“What’s going on?” Maddie said from the doorway.
Damn it.
I spun around and faced her. “Nothing. Delsey and I are just saying goodbye. Why don’t you say goodbye, too?” I stepped toward her and brought her into the room. “And say thank you for setting up the leg appointment.”
Delsey’s eyes lifted to me, getting my innuendo. I wasn’t thanking her for her sweetheart deal.
“Thank you,” Maddie’s soft voice said, wooden and forced.
“Oh, sweetie, it was my pleasure. Maddie, do you remember what we talked about this weekend? Friday night and yesterday?”
“I do.” She looked down.
Delsey glared up at me. “Put my cell number in her phone. It stays on me at all times. She can call me anytime she wants. But it’s best I don’t come around here for a while. Not with people gunning for me like this. I won’t put you and Maddie at risk.”
I nodded, agreeing with everything, only I’d rather protect her than have her stay away to protect me. Still, Maddie needed a woman like Delsey in her life. And if only one of us could have her, well the choice just got made.
Maddie had struck gold.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Delsey
A hand covered my mouth when I got out of my Lincoln Navigator.
“Shhh. It’s me.” Truitt’s raspy voice and warm breath relaxed me only slightly since the parking garage beneath my headquarters was dark that Monday morning.
“Are you insane?” I pushed his hand off me and stumbled back.
Truitt glared at me looking all gorgeous and cool in his dark jeans, a white button-down shirt under a charcoal gray sweater. “I need to talk to you.”
I didn’t bother asking how he got in the garage. He’d been a well-respected executive for years with allies all over the place. “Talk.”
He blinked, suggesting he hadn’t expected me to give in so easily, but a week home in the real world had softened me. “I’m sorry.”
I arched an eyebrow at him. “For what exactly?”
“Everything. Sasha. What I said to you on the phone, you know that’s not what I meant.”
“Calling someone ugly is pretty specific.” I crossed my arms. “There were a lot of things I could forgive, like banging my assistant. But being called ugly isn’t one of them.”
“I said that to hurt you. And I’m sorry. Of course, I don’t think you’re ugly, Mac. But this is nuts.” Hearing him call me Mac after the way Logan whispered Delsey when he came in me, made me want to vomit. Only, I had nothing in my stomach. The short plane ride from Wild Heart to Houston the night before was gut-wrenching and I’d been in knots ever since. “You need me, Mac. I screwed us up, I get it. And I don’t deserve another chance with you. I run this company for you, so you can do your thing in the lab. That’s where you shine. Please...” He stepped closer, and I drew back a step, my behind hitting the car door.
Any man being near me other than Logan made me feel violated. But I hated how Truitt was right, that he ran the company well. That I needed him. And with him at the helm, I could go back to my lab. Only returning to the status quo felt prickly under my skin.
I wasn’t the same woman who left Houston a week ago.
“Please, Mac.” He took advantage of my pensiveness and stood over me again.
“Did you plant that story?” I asked through clenched teeth.
“Of course not.” He ran a hand through his thick dark hair, brushed back and glossy. “I can’t believe you would even ask me that.”
I believed him for all the reasons I’d considered the previous week, mostly I saw it in his eyes. His pupils looked fully dilated and focused. I closed my eyes, and parted my lips to give in. “Damn you, Truitt.”
“I still love you, Mac.”
Those words shot my eyes open from the shock and in a flash, everything about Truitt changed. His eyes flickered and his pupils had narrowed.
He was lying. Trying to manipulate me. I pushed him away. “Oh my God,” I said, holding my throat. “I almost bought your sweet and sorry act. You forget, I see you lie all the time. That’s why you never gave me any bullshit story about Sasha.”
“A man can’t change his mind?” He inched closer to me again, but his lips had curled in irritation and his hands were balled in fists.
“Not a man as determined as you.” I set my foot back to push him off again and run away, but it happened so fast.
Truitt grabbed me by the shoulders and dragged me away from my car. Marshalling the muscles I barely used all week, I yanked away and twisted to get the only shot I had with a man.
