Her business is finding criminals…

But can she risk falling for a fugitive?

Capturing Ace Colton is the solution to bounty hunter Sierra Madden’s troubles. The bounty will pay off the vicious loan shark whose goons are after her. Too cynical to buy Ace’s protestations of innocence, Sierra tamps down her growing attraction. But when she’s the ultimate target, she might be forced to rely on the absolute last person she should trust.

The Texas-based author of more than thirty novels and novellas, COLLEEN THOMPSON is a former teacher with a passion for reading, hiking, kayaking and the last-chance rescue dogs she and her husband have welcomed into their home. With a National Readers’ Choice Award and multiple nominations for the RITA® Award, she has also appeared on the Amazon, BookScan and Barnes & Noble bestseller lists. Visit her online at www.colleen-thompson.com

Also by Colleen Thompson

Passion to Protect

The Colton Heir

Lone Star Redemption

Lone Star Survivor

Deadly Texas Summer

Rescuing the Bride

Lethal Lessons

Capturing the Commando

Discover more at millsandboon.co.uk

Hunting the Colton Fugitive

Colleen Thompson

www.millsandboon.co.uk

ISBN: 978-0-008-90534-7

HUNTING THE COLTON FUGITIVE

© 2020 Harlequin Books S.A.

Published in Great Britain 2020

by Mills & Boon, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF

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To the fellow authors I’ve met along the way,

thank you for all you do to offer inspiration,

encouragement and a pathway through

the darkest thickets.

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

About the Author

Booklist

Title Page

Copyright

Note to Readers

Dedication

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

About the Publisher

Chapter 1

Sitting at the built-in computer nook of a bunker hidden in the secluded foothills surrounding Mustang Valley, Ace Colton had long since lost track of whether it was day or night. With little access to natural light and zero human contact, he’d spent much of the past weeks obsessively sifting through news reports while considering the evidence against him. Trying to make sense of the so-called witness to his confession, the planted weapon and the way the solid and successful life he’d so long taken for granted had fallen to pieces since January.

No, fallen was the wrong word. That implied something that had simply happened on its own, for no rhyme or reason. It was obvious by this point that his life as Payne Colton’s eldest son, the hardworking and successful CEO of a billion-dollar corporation, Colton Oil, had been deliberately blown to pieces. Stolen from him by whomever had sent out that email telling every other member of the board, his family, that he was, in fact, no real Colton, but an imposter foisted off on them at birth.

Then, before the sickening shock of it, the sense of isolation and displacement, could begin to settle, his job was ripped away, too, though he’d done absolutely nothing wrong—known nothing of any scheme involving his being switched at birth.

He would never forget the searing pain of hearing his father, the man he loved and trusted, tell him that only a real Colton was fit to lead the company. Afterward, harsh words had flown between them, words Ace would regret forever. For as understandable as his hurt and fury might have been, he’d been overheard, making him the prime suspect later when his father had been found lying on his office floor, barely breathing, with two bullets in him.

Is he breathing still? When Ace had fled after a so-called witness had implicated him, and a gun linked to the shooting was found beneath a floorboard inside Ace’s own condo, the man he would always think of as his real father had still been in a coma, in critical condition. As badly as Payne had hurt Ace by acting as if, without a genetic link, none of his business acumen, hard work, or the relationships he’d spent a lifetime building made one damned bit of difference, he couldn’t hang around his condo waiting to be arrested, even though he knew he’d let down the people who cared for him by going into hiding.

But neither could he actually leave the area, not without doing whatever he could to track down the real shooter, protect his family from further harm, and find some way to get his life back on track, even if he had to do it using his laptop to connect to the untraceable virtual private network that was his sole link to the outside world. He thanked his lucky stars that he’d purchased this plot of land several years ago from the cash-strapped, out-of-state nieces of a former owner. Only after the property’s closing had Ace learned of the existence of a survival bunker from some old receipts and a set of long-forgotten plans found among a packet of yellowed paperwork he’d been given.

That long-ago investment, based on his vague instinct that the land, with its scenic views of the valley below, might someday prove a good place to build vacation rental cabins, had paid off in spades, a gift from his younger self to the desperate fugitive Ace had become. A gift he’d carefully retrofitted and provisioned as best he could in the weeks before it became apparent that he would soon be taken into custody.

Within the tomblike confines of the bunker, he searched his online sources for any relevant local updates from the Mustang Valley area, from the obituary he dreaded to the longed-for news that his name had been cleared. Finding neither, he began skimming other headlines, only to nearly jump out of his skin when an alarm wailed over speakers placed throughout the bunker.

Whoop! Whoop! Whoop!

The security cameras he had installed above-ground set off a siren that echoed throughout the confined space, alerting him to the presence of an intruder.

Heart thrashing against his rib cage, Ace leaped to his feet before typing in the code to access the hidden cameras. As his screen divided into six sections, a glimpse of swift movement and a clearly human outline on the lower right panel, near the entrance hatch, made his gut clench, though the lighting was too dim to make out any details.

There was a bright flash of light and then a muffled boom. Carefully hung tools fell from the walls of the bunker as Ace’s panic spiraled.

Was it the police, detonating the hatch and coming to arrest him? Surely not, he thought, reasoning that law enforcement, if they found him, would arrive en masse rather than what had appeared to be a solitary presence. His instincts told him it was far more likely that this was the same person who’d made the attempt on his father’s life and set him up to take the fall. Had the perpetrator come to bring him in—or to shoot him down, too?

Sweating bullets, Ace went for the handgun he’d procured before going into hiding and wondered if he had it in him to pull the trigger. With only one way in and out of the bunker, there was no avenue to flee, and locking the inner submarine-style door would only give his unwanted guest time to gather reinforcements—or trigger yet another blast.

Something clattered from the hatchway. Ace tensed, his stomach going icy cold.

Reaching above his head, he flicked off the LED lights that would expose him when the interior door opened. After weeks of solitude in the confined space, he knew the bunker’s every twist and turn by heart—the only real advantage he had against a well-prepared intruder.

Pushing himself back into the alcove adjacent to the opening, he waited in pitch darkness, feeling more like a trapped feral animal, teeth bared and claws ready, than the polished, urbane and occasionally ruthless corporate warrior he’d been for so long.

Against the shallow scrape of his own breath, he heard the turning of the door’s mechanism, followed by the whoosh of its hydraulics. Dim light flickered; then came a shadow, followed by a puff of air cooler than the scrubbed bunker atmosphere he had been breathing. Smelling of leaves and needles, earth and fresh greenery, it spoke of the foothills, nighttime—and an imminent threat to his freedom or his life.

With a wordless shout that echoed through the bunker, he jumped out and wrapped his arms around what he swiftly realized was a smaller person, twisting his body to slam his unwelcome guest headfirst into the bulkhead. There was a thud and a cry of alarm—higher pitched than he expected. An instant later the intruder twisted free, the silky sweep of long hair brushing across his face and filling his nostrils with a clean, light scent that triggered a memory of one of his sisters’ shampoos.

“Ainsley?” He drew back reflexively, wonder vying with relief to imagine his attorney sibling tracking him here somehow. Guilt came next as he recalled how he’d thanked her for her efforts to help him by disappearing on her, and horror at how hard he’d slammed her into the bunker’s unyielding steel framing. “Ainsley, are you all right? I’m so sorry if I hurt—”

Out of the darkness, something came at him like a guided missile, a blow that struck his temple hard enough to knock him off his feet.

Head swirling on a raft of nausea, he found himself on his hands and knees a moment later, feeling for the pistol, which had gone flying from his hands. A second click preceded the flashlight’s beam, and the whole bunker was once more flooded with bright light.

Before his eyes could adjust, the intruder sent his gun spinning out of reach with a kick. A no-nonsense yet decidedly feminine voice ordered, “On your feet, right now. Keep your hands where I can see them.”

