“No you don’t. This is my sister’s fault, not yours. You don’t deserve this.” She looked at Rob, pleading.
He clapped Dax on the shoulder. “Don’t turn yourself in. Look if it comes down to it, I can float you a loan to cover the shortage.”
“You’d do that for me?” Dax asked. He almost looked like he was afraid he was being conned again.
“I’d do it for her,” he said with a look at Kiley. Then he turned back to Dax. “Where you staying?”
“The Waterfront Hotel in Tucker Lake.”
Rob nodded. “I’ve got your number,” he said. “I’ll call you when I get everything arranged.”
Dax pressed his lips tight, nodded once, grabbed Rob’s hand and shook hard. “I’ll pay back every dime. And I’ll still owe you one.”
“I’ll take it in free advice, once the mares arrive.”
Dax clapped him on the shoulder, gave Kiley a nod, and went traipsing up the hill into the woods. He seemed to know where he was going.
“You didn’t have to do that,” Kiley said.
He shrugged. “You were right, Dax is a decent guy. When you told me he managed a race track, I thought you meant NASCAR or something. Not horses.”
“He hates his job, but loves the animals. Maybe you can steal him at some point.”
“Maybe I can.” Rob put an arm around her shoulders and said, “You uh…you were gone a long time, in there.”
She nodded.
“I could see through the curtain.” He nodded toward the second-story window. “Who’s the guy?”
Lifting her head, she met his eyes. His kind, caring, worried eyes, so different from the calculating, cool, lying eyes of her dad. “My father. He um…he’s fresh out of prison,” she said softly. “Been there for the last ten years.”
“For…?”
“Same kind of thing Kendra did to Dax. Only on a much bigger scale, and it turned out a helluva lot worse. He seduced a married woman, took her money and then left her. Her husband found out, shot her and then himself.”
“Holy God.”
“Dad went up for manslaughter.”
“I’m stunned he’s already out,” Rob said.
Kiley shrugged. “He’s a con man. Best one I ever met,” she said. “Taught Kendra and me everything we know. And now he’s here, and he’s up to something, and I don’t know what, and I can’t stop him and—”
“He taught you everything he knew,” Rob said.
“What?” She didn’t see the difference.
“He taught you everything he knew,” Rob said. “Then he went to prison when you were, what, twelve?”
She nodded.
“While he was away, Kendra was out there honing her craft on unsuspecting guys like Dax. Maybe…you were, too?”
“Trying to. Yeah. I’m not proud of it.”
He shrugged. “So that means by now you probably know more than he does. And if that’s the case, then you can figure out what he’s doing, and you can stop him.”
Kiley lifted her head slowly. “No one beats Jack Kellogg.”
“Someone did, or he wouldn’t have been in prison.” He sighed, and squeezed her tighter, pulling her against him. “You’re gonna get through this. I’m gonna help you.”
Chapter Twelve
* * *
When they got back to the ranch, there was a battered pickup truck sitting in the driveway. A giant in bib overalls was looking at the piles of junk outside the barn.
He turned, nodded their way as they got out of the truck and approached him, then held out a long arm with a dinner plate sized hand at the end of it and said, “Erskine Rowe. Miz Vidalia sent me.”
Rob shook hands with the man. “I’ve heard a lot about you from Vidalia,” he said. “Good to put a face with the name.”
He was an elderly gent with an eye for a treasure, who was, according to Vidalia, almost as rich as Bobby Joe. You’d never know it to see him. His well-worn bib overalls were about two inches too short for him. He wore a straw hat, and had a long face and a ready smile. “You’ve got some real finds here, son,” he said.
“Oh yeah?”
Erskine nodded, looking around. There was the kind of sparkle in his eyes that Rob probably had when he talked about horses. “Oh, yeah. Some of the blacksmith equipment is true vintage, and in top condition. And that carriage over there—that’s worth ten grand, easy.”
Rob looked at Kiley with his brows raised. “That’s gonna go a long way.”
