by Raeann Blake
She let the smile grow slowly then took a last drag off of her own cigarette and downed the rest of the whiskey in the glass. Something told her that tonight’s dreams would be even better than those of the night before. She suddenly couldn’t wait to go to bed.
She rose quickly and went back inside. She rinsed out her glass and set it on the bar then started for her room. She couldn’t help her eyes lifting once to the balcony, just the slightest twinge of guilt flashing through her about the thoughts that had gone through her mind when the man’s wife was right up there. Still, she had evidently tossed him aside like yesterday’s newspaper a long time ago. Besides, what was wrong with a dream? It was just a dream.
As soon as she was under the cover, she closed her eyes and smiled as a handsome face floated above her. Watching her just the way he had been when she had been looking at the stars. And his voice sounded exactly the same. So sexy. Twice she’d seen him without his shirt. Twice she had wanted to touch his skin. Feel his chest, his arms, his back. All those places not normally bared. So muscled, so taught, and right now, in her mind so slick with perspiration.
“Oh, man,” she whispered and drifted off to sleep.
Chapter Six
“Good, glorious morning,” she said breezily as she came through the door.
“Oh, good God. Here she goes again,” Clay muttered.
Hailey smiled broadly at Isobell and poured a cup of coffee then walked back to the bar and sat down then leveled a gaze at him.
“Did you get any sleep?” she asked softly.
“Some. Eat your breakfast. Let’s go over those bills,” he said lowly. He had slept little. And what bits he had were filled with flashes of her arm touching his. Them riding side by side. Sleeping close together by a campfire. Every time he woke he was drenched in sweat only to drift back off and have the images start all over again.
“Okay. Where is our vegetarian this morning?”
“She’s not an early riser. I’m sure she’ll drag herself down here sooner or later. I can tell you where I’d like to drag her,” he said then stopped and dropped his head to lean against his hand and shoved his plate back.
“Clay…I won’t say one more word if you’ll eat,” Hailey said softly.
“I will. I just want a little more coffee first. Go ahead and eat,” he said quietly.
Oh, damn. He looked like a little boy this morning. And the image pulled at her to comfort him but she couldn’t.
“What can I do? Tell me what to do, Clay.”
“Goddammit, Hailey. Just eat,” he snapped and shoved out of the chair and stalked over to the coffee pot. He had just poured a cup when he set the pot back on the burner and leaned against the counter with his head leaning against the cabinet door above it.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered then grabbed his cup and went through the door to the outside.
“Oh, God,” Hailey whispered. The tears were threatening to overflow her eyes and she tried desperately to blink them back.
“He didn’t mean it, Hailey,” Isobell said quietly.
“I know he didn’t. He’s just…he’s so upset. And I don’t know what to do,” she said hoarsely.
Isobell watched her in silence for a few seconds then softly said, “Oh, my.”
“What?” Hailey said as she quickly wiped her face.
“Nothing, dear. Nothing at all. Try to eat something, Hailey. It will bother him if he knows he upset you enough for you not to eat. Go ahead,” she said then quickly turned away. She lifted her eyes to the window to find Clay pacing back and forth outside, smoking. She had just figured out that Hailey was falling hard for him. She had thought it wonderful that she seemed to have a calming, softening effect on Clay. Now she wasn’t so sure. Good for Clay, yes. But she wasn’t at all sure that Clay would ever let himself trust somebody enough to really love them. And that would be very bad for Hailey. She was positive that Hailey was one of those women who would love openly, without reservation, even blindly. Women like that could be completely destroyed if that love was given to the wrong man.
When she saw him put the cigarette out and start back in, she quietly whispered, “Get ready.”
Hailey squared her shoulders and was just spooning a mouthful of eggs into her mouth when he came through the door and glanced at her then away as he walked back to the bar and sat down. He pulled the plate back to him and shook his head when Isobell tried to say she would make something fresh.
“This is fine. I’m sorry, Hailey. I really didn’t sleep well.”
“That’s okay. Let’s just eat and then I’ll go get those bills,” she said easily.
Clay lifted his eyes to hers then dropped them right back down and nodded. “Yeah. Okay,” he said softly then started eating. He couldn’t taste it, but he ate it.
They ate in silence and when the last bite was gone, Clay rose and carried both of their plates to the counter. “I’ll get the coffee. You go get the bills. I’ll meet you in my office.”
“Okay. Be right there. Isobell, great as always. Thanks,” she said then went through the door.
