Page 62 of Colton's Secret Weapon
It was the sense that his life choices hadn’t lived up to expectation. A lesson learned too late to avert the consequence.
How did a powerful man like her father live with the negative impact from a situation he’d created and couldn’t fix?
How did Dove help him find a way? When she didn’t know the way herself? Her mother had never taught her the lesson—not in words.
And not really in action, either. While she was absolutely certain her parents had adored each other, that her mother had loved her father and Dove, too, with her whole heart, she had no idea if they’d had an open marriage or not. If her mother had taken lovers while her father was away, Dove had certainly never known about it.
Nor could she come up with a single male figure in her mother’s life who might have been more than just a casual acquaintance.
The sound of Mitchell’s shoes on the creaking stairs had Dove scrambling to her feet. Putting the lid on her greens and shoving the container back into the refrigerator.
Feeling as though she’d had a good morning session, even though she hadn’t technically been in a meditative state.
Her incredibly odd reaction to sex with Mitchell hadn’t been about her. It had been a way for her to gain understanding of her father’s struggles. To be able to find a way to help him, where in the past she’d failed.
A new perspective with which to greet him when he awoke.
She didn’t have all the answers yet. But with her new understanding, she was finally on her way to finding them.
And knowing the reason behind her uncharacteristically territorial reaction to the previous night’s activities meant that she’d just freed herself up to have sex with Mitchell again.
A thought that brought enough of a flood of good feeling to drown out the pricks of fear as she headed out with him and into her day.
Or would have if he hadn’t come into the kitchen with tight lips and lines marring his forehead.
“What?” she asked, when his gaze sought her out and held on.
“There’s no sign ofLadybird’s mooring ropes, but they found evidence on the cement pad to indicate that someone had been standing on it within the last day. Not a footprint, but a lack of sea debris and algae growth, side by side, in the size of feet.”
Picking up the bag she’d packed for the hospital when she’d first come down that morning, she slung it over her shoulder and headed for the door. “So we know that someone tampered with the boat, but we have no way of finding out who.”
He was right behind her. Which just plain felt good. “Yep.” He didn’t sound at all happy about that fact.
“But we know who it is,” she reminded him. “It just means we still don’t have the proof we need to have him stopped.”
“It means he’s getting bolder,” Mitchell told her as he slid into the car seat beside her. They pulled their doors closed at the same time.
In unison.
As though their sex dance had somehow put them in sync. The thought filled her with pleasure. She clung to it as she asked something that had been toying at the edge of her brain. Something she hadn’t wanted to think about. “How would Brad Fletcher know about that cement platform? He’s not from Shelby, nor has he ever, that we know of, spent any time at St. James Boats. I didn’t even know about it until my dad bought the place and I started fooling around in the water. That was a few years before he’d retired, so before his fleet of boats were in. My folks would let me jump off the dock and swim, as long as one of them—Mom—was around to keep an eye on me.”
She was jabbering. Had her parents—their relationship—on her mind. They’d had a good plan for their future together. Her mother had seemed really happy about it. Eager to spend time at the marina. She’d been a huge help in getting the business up and running…
“Same way he got your studio vandalized,” Mitchell’s words cut into her remunerations. “Hired someone local.”
Maybe. Most likely. But… “Why go to all the trouble to swim in to get the job done when he could have just done the job from the docks?” With new horror shuddering through her, she turned to look at him. “Unless he knew about the newly installed cameras.”
The way Mitchell’s jaw tensed was his giveaway. “You already figured all this out,” she said to him. “And you have a suspect. Kirk? You think Fletcher hired him?”
Mitchell’s glance over at her as he paused at the end of his driveway held…speculation. Not confirmation. “It’s possible Kirk told Fletcher about the platform,” sounding…different. Tense, but not as…uptight.
“You suspected someone else.”
Pulling out onto the street that would take them into town, he gave her another, easier glance. “Notsuspected,” he told her. “Just wondered about. Not because he’s given me any reason to doubt him, personally, at all.”
There was only one person left that she knew of that fit the bill. “Wes?” she asked him, incredulous. “Wes would no more sabotage my father’s business than cut his own feet off. It’s not about the money for him,” she said. “It’s about family. Loyalty. Keeping businesses local. The man is Shelby golden to the core.”
Odd how Mitchell remained silent after her tirade, where normally he’d quietly lay out logical points as he saw them. And, not liking that he hadn’t done so—worried that his not doing so had something to do with the sex they’d had, as it was the onlything that had changed between them—she said, “The facts point to him.”
