Colton's Unusual Suspect, page 1
“I think you’ll be safest if you stay at my place, at least for tonight.”
“I’m not a stray puppy that you picked up and need to take care of,” she informed him.
“No,” he agreed calmly. “A stray puppy would undoubtedly be far more grateful.”
Orla began to argue with the assumption he had just made. But then, right in the middle, she stopped and laughed. “I guess maybe you’re right.”
“Does that mean that you’re about to continue giving me an argument about coming home with me?” he asked.
Orla nodded. “As long as you keep in mind that I am a martial arts instructor and that I know at least several ways to bring you to your knees without even trying.”
His eyes met hers. Sean looked as if he was struggling to keep a grin off his face. He inclined his head. “I consider myself forewarned.”
Dear Reader,
You have in your hands what I regard as a minor miracle. Not because it’s so good or the fact that this book is on its way to becoming my next hundredth book (granted I have a ways to go before I reach my four hundredth, having already written over three hundred and twenty books.) No, it’s a big deal as far as I’m concerned because it exists at all.
When I made plans to write this Colton book, I came down with COVID. Specifically, Long COVID, which blocks out your mind. It was the scariest illness I have ever had the misfortune to come down with. I have been writing stories—books, actually—since I was eleven years old. Suddenly, I was unable to construct an actual sentence. My brain was suddenly so cloudy and, for all intents and purposes, missing in action. I was afraid that I actually couldn’t write anymore. It lasted for several weeks but I am happy to say I am back to being me. I wish you all good health and to never come down with this if you haven’t already.
I do hope you like this latest effort because you have no idea how wonderful it is to be able to write something when you think you can’t anymore.
As always, I want to thank you for reading one of my books and from the bottom of my heart, I wish you someone to love who loves you back.
All the best,
Marie Ferrarella
COLTON’S UNUSUAL SUSPECT
Marie Ferrarella
USA TODAY bestselling and RITA® Award–winning author Marie Ferrarella has written more than three hundred books for Harlequin, some under the name Marie Nicole. Her romances are beloved by fans worldwide. Visit her website, marieferrarella.com.
Books by Marie Ferrarella
Harlequin Romantic Suspense
The Coltons of New York
Colton’s Unusual Suspect
Cavanaugh Justice
Cavanaugh Vanguard
Cavanaugh Cowboy
Cavanaugh’s Missing Person
Cavanaugh Stakeout
Cavanaugh in Plain Sight
Cavanaugh Justice: The Baby Trail
Cavanaugh Justice: Serial Affair
Cavanaugh Justice: Deadly Chase
Cavanaugh Justice: Up Close and Deadly
Visit the Author Profile page at
Harlequin.com for more titles.
To
Jessica
Who Can Still
Make
My Heart
Smile
Contents
Prologue
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
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Excerpt from Protecting Colton’s Baby by Tara Taylor Quinn
Excerpt from Guarding a Forbidden Love by Carla Cassidy
Prologue
Detective Sean Colton closed his green eyes and rubbed the bridge of his nose, doing his best to make the throbbing headache go away, or at least recede a little. The words on the page before him, words he had written down himself during the course of the investigation, were beginning to crisscross over one another and dance in front of him like some sort of possessed snake charmer.
With a sigh, Sean dragged his hand through his dark brown hair. He had put in later hours on occasion, but he felt as if he really should call it a night or, at the very least, take a break. It felt as if he had been at this for hours.
In reality, he had been at this ever since he had come home—four hours ago—and for a couple of hours before he had even left the precinct.
He supposed Eileen Reilly, his college fiancée who’d dumped him, was right. He was never going to change. No matter what he promised himself—or the woman he’d asked to marry him, and he had had two of them—somehow or other, the job always managed to come first. That was why the other engagement—to his childhood sweetheart—had fallen through as well.
Both women had dropped him because he tenaciously managed to push on, working on a case, no matter what he promised himself—or his fiancée of the moment—to the contrary.
He had been on the current case he was working on—a case he had been working without a partner, ever since Jacoby had changed departments—for a week now and he felt confident that he had narrowed his list of suspects down to one.
By process of elimination, Sean now believed the person who had to have murdered the beautiful, sweet-faced barmaid who had been the girlfriend of wealthy hedge fund manager Wes Westmore was none other than Westmore himself.
He felt it deep in his gut.
The girlfriend, Lana Brinkley, was found strangled in the Greenpoint, Brooklyn, apartment that they had shared. Neighbors had heard Westmore wailing and lamenting when he had walked into the bedroom and had discovered the badly beaten, battered body. People in the building generally kept to themselves, but when the wailing and lamenting didn’t let up, one of the neighbors, or rather several of them, called the police.
