Marie Ferrarella - Colton Undercover

She made no comment about that. Instead, she explained what had won her over. “He showed me photographs of some of his paintings. He’s looking for somewhere to display them.”

“So naturally he thought of Shadow Creek?” The dubious look on Mac’s face grew more pronounced.

“No, the Austin Art Museum,” she answered a bit too sharply.

This wasn’t sounding as good to him as it apparently did to her, Mac thought. “In other words, he’s stalking you?”

“No,” she insisted. “We just kind of ran into one another.”

He highly doubted that, but Leonor was a grown woman, capable of taking care of herself—he supposed. If he suggested otherwise, he knew that was liable to blow up on him.

“Uh-huh. Well, as long as you stay alert, I can’t see the harm in that,” he said agreeably. His expression softened as he looked at her again. “And I’ve got to say, it’s really great seeing you smile again. For a few days there, I didn’t think you were ever going to look anything but devastated again. I don’t mind saying that it hurt to see you that way,”

She was surprised to hear him say that. “I thought I was doing a good job hiding my feelings.”

Mac laughed, shaking his head. “Hate to tell you this, but you weren’t.” Since she was in such a good mood, he thought she’d be amenable to doing something else. “Listen, I was just thinking. What if we—?”

But Mac never got the opportunity to finish his sentence because at that moment, the front door flew open, hitting the opposite wall with a bang. Leonor’s half brother Thorne Colton came in, scowling and for all the world looking like a storm that was about to roll over the plains.

Without Thorne saying a word to his father, his deep brown eyes immediately homed in on Leonor. “It was you, wasn’t it?” he accused. Not waiting for her to answer one way or another—he wouldn’t have believed her if she’d said no—Thorne continued his rant. “Never really thought of you as being this selfish, but then, I guess I couldn’t really have expected anything else, could I? Given who your mother is,” he concluded nastily.

Mac was up on his feet, his usual easygoing expression gone. “Watch your tongue. And don’t forget, Livia’s your mother, too.”

Thorne blew out an angry breath. “And how many times have I wished that wasn’t true?” Livia’s fourth born snapped. The focus of his anger widened, taking in his father as well as his half sister. “What the hell were you thinking, anyway,” he demanded, glaring at at Mac, “letting Livia lead you to her bed?”

“That is none of your business,” Mac informed him, his voice only growing deeper as he warned his son off, “and whatever else you might think about that part of my life, you wound up being the result of that brief interlude—and no matter what else might have gone down, I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

Mac’s frown deepened as he looked at his son. “Except, maybe, for when you come rolling through here like a clap of thunder. I want you to keep a civil tongue in your head when you talk to your sister,” his father warned.

But Thorne was as stubborn in his own way as his father was. The only difference was their chosen decibel range.

“Why should I when she went running off at the mouth, spilling family secrets to some jerk with a laptop and an internet byline?” Thorne demanded. His eyes narrowed into dark brown slits as he glared at Leonor. “I’m right, aren’t I? It was you who sold us all out and told whoever the hell is behind Everything’s Blogger everything about us.” He didn’t wait for her to confirm his supposition. “How much did they pay you?” he wanted to know.

The last question stabbed her right through the heart. “It wasn’t like that,” Leonor cried.

Thorne pretended to look aghast. “They didn’t pay you?” he asked sarcastically.

“Enough!” Mac declared. “She doesn’t owe you an explanation,” he told his son.

“For splattering the so-called low points of my life all over the internet, thanks to some lurid blogger?” he cried, outraged. How could his father be taking her side? That angered Thorne almost as much as what he’d just accused Leonor of. “The hell she doesn’t.”

“Thorne!” Mac shouted. The warning note in the rancher’s voice was clear.

Unable to take Mac fighting with his son over something that she ultimately was responsible for, Leonor raised her voice to be heard above the two men.

“Stop!” she pleaded. When both men looked at her, she began by answering Thorne’s question, really hoping she wouldn’t break down in the middle of it. “I thought I could trust him,” Leonor retorted, anger and hurt throbbing in every syllable. She could feel tears forming as she continued. “We were supposed to get married—”

“Married?” Mac questioned, looking at her. He looked stunned by this addition. “You left that part out,” he told her.

Leonor inclined her head, as if conceding her error. “Sorry.”

“You’re going to have to do better than ‘sorry,’” Thorne told her angrily.

Doggedly, Leonor pushed on with her explanation. “I needed to talk to someone, to get everything I’d been carrying around all this time, like some kind of flesh-eating poison, off my chest.

“People were as nasty to me as they were to you—” she began, looking at Thorne.

His laugh was cold and dismissive. “I really doubt that.”

“Let her finish,” Mac ordered, cutting his son off.

Thorne scowled, but conceded. “Go ahead,” he told his sister grudgingly.

“I needed someone to talk to,” Leonor repeated, “and he was there, ready to listen.”

“And taking notes,” Thorne interjected nastily.

Leonor sighed. Thorne was right, but that didn’t help anything or change it. “I didn’t know that at the time,” she told him. “I had no idea he’d wind up putting it all in a blog and selling it to the highest bidder. I thought he loved me, but he turned out to be an opportunist.”

“If you wanted to talk so badly,” Thorne said angrily, not fully ready to accept that as an excuse, “why didn’t you come to me?”

She looked at him. Was he kidding? They were all at odds when their mother was carted off to prison. Thorne particularly.

“Maybe you forgot,” Leonor pointed out, “but you weren’t exactly the friendliest audience to turn to these last few years. I couldn’t talk to you.”

He wasn’t about to let her turn this around and blame him.

“Maybe that was because I could never understand how you could still love that woman after everything she’d done. She never once thought about how her actions would reflect on us or affect us. Hell, she never once thought about us, period,” he reminded his sister angrily. “Yet you went running off to visit her in prison every chance you got,” he said scornfully.

Her temper flared. Leonor gritted her teeth together as she ground out an answer to his accusation. “Because nobody else did.”

“There was a reason for that!” Thorne pointed out in exasperation. “The woman is evil.” Fury had temporarily robbed him of breath. When he got it back, he asked his sister, “Was she grooming you to follow in her footsteps? Was that it, Lennie? Was that why you sold us out like that? Are you helping her now?”

Stunned, Leonor couldn’t find the words to answer her brother, to defend herself. What hurt most of all was that Thorne felt she had to.

Mac came to her rescue. “That’s enough, Thorne!” he shouted. “I want you to apologize to your sister.”

There was cold fury on Thorne’s face. “Why should I?” he demanded.

Thorne was furious and he felt he had every right to be. His father was blind when it came to Leonor and his other half sisters, but women could be even more evil and deadlier than men. His mother was living proof of that, he thought darkly.