The speaker was not his little sister but a small and slender woman, maybe early thirties, whom he had never seen in his life. With her wavy, red-blond hair pushed back behind squared shoulders, she was aiming an intense green-eyed gaze, along with the business end of her 9mm automatic, directly at him.

“I said, on your feet—now,” she repeated, her face as softly feminine as her voice was firm. “That is, if you aren’t still seeing stars from that left cross.”

“That was you that hit me?” He staggered a little as dizziness washed over him when he rose. “With your actual fist?”

Sure, he’d dropped his guard when he’d mistakenly imagined he had body-slammed his little sister, but this woman, who couldn’t be more than five-four and maybe one-fifteen soaking wet, had damned near knocked him out with a single blow. “Tell me you clocked me with that gun or something. Leave a man a little pride, at least.”

“Come to think of it—” eyeing him critically, she waved the weapon to direct him farther inside the tube-shaped bunker “—maybe you ought to sit down. That punch to the head has you talking nonsense.”

As he moved in the direction she indicated, she bent to sweep up his pistol with her free hand before dropping it into a side pocket of her dark gray tactical pants, her movement so deft and assured that he knew immediately he was dealing with a well-trained professional.

There goes my last chance at freedom, he realized, his heart sinking. Unless he started talking fast.

“Who the hell are you,” he demanded, “and what do you want with me?”

“Relax and take a load off,” she suggested, gesturing toward a built-in leather sofa across the narrow corridor.

With little choice, he complied, while his captor stood across from him, her back pressed against the command center’s chair behind her.

“Nice little hideaway you’ve got down here,” she said, waving to indicate the pristine white walls and birch shelving, lined with boxed supplies that could easily stretch to last him for another six months. “Lucky thing for me your former real estate agent is the talkative sort. Very eager to chat about how understanding you were over the irregularities with the paperwork—including this little unpermitted building project that you could’ve thrown a fit over since it had never been inspected.”

“I couldn’t see much point of causing those two young women any grief over some old mothballed bunker I never had any intention of using,” Ace said, shaking his head. “And you actually looked up my real estate agent?”

She smiled. “In my experience, it’s a rare runner who strays too far from his home turf. Especially one with the kind of family ties that you have…and properties to spare.”

“In your experience as what?” he asked, more certain than ever than the armed intruder who’d packed such a wallop wasn’t law enforcement, since she hadn’t identified herself as such. “The woman who’s come here to kill me?”

She shook her head and made a scoffing sound. “I’m not here to kill you, Colton. I’ve come to escort you to the Mustang Valley PD so I can collect the bounty I’ve been promised.”

Sierra Madden tensed as Ace Colton leaned toward her, a lump rising where she’d slugged him and his dark brown eyes boring uncomfortably into hers.

“Start explaining, right now,” he ordered, looking better than he had any right to, considering his month-long confinement.

The neatly groomed light brown hair in his corporate headshots had given way to a somewhat longer, more unruly look. In place of the expensive suit and silk tie, he now wore a tight black T-shirt with worn jeans molded to a trim, athletic body. Though the bulge of his biceps made her suspect he’d been working off some of his frustrations with free weights, he was a good deal leaner than he’d been in photos from his CEO days. A spiky layer of stubble, frosted with a hint of silver at his jawline, gave him an edgy look of the sort that she’d always been drawn to…sometimes to her detriment.

Some men dressed up nicely, she knew, but leave it to her to come up with one whose appearance had been improved by life on the lam. Not that it matters. Ace Colton’s nothing to me but the fat paycheck I need to buy my way out of big trouble.

“First off, I need to know exactly who you are,” he added, “and who it was that put you on my trail.”

She chuffed a laugh. “You know, you’re awfully demanding for a guy with a goose egg on his head and a gun pointed at him. Or is arrogance just an occupational hazard for you CEO types?”

“Ex-CEO,” he said, sounding irritated, “as if you haven’t made it crystal clear already you’ve done your homework on my background. Which gives you a distinct advantage over me.”

“I happen to like advantages. But then again, who doesn’t?”

“Come on. A name, at least? What’s that going to cost you?”

She shrugged. “Fine, then. I’m Sierra Madden.”

“And you must be a bounty hunter, right? But how can that be? I haven’t been arrested, so there’s no bail bond for me to have skipped out on. What authority do you even have to—”

“The way I figure it, I’m aiming all the authority I need at you right now.” She jerked her gun a smidgeon higher. “But you’re right. This isn’t usually the way I work. And in your case, there’s no need to think of me as the enemy. I’m here to help you, Asa.”

“It’s Ace,” he corrected—unnecessarily, since she knew full well from her research that no one ever called him by his given name. “And I don’t know which part of that story is the most convincing, the part where you break in here aiming a gun at me or maybe it’s when you said you were about to turn me in to the police to be arrested.”

Frowning, Sierra reminded herself that Ace Colton was, for her, a means to an end. She didn’t have to like him—plus, he was wanted for attempted murder. “I’ve been hired by a member of your family interested in bringing you home so the best possible defense can be arranged for the pending charges.”

“I’ve been through all that with my sister.” He grimaced as if the memory pained him. “I know Ainsley means well, but with someone intent on setting me up to take the fall for our father’s shooting—”

“Ainsley?” Sierra shook her head. “It wasn’t her who sent me, or any of your siblings. It was your stepmother.”

“My stepmother? You can’t mean Genevieve? Why would she, when she thinks I’ve shot her husband?”

“No, not your father’s current wife. The other one. Selina Barnes Colton was the woman who—”

“Selina? Are you out of your mind?” Ace erupted, rocketing to his feet so quickly that Sierra shrank back, abruptly reassessing her earlier assumptions about the soft, rich man she’d thought to find here, a previously pampered forty-year-old heir who’d been unable to accept the abruptness of his change in status. “That woman doesn’t want to help me. She’s never wanted anything except to feather her own nest and—Hell, for all I know, she’s the one who shot my father and tried to pin it on me in the first place.”

“Sit down right now,” Sierra ordered, pointing the gun squarely at his chest. “Or so help me, I will make your stepmother very sorry that she didn’t specify that I had to return you in one piece to collect the bounty.”

“She’d throw you a party if you shot me. Believe me, from the moment she weaseled her way into the family, that woman has never, for a single moment, had anyone’s best interests but her own in mind.” Ace shook his head, his eyes darkening with fury. “Marrying my dad after my mother died and playing our stepmother for a hot five minutes was only a means to an end for her and nothing more.”

“So she was never the maternal type? That’s what you’re saying?”

Ace scoffed and waved the question off, bitterness twisting his expression. “She might’ve had my father fooled at one time—and for all I know, she still has something on him, considering how she’s managed to hold on to her job at Colton Oil and the nice house he built for her on ranch property—but believe me, she’s not fooling anybody else.”

Sierra caught her breath, recalling her own suspicions. The rational, rehearsed-sounding explanations the polished businesswoman had given, along with the outsized bounty Selina had offered, hadn’t jibed with the raw avarice gleaming in the cool depths of her eyes.

Ordinarily, Sierra would have asked more questions. Or even trusted her instincts and walked away from the highly irregular agreement. But the truth was, she’d been desperate, more than desperate, and the deal, coming when it had, had seemed like a miracle from heaven. Or from whatever Great Beyond accepted broken-down gambling addicts like her father.

“She’s never given a damn about any of my father’s children,” Ace said. “For her, it’s always been about getting her hooks into the family fortune. And I promise you, whatever she’s paying you to do is part of the next round in her game plan, because she has to know that we’ll toss her off the property in a minute if my father—if he—”

He stopped himself abruptly, his forehead creasing with worry. Sinking back down to the sofa, he asked quietly, “Tell me I haven’t missed something while I’ve been stuck here, that my father hasn’t—that he isn’t worse. Or even—I keep checking online when I’m able, but I know that sometimes, in cases like these, the hospitals and police withhold information.”

