Stepbrother Breaks Bad: The Complete Series Read online

  Miss Annabelle laced her fingers together to show off her bright pink nail polish, as if in anticipation of his judgement on her new pie. But as he flaked the crust with his fork, his appetite suddenly gone, she said, “Do you want to tell me what happened?”

  He didn’t. Colton didn’t want to tell anybody what had happened. Certainly not a nosy neighbor. But she could read about it in the paper so there was no use denying it. “Not much to tell. Just made a mistake in the field.”

  “What kind of mistake?”

  Colton took a forkful of pie and stuffed it in his mouth to relieve himself of having to answer. But the sweetness of that pie filling mixed with the cinnamon and wine was so heady that it was almost like sex.

  Almost.

  Damn. Miss Annabelle could bake. It’d be some kind of sin to lie to a woman who baked a pie like that. So he said, “We were going after a drug kingpin. A big one. But as things started shaking out, it was clear that we couldn’t touch him. We could bust some of his underlings, though, and the hope was that we could turn them.”

  Miss Annabelle nodded, her eyes wide, soaking up every word as if she had any idea what the underworld of crime looked like outside of Boone County. She didn’t, of course. So Colt didn’t know why he was still telling her any of this. But another heavenly bite of pie, and the truth just came out of him. “Long story short, I didn’t want to settle for underlings. I wanted the kingpin. So I went after him. All on my own.”

  He didn’t expect Miss Annabelle to sigh. “Well, of course you did. You’re a Marbray and he was your white whale.”

  Colton tilted his head. “Say what?”

  Miss Annabelle patted his hand. “Oh, you come by it honestly, boy. It goes back generations with your family. You Marbray men get obsessed with things. Sometimes for the better. Sometimes for the worse. With your great-great-grandpappy it was the strikes and the coal mine wars. Wouldn’t stop until he got his head bashed in during the violence. With your great-grandpappy it was this house. Took him near a decade to build it with his own two hands, but he had a dream for this hill and didn’t stop until he made it happen. And your daddy…well, his obsession was your Momma.”

  Colton’s father had died in a car accident when he was still too young to remember. But he’d heard the stories. He’d heard all about how his father wooed his mother—year after year—wearing her down until she finally realized that she loved him back just as much.

  Maybe obsession was in his blood…

  Colton cleared his throat. “Well, however I come by it, honestly or not, it didn’t serve me well in the field. I got cocky. Put too much faith in an informant. I went too far. I shot a man dead and we ended up with nothing. The whole case fell apart. Now here I am, licking my wounds.”

  Miss Annabelle eyed him, and straightened her pink framed glasses. “Sounds like you’re in a dark place my boy.”

  Colton was in a dark place. He was all alone in this world now. No family. Only a few friends. And the career he’d sacrificed everything for was tarnished. He’d had trouble sleeping. Been drinking more than his fair share. Hated his desk job. Was lonelier than he could ever remember.

  Felt like shit every day.

  Which is probably how he came to be spilling his guts to Miss Annabelle of all people. “I dunno,” Colt said. “There just comes a point, maybe, where a man feels like he’s gonna break.”

  “Well, that’s good,” she said.

  Colt tilted his head in confusion. “It’s good? You mean your pie?”

  “The pie is good too,” she said, licking her fork. “But I mean that it’s good you’re in a dark place and that you feel like you’re gonna break.”

  He quirked a curious brow. “That which does not kill us makes us stronger?”

  Miss Annabelle chuckled. “No. I think you been lost for some years and you’re about to find yourself. See, we don’t know who we are until we’re strained to the breaking point. We never know if we’re gonna break good or bad. Sounds like you’re about to find out.”

  Chapter Three

  SHELBY

  People were scared of my father.

  I’d known that as long as I’d been alive. It was part of his charm, really. It made him a big man around these parts, where he ran the bar, the mechanic’s shop and a few less savory enterprises that he never admitted to owning.