Clay sighed as he poured the coffee then turned to face the woman who put up with his moods every day. “I should warn you. I promised her that if she could straighten out the mess Pepper made that I’d personally cook the best Double-C Bar steak money could buy for her. It looks very much like she’s on the way to doing just that so I guess I’ll be invading your kitchen one night. You can have your choice of taking that night off, or staying and get waited on for a change instead of waiting on us. I’ll let you know what night.”
“Okay. And I’ll let you know what I decide,” Isobell said then grinned up at him when she saw the first hint of a smile try to tug at his lips that she had seen in a very, very long time. Then she made it go away.
“She’s good for you,” she said quietly.
Clay glanced at the door with a frown then back to Isobell again. “She’s good for the ranch, Isobell.”
She watched him silently as he went through the door and let her own frown show again. Now she was very worried about them both.
He went through the door silently and handed her the cup then walked behind the desk. “Okay. Let’s start with the ones that need to be paid right away, then let’s talk about the Yates bill.”
“Okay. This stack is the ones that are due soon. As long as we get them in the mail by Friday they’ll all get there on time,” she said as she moved one stack to the middle of the desk in front of him.
Clay went through them one by one and nodded as he handed them back to her one at a time. Once he’d reached the bottom he looked up at her. “Those are all okay. Go ahead and enter those and print them out and I’ll sign them. That’s all the ones that are urgent?”
“It is. The rest can wait until next week.”
“Okay. Yates. I still want you to tell me what he said to you, but for now tell me what it is that’s bothering you about that bill.”
She handed him a copy of the bill and pointed to several items that she had circled with a red pen. “At first, I thought…”
“Busy as little bees already this morning, I see.”
Clay’s eyes cut to her then back to the paper in front of him. “We are busy, Gail. What do you want?”
“I need to talk to you…alone,” she said as she stood in the doorway.
“Like I said, we’re busy.”
Gail walked into the room and sat down in the chair next to Hailey. “I’ll wait. And I’ll take a cup of that coffee, Hailey.”
Hailey didn’t even look up or hesitate. “I’m his business manager, Mrs. Cardell. Not your personal slave. If you want a cup of coffee, I’m sure you know where the coffee pot is located. Get it yourself.”
Clay ran his tongue along his teeth to keep the grin from showing and didn’t change his expression or look up to see the expression on Gail’s face. It was several seconds before the cool response came.
“You really are rude and impudent, aren’t
you?”
“Well, there’s a mark in the plus column right there. Hailey, this is what he’s charging us for grain? That looks high,” Clay said then kept scanning when Gail finally shoved out of the chair and walked out without saying another word.
Hailey chanced one quick glance up at Clay and thought that there might be just the slightest twitch to the corners of his mouth, like he wanted to grin but wouldn’t. It would be a first. She had not seen even the slightest smile on his face yet.
“It is high. That’s what I wanted to show you. That price is seventy percent above market value. Fifty percent above what other suppliers in the area are charging. All of those items marked in red are all at least fifty percent above what we could get it for somewhere else. And they’re fifty percent above what he was charging you six months ago.”
Clay finally looked up at her then back down at the bill again. “Sonofabitch. We’ve been using this bastard from day one. Hell, the old man even bought from him. Why six months ago? What happened then?”
“I can’t prove anything, Clay. But my guess is that it’s one of two things. One of them could be that he and the woman who was doing this job then worked out a little kickback scheme. Maybe after she left he decided to keep the prices up there just to see if he could get away with it.”
“Six months ago. I can’t even remember who was here six months ago,” Clay said quietly as he tried to remember.
“Her name was Fiona. I checked the personnel file. She left a couple of months after this started.”
“Fiona. She was here for four months. Longer than anybody else has lasted. You said two reasons. What’s the other one?”
Hailey hesitated for just a few seconds then said, “That he’s trying to run you out of business.”
He opened his mouth then clamped it back shut as he met her eyes. Something there told him which one she believed to be the truth.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Clay snapped.
Hailey shrugged her shoulders and said, “I’ll talk to him. If he won’t come down to a fair price, he’ll lose the account if that’s alright with you.”
“No, I'll talk to the bastard and find out what his problem is,” Clay barked.
“Clay, let me do my job,” she said easily.
“Hailey, a lot of the stuff that we buy from him, nobody else in town keeps in stock.”
“And I’d bet money they would if we let them know that we would need it on a regular basis and that they would get the business. Clay, please. Let me handle this. Honest to God, I know what I’m doing.”
