Colton 911 secret alibi, p.1
Colton 911--Secret Alibi, page 1
A tingle of alarm chasing down her spine, Valerie stood and surveyed the yard. “I don’t see anyone.”
“Damn. He got away,” Nash muttered as he drew back his fingers and stared at the red smears there. He blinked hard, squinted, then shielded his eyes as if the early-evening twilight hurt them. “I, um...”
“Can you stand? Walk?”
He waved her off. “I’m fine. I just...” He wobbled when he tried to rise, and she caught him as he stumbled.
“You are not fine. You hit your head.”
“No, the intruder hit it for me.”
The idea of an intruder attacking Nash sent a chill to her core. Axel had been attacked in his home. His head bashed. Now Nash...
* * *
Colton 911: Chicago—Love and danger come alive in the Windy City...
* * *
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Dear Reader,
Working on a Coltons continuity with my fellow Harlequin authors is always exciting. This book was no exception. Colton 911: Chicago brings all the drama, danger and romance you’ve come to expect from this dynamic family!
Years ago, Valerie Yates and Nash Colton had a steamy youthful romance...with devastating repercussions. Now the former lovers have a second chance at forever—unless murder and revenge get in the way!
By the way, as I always do, I’ve included a cat in this book. Kitty, the friendly, somewhat presumptive male calico—yes, male—that visits Nash’s house constantly throughout this book is a salute to our neighbors’ male calico that spent more time at our house than his own...even inviting himself into our kitchen. Sadly, Kitty passed away shortly after the writing of this book, and he is missed.
Happy reading, and happy holidays to all!
Beth Cornelison
COLTON 911: SECRET ALIBI
Beth Cornelison
Beth Cornelison began working in public relations before pursuing her love of writing romance. She has won numerous honors for her work, including a nomination for the RWA RITA® Award for The Christmas Stranger. She enjoys featuring her cats (or friends’ pets) in her stories and always has another book in the pipeline! She currently lives in Louisiana with her husband, one son and three spoiled cats. Contact her via her website, bethcornelison.com.
Books by Beth Cornelison
Harlequin Romantic Suspense
Colton 911: Chicago
Colton 911: Secret Alibi
The McCall Adventure Ranch
Rancher’s Deadly Reunion
Rancher’s High-Stakes Rescue
Rancher’s Covert Christmas
Rancher’s Hostage Rescue
In the Rancher’s Protection
Colton 911
Colton 911: Deadly Texas Reunion
The Mansfield Brothers
The Return of Connor Mansfield
Protecting Her Royal Baby
The Mansfield Rescue
Visit the Author Profile page at
Harlequin.com for more titles.
Acknowledgments
Thank you to Kasey Witherington, MEd, LPC, for her assistance as I researched borderline personality disorder and sought to better understand Valerie’s mother. Kasey generously answered questions for me and shared further sources for my research. Any mistakes I have made in portraying the disorder are mine alone.
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Epilogue
Excerpt from Agent Colton’s Takedown by Beverly Long
Prologue
Twelve years ago
Three minutes. Just three minutes.
Good God, who knew three minutes could last so long?
Valerie Yates tried to clear her mind, shift her focus, but waiting had never been her strong suit.
She bent over the paper in front of her and resumed sketching. A face began to take shape in the squarish oval she’d started. Eyes, nose, lips...
Soft, demanding lips. Skilled lips that made her breath catch and her toes curl.
With that unbidden thought, she pressed too hard and the tip of her charcoal pencil snapped off. Huffing her frustration, she leaned back in her desk chair, shook the tension from her hands. Checked the clock.
Seriously? It had only been one minute and fifteen seconds?
She scrubbed a hand down her face and took a deep breath to quell the churning in her gut. The added nervous tension did not help the swirl of nausea that had plagued her lately.
One minute thirty seconds. Halfway.
Groaning, she found her sharpener and fixed the tip of her pencil. Resumed sketching. A smudge with her thumb to soften a line and add shadow, contour. She was drawing Nash again, she realized. Without even considering what she was doing, her fingers, her mind, automatically created the image that filled her thoughts these days. She set down her pencil, closed her eyes and allowed herself to go to those magic nights and stolen moments. To sweaty skin. Adoring hazel eyes. Whispered promises.
Nash Colton. Her first love. Her first lover.
“I wish you didn’t have to leave,” he’d said morosely that last summer night, two months ago.
“Me, too.” Valerie had shifted to her side, pressing her lean, naked body against his. Even at eighteen, he had the taut, muscled body of an athlete. Not gross, bulky muscles like those weight lifters they’d watched on the summer Olympics last year. No, Nash was more... What was that swimmer’s name? Michael... Phillips? No, Phelps.
Valerie drew circles on his flat, bare chest and sighed. “I’ll come back next summer. And probably at Christmas. My mom was talking about going skiing in Colorado at Christmas, but I’ll tell her I want to come back here instead.”
