Second Chance Colton

Praise for Marie Ferrarella

“Expert storytelling moves the book along at a steady pace. A solidly crafted plot makes it quite entertaining.”

—RT Book Reviews on Cavanaugh Fortune

“A joy to read”

—RT Book Reviews on Christmas Cowboy Duet

“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

* * *

Be sure to check out the next books in

The Coltons of Oklahoma series.

The Coltons of Oklahoma: Family secrets always find a way to resurface …

Second Chance

Colton

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.

To Carly Silver

and

Brave New Frontiers

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

Epilogue

Extract

Copyright

Prologue

There was a time when he loved coming up to this ranch. Loved riding through its fields, getting lost in its acreage.

Right now, that time seemed as if it were a million years ago. Back then he’d been a boy and this had been his ranch.

Well, his and his family’s, Ryan Colton amended silently.

Back then, the only crimes, large or small, harmless or serious, had all been made-up, part of the make-believe games he, his brothers Jack, Eric and Brett, as well as his half brother, Daniel, and his baby sister, Greta, would play.

Playing had been serious business back then.

He wished for a moment that he could go back to that point in time. Back to when innocence had been a major player in all their lives.

But a lot of things had happened since then. Jack had gotten married, become a father and then gotten divorced before he finally got it right and found Tracy. Eric had left the ranch to become a trauma surgeon at Tulsa General Hospital, where he had met Kara, the love of his life. Daniel, along with his wife Megan, and Brett and his wife, Hannah, were still here on the ranch, along with Jack, but Daniel and Brett had ideas about managing the ranch that differed from the direction that Jack had initially wanted to take. All three were currently trying to iron things out rather than clashing over methods the way they had once done.

And Greta, well, Greta was Greta. Her gift for training horses took her away from the ranch a great deal more than it once had. These days found her in Oklahoma City more than here because of her engagement to Mark Stanton. But even when she was gone, her presence seemed to just ooze out of the very shadows, as if unconsciously reminding the others that she, too, was a Colton and every bit as much a part of this ranch as they were.

As for him, well, he had gone into the Marines in search of himself. He came back still looking, except now he did it as a homicide detective with the Tulsa police department.

And it was in that capacity, as a police detective rather than a Colton sibling, that he was here now, standing in one of the Lucky C’s smaller stables, staring at a broken windowpane with blood smeared on the jagged edges.

Whose blood was it and why had they broken in? Other than defacing some of the property, he saw no reason for this. Nothing seemed to have been taken.

But it was obvious that something sinister was going on here at the Lucky C—something that seemed to call the ranch’s very name into question.

This wasn’t the first time he’d been called up to the ranch to investigate a sinister occurrence. In the past few months there had been a series of “mishaps,” for lack of a better word, Ryan thought darkly as he methodically examined the crime scene.

There’d been the fire that’d started up for no apparent reason—no faulty wiring, no carelessly discarded matches or cigarette butts—and several wanton, senseless acts of vandalism. And there was that break-in that had occurred just the other day, also with no particular rhyme or reason to it.

And then there had been that initial break-in at the main house, shortly after Greta’s engagement party, that had been the start of it all. Someone had broken in and stolen some things—and beaten his mother in the process. Beaten her senseless. Jack had been the one to find her that day. Ryan didn’t want to think about what the possible consequences of that beating could have been if he hadn’t.

As it was, Abra Colton had remained in the hospital for some time, in a coma and all but lost to all of them. He’d thought his father would come completely apart during that time.

Mercifully, his mother was out of the hospital now and back home, but when he’d finally questioned her, she’d been unable to shed any real light on what had happened to provoke that attack—or, more important, the name of the person who had attacked her. Her testimony—when his mother was finally up to giving it—had been jumbled and vague.

And then she had just shut down, saying she didn’t want to “speak of it.” Afraid for her mental state, Ryan knew better than to try to push her. So he was resigned to waiting until such time as his mother was ready to “speak of it.”

He sighed, moving slowly about this latest crime scene. His mother’s attack—and the robbery—had been the beginning. These other senseless acts of destruction had followed, but they’d left no discernible pattern.

What he was now looking at was the most recent of several lesser acts of vandalism that had befallen the family. The Lucky C, it seemed, had found itself at the very center of some strange activity—activity that just reeked of malice.

The only thing Ryan knew with certainty was that the attack, the acts that had followed, weren’t random, the way he’d initially hoped. Someone definitely had it in for his family.

