Page 37 of Forty and Fighting Dirty
I’d haveoptions.
For a woman who’d had to squirrel away bits of money here and there for years in order to have enough of a cushion to leave her ex-husband, options were pure gold.
I wasn’t letting this house go without a battle. And Rhett Baldwin was about to find out just how dirty I was willing to fight.
I stood, marched the two steps that separated my chair from the desk, reached across the wooden surface, and flipped my ticket over, jabbing my finger at the fine print. “The rules say that you have to produce the winning ticket to claim your prize.Mr. Baldwin,” I asked, turning to glare at him. “Are you able to produce the ticket?”
He waved a hand, unconcerned. A king in his domain, confident of his power. His drawl was slow and mocking, as was the arch of his brow. “You know the answer to that, Darling.”
“Thank you.” I gave him a smile as sharp as the fine edge of my temper. Turning back to the lawyer, I tapped my fingernail on the ticket. “According to your very own rules, the important half of the document is the ticket itself.” I grabbed the scrap of paper holding my name. “This is the document that needs to be produced to claim the prize. Not the stub.”
Maya frowned. “Well?—”
“I seem to recall you grabbing that ticket out of Violet’s hands when I’d already begun the transaction,” Rhett interjected. “And there are at least a dozen witnesses.”
“And no one would dare go against the word of the great Rhett Baldwin, would they?” I shot back.
“It’s not my word against yours, Darling, it’s what happened.”
“And yet my name is on the winning ticket.”
“And mine is on the stub.”
I bared my teeth at him as rage swept through me like a swarm of angry bees. His eyes sparked, anger flashing. Good. I wanted him angry. I wanted him to show these people therealhim. Not the benevolent hero come to save the town. The angry, bitter, petty little man who didn’t even have the heart to take care of an injured cat.
Thatwas the Rhett Baldwin I was fighting. Notthe man who paid for knee surgery and bought weekly jars of mango chutney.
I backed away from the desk and sat back in my chair. “So. What do you propose we do?”
The three of them looked at each other, then at me.
David cleared his throat. “Maya?”
She pursed her lips, brow creased. “This is highly unusual.”
Rhett leaned back in his chair, a king in repose, like he didn’t have a care in the world. He blinked his gaze over to me and arched his brows.
I arched mine right back.
“You’re not going to back down, are you?” he asked, sounding vaguely amused. The anger in his expression had banked, but I knew it was there, lurking under the surface. I couldn’t believe people fell for the good-guy act. He was such a liar.
I leaned on my own righteous fury and narrowed my eyes at him. “I’m not backing down when I know I’m right,” I said through clenched teeth.
“This is all feeling very familiar,” he noted, and that same mocking tone danced on his tongue and lit his eyes with mirth. He was laughing at me.
Laughing at the fact that I didn’t let people cut in line ahead of me, or steal prizes out from under me. Laughing at the fact that I was a sad, weak little woman who refused to be little or weak in his presence.
I hated him. I hated him so much for trying to make me feel small, for using his might to try to bully me into backing down again.
“There’s more at stake than a blueberry muffin this time,” I ground out. My jaw was so tight I could feel the beginnings of a headache around my temples.
“So it would seem.”
“I want to know why a rich gazillionaire like you needs to steal a home out from under two young boys and their mother,” I said. “Wouldn’t that be an interesting news story?”
The spark was back in his eyes. He clenched his jaw, and I watched his throat bob with a tense swallow. “It amazes me that you pretend to be so nice with everyone else, Darling.”
“Funny,yousaying that tome.”
