An early morning proposal, out of the blue, after the night they’d had, preceded by the weeks they’d had... She’d have been nothing but selfish to accept.

  But she kissed him when he came out of the shower. Deep. Long. Like a lifetime lover would do. Squeezed his arm before she got out of his truck at her folks’ house and got into her own SUV. She waited for him to pull into her garage after her and walked with him into her house.

  And smiled, an expression she felt to her soul, when he was waiting for her with breakfast made when she came out of her room. He pulled her into his arms then, kissing her as deeply as she’d kissed him earlier, and she started to rest a little easier inside.

  They were going to find their way.

  It might not be traditional. Or be exactly what she thought she wanted.

  But in the end, what she wanted was him.

  And if he wanted her as badly, they’d find a way to make it work.

  Fletcher called just as they were getting ready to leave for the hospital. He was heading up after a shower, and asked that she wait to tell their parents what had happened until he got there.

  A condition with which she was quite happy to comply.

  She put him on speakerphone then, as he relayed what had transpired during the night. Sebastian drove, as they heard, together, that her kidnapper’s name was Bob Thompson.

  “I know that name,” Sebastian said.

  “His lawyer approached you six months ago with an offer to buy your five acres on the lake,” Fletcher said. And Sebastian and Ruby frowned together.

  “All of this is because Sebastian wouldn’t sell his land?” she asked, incredulous. No matter how much research, how many questions asked, or how many foreseen risks she might have turned up on a land offer, she’d never, in a million years, have come up with such a potentially deadly consequence.

  “Yes and no. Yes, if Sebastian had sold the land, the man wouldn’t have gone after the two of you. But he’d have been living right here in Owl Creek and that would not have been good,” Fletcher continued. And Ruby grew more and more incredulous, and horrified, too, as she listened. “He’s an Ever After Church member, and claims that God told him that the property belonged to the church. That God wanted the land for a new church.”

  “I’ve never even heard of the Ever After Church,” she said, glancing at Sebastian, who shook his head.

  “Neither had we. Supposedly it was founded by some guy named Markus Acker. But this is where it really gets weird. This guy, Thompson, has a record. He ran an illegal gambling ring for years without getting caught. And when he was apprehended, he made a deal to turn in some of his clients who were mobsters to stay out of jail. Apparently, the second chance turned his life around, he found religion and has dedicated his life to the service of Ever After Church, claiming it saved him. To the point that he was willing to risk going back to jail to follow what he claims are God’s edicts. He’s been living in plain sight, staying at a cabin on the lake. Dressed in expensive clothes. Golfing. The blue hoodie was for his nighttime persona. Using a rowboat along the shore in the dark to access Crosswinds. He’s a smart guy. Too smart for his own good. He was able to hack into the Wi-Fi on Mom and Dad’s security system so if it went off, it dialed his number instead of the security company or police. He’d done that the day after the kidnapping, when you started staying there. He’d been following you ever since.”

  Ruby had no words.

  Sebastian’s were off-color. And pretty much expressed her own feelings. Shivering, she put her hand on the console between them, and he laced his big, warm fingers through hers.

  “He’s still claiming that we’re all sinners and that God will make us pay,” Fletcher said.

  Consequences again. The thought hit Ruby. They were everywhere, those things that happened due to choices made. She was never going to be able to control them all.

  And she sure as hell didn’t want to try and end up losing sight of reality, as Bob Thompson surely had.

  “What about Leon?” Sebastian’s question brought her back to the moment at hand. And the man at her side. One who’d asked her to marry him when marriage hadn’t even been a dot on his radar. And who’d been rejected by her.

  “When he saw Thompson in handcuffs, being led by his open door...”

  “Your suggestion, I’m sure,” Ruby butt in.

  “Yeah, well, when Leon saw Thompson, and knew that he’d been arrested, he was only too happy to tell us that Thompson had been a visiting minister at his church on and off, and had approached Leon, saying he’d had a vision, that God had chosen Leon to do a hard part of His work...”

  “He duped the kid into setting my place on fire,” Sebastian said. “But what about saying I was his brother?”

  “This kid believes that all people on earth are brothers and sisters, per his bible readings. His last name’s Connolly. Turns out his dad’s in prison. His mom abandoned him. He’s been in and out of foster homes his whole life. Some of them abusive. And, in high school, landed in the home of a couple of zealots, who took him to a small, very strict church. He’d been looking for something to believe in, someone to believe, his whole life, and he thought he’d found his family. His home.”