“You’ll double that with the rest of these things.”
“I can’t believe this stuff has been here all this time, and we never even knew,” Kiley said. “Dad was always trying to find ways to make a buck, and he had plenty right under his nose.”
“Guess you just never know what you’ve got,” Rob said.
“Two ways we can work this,” Erskine said. “I can sell it on consignment, keep twenty percent. You’ll make more money that way, but it’ll take longer. Or I can give you twenty thousand for everything. Full disclosure, I could make more that way. Possibly as much as a third, but you’d have the funds right now.”
Rob nodded and looked at Kiley. “What do you think?”
“I think if we had the money now, we could use it to get the ranch earning that much sooner.”
“I agree. We’ll take twenty-five for everything,” Rob said.
Erskine narrowed his eyes and his face wrinkled like a baseball mitt. “I believe my offer was twenty.”
“Well, that was your opening bid, yeah. And my counter is twenty-five. There are ten dealers I can think of within a thirty-mile radius. I can call around, see if any of them are willing to—”
“Twenty-five.” The old man turned and shuffled back to his old, gray pickup truck. “I’ll send the funds over with the boys when they bring the flatbed this evenin’.” Then he got into his truck and it spit and sputtered to life, then rumbled away.
Kiley looked at Rob, and her eyes sparkled like diamonds. And right out of the blue, she slung her arms around his neck and hugged him hard. “I can’t believe it!”
He grinned and picked her right up off her feet, spun her in a circle while she laughed out loud, and then set her down again. And as she stared up into his eyes, her smile died slow and her eyes went smoky. He felt that uncanny pull and leaned down, wrapped her closer, and kissed the living daylights out of her.
And she kissed back. Their mouths parted, tongues wrestled, bodies pressed tighter. His heart kicked into overdrive, and his blood got so hot it burned from the inside.
And then suddenly, she pulled away.
He blinked, disappointed right to his toes.
She said, “I’m sorry. I just…I have some…things.”
“I know you do. I’ve pretty much decided it doesn’t matter.”
“I’m gonna work them out. I’m close.”
“And you’re gonna tell me.”
She bit her lip, lowered her eyes.
“You said you were gonna tell me.”
Nodding hard, she said, “I know. I want to. I’m just…”
“You just still don’t trust me enough,” he finished for her. “Not even after today.”
She didn’t answer, and he sensed that was because she was trying not to lie to him. “I… we need to have my father and my sister over for dinner tomorrow night, along with your brother Joey, if that’s okay with you.”
“You said I shouldn’t trust your sister around my family, Kiley.”
“And you said your family could spot a pretty con a mile away.”
He nodded.
She lifted her chin and met his eyes. “I am giving you my word, right now, that I won’t let her hurt your family. You have to believe me.”
He took a long, slow breath. “Even though you’ve been lying from the start, right, Kiley?”
She swallowed hard, he saw her throat move.
He took a big breath. “I could choose to risk trusting you enough to partner with you on this place,
even enough to share the house with you, because it was my risk to take. No one was gonna get hurt but me, if I was wrong.”
“You’re not wrong.”
“But now you’re asking me to put my family at risk. Joey falls in love if a girl looks at him too long. I’ve been brought to my knees by a woman who lied. I can’t watch him go through that.”
She lowered her head, nodded slow. He sighed, too. “If you’d just tell me, just trust me enough to tell me….”
She nodded. “I need a shower,” she said. “It’s been a long day.”
She headed for the house, head hanging low, no bounce in her step at all. Dammit, she was gonna drive him to drink. He slapped his hat against his jeans, and hurried to catch up to her. “It’s your house too, Kiley. I don’t have any right to tell you who you can or can’t invite to dinner.”
She stopped walking, didn’t look at him, just stopped, head still down. “So…tomorrow night?”
“Tomorrow night.”
She looked up at him, smiled, but it didn’t reach her eyes. They were full of worry and fear and he didn’t even know what else.
“Thank you, Rob. I promise, this is all gonna be over soon.”
