“We’ve somehow gotten that impression here in the shop,” Lou said drily. “Something about the way she generally comes in here and treats us all like lower class citizens gives it away.
“Right.”
Skye sank back into her chair and tried not to feel embarrassed and ashamed. She hated those emotions! She hated that it only took something like this story to send her crashing right back to that place in her life where she was nothing but trash and everyone around her was better and more important than she was.
None of that was true, of course. Skye knew that on a logical plane. She knew that she was just as important as someone like Trisha Olivares-King who had been rich her whole life and yet had done nothing good with her wealth or her education. Skye was important because she worked hard to be a productive member of the world. She could still recall the moment in time when she had made a decision for herself that this was to be her measure of a well-lived life. Not money. Not position. Not power. Just the idea that she had done what she could with what she had to make the world a better place.
“Skye?” Lou was touching her arm again. “I think you might want to just go home for the day.”
“No.” Skye pulled out her tablet and settled down to work. “I’m not running home with my tail between my legs. I refuse to do that. I’m better than that. I’m stronger than that.”
Lou sighed and squeezed her shoulder. “All right then, I think you might want to keep your head down, though, because I believe that the woman who just walked into the shop is actually a reporter for Channel Eight News.”
“Huh?” Unfortunately, Lou’s words caused Skye to look up at just the wrong moment.
Skye actually watched the young woman’s expression brighten as she discovered that her quarry was indeed here in the shop sitting in the corner where the reporter had likely been prompted to find her.
The reporter was young. Skye could not believe that at twenty-five she still felt like there were people who were so much younger than her. Twenty-five was not old, but this young woman looked so green that Skye wanted to laugh out loud. Brittany Sands. That was her name. Brittany Sands with Channel Eight News.
Brittany was wearing a bright royal blue blouse over her black slacks. The blouse was cut out on the shoulders and slit all the way down the sleeves to the wrists. It bared most of her chest as well and the girl certainly possessed the boobs to pull it off. Skye could not have produced that kind of cleavage without surgical assistance.
As expected, the reporter’s hair was an enormous helmet on her head, teased and sprayed and holding in spite of the fall humidity. Even her pancake-level makeup seemed somehow protected from the climate. How did people do that? If Skye had attempted it, she would have melted into a puddle of product right on the coffee shop floor.
“Hello!” Brittany Sands gushed. She put out her hand, which Skye was compelled to shake because of simple manners. “I’m Brittany Sands of Channel Eight News. Ms. Kincaid, we would just love to do a story on your amazing life.”
Skye could not help it. The snort slipped out in spite of her best attempts to quell it. “I’m sorry, Ms. Sands. But could we cut the bullshit. I’m in journalism. You’re in journalism. And I don’t believe for one second that you’re trying to make me look good with your exposé because that wouldn’t get you the ratings that you need to graduate from being an on-the-street reporter to a news anchor with a cushy job in the studio.”
Brittany’s elegantly shaped brows shot up in obvious shock. “Oh. Well. Um.”
“Uh huh.” Skye watched and she waited. In a few minutes she was going to start tossing straw wrappers into the woman’s half-opened mouth. They would probably just stick on Brittany’s lipstick-coated lips. “You have to realize that most of that story was total crap. It was made up by my former editor, who though she writes for the Dallas Star, she honestly believes it’s basically a gossip rag.”
“What?” Brittany frowned. “What do you mean? They still have to fact check. Right?”
“I did,” Skye told her fellow journalist. “But Carolyn does not. Ever. And she hates people who bother to stick to the truth or to the facts. She likes drama and smut. And she wants to publish it. But she likes to do it under the guise of the Dallas Star because it makes her feel like a real reporter.”
“That’s horrible!” Brittany whispered. She looked confused. “So you didn’t get fished out of a dumpster?”
Skye could not help it. She rolled her eyes and groaned. Then she pinched the bridge of her nose with her thumb and index finger. “No. I did not. I was relinquished quite legally at a fire station. I spent the next sixteen-plus years in a group home, at which point I was emancipated and moved into the apartment building where I live now. It’s really not that exciting.” It actually wasn’t exciting. However, it was probably a bit more tragic sounding than the average resident of Dallas was used to hearing and that was what Skye was most interested in downplaying. She did not want to be a public interest story. Ever. At all.
“Wait. You lived in a group home.” Brittany was busy pulling out her pad of paper and scribbling something down.
Skye groaned. She did not want to feature in this evening’s news. “Honestly, kid? If I were you I would focus on the fact that Carolyn Phillips of the Dallas Star is lying to get people to purchase her papers. You want information for a story? I’ll give you that. I have no problem exposing Carolyn for what she is. I’m not going to talk about my background though. I’m not some rags to riches story. I’m a normal woman who lives in a tiny one-bedroom apartment.”
“And happens to be dating a King,” Brittany finished triumphantly.
“Wrong.”
“Huh?”
Skye shook her head. “I’m not dating a King. I have friends with that last name. We have been working together to try and ask the public to just ask some very pointed questions about his father’s death. The idea that Big Mac King could die in a freak hunting accident on his own property is a little suspicious. That was the only point. And we don’t even know if it’s true. The sons just wanted enough interest to get the police to reopen the case.”