  Women wanted his protection. They wanted his love. And he’d been able to hide the dark side of him long enough to convince Colton’s mom to marry him; after all, Darlene was just looking for a strong father figure for her son. But what none of us knew back then was that everyone was scared of my father because he hurt people.

  Oh, I’d known my daddy could wield a belt when he wanted to. He’d even given Darlene a good smack—which had resulted in a knock down fight when Colton found out. But when I say that my father hurt people, I don’t mean domestic woes.

  No. My father hurt people. He and the men with whom he did business were known to break noses, bash knees, and—on one occasion—throw someone down the stairs. It was the kind of rough stuff that went hand-in-hand with running a chop shop and an auto-theft ring.

  I didn’t like it. I never asked about the details when making up entries in the ledger to disguise where all the money was coming from. But I’d never even imagined—not for one moment—that it could end in murder.

  At least not until Colton showed me the photos of those two men.

  I recognized them. They were men who my father had threatened just a few nights before when they’d showed up in the bar demanding money. Now they were dead. Shot, execution style. That’s what Colton had said. And in spite of the fact that it was summertime and so muggy the air outside was thick to breathe, I hadn’t been able to get warm ever since he said it.

  So by the time my father came in one morning with a whole duffle bag of cash, my nerves were on end. Following my father into his air conditioned office in the back of the bar, I asked, “You hear about them men shot at the side of the highway?”

  He grunted while stacking the bills in his safe.

  It wasn’t an answer. So I pressed for more. “You know Colton Marbray was here asking about them.”

  That got my daddy’s attention. “So that’s why Colton was sniffing around you?”

  I folded my arms over myself, feeling vulnerable, and a little guilty, as if my father always thought I was somehow to blame for men sniffing around me. Maybe I was. Because I was the kind of girl that a man like Colton could kiss, but never love. And I was still reeling from knowing that our first kiss had been just a means to get me to talk, and meant nothing to him at all. “He showed me photos. Wanted to know if I recognized those men.”

  My father turned to stare. “What’d you say?”

  “I said I never saw them before in my life.”

  I expected my father to be proud of me. To be grateful that I knew better than to give information to lawmen. But instead, my father scowled. “You lied.”

  “Well, what was I supposed to do?”

  “Colton wouldn’t have asked if he didn’t already know the answer,” my father said. “Probably has some record that they were in the bar. Now he’s got you denying it. It’s only going to make him suspicious.”

  My stomach twisted at the thought. “I didn’t deny they were in the bar. I just denied recognizing them. There’s nobody that can say otherwise. You were the one who argued with them, not me. Or was I supposed to tell Colton the truth about that, too?”

  My father put both hands on his desk and stared into my eyes. “You got something you wanna ask me, Shelby?”

  Tell me you didn’t kill anybody, I thought. Because even if my father and I had our problems, we were still family. Blood. I didn’t want to think he was capable of something so terrible. I’d have believed him if he told me he had nothing to do with it—because I wanted to believe him. But I was too afraid he might tell me different. “I wanna ask what I should do if Colton—”

  “You stay away fr
om that boy, d’you hear?”

  I hadn’t sought him out! Not this time. It wasn’t my fault. But that wasn’t ever going to make a difference to my father, by whom I never could seem to do right.

  “Here’s a list of some parts to put up for sale from the shop,” my father said, tossing me a stack of paper smudged with oil and grease. He’d claim, if I asked, that they were rare parts from cars that were surrendered at the mechanic’s shop. But I wasn’t stupid. A whole lot of expensive cars just happened to pass through Shiloh township and break down along the way.

  I supposed that by listing those parts up for sale on the internet, I was an accessory to crimes I didn’t even know about. I’d always told myself that if I didn’t ask then I couldn’t feel guilty. Ignorance was bliss. But it had always bothered me anyway. I resented being used like this. I resented it like hell. I’d made plans to leave this shit hole town every day of my life since before I could remember. Somehow, Colton’s return had changed all that, because now I felt like I had to get out of town tomorrow.

