by Joanne Rock
He poured himself a glass, trying not to think about Elena’s news this morning.
She hadn’t taken the bribe.
He knew in his gut as soon as she’d said it that it was the truth. He should have known it—if not at the time, when he’d assumed the worst of her, then shortly afterward when she’d left in a fury. It turned out she hadn’t been furious with his father for offering to pay her off to make her leave Gage’s life. She’d been livid with Gage for believing she could be bought.
Tipping back the measure of aged Kentucky bourbon, he set the stopper back in the decanter and turned away from the bar in time to see Jonah and Desmond enter together. Desmond thanked the AV staff member before dismissing her.
“What gives?” Gage barked more sharply than he’d intended.
Jonah shook his head. “Dude, I’ve got the newborn. If anyone should be tired and out of sorts about the snap meeting, it ought to be me.”
“Right. Sorry, mate.” Gage had been in the middle of the most significant conversation of his life when he’d been interrupted, but he didn’t mention that now. He’d have to figure out how to proceed with Elena later, once he knew what was so all-fired important to get everyone together now.
Desmond switched on his laptop and brought online a specially made ninety-inch television screen over the fireplace. The screen divided into three windows, one for each of the other owners. Miles arrived first, with Alec and Weston flickering into view shortly afterward.
“Looks like we’re all here,” Weston observed, kicking things off while Gage and Jonah took seats on a leather sofa by the fireplace. “I’ve gotten Devon Salazar’s permission to share this information, which came from April’s investigation of the money trail for Alonzo’s book. She discovered the majority of the income has gone toward the support and education of a thirteen-year-old named Matthew Cruz.”
Jonah coughed on the sip of coffee he’d just taken. Gage felt his jaw drop. Alonzo was supporting a kid?
“Is there any reason to believe it’s Alonzo’s son?” Desmond asked. “Did Devon run DNA?”
“Matthew Cruz looks nothing like any of the Salazars.” Weston glanced down at his own laptop as he spoke, and with a keystroke, he shared a photo of a lean, gap-toothed preteen. With dark blond hair and gray eyes, he bore no resemblance to Alonzo, or his sons Marcus and Devon, who owned Salazar Media and had worked with the ranch on branding and promotion.
“If the kid is thirteen years old, it means he was conceived during the worst year of our lives,” Alec observed, leaning closer to his computer screen, maybe scrutinizing the photo. It made his face loom large on the television screen. “The boy looks most like Jonah.”
Jonah shook his head, his expression thunderous. “Don’t even go there. I’m still reeling that Alonzo did all this without breathing a word to any of us. Besides, you know damned well if the kid was any of ours, Alonzo would have kicked our asses if we weren’t accountable.”
“Why would Alonzo take financial responsibility for anyone that wasn’t a blood relative?” Gage asked, trying to make sense of a day that had taken a fast downward spiral after beginning with a trail of rose petals.
“First, we make sure it’s not a blood relative,” Weston chimed in again, apparently knowing more about the case because things had worked out well between him and the financial forensics investigator. “Devon is going to reach out to Matthew’s guardian and see if she’ll agree to paternity testing.”
“Who’s the guardian?” Desmond asked, one shoulder tipped against the stone wall near the fireplace. It was barely past noon and the casino owner was already dressed in an impeccable custom suit.
Weston clicked another button and a new face appeared on the screen where Weston had been a moment ago. “This is Nicole Cruz. She worked briefly at the ranch under the alias Nicole Smith, but she was fired suddenly by a supervisor who said it was performance-related. When I tried to follow up on that incident, I discovered the supervisor quit the next day and didn’t leave a forwarding address.”
“Which means the supervisor could have been lying. Or someone at the ranch applied pressure for Nicole to leave,” Miles pointed out. The two brothers frequently didn’t see eye to eye. “Is Nicole the mother?”
“According to her, no,” Weston replied. “When she introduced herself to April several weeks ago, she claimed Matthew is her sister’s son, and that her sister died suddenly without naming the father. So far, we don’t have a photo of the mother since Nicole and Matthew disappeared after Nicole was fired from her job at Mesa Falls.”
“So we hire someone to track the kid and his guardian using a last known address,” Gage suggested, already itching to start piecing the puzzle together before someone else did. Someone like Elena. Could he trust her to be honest with him about her next move? Despite their night together, he couldn’t be sure. “Or are the Salazar heirs already doing that?”
“At the very least,” Miles added, “we need to ask around Mesa Falls to figure out who knew her. I’m ready to take some time away from Rivera Ranch, Gage, if you want me to come help out at Mesa Falls.”
Gage wondered who was the most surprised by that comment. Weston reared back from his screen like someone had just shoved him. Jonah coughed through another sip of coffee. Desmond made a long, low whistle.
Miles swore and shifted in his seat, the Sierra Nevada Mountains visible out the window of his ranch office behind him. “Every one of you takes time off. I’ve earned it. Besides, I’m going to ask the Mesa Falls foreman for some recommendations to bring sustainable ranching practices to Rivera Ranch.”
