to willingly torture her to make a point. If she can’t tolerate you, give her a divorce.”
I hadn’t realized how deep my father’s affection for Sydney ran until this moment. Or how little faith he had in me, which, frankly, was a letdown. “What about the living arrangement? How’s she running the company from here?”
“She’ll do two weeks on and off for now. Unless you’d like to move back to New York and take the job yourself?”
A humorless bark of laughter rose up my throat, edged with scorn and sounding like defeat. “You’ve thought of everything.”
“I always do.”
“I stay here, or you can forget it.”
“Fine. She’s boarding the company jet as we speak.”
“For shit’s sake, don’t I get any time––”
“To do what?” my father cut in. “Change your mind? You should’ve thought of that when you didn’t return my calls. One more thing. Keep your hands to yourself, Scott. This isn’t one of your bimbos. Don’t fuck this up.”
The soft click of the call disconnecting might as well have been as loud as a shotgun blast. The quiet peaceful life I’d built was over.
Sydney
A four-hour plane ride wasn’t exactly how I’d planned to spend my Friday afternoon. It did, however, offer me the opportunity to hammer out all the issues with the Wilson & Bosch contract and more importantly thwart any plans Damon Hastings had to steal my thunder. Short of bringing him the heads of his competition, Hastings had been doing everything to get into Frank’s good graces, to replace me as Frank’s second-in-command. No bigs. Damon was just one more in a long line of testosterone-jacked bullies I’d dispatched over the years.
Frank had emailed me that the conversation with Scott had gone according to plan. It was anyone’s guess what that meant and calling Frank to clarify didn’t hold any appeal. I’d know soon enough anyway. Despite what Frank believed––that the marriage was a done deal––it wasn’t. I needed to gather intel on the enemy. To get a firsthand assessment of what I was dealing with. If Scott was still as horrible as I remembered, I’d be forced to decline. Nothing was worth my mental health. Not even the job opportunity of a thousand lifetimes.
By the time the Gulfstream touched down in Jackson Hole, I had a room booked at the Four Seasons. Clean sheets, a comfortable bed, a hot meal. These were the things that made me happy, gave me pleasure, and since I could afford it, I never went without. And going without was something I was intimately acquainted with. My grandparents had seen to that, the memories still as fresh as a third-degree burn.
The ranch where Scott lived was located half an hour out of town. That nugget of information was met with some serious freaking side-eye. Because…Scott? On a ranch? C’mon. This was the same Scott Blackstone who had beauticians from Frederic Fekkai come to his penthouse apartment to style his hair. The same Scott who didn’t launder his Tom Ford boxer briefs. He threw them out and wore new ones at seventy-five bucks a pop.
The same Scott who I had loosely agreed to marry––God help me.
I knew all this because I’d hired his cleaning lady when he moved out of town and Thea and I had hit it off. Over the years we’d become friends, and Thea loved nothing more than to share “Scott stories” over cocktails. At some point I’d asked her to stop because the more I learned about Scott, the more it turned my stomach.
Breathing a sigh of relief, I stepped into the hotel lobby wheeling the overnight bag I always kept at the office for emergency trips and headed for the front desk. My head was spinning from all that had transpired, and a hot shower and cool sheets would go a long way to fix that. A good night’s rest would give me the strength to face…whatever it was I was facing.
And whatever it was, it was going to be handled either way. How could I possibly convince the board of directors that I was the right person to fill Frank’s considerable shoes, able to run a Fortune 500 company with subsidiaries all over the world, if I couldn’t manage one overgrown, spoiled manchild.
The back of a very large cowboy caught my eye as I strolled past the lobby bar. He must be a cowboy. Who else would wear one of those corny checkered shirts with a tooled belt? Despite the fashion emergency, I couldn’t help admiring broad