  And that stack of cash in my daddy’s safe was looking like the tempting solution to my problem…

  I said before that I was good with numbers. That was a bit of an understatement. I was great with numbers. And not just making them all balance in a ledger, either. I could remember a string of numbers a mile long, which is why I had no trouble remembering the combination to my father’s safe.

  I waited until Friday—always a busy day of the week at the shop. Lucky for me, this one happened to fall during the yearly Scarecrow Festival, over which my father presided, and in which Shiloh’s fine citizens all turned out to eat, drink, and be merry.

  Which meant the bar was closed.

  I’d never have a better chance to take the money and run. Unfortunately, if I didn’t at least put in an appearance at the festival, someone would notice. Especially since my homemade apple crumb cake was entered in a contest. So I was in the middle of town square bright and early Friday morning, setting out my dish on the blue and white checkered tablecloth right next to Annabelle Tidwell, whose son Huey was on hand to help.

  “My, that’s a nice golden top on that cake you got there,” Huey said, sweet-natured and flirtatious as ever.

  Huey was a big, good-looking farm boy. A mite on the short side, but a girl couldn’t go wrong with a solid working man like that. Problem was, he wasn’t Colt and never could be. “Thanks, Huey. It’s the butter that does the trick…”

  Miss Annabelle tugged down her pink shirt over a slightly portly tummy. “He’s right though. Browned up just perfect. Looks like I’ve got stiff competition this year.”

  “Oh, you don’t have to worry, Miss Annabelle,” I drawled, eying her lattice-work berry pie with envy…and hunger. “Everybody knows you’ll take the blue ribbon. The rest of us are just fighting it out for second place!”

  I was gonna miss her pies. I was gonna miss her. I was even gonna miss Huey and this festival and this town square. But if it meant getting away from my daddy’s crooked business, and getting away from Colton before he broke my heart again, it would be worth striking it out on my own.

  A sentiment I felt keenly when I saw Colton’s hat towering above the crowd as he came swaggering my way. I felt myself go weak from head to toe, every cell in my body aware of him. Every thought in my mind centered on the memory of our kiss. A kiss we shouldn’t have shared, because we were both just playing each other. But a kiss that had left me dizzy and shaking in its aftermath, touching my lips as if I could hold onto the taste and feel of him forever.

  Goddamn, I wanted him so bad it was like a sickness with symptoms I couldn’t hide. Because much to my mortification, Miss Annabelle took one look at me, frozen where I was, then followed my eyes to Colton. “Good Lord Almighty, Shelby. You look like you’d be willing to give away your cake and the world, just on Colton Marbray’s say so.”

  “Dunno what you mean,” I said, so embarrassed I wished I could just dry up and blow away.

  Huey looked so distinctly uncomfortable that I was grateful when his mother gave him an excuse to go. “Huey, I left my sunglasses in the car. Would you be a love and fetch ‘em for me?”

  Huey frowned but lumbered off to do her bidding, a gentleman as always. Then his mother leaned in to me as two children ran by with balloons. “Not that I blame you for looking at him that way. Colton Marbray is good-looks personified with a dead sexy hitch in his walk. Why if I was a few years younger—”

  “Miss Annabelle!”

  “All I’m saying is that Colton isn’t the same boy who left here,” she continued, setting out pink napkins for the judges who would be tasting her pie. “So if you want him, you’d best be ready to save his soul, and your own.”

  Save his soul? I couldn’t imagine what she meant by that. Especially when the only thing I knew I wanted was to be underneath him, pulling his body into mine. Souls were the very last thing on my mind. “Get on with you, Miss Annabelle. He’s my stepbrother.”

  “You suddenly worried about the way that looks, Shelby Baker? Because the hillbilly gossip about you and Colton goes all the way back to the day he beat down my son for having a go at you. That ship has long sailed…”

  Oh Lord, was there a way to make her stop talking before Colton got to our table? I couldn’t think of any, so I just kept my spine straight and my eyes ahead, trying not to lick my lips at the sight of Colton wearing a tight-fitting long john shirt at the start of summer without even breaking a sweat.