I kneed Truitt in the groin. He yelped and doubled over, allowing me to run for the elevator.
Through my hazy vision, I saw Rick and Jacob, my security detail running toward me. “Mac!” Rick yelled. “Jacob, get her to the elevator.”
“I’m fine.” I crashed into them, hugging them, feeling steel across my back.
Jacob’s prosthetic arm.
Breathing heavily, I said, “Just escort that piece of garbage off my property and anyone else you think will let him back in.”
TESS MET ME IN THE executive lobby when the elevator opened outside my office. An office I rarely used. “Are you all right? I got an alert on my phone. Some kind of breach.”
I pushed a loose hair from my eyes. “Truitt. In the garage. My guys are taking care of it.” Through the reflective mirrored panels, I caught a glimpse of myself and gasped. The twisted bun I’d made had unraveled. I was the cosmetics queen and looking flawless was my brand.
Not today.
“I have the war room all set up in your private conference room.” Tess steered me that way. “We have a lot to discuss. And, Mac...” She stopped to face me. “I have some bad news.”
Logan
I HATED LAWYERS. NOT that I’d tangled with many. I’d never even met one before my family died. Now they were just people delivering me terrible news. Going to the firm that settled my parents’ estate was a no-go. I didn’t need the reminders of my horrific past while trying to decide my future.
Those contracts were on my mind as I got Maddie off to school on Monday morning. We’d both walked around the house like zombies. The emptiness inside the four walls was palpable. If any two people knew how to survive a loss, it was me and Maddie. If Delsey wasn’t going to be ours, we’d get through it. It wouldn’t be pretty, though.
On my way to the ranch, I dropped off Delsey’s two contracts to Aaron Pendergrass, a cowboy who I’d heard had gone to Harvard. That was good enough street cred for me, plus the Renners used him too, another huge point in Aaron’s favor.
Before I’d realized it, the morning had gone by, all the thoughts in my head fogging me up.
Max, one of the ranch hands called out to me. “Yo, Logan, you have a visitor down by the gate.”
A visitor? I hated how my throat had gone tight wishing it was Delsey. So much had been turned upside down. In high school, despite her smarts and preferential treatment by teachers, I ruled that place. I was king. Years later, Delsey owned my heart. It was fitting for her to come sweeping in like Princess Charming.
My heart pounded thinking my happy ever after had found me.
My heels caught in the dirt spotting the man standing there. His wide shoulders, hands in his pockets, and white-blond hair glinting off the morning sunlight made my stomach burn.
Not Delsey. So not Delsey.
The most abominable man I’d ever met had dared to show his face.
“How’s my kid?” Kyle Weatherby asked in a rough voice.
I breathed in and out, all my options going through my spinning head. The obvious one, pummel this piece of shit to the dirt had to be held back. Kyle had rights. Never exercised them, though. Why now?
Of course. Delsey. Word crawled into whatever sewer Kyle had been living in. All that terrible press yesterday only meant one thing to this sumbitch. Miss Moneybags had taken a shine to the man’s daughter. That spelled dollar
signs to this low-life. He’d bled my daddy dry asking for handouts in exchange for leaving Janey alone. Kyle hadn’t counted on the accident that sent his gravy train to the grave and made me a broke sumbitch who couldn’t pay my rent, let alone pick up blackmail payments.
“She’s at school,” I answered, keeping my fury in check.
“I didn’t ask where she is, I asked how she is?”
“Do you really expect me to believe you care?”
“She’s my kid. My blood.”
My blood boiled. “Oh, so you’re not denying that anymore? Why don’t you just keep being the scumbag you’ve been since you got my sister pregnant and walk away for good. No more judgment. I promise.”
Kyle’s eyes narrowed, his hat casting a shadow across his face of hard lines and anger. The man was handsome in a prick kind of way. Enough to attract my gorgeous sister. This shit-for-brains had her blocking his number, but it’d been too late, she was with child and tried to do the right thing because Janey was a damn decent human being.