  There it was again. Family.

  Home. She placed her other hand over her stomach. Cradled her tiny but growing baby.

  “And hey, sis, you’ll be the first in the family to know—I’ve been offered lead detective here in Owl Creek. And I’ve accepted. I’m moving home!”

  Ruby burst out with enthusiasm without even thinking about how it would be with one more sibling watching her. Giving her their opinion of her life choices. Butting in. Instead, she let herself be happy to have someone she loved back home.

  And after they hung up, she asked Sebastian to pull into a mountain park not far from Connors.

  He stopped in a small, deserted lot by a hiking trail. “What’s up?” he asked, turning to run a finger through a few strands of hair that had fallen out of her always loose bun.

  “Why did you ask me to marry you? Full-out honesty here, Sebastian...” she said, her tone filled with warning. Though she couldn’t have told him to save her life what the consequences would be if he didn’t comply.

  Because the heart knew what it knew.

  And was strong enough to deal with the consequences.

  “Because I realized something last night on my way back to Owl Creek,” he told her, looking her straight in the eye, his fingers remaining in her hair. “You and I—we’re a constant. When life flew out of control for both of us, others were involved, in the picture, helping, but you and I were my constant. Us. Together. I’m good alone. I’m better with you. And I think you’re better with me, too.”

  Her eyes flooded with tears. Her lips were trembling so much, her throat so tight, she couldn’t speak.

  “I love you, Ruby Colton. As much as I’m going to love that kid you’re carrying. I don’t want to go to bed at night without you, wondering about you. Or wake up in the morning thinking of you, when I could be lying there with you. This morning, it was all...just there. The battle I’d been fighting, to be independent and live alone... Maybe I was just afraid of losing love again. Maybe I was just plain uninformed. But I lost the battle, Ruby. I don’t need to fight it anymore.”

  She swallowed. Tried to speak. And when she couldn’t, she threw her body over the console, her top half landing against Sebastian, and her butt on the hard cover between their seats. It wasn’t a well-thought-out plan. Or elegant.

  It didn’t work well.

  And she didn’t care.

  Because it got her where she most needed to be. Her body in the arms of the man she loved. And her arms around the human who needed her just as badly.

  He lowered his lips as she raised hers. And in that kiss, she found her future.

  It wouldn’t be perfect.

  There’d be hardship and pain along the way.

  Their child would grow up to disagree with them, go out into the world and take their own risks. And if they had more than one...then they’d all eventually go and there would be even more risks.

  She had to take them.

  When they both finally came up for air—only because they couldn’t go any further to assuage their physical needs on the driver’s seat of his truck—she whispered, “Ask me again.”

  “Marry me,” he said, and this time she smiled.

  He hadn’t asked the first time.

  He’d commanded.

  If she’d heard that, she’d have understood.

  Because she knew Sebastian Cross. He hadn’t been commanding her. He’d just been that sure of his own personal course going forward. And that’s all she’d needed to know.

  “Marry me,” she said back, in just as forceful a tone.

  And this time, when they kissed, they did so around the smiles on their lips.

  * * *

  Keep reading for an excerpt from Cavanaugh Justice: Cold Case Squad by Marie Ferrarella.

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  Prologue

  You never thought that I would ever amount to anything, did you, Aunt Lily? the man asked sharply, his voice as taunting as he had once felt his aunt’s had sounded. An ugly smile curved his mouth. Well, I certainly fooled you, didn’t I? The kid you always referred to as being such a big loser didn’t turn out to be a loser after all, did he?

  Jon Murphy regarded the face of the woman in the picture on his desk.

  He felt that the face was actually looking back at him. He could almost read her thoughts.

  It was a big deal for him, keeping that framed photograph right there in front of him. There were times when he would have been a lot happier just hurling it, frame and all, across the room—if not into the garbage altogether.

  But he knew that he needed the photograph. One, because he didn’t want to answer a lot of questions about what had happened to it—people were incredibly nosy—and two, because it reminded him of his purpose and what he was doing here in the first place. Not in the classroom, but on earth.

  His handsome face darkened as he thought about it. However, for once, he was at peace staring at the image of his late aunt.