  And Miss Annabelle wasn’t lying about that dead sexy hitch in his walk… as if that gun in his belt weighed him down.

  “Miss Annabelle,” Colt said, with a tip of his hat. Then he turned to me. “Shelby.”

  I tried to remember the way he said my name. Because it might be one of the last times I ever heard him say it. I tried to engrave it in my heart—as if I could find some little way to hold onto him, even after I was gone.

  Still, I tried to play it cool. “Didn’t know the government gave time off for the Scarecrow Festival. Or are you playing hookie just for a slice of Miss Annabelle’s pie?”

  “I always did have a sweet tooth,” Colton confessed, with a shit-eating grin. “But the truth is, I’m here to ask some questions about them poor bastards found at the side of the road.”

  “Told you all I know,” I said, my belly tightening with the lie.

  “Maybe not. Maybe so,” Colton said. “But I’m wondering what your daddy said when you told him I was asking. Because I’m betting that’s just what you did. Ran off to Buford telling tales…”

  “Was I supposed to keep our conversation confidential and didn’t know it?” I asked, putting a glass dome over my cake to protect it from the buzzing bees. And though Miss Annabelle was clearly curious, she moved to the end of the table to give us the semblance of privacy.

  Colt’s grin fell away. “What’d he say, Shelby?”

  “He said to stay away from you,” I replied, finally meeting his eyes.

  “Probably good advice,” Colton answered. “But you should know that I’m pretty sure I know what happened to those men. They were car thieves with rap sheets a mile long. The vehicle they were found in, well, let’s just say it was worth more than my salary. It was lifted in Chicago and driven all the way here to Shiloh—probably because the thieves had someplace to stash and dismantle it.”

  My mouth went dry and silent but I never looked away.

  Meanwhile, Colton leaned forward. “That someplace was probably your father’s garage. Because Buford Baker’s not just some small business owner from Shiloh. They know his name up in Chicago, too. He’s made a reputation for himself. And I’m thinking that these thieves had probably done business with Buford before.”

  I let Colton talk, trying to give away nothing, my fingers digging down deep into my pockets so that I could hide the shaking. Yet still, I was silent.

  Colton finally peered at me from beneath the rim of his hat. “The question is what went wrong this time?
What’d these thieves do to piss your daddy off so much that he not only had them killed, but left a nice new shiny Silverado sitting there at the side of the road…”

  There it was. The accusation that my father was a killer. Sitting out there for anybody to hear it. Even Miss Annabelle looked horrified. And in spite of the poison of my own doubts, I felt the need to stand up for my blood kin. “That’s quite an imagination you’ve got there, Colt. You best watch what you say lest someone take it as slander against an innocent man.”

  “You denying it, Shelby?”

  “I deny knowing anything you’re talking about,” I said, because it was mostly true. Whatever was at the heart of my father’s quarrel with the dead men, I didn’t know and I didn’t want to know.

  What’s more, at that very moment I thought I caught sight of two strangers in the crowd. A squat man in a leather jacket and a teenager—both of whom made me feel uneasy for no reason I could reckon except that they weren’t from around these parts. Obviously, Colton was rattling me. He was rattling me bad. I had to get my bearings about me, so I yanked my hands out of my pockets and reached for the tasting cake and put it on the table next to the one meant for display. “You want a bite before the judge’s get at it?”

  Colton stared at me a moment, as if unnerved by my newfound ability to resist his charms. Then he said, “Not hungry.”

  “Suit yourself,” I told him, taking a bite of my own cake just to give my mouth something to do other than drool over him.

  Colt’s eyes narrowed. “You know I’m going to question all these people, Shelby. And one of them is gonna give me an answer that leads me back to you and your daddy.”

  With a mouth full of sugar, I said, “Knock yourself out.”

  And those were the last words I ever planned to speak to Colton Marbray…

  Chapter Four