“Never mind,” she told Carson, changing topics. “I have to see to my baby, if it’s all right with you,” she said, a mild touch of sarcasm breaking through.
Rather than say anything in response, Carson just waved her back to her quarters.
Serena’s voice was fairly dripping with ice as she said, “Thank you.”
With that she turned on her bare heel to walk back into her suite.
“Let’s go, Justice,” Carson said to the dog, steering the animal toward the stairs.
Keeping a tight hold on the dog’s leash, Carson walked out of the house quickly, a man doing his best to outrun memories he found far too painful to coexist with.
Once outside, he saw the other members of the K-9 team. Not wanting to be faced with unnecessary questions, he forced himself to relax just a little.
“Anything?” Carson asked the man closest to him, Jim Kline.
Jim, paired with a jet-black German shepherd whimsically named Snow, shook his head. “If that woman’s anywhere on the property, she’s crawled down into a gopher hole and pulled the hole down after her,” the man answered him.
Finn came over to join them. Carson noticed that the chief looked as disappointed as he felt.
“Okay, men, everybody back to the station. We’re calling it a night and getting a fresh start in the morning.” The chief glanced over in his direction. “You, too, Gage,” he ordered, obviously expecting an argument from Carson.
And he got it. “I’m not tired, Chief,” Carson protested, ready to keep going.
“Good for you,” Finn said sarcastically. “Maybe when you get a chance, you can tell the rest of us what kind of vitamins you’re on. But for now, I’m still the chief, and I still call the shots. We’re going back to the station, end of discussion,” Finn repeated, this time more forcefully. He left absolutely no room for even so much as a sliver of an argument.
Resigned, Carson crossed over to his vehicle and opened the rear door to let Justice in. Shutting the door again, he opened the driver’s side and got into the car himself.
He felt all wound up. Talking to Serena Colton while she was wearing that frilly, flimsy nightgown beneath a robe that wouldn’t stay closed hadn’t exactly helped his state of mind, either.
Carson shut the image out. It only got in the way of his thoughts. And despite being dragged through the wringer physically and emotionally, he sincerely doubted he was going to get any sleep tonight.
Biting off an oath, Carson started up his car and headed toward the police station.
* * *
Serena could tell that the rest of her family was still up. From the sound of the raised, angry voices wafting up the stairs, they were going on about this sudden, unexpected turn of events and how furious her father and mother were that Finn hadn’t seen his way to leaving them out of this investigation strictly on the strength of the fact that they were his family.
Instead, Finn had actually treated them like he would anyone else, rousing them out of their beds just because he felt it was his duty to go over the entire grounds, looking for a woman her parents felt had no business being on the family ranch in the first place.
Serena let them go on venting, having absolutely no desire to get involved by sticking up for Finn. Her parents were going to carry on like this no matter what she said.
Besides, right now her main duty was to her daughter. The ongoing commotion had eventually agitated Lora, and she wanted to get the baby to fall back to sleep.
The corners of her mouth curved in an ironic smile as she looked down at the infant in her arms. Funny how a little being who hadn’t even existed a short three months ago had so quickly become the very center of her universe. The very center of her heart.
Since the very first moment Lora had drawn breath, Serena felt obliged to protect the baby and care for her, doing everything in her power to make the world around Lora as safe and inviting for the infant as was humanly possible.
These last few months, her focus had been strictly and entirely on Lora. She had long since divorced her mind from any and all thoughts that even remotely had anything to do with Lora’s conception or the man who had so cavalierly—and unwittingly—fathered her.
It had all been one huge mistake.
She had met Mark, whose last name she never learned, at a horse auction. The atmosphere at the auction had been fast paced and extremely charged thanks to all the large amounts of money that were changing hands.
Representing the Double C Ranch and caught up in the excitement, Serena had broken all her own rules that day—and that night. She had allowed the devastatingly handsome, charming stranger bidding next to her to wine and dine her and somewhere amid the champagne-filled evening, they had wound up going back to her sinfully overpriced hotel room where they had made extremely passionate love. Exhausted from the activity and the alcohol, she had fallen asleep after that.
She had woken up suddenly in the middle of the night. When she did, Serena found herself alone, a broken condom on the floor bearing testimony to her drastically out-of-character misstep. Managing to pull herself together and taking stock of the situation, she discovered that the money in her wallet as well as her credit cards were gone, along with her lover.
Canceling the cards immediately, she still wasn’t fast enough to get ahead of the damage. Her one-night stand had cost her several thousand dollars, racked up in the space of what she found out was an hour. The man worked fast.
It was a very bitter pill for her to swallow, but she felt that there was an upside to it. She’d learned a valuable lesson from that one night and swore never to put herself in that sort of stupid situation again. Never to blindly trust anyone again.
Moreover, she made herself a promise that she was through with men and that she was going to devote herself strictly to raising horses, something she was good at and understood.
That was what she planned.
Life, however, she discovered, had other plans for her. Her first and only one-night stand had yielded a completely unplanned by-product.
She’d got pregnant.
That had thrown her entire world out of kilter. It took Serena a while to gather her courage together to break the news to her parents. That turned out to be one of the worst experiences of her life. They reacted exactly as she had feared that they would. Her father had railed at her, absolutely furious that she had got herself in this sort of “situation,” while her mother, an incredible snob from the day she was born, carried on about the shame she had brought on the family.
Joanelle accused her of being no better than her trashy relatives who hailed from the two lesser branches of the family. The only ones in the family who were there for her and gave her their support were her brothers, Finn and Anders.
She also received support from a very unlikely quarter. Her cousin Demi Colton. She and Demi had never been really friendly, given the branches of the family they came from. But Demi had done her a favor involving one of the ranch hands about a year ago. That had earned her cousin a soft spot in Serena’s heart.
And then, when she found herself pregnant, with her parents pushing for her to “eliminate” her “shame,” it was Demi, surprisingly enough, who had come out on her side. Demi told her that she should do whatever she felt she should as long as that decision ultimately meant that she was being true to herself.
At that point, Serena did some very deep soul-searching. Ultimately, she had decided to have her baby. Seeing that her mind was made up, her brothers gave her their full support. However, it was Demi she found herself turning toward and talking with when times got rough.
She wasn’t ordinarily the type who needed constant bolstering and reinforcement, but having Demi to talk to, however sporadically, wound up making a world