Page 63 of Tempting Fate
“I guess once you get old Gunner here settled in you’ll be taking off.” Gabe scratched the horse’s nose.
“That’s the plan. Just have to find my gold.” She flashed him a tight smile as if to say:You might not think it exists, but I know it does.
“Happy hunting.” He wasn’t going to get into it with her. If she wanted to waste her days digging in the dirt, far be it from him to stop her.
Outside, he heard a truck pull up and a door slam, then boots crunching gravel. A few seconds later, Clay came through the barn doors.
“I want to talk to you.” He jabbed his finger in the air.
“I’m here.” Raylene opened Gunner’s stall, walked to the center of the barn, and put her hands on her hips. “Talk.”
“If your old man knew what you were doing he’d roll over in his grave. Even he wouldn’t have sold that land for a motorcycle park, and Ray always put business first. Everyone knows you’re a spoiled brat, leaving a trail of destruction wherever you go. But this, even for you, is beyond the pale.” Clay reached under his cowboy hat and scrubbed his hand through his hair. “The one thing I thought we had in common was love for this land…for our ancestors and for the legacy they left us. Guess I was wrong.”
He started to walk away when Raylene said, “Make me an offer. Like I told Lucky, I’ll sell it to you for the same price. It’s good, fertile land. Good grazing for cattle.”
Clay turned and glared at her. “If I could afford it I would, for no other reason than to get you out of here.”
“You won’t have to wait long for that,” she spat. “But I think you have a hell of a nerve. You don’t know my situation, you don’t know anything about me, yet you think you have the right to decide who can purchase my property and who can’t. Just like you can’t afford to buy it, I can’t afford not to sell it. Yet according to you, I’m the one in the wrong. Three words, Clay: Get. A. Loan.”
Gabe continued to lean against the stall, watching the match. So far, he’d say Raylene was winning, though Clay had lobbed some doozies. But Gabe pushed off the wall when Clay started coming toward Raylene.
“Let’s keep this civil, folks,” he said, and moved to Raylene’s side. Gabe didn’t think Clay would pick his hands up to a woman, but he could see steam coming out of Clay’s ears.
Clay shot him a look, then did an about-face and walked out.
“Making friends and influencing people, aren’t you, Ray?” He watched all her earlier confidence dissipate like a puff of smoke.
“I wouldn’t do it…I wouldn’t sell unless I had to.”
“How broke are you, really?” He was starting to think she hadn’t been exaggerating her money situation.
“Exactly what I told you before.”
“How can that be, Raylene? I know what Logan got when your dad died.”
She nodded. “First thing Butch did when I got my money was buy hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of equipment for his ranch. Guess who isn’t listed as one of the owners of said ranch?”
“Where was your lawyer in all this?”
“He fought for me. He fought hard, and when everything was hashed out in court I owed him more money than Butch had stolen from me.” She let out a breath. “And the sad truth is I’ve always been bad with finances, because when I ran out of cash there was always more…from Daddy…even begrudgingly from Butch. I used to call it hush money, to overlook his infidelities…his abuse. After moving out of our Denver house and racking up an enormous bill at the Four Seasons, I rented a beach home in Santa Monica for twenty-thousand dollars a month.” When Gabe did a double take because he wasn’t sure he heard her right, she rationalized, “It was built for a silent film star.”
“Oh, well in that case…”
“I thought nothing of spending three hundred dollars on a pair of jeans or eating at Urasawa,” she continued. “In one month, I bought a new truck and a Mercedes Roadster. The next, I booked a week at a spa in San Diego. Then one morning I woke up and there was no more money and no one to tap for a loan.”
“Did you tell Logan?”
“No, and if you do I will kill you in your sleep.”
He sat on a bench near the tack room, trying to comprehend how someone could be that irresponsible…that extravagant. “You’re telling me you pissed through your entire inheritance?”
“Yes, though there wasn’t much left of it after Butch got through with me. The only thing he wasn’t able to get his grubby dukes on was the land. In exchange, he got a lot of other stuff.”
Gabe was guessing that the other stuff was even more valuable than the land and that, unlike Raylene, Butch knew the legend of the gold was bullshit.
“What about the Mercedes? Can you sell it?”
“Repossessed.”