One of the reasons they’d founded Mesa Falls was to highlight more green practices in raising cattle, and the experiment had turned Mesa Falls into a successful showplace.
Gage was the first to recover from his surprise since Miles had already indicated to him that he’d be willing to cover for Gage this week. “I’d appreciate the help for as long as you care to stay. Elena Rollins should be leaving Montana soon and won’t be doing a story about Alonzo.”
Even as he said it, he realized how much he didn’t want her to leave, no matter how upset he’d been by her revelation in the hot tub this morning. Something incredible had happened between them last night, and he wasn’t ready to turn his back on it just because she’d shaken his whole view of their past together. They’d been too quick to call it quits the first time. What if they kept things simple this time? Instead of worrying about how they would fit—or not fit—into one another’s lives, they could simply spend night after scorching night in one another’s arms and not worry about the future.
He hadn’t realized how fully he’d lost the thread of the meeting conversation until Desmond said his name.
“Gage? You still with us?”
Damn it.
“Sorry.” He wasn’t used to being distracted. Especially not by a woman. In his work, he normally juggled ten different tasks at a time. But the lack of trust and honesty between him and Elena burned raw. “Just thinking about how quickly I can tie up loose ends here and be back at Mesa Falls.”
Jonah gave him a sympathetic glance as he leaned deeper into the sofa. “We’re on to party planning. Miles suggested we host another celebrity shindig on-site and release a statement offering our own narrative about Alonzo. Maybe if we share a story of our own for where the money went, the public interest will die down.”
“You mean we lie?” Gage couldn’t imagine his friends would sink so low.
“Of course not,” Miles was quick to clarify. “Alonzo funneled some of the profits from his book to building infrastructure in poor neighborhoods in cities around the world. We have photos and concrete evidence of those travels, right, Wes?”
“We do,” Weston confirmed, clicking more keys before a picture of an old-fashioned bulletin board covered with photographs held up with thumbtacks appeared on his screen. T
he shots showed Alonzo in foreign countries around the world, posed with volunteer groups in front of a variety of building projects.
“So we have a party,” Gage agreed, wondering if he had ever felt in less of a party mode in his life, “and reveal Alonzo’s secret life as a philanthropist.”
Desmond straightened from his spot near the fireplace. “Do you think Elena will take up the cause? Be the vehicle for the story we want to circulate about Alonzo?”
Gage’s gut knotted at the thought of asking her to use her newfound social media cache to share a story that he knew wasn’t the full truth. He refused to lie to her after the way he and his father had treated her six years ago.
“I’ll see what I can do,” he said, unwilling to promise anything.
Especially when feeding Elena a story like that meant she’d be all the more likely to leave Montana—and Gage—for good.
Ten
While she waited for a boutique owner to finish her conversation with Chiara in the casino resort shops, Elena glanced up at the door of the high-roller suite in the second-floor gallery, where Gage was in a meeting.
What had been so important to tear him away from their conversation this morning? He’d closed himself in the den of their suite after Desmond’s arrival, not reappearing until it was time to leave for his meeting. She wasn’t necessarily hurt by his lack of communication. She understood business didn’t stop just because she’d revealed a long-held secret to Gage. But she couldn’t deny she was curious to pick up where they left off, to see if her revelation changed anything in their relationship.
Chiara’s voice interrupted her thoughts. “Elena, will you hop in a photo with Mimi so I can tag you both and help her find you in case she wants to place a future order for your designs?”
Shaking off the romantic preoccupation with Gage, Elena hurried over, amazed at how Chiara’s hustle never took a day off. While Elena had been daydreaming about Gage, Chiara had been talking up Elena’s potential future business. Both Astrid and Chiara had insisted she had a real talent for fashion.
“Of course.” Elena posed with the woman, one of the boutique’s mannequins between them, while Chiara took several photos. “You have a beautiful store. Thank you so much the tour.”
After shaking hands with the owner, Chiara and Elena left the store and returned to the shops that fanned out around a courtyard fountain. The water bubbled and splashed from the mouth of a sea dragon before falling into a marble pool at its base.
Again, Elena glanced up at the second-floor gallery toward the high-roller suite, but the door remained closed. She noticed Chiara followed her gaze.
“Astrid made it sound like the Mesa Falls owners were meeting for supersecret reasons.” Chiara’s green eyes sparkled with mischief, like they shared a secret of their own. “Have you made any progress cracking the code of silence from them about Alonzo Salazar?”
Caught off guard by the question since Chiara was close with Astrid, Elena took a moment to consider her response while a group of young tourists photographed the sea dragon.
“Honestly, I’m backing off the story.” She hadn’t consciously made the decision until that moment, thinking she’d wait to see how things played out with Chiara. “I was convinced that Salazar had greedy ulterior motives for writing his book when I first started digging, but now I’m not so sure that was the case.”
“Really?” Chiara turned her face away from the tourists’ cameras, then leaned closer to Elena, green eyes wide. “Do tell.”
Her obvious interest gave Elena pause. She wasn’t entirely sure why, but she hadn’t survived her teens with a drunken nomad for a father by ignoring her instincts. So she spoke more cautiously than she might have otherwise.
