The Coltons of Texas

“A joy to read.”

—RT Book Reviews on Christmas Cowboy Duet

“Ferrarella’s romance will charm with all the benefits and pitfalls of a sweet small-town setting.”

—RT Book Reviews on Lassoed by Fortune

“Heartwarming. That’s the way I have described every book by Marie Ferrarella that I have read. In the Family Way engenders in me the same warm, fuzzy feeling that I have come to expect from her books.” —The Romance Reader

“Ms. Ferrarella warms our hearts with her charming characters and delicious interplay.”

—RT Book Reviews on A Husband Waiting to Happen

“Ms. Ferrarella creates fiery, strong-willed characters, an intense conflict and an absorbing premise no reader could possibly resist.”

—RT Book Reviews on A Match for Morgan

* * *

We hope you enjoy this dramatic new series:

The Coltons of Texas: Finding love and buried family secrets in the Lone Star state …

Colton Copycat

Killer

Marie Ferrarella

www.millsandboon.co.uk

MARIE FERRARELLA, a USA TODAY bestselling and RITA® Award-winning author has written two-hundred-and-fifty books for Mills & Boon, some under the name Marie Nicole. Her romances are beloved by fans worldwide. Visit her website, www.marieferrarella.com.

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To Melissa Senate, with love, for handing me a great outline to work with!

Contents

Cover

Praise

Title Page

About the Author

Dedication

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

Epilogue

Extract

Copyright

Prologue

“Watch and learn, little sister. Watch and learn.”

Celia Robison’s eyes met her younger sister, Zoe’s, in the full-length mirror as the former fussed over her wedding veil, adjusting it for the umpteenth time in order to best play up her delicate features.

She was talking to Zoe in the church’s bridal room. The latter had popped in a few minutes ago to see how she was coming along. Celia always loved having her sister around—and never more than today—because she knew she always looked even hotter and sexier than usual in comparison. The sweetly attractive Zoe looked like the typical shrinking violet that she was.

Right now, Celia was approximately ten minutes away from leaving her single status permanently behind and marrying Sam Colton, a rather stoic detective on the Granite Gulch police force—and a man that Zoe had secretly been in love with since forever.

Not even Sam knew how she felt, and the librarian—a rather stereotypical career choice that suited the shy, blond-haired Zoe rather well—intended to keep it that way. She doubted Celia knew how she felt about Sam when her sister had asked her to be one of her bridesmaids—and Zoe knew she couldn’t turn her sister down without arousing suspicion. Besides, with both of their parents gone now, Celia was the only family that she had. So, much as it made her heart ache, she’d said yes.

The charade—pretending to be happy for Sam and Celia—was really killing her despite the brave front she was putting up. But this mysterious, cat-ate-the-canary look on Celia’s face had caused her to forget her own bruised heart and piqued her curiosity.

To be honest, it made her uneasy.

Celia had always been the devious one, but given her looks, she had always been able to get away with things others in her position wouldn’t have been able to.

“Watch and learn what?” Zoe finally asked when Celia said nothing further. Her sister just continued smirking at her reflection, as if some huge secret existed between her and the mirrored image.

“Why, how to trap a man of your choice, of course, little sister.”

Zoe hated that condescending tone. Celia used it often with her. “What are you talking about, Celia?” Zoe asked impatiently.

Celia turned away from the mirror to look at her. “Why, Sam, of course. I’m talking about Sam. My future beloved.” She laughed then, clearly delighted with herself.

Zoe moved in closer, discreetly sniffing the air between them. “Have you been drinking, Celia?”

“Not yet, but I will be soon,” Celia assured her with a wink. “That’s what got him, you know. Drinking. And now I’m going to be wrapping him around my little finger—him and that lovely Colton money of his.”

Zoe was beginning to get a very uneasy feeling in the pit of her stomach. Something was very off. “English, Celia, speak English.”

Celia blew out a breath, and shook her head. “You know, you really are no fun, Zoe. Lucky for you I’m in such a good mood.”

As if to underscore what she’d just said, Celia began softly humming the bridal march under her breath.

This one time, Zoe didn’t allow her sister to put her off. She intended to get to the bottom of this. Celia seemed too pleased with herself for it to be some inconsequential trivial thing.

“What did you do, Celia?” she asked in a firm, quiet voice, her eyes never leaving Celia’s.

Of the two of them, Celia was the vivacious one, the one who had always turned heads. The one who could have any boyfriend she wanted and who could talk her way out of anything. Celia was just that stunning.

As for her, Zoe knew she had to content herself to live in Celia’s shadow. But for the most part, she was okay with that. She loved her sister, even though at times that wasn’t nearly as easy as it should have been.

But what Celia was alluding to was sending an icy cold shiver down her spine and Zoe intended to find out just what her sister was talking about.

