her father’s voice reverberating in her ear with his loudly shouted demands, Marlowe opened her email, hoping that maybe the contents weren’t as bad as it initially seemed.
It was worse. Marlowe’s head was suddenly filled with a swirling kaleidoscope of memories, all grounded in her childhood. Adventures and events that she and Asa, whom everyone called Ace, had shared as children. Ace was her big brother. He was a big brother to all of them, even to her adopted brother, Rafe. Ace didn’t care. He treated Rafe just like he was a real brother.
That was just the way that Ace was.
Marlowe looked back down at the email’s subject line.
That was absolutely absurd, she thought. Who would say such a crazy thing? Who would even come up with such an idiotic idea, she silently demanded, stunned beyond words. Maybe this was the work of some competitor in an attempt to disrupt the company.
“Marlowe? Marlowe, are you there?” Payne Colton’s deep voice thundered, bringing her back to the moment and her suddenly cold and incredibly inhospitable-feeling office.
It took her a second to focus and come around. Thinking took another second. “Yes,” she said, breathing heavily, “I’m here, Dad.”
“No,” her father corrected her sharply, “you’re there. I need you to come here. Now!” he declared. “Can you do that for me?” he asked his daughter sarcastically. “Can you hightail it out of your overdecorated office and get yourself to the boardroom five minutes ago?” Payne shouted.
It wasn’t just Marlowe’s knees that were shaking now—it was all of her.
With effort, she gripped the armrests of her chair and literally hauled herself up to her feet. Testing the strength of her legs for a second to make sure that she wouldn’t just fall flat on her face with the first step she took, Marlowe slowly moved her hands away from the armrests. By now her heart was pounding against her chest like a drumroll.
“I’m coming,” she told her father in what seemed like a whisper.
“What did you just say?” Payne demanded angrily. “I can’t hear you!” he declared like the marine drill sergeant that all his children, at one time or another, had felt he was.
Marlowe took a deep breath, filling her lungs with air before she repeated the words. “I said I was coming.”
“Then get here already!” Payne snapped.
The next moment, the connection was abruptly terminated. Only her father’s disapproval and anger lingered in the air around her like a dark, malevolent cloud.
This wasn’t happening, Marlowe silently insisted as she closed down her laptop.
That done, she raced out of her office. None of it, she tried to console herself. None of this terrible stuff was happening. Not this hateful email and not that positive pregnancy test.
It was all just a bad dream, and any second now, she was going to wake up, Marlowe promised herself. And when she did, all of this was just going to be an awful, fading memory.
Her high heels resounded, clicking rhythmically against the highly polished marble floor as she ran down the corridor to the Colton Oil boardroom. The staccato sound seemed to mock what she had just told herself.
Her heart fell with a thud as she reached the open boardroom door.
It didn’t look as if she was going to wake up from this one after all.
It was almost surreal that after all these years of being on the opposing side of every argument, Bowie Robertson couldn’t seem to be able to get thoughts of Marlowe Colton out of his head. The simple truth of it was that he hadn’t been able to stop thinking about the Colton Oil president for the last six weeks.
At first, it had been because the woman was single-handedly responsible for what was admittedly the greatest night, bar none, of his thirty-two-year-old life.
Granted that, for years now, he had been very aware of the fact that Marlowe Colton, with her shoulder-length mane of whitish-blond hair and a figure that wouldn’t quit, was drop-dead gorgeous. But he had also viewed the woman as the personification of an ice queen. An ice queen with nothing but cutthroat ambition running in her pretty veins.
He had been completely blown away to find out that the total opposite was really the case.
Yes, he had had a great deal of champagne to drink that night, but even an entire river of alcohol wouldn’t have been able to drown his brain to the point that would get him to believe something that wasn’t really true. He would have to have been beyond utterly drunk to believe that what had actually been a sow’s ear had transformed into the proverbial silk purse.
No, he wasn’t suffering from some sort of delusion; that had actually happened.
But as enchanted as he’d been by the slightly vulnerable, passionate, warm, funny woman he had made love with in her oversize hotel bed, the cold reality was that it had turned out to be just another illusion, a sleight of hand with no staying power once it was viewed in the light of day.
In fact, he had discovered that Marlowe actually did care about the environment and that she had set up awards for Colton Oil employees who created sustainable technologies and were working to make the family business more eco-friendly. That notably went against her father’s narrow-minded view, but once he had left her room and was on his way back to his own world, Bowie quickly found out just how cold and vicious Marlowe Colton could really be.
A few short hours after they had spent what he had viewed at the time as an exceptionally passionate night together, Bowie found himself to be a marked man.
Marked for death.
There had been two attempts made on his life in breathtakingly short order. Right after he had left the hotel, someone driving a black SUV tried to run him over. When that attempt hadn’t been successful because he had managed to get out of the way just in time, someone tried to shoot him.
The sound of a gunshot had been so benign that at first he thought it was a car backfiring—and then he saw the hole a bullet had made right through the car window that was less than a foot away from where he’d been standing.
The two incidents, so close together, were just too much of a coincidence for Bowie to merely shrug off. It had to have been because of Marlowe—or someone acting on that she-devil’s orders. It was too much of a coincidence that, right after he’d slept with the enemy, someone tried to kill him...right?
He speculated that the reason for the attempts on his life—the failed attempts, he gratefully amended—were twofold. One, the woman had obviously let her guard down that night, and since he was the one who had witnessed this drop and been on the receiving end of the consequences of that action, she undoubtedly didn’t want him telling anyone about it. The only way to ensure that didn’t happen was to have him eliminated.
Why had she gone to such drastic lengths? She had also shared something with him that, in hindsight, would probably be considered a company secret. She was