“As far as I know,” she said, “there’s been no change in his condition.”

He sighed, some of the tension draining from his face. “Thank God for that.”

“I suppose you’re sorry then, about what happened,” she said, reminded of how many times she’d heard such sentiments from killers in the past. Maybe, she supposed, they even meant what they were saying. But in her world decent people didn’t shoot or stab or strangle the people they loved when they got angry. They didn’t leave them grievously wounded while they fled like cowards from the consequence of their actions.

“Of course I’m sorry someone did this to him. Did this to all of us,” Ace blurted, his deep voice shaking with emotion. “I didn’t hurt my father. I never…no matter how upset we both were—you have to believe me.”

She shrugged a shoulder. “No offense, Ace, but I’m not really the person you need to waste your breath convincing. You’ll get an attorney, I imagine a first-rate one with all your money, and he or she will—”

“I love my dad,” he insisted, his dark gaze never wavering. “I always will, and he’ll always be the man I think of, the ideal I’d want to emulate, should I ever get the chance to be a father.”

Though she was well aware that Payne Colton wasn’t Ace’s biological father, it struck her that Ace’s words still resonated in a way that his stepmother’s hadn’t. But Sierra had run across plenty of people who were perfectly capable of harming a family member and then pretending—even to themselves—that it had never happened. Or praying that the victim would pull through so the charges they themselves faced would be limited to assault rather than murder.

“You’ll get your chance later to explain all this,” she assured him, eager to move things along. Yet, she couldn’t stop thinking of how he’d said, should I ever get the chance to be a father. Her conscience prickled but didn’t stop her from reminding him, “I still have to take you in now.”

He shook his head. “You can’t. Don’t you understand? Selina only wants me dragged in to take the heat off her. Or she’s setting me up somehow. Probably planning some accident to take me out before I ever go to trial.”

“If that’s really the case,” Sierra assured him, “you’re better off in jail. I’ll see you get there safely.”

“I’m safer here, where I can keep working on finding the real shooter and figuring out exactly who’s behind all this.”

“I hate to break it to you, but that ship has sailed.” Sierra lifted her chin. “Even if I wanted to pretend I’d never seen you, when I take on a contract, I deliver.”

“If it’s professional pride,” Ace said, “what pride could there be in doing the bidding of a conniving schemer like Selina?”

“Listen, Colton, I’ve just met you. And even you have to admit, you’ve got a lot of very compelling reasons to lie your head off at this point.”

“Then pick up a damned phone. Ask anybody in the family. They’ll all tell you the same thing about that woman. She’s clearly up to something. And she means to destroy me, or maybe the whole family, to get it.”

Not my circus, not my monkeys, Sierra told herself, recalling one of her father’s favorite proverbs. No matter how compelling a case Ace Colton made, or how ridiculously hot he looked doing it, it didn’t change that fact.

But there was something in his expression—or maybe it was guilt over the secret she’d learned before coming to look for him, the secret she was keeping from him—that had her explaining, “It’s nothing personal, but you’re not the only one with father issues. And mine are about to get a whole lot messier if I don’t deliver you and collect the bounty Selina promised me tonight.”

“What could possibly be messier than having a framed man—or maybe even a dead one—on your conscience?”

She scowled, her stomach souring at the reminder of her most pressing problem.

“Losing a leg to my father’s loan shark,” she said bluntly, “all because he’s hell-bent on making an example out of me.”

As tough a customer as the bounty hunter holding him at gunpoint appeared to be, Ace couldn’t miss the flicker of fear in the depths of her green eyes warring with her apparent need to appear strong.

Yet, he sensed an opening, too, like a hairline fault in a rock face that would allow a skilled climber a toehold.

Praying that he wouldn’t plummet, he tried, “Your father’s loan shark? How’s that work?”

She tensed visibly, bristling at the question. “I don’t owe you some longwinded explanation. It’s enough that I tell you we’re going to—”

“You’re right.” He shrugged. “I don’t need a damned thing. But it looks to me like you could use to tell it. And why not to me? After all, who am I but some attempted murder suspect with a bounty on his head?”

Having said his piece, he fell silent, giving her the space to work it out for herself. If he failed, he had lost nothing. But if she opened up to him, he figured he might find some avenue to somehow talk his way out of this mess.

“You know, you’re not the only one who loves your old man,” she said accusingly before her voice went husky with emotion. “I loved mine, too, still do, God rest his stubborn soul. He taught me everything I know about the bounty hunting business, most of what I know about men. And everything I’ve learned about picking up on human weakness. The problem was, he was stone blind to his own.”

“We’ve all got our blind spots,” Ace said. He’d erupted in anger after his world had crumbled instead of using his head and working harder to figure out whatever angle the woman who’d apparently switched him at birth had been playing.

“Part of it was Vegas,” she continued, “that whole world where I grew up, and the cash, the flash and the high rollers he was always drawn to, especially after my mom left us. By the time I realized he was keeping everything afloat, even feeding the two of us, on borrowed money, he owed a small fortune. I did my best to help out, worked my tail off in the family business to pay down the debt, got him into a gambling rehab program, but it only got worse and worse until…”

Sighing heavily, she reached up to pinch the bridge of her nose, the gun drooping a little in her right hand.

Ace wondered if she might eventually drop her guard enough for him to turn the tables.

“For a while,” she continued, “it really seemed like things might work out. He was doing better. We were—until the cancer got bad.”

“I’m sorry,” he said reflexively, unable to keep his mind from going back, however briefly, to the hell of losing his mother when he and his siblings were just kids. Though Sierra was a woman grown, it sounded as if she had no other family, no one else at all, to lean on.

She nodded in reply. “The worse the news from his doctors, the more he needed an outlet for his stress—and the more convinced he became that he was on the brink of scoring that one big win that would finally turn everything around. It was so infuriating, listening to him claiming he was doing it for me when he was only making things worse.”

Ace told himself he’d been alone for too damned long, getting sucked into her story this way. “I totally get that. Ainsley and our siblings could never understand our father’s addiction to Selina. His refusal to banish her from our lives, no matter what she did.”

“By the time my father died,” Sierra continued, her gaze so distant that it made him wonder if she’d even heard him, “he owed doctors, the hospital—but the worst was the hundreds of thousands, with interest compounding daily, he had on the books of the most cutthroat loan shark in Nevada.”

“But those debts were your father’s,” Ace said, trying not to let her catch him watching her gun hand droop a little farther, “not yours.”

“Try telling Ice Veins that.”

“Ice Veins?” Ace shook his head. “You’re kidding. The name sounds like something out of some old gangster movie. With cases of machine guns and crates of bootleg whiskey.”

Sierra shrugged. “You don’t get a reputation like his by being subtle. Or reasonable, either. You would think he’d like to keep me in one piece just to keep his payments coming, but he took offense last month—extreme offense—when I refused to turn loose a bail jumper named Eddie Harris who happened to be his favorite nephew.”

“Maybe under the circumstances you should’ve considered—”

She shook her head, a hard, emerald fire sparking in her eyes as the gun twitched back to its full, upright position. “My dad might’ve owed the guy, but that doesn’t mean that Ice Veins owns me. And I’m not letting a homicide suspect, no matter who he is, walk for anybody. Especially not someone like Eddie, who’s been accused of other killings in the past.”

Ace’s heart fell. Because that was all he would ever be to the beautiful Sierra Madden. Another scumbag suspect to be handed over. Why would you even care what this woman thinks?

“Immediately after that,” she said, “Ice Veins called in the rest of my note, said I needed to pay off the final chunk by two days ago, or he was going to personally see to it that I came up a leg short.”

“A leg? He threatened to cut off your leg?”

“Smash it, sever it, shoot it… I didn’t ask for the specifics. All I know is I won’t be working, or making further payments, without two good legs to stand on. Which means I’m a dead woman if I can’t come up with the twenty-five thousand dollars that Selina promised me for bringing you back to your family.”