Now.

“You seem very pleased with yourself, Celia.” Flattery had always been the way to go with her sister. “Why don’t you tell me why?”

Celia looked as if she was just bursting with her accomplishment and utterly enthralled with what she’d managed to do. “Sam’s marrying me to give his baby a name.”

Zoe’s eyes opened so wide, they almost hurt. “What baby?”

“Exactly,” Celia countered smugly, her eyes dancing.

Zoe caught hold of her sister’s shoulder to keep her from turning back to the mirror. “Celia, stop speaking in riddles. You’re going to be marching down the aisle in a few minutes. Tell me what you’re talking about.”

Had she thought it would do any good, she would have issued an ultimatum to her sister—that she couldn’t leave the small room until she came clean. But Zoe knew Celia would only laugh at her and then it would get ugly from there. All she could hope for at this point was to wear Celia down.

“You do take the fun out of things, you know that, right?” Celia accused, annoyed. And then she laughed. She was far too pleased with herself to let the occasion be ruined by her annoying younger sister—who did, after all, have her uses. “Sam and I never even slept together.”

Zoe’s mouth dropped open. “I don’t understand. If you didn’t sleep together, then why would he think you’re carrying his baby?” Something was really, really wrong here.

Celia sighed. Spelling it out took a little of the drama, not to mention fun, out of it.

“Because one night, after he’d killed that awful criminal he’d been chasing, he came to my place just to unwind and talk. Seems killing doesn’t sit well with Sam,” she added with offhanded sarcasm. “Anyway, he was upset and I just kept plying him with whiskey until he totally passed out on my sofa. Then I messed up my place to make it look like we made wild, passionate love all over the living room. When he woke up, I shyly told him I’d never done ‘anything like that before.’”

That in itself was a lie, Zoe thought. Celia had slept with several men who she knew of in the past couple of years. There’d probably been more.

“Two months later, I came to his place and tearfully told him that I was pregnant with his baby.” Her grin all but split her face. “That’s when he offered to ‘do the right thing,’ just like I knew he would,” Celia said, absolutely pleased with herself. And then she spread her arms wide and declared, “And here we are.”

Stunned, Zoe didn’t even know where to begin to unravel all this. “Then you’re not—”

“Nope,” Celia responded. Zoe didn’t think it was humanly possible to be more pleased with herself than Celia was at this minute.

Didn’t Celia realize the dangerous game she was playing? We both know Sam wouldn’t put up with being lied to, Zoe thought.

She asked the first logical question that occurred to her. “What happens when the full nine months go by and there’s no baby?”

Celia waved away the very idea she was suggesting. “Oh, I’m not going to wait the full nine months. Sometime in the next month or so, I’ll tearfully tell him I lost our baby. Who knows?” She laughed with a careless half shrug. “He might even be relieved. And by then, it wouldn’t matter anyway—I’ll be married,” she concluded.

Since Zoe had dropped her hand from her shoulder, she turned away from her sister and went back to adjusting her veil and dress.

“I really do make a beautiful bride,” Celia complimented her reflection with feeling.

“You can’t get married to Sam under that pretext,” Zoe cried, staring at her in disbelief. “You have to tell him the truth.”

“No, I don’t.” And then Celia looked at her in the mirror, her face almost contorted with anger. “Oh, stop carrying on like this. After all, it’s not like Sam believes in love or marriage or even the almighty institution of family.” She paused to put another layer of lipstick on. “So marrying a woman he doesn’t love isn’t such a big deal.”

“And you’re okay with that?” Zoe asked incredulously. This had to be the lowest thing her sister had ever done, tricking someone into marrying her. “Marrying someone who isn’t in love with you? You’re really okay with that?”

Celia’s temper was just about at its end. “Of course I’m okay with that. Do you know how rich those Coltons are?”

“I don’t care if they’re richer then God,” Zoe exclaimed. “You can’t go through with this, Celia. It’s not right,” she insisted.

Celia tossed her head in that way of hers, the way that emulated queens ruling over small kingdoms.

“It’s more than ‘right,’ it’s perfect,” she countered, completely pleased with what she had brought about. “Now stop lecturing me like some dried-up old spinster with a house full of cats and get ready for the biggest bash this town has seen, bar none.”

Zoe pressed a hand against her stomach, which was suddenly twisting itself into a tight knot. She felt sick to the bottom of her stomach. She couldn’t be a party to something like this.

Celia, Zoe noted, had gone back into her own little world. Having eyes only for the image she beheld in the mirror and once again humming a tuneless “Here Comes the Bride,” Celia didn’t even seem to hear her slip out of the room.

Her stomach twisted harder, threatening to make her throw up. She had to find Sam, find him and tell him what Celia had just confessed to her. Sam couldn’t be allowed to go through with the ceremony. He’d be marrying Celia under false pretenses.