The questions that were on the table now were why and who?

He knew that he was too close to this. But who had more of an incentive to solve this thing than he did? Whoever had orchestrated this had already tried—unsuccessfully, thank God—to eliminate his mother, Abra, from the family tree. He didn’t want to hang back, spinning theories and coming up empty, potentially leaving the ranch and his family wide-open for another all-out assault.

Who knew, the next time it might not just be a broken window he’d find himself dealing with, but someone’s broken neck.

This had to stop before then.

Ryan frowned. He needed to put the call in for the crime scene unit to get out here. They had a sharper eye for this sort of thing than he did. With luck and their combined efforts, he could put an end to this, whatever “this” was.

With luck.

The very phrase mocked him, but he was determined to get to the bottom of all this.

And soon.

He had to.

Chapter 1

“You’re wrong.”

Ryan Colton’s booming, resonant voice filled every available nook and cranny within the small, albeit state-of-the-art, Tulsa PD forensic lab.

“No, I’m not.”

Susie Howard, the lab’s chief forensic expert, refused to be intimidated and stood her ground, even though a part of her could understand why the homicide detective before her had balked. After all, she’d just told him that the person who had broken into and apparently vandalized one of the ranch’s stables—and was possibly responsible for the numerous vandalisms that had occurred prior to this latest one—was his sister, Greta.

But like it or not, Susie thought, evidence was evidence.

Doing her best to sound professional and remain removed—no easy feat in this case—Susie stated the obvious. “You asked me to put a rush on the DNA evidence, so I did. The sample from the Lucky C’s crime scene went to the head of the line and that’s your answer,” she told him, tapping the name that had been generated by her trusty machine after the test had been completed. Greta Colton’s prints and DNA were in the system because of the nature of her work.

Frowning, Susie withdrew her well-manicured finger. “I can’t help it if you don’t like the answer, but that’s it. The machine doesn’t lie—even if you think that I do,” she concluded, her hazel eyes narrowing as she tossed her head. A blond tendril came loose from the tightly wound bun she wore at the back of her neck as she looked up at the six-foot-two detective.

Ryan struggled to keep his temper in check. It had grown very frayed lately. Yelling wasn’t going to get him anywhere, he knew that. Especially not with Susie.

But she just couldn’t be right.

She couldn’t be.

His words were carefully measured as he spoke. “I didn’t say you were lying, but there’s always the possibility that there’s a margin of error.”

Which was what he was pinning all his hopes on now. He knew Greta, had watched her grow up. There was no reason he could come up with for why she would do something like this.

“Run the test again,” Ryan instructed, his voice leaving no room for argument. “I don’t want to tell you your job—”

“Then don’t!” Susie retorted.

Ryan continued on the subject as if she hadn’t said a single word. “But there was enough blood on that broken window to take several swabs. Run a second sample. And a third if you need to,” he added before the forensic expert could protest.

“How many do you want me to run before you accept the results?” Susie challenged.

“Just run the test again,” Ryan ordered, doing his best to remain removed from the discussion.

Fat chance of that. The woman who had just told him that the blood belonged to his sister, Greta, was the same woman he had once been seriously involved with. The same woman, after their relationship had become serious, he had deliberately cut off all ties with.

He’d been a Marine back then, home on leave, when their paths had first crossed. They had hit it off instantly—hot and heavy, and very, very serious. He spent every moment he could with her, and she with him. Neither of their families knew about their relationship because they never made time for anyone else. It was as if somehow, subconsciously, they both understood that they were on a timetable. When he received word that he was being deployed overseas again, Susie had naturally been upset, but she’d promised to wait for him no matter how long it took.

That had been the problem. The burden of having someone waiting for him, loving him and praying for his safe return, was just too much for him to carry into battle. The weight of that responsibility threatened to sap away his edge, to blur his focus, and survival depended heavily on focus.

Besides, if he didn’t make it back, he knew how that could affect the rest of Susie’s life—how it could destroy the rest of her life. He couldn’t do anything about the way his family reacted to news like that, but he could do something about Susie.

There was far too much guilt attached to their relationship for him, so he chose the simple way out. He broke things off between them—doing so in a letter rather than in person.

In effect, he had chosen the coward’s way out. He never found out how she felt about the breakup because Susie never wrote back. Eventually, he convinced himself that that was for the best and that this was the way things were meant to be. He was meant to be alone.