“Oh.”
The light of interest went out of Brittany’s eyes, which wasn’t really a surprise. But it was a disappointment. Why did nobody want to talk about the real news? Why did they only want to talk about the bullshit?
Skye snorted and shook her head. “So pretty much you’re no longer even interested in talking to me. Am I right?”
“Well, I’ll talk to my producer about the Carolyn Phillips angle,” Brittany assured Skye. “But the coroner already ruled Mac King’s death an accident so that’s kind of a moot point. Don’t you think?”
“Sure.” Skye shook her head and got up to leave the coffee shop. “Because no coroner has ever been wrong or even paid to be wrong in the history of the office.”
There. That was enough for today. Skye needed to get out of here and find out what was really up with the whole “wolf attack” thing.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
The sun crept slowly over the old front room of the A-framed ranch house. It was difficult to tell what time it was. The interior of the place was nearly bare. The furniture had once belonged to the King brothers’ grandfather and it was sadly sagging in all the wrong places. The two sofas where Jason and Edward had crashed for the night were placed at an angle to the fireplace. The fabric was plaid and threadbare in places. Jason was pretty certain he had a line on his face from the pillow he had been using for the past few hours.
Past few hours. In fact, why was he even awake? At this point they’d probably only been sleeping for a few hours at most. There was no reason to be awake. Orion, Devon, and Zane were upstairs in the three bedrooms tucked tightly into the old house’s construction. There was a single bathroom up there too. Not that Jason could hear a single peep from his sleeping brothers. They wouldn’t be up and showering for a while. The lot of them were exhausted after their night of patrolling their prop
erty.
So what had woken Jason from a sound sleep? He felt for sure that there had been something. Sitting up, he flung his legs over the edge of the sofa and stood up. He was still wearing his clothing, but his boots were over by the door because they were muddy. Edward had not moved. It almost looked as though Edward was dead. He wasn’t, but it still looked as though he had been a casualty of the absolutely crazy night before.
Jason stumbled to his feet. Insane night. That was an understatement. There had been more destruction going on the previous night than had probably ever been seen on the property. Jason stretched as he recalled the men running away into the night and heading for their vehicles. They had compounded their problems exponentially when they had driven off without paying any attention to the fact that the rest of their tie downs had been loosened. There were now bits and pieces of equipment scattered from the creek bed to the ranch’s entrance. It was going to take a lot of clean up to get rid of the mess that had been left behind by the trespassing developers.
The full throated purr of a diesel engine brought Jason around. He spun about and stared at Edward. He was still on the couch. That meant it wasn’t his truck out there making all the noise. What in the hell?
“Edward!” Jason snapped. He closed the distance between himself and his brother’s peacefully sleeping body in two strides. “Edward, get up! Someone is here!”
Jason bolted to the front door. He shoved his feet inside his boots and pushed his way outside onto the porch. The sight that greeted him was probably the most horrible that he had seen yet.
The machinery that had been parked on the flatbeds was being started up and unloaded as though someone intended to use it. Jason gaped. They couldn’t! There was no agreement in place and nothing had been signed!
“Orion!” Jason shouted at the top of his lungs. “Get your ass down here quick and bring your phone!”
Orion’s SUV had been sitting right behind one of the big machines with its enormous rolling tracks and front end swiveling bucket. The boom turned as Jason watched and the bucket took one whack at Orion’s SUV to knock it out of the way. The much lighter SUV flipped over onto its side and was neatly shoved out of the way of the backhoe now being slowly unloaded off the flatbed.
Jason could not wait for his brothers. He could hear feet hitting the floor upstairs. The crash of Orion’s SUV flipping over was incredibly loud. The windows shattered in a hailstorm of tempered glass. Jason strode off the porch and moved toward the scene just as the backhoe started to move in the direction of Edward’s truck.
“Oh hell no!” Edward snarled as he shoved his way past Jason to put himself between the machine and his truck. “Hey, you assholes! You don’t get to trespass and destroy my property!”
“Who says we’re trespassing?” A man with a clipboard came striding their direction. “We’ve got orders to demolish this house today. I’m the foreman of this job and I say what happens!”
“Let me see,” Jason snapped. He held his hand out. “This house belongs to the Kings. This land belongs to the Kings. Do you know what that makes me?” Jason glared into the foreman’s face. “Because this deal isn’t done. There’s no job. There’s no development. My name is Jason King and I promise you—Mr. Foreman—if you take one single whack at my family’s house I will sue your ass so hard that your great grandchildren will be born bankrupt.”
The foreman drew back. His bushy eyebrows retreated into the red hardhat on his head. He turned around and waved his hand at his men. Then he made a slashing motion across his throat and the engine noises suddenly died as the big diesels were shut off.
Jason stared at the clipboard. There was indeed an order to demolish the house and to start clearing trees. It had nothing to do with the developer. The name Reese Herrera or the Herrera Home & Land Real Estate Agency did not appear on the order at all. Instead there was a King Security Solutions logo and a signature that caused Jason to catch his breath and start cursing.
