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“It’s no big deal. I’ll take the sofa.” Making an effort to look and sound more at ease than he was feeling, he pulled off the cowboy hat and tossed it onto the lumpy gold tweed cushions. “Now, about this girl you mentioned, the one claiming to be my—”
Sierra frowned and shook her head. “Young woman, you mean,” she corrected, pulling a couple of cans of Coke and some paper napkins out of the bag. “But first, why don’t you go wash the blood off your face, bruiser?”
Wincing at the reminder of the crack he’d taken from the bearded thug’s gun to his face, Ace ducked into the small bathroom to clean up as best he could. A few minutes later he returned after stripping down to his black tee to rid himself of the now-stained Western shirt and bandanna and washing carefully so as not to reopen the split skin at his cheekbone.
Sierra looked up from the seat she’d taken at the table. “That looks better, though I can already see you’ll have a shiner.” She passed him one of the two Cokes. “How’s it feeling?”
“It’s stopped bleeding.” As he popped the can’s tab, he shrugged, not mentioning the halo of bright specks he’d seen around the bathroom’s bare lights or the dull but steady throb in his head. “I’ll take that as a win at this point. What about you? Seriously, you okay?”
“Nothing I can’t handle,” she insisted with a defiant gleam in her eyes that made him suspect her answer would be the same even if those thugs had lopped off her leg.
Once he’d claimed the chair across from her, each of them grabbed a pizza. Over the next few minutes they ate in silence, making short work of a meal that failed to satisfy but would at least help to energize their tired bodies.
But it wasn’t enough to keep thoughts of their earlier conversation from crowding in on him before Sierra pushed away her last half-eaten bite as he washed down a final mouthful.
“So you’re going to quit putting me off and tell me about this Nova person,” he prompted as he set his soda down. “I need to hear all of it, now.”
Blowing out a breath, Sierra wiped her hands and pulled out her cell phone. When she looked up again into his eyes, he once more felt the impact of their connection, reaching all the way down to his spine and crackling outward through the myriad nerve endings. He felt a buzz of anticipation, the unshakable sense that this tough, smart woman had come into his life to change its course forever.
Or maybe utterly destroy what little I have left...
“I’ll do you one better, Ace,” she told him. “I’ll show you right now. You see, after Selina hired me, I realized I couldn’t do the job without getting to know who’s who in your family before I started interviewing them for clues regarding your whereabouts. I needed a system to document their names and faces since it’s such a large clan, with so many siblings and half siblings.”
“They’re not really mine, though. Not anymore,” he said, thinking of how not one of them was an actual blood relation. Of how he’d been cast adrift by that fateful email exposing him as an imposter.
“Well, they still think of you as family, your brothers and your sisters,” she insisted.
The assertion sent relief zinging straight to his heart. Sure, his siblings had stuck by him at first, when Ace’s body type hadn’t matched that of the assailant seen in the grainy security footage from the office, nor from the failed sting operation. When another piece of evidence had turned up as well, an Arizona Sun Devils pin found beneath the boardroom air-conditioning unit in the wake of their father’s shooting, that, too, had seemed to point in another direction, since like his father, Ace had never had much interest in collegiate sports.
But once that so-called witness had come forward, insisting that he’d confessed to shooting his father and hiding the gun inside his condo, Ace had lost hope that anyone would truly believe in him at all, much less still want to claim him as a brother.
“I got a picture of each of them from Selina and made notes as to how they were related.” Sierra opened the photo section of her phone.
The rickety chair creaked as Ace leaned forward, straining to see familiar faces—faces that made his heart ache with nostalgia for simpler, happier times as she began to scroll. Would he ever again see them? Ever share another exchange not tainted by lies and weighted down by tragedy?
As his skin tightened and his pulse spiked, her voice took on an unearthly quality, seeming to echo in his ears. “That’s your daughter, Nova Colton.”
“Nova Colton...” His own words came out strained and parched as if he’d been trekking through an endless desert. Because this was impossible, some kind of tortured nightmare—or worse yet a flat-out lie, meant to disarm his defenses and lead him to his arrest as calmly as a lamb to slaughter.
As the panicked thought raced through his head, Ace stood so abruptly that the chair tipped to the floor behind him. “I don’t have a daughter,” he insisted, needing to let her know she damned well wasn’t fooling him with this wild story. Or was he only trying to keep the ground from shifting out from underneath him, as it had so many times in these past months?
Coming to her feet as well, Sierra turned the cell to hold it against her chest. As she looked up at him, compassion eased the hard set of her jaw and softened her green eyes.
“You do, Ace. Yes, you do,” she said. “And not only a daughter...” Flipping the phone around, she smiled, showing him a pretty young blonde woman, with an unmistakable bump at her midsection. “But a grandchild on the way.”
Every atom of him shook, demanding that he turn away. Or curse her for the cruelty of this deception. Why hadn’t he realized earlier she’d only been stringing him along?
He pictured himself storming out, vanishing into the dark desert night. If Sierra wanted to stop him, she’d have to knock him off his feet again or catch him in time to pepper spray his face as she had the bald thug’s.
Except he didn’t leave. Didn’t even turn. He couldn’t. Not with the wonder of her words still sinking in, of what he could see with his own two eyes on her phone’s screen, igniting like a spark in a stack of drought-dry kindling.
“She—she’s pregnant?” he found himself asking instead, as if what Sierra had said hadn’t sunk in the first time. “But she’s so young. What would you say?”
Sierra scrutinized the photos. “Twenty-two, maybe twenty-three, tops. Couldn’t be much older. And you’re, what is it? Forty now? Not that you really look it but—”
“Which would’ve made me—Hell, I must’ve only been about...” In the split second it took him to do the math, a buzz started inside his brain. A buzz that morphed into a swarm of tiny, bright dots as it hit him that Nova had her mother’s jaw and forehead.
“Oh, hell,” he said, groaning at the memory of a girl he’d scarcely thought about in decades. A memory that cracked the dam of disbelief.
