by Joanne Rock
She began to see her grandparents’ corporate acumen more clearly as she let go of any illusion that they wanted what was best for her. In some ways, that made it easier to disappoint them.
Especially now that she’d had an opportunity to see for herself what she would be missing out on if she’d wed Eliot.
“I’d like some time to think about it,” she said finally, needing to buy herself time to process it all. “Why don’t we have lunch tomorrow and we’ll talk about it more then?”
Her legs felt shaky. Or maybe it was the ground beneath her feet that was shifting now that her ethical foundations had been kicked out from under her.
Her grandfather nodded, already agreeing to the plan, but her grandmother leaned forward in her seat, fixing Lily with her gaze.
“Until then, try to remember that marrying one of the wealthiest heirs in the Western world isn’t exactly a chore,” Helen Carrington said dryly. “It’s not like we’re asking you to sacrifice your firstborn.”
With an effort, Lily gave her grandmother a tight smile before she walked them to the front door. As soon as they left, she found herself wanting to run to Marcus and knew that wasn’t the solution. If she couldn’t trust Eliot, who she’d believed to have been her friend since childhood, how could she ever trust a man who told her he only wanted relationships that were simple?
With clear rules. Where no one got hurt.
Except she’d developed feelings for Marcus in the space of a few short days. Unwise of her. Not at all sensible. But they were strong feelings nevertheless, grounded in a relationship so different from anything she’d ever experienced.
For all of Marcus’s faults, there’d been a real honesty in how he’d approached their relationship. He hadn’t lied to her the way Eliot and her grandparents had, allowing her to believe in a romance that had never existed. Marcus had been up-front about the attraction, and about what it would mean for them if they gave into the temptation of it.
She respected that. Appreciated it, even when the fallout was going to hurt her.
Because with Marcus, there was more to their relationship than just the physical intimacy. It was about the way he’d let her see the real him, giving her a glimpse of how he thought. What he believed. They might be very different people, but she’d seen behind the creative media guru facade.
And she liked what she’d seen.
She suspected she was going to get hurt for being foolish enough to ignore the warning signs that he’d plastered all over himself. Because even with his words and clear rules ringing in her ears, Lily was falling for him anyway.
* * *
Marcus hadn’t wanted his time with Lily to end like that.
Without a goodbye. Without a conversation about what the future held for them. He’d thought he could find a way to keep seeing her. Find a way to continue a discreet affair somehow. But the arrival of her grandparents had thwarted all that. He hadn’t wanted to leave Lily to the wolves. But they were her family, weren’t they?
He couldn’t get her off his mind as he drove over to the main lodge to find Devon.
Lily was a strong woman, and she wasn’t going to let her grandparents bully her into a marriage she didn’t want. But he hated that she still faced that kind of pressure. He’d like to think that if he’d been in her grandparents’ position, if his business faltered and the only thing that could save it was a merger by marriage, he would have too much personal integrity to coerce his own granddaughter into a loveless relationship. But—despite what it said about him—he could understand the desire to save the business that bore your name. And he suspected Lily was being pressured to change her mind about her ex-fiancé.
As he parked the borrowed ranch vehicle in front of the lodge and got out, Marcus faced the fact that he hadn’t wanted to be anywhere near a conversation involving her ex. No matter how much he told her that he wanted to keep things simple with her, she’d slid past his defenses long ago and somehow remained there. For years, it hadn’t mattered because she was taken.
Now? He knew that what they’d shared this week had been deeper than the superficial dating he’d done in the past handful of years. If he’d remained in that house with her grandparents, being a part of a conversation about the man who didn’t appreciate her when he’d had her, Marcus wouldn’t have been able to keep his opinions to himself. The truth was, no one was good enough for her.
Especially not some Ivy League heir to the family throne who didn’t appreciate how hard Lily had worked to find her own niche outside the Carrington realm.
By the time Marcus entered the main lodge and found his brother seated in the great room, he was on edge. Spoiling for a fight, even.
His brother sat against a wall near the bar, his Italian leather loafers out of place in the Western-themed room that contained more elk horns than seats. Devon was reading the paperwork that had spilled from the envelope all over the game table next to him. He’d drunk two-thirds of his dark amber drink, the ice cubes clinking against the glass as they melted and shifted.
Marcus dropped down on a bench across from him, not waiting for an invitation to sit. “Why did you hire a private investigator before you came here?”
His brother put down the paper he was reading. “Because I thought maybe Dad was going to reveal he had a secret fortune he was leaving to you and you were going to try to buy me out of the company.”
Surprised, Marcus leaned back in his chair, weighing that answer. “That makes no sense. Besides, I have enough money of my own to buy you out. If it was simple to do, I would have tried pushing you out of the company a long time ago.”
“I’m well aware you wanted me out,” Devon replied evenly. “And beyond finances, I thought Dad might have some secret in here that you already knew. Something that would give you leverage against me.”