“You’d give up skiing in Colorado to see me?” he asked, his tone both surprised and wistful. Grateful. Hopeful. Her heart broke a little for him. She knew how the death of his mother and strained relationship with his father had hurt Nash.
“Of course, I would. I—” She caught herself before she blurted “I love you.” Instead she finished with “I think you’re special. We have fun together.”
He wiggled his eyebrows seductively. “Lots of fun.”
She playfully punched his arm. “You know what I mean.”
“And how will you explain your preference to come back to Chicago instead of skiing to your parents? Are you ready to tell people about us?”
Val furrowed her brow. “No. We can’t tell yet. If my mom ever found out we were...well, whatever this is.” She waved her fingers between them. “She’d freak. She probably wouldn’t even let me come back to visit Uncle Rick next summer.”
“She’s really that strict?”
“Yeah.”
Nash frowned and folded his arm behind his head. “Has she ever explained why she doesn’t want you spending time with my family?”
“Not really. She just says ‘Stay away from those Coltons! They’re trouble!’”
“Well, I can understand that a little if my father and Uncle Axel are the only Coltons she knows,” Nash said, his dark blond eyebrows furrowing, “but has she even met any of the rest of us? We’re not so bad.”
“It’s more than that. I’m pretty sure she got pregnant with me in high school. I mean, all you have to do is the math. So she’s worried that I will—” She didn’t finish the sentence because it was obvious what her mother was worried she’d do. And because she and Nash had. Recently. More than once.
He flashed an impish grin. “Yeah, well...”
Valerie felt a flush sting her neck and cheeks. “Nash!”
He stroked her face with his fingers. “Don’t worry. We’ve been careful.”
Valerie leaned on one elbow and bent her head to kiss him. “I know.”
“It’s hard, not telling anyone. I really want to tell Damon. He’s not just my brother. He’s my best friend. And you make me so happy...”
Beaming her own bliss, she framed his face between her hands. “You, too. But...for now, let’s not say anything. If my mom found out—” She sighed, knowing how badly that conversation would go and not wanting to risk anything that would push her mother to the edge. To drink. “Maybe next summer—”
A hungry growling sound rumbled from his throat as he captured the back of her head with his free hand and tugged her down for a deep kiss. “I don’t think I can wait for next summer, Val. God, I’m going to miss you.”
Tears pricked her eyes, and so he wouldn’t see her weakness, she kissed him again. Long and hot and full of the love she was scared to put into words.
His hand moved down her spine, cupped her bottom. She scooted on
Ding.
The tiny bell sound of the timer she’d set on her clock yanked Valerie out of her memories. Back to her Ohio bedroom. And the reality that faced her in her en suite bathroom.
“Well,” she said, glancing down at the sketch she’d made of Nash, “Time’s up. Here goes nothing.”
Her knees shook as she crossed her bedroom and approached the bathroom sink. She lifted the washcloth she’d used to cover the plastic stick, as if to hide it from...what? She wasn’t sure. So she wouldn’t peek early?
Her hand trembled as she lifted the corner of the rag and flipped it aside. Leaned in to read the display.
Positive.
The nausea in her gut surged, and she lost what little breakfast she’d managed this morning. After wiping and rinsing her mouth, then flushing the commode, she sank to the floor with the plastic pregnancy test stick in her hand. What was she going to do? Her mother would kill her. Worse, would her mother retreat into the bottle again? She’d just gotten sober this summer at the clinic. But any little thing could push her to the brink.
A sob rose in Valerie’s throat, but she choked it back. She had to be brave, had to figure out what to do next.
“Oh, Nash. I guess we weren’t careful enough.”
Chapter 1
Twelve years later
Late October
“It is flat-out unacceptable to me that your father has access to millions of dollars and hasn’t offered one penny of it to help get Jackson back!” Nash Colton raged as he paced tight circles in the kitchen of his cousin’s suburban Chicago home. “It’s infuriating!”
“Yeah, well,” Myles Colton replied from the ladder-back chair where he was watching Nash pace, “my dad was cut from the same cloth as your dad, so...you know how that is. They might not be identical twins, but Axel and Erik Colton are exactly alike in all too many ways.”
Nash slammed a cabinet door too hard, his frustration boiling over.
“Hey, cool it!” Myles said. “Faith is trying to rest. We haven’t gotten any sleep lately, and the stress is wearing on us both.”
Nash took a deep breath and scrubbed both hands on his face as he exhaled. “Of course. I’m sorry. I know that anything I’m feeling has got to be a hundred times worse for you.”
Myles, whose four-year-old son Jackson had been kidnapped a few days earlier for a ransom of thirty million dollars, balled the hand he’d been resting on the tabletop. “I’m trying to keep it together for Faith’s sake. But the waiting, not knowing...”
“I’m sorry,” Nash said. “My grumbling isn’t helping. I just wish I could do something!” He scraped out a chair across from his cousin. “If I could help raise the ransom money—”
Myles angled a skeptical look at him. “You have thirty mil lying around you’d like to donate to the cause?”
“Hardly. Architects in my firm don’t make that kind of dough.”
