Page 132 of Embracing the Change

“I don’t think a call to her is going to change her mind.”

“I hate to admit this too, but I believe you’re correct, and further, this is not my forte, dealing with women like that.”

“Leave it to me.”

Oh no.

“Not gonna happen,” he replied.

She lifted her head. “Jamie?—”

“No, Nora.”

“Jamie!” she snapped, post-orgasm mellowness vanishing.

“You’re not in the line of this fire,” he clipped.

“You’re not either.”

“Acquiring the ranch is a waiting game at this juncture. If Pop doesn’t find an ally, and at this point, he has only two, Roland and Paloma, he’s fucked. The only recourse we have is me uncovering who Roland is conning into getting involved in this mess and convincing them not to get involved in this mess. The ranch is leveraged for more than it’s worth. I can’t imagine anyone with a lick of business sense getting involved in the first place, so we might be worried about nothing.”

“I can imagine, if they don’t like AJ, and they want to fuck him nearly as much as you do.”

Christ, he was off his game.

He hadn’t thought of that.

And his father had a lot of enemies.

“Damn,” he muttered.

“This is a good course of action,” Nora approved. “Find them. Stop them. Obviously, Paloma is not going to win you. And Roland isn’t going to win me. If you can put a stop to your plans being stymied to take the ranch, eventually, none of them are going to have any ammunition to hurt either of us.”

Roland was a pest.

Paloma was a vulture.

And AJ was a snake.

Thus, Jamie wasn’t certain Nora was right.

But there was nothing else he could do.

Beyond the ranch, he’d taken everything AJ had. Roland was his woman’s ex, and the father of her children, so Roland might think his hands weren’t tied, but Jamie understood, in some ways, his were. And he wasn’t comfortable fucking with a woman. Paloma wasn’t his favorite person, but she had nothing but fading looks. He couldn’t live with himself if he found a way to leach blood from that stone.

“Fuck,” he muttered again, dropping his head back to the sofa.

Nora curved a hand around the side of his neck and pushed up so he could see her. “We’ll be just fine, darling.”

Jamie was pleased to hear the strength behind her assertion.

She believed that.

But Jamie had a bad feeling that something was coming.

And Jamie had not made the life he’d made by ignoring his intuition.

It wouldn’t take long at all for him to discover, as usual, he was very right.

---