He didn’t like the little shiver of trepidation that ran up his spine when she said that, but he nodded all the same, and she kissed his mouth fast, then turned and hurried into the house.
* * *
Stress, worry, fear of what her family was doing in Big Falls, not to mention Kendra playing with Joey’s feelings, were eating away at Kiley from the inside. And on top of it all, the fear of what they’d do to her entire life if she tried to stop them. She’d been racking her brain all night to figure a way out of all of this, but she hadn’t come up with a thing.
“Mail call,” Rob said when he came inside. He’d been out helping Erskine’s guys load all the stuff from the barns onto a flatbed truck.
He dropped a pile of mail on the kitchen counter, but Kiley didn’t look at it. She was too busy looking at him. His T-shirt was tight, so his chest was kind of strutting its stuff. And then she noticed his biceps, and the hairs on his forearms, and those strong, hands of his, and everything she’d been worrying about evaporated from her mind.
“Kiley?”
“What?” She blinked, jerked her eyes up to meet his and said, “Sorry. I’m just…distracted.”
He moved closer to her, pressed his hands to her shoulders, and then ran them up and down her outer arms. “Family stuff is hard. And I know yours is a little messed up right now. Mine was too, until we all came out here and Vidalia adopted a passel of grown men into her brood. Family first, that’s the Brand motto. And it’s become the McIntyre’s too.” He smiled crookedly. “I guess you could call it our step-motto.”
She couldn’t help but laugh.
“I gotta say, I like it better than my dad’s former motto.”
“And what was that?” Kiley asked.
“‘If there’s not a profit to be made, drop it and move on.’” His expression turned serious as he said it, and she knew he wasn’t teasing any more. “Your family have a motto, Kiley?”
“Not officially,” she thought for a moment. “But my father used to say about a hundred times a day, ‘if you’re dumb enough to be taken, you deserve it.’”
“That’s harsh,” he said.
She smiled up at him, trying to get back to the lightness of the earlier conversation. “Yeah. I like the Brand family motto better.”
“So do I.” He kissed her on the forehead, and said, “Relax. Tonight will go fine, I promise. And Joey said he’d stop at the diner on the way out, pick up the giant take-out order I just placed.”
“Oh, I wish you hadn’t asked him to do that. Guests shouldn’t have to being their own food. I was gonna heat up Maya’s frozen lasagna.”
“He offered, and he doesn’t mind.” He tugged his T-shirt away from his skin and wrinkled his nose. “I need to hit the shower. There’s a Big Falls’ Big Future flyer in that pile of mail. All the local landowners have made donations, and we’re landowners now. You should look it over and we’ll talk about it later.”
“Okay.”
He headed through the house and up the stairs, and Kiley watched him go and wondered what was happening to her head. She was literally pining for the guy. And she wondered how much longer he was going to want to take things slowly. She was ready to kick things up a notch.
But she knew she was the one keeping barriers between them. Her secrets were what stood in the way. She had to break those walls down, open up to him, tell him the truth.
But she had to deal with her dad and sister first. She didn’t want to see either of them in prison. Especially not her sister.
Sighing, she wandered to the counter and picked up the stack of mail, flipping through it. She stopped on the big yellow envelope with the sunshine logo address label on the front that read Big Falls’ Big Future.
She opened the envelope, pulled out the paperwork inside. A cover letter, and a slick trifold brochure that showed reservoirs in other towns. There were images of lush green parks linings their shores, designated swimming areas, playgrounds filled with happy children, kayakers, canoeists, fishermen and blue, blue water with diamond ripples glittering in the sun.
She started reading the text and then she stopped and her heart seemed to freeze into a chunk of ice in her chest. “Oh my God,” she whispered. “Oh. My. God.”
“What? What is it?”
She spun around, clutching the flyer to her chest and blinking at Rob. He’d come back downstairs for something. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, just jeans. She was almost too stunned by the revelation to notice. “I…I…”
Frowning, he came closer, took the flyer from her, looked at it, then at her again. “Kiley? Jeeze, you’re white as a sheet. Sit down.”
