Antarctica. She’d still taken money to abandon him and what they’d built together. She’d destroyed their future. In the end, to take the money and run had been her choice. She hadn’t even loved him enough to tell him face-to-face.
And she’d taken sweet, precious little Emma with her.
Emma.
She’d be...four years old now. Halfway to five. He tried to picture the sunny little girl who had so captured his heart. What was she like? He had little contact with small children, so his only measure was trying to remember what his little sister Piper had been like then, when he was seven and she four. She had chattered, made wild leaps of imagination and pestered him with the question “why?” about seemingly everything, but that was about all he remembered.
“The old man turned her down when she came at him for more money, and she killed him.”
No. Not Jolie. Not the woman whose laugh could light up an entire room. Sure, she’d had a rough start in life and had gotten tangled up with some unsavory people, but she’d changed all that. For Emma, she’d remade her life. She would never intentionally hurt anyone. She just wouldn’t.
Would she? Could he really say this when she’d done just that, and for the most venal of reasons—money?
He spun the chair around, turning his back on the city that held the one woman he’d never been able to let go of.
* * *
“Don’t wanna go sleepy time.”
Emma mumbled it against Jolie’s side as she sat on the wide window seat in the study alcove that served as the girl’s bedroom in the small apartment. The nearly full moon shone in through the large window, something the girl normally enjoyed, but not tonight.
“I know,” Jolie said. She could only imagine what kind of nightmares the girl might be afraid of, and rightfully so. She’d thought of keeping Emma with her, but had had second thoughts that that might plant the idea of her having bad dreams, or worse, not being safe in her own bed.
“What if I see her?”
“Then I’ll be right here.”
“You won’t let her get me?”
“Never ever.”
That seemed to comfort the girl. She snuggled closer. “I don’t like her. She looked at me mean.”
“It’s all right,” Jolie began, automatically soothing before the sense of the child’s words sank in. Until now, it had always been the woman was mean-looking. But this...
“She looked at you?”
“When she saw me. In the car.”
The killer had seen Emma? Knew Emma had seen her? Jolie had to steady herself. “Did she come toward you? Toward the car?”
Emma nodded. “But I wasn’t scared, Mommy. ’Cuz you locked the door. She couldn’t get me. She ran away and you came.”
Jolie hugged the girl even closer, her mind racing but her heart outpacing it.
“Did she ever actually touch the car?” she asked, some vague idea of fingerprints stirring in the tiny portion of her brain that wasn’t flooded with panic.
Emma shook her head. “She ran away,” the girl repeated.
She could have killed my baby! She had a gun...why didn’t she just shoot...thank God, but why didn’t she... Emma is small. Maybe she couldn’t see her...that’s why she came toward the car...if I hadn’t come back when I did...why on earth did I leave her alone, even for seconds...? Never, ever again...
The horror was building rapidly inside her, and mixed with a healthy dose of self-condemnation, she knew the child would sense it at any moment. She already seemed to be waking up rather than winding down for sleep. Jolie fought down the roiling emotions. “Put your head on the pillow, sweetie.”
Reluctantly the child did so. “Sing me the song,” she said.
Jolie’s breath caught. She hadn’t asked for it in a while. How odd—or perhaps not—that she asked for it today, the same day her own foolish brain had been so full of the man who had first sung it to her, surprising Jolie with his deep, beautiful voice gone soft and sweet as he sang—wonderfully, she thought—the song of all the pretty little horses to the babe in his arms.
She often wondered if Emma remembered, too. If she remembered him. Or if somehow the song had just lodged in her memory and she didn’t associate it with anyone in particular; she just liked it.
Her own voice wasn’t nearly as good, or as strong, as T. C. Colton’s, and she hated the way singing it brought him so close in her mind, but tonight she wasn’t surprised it was what Emma wanted.
She tried, although she was shaken. She managed enough that her daughter relaxed into sleep. Grateful, both that Emma had gone to sleep and Jolie was able to stop the song that brought such painful memories, she stayed put for a long time. Finally she stood, but she knew her focus would be on Emma all night, in case the child did have those nightmares she herself feared.
She called the police, getting a weary-sounding woman who was nevertheless polite, and if not comforting, at least reassuring. The woman would forward along the information—that the killer had seen the only witness—to the people handling the murder case first thing. She also took down Jolie’s address, assuring her they would keep her location on close patrol check.
Far from sleep, she busied herself around the small apartment, gathering dirty clothes for washing, putting her day planner—the one she clung to for several reasons, including the man who had given it to her—in a desk drawer and assembling Emma’s lunch for tomorrow. If she had the choice, the girl wouldn’t go anywhere near the day care. But Jolie didn’t want to make things worse by freaking out and have Emma sense it and become more frightened herself. And she had to work, so she had little choice.
“I wasn’t scared, Mommy. ’Cuz you locked the door. She couldn’t get me.”
A shudder went through her. She felt the crash coming and quickly put everything away. She returned to the living area, where she pulled Emma’s favorite item, the big bluebonnet-blue chair, over toward the alcove where she could hear easily. She sank down into the cushioned softness, only then letting it all wash over her.
For a long time she simply sat there, shaking. She felt as if the ceiling fan were turned on, although it wasn’t. She thought of getting up and checking the thermostat, but she knew what she’d see. It might be October, but this was Texas; it was hardly cold. The chill was in her, not the room.
Emma. Her precious baby, the only thing that really, truly mattered in her world.
She drew her feet up, curled her legs under her and settled in. She wasn’t going anywhere tonight. She would doze here. She didn’t want to go too deeply asleep in case Emma awoke, frightened.
She only wished she had a way to turn off her tumbling thoughts. But it was impossible to avoid the harsh reality; her little girl had witnessed a green-eyed woman kill another woman in cold blood, and the killer knew it. Jolie wondered if this would leave her child forever terrified of green eyes.
A vision of other green eyes, those belonging to the man she had hoped to spend her life with, drifted through her tangled mind. Funny how eyes that were so cool and dismissive in his mother, Whitney Colton, could be so different in him. His gaze had been sometimes amused, sometimes thoughtful, occasionally angry, but always powerfully male. And never, ever cold in the way his mother’s had been the day she had insisted Jolie was nowhere good enough for her son, and ordered her off Colton Valley Ranch.
She yanked her thoughts out of that well-worn track, even as she acknowledged the irony that thinking about her daughter seeing a murder was the only thing powerful enough to do it.
That, and the fact that the victim bore a distinct resemblance to herself. Although that was merely an afterthought to her. Everything was, except her