He leaned back in the chair and looked out the window as he blew out a long breath then finally shifted his eyes back to hers. “Okay. That’s your area. That’s what I hired you for. Do what you can.”
“Okay. I’ll take care of it. Now. I have one more thing I want to ask you before I start on those checks. What is the purpose of charging this stuff all month? We go in to pick it up. Why not go ahead and pay it then?”
“When I took over, we didn’t have the cash to do that. We charged all month and when it was time to pay the bill, if we didn’t have enough, we loaded up some cattle and carried them to market. We paid the bill and started over again the next month.”
Hailey nodded and said, “Okay. But that’s not the case anymore. I would recommend that we not charge any of this stuff that we buy locally. They can give us a total before we go in to pick them up and we can carry a check with us. If that works out okay, we could set up something later to do wire transfers so that we don’t even have to use a check. But for now, let’s get you off the credit merry-go-round.”
Clay thought seriously about it for several minutes then finally nodded. “Okay. Do it.”
“Alright. Before I call him, I’m going to check the availability in other stores around town for the supplies that are currently on the list. I can’t completely alienate him until I know for sure that we can get what we need somewhere else.”
“Okay. Hailey, I won’t stand for him saying things to you he shouldn’t. I want to know if he does.”
“I’m a big girl, Clay.”
“Goddammit, you’re just bound and determined to piss me off. I said I wanna know about it.”
Hailey bit her bottom lip and nodded then finally said, “Okay. Anything else?”
Clay let his eyes drift shut then growled, “Get the hell out of here. Go to work.”
When he opened them again she was gone and he finally let the slight smile show. But it quickly disappeared when Gail showed back up in his doorway.
“Are you quite finished now?”
“What do you want, Gail?”
She walked into the office with a cup of coffee then settled in the chair then looked up at him silently. He saw her open her mouth then close it again and blow out a short laugh of disbelief when Hailey came back through the door with his cup that he hadn’t even realized was missing. She set it silently on his desk then turned and started out without saying a word.
“Thanks, Hailey,” he said quietly. He was trying desperately not to grin at the look on Gail’s face, but it was hard.
“Sucking up?”
“What do you want, Gail?”
“Can I close the door?”
“Whatever will get you out of here the quickest,” Clay said then took a sip of the coffee and then settled back in the chair to wait. He had no doubt she was going to ask him for some money. He couldn’t have been more shocked when she sat back down in the chair and met his gaze levelly and said what she really came there for.
“I want a divorce, Clay.”
He waited just a couple of seconds then said, “For how much?”
She shook her head and kept her voice calm. “I don’t want your money. I just want a divorce.”
He leaned farther back in the chair and studied her carefully. “You could have done this two years ago. Why now? Woodrow?”
“Yes,” she said without hesitating.
“File it. Or I’ll file it. Make no mistake, Gail. I’ll pay you whatever I can within reason if that’s what you want to get this done. But I will not give you one square inch of this ranch,” he said lowly.
“I don’t want the ranch, Clay. I don’t want your money. Woodrow and I want to get married. And I can’t do that when I’m still married to you.”
“File it.”
“Okay. I have a flight back to California this afternoon. I’ll go in and see a lawyer this morning and get it started.”
Clay opened a desk drawer and rummaged through it until he came up with a business card. “This is my lawyer. Have the papers sent to him.”
“Okay. Clay, why didn’t you ever file?”
He sighed and turned his head to look at the window. “I thought about it. I guess I thought it was the price I should pay for…everything. I asked you for this right after the wreck, Gail.”
She blew out a short laugh and nodded. “Yeah. You did. Two days after the wreck. You were supposed to be mourning with me, not trying to…never mind.”
“Gail, I am sorry about that. I know the timing sucked. But you knew I didn’t love you. And you didn’t love me. There wasn’t any reason to stay married after that.”
“Yeah. I guess not. I have to go, Clay.”
“I’ll walk you out,” he said and rose from behind the desk then opened the door for her. “Is your bag upstairs?” he asked as they started across the living room.
“No, it’s already in the car,” she said quietly then stopped by the front door and looked back around the room one time then up to Clay.
“Goodbye, Clay,” she said hoarsely.
“Goodbye, Gail. Good luck,” he said quietly. He stayed where he was and watched her as she walked away, not closing the door until she was in the car and driving away. He suddenly felt a huge loss inside of him. One that he knew his anger at her had masked for two years. He walked slowly across the room and poured a glass of whiskey then went back to his office and closed the door.