get closer...impossibly closer. Her nipples tightened and her insides melted as Chris tilted her head back and his lips trailed down, down, to brush against the incredibly sensitive hollow of her throat. Then lower.

Holly moaned in her sleep and curled onto her side, pressing her legs together against the throbbing she felt there. And the dream suddenly vanished.

* * *

She woke to the mouthwatering aroma of baked chicken, Ian and Jamie’s chorus of “Ma-ma-ma-ma-ma” as they stood and banged on the sides of their cribs to get her attention and the guilty memory of Chris’s dream kiss. Not the kiss so much as her reaction to it, she acknowledged as a flush of warmth swept through her body. As if...

A tap on the door frame drew her attention, and there stood Chris in the doorway, almost as if she’d dreamed him into existence. Holly quickly hid her face with her hands and rubbed at her eyes, pretending she needed to wake up that way. She didn’t—she just didn’t want Chris to see her flaming cheeks.

“Dinner’s ready” was all Chris said, and as he walked farther into the room, Holly scrambled off the bed. “I’ll take Ian for you,” he said, lifting the older of the twins—older by three minutes—out of his crib.

“How do you know that’s Ian?” she asked, moving to grab Jamie. “They’re identical. Most people can’t tell the difference. Peg can, but it took her a week.”

The intimate smile Chris gave her curled her toes. “Ian looks up when he sees me. Jamie looks away.”

“That’s it? That’s how you can tell them apart?”

“Well...that and the fact that Ian’s ears stick out just a little more than Jamie’s, and Jamie’s hair is just a shade lighter than Ian’s.”

Holly stopped short, glancing from the toddler in Chris’s arms to the one in her own arms. “You’re right,” she said after a minute. “I never realized about the ears...but you’re right.”

“So how do you tell them apart? Motherly instinct?”

She adjusted Jamie to balance him against her hip and popped a kiss on his rosebud mouth. “I can’t really tell you,” she confessed. “I just know.”

Chris nodded as if she’d given him the answer he expected. “Motherly instinct,” he repeated, but this time it wasn’t a question. He turned toward the doorway. “Come on, dinner will be getting cold.”

“I was going to make dinner,” she protested as she followed Chris into the kitchen, feeling guilty.

“You were fast asleep every time I came to check on you, and I didn’t have the heart to wake you.” Chris settled Ian in one of the two high chairs he’d pulled up beside the kitchen table and strapped him in. “Hang tight, buddy,” he told the boy as Ian began banging on the tray and shouting, “Din-din-din-din-din!”

Jamie took up the chant as Holly got him settled. “Sorry,” she told Chris over the boys’ urgent demands. “I usually feed them a little earlier. I must have been more exhausted than I thought.”

“Adrenaline will do that to you,” Chris said as he grabbed two child-sized plates that were sitting in the microwave, added the baby cutlery she’d used at lunch from the rack on the drain board—he must have washed the lunch dishes, Holly realized with another little dart of guilt—and whisked the plates in front of Ian and Jamie. Baked chicken, cut into baby-sized bites, sat next to miniature mounds of mashed potatoes. Peas with a tiny dollop of melted butter rounded out the servings.

“Are you sure you’re not a nanny in disguise?” Holly joked as the twins’ eyes lit up and they dug in, soon making a mess out of feeding themselves. “How do you know—”

“Don’t even think about finishing that sentence,” Chris told her in a stern voice, but the twinkle in his eyes gave the lie to his tone. “I’m the second oldest of seven. That many kids in a family—you need a lot of hands to get all the work done. My twin sister, Annabel, and I used to help Mama with the younger kids, especially my baby sister, Josie.”

He turned away to take the rest of the chicken out of the oven, but not before Holly saw a troubled expression slide over his face. More land mines, she warned herself. He doesn’t want to talk about his childhood. That made sense given what he’d told her this morning—that his father was a notorious serial killer who’d killed Chris’s mother, too.

She cast about in her mind for a safe topic of conversation as she filled a plate for herself from the chicken pan and the pots on the stove, and Chris filled Wally’s bowl with fresh water. “I didn’t realize you’re a twin,” she said as she seated herself at the table.

Chris started to respond, but Holly leaned over to Jamie, who was rolling his peas across his high-chair tray and then smashing them flat with the tip of one chubby pointer finger. “You’re going to eat those, mister,” she told him in a no-nonsense voice. “So you just peel them up and pop them into your mouth.” She waited until Jamie obediently scooped up two peas and ate them before she glanced up at Chris. “Sorry. It’s a constant battle with boys this young. They want to feed themselves, but... What were you going to say?”

“I was just about to say that yeah, I’m a twin myself. Not identical, of course, but there is an unbreakable bond.”

“I’ve seen that with Ian and Jamie already.”

“Not surprised. It starts early.”

“What does your sister do? Is she a PI like you?”

Chris shook his head. “She’s a cop.” He hesitated. “My brothers and I—we didn’t want that for her. I know it’s chauvinistic in this day and age, but this is Texas. We wanted her to be safe, you know? I had a big argument about it with her. And—” he had the grace to look ashamed “—none of us except Sam attended her graduation from the police academy. She graduated top of her class, too.” He took his plate and settled in a chair at the other end of the table.

They ate in silence for a minute, then Chris said roughly, “I know how it sounds, but we’ve already lost one sister. Josie. We don’t want to lose the only one we have left.”

Treading cautiously, Holly asked, “What happened to Josie?”

“No one knows. We haven’t heard from her in six years.” His brows drew together in a troubled frown. “And even before that she practically refused to have anything to do with us for years.” He thought for a moment. “I guess she was about twelve when she told the social worker she didn’t want us visiting her anymore.”

“How old were you?”

