“She’s Karen Carter now. You know, like Mayor Carter.”
His eyes rolled slightly. “Yes, baby, I know she managed to get the mayor to marry her. I don’t know what she has to do with this.”
Because he wasn’t thinking. “Right after Chelsea was born, I went to a brunch at the Deer Run Women’s Committee. I was going to head up the auction to raise funds for the new school. Well, Karen had me kicked off because she said there was no place for whores in her town.”
“She said what?” Aidan’s voice had gone dangerously low.
There was a reason she’d tried to take care of it herself in the first place. “She always calls me a whore, Aidan. But she usually does it behind my back. I got a little mad.”
His eyes narrowed. “What exactly did you do?”
She bit her bottom lip. “I might have dumped a punch bowl over her head and told her to take her fake boobs and get out of my house. We own the building the meeting was taking place in. Needless to say, they moved their meetings to somewhere else. But Karen was mad. Everyone laughed at her. She deserved it. But then she walked up to me at Patty Cakes and we had a little discussion.”
“You should have had a discussion with me.”
“Aidan, you shouldn’t have to deal with mean-girl name calling. But she took it further.” Tears threatened, but she bit them back. “Aidan, she’s going to have her husband take a thousand acres in the east field. He’s going to take our water access and he’s going to use eminent domain to take it. He claims he’s going to build an outlet mall.”
Aidan’s eyes closed, and he took a long breath. “Oh, baby, that wasn’t about a shopping mall. That was a land grab plain and simple. The east pasture is sitting on what might be a ton of natural gas. I turned down a contract with the gas company to drill because I don’t trust them. The mayor wants that money so he came up with the idea of taking the land.”
“You knew about it?” All this time she’d worried sick and he’d known?
“The mayor doesn’t want the land anymore.” Lucas was standing in the doorway, a plate in his hand. “I explained that I could keep him tied up in court for a very long time.”
That didn’t sound like Lucas. “Is that all you did?”
“I might also have had Chase dig up dirt on the bastard’s tax practices. He might owe the IRS a ton of money and he has undocumented workers working in his family’s estate. I might have presented him with evidence and he might have crapped his pants and backed down. But the official reason is we’re being completely unreasonable and threatening to tie the county up in court. I think he told everyone Aidan was an environmentalist.”
“Yeah, they think that’s worse than being gay, which is the other thing they call me.” He took her hands in his. “I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want to fight about the gas rights. Baby, the company that’s offering is known for being sloppy and, honestly, I don’t want to take the chance that we could make a quick million but lose the land in the end. Ranching is our future.”
“But all this time I thought I was going to cost us the land.”
“Baby, the mayor might enjoy screwing Karen, but he’s not about to let her make decisions like that. He didn’t marry her for her brain. He married her because she’s thirty years younger than him. She was always a mean bitch. She probably heard what he was planning and decided to make herself look like she had some power. How long has this been going on?”
“That bitch.” She felt so stupid. “Months, Aidan.”
“Months? Why didn’t you talk to me?”
“Why didn’t you talk to me?” She threw back at him.
“Because you’re both impossibly stubborn and obnoxious.” Lucas sat the plate in front of her. “And you’re both going to change or we’re going to fall apart. Lexi, what was your plan to save the ranch and how did it involve being on the phone twenty-four seven?”
He knew her really well. “I was going to up my writing so we would have the money to fight this or I could buy us new land.”
Aidan shook his head. “Baby, do you know how much new land would cost? I know you make a lot of money, but you don’t make millions and that’s what it would take. Lexi, I don’t know what you were thinking.”
“I was thinking I didn’t want you to know how stupid I was. I was thinking I would try to save us. But you and Lucas had already done it and not even bothered to tell me something was wrong.”
“That sounds a whole lot like the pot calling the kettle black,” Aidan shot back. “You’ve kept us at arm’s length for months because you weren’t willing to talk about what had happened. I might not have been totally truthful with you, but I didn’t push you away.”
“Really?” Lucas asked, passing the plate to her. “Eat, Lexi. If you don’t, I’ll pull you over my knee. I haven’t topped you in almost a year. Between the pregnancy and this episode, I haven’t gotten what I needed in a very long time, so I wouldn’t test me now.”
Her heart ached a little. She’d known that Lucas was hurting and she’d still held him away. She took the sandwich he’d made her and had a bite.
“As to you, Aidan, you can’t say you haven’t held yourself apart from me. How long did it take you to ask me for advice? How many weeks went by?”
Lexi looked back at Aidan. “You didn’t talk to Lucas?”
They always talked. She couldn’t stand the thought of Aidan feeling so alone—the way she’d felt for months.
“I thought I could handle it.” Aidan took a long breath.
The same way she had thought she could handle it.
“I’m tired of both of you,” Lucas said. “I’m tired of being ignored. When I have a problem, I come to you. I’ve asked your opinion on everything from what car to buy to how to handle the human resources problems at the Dallas office. I didn’t do that because I thought the two of you knew everything. I did it because I trust you and love you and I need you to know what’s happening in my life. Neither one of you feels the same about me.”
“Or we’re just very stupid,” Lexi tried.
Lucas shrugged a little. “Either way, it has to change. I’m not saying I’ll leave. I can’t. We have two children who depend on me. But I will change my expectations of what our relationship means. I’ll hold myself apart. I don’t want that. I want what was promised to me. I want my family. Make your decisions. I’m going to go and think for a while.”
“Lucas,” Aidan called out as he turned to go.
Lucas didn’t turn around. “No. If you want me, you’ll know where to find me. Don’t come looking if you can’t be my Master.”
He walked out the door, his boots ringing against the hardwood floors.
“He doesn’t mean that.” She couldn’t let Aidan get mad at Lucas.
Aidan sat back against the bed. “Yes, he does. He has every right to be mad, Lexi. We failed him.”
The “we” gave her a little hope. Something had settled deep in her chest. Something that had been tight and nasty had loosened up. “I didn’t fuck everything up?”
Aidan chuckled a little. “Oh, I think we fucked up plenty. Lexi, why didn’t you talk to me?”
He pulled her back into his arms. Those big biceps surrounded her, and just for a moment, she felt safe. He’d heard the truth and he wasn’t pushing her away. “She has power over us. She can make life difficult for us and I still got pissed off.”
“You should have clocked the bitch,” Aidan replied.
She shook her head. “I can’t get us kicked out.”
Oh, god. She’d never really thought about it that way. She’d had her daughter and then she’d done something that could have cost them the ranch and her whole childhood had played out in some weird place in the back of her brain.
She’d always felt it. She’d felt the fact that she was the reason her mother had lost her home. She’d been the reason they had struggled and her mother had to fight for their existence. She’d been the reason her mother had married a man she liked but didn’t love.