With that in mind, he struggled to move on, to move forward. After his honorable discharge, he wound up becoming a police detective. In the beginning, it all boiled down to a matter of putting one foot in front of the other. And somehow, while he wasn’t looking, six years managed to pass by.

He’d assumed he would never see Susie again. It got a little easier dealing with that with each year that went by.

The sight of Susie walking down the hall at the Tulsa police department one morning four years ago had completely knocked the air right out of him. But after a few seconds, he’d recovered and managed to push on.

For the past four years, they had politely but determinedly ignored one another, pretending not to be aware of the other person’s existence whenever they found themselves in the same general vicinity. His cases were such that he found he didn’t need any help from the forensic department.

But now, with the vandalism at the Lucky C amped up to a dangerous degree, Ryan resigned himself to the fact that he needed her help. Needed her training and her lab to help him solve this all-too-personal case he had taken on before things went from bad to fatal.

And now the attractive blonde who still sometimes turned up in his dreams had given him an answer that had all but left him numb and speechless. Was this her way of getting even with him for breaking up with her?

No, whatever else he might feel about Susie Howard, he knew that she had a great deal of integrity. He was allowing his imagination to run away with him, something that didn’t happen very often. He would be the first to admit that the situation had made him desperate.

He forced himself to remember that Susie wasn’t the kind of person who would let her feelings get in the way of her work—and she certainly wasn’t the type to frame an innocent person, no matter how much she might want to because she was in effect jilted by that person’s older brother.

That wasn’t the way Susie operated. Her sense of honor was something that he’d found admirable about her all those years ago.

Since he knew that Susie wasn’t responsible for the results that were damning his sister, that left Ryan clinging to the only possible excuse he had left—that somehow, the periodically calibrated forensic equipment had malfunctioned.

Susie looked as if she was going to continue staunchly refusing to rerun the test. He had to get her to reverse that position.

“Do it for me,” he requested, his voice as devoid of emotion as he could possibly render it. “Run the test again.”

“Oh, well, if it’s for you, sure, I’ll run it again.” There was more than a touch of sarcasm in Susie’s voice. “And if it wasn’t for you, I’d still run the test again, just because there seems to be some sort of doubt involved here,” she went on to add icily. “I can see why finding out that your sister vandalized the family stables might be upsetting to you, so yes, I’ll run the test again,” she informed him coldly. “Now, if you don’t mind getting out of my lab, I’ll get started on that second test.”

She turned her back on him, pretending that he was already gone.

She knew he wasn’t because she could see his distorted reflection on the surface of her mass spectrometer. The machine was facing her. Her parting words to Ryan were “I’ll have someone call you with the results once they’re in.”

When Ryan’s reflection continued to remain exactly where it was, she asked in as disinterested a voice as she could summon, “Is there anything else?”

This had to be said. He knew that. If the air wasn’t cleared between them, then she might be sorely tempted not to do her best job. He felt confident she wouldn’t manufacture evidence, but he wasn’t so sure that she’d bring her A game to the case.

“Yes,” he said after a long moment, addressing the words to the back of Susie’s head since she wasn’t turning around again, “there’s something else. I want to apologize for treating you so badly when I broke it off between us. But I did it for you, for your own good.”

She almost swung around then, almost fired at him with both barrels, calling him an idiot and a fool—and a liar. Calling him an egotist for using that pathetic excuse when the real reason he had pulled his emotional vanishing act on her was because he’d obviously been afraid of commitment.

Any first-year psychology student would have been able to tell him that.

But she didn’t swing around, didn’t give Ryan a tongue-lashing and didn’t tell him exactly what she thought. What would be the point? He had his lie, which he was holding on to for dear life, and she had moved on.

Or told herself she had.

So she remained facing her workbench, acting as if Ryan hadn’t said a single word to her about their past or its abrupt ending.

“I’ll have someone call you the minute the second results are in,” she repeated.

This time, she saw his reflection retreat and then disappear.

Heard the door to the lab close again.

Only then did she turn around on her stool. “You jerk,” Susie murmured, staring at the closed door. Her voice grew louder, more heated with every word she uttered. “You big, self-centered, blind, stupid, stupid jerk.”

“Two degrees, six years in college and that’s the best you can come up with?” Harold Gould marveled as the tall, thin lab assistant stepped out from the computer tech area where he had been working.

His white lab coat hung like a bland curtain about his all but emaciated frame, giving the impression that it would begin flapping wildly about that same frame at the first sign of a breeze.