“My name is on that birth certificate,” Kyle reminded me.
“That don’t prove she’s yours.”
“You do realize saying stuff like that makes your sister sound like a whore.”
I snapped and lunged for his throat. Kyle came prepared to trade blows and had stepped back to brace himself against my six-feet of fury. Grabbing his jean jacket collar, I swung hard, smashing a fist into Kyle’s cheek. He kneed me in the stomach, though, knocking the wind from my lungs. A crack of his fist against my right eye caused an explosion of pain through me and sent me down to the dirt.
Kyle lifted his shoulder, fist drawn to get another blow, but I marshaled my strength and knocked him under his jaw, the kind of jab that made a man see stars. He lost his balance and I got a few more punches in, pushing past my own pain.
“Don’t you go near Maddie, you sick piece of shit. You had your chance to do the right thing twelve years ago. I got her now. She’s mine and you ain’t getting near her.”
“I got rights according to the law.” Kyle spit and struggled to stand. “That was enough to make your daddy pay up. That’s all I’m looking for now that I know you can pay me.”
The click of a shotgun spun the scumbag around.
“Get your ass off my property right now, Weatherby.” Cam shoved a double-barrel muzzle under his nose.
Walker stood behind Cam with a menacing stare that I’d not seen before. The man had access to drugs that could put a sumbitch like Weatherby in a coma. Maybe Kyle knew that because he looked more afraid of Walker than of Cam’s White Lightning shotgun.
“I don’t know what you heard. Nothing’s changed from a year ago when you came around. I’m broke. And don’t threaten me with a lawyer. You don’t want Maddie, you never wanted her. You just want cash,” I said as Walker helped me up and Cam put the gun down, but kept it at his hip. “I ain’t giving you a dime and I sure as shit, ain’t giving Maddie up.”
“We’ll see about that.” Kyle tipped his hat, flipping me the bird. “I’m leaving, Renner.” Kyle ambled down the gravel road leaving the ranch.
“You okay, Logan?” Walker asked, fisting my jacket because I still felt unsteady.
“No. I’m not goddamn okay.” Except, I could be. My Hail-Mary sat on Aaron Pendergrass’s desk. One anyway. I needed to buy the house and get out of debt in case Weatherby made good on his lawyer threat. Being broke and unable to provide for Maddie was a sure way to lose her.
As far as the gas rights deal, that just became a no-go if being stupid rich meant that piece of shit would never go away.
No. Go.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Delsey
My private conference room where I had wooed retailers with its beautiful walnut furniture, elegant silk drapes, thick plush carpet, and bold prints of women in my makeup had been transformed into a back-of-house police investigative workroom.
Someone blocked all those beautiful model prints with a large whiteboard littered with black and white crime-scene photos, red marker lines, and bullet points.
I would have stood at the head of the conference table and ran the meeting, but this was Tess’s show, so I took the seat opposite her on the far end. “You said something about bad news?”
Tess exhaled. “One being, the board is arriving as we speak.”
“I put them in Truitt’s conference room,” Stanton, his deputy said, adjusting his tie.
Tess quickly introduced a team of investigators and their names went by me one hundred miles an hour because I recognized the face at the top of the pyramid on the whiteboard.
Sasha...
My former assistant...
Truitt’s mistress...
She planted the story.
After she quit and disappeared. But why?
“What other bad news is there?” If they’d found my plant, they should be rejoicing. “I have no intention of resigning if you found out the story was made up by—”
“The story is true, Mac,” Tess said with sad eyes.
I bolted out of my seat like it’d been struck by lightning. “No. It’s not. I run my lab.” I faced Stanton. “Your old boss liked to point out I spent too much time there. He was right. That meant I knew every inch of that place and—”
“Not your lab, Mac,” Stanton said. “Not the one on our campus here, anyway.”
I lifted my eyes to Tess. “What’s he talking about?”
“We found out the lab they were talking about is in Russia,” Tess said quietly.
Heat crawled up my neck. “We don’t have a lab in Russia.” Though as I said it, I made a wicked connection that should have been obvious.