Twenty-five thousand dollars? Selina clearly wanted him back—and no doubt, locked up—in a big way, if she was willing to cough up that kind of cash. And it was crystal clear that the bounty hunter wasn’t about to—and couldn’t—set him free with her own health, possibly her life, hanging in the balance.

“So what if I told you,” he said, weighing the possibilities, “I’d be willing to pay you that same twenty-five grand. Get this gangster off your back forever, if you’ll only—”

“You have the money here?” she asked, the skin crinkling around her nose. “Just lying around this bunker?”

“Well, no,” he claimed. A knee-jerk reaction, when the truth was more complicated. And far too dangerous to share with a woman with a gun and such a pressing need. “Not exactly, but—”

“But nothing. I haven’t been in this business for a dozen years without having desperate fugitives try to buy me off before. I suppose you think I’m dumb enough to take a personal check?”

He made a scoffing sound, thinking quickly about how would be the best way to do this without guaranteeing that he turned his bunker hideaway into his tomb. Because he might feel for Sierra’s predicament, might even find her sexy, with those big green eyes and that tight little body that could so handily knock him on his ass, but he’d be a fool to trust the woman with his life.

“You can handle an online transfer, can’t you?” he asked. “I can’t access my accounts from here. We’ll need to get well away so I can use my cell without leading the authorities straight here.”

He’d been fantasizing for weeks about returning to the surface. Feeling the wind whispering against his skin, smelling the fresh scents of the underbrush and seeing the outlines of the foothills, along with the variegated greens of the foliage at this elevation. But he knew that the moment he powered it up again, his phone would ping the nearest cell towers. And surely the police would be working with his telecom provider, waiting to spring into action the moment they could get a bead on his location.

She looked doubtful. “I don’t know, Ace. If I’m seen anywhere with you and I don’t turn you in like I agreed to—”

“It’s not like I can afford to take that kind of a chance, either,” he said. “That’s why I took the precaution of stocking this place with some things I might need in case I had to disguise myself.”

“You sure you’re only a first-time fugitive?” Amusement quirked the corners of her mouth. “Because you’ve really done a first-rate job on your prepping.”

He snorted and shrugged. “It’s the CEO in me. I’ve always been a big believer in the value of insurance. Let’s see if I have anything here in my bag of tricks that might work as a disguise for you, too.”

Pulling a duffel from one of the boxes on the shelves, he reached to unzip it.

“Not so fast,” she warned. “Push that over to me first, will you? Slowly.”

Looking up at her, he said, “Listen, I can assure you that you’re holding the only gun I had with me in the bunker.”

Red-blond brows, a shade darker than her hair, rose. “Forgive me if I need to make sure you haven’t planted a little insurance elsewhere.”

As she squatted down and checked through the bag’s contents, he said, “If I give you the money for this loan shark, I’ll need your promise you won’t lead the police to my bunker’s entrance.”

Sierra pulled out a cowboy hat, followed by an oversize snap-buttoned shirt and a pair of Western boots. “And you’re willing to take me at my word on that?”

He offered a half smile. “If you won’t sell out your honor for a man like Ice Veins, I have some hope, maybe this much—” he pinched his fingers about a half inch apart “—that you won’t do a woman like Selina such a favor.”

“I’ll tell you what,” Sierra offered. “You drop that money into my account, and I’ll make myself scarce. I promise. I’ll take off for Vegas before sunup. And I won’t volunteer any help to the police with their investigation.”

“But if you’re brought in and questioned?”

She huffed out her disbelief. “You aren’t seriously asking me to outright lie to the cops for you? Come on, Colton. I’ve already told you what I will do. What I can do if I want to keep my license.”

He stared a challenge at her, certain that all he’d have to do was wait before his silence and the lure of desperately needed money would convince her to give up even more. It was a tactic that had worked for him more often than not during business negotiations.

But it was clear from Sierra’s expression that she wasn’t falling for it. Clear enough that he dropped the idea of sweetening the deal with an additional sum of money almost as quickly as it occurred.

“You’ve heard my terms.” She rose from her seat, the gun held firmly in her hand. “So are we still dealing? Or do we make the drive to the police station instead?”

He sighed, realizing that trusting in this deal—and whatever luck the universe might have on offer—remained his best shot to steer clear of whatever his loving stepmother was plotting. It was his best chance, too, to buy himself the time to figure out whether Selina might be somehow linked to the woman who had apparently switched him with the real Colton heir—or his father’s shooter.

“All right, then,” he agreed. “Let’s do this disguise thing.”

“Just don’t make any quick moves or do anything you haven’t vetted with me first,” Sierra warned him, “or your particular get-up may involve an eye patch and extra bandaging…”

Chapter 2

Having altered her appearance on many previous occasions, Sierra was quick to improvise. While he turned his back to make his own choices, she stripped off her gray fleece top, then pulled an oversize navy men’s work shirt from Ace’s bag of tricks over her tee.

After shoving the rolled sleeves up to her elbows, she tackled her long hair, twisting it into a long ponytail, which she tucked up beneath another duffel find, a tweed newsboy cap. Also large for her, the hat slanted jauntily, its short brim resting atop a pair of chunky, horn-rimmed glasses. To that, she added a distinctly teenage male slouch and the bored and sullen sneer that had made any number of jittery bail jumpers miss her among crowds before.

“Wow,” Ace said when he turned around a couple of minutes later. “If I didn’t know there was a good-looking woman underneath that…”

“And for a diamond cufflinks, silver-spoon type, you make a half-convincing cowboy,” she said, honestly assessing his new look, thanks to the black Stetson, Western shirt and boots and the red bandanna he’d tied around his neck. But then again, she reminded herself, he wasn’t biologically a Colton, so maybe this version was closer to the truth than either one of them imagined.

“I’ve got a fake beard and some spirit gum if you think that’ll help.”

Making a face, she shook her head. “Just keep your collar high and your hat low because if anybody gets close enough to look at either one of us too hard, this is gonna be a real short trip.”

Sierra couldn’t help noticing how nervous Ace looked as they emerged from the hatch that her charge had blown open earlier into a darkness brightened by the glow of a full moon. As he peered into the deepest shadows, he jerked his head toward the sound of an owl hooting and a soft wind rustling through the treetops.

“Relax, Ace,” she urged him, more concerned about his frame of mind than she was about running across anyone else on this isolated hillside. “I had every reason to make sure I wasn’t followed coming up here. We’re all alone, not a soul for miles. My car’s hidden just a couple hundred yards below.”

“Sure,” he said, his voice hoarse as he used some fallen branches in an attempt to disguise the now vulnerable entrance from other prying eyes, an entrance she’d had a devil of a time finding earlier, in spite of the rough map the real estate agent had sketched for her. But as he rose and walked beside her, their feet crunching on dried twigs and grasses, she could easily spot the tension in his movements, as if every muscle lay coiled, waiting to spring into action at the slightest sign of trouble…

Or was he waiting for his chance to get the drop on her?

Increasingly concerned that he might try something that would end up getting one or both of them hurt—or cost her her crucial payout—she began to wonder if sticking with Selina’s deal would prove the safer bet. “Maybe this offer of yours isn’t such a good idea,” she suggested as he lifted a pine bough and held it to let her duck under. “Twenty-five grand’s a lot of money just to delay a problem you’re going to have to deal with sooner or later anyway. And besides, if you really were right about your stepmother plotting something—”

“I’m willing to take my chances,” he said, his breath catching for a moment as he caught his first glimpse of the lights of town, many miles in the distance.

“I’d be just as happy solving my problem with her money as yours,” she admitted, reaching up to adjust her cap, which had slid down to obscure her vision. “Besides, you could hire a really good lawyer with that kind of—”

Returning his attention to her, he waved off her concern. “Lawyers and money I’ve got,” he said bitterly. “Money I’ve saved my whole life for the family I never took the time away from work to start. And now, for all I know, I’ll never get the chance to…”

“Ace…” Her heart twisted at the thought of the latest news from Mustang Valley. A personal matter and a secret that a complete stranger like her had no business sharing with the fugitive.