“Twenty. The summer before my junior year in college.” He sighed. “But even before that she... When Trevor turned eighteen—Trevor’s the oldest, three years older than me—when he turned eighteen, he tried to get custody of Josie, take her out of foster care. But she refused. We figured it had something to do with her foster sister, Lizzie. They were particularly close. And Lizzie says they were both attached to their foster parents.”

He sighed again. “I also tried to get custody when I turned eighteen and graduated from high school. I’d have passed on college if that’s what it took—scholarship be damned. But I didn’t have any more luck than Trevor.” He looked down at his plate, forked a bite of chicken and swirled it in the mashed potatoes, then ate it.

Holly pried peas off Jamie’s tray, piled them on his plate and tapped an imperious finger. “Eat those, mister.” She glanced over at Ian to make sure he was eating what was set before him without difficulty, then looked up at Chris. “What happened then?”

“Even with the scholarship it wasn’t easy, but I managed. I worked to put myself through school, and when I graduated, I came back here to Granite Gulch. Laura was waiting for me—we’d been engaged since my junior year in college—but I told her I needed to try one more time with Josie...who turned me down flat.”

That hurt him. Chris didn’t have to say it; Holly just knew. “Josie didn’t say why?”

“Nope. Basically her message was ‘Leave me alone.’” He paused. “I don’t blame her in one way. She was only three when our father murdered our mother—I doubt she even remembers her or us as a family.”

But you do, Holly thought. You remember...and it hurts you to remember.

“So it only makes sense she didn’t want to have anything to do with her brothers and sisters—we’re not her family anymore. Then six years ago...” Chris began, but when he stopped, Holly raised her eyebrows in a question, so he continued. “Josie ran away six years ago. At least that’s the best we can figure. I’ve been searching for her off and on ever since.”

Now Holly thought she understood what Peg had meant when she said Chris needed to do this, needed to shelter Holly and her boys from the McCays. Chris carried a load of guilt over his missing sister. Probably some guilt over his mother, too.

“You said there were seven of you, and that Trevor’s the oldest. What does he do?”

“FBI profiler.”

“Wow. Impressive.”

Chris nodded, but Holly got the impression there were some unresolved issues between Chris and his older brother. I wonder what that’s about. She wasn’t going to ask, of course. But maybe he would volunteer something later on. “After Trevor it’s you and Annabel, right? And Josie’s the baby. Who else?”

“Ridge. He’s two years younger than me.”

“Unusual name.”

Chris laughed. “It suits him. He’s in search and rescue. He’s big and bad and nobody messes with Ridge.”

Kind of like you, Holly thought, but she kept it to herself. “And after Ridge?”

“Ethan. He’s twenty-seven, and he is intense. He kind of keeps himself to himself, if you know what I mean.” Holly nodded. “He’s a rancher. His ranch is...oh, about ten miles from here. The isolation suits him, but he’s going to have to get accustomed to having more people around—his wife, Lizzie, is expecting a baby any day now.”

“Oh, that’s nice. You’ll be an uncle again.” She counted up in her mind, then said, “One more. Another brother, right?”

“Yeah. Sam. He’s a police detective, right here on the Granite Gulch police force, just like Annabel. He’s twenty-five, and he just got engaged in January to the sweetest woman, Zoe. You’d like her.”

“Wait. Zoe Robison? The librarian?”

Ian piped up, “Zo-ee, Zo-ee!” and Jamie copied him. Holly quickly looked over at her boys and realized they were pretty much done. They’d left a disaster that would need hosing down to clean up, but at least they’d managed to eat most of what was on their plates. What hadn’t been eaten was now adorning them. She shuddered at the mashed potatoes Ian had massaged into his eyebrows.

“You know Zoe?” Chris asked.

Holly jumped up and grabbed the washcloth from the sink. “She runs the Mommy and Me reading program at the library,” she explained as she wiped Jamie’s hands and face, then did the same for Ian. “Ian and Jamie adore her, and yes, she’s really sweet.”

Chris waited until Jamie was clean, then he unstrapped the boy and lifted him out of the high chair, setting him on his feet. When Ian was ready, he got the same treatment.

“Leave this,” Chris told Holly. “I’ll clean up and put the dishes in the dishwasher.”

“I should do it,” she protested. “Ian and Jamie are the ones who made such a mess.” She grimaced as she took in the condition of the floor, which had a few peas scattered beneath the high chairs—the ones Wally hadn’t gobbled up—not to mention a couple of gooey globs that looked like mashed potatoes.

“You probably want to give the boys a bath before too long.”

“You mean before they track the mess into the rest of the house?”

Chris grinned. “Yeah, that’s exactly what I mean.”

“You really don’t mind cleaning up in here? I feel awful leaving this for you.”

“Don’t sweat it.” He was already swiping a damp paper towel over the mashed potatoes and picking the remaining peas up off the floor as she spoke. Chris’s cell phone rang at that moment, and he threw the peas into the garbage disposal before he checked the caller ID. “Annabel,” he told Holly. “I should take this. Excuse me.” He pressed a button. “Hey, Bella, what’s up?”

He stiffened almost immediately, and Holly watched his lighthearted expression fade away as he listened to his sister on the other end. Two minutes passed, then three, before Chris said, “I’m sorry to hear it. What does Trevor say?” He made a sound of impatience, then nodded as if Annabel could see him. “Okay. I understand. Besides Trevor and Sam, who else knows?” He listened for a minute, then said, “Nothing I can do, but thanks for letting me know. Watch yourself, okay?”

He disconnected but didn’t put the phone away. He hit speed dial, waited a few seconds, then said, “Peg? It’s Chris. Have you been watching the local news?” Apparently the answer was no, because he added, “Turn it on. Now. Annabel just called me. They found another body with the bull’s-eye marking. Yeah, number eight—Helena Tucker.”