Second Chance Colton

He could feel Susie’s eyes on him, as if scrutinizing his very thought process. What she said next all but confirmed his suspicions.

“Maybe you should take another family member with you when you go to question her,” Susie suggested.

Susie pressed her lips together. She knew she should just keep out of this. After all, the man had all but callously torn her heart right out of her chest without so much as a warning shot. She owed him nothing.

But even so, the look on his face had her feeling for him. She knew that if she were in his place, confronting this sort of situation, she would feel awful.

Memories from the past tried to break through, memories of a time when they were each other’s entire world.

But that was then, this was now, she reminded herself. She had to get a grip on her emotions. They had absolutely no place here.

“Thanks,” he said, surprised that Susie would even bother to attempt to give him helpful suggestions, given their past. “But that’s not a good idea. If I take one of my brothers with me, Greta will think we’re ganging up on her. She’s been on edge ever since our mother was attacked.” He remembered being called to the scene by his frantic father and racing to his mother’s side. The whole episode was vividly imprinted on his mind.

“Just before she slipped into an unconscious state, when I asked my mother who did this to her, she just stared at me and then started to cry. I couldn’t get her to say anything or even indicate whether or not she had seen the attacker’s face. She slipped into a coma right after that.

“When she finally came out of her coma, every time Greta was anywhere near her, my mother looked, I don’t know, spooked I guess is the best word for it. As for Greta, she just looked uncomfortable—and hurt.” He shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know what to make of any of it.”

For a moment Susie forgot that she wasn’t supposed to be talking to Ryan beyond uttering a few monosyllabic responses. All she saw was an all-too-human homicide detective, torn between job responsibilities and familial loyalties—a fellow human being in need of some kind of support.

That was the Ryan she was talking to.

“If not another family member, maybe you could take another female with you to be supportive of Greta as well as you,” she proposed.

“You?” Ryan asked in surprise. Was she actually offering to come with him to question Greta?

Susie shrugged. She had painted herself into a corner with that one, she thought. The focus wasn’t supposed to be on her but on the situation—and the crime. She’d meant the suggestion in a general way, but there was no denying that she was a female.

“I do qualify for the category,” she was forced to admit, almost against her will.

Ryan smiled then, remembering a time prior to the breakup he had engineered. A time when everything had seemed perfect despite the claim the service had on him. Remembering a very small island of time when he had been in love, and had just allowed things to “be” without any in-depth analysis.

“If memory serves me, you more than qualify—and thanks for offering—but this is something I have to do on my own,” he told her. “I think that the less people Greta sees when I arrive, the better this whole situation might work out.”

Or at least that was what he hoped.

Susie didn’t know if he was just being protective of his sister, or if Ryan was once again dismissing her wholesale out of his life.

In either case, she told herself, her conscience was clear. Despite the extenuating circumstances, she’d offered to do the right thing. That she had done so was not negated by his refusal of her offer. It just made her square with him.

“Suit yourself,” she responded, doing what she could to sound indifferent. “You always know best.”

The last part had sounded incredibly cold as well as formal and withdrawn to his ear. Whatever bridge they had crossed a moment ago was now officially uncrossed again and they were back to their initial corners. They were once again on the opposite sides of the fence, the words opposite sides all but ten feet tall with neon lights dancing around them.

He didn’t have time for this, didn’t have time to deal with any regrets, small or, in this case, large. What was done was done and he had to focus on the present. Just possibly, he had a sister to bring back to the fold. A sister that he had to take care not to alienate as he tried to subtly question her about her part—if she had played a part—in these bizarre, random attacks of vandalism and destruction that were occurring on the ranch.

A sister who just might never forgive him if she proved to be innocent of any wrongdoing and thought that he was accusing her of the exact opposite.

There were times when he scolded himself for not having chosen a simpler, easier path in life. But everyone had to follow their strengths, he reasoned, and his involved ferreting out the truth and taking down the bad guys.

“Thanks for all your help,” he said to Susie as he started to leave again.

She looked up at him. “I’m sure you don’t mean that, but you’re welcome.”

He was about to take exception with the way she had phrased that—it sounded as if she had stopped just short of calling him a liar—but he caught himself just in time. There was no point in attempting to contradict her point of view about the immediate matter at hand. She had a right to her opinion, even if she was dead wrong. Because he had meant what he’d just said.

He was deliberately wasting time. Every minute he stood here was another minute that he was delaying the inevitable because it was going to be, at best, awkward and uncomfortable. He didn’t want to think about what it would be like at its worst.

Squaring his shoulders, he left the lab. He needed to get this over with. Now.

And then, he thought as he went down the corridor, he could move on to something else.

Hopefully more successfully than the last time he’d told himself he was moving on.

He sincerely doubted that he could do any worse.

Chapter 3 (#ulink_3056f9d9-e258-583a-9bcd-b2396614132f)

Ryan knew that as an investigating detective with the Tulsa PD, even if he was questioning his own sister, because he was doing it in reference to a current active case he was working on, it was in everyone’s best interest to keep things businesslike and official. Among other things, that meant that he should be making this call from the phone on his desk at the precinct, not from his personal cell phone while he was sitting in his car.

He supposed that he could argue that he was doing it for the quiet, because the precinct was usually almost too noisy to allow anyone to hear themselves think. But the truth of the matter was that his real reason for making the call from inside his vehicle was that he didn’t want to be overheard.

It was bad enough that he had to ask his sister painful, probing questions like this without having everyone within a ten-foot radius hearing him asking. He was a Colton. One of the Coltons. The family that had, through absolutely no fault of their own, their very own serial killer in their family tree, thanks to his father’s brother, Matthew.

Granted, it all had happened a long time ago and his uncle had been locked away in prison for a while now, but he was well aware of the fact that people loved to point an accusing finger and watch people of prominence come tumbling down. They loved watching their fallen-from-grace sinners every bit as much as they loved cheering on their saints and heroes.

Sometimes even more so.

He wanted no part in supplying those people with any sort of ammunition, especially if there did actually turn out to be a reasonable excuse for all this.

He supposed a tiny part of him hadn’t turned cynical yet and still believed in miracles.

So he sat in his vehicle, trying not to notice how stuffy it seemed with the windows rolled up and his doors locked, and he called his sister’s number.

After a short delay, he heard the cell phone start to ring. Waiting for Greta to answer her phone, Ryan counted off the number of times her cell rang. After four, her voice mail kicked in. Impatient, he was about to terminate the call and try again in a couple of minutes when he heard Greta’s breathless voice as she came on the line.

“Hello?”

Rather than relax, he felt his shoulders stiffen. “Greta? It’s me. Ryan.”

“Hi.” And then he heard her ask guardedly, “What’s up?”

Was that just his imagination—or her guilty conscience stepping up? “I’m coming up to the ranch to see you.”

He heard her laugh softly. “Well, you can come up to the ranch, but you won’t see me.”

Was he tipping her off with this call? Was she planning on taking off? He needed more to work with. “Why?” he asked.

“Why do you think?” Not waiting for him to respond, she gave him the answer to her own question. “Because I’m not at the ranch. I’m not in Tulsa at all. I’m back in Oklahoma City.”