She weighed her options, struggling to balance the knowledge of the heinous crime this man stood accused of against the possibility that just maybe, telling him would ground him, giving him some reason to be careful. A reason that might help ensure her future, keeping her alive, as well…

Her gaze connected with his. A real connection that Ace felt running through him like a strong electric current. And in that moment he sensed, with a clarity unlike anything he’d experienced in his entire life, that there was something that she meant to tell him. Something that would fracture the plane of his life into two distinct parts: before and after.

“There’s no easy way to say this except to come right out and tell you,” she began, her voice vibrating with emotion. “You have a daughter. A daughter of your own who’s waiting patiently to meet you.”

“What? What the hell?” Adrenaline spilled through the floodgates, unleashing a throbbing in his chest, a burning tightness stretching over his skin. Followed by absolute fury that she would mess with him like this. “Why on earth would you tell a lie like that when you know damned well I’ve just lost any claim to all the family I ever had?”

“Whoa, whoa, cowboy,” she said, a glint of moonlight off the handgun’s metallic surface giving away the fact that she had raised it. And making him realize he’d advanced on her in a way she clearly found threatening. “Pipe down for a minute and just listen to me, would you? I’ve seen a picture of Nova myself, thanks to Selina, and heard that your brothers and sisters introduced her as your daughter. A daughter by blood, Ace. There’s already been a DNA test.”

“But that’s…impossible,” he said. “I don’t have a little girl—I couldn’t possibly.”

“She’s in Mustang Valley,” Sierra told him. “And she’s a young woman, not a child. Not only that, but she’s—”

Stiffening, Sierra cut herself off to glance back over her shoulder.

It was the only warning Ace had before a dark bulk separated itself from the deeper shadow. A loud crackling sound preceded her cry of pain and alarm as she buckled forward.

Before Ace understood what was happening, she’d collapsed completely. He spotted a large man hunched over her and pressing a stun gun to the side of her neck, which was sparking and snapping with the rattling sound of a transformer arcing.

“Hold it right there,” a deep voice growled as a second man grabbed Ace’s shoulder from behind and pressed something hard and unyielding—stun gun, it had to be—against the sore spot at his temple. “Move another muscle and you’re dead when you don’t hafta be. Our beef’s not with you. It’s this little deadbeat we got business with.”

“Stop it now! Stop shocking her before you kill her!” Ace shouted, sickened by the popping noises, the helpless jerking of her body beside the shaved-head ox squatting beside her, his mouth stretched into a leer of pure cruelty. Sierra Madden might be Ace’s captor, but this sickened him—and had him wanting to turn their weapons on the two thugs that had jumped them. Thugs that gave credence to the story she had told him about the loan shark who went by the name Ice Veins.

When the crackling ceased abruptly, the man holding the gun on him, a heavily muscled specimen with a dark chinstrap beard, told his partner, “Careful frisking her for weapons. My buddies from down the boxing gym tell me she’s won her last two matches by knockout, and half the guys are scared to spar with her.”

No wonder she took me down, Ace realized. Not that it made him feel one bit better to hear the bald guy laugh or watch him pin her down with one meaty hand splayed across her chest while she whimpered, struggling to regain control of her still-twitching limbs. “Bitch won’t be punching nobody for a while. Nice try with the disguise, Miss Madden.”

With that, he tossed aside the fake glasses and pulled her hair free of its makeshift updo.

“N-no,” she protested. “G-get your—h-hands off me.”

Ace surged forward in response, only to grunt with pain when the bearded goon holding him sharply cracked the gun against his brow and cheekbone. Vision graying out, Ace dropped to his knees.

By the time he could see again, the bald thug was pocketing both Sierra’s weapon and the one she’d taken earlier from Ace inside the bunker. Rising with a grunt, the huge man took a step back, aiming a revolver so long that it practically qualified as a hand cannon above the bounty hunter’s breast.

“I didn’t come across any wad of cash that felt like my boss’s twenty-five thousand dollars in those pockets,” he told her, a satisfied sneer spreading across his broad face. “So which leg do you want blown off? The right one or the left?”

Nauseated from the threat as she felt uncoordinated from the jolting, Sierra pleaded, “You can’t do this—”

“If you’ll be patient just a minute—” though dark streamers of blood were running down his face, Ace Colton spoke with the forced cheer of a determined salesman “—I’ll be happy to take care of Ms. Madden’s bill here.”

Both men’s heads snapped in his direction. Along with Sierra’s surprised gaze. Why would he volunteer his assistance, now that she was both unarmed and helpless? Did he think they’d kill him otherwise, eliminating him as a witness to their violence?

“All of it?” the bald man asked him, his pale eyes narrowed with suspicion. “Because we’ve got strict instructions not to leave Mustang Valley without either the money or a photo of the mangled leg she owes my boss.”

“And personally,” his bearded cohort chuckled, “we kinda figured that ole Ice Veins would just as soon have us blast her leg off, on account of the way she jammed up his favorite nephew.”

“Every penny,” Ace insisted, “if you don’t mind waiting for me to head down to where I can get a decent cell phone signal so I can transfer the funds to—”

The bearded man nearest to him snorted. “You think we take electronic transfers? I imagine you want us to print you out a nice, neat receipt, too?”

The men’s coarse laughter had panic bubbling up into Sierra’s throat.

“This is a strictly cash operation, mister,” the larger bald man told him, his voice dropping to a more menacing pitch as he straightened to tower over her. “But it’s your lucky day, and we’re giving you one chance right now. Walk away and forget you ever saw or heard us, and you don’t have to be a part of this. Otherwise… I’ve got some extra ammo in this gun.”

When Ace glanced toward her, Sierra felt truly lost, as alone as she had ever felt in her life. For Ice Veins’s men were offering him the escape he craved and needed.

Certainly, he didn’t owe her, Sierra knew as she steeled herself, her gaze connecting with the fugitive’s for a fraction of a second. Nice for Colton to try; he surely wouldn’t risk his own skin for the woman who’d burst into his lair and decked him with a left cross, the woman who meant nothing to him other than a threat.

“What if I told you I could get it all in cash,” Ace blurted, looking from one of the loan shark’s men to the other, “by tomorrow morning? And what if I sweetened the deal with, let’s say, five grand each for the two of you? You know, to reward you for your patience if you’ll only wait?”

Sierra’s heart skipped a beat, her lungs refilling with the sweet, fresh breath of hope. Though she couldn’t imagine how Ace could actually come up with so much currency so quickly, his gambit flooded her with the energy she needed to reach down and carefully begin lifting up her pant leg, reaching for the boot that her captor hadn’t checked nearly as carefully as he should have.

“I don’t know,” the bald man told Ace. “We do have somewhere else we’re supposed to be.”

“And besides,” the bearded one said, “if Ice Veins figures we’re trying to run some kind of side deal on him—let’s just say he’s not the most forgiving of bosses.”

“Who’s to say he has to know?” Ace asked. “Or that it even has to be five thousand? What if I made it eight apiece?”

“Or how ’bout ten for each of us, big spender?” The bearded man laughed. “Is this bitch worth it to you?”

“You may not be an ATM, but I’m not your piggybank, either,” Ace said, abruptly shifting from affable salesman to tough negotiator. “So take it or leave it. It’s no skin off my teeth. I’m just trying to save us all some fuss and bother.”

“You’ll be no bother to anybody when you’re dead, Slick,” said the bald man, spinning his bulk toward Ace so quickly that Sierra knew for certain that he meant to shoot him.

It forced her to spring into action, grasping the little pepper spray gun from her boot holster. With its palm-size orange safety tip—designed to let police know it was not a lethal weapon—it might not look like much, but the toy-like plastic backup sent a stream of noxious fluid straight into the big man’s face.

