Page 63 of Return of the Rancher

Fifteen

India was cold, so cold, and it wasn’t the temperature in the room. She was chilled with fear. There had been many times over the last five years when she had wondered if she really wanted to know the truth. Now the moment was at hand, and she wasn’t sure she could bear the revelations she was about to hear.

Farris looked like a man being tortured, stretched on a rack, made to walk over fiery coals. She would have stopped him if she could. But she had begged for this moment, demanded it. Now she couldn’t escape the consequences.

Instead, she stood and grabbed his tuxedo jacket off the chair where he had tossed it. She slipped her arms into the sleeves and burrowed into the protection it provided. Any lingering warmth from his body had dissipated, but the coat carried his scent.

“I was wrong,” she said quietly. “You don’t owe me any explanations. Not after all this time. You and I have both moved on. Whatever it is, I forgive you, I swear.”

He paced the floor now, as if sitting still was more than he could handle. “It’s time,” he said. “Time for you to know the truth.”

“Okay.” She braced herself, unable to anticipate what was coming. “Go on. What happened?”

He ran both hands through his hair. Even rumpled, he was masculine grace personified. He had carried secrets, but in the early part of their marriage, she had never felt a gulf between them.

She saw the muscles in his throat ripple as he swallowed. “I had a chance to annihilate the man who married my mother illegally and made me a bastard.”

“Oh, Farris. What did you do?” Had he really destroyed Simpson and dealt with the guilt ever since?

Farris opened the minibar, found a tiny bottle of Scotch and downed it like a man taking medicine. “A guy came to me, an acquaintance, someone who had no idea who my father was or what had happened to me in the past. This person told me about a hot stock deal. It was going down the following day. But if I wanted in, I had to act fast.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Someone had initiated a hostile takeover of Simpson’s business empire. All I had to do was buy a significant number of shares, and I could watch Simpson lose everything. It was what I had waited for all these years.”

“But it wasn’t your idea. Maybe you were wrong to buy those shares, but you don’t have to feel guilty about that. It was going to happen anyway, right? They would have found someone else to invest.”

Farris shook his head slowly. He was pale. Beneath his perpetually golden skin, his color was bad. His eyes burned with emotion. “Don’t try to make excuses for me, Inkie. This is only the beginning.”

She began to shiver. And she couldn’t think of a single thing to say.

He continued to pace. “You may have heard people call me the Ice Man.”

“Once or twice.”

“I’m known in business as the guy who never plays the market with emotion. I study. I assess. I compute the odds. And I invest based on those principles. But when this opportunity to bury Simpson came along, I jumped at it. My hatred and my vendetta blinded me to everything but a driving desire to punish him.”

“I see.” She didn’t really. She didn’t understand anything at all. But she had to say something.

Farris continued his story as if he was watching a movie from the past and narrating. Only this was much more visceral.

He lifted his gaze and stared at her with an expression that broke her heart. “I lost everything, India. It was a bad investment.”

“Bad, how?”

He muttered something under his breath. “There are a hundred reasons why, but the short answer is that I let down my guard, and I sold my cow for some magic beans. I lost ten million dollars, India. Overnight.”

She blinked, not sure she had heard him correctly. “Ten mil—”

He held up a hand, cutting her off. “You heard me. I was panic-stricken. All I could think about was how your father had gambled away your family home and left you an orphan. On our wedding day, I had promised to love and cherish you in sickness and in health, but at the first opportunity, I betrayed your trust in me.”

Now it was her turn to pace. The carpet was soft beneath her bare feet, but she ached all over. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

He leaned against the door, his mouth set in a grim line. “I was embarrassed, humiliated, distraught. I couldn’t bear to see the look in your eyes when you realized how badly I had failed you. I had to liquidate almost everything we owned, India. Stocks, bonds, a few properties I had acquired as investments. Somehow, I managed to hold on to the ranch and our apartment. But even that was dicey.”

“I can’t believe this.”

She began to look back, to relive those months. In the context of what she had just learned, some of Farris’s bizarre behavior began to make sense. No wonder he had been distant. No wonder he had begun sleeping alone.

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