“Why would you think that?” Marcus heard a scuffling sound outside in the reception area, so he lowered his voice, even though the main lodge was like a ghost town with no other guests except for Lily this week. “Don’t get me wrong—I’m not surprised you’d suspect I would use any leverage that fell into my lap, but why would you think Dad had shared anything with me? No one knew what he was up to.”
“You went to school where Dad taught—time I never had with him.” Devon spoke quickly, but not quite fast enough to hide a flash of pain. “All the owners of Mesa Falls Ranch went to Dowdon, too. Plus, Dad spent a lot of time here before his death. I thought maybe there was some connection to this place for both of you.”
Unbidden, Lily’s words floated through his brain. Do you two have to be so suspicious of each other?
Clearly, the suspicions went both ways.
“This is my first time in Montana. And I knew nothing about the book, let alone why he spent so much time up here.”
“Did you read this?” Devon pointed to a letter handwritten on notebook paper.
“I must have missed it.” The fold marks on it were deep, so maybe it had been at the bottom of the envelope. “I passed the whole thing over to you before I read everything carefully.”
He’d thought he had reviewed all the important things, though. The note was a letter in their father’s hand, addressing both of them.
“Take it.” Devon pushed it across the table. “That one is more personal and doesn’t address the rest of this stuff.” He waved a hand over the contact information for the literary attorney, the newspaper clippings and old story notes for the book their father had written. “But first, we should figure out what all this means for the business.”
Marcus shoved their father’s letter in the breast pocket of his jacket. As he pulled his hand away, a long dark hair came with it, reminding him of the time he’d spent with Lily before her grandparents arrived. The need for her—not just to be with her, but to help her, protect her, talk to her—kept growing the more time he spent with her. A nee
d that wasn’t going to disappear just because he got on a plane and flew to the opposite coast.
“Having the company associated with this would be a nightmare.” Marcus pointed to one of the news clippings about actress Tina Barnes contemplating a lawsuit. “It’s been a secret for this long, I don’t see any reason why it can’t remain a secret.”
“If Dad had a contract to protect his identity, or some kind of confidentiality agreement with the publisher, it probably expired when he died. We need to find out before this explodes on us and we’re caught without a plan.”
Marcus eyed his brother as Devon took a long swig of whatever he’d been drinking.
“But isn’t all of this a giant distraction from why Dad wanted us here in the first place?” He’d come to Montana to make arrangements about the control of Salazar Media and go his separate ways from the brother he didn’t trust. “We promised him that we’d come to the ranch and figure out the future of the company, not plan his literary estate that he never bothered to mention to either of us.”
Devon frowned. “Lily didn’t change your mind about that?”
Marcus stared at him, wariness knotting at the back of his neck.
“Change my mind about what, exactly?”
“About trying to maneuver me out of the company.” Devon jammed the remaining papers on the table back into the envelope. “The two of you appear to have gotten on damn friendly terms, so I hoped maybe you’d decided to end your personal war with the New York office.”
Marcus swore, anger rising fast that his brother would think he’d mix business with...whatever had happened between him and Lily. He questioned it now, looking back at the affair to see if he’d missed something. “Did you send her here to seduce me?”
The idea would have been laughable considering how much he’d always wanted her anyway. Except it wasn’t one bit funny.
“Of course not.” Devon set down the envelope, staring at him with what looked like genuine shock. “She’s my friend, Marcus. And the last I knew, she was also engaged, so I’d never in a million years...” He cut himself off, shaking his head. “You don’t know her at all.”
“Maybe I don’t,” he agreed, remembering all the times his instincts had warned him not to trust her, that Lily’s first loyalty was to Devon. “But humor me, will you, and clarify for me why you sent her here in your place?”
“To help you close the deal for the Mesa Falls Ranch account,” he said with absolute seriousness.
“We both know I could have closed that deal with my eyes closed, so let’s cut the bullshit.”
The sense of betrayal cut deep. Not because of Devon, whom he expected it from. But because of Lily. How had he let himself read something deeper into what he’d shared with her?
“I had hoped that you’d stay here until I could get back to the US,” Devon admitted, spinning the heavy bar glass around and around on a thick wooden coaster. “I guessed—correctly, I might add—that she would be the one person in the company you might actually stay put for.”
“I don’t appreciate being manipulated. And I damn well don’t like how you used Lily.” He wondered how clearly she had understood her role. Maybe she hadn’t.
But then again, she knew Devon well. And once she’d broken things off with her fiancé, she’d freely confessed that she needed to protect her position at Salazar Media more than ever.
It cast a dark pall over the affair and all the things he thought he’d been feeling for Lily.
Betrayal burning like bile, he couldn’t trust himself to say anything more and keep a civil tongue in his head. Marcus shoved back from the table and made fast tracks out of the room, away from his brother.
* * *
Regina scrambled away from the door as fast as she could when she heard footsteps heading her way.
She’d taken off her boots to make as little noise as possible on the tile floors. With no one else in the main lodge besides a maid who’d left the building just as Regina arrived, she didn’t need to worry about how odd it looked to sprint across the reception area cradling her boots in her arm.