Yelping and choking, he dropped to his knees, clawing at his streaming nose and eyes while blindly squeezing off a round from his huge gun.

Rising, Sierra whirled around, hoping to spray the bearded man’s face, too. But she saw that Ace was grappling with him, the two of them fighting to control the gun still in the thug’s right hand.

Get out of here, her instincts screamed. Get to the car before the other creep manages to shoot you!

But there was no way she could leave Ace, not when she was responsible for dragging him into this mess. So instead she looked around desperately until she found a fallen tree limb. Snatching up the thick branch, she whacked the bearded man so hard across the back that the breath exploded from his lungs.

The force of the blow sent him lurching into Ace. Yet another shot, a deafening crack, echoed through the darkness.

For a moment she held her breath, listening for something, anything, beyond the coughing and the cursing of the pepper-sprayed bald thug, to let her know what had happened.

Then she heard the unmistakable crash of a man’s body thudding to the ground.

Chapter 3

Ace’s breath roared in his ears as the two of them pounded downhill, Sierra hauling him by the hand. One of the loan shark’s goons roared threats as the moans of the bearded man, who’d been shot in the struggle, faded behind them.

“Hurry. Car’s this way.” Panting out the words, she spoke urgently into Ace’s ear, “And whatever you do, keep your head low. The big guy’s still got his gun!”

Ace wasn’t sure how ducking was supposed to stop a bullet, but he instinctively heeded her advice as he scrambled after her. Practically blinded by the darkness and the blood streaming into his right eye, he was repeatedly whipped and scraped by branches.

But regardless of the outcome, he’d cast his lot with this woman. And now he had no choice except to trust her to get them both out of this situation.

Even so, when she drew up short and peered around a few minutes later, doubt flooded in. With his injured face throbbing in time with the pounding of his heartbeat, he asked, “You’ve lost the car, haven’t you? Maybe if we crouch down and hide, they’ll pass us by.”

“There! It’s over there.” Her sigh was audible as she let go of him and led him to a small depression partly shrouded by thick undergrowth. “The door’s unlocked, so—”

Needing no more invitation, he clambered over and climbed into a dark-colored sedan. Seconds later she was in the driver’s seat and snapping on a seat belt before cranking up the engine.

The car lurched backward and swung clear of the brush before she dropped it into Drive.

From outside there was a pop, followed by a splintering sound as, just behind Ace’s head, the rear passenger window shattered. “Go, go, go!” he shouted.

The tail end of the car careening, the tires suddenly gained purchase. As the headlights came on to illuminate the path ahead, Ace shouted an unnecessary warning. Sierra was already swerving around tree trunks thicker than his legs.

Belting himself in in an effort to remain upright, Ace said, “Dirt road’s to your left. There! We’re clear now, or I think we are—unless he’s got wheels nearby, too.”

She darted a glance into the rearview mirror, her eyes wide and her face frozen in a grimace. His admiration rose another notch as she visibly pulled herself together, slowing her gasping breaths and mastering her body’s shaking.

“Half blind as he’s gotta be and with his partner shot, we’re sure to lose him.” Sierra flicked a look in his direction as she pulled onto an old logging road and mashed down on the accelerator. “Are you—your face?”

Wiping away blood, he said, “I’ll be okay, I think. What about you? Are you hurt?”

She gave a hoot of laughter. “Ask me once the adrenaline wears off, why don’t you?”

Ace suspected the same might be true in his case, with the thundering in his chest, the crazed buzz of adrenaline drowning out everything except the immediate need to get clear of the two men who would surely kill them, given half a chance.

It didn’t sink it for another mile or two down the dark and tree-lined road that the wound he had inflicted on the bearded man during their struggle might very well prove fatal.

“I’ve never shot a man before,” he said, sounding as numb as he felt. Let alone maybe killed one, despite what half of Mustang Valley and the police seemed to think.

Sierra slid another look his way. In the faint glow of the dashboard lights, he saw her narrow-eyed skepticism give way to a nod. “If it makes you feel any better,” she said, “he wouldn’t have any qualms about putting a bullet in you before he plugged me.”

“I know there wasn’t any choice. It’s just… I’m not—I don’t know how to deal with any of this.”

“I get that, Ace, and I appreciate it,” she said. “Just the same way I appreciate that you didn’t turn your back on me when they gave you the chance to walk away.”

This time it was Ace’s turn to laugh, a humorless sound like the scraping of dry tree limbs in the wind. “I’ve been on the wrong end of enough business dealings to know when I’m flat-out being lied to. Those guys never meant to let me go. They would have sooner shot me in the back the moment I turned around than trust me to leave and keep my mouth shut.”

“You have good instincts,” she allowed. “In their line of business, witnesses are liabilities. But thanks anyway. It means a lot. Without your help, I’d’ve definitely…”

“You’re welcome, I suppose,” he said when it became apparent that she didn’t care to finish the thought. “But where to now? If they do catch up with us, I doubt they’re going to be in the mood to stop with your leg.”

She slowed before turning left onto a hard-packed caliche road. “That’s my problem, not yours. I’m taking you back to the police station, where you’ll be safe from my issues and will be free to start getting your life back in order.”

“Free?” he fired back. “We both know the first thing they’re going to do is lock me up so I don’t disappear again.”

“Haven’t you been in a cage all this time anyway?” she asked. “I don’t see what the difference is, except for this time your family has some high-priced lawyer working on your issue.”

“Oh, there’s a difference, all right. Come on, Sierra. Can’t you see? We’re in this together now. You’ve already said you owe me.”

“I owe you more than getting you killed over what just happened. Which means putting space between us.”

“Or better yet, making sure they don’t find either of us. And I think I know a place where we can hole up, at least for the rest of the night. A little mom-and-pop motel outside of town, well off any of the main drags, where we can get a room in cash—I’ve got enough on me to give you some to register so they won’t see me—and lay low for the rest of the night.”

She glanced his way. “You mean a no-tell motel where you rich boys take your mistresses?”

“Don’t look at me.” He shrugged. “I’m an unrepentant bachelor with my own private condo in town and a home on the Triple R. But I’ve heard about this place…and I’m willing to bet that those two haven’t. They’re from Las Vegas, aren’t they?”

“They are, but—” She gasped and braked hard as a tan blur whisked before their headlights. The tires grabbed the gravel, but not fast enough to avoid the large deer that had come out of nowhere.

As the car shuddered to a halt, the buck thudded down across the hood, its head bent backward and one point of its antler at the center of a fist-size spider’s web in the middle of the windshield.

With her face pale and her hands clenching the steering wheel, she stared openmouthed, tears pouring down her face. “The poor thing—I didn’t—I never saw it coming—Oh, no—I’m sorry, deer. I’m really sorry.”

“It’s all right,” Ace said, struggling to still the shaking in his own voice. And oddly touched to see this experienced bounty hunter, who apparently dealt knockout punches as a boxer, so affected by the animal’s accidental death. “It happened so fast. I can’t imagine he felt anything. Here, let me get out and try to move it. We have to—we need to leave as fast as we can, before those guys catch up with us.”

Bailing out of the car, he tugged and hauled at the heavy carcass and, with a grunt of exertion, rolled it to the ground. After checking out the car, he went around and opened the driver’s side door.

“Move over, Sierra. I’m taking the wheel from here.”

She blinked up at him, her eyes huge and unfocused. “Wha—”

“Car looks drivable,” he told her, “but I need you to move over. Switch seats with me right now. You’ve got to trust that I’m the best person to get us both clear of this in one piece.”

Pulse racing wildly, Sierra stared up at him, weighing the risks against the realities—and her lifelong inclination to fight any man attempting to control her.

Swallowing back reluctance, she told herself that accepting Ace Colton’s help was the smartest, surest way to get them both to safety. For one thing, he knew where they were going. For another, she was shaking so hard her teeth were chattering and she thought she might be sick.