Russia. Sasha.
“Truitt bought the lab six months ago,” Stanton said and after getting a nod from Tess, added, “He kept it on the down-low because well, it’s...Russia.”
That’s what I got for giving the reins over completely to someone else. I sat, my legs too weak to hold me up.
“He created a subsidiary. He had no nefarious intent.” Stanton moved his hands over the documents that I assumed proved all this. Proved I was guilty. Technically. “Russia is an emerging market, Mac. It was Sasha who gave him the details about a fledgling cosmetics company there. Truitt thought he was doing a good thing for us.”
“And her,” Tess added with bite in her tone.
A man in a blue suit and white hair under a black cowboy hat introduced himself. “Kit Reynolds, Reynolds PI, here in Houston, ma’am.” He tipped his hat to me. “It was her father’s company.”
“A company he ran into the ground,” Tess said.
“We’ve accessed her cell phone records,” Kit said. “After you caught her with Truitt, Mac, she went back to Russia and from the texts we recovered, she expected him to quit too and join her.” He pushed papers across the table, as if I wanted to read what she and Truitt texted back and forth.
When I shook my head, Stanton passed them back with vigor like he was protecting me. It made sense to appoint him, COO.
Tess scooped them up. “She gets angrier and angrier. Truitt tried to appease her, if you can call it that. But bottom line: he blew her off.”
“Russian med labs notoriously test on animals, some legitimate, like here in the U.S. But in other industries...” Kit trailed off.
In other industries like cosmetics, hair products, skincare, etc., cruelly testing on animals still happened.
“And that Russian lab regularly tested on animals?” I asked. “That hadn’t stopped when Truitt bought the company?”
“There’s no way to know,” Tess said. “The Russian government doesn’t ban it, so they had no real incentive to stop. My assumption is they still are.”
I glanced around the room, impressed with all the work Tess had been able to put together in a week. The Truitt connection was messy. I assumed he didn’t want to go live with his mistress, not because he still loved me. His refusing her more than likely pointed to him simply not wanting to li
ve in Russia.
“Thank you, Tess. This truly is amazing. What are we doing about it?”
“We’re divesting obviously,” Stanton answered me quickly.
“Good.” I slowly lowered back into my seat. “I’m not resigning. We have all the proof in the world, I knew nothing about this.”
All eyes strayed to Tess and then hers closed briefly.
Uh oh. They’d had this conversation and she drew the short straw to lay more bad news on me.
Nodding, Tess said, “The story is still true. Your ignorance won’t hold water with the public. In fact, it will make you look worse. You’re the CEO. You’re supposed to know everything that goes on in your company.”
I’d put my name on the company because I was proud of my early developments. My face too, showing the world what my cosmetics did for me. Only, now it will be compared to a face full of paint thinner and fake blood. I had a PhD, not an MBA, but Tess was right, at the end of the day, this was my responsibility.
Leaving on a true scandal also meant no golden parachute for me. I’d have to divest all my stock and options.
“The board is waiting for you, Mac,” my new assistant, a sweet southern girl from Atlanta said from behind me.
I turned to face her with a smile. “I’m on my way.”
Logan
ON MY LUNCH HOUR, I drove up to Aaron’s storefront law office on Main Street. Pendergrass himself waited for me on the sidewalk, keeping the rockstar parking spot open. What on earth had Delsey put in that contract? Her summary had filled me in enough. But I’d been listening with a different set of ears. Pride-filled ones. Heartbroken ones.
Aaron’s handshake was strong. “I’ve been hoping you’d come see me, Logan,” he said, steering me into his office. “Long before today.”
“Can we talk about the home sale contract first?” I asked, removing my hat.
“Sure. Sign it. It’s a fair price.” Aaron handed me a pen.
“And that loan?” I tapped the top sheet. “Is this some sweetheart deal?”
The Cowboy's Rebel Heart: An Enemies to Lovers Second Chance Romance (Wild Texas Hearts Book 4) Page 22
