Page 2 of The Cowboy's Second Chance Bride

Cutting our losses would be a huge financial suck. Losing the edge on our project meant losing a lot of money as well as market share and the first-mover advantage, investment returns, partnership and integration, brand reputation, talent retention, legal and intellectual property issues and lawsuits, positive media attention, data advantages, pricing power, and worst of all… customer trust.

Hands down, had we been able to launch this project on schedule, there was no doubt Optium would have done it with ethics and safety, front and center. All Hitchens and Sons cared about was getting personal data to leverage money. Most people didn’t realize Hitchens and Sons also had their hands in the insurance industry, which meant if you tried to get insurance through their company, they could use all the data they collected to charge you higher prices or to reject you altogether. And that was just tip of the iceberg with them.

“You can’t just let this go, Cal. You need to fight back!” my mother said.

Morgan Baker-Beckett, my mother, had been gunning for me to take down her estranged husband. And when the attack was launched, she’d jumped on a plane and rushed to my side—only I was in Peru, and she’d gone to our office in Seattle. She’d “thought it best” if she waited here for me.

“Your father will not make this an easy or quick battle. In the thirty-two years of our marriage, I have never seen the man give up or give in.”

“Didn’t I say I was going to strike back?”

Yes, enemy number one, current and past, was my good old pops. Isn’t family great? If I’d had a sense of humor, I would have laughed about the fact that she saw this as a battle, like I did. But I’d lost my sense of humor many years before. My funny bone was a shriveled-up prune of emotion, rotting away deep in the dark recesses of my soul. I lived comfortably with cynicism and snark.

Paul, leaning against the wall, crossed one ankle over the other. “He’s done a great job planning this out. We have to give him credit for that. He found your weakness and is using it against you.” Paul used his middle finger to push up his glasses. Like me, he had a few choice words for Dalton Beckett.

Jace Shepard scoffed. His nostrils flared in anger.

Tell me about it, buddy. I was just as angry.

Jace had never really liked my dad. When you had a great father like Jace’s, dads like mine seemed like fictional villains rather than real-life assholes. Dalton—he didn’t deserve to be called dad—had slammed me in the media, saying that a guy who wasn’t married and hadn’t dated in a decade had no business talking about dating and relationships. He’d said a guy whose house had been broken into the other day couldn’t know much about personal security.

Yeah, my apartment had been broken into five days earlier. When Paul told me it looked like all they took was the TV, I’d said, “I don’t have a TV.”

I hadn’t been home yet to check what was missing, but I would have bet a year’s salary nothing had been stolen, because I literally had only the essentials—a few clothing items, some cookware, a bed, and a couch. I was never home. I carried my laptop with me.

The day before, I’d taken a bullet for a client when all this bullshit here was going down. And besides that, someone had entered my mom’s ranch, broken into my sister’s glass-blowing workshop—her livelihood, by the way—and destroyed over a hundred grand in equipment and finished pieces. That had been in the media too. Here I was, supposedly one of the best in that field, yet neither residence had security. It made for a good story. Coincidence? I thought not.

“We’re not going to cut our losses. I’m not giving up on this division or this project.” I scratched the wound on my upper arm and winced as my fingers tugged on the stitches.

Citra jumped up. “Let me look at this.” She gestured for me to take off my shirt, then eased off the slightly stained bandage. As well as being one of my first employees, Citra was an excellent field agent with medical experience, which came in handy if one got shot.

I was that one in this case, by the way. Getting shot sucked. But at least the asset was alive and his stalker was headed to prison.

I wiped a hand down my face, and when I came to my chin, I rubbed at the stubble. I glanced at my watch. Twenty hours of no sleep. Or a proper shave and shower. Did I mention how dog-tired I was?

“Merely a flesh wound,” she mumbled in her best Monty Python voice. “I’ll give you some antibacterial ointment that should help with the itch. But as you know, itchy is good. However, the stitches the field quack put in are not great.” She snorted, letting me know that was an understatement. “They’ll give you a gnarly scar.”

“I’m told chicks dig scars.” I observed the poorly done, uneven stitches. The wound didn’t look like a gunshot but more like I’d snagged my arm on a fence or something equally lame.

“Like you care. I’d love to know if you ever showed a chick your scars.”

Jace raised one brow. He was like the subconscious part of my brain that I tried to ignore, only I couldn’t because his expression always reflected my thoughts. Yeah, yeah—once upon a time there had been a chick. I knew it. He knew it. No one else knew it. Things hadn’t ended so well, and that was the end of chicks and showing scars for me.

Citra slapped a clean bandage onto my arm.

“Ow, go easy,” I said, partly joking. My arm was a little sore but nothing a pain reliever couldn’t ease.

“Next time, don’t get shot, and we won’t have to do this.”

“Well, it was me or the asset, so I picked me. Can you imagine what the papers would be saying had it gone the other way?”

“Calvin,” my mother said, drawing my attention back to her. “Why are you so calm? How can you sit there and joke with Citra?” She sat on the couch across from my desk, looking ready to kill. And she had a target— Dalton Beckett, who’d always been the target for all of her feelings. She slapped the leather couch. “I can’t believe Dalton is doing this. And I can’t believe I’m surprised.” She crossed her arms.

“I’m in the business of being proactive, not reactive, so I need time to think and process.” I looked at her from under my brow. “But I’m not calm. I’m pissed off as hell.”

“As far as the news articles about you on social media go,” Paul said, “we’ve been trying to get the name of the journalist writing all these articles and doing all this posting, but Spoon says he’s hidden behind a VPN.”

I shifted my focus back to Paul then to Jace, who was sitting quietly by my mom, his expression thunderous.

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