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The officer behind him grinned as he recited the Miranda warning to Jace. “Jason Walters, you have a right to remain silent...”
Unable to hold back any longer, Asher rushed over to them.
“Stay back,” Spencer warned.
Asher lifted his hands to show he wasn’t a threat. “Please, just give me a minute.”
Spencer nodded, and the other officers shifted Jace and his girlfriend to face Asher.
“What are you doing here?” Jace asked him.
“Just tracking down my long-lost brother. The results are in, you know. We’re not related.”
“Big surprise.” Jace lifted his shoulders and lowered them. “Hey, it was a good con. You’ve got to give me credit for thinking of it after I learned about the forty-year-old baby-switch thing involving that Luella Smith lady. Sure, it was someone else’s game, but why should she be the only one to reap the rewards?”
Jace shook his head, chuckling. “And you Coltons were so desperate to find your ‘real Ace’ that you swallowed my whole story. My idea to use the name ‘Jace’ was ingenious, if I don’t say so myself. Like the new-and-improved Ace.”
He glanced down at Asher’s fisted hands and grinned.
“You didn’t think I really liked your jerk dad or your filthy cattle, did you?”
Asher’s stomach tightened as if the guy had just punched him. In many ways, he had, but at least he wouldn’t get away with what he’d done to his family.
“Now you take credit for the plan?” Sasha spat at her coconspirator.
“Fine. It was all her idea to have me pose as the baby switched with Ace.” He paused to grin at the woman next to him. “She also came up with the plan to call in the phony tip about the current Colton baby, so you’d all be too focused on that to pay any attention to me while I sucked your family dry until the DNA results came back.”
“What about the delay at the lab and the repeated test?” Asher asked.
“She had a friend in the lab, too. Isn’t that great? But we won’t be sharing all our secrets.”
“Oh, don’t worry. We’d already figured that one out,” Spencer said. “We’re expecting an arrest by the end of the day.”
Asher wasn’t sure he wanted to hear the answer, but he had to know one more thing.
“Why did you do it?”
“You probably think it’s all about the money,” Jace said. “Well, it wasn’t. You all deserved everything that happened to you after what one of your former foremen did to my dad, Bill Walters, when he was a cowboy on the Triple R. They drove him to a heart attack.”
“I don’t remember the name.”
“It was before your time, but that doesn’t make any of you Coltons less responsible.”
Asher swallowed, again feeling bad for actions of those on the Triple R before he was born or had any impact on the ranch decisions. “He survived, didn’t he?”
“Yes, but he was never the same after that. They took my father from me. He was just a shell of a man.”
“I’m sorry your father was treated badly, but the atmosphere on the ranch is different now. I’m the foreman, and you know I care about the ranch hands as much as I do the animals and the land,” Asher said. “No matter what happened, it didn’t give you the right to target my family.”
His heart squeezed as he remembered how Willow had as much reason to hate the Coltons as Jace had, but she’d never struck out at them the way he had
.
“Oh, hell,” Sasha called out. “Could I have found a worse accomplice for this con?”
Jace glanced over at her. “You needed me. I’m the one who got inside. I’m the one who gained everyone’s trust enough to have them letting me provide security, like a fox guarding a henhouse.”
“And you wouldn’t even have known about the game in the first place if I hadn’t been forced to do home care for that gabby retired nurse from Mustang Valley.” She spoke to Asher. “Does the name Nancy Hersh sound familiar to you?”