  For now.

  For now because his appetite had been satisfied. But Jon Albert Murphy knew better than anyone that, at best, this was an extremely fleeting set of circumstances. His insatiable appetite to kill another woman would be back in full force before he could come to terms with it. It always ate away at him long before he was ready to eliminate the source of his anger.

  A day lecturer, Murphy was sitting in his cubbyhole of an office—an insult to his honor as far as he was concerned—with the door closed. Even so, the lecturer was carrying on the discussion with the photograph entirely in his head. It wasn’t the sort of “conversation” that he could risk having out loud, not when there was a chance that one of his students—or any student, really—could come walking into his office and overhear him.

  For the most part, the students who attended Aurora Valley College were a rude bunch of wet-behind-the-ears kids, he thought angrily. Not at all like he had been at their age. He had learned early on, thanks to Aunt Lily, to keep to himself. And to never speak unless he was spoken to—and at times, not even then, because he might find himself the target of someone’s unabashed wrath.

  But then, the people who frequented the lecture hall where he spoke and the classroom where he taught hadn’t been raised by his mother’s aunt Lily. Aunt Lily who had used her razor-sharp tongue to create countless bleeding holes in his self-esteem from the very moment she had become his guardian.

  Murphy remembered how stunned he had been when he discovered that his white trash mother had decided that she didn’t want to be saddled with him any longer. That was when Aunt Lily had stepped up to take over.

  At the time, he had been too naïve to understand why Aunt Lily had volunteered to do that. He had just thought that the woman was being kind to him. But he had learned all too quickly that that wasn’t the case.

  It had been his last innocent thought.

  And then, for a moment, the lecturer smiled to himself. Murphy was more than willing to bet that, in the end, Aunt Lily wound up regretting the decision she had made to be his guardian. Things hadn’t exactly turned out the way she had planned.

  Murphy sighed, resigned, as he looked back at the paper he had half-heartedly been attempting to read. These so-called “students” who attended Aurora Valley College, they were all a bunch of hopeless illiterates. Sometimes he couldn’t help wondering why he bothered wasting his time with them.

  But then, he thought, he knew exactly why he was doing this. Not to be dazzled by the magnitude of someone’s brain. That was definitely not the reason why he had applied to Aurora Valley College for the position of lecturer in the English Department when it had come up.

  He had come to the two-year college for an entirely different reason—a different agenda.

  He had come here looking for another sort of gratification. One that Aurora Valley College had been able to provide him with.

  Several times over, Murphy recalled with an eerie smile that would have unsettled anyone who looked at it.

  Shifting, Murphy tried to make himself comfortable in the hand-me-down office chair he had inherited along with the desk. It was an impossible task as far as he was concerned. Another insult in his eyes.

  The chair creaked as he leaned back in it and continued to read the incredibly dull paper. He could almost feel his eyes closing.

  Talk about boring, he thought in disgust.

  Murphy was surprised that he could read it and somehow still manage to remain awake. It was really a constant battle just to keep his eyes open.

  Little by little, he forced himself to shift his mind to the events he was anticipating happening later on this evening, after classes were over. Later this evening was when he was supposed to get together with Mrs. Lauren Dixon. The vivacious older blonde had asked him for help with her next paper. She had told him that she anticipated problems. Right.

  As she made the request, the restaurant waitress had even blushed a little.

  Like he didn’t even know what was going on.

  The corners of his mouth curved as he thought about meeting the woman in some little-frequented, off-campus location. Now all he had to do was decide if tonight was going to be the night when he made his move, or if he was going to put it off until some later date, anticipating the way it would feel.

  Sometimes, he told himself, waiting for that final moment was half the fun.

  Anticipation, Murphy thought as his pulse sped up and his smile widened, could be everything.

  He finished reading the paper he was holding quickly, then decided to award it a giant C plus, far more than the execution was worth in his opinion. Who knew, he might want to cultivate some goodwill with this student at a later date as well.

  No stone unturned, he decided with a wicked smile.

  Copyright © 2024 by Marie Rydzynski-Ferrarella

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  ISBN-13: 9780369743053

  Colton Threat Unleashed

  Copyright © 2024 by Harlequin Enterprises ULC

  Special thanks and acknowledgment are given to Tara Taylor Quinn for her contribution to The Coltons of Owl Creek miniseries.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

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