I refuse to meet his eyes and nod, feeling slightly overwhelmed. The high of last night is replaced so easily by the worry of today and the constant apprehension over how I’m going to make the finances work.
“Here you go,” Will says, saving me from having to face Jack.
“Thanks,” Jack says.
“Is that all?” I ask, needing to go groom the horses and use the time to figure out everything.
“Yeah.” Jack’s voice is gentle where it had been almost harsh in the past. “Wait. There is one more thing. The feed that was delivered yesterday . . . is that the same quantity and mixture you always order?”
“Yeah.” My response is cautious as I look between the two, hating the tingles I’m getting on the back of my neck from it. “It’s on a schedule from Lone Star Feed. Why? What’s going on?”
“Nothing,” Jack says with a shake of his head as he closes the binder with all the breeding info and grabs his keys from his pocket. “I’ll be back in a bit. I have to run into town.”
There’s something in the way he makes the comment—an underlying anger I don’t understand—that has me chasing after him as he strides out of the stable.
“Jack. Wait up. Where are you going?” He doesn’t wait for me, forcing me to run after him. “Goddamn it, Jack! Tell me what in the hell is going on.”
I grab his arm and yank on it right as he gets to his truck. When he turns to look at me, his face is a mask of measured fury that has me stepping back momentarily.
“They’re cutting your grain.”
“Cutting it?” I ask because I have no idea what that means, only that he’s livid about it.
“Yeah. Cheating you by adding the cheapest filler to your high-end grain.” He yanks open the driver’s side door of his truck.
“You knew this and you were going to leave without telling me.” For some reason, it’s easier to focus on him than on them. “Don’t you think I had a right to know?”
“This is where you trusting me comes into play,” he says with a subtle nod. Where my voice is shrill, his is even as can be.
“But—”
“You hired me to manage the ranch, now you need to let me do my job, Knox.” He climbs in and slams the door with a reverberating slam, his elbow resting on the open window as he looks at me, the harsh lines etched in his handsome face slowly softening.
“How did you—I mean, what makes you think we’re being screwed?” I ask still trying to wrap my head around it all.
Jack’s usually stoic expression struggles against the anger I can see fighting its way through. “I’ve suspected it for a while but wasn’t sure until just now. The pellets varied so much from one batch to the next, but I needed to get a new shipment to confirm it. I wasn’t sure if your records were off because of an honest mistake, a past employee who was pissed about pay and skimming product, or possibly even you. Hell, you were learning as you went for the most part, so I was waiting to get our first full shipment so I could know for sure.”
“Those assholes,” I mutter and shake my head, feeling both dumbfounded and duped. My judge of character questioned once again, my ability to trust outright tested anew. “I don’t even know what to say.”
“Will saw it right away. It was good to have him here for that,” Jack explains.
“Christ,” I say as I turn my back and step a few feet away from him so I can work through my thoughts and emotions on this.
Bracing my hands on the top rail and a foot on the lowest one, I hang my head and try to wonder how I could have missed this.
“Don’t beat yourself up about it, Tate,” Jack says as I hear the truck door open and the crunch of his boots on the gravel before he steps up beside me, his posture mimicking mine.
“I should have seen it. I mean, all this time I’ve been paying a fortune for the top-of-the-line shit while I’ve been getting bottom of the barrel crap.” I blow my bangs out of my eyes and shake my head, mentally chastising myself. “I did call them months ago to ask why there was such a color variation in the pellets I’d received. There’d always been some, a few light brown pellets amid all the dark brown ones, but the mixture was beginning to change with each delivery so that there were more of the lighter ones. They told me it was a new supplier they were using and that it was all mixed together in the silo. I should have known better.”
“Don’t do that. Don’t doubt yourself. Remember what I said to you. This is your ranch, you fucking defend it . . . even when you don’t know the answers.”
“But why, Jack? To hurt the horses? To get back at me for Fletcher?” Questions run through my head faster than I can process them, but the most prevalent one of all is the hurt I feel. The betrayal. The everything.
“Because they can.” Jack turns and looks at me. “Because they’re assholes. Because, for some reason, they have a hard-on for you and want you to fail.”
“They were the first ones I paid back in full after I found out about the outstanding balances. I don’t understand.”
“You’re a female, and assholes like to screw women over to feel like they’re bigger men,” he says. “That, and as sad as it seems, you’re an outsider and this Podunk town doesn’t seem to take well to outsiders.”
I roll my shoulders and angle my head up to the blue sky above.
“I’ll take care of it, Tate.”
“And then what? They can laugh that I’m too dumb to have questioned more and high five each other because they were right and it took a man to point it out?” I fight the tears of frustration I don’t want to well. “I’m sick of running and hiding, Jack.”
I jump when his hand slides to the small of my back. The jolt is a kneejerk reaction, but his hand there has me realizing just how much I miss having someone to talk to when things got tough. Just how much I miss having someone wrap their arms around me to tell me everything is going to be all right.
“Get in the truck.”
23
JACK
“You want to explain to me why I should believe a goddamn word you say?”
It takes every-fucking-thing inside me to keep from knocking his teeth out, but my forearm is pinned to his chest, my temper a riot of anger as he sputters in much the same way my brother did the last time he tried to extort money from me.
This is all too ironic. All too much of a clusterfuck of coincidence that I shake my head and sneer at the asshole.
His eyes are bugged. His breath is labored and stinks of the bag of Doritos he has hidden behind the counter. The sweat ring on his T-shirt that he tries to pass off as high dollar but is a knock-off grows.
“Believe the rumors they say about me, Jed. Believe them and realize this is your chance to do the right thing before I take pleasure in doing all the wrong things,” I threaten without a fucking clue as to what the town is saying about me.
This is where keeping my mouth shut has come in handy.
“I swear. It’s just . . . it was . . . an honest mistake.” Spittle flies as he sputters, and I’m so pissed it doesn’t even faze me.
“An honest mistake?” I ask with a laugh. “If it were an honest mistake, Jed, then why did you threaten to call the cops the minute I walked in here, huh?”