I know what I saw and what I heard.” Josh was adamant. He shot up from the sofa and turned to face his uncle. “He was definitely fooling around with that girl—his assistant,” he said through clenched teeth. His jaw twitched with anger as he began to pace back and forth.
“I want you to calm down, son,” Sully tried to reason.
“I just want to kill him!” Josh slammed his clenched fist into the open palm of his other hand.
“Hey, don’t ever say that,” Sully warned.
“I promise you, Uncle Sully, if that man hurts my momma—”
He felt like a caged beast, holding back his rage. “I’ll tear him apart with my bare hands!” Josh threatened, displaying his fists as the lethal weapons they were. He was so enraged, his body was trembling.
Sully rose from his seat and put a hand on Josh’s shoulder. “Boy, you need to calm down before you do something you’ll regret. That quick temper of yours is going to get you into trouble someday.”
“You’re saying I can fight to defend my country, but I can’t fight to defend my mother?”
“It’s not the same. Think about it. What’ll hurt your mom worse? A man breaking her heart or her son ending up in prison for the rest of his life?”
Josh jerked back like someone had slapped him hard. Visions of being hauled to prison in chains and an orange jumpsuit flashed before his eyes.
“Now, son, as her big brother, my first instinct is to protect your mother, too—always has been—but when I jump in without thinking things through, I usually make matters a whole lot worse. Let’s give Lucas the day to tell her, like you said. Then, I’ll go see him at the end of the day and have a man-to-man talk with him.”
Though Josh wanted nothing more than to rip Lucas’s head off with his bare hands and feed it to the wolves, he considered that his uncle might be right. The last thing he wanted was to hurt his mother. He took a breath, sucked in hard, and released a cry of exasperation.
He would wait, he told his uncle, but if Lucas hadn’t broken it off with his mother by tonight, he was going to take matters into his own hands and it wouldn’t be pretty. Sully had until six o’clock to deal with the scoundrel, Josh said.
~*~
Sully spent the day agonizing over how he was going to protect his little sister and still get the city’s money back from Lucas Wakefield. He knew that if he pushed Lucas to break off the engagement with Maggie, rumors would spread all over the valley and people would start pulling their money out of the Whitetail Resort. He and Lucas needed the prospects on the bus trip next week to invest their money or Lucas would not be returning the hundred thousand dollars to Sully.
Was Josh right about Lucas fooling around with his assistant? Was she involved in the scam? Or was she just working for Lucas and fooling around with him, unaware of what was really going on?
Sully remembered Maggie introducing Fiona to him at the welcome party for Lucas, telling him she had been in the area for a while and she hadn’t had much luck finding a job. He recalled Maggie introducing Fiona to Lucas, as well. So, she couldn’t have initially been part of the plan—but was she now? Had she been sucked in by this powerful and charming man, just as Maggie had?
It was going to be a long day, Sully told himself, waiting to see if Lucas would do the right thing and tell Maggie. If the town thought Lucas was stepping out on Maggie, he had to know it would ruin him. So why was he willing to fool around with his assistant with so much at stake? Knowing firsthand of Lucas’s devious and manipulative ways, he would likely be planning his own damage control strategy to keep Maggie under his spell, keeping her from believing that Josh was right in what he saw and heard, maybe even devising some way to get Josh out of the picture altogether.
Sully shuddered. Did he really even have any idea what Lucas was capable of?
~*~
Emily sat at her desk, in front of the computer in her office across the main hall from Lucas’s office. She had been searching the internet all morning, trying to find something on Lucas Wakefield. She had attempted to call Isabel several times in the last few hours, but