“The Mesa Falls owners all trust Salazar. And that says a lot to me.” She peered up toward the meeting place again and spied Jonah emerging with Desmond Pierce. “They must be finished now.”
“You know they all attended a boarding school where Alonzo was a teacher, right?” Chiara asked, her gaze narrowing as a tall man dressed like a casino employee approached Desmond Pierce and seemed to receive instructions. “I attended a girls’ school nearby, but none of them remember me.”
Elena did a double take as the words sank in. “You knew them from their school days? Does Astrid know?”
“I mentioned it to her once, but I’m not sure if she remembers. But it’s not as surprising as it sounds that none of the owners remember me. I was just plain old Kara Marsh back then—tall and gawky and a long way from being comfortable in my own skin.”
As much as Elena longed to find Gage upstairs and pull him into a quiet corner to finish their earlier conversation, she couldn’t deny a strong curiosity about Chiara’s tie to Gage and his friends. A tie he apparently didn’t know about.
“You changed your name?” Elena wondered how many of her followers knew about this.
“No. I simply use Chiara like a stage name. When I started out, it made it easier to have some separation between my professional world and my personal life.” Chiara pointed toward the stairs. “Shall we go up? I’m sure you’re eager to see Gage.”
Was she that obvious? But as much as she’d thought about him all day, she also feared she was getting in over her head with him. His reaction to her news this morning had been difficult to read. Instead, she delayed a bit longer, asking Chiara another question.
“Doesn’t it bother you that they don’t remember you?” she pressed, not moving toward the steps.
The sound of the fountain splashing filled the air. A group of young women wearing T-shirts printed with “Bridesmaid” in frilly font giggled as they passed Elena, fruity drinks in hand.
“Not really. I don’t want to be Chiara Campagna forever,” she mused wistfully, gazing down at a wristwatch with a huge yellow diamond in its face. “But if you change your mind about looking into Alonzo Salazar’s connection to the ranch owners, I’d be game to develop an angle with you.”
Stunned by the turn the conversation had taken, Elena followed her new friend up the steps to the gallery, where Chiara greeted Jonah. Why would Chiara take an interest in dredging up a past the Mesa Falls Ranch owners clearly wanted to keep quiet? The woman’s words stirred Elena’s curiosity, making her wonder if she’d allowed Gage to lure her away from the Alonzo Salazar scoop too easily. She needed to see him. Speak to him.
Elena lingered a moment with Chiara to say hello to Jonah, then excused herself to peer into the suite where the owner meeting had taken place.
Gage sat with his back to her on a huge, curved leather sofa, a fitted black jacket drawing attention to his broad shoulders. He was tapping away on his phone. There was an artful arrangement of birds of paradise on the glass-topped table in front of him, and a fire burned in the sleek, modern hearth. A massive flat-screen television was mounted over the fireplace, but the display was dark. On either side of the fireplace, windows overlooked Lake Tahoe, the clear sky making the water look impossibly blue.
A moment of nervous anticipation threaded through her at the sight of Gage. Attraction, uncertainty and a whole lot of other emotions she didn’t bother to unpack all clamored for her attention.
“Gage?” she called to him and he spun around immediately.
“Elena.” His shoulders relaxed a fraction. He remained unsmiling, yet somehow seemed relieved to see her.
Or maybe that was wishful thinking.
“Am I interrupting you?” She hugged her handmade hobo bag more tightly to her side, the fake jewels from repurposed old necklaces digging into her forearm where she pinned the purse to her body. “I met Chiara downstairs a couple of hours ago to share ideas about a potential new business venture.”
She was still in a daze that one of the world’s most famous faces was interested in helping her move into the fashion world, potentially developing an experimental line of her own as a guest appea
rance for another brand.
Elena had never visualized something like that for herself, but she would be crazy not to pursue the opportunity while she had it. Although something made her uneasy about the woman’s second proposition, suggesting she would support Elena if she wanted to write a piece on Alonzo Salazar despite her growing feelings for Gage.
“I’m glad you’re here.” Standing, Gage tucked his phone in his jacket pocket and strode toward her, his dark eyes making her melt inside even though she couldn’t quite read his expression. “I owed you my undivided attention this morning. My apologies for the interruption.”
Her body hummed everywhere as he approached, something that always happened around this man, but the effects were more pronounced after the vivid reminder of what it was like to be with him the night before.
“You’re a busy man.” Her thoughts traveled back in time to their first encounter. “I understood that from the moment we met, considering how long it took to get a meeting with you.”
“These days, I clear my schedule for you.” His gaze tracked over her. “How about we have dinner at the resort tonight and we’ll pick up where we left off in the hot tub?”
Her pulse thrummed faster, awareness surging through her bloodstream.
“I look forward to it,” she confessed, needing to clear the air about their past once and for all.
And once that was done—like it or not—she needed to confront Gage about the mysterious Alonzo Salazar. Because whether or not she shared her findings about the author with the public, she was beginning to suspect the man was the key to a larger story that Gage was keeping hidden from her.
* * *
Gage couldn’t take his eyes off Elena.