He’d be—

She came to an abrupt halt mentally. The thought of telling him about this elaborate scheme of her sister’s made her feel even sicker. Moreover, if she went through with it, it would easily brand her as a snitch. She was the blameless one here, but that wouldn’t be the way Sam would see it.

She had to try one last time to get Celia to call off the ceremony and tell Sam why on her own.

Squaring her shoulders, Zoe closed her eyes for a moment, trying to gather her courage together. She’d always just gone along with everything before, but this was the proverbial straw. It was just too much. She couldn’t allow this wedding to take place.

Though she dreaded butting heads with Celia, that was exactly what she was going to have to do.

Eyes opened again, Zoe marched back down the hallway to the bridal room. Knocking once, she didn’t wait for an invitation to enter.

Instead, she threw open the door, took one step into the room—

And started screaming.

Chapter 1

Zoe didn’t remember screaming.

Didn’t remember pursing her lips or emitting the loud, piercing sound less than a heartbeat after she’d opened the door.

Didn’t remember crossing over the threshold into the room, or bending over Celia, who was lying faceup on the floor.

The exquisite wedding dress her sister had taken such all-consuming delight in finding was now ruined. There were two glaring gunshot holes in her chest and her blood had soaked into the delicate white appliqué, all but drenching it. The pattern beneath it was completely obliterated.

The whole scene, which was whizzing by and moving in painfully slow motion at the same time, seemed totally surreal to Zoe, like some sort of an ill-conceived, macabre scene being played out from an old-fashioned B-grade horror movie about a rampaging slasher.

And if the dreadfulness of all this wasn’t enough, someone—the killer?—had gone on to draw a bizarre red bull’s-eye on Celia’s forehead. There was a single dot inside the circle, just off center, and whoever had drawn it had used some sort of a laundry marker, so the bull’s-eye stood out even more than it normally might have.

This can’t be real, it just can’t be real.

The desperate thought throbbed over and over again in Zoe’s head. She’d just left Celia, what, a couple of minutes ago? Five minutes, tops?

How could all this have happened in such a short period of time?

Who could have done this to her sister?

Why hadn’t she heard the gunshots when they were fired?

And for God’s sake, what was that awful noise she was hearing now?

Zoe tried to see where it was coming from, but for some reason, she just couldn’t seem to turn her head.

She couldn’t even move.

The noise was surrounding her. It sounded like wailing, or, more specifically, like keening. It approximated the sound that was heard when someone’s heart was breaking.

Zoe had no idea the noise she was attempting to place was coming from her.

* * *

“You realize this is probably going to be the happiest day of your life, you lucky son of a gun.” The declaration, uttered by one of the men waiting to be ushered down an aisle and into a pew, was directed at the bridegroom. “It’s all downhill from here,” the older man chuckled.

Detective Sam Colton kept the half smile he had been sporting for the past half hour pasted on his handsome, tanned face and merely nodded.

Words were not his strong suit and he couldn’t think of anything to say in response to that, other than the fact that if this was to be the happiest day of his life, it certainly didn’t put the bar up very high.

And as for it being “downhill from here,” well, he already knew that.

He was marrying Celia Robison, who some of the other detectives on the force had made very clear they regarded as being quite an eyeful, as well as a number of other clichéd descriptions.

None of that had entered into the reason why he was standing here, waiting for everyone to take their seats so the ceremony could begin. Waiting for all this to be over with.

He was marrying the woman for one reason and one reason only.

She was having his kid and he’d vowed a long time ago that if he ever did happen to have any kids—most likely by accident, which this was—he was sure as hell going to be there for him or her. He wanted this kid’s upbringing to be completely unlike his own. His childhood had involved his father killing his mother and then his siblings and him being scattered to the winds.

More specifically, they had all been sent off to different foster homes, but they might as well have been scattered to the winds for all the time they’d managed to spend together during all those awful, soul-scarring years.

No matter what it took, his kid wasn’t going to go through that, wasn’t going to feel abandoned, alone and ashamed because no one wanted him or her. If he had to marry Celia for that to happen, well, so be it. He’d managed to survive all this time—and had gotten as far as he had—by learning to roll with the punches. He’d roll with this one, too.

And in the end—

Sam’s head jerked up as everything within him went on high alert the second he heard it.

Part of his response was due to his police training, the rest had evolved based on pure survival instincts. The latter had been necessary in order to live through some of the foster home stays he’d been forced to endure.

“Did you hear something?” Ethan, one of his brothers—they had pretty much managed to find one another and reunite in these past few years—asked him.

By now, Sam had broken into a run and ran past him without responding.

“I’ll take that as a yes,” Ethan said, answering his own question and hurrying after Sam.

Once they reached the hall, it was obvious the sound was coming from the bridal room. It grew louder and more jarring the closer they got.

