Page 83 of Impossible Love

Declan grabs the file and laptop and Evander hops on one leg to his bed, and immediately props his cast on several pillows, from hip to ankle. Even if I hadn’t seen Phoebe at the door, I’d know she’d just been there.

Fresh flowers are in a vase on the nightstand, and Evander’s room is unnaturally tidy.

Evander opens the file and sets it by his side, then opens the laptop. “So, I was going through the signed BLM contract.”

The hairs stand up on the back of my neck. “What about it?”

“We have a problem, Cal. Why don’t you take a seat?” Evander points to the armchair by his dresser.

“No fuckin’ thanks, bro. What’s wrong with the contract?”

He lifts the document out of the folder. I see a little red sticky note on the edge of one of the pages.

“Just tell him,” Finn says.

Declan sits on the foot of the bed, a deep frown on his face. I feel Special K right next to me, his giant arms folded over his chest and his body tensed. We’re circling the wagons. I brace myself for whatever is about to happen.

“We’ve got a big damn problem. We could be in danger of losing access to about a quarter of our total acreage, and unless I’m wrong, and I’m never wrong, someone has just launched a cruise missile over our back fence.”

Chapter 43

Cal

Eventually I raise my face from my hands and look up at my brothers. I’ve been sitting on the chair next to Evander’s dresser in silence, eyes closed, doing my damnedest to sort this out in my brain.

I was right there in the room with Victoria and reps from the BLM, Interior, and tribal governments. I heard everything that went on. Yes, I did step away to arrange for the suite at the Fairmont and call the jeweler in Tahoe, so is that when it all happened? When she betrayed us?

I refuse to believe it. “She wouldn’t have done that,” I say for about the tenth time in fifteen minutes. I don’t sound convinced myself, so I know I’m not convincing my brothers.

Finn looks at me with sympathy. Special K’s face is as blank as a slab of granite. Declan is shaking his head, pissed as hell. And Evander looks guilty.

As he should. It was his idea to send Victoria to negotiate in his place.

And yet I still don’t fully understand what’s gone down. Maybe I’ve been too furious to pay attention. “Walk me through it again,” I tell Evander. “Explain it like I’m five. Fuck that—explain it like I’m three.”

Evander sighs, then flips his laptop around so we can all see. “Here’s our last BLM agreement from ten years ago. See here, where we renew our ten-year lease for the two hundred square miles of public lands between our northwest pastures and Sulfur Springs? The way we always have and always will, with all the access rights?”

We all nod.

Evander points to the printed document. “Here in the new version, we cancel the current lease and relinquish all rights to that BLM land. That means Sulfur Springs is no longer connected to the rest of Yosemite Ranch and becomes a standalone parcel, dramatically tanking its market value.”

“Victoria had to know that,” Finn says.

“Yeah, since she’s a land speculator,” I mumble.

“I gave her the boilerplate language,” Evander continues. “All she had to do was get the BLM to agree to terms and price. She’s a Yale business school grad, for fuck’s sake. Extending the lease was the entire point of the negotiation and the reason you flew out to San Francisco.”

“But I watched her in action. She talked them down in price. She got them to give us access to Pine Creek, which we haven’t had for three decades. I saw her do everything we asked and then some.”

“Got that right,” Special K mutters.

I’m sick to my stomach. I’m so fucking pissed off that I’m seeing spots. But I’m not angry at Victoria. I’m angry at myself. For the first time in my life, I gave my dick domain over my brain. And because of that, I’ve failed at my mission—maintain the MacLaine legacy of a fully operational Yosemite Ranch.

I know better than to trust anyone outside our circle. And I knew better than to trust her.

And I did it anyway.

I jump up and snatch the document from Evander, as if I could read it again and find some loophole that would exonerate Victoria, some way to prove she didn’t do this to us. I flip through all sixteen pages, from the introduction to the signature page, the BLM attorneys’ scrawl in the left column and Arlo’s on the right. Standard.

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