Silently, she tucked into an alcove that led to a sitting area overlooking a courtyard, her heart racing as she forced herself to be very, very still. What would she say if one of the Salazars caught her spying?
Her breath sounded like giant billows in the small space, the whoosh of it convincing her she would be found out any second.
But then she heard the front doors open and close hard—as if someone had used a battering ram on them instead of a human hand. The sound of footsteps faded, giving her the courage to peer out into the lodge’s reception area. The massive foyer glowed with afternoon sunlight from the windows in the atrium-style entrance. The front desk was unmanned and discreet enough that it could pass for a sideboard when not in use to check in guests.
Regina put her boots back on, releasing a pent-up breath. She didn’t care for spying, and she wasn’t particularly good at it. In the last two hours she’d risked her tentative new position at the ranch twice—once by sneaking into the building with the business office and nearly running into Cooper Adler. And a second time just now, listening to Devon and Marcus discuss how much they wanted to bury their father’s secrets for good.
Which only proved that they recognized Alonzo’s misdeeds for what they were—an intrusion into her family’s privacy and rights. But she still didn’t know if they stood to profit from the book, or if they had in the past without realizing it.
She couldn’t know their intentions until she got closer to them. Or, more accurately, until she got closer to Devon. Marcus was clearly involved with Lily Carrington, and he already knew his way around Mesa Falls Ranch.
But Devon was all alone, and he’d just arrived.
He would need a good trail guide to show him the sights.
Twelve
By the night of the welcome reception for the Salazar brothers, Lily recognized that Marcus had been avoiding her.
She stared out the window of the chauffeur-driven Escalade that had picked her up at the lodge to deliver her to Weston Rivera’s home on the Bitterroot River. In the three days since her grandparents had arrived in Montana, she hadn’t spoken to Marcus once. At first, when Devon revealed that his brother had left Mesa Falls Ranch for an unscheduled trip to Denver to meet with a client, Lily told herself that Marcus was simply trying to make their inevitable parting easier by removing himself from her presence.
Or perhaps he’d been giving her space to smooth things over with Devon to help her keep her job, although Devon had remained strangely silent about the topic of catching her in the stable that day with Marcus.
Still, despite the hurt of his departure, she’d thought she would try to process everything that had happened over the past week on her own. She’d phoned Eliot to discuss their misunderstanding in detail and had been relieved to learn that her grandparents had missed some of the nuances of their conversation with Eliot about the broken engagement. Yes, Eliot would still be open to a marriage of convenience, but at the time he’d proposed, he genuinely thought their friendship would help them fall in love and make a formidable team. He’d only contacted her grandparents in the hope maybe Lily’s mind wasn’t made up yet, and he seemed sorry for the problems he’d created for her. He didn’t think his father would concede to a merger without the marriage, but he’d been willing to look into it.
She hadn’t asked if he was seeing someone else because it didn’t matter. She was relieved to have salvaged a tentative friendship and an open dialogue on a merger, which had been enough to mollify her grandparents for now. Lily would use all her business savvy to draw up a merger proposal for Eliot’s father when she got back home, and her grandparents would have to be content with that.
Either way, the engagement was behind her. The conversations with Eliot and even her family had left Lily even more certain
she wanted more time with Marcus, who’d been honest with her about his intentions and about wanting to be with her. Except now, he didn’t seem inclined to give her any more of his time since he’d ceased communicating with her.
The Escalade rolled to a stop outside Weston Rivera’s massive modern home built into the mountainside overlooking Bitterroot River Valley. Her grandparents had flown home to Newport the day before, declining an invitation to the welcome reception. Devon told her the gathering would be for fewer than fifty people, but it looked bigger than that from the way guests spilled onto a huge front deck where a tuxedoed bartender was making drinks. White patio lights were strung in a canopy over the deck, giving the gowns and jewels of the beautifully dressed crowd a fairylike glow. The sound of laughter and contemporary rock music filtered softly through the tinted windows a moment before the driver opened Lily’s door.
Was Marcus here? She took the driver’s hand, allowing him to help her from the vehicle. She’d dressed with care, choosing a pale purple satin-and-lace gown with a big bow tied at the hips. The strapless bodice gave her room for a sapphire-and-amethyst necklace that belonged to her mother, a piece Maggie had left behind when she’d abandoned the Newport lifestyle. Normally, Lily avoided the splash of added jewels, but tonight she’d wanted to embrace her Carrington heritage. The name didn’t just belong to her grandparents. It was hers, too. Maybe writing a successful merger proposal would help them respect what she brought to the table for the family business. And if not, that didn’t mean she didn’t deserve it. Therapy had helped her to understand that.
Besides, the jewels were beautiful. And yes, she wanted to make Marcus eat his heart out.
Lily walked up the carpet runner spanning the stone steps in deference to guests’ evening shoes. She spotted her host immediately. Devon had introduced them two days prior when they’d had a meeting to discuss preliminary event ideas for the ranch’s social media outreach. She’d had to present Marcus’s ideas without him.