Because he was temporarily between cases, this one landed in his lap.
He took an instant dislike to Westmore, he couldn’t have even explained why. The man acted as if Lana’s death had happened strictly to annoy him. Sean was unmoved by the hedge fund manager, who he felt was just putting on a show for his benefit and strictly to garner sympathy from him.
The people that his heart really went out to were the victim’s parents. Lana Brinkley was her parents’ only child. He gathered that the down-to-earth couple had been so hopeful and so happy when their daughter caught the eye of the wealthy real estate mogul and hedge fund manager and quickly became engaged to him.
According to the neighbors, “who wouldn’t dream of gossiping,” things went downhill shortly after they moved in with one another.
Raised voices were heard shortly thereafter. One-sided raised voices, which intensified the feeling in his gut that something had definitely been wrong.
Sean had to admit that he was really looking forward to slapping the cuffs on that bastard if he turned out to be guilty. Westmore acted as if it was a real privilege for Sean to occupy the same space as he did.
That was the first thing he had against Westmore, but definitely not the last.
Sean studied the paperwork before him as he chewed on his lower lip. Parents really should be more careful before signing off on their daughters—or their sons, for that matter, he amended. Murder wasn’t a one-way street. Just because a person had money didn’t automatically make that person blameless—or even a good match. Sadly, he had quite a few stories to back that feeling up, Sean thought.
Placing the photographs he had been studying on the table, he felt they comprised bone-chilling “before” and “after” shots of the barmaid. Westmore had to have been really angry to have done this amount of damage to the young woman, he thought, frowning.
Maybe he was jumping the gun here, but he was really looking forward to bringing this slime-bucket down.
Just then, the phone on his desk rang.
He debated not picking it up, but it just wasn’t in him to ignore the call—especially one coming in at night.
“Detective Colton,” he answered, raising the landline receiver to his ear. It was an old phone that had belonged to his late father. He just never had the heart to get rid of it after his father passed away.
A female voice on the other end immediately spoke up. “Sean?”
The melodious voice sounded vaguely familiar, although he couldn’t put his finger on just why at this moment. It took him a full second to rouse himself. “Yes?”
“Sean, this is Ciara Kelly. Humphrey’s wife,” she further identified herself. “Humphrey said that if I ever needed anything and he wasn’t around, I should call you.”
“Yes, of course,” the detective readily agreed, immediately focusing as he stood up. Something was wrong, he could tell from the edge in her voice. He spoke to the agitated woman slowly. “What can I do for you?”
Humphrey Kelly was a brilliant psychiatrist who had
However, six months ago, Humphrey had surprised all of them by marrying an attractive marine biologist twenty-five years his junior after what seemed like a whirlwind romance.
Sean and his siblings hardly got to know her before vows were exchanged, but it was enough for them that Ciara made Humphrey happy.
There was some hesitancy in her voice as the woman said, “I might be making too much of this, Sean.”
“Let me be the judge of that,” Sean told the woman evenly.
He really didn’t have a relationship with Humphrey’s wife, but since the man was important to him and to his siblings, he was attempting to develop one.
As he waited for the woman to answer, he heard her taking in a deep breath before continuing.
“I’ve been trying to reach Humphrey. He left for the courthouse this morning,” she explained. “Anyway, he always, always calls me when he gets to his destination. It’s just something he does,” she quickly explained. “Anyway, he didn’t call me and when I tried to call him, I couldn’t seem to reach him. To be honest,” she continued, a degree of hesitancy in her voice, “I’m afraid that something might have happened to him.”
Sean felt slightly uneasy but knew something that might make Ciara feel a little better. “If anything had happened to Uncle Humphrey,” he assured her, “I would have known about it.”
“You mean like telepathy?” Ciara asked, uncertainty in her voice.
“No, not really,” Sean said, trying not to laugh. “Because Uncle Humphrey deals with so many high-profile patients, a long time ago I set up a high-tech distress signal that would have alerted me had there been something wrong. All it would take was a single press on the face of Humphrey’s watch or his phone to set off an alarm.”
He heard a huge sigh of relief on the other end of the line. “You have no idea how happy you’ve just made me.”
“Glad to have been of help,” he told Ciara.
“But we were supposed to go to a dinner party tonight. It’s not like him to just forget about something like that,” she added. “He was really looking forward to this one.”
This news gave Sean pause. He tried not to let his concern show in his voice. “Let me track Humphrey down,” he told Ciara. “Maybe he just got caught up with one of his patients.” As soon as he hung up the phone, he called his sister, Eva, now a rookie cop. He wanted to assure himself that his late father’s friend had arrived at the courtroom safe and sound. The fact that he never came home tonight was troubling. And the fact that Humphrey’s alarm hadn’t gone off was only slightly reassuring.