She sank into a kitchen chair. He pulled out a second one, turned it backwards and straddled it, facing her. “Now tell me what’s wrong.”
She blinked, met his eyes, and said, “I don’t have a choice. I have to.”
She lowered her head, too ashamed to look him in the eye. “My father’s behind Big Falls, Big Future.”
He frowned, clearly not getting it. “What do you mean, he’s behind it?”
“I mean it’s a scam. All that money the locals have been raising and donating. He’s just going to take it and leave town.”
He took the flyer again, looked at it as if he could see the truth there. “How do you know?” he asked.
Closing her eyes, she said, “Because I wrote it.”
* * *
Rob took it upon himself to call Kendra on her sister’s phone, and postpone their dinner. Then he called the diner in time to cancel his takeout order, popped that frozen lasagna into the oven, and scoured the cabinets for alcohol. He was fairly certain there had been a few bottles of something among all the gifts and supplies his family had brought over. And Lord knew he was going to need it. His little con-artist was about to come clean.
Whiskey. It would do. He filled two glasses with ice, poured the whiskey over, then added Coke and carried the glasses into the living room.
Kiley was sitting on the sofa. He handed her a glass and sat down beside her. She sipped, swallowed, then sipped again. “We went into foster care after Dad went to prison. They put us in separate homes. It tore me up. Her, too, I think.”
“I’m sorry.”
“We tried to stay in touch, but it wasn’t easy. When we turned eighteen they just cut us loose. But at least we had each other.”
“What did you do?” he asked, watching her face, trying to imagine being eighteen with no home, no job and no money and just being expected to figure it out. He needed to remember to thank his parents for the childhood he’d had.
“We did the only thing we knew how to do. Ran a game. I was good with words, so I put the flyer together. Fundraiser to create a dog park in a small neighborhood. PO Box address to send donations. Kendra got a job at a print shop, just
long enough to run them off. We pulled in five grand.”
“Wow.”
“I felt terrible about it. I knew I couldn’t keep living that way.” She lowered her head, seemed to be looking inside herself. “It just galvanized Kendra. She was so high on pulling it off, she starting coming up with bigger, better cons. She was furious when I told her I wasn’t interested. We split the money, I went my way, she went hers.”
“Okay. What did you do then?”
“I got an apartment upstate, went through a dozen jobs, waitress, convenience store clerk, bartender, fast-food worker. From time to time I’d have to run a game to pay the rent. Nothing elaborate. Sob story to a co-worker, or a date. That kind of thing.”
Again, he just nodded and listened.
“And then I got the news that my sister had died. They sent me her ashes. And I just…”
“Fell apart,” he said. He moved closer, put an arm around her shoulders.
“I wanted to come home, started looking for news about Big Falls online. Found out the place was going to be auctioned.”
He was half afraid to hear the rest, but he braced himself for it, told himself it wouldn’t be that bad.
“I knew I had to come home. I couldn’t bear to see my home auctioned to strangers. I thought—I thought just one con, a big one, and it would be my last one ever.”
Rob closed his eyes.
“I put up a website with a video of a chihuahua who’d lost his hind legs. Spun a big sob story about my best friend needing expensive prosthetics, and asked for donations. It went viral. In three weeks, I had half of what I needed to buy back the place.”
He felt like he’d been hit in the chest with wrecking ball. The breath just left his lungs. And he tipped his head back, stared at the ceiling. “You stole the money to buy the ranch.”
“I never considered it stealing.”
“What you considered it doesn’t change what it was, Kiley. It was stealing. You stole…half a million dollars.” Saying it out loud made it seem even worse, not that much probably could. “My God, do you know what kind of time you’d do for that?”
She closed her eyes. “I kept the email addresses of every person who donated. I’m going to pay them all back.”
Oklahoma Moonshine (The McIntyre Men #1) Page 15