Still in overdrive from the adrenaline the stun gun attack had sent coursing through her, she’d had nothing in reserve—nothing at all—to handle this unexpected accident. And no choice now except to do what she had to in order to survive.

“Okay,” she said, ignoring the hand he offered to climb out unassisted. On the way to the passenger side, she turned to look behind them and breathed a little easier to see no sign of pursuit yet. She also noted, with a chagrined glance, her Camry’s dented steel-gray hood and damaged grill.

The moment her seat belt clicked, the car leaped forward, a few ticks and rattles hinting at some body damage but nothing that seemed to give Ace trouble. As the dark road straightened, he switched off the headlights before explaining, “If anybody’s following, let’s make their job a little harder. I know these back roads well enough to—”

“Just please, be careful,” she said drily as they bumped along. “I’d hate to lose my safe driver discount with my insurance company.”

Over the next twenty minutes Ace proved himself a skilled and confident driver, especially for a man who hadn’t been above ground, let alone behind the wheel, in some time. As they descended from the hills, he turned the headlights back on, and she made out the darkened outlines of low-slung ranch houses and outbuildings with parked vehicles or cattle trailers nearby, along a narrow rural road lined with fence posts. Since it was after 1 a.m., only the occasional security light stood against the inky darkness of the Arizona night.

One such outpost marked an old beige stucco building that squatted before a rocky bluff. The Cactus Flower, read a spot-lit sign beside a once-grand but now tilted and half-dead saguaro—possibly a victim of the moderate earthquake that had struck the area recently. More modest rows of solar lights marked out a rock pathway—cracked across the middle, but otherwise intact—leading to an office with an old-school pink neon sign reading Vacancy.

“What do you think?” Ace asked, the sound of his deep voice startling her out of her thoughts.

“It’ll do,” she said, taking in the bar shape of the apparently undamaged double-sided building, which couldn’t have more than twenty rooms, tops. On this side of the motel, she made out only two parked vehicles, and there were plenty of empty spots, which would allow them to leave the vehicle some distance from whichever room they ended up in—a precaution she preferred.

As Ace peeled off several twenties to go and check in, he said, “I’m not trying to be stingy, but the clerk’s going to find it strange if you try to rent two separate rooms for us.”

His obvious concern for her feelings made her stomach do a funny little slip-slide. Considering their circumstances, they both had a lot bigger worries than anything as old-fashioned as the notion of her honor as a single woman.

“You don’t really think I’m letting you out of my sight, do you?” In spite of her fatigue, she felt a smile pulling at the corner of her mouth. “Besides, we have a lot to talk about before either one of us gets any shut-eye.”

“Starting with what you said about this—this alleged daughter of mine, if you were really serious about that.”

“I may have my moments, bluffing in front of fugitives, but I would never lie about a thing like that,” she insisted. “Never.”

He hesitated, clearly weighing her claim before asking, “You said her name was Nova, right?”

Sierra nodded, seeing in his face how hard the possibility that he had a child had hit him, even if he wasn’t certain he could take her at her word. “Nova Ellis Colton, yes. That’s how I’m told your siblings introduced her. Just wait here in the car, but if you don’t mind… I’ll need to take my keys.”

Anger gleamed in his eyes, like sparks flying off a struck flint. “I thought we were way past that, Sierra, that you’d decided you could trust me. You really think I’d drive off, when you’re my only source of information on a young woman who’s going around pretending to be my last known biological connection on the planet?”

“They’re not treating her as a pretender, not with that DNA test. And she’s not the last. But I’ll tell you more when I come back out. With those car keys in my pocket.” Sierra held her hand out.

Glowering at her, he demanded, “Are you kidding? After a tease like that one? Why on earth would I take off now?”

With a derisive snort, she popped the wide brim of the hat he was still wearing. “I can think of twenty-five thousand bucks’ worth of motivation, cowboy. Which happens to be exactly the same number of reasons I can’t afford to let you go.”

As he sat waiting, keyless, in the car, Ace tried not to take it personally. Of course Sierra didn’t trust him. He told himself he wouldn’t risk it, either, if he were counting on the twenty-five thousand dollars she needed to repay a criminal with a name like Ice Veins and save her leg, if not her life.

Still, her distrust rankled, after what the two of them had been through, the way they’d worked together to overcome the armed thugs. And even more than that, he’d thought, back in the bunker, they’d truly been communicating on a deeper level than fugitive to captor.

You’ve been locked underground like a mushroom too damned long if you think for one moment that bounty hunter sees you as anything but another scum-sucking criminal to be hauled in for a reward. Reminding himself of the way she’d not only decked him but also come back from her tasing to pepper spray her assailant, he realized he had never met a woman half as hard-core…or any less likely to be persuaded by the Colton name, money and position that had drawn so many other women to him in the past.

Well, you can kiss all that goodbye now, he thought. Even if he cleared up the murder accusation, that suspicion would likely taint him for other companies looking for new executives, just as it would for the type of women he’d so long squired to charity events and social gatherings. Though the career part left him troubled—his role as the face of Colton Oil had always been more a matter of personal satisfaction than money to him—the thought of leaving behind those glittering social gatherings and the polished beauties who lived to dress up for them came as a relief. After all he and his family had recently been through, the thought of suffering through another season of superficial conversations about who was wearing what designer, driving which new luxury car, or vacationing at what exclusive beach or ski resort tempted him to head back to the bunker and hide himself away again.

He began to realize how much the past few months had changed him into someone else. Or maybe he had never been the man he’d liked to imagine in the first place. Maybe the real Ace Colton, the man whose life he’d inadvertently stolen, was meant to be that person and he was someone else entirely.

The wild thought chased its tail around his throbbing head until Sierra returned from checking them in, a small plastic grocery sack and a large, flat box in her hand.

“What do you have there?” he asked once she’d climbed in. “That smells almost like—is that pepperoni?”

“Hot and greasy,” she said, her tone light with amusement. “The night clerk’s maybe eighteen, and he’d just pulled a couple of those French bread pizzas out of this toaster oven they keep in there. Luckily, he hadn’t trashed the box.”

“You talked a teenage night clerk into parting with hot pizza?”

“Don’t be too impressed. The kid had another box in the freezer, and it still cost me twenty bucks. But he did throw in a couple sodas.” She added a shrug. “I figured we could use a little fuel.”

Ace’s stomach gave an unexpected growl, and he admitted, “I could eat,” much to his own surprise.

“Apparently.” She chuckled as she directed him to park the car on the deserted rear side of the building.

Afterward, as they walked to the far end of the room block, Ace noticed she was weaving slightly.

When she stumbled, he reflexively caught her arm to keep her from falling forward. “You all right there?”

Sniffing indignantly, she pulled free and straightened the box with the pizza. “Don’t worry, Ace. Our midnight snack is safe with me.”

He let it go at that, following behind her. And filing away the fact that the stun gun attack had taken more out of her than she was willing to let on.

Once inside the room, he locked and chained the door behind them and turned to see her frowning at the cramped space and tired decor.

“Sorry they didn’t have anything with two beds.” She set down the pizza box and the bag on a small, round table and pulled out one of the mismatched wooden chairs. “Apparently, all their rooms are set up like this one.”

“It’s no big deal. I’ll take the sofa.” Making an effort to look and sound more at ease than he was feeling, he pulled off the cowboy hat and tossed it onto the lumpy gold tweed cushions. “Now, about this girl you mentioned, the one claiming to be my—”

Sierra frowned and shook her head. “Young woman, you mean,” she corrected, pulling a couple of cans of Coke and some paper napkins out of the bag. “But first, why don’t you go wash the blood off your face, bruiser?”