Eva picked up her phone on the second ring. “What’s up, big brother?” she asked.
“I need you to check on something for me,” he said.
Chapter 1
As usual, Orla Roberts found herself running behind. There were days that it felt as if she was always running behind. Not by very much, of course, but just enough that if she slowed down a little bit, she would lose her place and begin to backpedal.
That never happened, though. Orla was grateful that she was good at the various jobs she undertook. And, not only that, she managed to be fast at them as well.
On those very rare times that she lost her place, it certainly didn’t take her very long to catch up, she thought with a satisfied smile. Orla took a great deal of pride in what she did.
Had she been like her twin sister, Aimee, she would have been more than content just to sit back and allow her father, real estate mogul Rockwell Roberts, to pay all her bills, with no thought of ever paying anything back. For Aimee, there was no thought of her ever paying for anything. It just wasn’t done. Not that she was ever appreciative about her father taking care of her finances. She just felt she deserved it. At one point, Orla felt this was how Aimee thought their father showed his love, but now she just wanted nothing to do with her twin. Heaven knew she had tried, but Aimee had betrayed her. So had Orla’s boyfriend. She wasn’t sure if he had even cared about her. She discovered that he had slept with Aimee because she assumed that he felt there was something exciting about sleeping with both twins.
Well, she thought, they could have each other. As far as she was concerned, they deserved one another and she wanted nothing to do with either one of them. They were certainly made for each other. They were both hateful human beings. She was actually relieved when they were locked up after, much soul searching, she had decided to press charges against them. Aimee and Joe had both been convicted of stalking her.
She should have known her peace of mind wouldn’t last. Last night they had managed to escape, each killing a guard in prison. Orla was trying very hard not to panic about this. It wouldn’t help the situation. The authorities who called her had reason to believe that Aimee and Joe were headed upstate and that Orla was in no imminent danger. And Orla was someone who could take care of herself.
Orla couldn’t have been more different from her twin if she had tried. They were complete polar opposites.
She had been independent practically from the day she’d been born, certainly from the day that she could walk. The path she followed was not one that ordinarily appealed to a young woman who didn’t necessarily have to pay her own way. But she actually liked paying her own way.
Unlike her twin, Orla thought nothing of working hard at unorthodox careers. The thirty-five-year-old was a trained bodyguard, not to mention the proud owner of a black belt thanks to being a self-defense teacher.
To look at her, a person wouldn’t have thought that the tall, slender, green-eyed woman could take care of herself nearly anywhere as well as she could. But there was no question about her capabilities. She carried herself with remarkable confidence and an assurance. It certainly did not come across in any manner of conceit.
Orla also conducted herself with a sense of humor. But if for some reason she felt she wasn’t being taken seriously, or even if someone looked at her in the wrong way, the look she shot back at that person would have easily cut them dead in an instant.
Perforce there was a reason for the way she conducted herself. The clients Orla selected were all affluent ones. Choosing people who could well afford to pay her high price gave her the ability to take on pro bono work for women who couldn’t afford to pay for help. Women who found themselves stuck in abusive relationships. Women who saw no way out of their situation or were desperately struggling to find a way to free themselves from these relationships—short of suicide, of course, she thought. She couldn’t help thinking how desperate someone had to be to even contemplate something of that nature.
Luckily it had never come to that point for her.
Despite the fact that her ex-boyfriend had cheated on her, she had refused to let it break her.
Taking everything into account, she had been born lucky and she knew it. Helping other women who struggled with abusive men was her way of paying it forward.
Not to mention that she was exceedingly good at what she did. Orla also possessed a good eye for detail and the ability to keep those details straight.
Of course, her choice of career, or what she referred to as her career, didn’t exactly please her Irish-born mother, Clodagh O’Connor.
But then, not very much pleased her mother, Orla thought ruefully. She had given up thinking it was her mission in life to try to please her mother and get her to come around. Orla marched to her own drummer.
Her parents, like so many other parents she knew of these days, were separated. Her father spent his days selling property at the highest possible market value, steadily building up and amassing the family wealth, and his nights rewarding himself by going out with beautiful women who were half his age, a fact that managed to embarrass her mother no end.
Long ago, Orla decided to follow her own path, adhering to principles that meant absolutely nothing to Aimee. For her part, her twin had never concerned herself with even remotely attempting to curry favor with Orla—or being nice to her. She certainly hadn’t cared a fig when it came to doing well by her twin.