“What?” Orion demanded. He was walking up behind Jason and glaring at his destroyed SUV as though he were going to personally castrate someone over the slight. “Who do these people think they are?”
“Us,” Jason murmured. He thrust the clipboard at Orion. “That’s Dad’s signature but look at the date.”
Orion looked once and then he looked again. Jason could not blame him. The signature was supposedly their father, but the date read yesterday. There was no way that this had happened. And it wasn’t even their father’s signature. The loops and swirls were wrong just like they had been on the real estate contract. Someone was forging their father’s signature and the person was either getting bold or desperate.
“This signature is fake,” Orion said flatly. He smacked the foreman in the chest with the clipboard. “Get your shit and get off my land. And you’d better clean up the mess from the rest of the stuff scattered all over my road too. I don’t know what your men were playing at last night but we could hear them all night long!”
“That order is good!” The foreman sounded angry and was bordering on belligerent. He puffed up his chest and thrust it right at Orion. “I got it this morning!”
“Uh huh,” Orion fired back. “And it was signed yesterday, right?”
“Yes!”
Jason could not hold his tongue one second longer. “Signed yesterday by a man we buried in the ground last weekend?”
Suddenly the blood drained from the foreman’s face. “What are you talking about?”
“Where have you been?” Jason demanded. “My father is Mac King. Mac King died nearly three weeks ago in a hunting accident on this property. He was buried this past Saturday. Almost a week ago now. He could not have signed that order. Nor did he ever intend to sell this land. So you need to get out of here before we”—Jason gestured to the rest of his brothers as they emerged from the house to stare upon the mess with awe—“decide to treat you as honest-to-God trespassers. You get me?”
“But I saw him sign!” the foreman protested. “I saw him!”
This was an interesting development and one worth pursuing. Orion was ready to blast the guy back to the property line, but Jason grabbed his brother’s arm. “You got a picture of Tex?”
Orion turned to stare at Jason as though he’d just suggested they should take selfies with the damaged SUV. “Huh? What are you talking about?”
“This guy says that he saw Dad sign this order. Right?” Jason could not believe his brother was being this obtuse, but then Jason wasn’t the one who would be shopping for a new car later this afternoon. “So see if he recognizes the person who signed the order.”
“I’ve got it,” Edward said roughly. He was already pulling out an old hunting photo of the seven of them. Five King boys, Mac, and Tex, right here in front of the house. “Do you recognize the guy who signed the order?”
The foreman took the cell phone and pulled off his glove in order to use his fingers to enlarge the picture. He seemed to be studying the whole photo. His gaze lifted in order to look at every single brother, then he glanced at the house. Finally he pointed to someone in the picture. It wasn’t Mac. It was Tex.
“This is Mac King. See? You guys are all standing here in the yard.” The foreman made a face. “I don’t know who the other guy is, but this is Mac. You said he’s dead? Are you sure?”
“Are you from Dallas?” Jason wondered suddenly.
The man shrugged. “Fort Worth. Same thing.”
“Not when it comes to local news apparently,” Edward muttered. He was the one to give the foreman a very serious look and then point to the photo. “That is not our father. That is his business partner, Tex Johnson. The other guy is our father and he is dead. Google it. You’ll pull up all kinds of news coverage about the funeral and stuff. It wasn’t like Mac King wasn’t a known man in Dallas.”
“Mac King is dead.” The foreman repeated this again and again as though he were desperately trying to understand what he was hearing. “That’s a bit of a shock.”<
br />
“So can you get your stuff back on the trucks and get it out of here?” Orion growled. “And while you’re at it, flip my damn SUV over, please?”
“Oh. Right.” The foreman seemed to realize that he had just done something very bad. “We didn’t mean anything by it. The guy—Mac—but apparently not Mac—said to make sure we didn’t hold back. He said that there would probably be resistance and that we had his full permission to evict you all from this land as quickly as possible.” The foreman removed his hard hat and ran his fingers through his hair. “Then there was that wolf attack last night and I’ll admit that we were spooked. I figured I would just come in guns blazing and tear the place down.”
“With us inside?” Edward asked drily. “Was that part of the deal?”
The foreman shrugged. “He told us over and over that the house was totally empty.”
“It wasn’t,” Jason explained quietly. “Not only that, but the utilities are still on. You’d have hit that gas line and there would be a crater right now where that house is standing.”
“Shit!” The foreman seemed to take a minute to catch up. Then he realized just how serious this was. “The electricity and the gas are live?”
Jason nodded. “We were in there all night. We came out to the property to check things out because there had been some really strange issues with some developer trying to claim it was being sold.” This was a bit of an exaggeration, but still pretty much the truth. “I promise you that the gas and electric are working.”
“My men and I would have been killed!” The foreman cursed and threw his hardhat at the backhoe. It bounced off the steel sided machine and went bouncing crazily across the yard. “You let me know what I have to do to make that bastard pay! He would have killed every one of my men, myself included! And even if we had survived, we would have had to deal with murdering people who weren’t supposed to be here!”
Billion Dollar Wolves: Boxset Bks 1-5 Page 21