“It’s bad luck to see the bride before the wedding,” Ethan called after Sam. It wasn’t meant to stop his brother. Ethan was just stating a point of fact.

The next moment, as he came to a skidding halt behind Sam and took in the scene Sam was viewing, he muttered under his breath, “And this has got to qualify as the worst possible kind of luck a groom ever encountered.”

For an excruciating, shattering moment, Sam froze several steps away from Zoe. At first, he wasn’t even aware she was the one screaming.

He couldn’t take his eyes off Celia.

It wasn’t a sense of loss that was echoing through every fiber of his being. It was shock. Complete, total and utter shock, swaddled in disbelief. The shock was not tied to the fact that Celia was dead, but to the symbol he was looking at on her forehead.

He knew that symbol.

He recognized it from both photographs he’d seen originating from crime scenes, and from the nightmares that had haunted his earlier dreams.

That was the symbol his father, the infamous serial killer, Matthew Colton, used to draw on the foreheads of his victims.

But those victims were all men of a certain size and age who reminded Matthew of his older, far more successful brother, Big J. It had been Matthew’s way of doing away, by proxy, with a man whom he hated with every fiber of his being and whom he blamed for everything that had gone wrong in his life.

Matthew killed men, not women. The thought echoed over and over in Sam’s head. And while Matthew had killed his wife when she stumbled across his heinous secret, he hadn’t made a practice of killing young women in their twenties. If nothing else, it would have come to light by now if he had.

Besides, Matthew Colton had been behind bars for twenty years. He couldn’t have killed Celia.

Then who had?

This didn’t make any sense.

The detective in Sam wanted to focus exclusively on the murder—Celia was clearly already dead—of the woman whom he would have married in ten minutes. The human side of him that was struggling to resurface after being buried for more than twenty years felt obligated to offer some sort of comfort to Celia’s sister.

Zoe looked as if she was bordering on going into shock—if she wasn’t already there.

“Zoe—” Sam began, then fell silent, at a loss as to what to say next.

But he didn’t have to talk. The moment he said her name, she turned toward him. He saw the tears flowing from her eyes and the stricken look on her face just before she collapsed into his arms.

He barely caught her in time.

Sam held on to her awkwardly, as if he felt that making any sort of contact would wind up cracking his carefully built up, impenetrable walls.

“She’s dead,” Zoe sobbed. “I was just in here and now Celia’s dead. Why did I leave her? She’d still be alive if I hadn’t left the room. Oh, God, why didn’t I stay?” she sobbed.

Sam looked over her head helplessly toward Ethan. He knew what to do at a crime scene, knew how to defend himself against a killer and knew how to handle himself in all the steps between. But when it came to dealing with something like someone else’s grief, or a woman’s tears, he hadn’t a clue.

Completely at a loss, he looked toward his older brother for help.

Ethan picked up his cue effortlessly. “Why don’t you come outside, Zoe, get some air?” he suggested gently, trying to take hold of Zoe’s arm. He was ready to lead her out of the room.

But Zoe surprised even herself and remained firm. She shook her head adamantly from side to side.

“No, I can’t leave, I can’t leave Celia,” she insisted, looking down at her sister’s prone body.

Sam had already felt for the pulse he knew was no longer there. Celia was gone. Whoever had fired the shots knew exactly where to aim.

Rising to his feet, Sam took a firm hold of Zoe’s arm. “You can’t do her any good anymore, Zoe. Celia’s dead.”

“But why? Who?” Zoe cried, looking at Sam through fresh tears.

Her last thoughts of Celia had been angry ones. Her last words had been condemning ones.

How was she supposed to live with that now?

The guilt of that—and of leaving Celia alone to fall prey to her killer in the first place—had already begun to eat away at her.

“Those are my questions exactly,” Sam replied evenly. There wasn’t a shred of emotion evident in his tone as he asked her pointedly, “What can you tell me?”

“Sam, don’t you think now isn’t the time—” Ethan began, trying to get Sam to treat Zoe with a little more compassion. Ethan’s question indicated he thought the victim’s sister looked as if she was a hair’s breadth away from coming unglued. Asking her questions right now might just push the poor woman over the line.

But Sam apparently didn’t see it that way.

“Now is exactly the time,” Sam emphasized, looking at Ethan. “While it’s all still fresh in her mind.” And then he turned back to Zoe. “Zoe?” he asked, looking at her pointedly. “Did you see anyone walk into Celia’s room after you left her?”

Zoe shook her head, wisps of blond hair coming undone and falling about her face and neck. “No,” she responded hesitantly. “I don’t think so...”

“You don’t think so?” Sam demanded, stretching out the key word and making it all sound almost like an accusation.

It only caused Zoe to look even more bewildered and at a loss.