“Oh,” Mac had said. His deep voice rumbled out the single word, putting a huge amount of meaning behind it. “You’re talking about that internet story, aren’t you?”
Leonor’s eyes had widened as she looked at the man who had patiently taught her how to ride. The man she had always regarded as more than just her mother’s foreman, or even Thorne’s father. He had always been the single stable force in her life.
Had she disappointed him?
“You saw that?” she asked in a small, ashamed voice.
Mac had surprised her by laughing. “I’m not quite as backward as you might think. I own a laptop and sometimes, I even turn it on.”
Leonor flushed. “I didn’t mean to insult you—”
His smile was wide and all encompassing, as well as very kind. “You didn’t, little girl. I’m just teasing you. But I did see the articles,” he said, referring to the tell-all that went into great detail about not just Livia before her empire had crumbled and she’d been sent to prison, but also about each of the woman’s six children and their lives, “and I thought to myself that whoever wrote it had to have a lot of inside information about the Coltons from someone.” The look on his face registered surprise, but not condemnation. “I just never thought that the ‘someone’ was you.”
She was desperate to make Mac understand that she hadn’t revealed any of it for personal gain or, heaven forbid, for any sort of monetary reward. “He tricked me, Mac. He made me think that he cared about me. I would have never said a single word if I’d known that he was going to use it to spread it all over the internet.”
Mac nodded understandingly. “I kinda figured that,” he told her.
There was absolutely not a single iota of judgment in the man’s deep voice.
Leonor pressed her lips together, and then raised her tear-filled eyes to his. “I thought he loved me,” she confessed, her voice almost trembling. “I thought I could tell him anything. He told me I could tell him anything.”
“I just bet he did,” Mac replied, doing his best to keep his anger in check. “You sure you don’t want me to track him down and beat him up for you?” This time, as Mac clenched his hands into fists beside him on the sofa, he was only half kidding.
“I don’t want you getting into trouble on my account,” Leonor told him.
“Might do us both some good,” he pointed out, coaxing her just the tiniest bit.
Leonor looked up at him quizzically. She knew why he thought it would do her some good, but Mac? She didn’t quite understand why he would say that.
“Why you?”
“Because I don’t like anyone hurting you,” he told her simply.
She felt her heart swell. She really needed to hear that, she thought.
“Thank you, Mac.” She returned his smile, wondering how she could possibly convey to the man how grateful she was to have him in her life. “Letting me stay here for a while is all I need.”
She sighed and put her arms around Mac—or tried to. There was more of the big man than her arms could possibly encompass.
Mac laughed softly—she’d always thought of his laugh as such a comforting sound—and embraced her.
“Like I said, stay as long as you like. I want you to think of this as your home,” he told her again without any fanfare.
That had been four days ago. So, here she was, Leonor thought, hiding out at Mac’s ranch, doing her best to pull herself together and regroup enough to be able to face each of her siblings, preferably individually, so she could field their questions and get them to hear her out and see her side.
She needed to have them forgive her, if not today, then eventually. Forgive her and see that she was as much of a victim in all this as they were, because they might be resentful to see their names and their lives shockingly dramatized online in a cheap effort at sensationalism. But David had used her to do this to them and she was not only suffering the same fate as they were, she was also suffering because someone she loved and believed loved her had done this, using her as a means to an end. And in the bargain, making her family look at her as a traitor. She’d reported him to the police, but he had hidden the money well and it was a case of her word against his. Things looked rather bleak from every standpoint.
She had trouble battling the hopelessness that kept insisting on encroaching on her state of mind. But if she hoped to ever win back her family, she had to keep that feeling at bay.
* * *
Well, this was unexpected, Josh thought, checking his email the moment he checked into the bed and breakfast when he arrived in Shadow Creek.
Leonor Colton had taken a leave of absence from the museum.
Josh frowned. He had gone undercover, taking on the identity of a billionaire with a keen interest in art and the museum, in order to become a person of interest to Leonor so that he could get closer to her, and now she’d taken a leave of absence. Josh shook his head. This was going to be trickier than he thought.
Well, it was too late to switch identities again because in this day and age everyone’s “backstory” could be checked out on the internet in a matter of minutes, and his was already a matter of record. That was thanks to Jeremy Bailey, the IT wizard in the San Antonio field office who had whipped up this identity for him. Jeremy had even created a Facebook page for him, cleverly backdated with photographs of an ex-wife and a number of parties and fund-raisers—all art-oriented—that he’d attended in the past.
Josh pulled up the page on his laptop now, wondering who the woman posing as his ex-wife was. Whoever Jeremy had used, the woman was a little too flashy for him, he mused. He preferred more classy women, women whose brains were stuffed to full capacity instead of just their closets.
So far, Josh hadn’t met anyone who could hold his interest for more than a few dates, but then, in defense of all the women he had ever gone out with, he’d never had the time to properly pursue a relationship.
For one thing, he had moved around a lot, transferring to different field offices whenever new opportunities arose. Single, with no family, he had nothing to keep him anchored to any one place.
With him, it was always the next case that piqued his interest.
But at the moment, it wasn’t the next one that did it. It was this one.
He had set his sights on bringing Livia Colton in, and to do that, he had already decided that he was going to have to get close to Leonor. Some of the circumstances might have changed, but the bottom line was still the same.
He just needed to do a little rewriting to make it ultimately work and he was nothing, he thought, smiling to himself, if not creatively flexible.
“You’re going down, Livia Colton,” he promised. “And so’s your daughter if she’s in on this.”
He got to work.
“Just remember, you don’t have access to a bottomless expense account.” Andrew Arroyo’s voice crackled a little, thanks to a poor cell phone connection. “The budget’s been cut, so be sure you watch how you throw that money around, Howard,” the FBI assistant director in charge of the San Antonio field office warned him. “Just because you’re supposed to be this big shot billionaire doesn’t mean you have to spend money like one. As a matter of fact,” Arroyo hinted helpfully, “a lot of billionaires are known to be tight when it comes to their