Hunting The Colton Fugitive

“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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