“Right. So we have no ransom money. Which means for now we do what Brad Howard, our FBI contact, is telling us. They’re working on a plan.”
At that moment, Myles’s phone sounded with an incoming call. “Speak of the devil...” He lifted the phone to his ear. “You got news?”
Nash signaled to his cousin that he was leaving so that Myles and his FBI contact could work on the plan to bring Jackson home safely and catch the cretin behind the kidnapping and extortion.
He hated not being able to help Myles. He hated even more that the people who could potentially do something to make a difference seemed indifferent to Jackson’s kidnapping. His father, Erik Colton, and his father’s fraternal twin, Axel, received a substantial stipend from the estate of their late father, Dean Colton. They lived well. Very well. But none of that wealth seemed to trickle down to their children. Not that Nash or Myles or any of the younger generation of Coltons wanted the rather tainted money. They all had their own lives and careers. They’d managed to rise above their flawed paternal relationships to become independently successful.
But even if all of his siblings and cousins pooled their resources, they wouldn’t come anywhere close to the thirty million that had been demanded for Jackson’s safe return. But he knew who did, and Nash found it unconscionable that Axel wouldn’t donate any of his sizable wealth to save his grandson.
Nash couldn’t let that rest. He dialed Axel’s home. The housekeeper answered.
“He’s at the racket club, having a tennis lesson as I recall,” the maid said. “Is there a message?”
“No. Thanks.” Nash disconnected. The racket club. He knew the hoity-toity club the housekeeper meant. “Perhaps this calls for an in-person conversation,” Nash said to no one in particular as he headed outside into the late October chill to confront his uncle.
From Myles’s front steps, he heard a car door close and glanced up to see who was arriving. And his heart slammed against his ribs.
* * *
Valerie stopped in her tracks, her breath catching when she spotted Nash coming out of Myles and Faith’s home. Twelve years of heartache, confusion and anger roiled inside her. Flashes of memory blinked in her mind’s eye like a painful slide show—holding Nash, her mother’s scornful shouting, sharp abdominal cramps, laughing at Nash’s corny jokes, a bittersweet goodbye kiss under the arbor, an incriminating picture. So much history. So much hurt.
Releasing the air she’d snagged in her lungs, she took a couple of slow steps forward. She’d known that eventually she’d run into Nash. Before she’d left Ohio, she weighed that particular risk against her desire to be near Myles and Faith and help the family during the crisis they faced with little Jackson missing. She’d hoped she could minimize her chances of seeing Nash by avoiding large family gatherings and spending the majority of her time at her Uncle Rick’s house. Foolish thinking. Nash was woven too tightly into the fabric of the Colton family for her to not run into him.
She gathered the courage to speak to him, to show a modicum of civility and calm, even if her pulse scampered and her thoughts were in a whirlwind.
But then, tightening his mouth, he turned without speaking and marched across Myles’s lawn to an Infiniti coupe parked at the curb. He climbed in and sped away, leaving her standing there. Alone. Again.
She couldn’t say how long she stood there, staring down the street where Nash had long ago disappeared. And she made a decision. Enough was enough.
Earlier in the month, as she’d driven into Illinois and gotten closer to Chicago, a nervous energy had twisted tighter and tighter inside Valerie. One part of that tension, she knew, was an excitement to be returning to a place where she’d spent happy summers and found a second home with her uncle’s stepfamily. She’d loved the warm and welcoming home that sat behind Yates’ Yards Plant Nursery, her Uncle Rick and Aunt Vita’s business. She’d loved spending hours helping in the nursery’s greenhouses, among the beautiful plants and fragrant blossoms. As an only child with a part-time mother who’d let it be known she resented her daughter, Valerie had loved getting to know Vita’s family and forming deep bonds of friendship and camaraderie with her Colton “cousins.”
Quite simply, over the last twelve years, she’d missed them. Missed the passion for art she’d shared with Lila, missed the playful teasing of Myles and Aaron, missed the maternal conversations she’d had with Vita and missed her Uncle Rick’s dorky dad jokes and made-up excuses to get the extended family together for picnics or outdoor games. Water balloon fights on so-called “wet Wednesdays.” Homemade ice cream on National Strawberry Sundae Day. Potluck picnics in his flower garden to honor Red Rose Day. Cheese hors d’oeuvres on the lawn for Moon Viewing Mondays. She smiled to herself remembering all the wonderful, silly times. Good grief, she’d missed those laughter-and-love-filled days when she’d returned to her mother’s tumultuous brand of parenting.
But she’d stayed away from Illinois. Because, of all the Coltons she’d met and loved when she’d spent blissful summers in Chicago, one Colton in particular had rooted himself deep in her heart...and shattered her world.
But enough was enough.
She’d sacrificed enough—too much—because of Nash Colton. The time had come to put a few things straight with Nash and reclaim the family that meant so much to her. She didn’t want to fear seeing Nash, didn’t want to hide from a confrontation with him, didn’t want to miss any more family events and celebrations because Nash would be there.
