Page 49 of The Thing About My Secret Billionaire
“I’ll find out who it is,” he says. His voice fades out as he passes the front of the shed and gets louder when he reemerges on the other side. “You mark my words. You will regret not selling to me.”
My hands are shaking now. How dare Skinner fucking threaten Frankie like that.
If I hated him before, I now detest, despise and loathe him to the very marrow of his repulsive bones.
And I’m absolutely fucking certain he wouldn’t be taking this approach if Frankie were a six-foot-seven, three-hundred-and-fifty-pound guy.
He’s such a fucking coward.
I close my eyes and flatten my back against the shed, taking long, slow breaths to try to calm my anger and slow my enraged heart until the sound of his tires crunching on the driveway fades away.
First priority, check if Frankie is okay.
When I walk around to the front of the shed, I can’t see her. Perhaps she’s already gone back to the house. Then my attention is caught by movement inside the barn. She’s coming down the stairs.
My heart skips at the thought her first instinct afterbeing treated like that was to come look for me. It’s me she wants to tell. It’s me she wants to lean on. And that makes me feel like the king of the fucking castle.
It takes a few seconds for me to register that it would also make her more likely to trust my advice on which offer to take—and thatthat’sthe thing I should have thought of first.
The lead weight of guilt I carry around in my stomach is suddenly twice as heavy.
As I approach the barn entrance, Frankie sinks onto the bottom stair and slumps forward, burying her face in her hands.
I pause for a second to take her in.
This successful, driven woman who has a great job in Chicago is sitting on the bottom step of a staircase inside a beautiful, but probably not entirely safe barn, just feet from where her grandfather cradled her dying grandmother.
How torn she must be—between the city with the job she’s worked her whole life for and this place with all the memories surrounding her. This place that she has just two months to save for her grandfather and, likely, herself.
It’s a dichotomy I sure as hell wouldn’t want to have to cope with.
And as she lifts her head at the sound of my slowly approaching footsteps, the weight of it is written all over her perfect face.
Her eyes are almost gray, her brow heavy, and it looks like it’s taking every ounce of energy she has to lift one corner of her mouth into that now-familiar half-smile.
Meanwhile, all my willpower is being channeled into forcing myself to take deep breaths and keep my pace snaillike so I don’t just lunge at her, takeher in my arms, bury my face in that glossy, herb-scented hair and tell her that if Skinner ever shows up here or talks to her like that again I’ll mulch him into Waldo’s next dinner.
“What’s wrong?” I ask, getting closer. “Has something happened?”
I join her on the stairs. They’re so narrow I have to squish right next to her to stop my butt cheek from falling off the side.
Her thigh is crushed against mine, creating a stirring low in my abdomen as I twist to face her and rest my arm on the step two stairs above us.
“One of the developers was just here.” She drags an arm across her eyes from elbow to wrist. “He was even worse than Grandpa said he was.”
Skinner did this. He made her feel like this.
My rage at that vile man throbs in my head. I thought I already had enough reasons for hating him. He ruined my young adulthood—I had to work every possible hour of the day to keep a roof over my family’s head because of his actions. And after failing to ruin my development career, he’s never ceased to snipe at me at every opportunity, whether it’s in city council meetings, at real estate awards dinners or, hell, even once when I was stuck in traffic next to him. And now I have another reason to hate him. He’s upset Frankie.
But if I bought this place, wouldn’t I be doing that too?
Fuck. This was supposed to be so fucking simple—just come here, buy the land and leave. But I’ve made it all so fucking complicated and confusing.
“Christ, I’m sorry I wasn’t around.” I let out a frustrated sigh. “What did he say?”
She sniffs. “Basically told me if we don’t sell to him,he’ll have us closed down because this barn is unsafe. And he assumed the stables are too.”
I know forsurethe stables are. I’ve done enough site visits with structural engineers to see at first glance that they’re not one hundred percent sound.