Startled, Susie’s eyes met those of her junior assistant, who was also a lab intern. The brown eyes continued looking back at her, the assistant never flinching.

“I didn’t know anyone else was here,” Susie told the intern.

“Obviously. When I saw him walk in I was going to clear my throat in case something private was going to be said. But Colton started talking right away and it sounded kind of personal from the get-go.” The look he gave her was sympathetic. “I didn’t want to embarrass you.”

“You just wanted to eavesdrop, hoping to score some juicy gossip,” Susie countered.

She knew how the man operated. Harold Gould knew more about what was going on in the precinct after being here for a little more than three months than some of the twenty-year veterans did. It wasn’t only lab procedures that he absorbed faster than a sponge.

The painfully thin shoulders rose and fell quickly, indicating that Harold had no intention of even attempting to contest her take on the situation. They both knew he enjoyed being a font of information, both technical and private.

“Yeah, well, there’s that, too,” he agreed, and then he tried to set her mind at ease. “Don’t worry, I don’t have any time to talk to anyone so this isn’t going into the rumor mill. And besides, I might be had for a song when it comes to certain things, but don’t ever doubt my loyalty.”

She liked Harold and was fairly certain that his heart was in the right place. But she’d paid the price for blind faith before and that had made her leery. Harold could just be offering her pretty words to distract her, Susie thought. “If it does hit the rumor mill, I’ll know who to come after.”

A small, amused smile played across all but nonexistent lips. “Should I be shaking in my shoes now—or wait until later?” he asked her.

“Later,” she told him. “We have work to do now.” She glanced again at the closed door. “I’m going to have you run the DNA test on the blood this time.”

“Really run the test, or...?” He raised one eyebrow, leaving the rest of the sentence unspoken but definitely understood.

Susie wanted to make one thing perfectly clear even as she cut the intern some slack because he was, after all, still relatively new.

“We don’t do ‘or’ here, Harold. We don’t even think about ‘or.’ Just one tiny instance—or even the hint of that kind of impropriety—and everything we’ve ever done here is going to be viewed as suspect and called into question. The amount of work that would be generated by something like that would be astronomical. Have I made that clear enough for you?”

She didn’t want to come off as sounding belligerent, but there should be no question about how procedures were conducted.

“Just kidding, boss lady,” Harold told her, raising his hands as a sign of surrender.

“I know. But it doesn’t hurt to reiterate how we do things out loud every so often so that we don’t ever lose sight of our function here. Because it only has to happen once and suddenly, we’ll get our walking papers and be out on the street.”

“Understood,” Harold assured her. “But even so, you could stand to improve your vocabulary,” he told her. “I could work up a whole host of multiple-syllable expletives you could hurl at yon studly homicide detective the next time your paths cross. You don’t want to be caught unarmed, do you? Or worse, tongue-tied?” he concluded, pretending to shiver at the very thought of that happening.

“You miss the salient point. I don’t want our paths crossing, period,” she said, getting to the heart of the matter.

“For that even to be a remote possibility at this police precinct, one of you is going to have to put in for a transfer. Like, to a different city.” Harold’s shallow complexion seemed to brighten instantly as he thought over possibilities. “Do I get a vote as to which one of you should go?”

She wasn’t about to feed the intern any more straight lines. Given half a chance, the man could go on talking for hours, like a windup toy whose spring had somehow malfunctioned and while she liked him and felt he did have a great deal of potential, she definitely didn’t want to encourage him, especially not when there was work to do.

“Just do the test, Harold,” Susie requested.

The lab intern saluted her comically as he said, “I hear and obey, my liege.”

Susie rolled her eyes as she got back to her work.

* * *

Susie couldn’t be right, Ryan stubbornly thought as he got back into his car. Starting it up, he pulled out of his parking spot, turned the sedan around and headed back to the Lucky C.

The forensic team, obviously, had come and gone. They had a reputation for being very thorough. Although he had been the one to initially call them in to see if he had missed something, he wanted to go back and go over the latest crime scene one more time to see if perhaps they had missed something this time around.

It was worth a shot. What did he have to lose?

Especially when he stood to gain so much more if he was right and Susie wasn’t.

What he wanted to do with this latest return trip to the Lucky C was find something that would negate what Susie was claiming: that that was Greta’s blood at the crime scene. That it was Greta’s blood that was all over the jagged edges of the broken window.