Wincing at the reminder of the crack he’d taken from the bearded thug’s gun to his face, Ace ducked into the small bathroom to clean up as best he could. A few minutes later he returned after stripping down to his black tee to rid himself of the now-stained Western shirt and bandanna and washing carefully so as not to reopen the split skin at his cheekbone.

Sierra looked up from the seat she’d taken at the table. “That looks better, though I can already see you’ll have a shiner.” She passed him one of the two Cokes. “How’s it feeling?”

“It’s stopped bleeding.” As he popped the can’s tab, he shrugged, not mentioning the halo of bright specks he’d seen around the bathroom’s bare lights or the dull but steady throb in his head. “I’ll take that as a win at this point. What about you? Seriously, you okay?”

“Nothing I can’t handle,” she insisted with a defiant gleam in her eyes that made him suspect her answer would be the same even if those thugs had lopped off her leg.

Once he’d claimed the chair across from her, each of them grabbed a pizza. Over the next few minutes they ate in silence, making short work of a meal that failed to satisfy but would at least help to energize their tired bodies.

But it wasn’t enough to keep thoughts of their earlier conversation from crowding in on him before Sierra pushed away her last half-eaten bite as he washed down a final mouthful.

“So you’re going to quit putting me off and tell me about this Nova person,” he prompted as he set his soda down. “I need to hear all of it, now.”

Blowing out a breath, Sierra wiped her hands and pulled out her cell phone. When she looked up again into his eyes, he once more felt the impact of their connection, reaching all the way down to his spine and crackling outward through the myriad nerve endings. He felt a buzz of anticipation, the unshakable sense that this tough, smart woman had come into his life to change its course forever.

Or maybe utterly destroy what little I have left…

“I’ll do you one better, Ace,” she told him. “I’ll show you right now. You see, after Selina hired me, I realized I couldn’t do the job without getting to know who’s who in your family before I started interviewing them for clues regarding your whereabouts. I needed a system to document their names and faces since it’s such a large clan, with so many siblings and half siblings.”

“They’re not really mine, though. Not anymore,” he said, thinking of how not one of them was an actual blood relation. Of how he’d been cast adrift by that fateful email exposing him as an imposter.

“Well, they still think of you as family, your brothers and your sisters,” she insisted.

The assertion sent relief zinging straight to his heart. Sure, his siblings had stuck by him at first, when Ace’s body type hadn’t matched that of the assailant seen in the grainy security footage from the office, nor from the failed sting operation. When another piece of evidence had turned up as well, an Arizona Sun Devils pin found beneath the boardroom air-conditioning unit in the wake of their father’s shooting, that, too, had seemed to point in another direction, since like his father, Ace had never had much interest in collegiate sports.

But once that so-called witness had come forward, insisting that he’d confessed to shooting his father and hiding the gun inside his condo, Ace had lost hope that anyone would truly believe in him at all, much less still want to claim him as a brother.

“I got a picture of each of them from Selina and made notes as to how they were related.” Sierra opened the photo section of her phone.

The rickety chair creaked as Ace leaned forward, straining to see familiar faces—faces that made his heart ache with nostalgia for simpler, happier times as she began to scroll. Would he ever again see them? Ever share another exchange not tainted by lies and weighted down by tragedy?

As his skin tightened and his pulse spiked, her voice took on an unearthly quality, seeming to echo in his ears. “That’s your daughter, Nova Colton.”

“Nova Colton…” His own words came out strained and parched as if he’d been trekking through an endless desert. Because this was impossible, some kind of tortured nightmare—or worse yet a flat-out lie, meant to disarm his defenses and lead him to his arrest as calmly as a lamb to slaughter.

As the panicked thought raced through his head, Ace stood so abruptly that the chair tipped to the floor behind him. “I don’t have a daughter,” he insisted, needing to let her know she damned well wasn’t fooling him with this wild story. Or was he only trying to keep the ground from shifting out from underneath him, as it had so many times in these past months?

Coming to her feet as well, Sierra turned the cell to hold it against her chest. As she looked up at him, compassion eased the hard set of her jaw and softened her green eyes.

“You do, Ace. Yes, you do,” she said. “And not only a daughter…” Flipping the phone around, she smiled, showing him a pretty young blonde woman, with an unmistakable bump at her midsection. “But a grandchild on the way.”

Every atom of him shook, demanding that he turn away. Or curse her for the cruelty of this deception. Why hadn’t he realized earlier she’d only been stringing him along?

He pictured himself storming out, vanishing into the dark desert night. If Sierra wanted to stop him, she’d have to knock him off his feet again or catch him in time to pepper spray his face as she had the bald thug’s.

Except he didn’t leave. Didn’t even turn. He couldn’t. Not with the wonder of her words still sinking in, of what he could see with his own two eyes on her phone’s screen, igniting like a spark in a stack of drought-dry kindling.

“She—she’s pregnant?” he found himself asking instead, as if what Sierra had said hadn’t sunk in the first time. “But she’s so young. What would you say?”

Sierra scrutinized the photos. “Twenty-two, maybe twenty-three, tops. Couldn’t be much older. And you’re, what is it? Forty now? Not that you really look it but—”

“Which would’ve made me—Hell, I must’ve only been about…” In the split second it took him to do the math, a buzz started inside his brain. A buzz that morphed into a swarm of tiny, bright dots as it hit him that Nova had her mother’s jaw and forehead.

“Oh, hell,” he said, groaning at the memory of a girl he’d scarcely thought about in decades. A memory that cracked the dam of disbelief.

“Maybe you ought to sit down before you fall down.” Sierra’s voice faded to a distant echo, worry threaded through it.

Swallowing hard, Ace righted the chair he’d toppled before sagging into the seat. But his mind was blazing with another face, with a name that struck like a bolt from the blue. Allegra. Allegra. “That girl. That summer… How could I have been so—” Face burning, he looked up at Sierra, miserable to think of what he’d done. And what he’d missed out on because of it. “Why wouldn’t she have told me, given me a chance to—She never said a word. I don’t understand this.”

Sierra took a seat as well, saying nothing to absolve or encourage a confession. But the story spilled out of him anyway, too raw to keep inside.

“I was seventeen. We both were. I’m not even sure now,” he admitted, “other than it was just a summer fling.”

Ace caught the look she slid his way, read the disgust in it. Or maybe he was only seeing his own judgment of his teenage self reflected in her eyes.

“You’re absolutely right,” he said bitterly. “I was a jerk, a stupid kid who got caught up in the magic of summer and a few heady hours of freedom. What was the harm? I remember thinking. No one would ever find out.”

Laughing bitterly, he added, “Joke was on me, I guess, since I never heard from her again.”

“But you didn’t reach out to her, either?”

Swallowing hard, he shook his head. “I never imagined there was any need to. I never suspected for a minute. But her—not a phone call, not even a postcard. If she had, I would have…”

He stopped short, knowing for a certainty how the man he was now, the person he’d grown into, would have responded to such a bombshell, especially after learning such a painful lesson about the real meaning of family. But back then, as a callow youth mostly wrapped up in his ambition and his pleasures, he couldn’t say for certain—to his great shame—that he would have done right by the girl he’d barely known. Still… “Why didn’t she at least give me the chance?”

“You can ask her daughter—your daughter—when you meet her,” Sierra said, handing him her cell with the photo of the young blonde woman with eyes as green as Allegra’s had been still on the screen. “It’s why Nova came to Mustang Valley. To find you.”

Swallowing hard, Ace nodded, feeling gutted. Emptied of the remnants of the man he’d left behind when he’d fled whomever was plotting to frame him for a crime he had not committed. Yet, along with the grief of that loss, he felt something more, as well. The dim glow of hope, a lone star emerging in the bleakest twilight.

“I might not’ve been the man I should’ve been back then, with her mother,” he said, his throat tightening and his thumb caressing the image on the phone’s screen. “But I swear to you, as long as there’s any shot of my becoming a—a real father to this Nova and being there for her and her child, I’ll do whatever it takes to make that happen.”

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