Billionaire's Second Chance (Billionaires #16) - Jennifer Hartley Page 0,19

straight before I blew it.

“Yeah, me, too. I’ll swing by later this morning.”

I hung up the phone after saying goodbye and sat in my empty hotel room to gather my thoughts. I knew something was up with Clara, something besides simply trying to push me away because she was scared of her brother finding out that she was sleeping with his best friend. There was something unusual going on with her, and I needed to figure it out. I needed to figure her out. I wasn’t going to leave this town until I did.

After I wrapped up a few other calls and loose ends, I drove back over to the farm. I stopped at the market on my way and picked up some ingredients for what I was hoping would be a nice start to the morning. When I got there, I was all prepared to cook Scott and Clara a nice homemade breakfast in return for all of their hospitality. But I should have known that they would have already eaten. Days on the farm were early and long, and they were both already hard at work. I waved and walked out into the fields where they were both staring at the tractor. Scott waved back and looked happy to see me. Clara, on the other hand, did not.

What was her deal? I was really hoping that we didn’t have to start this all over again. She scowled at me as if she had thought I had already left Amarillo and she wouldn’t have to worry about dealing with me again for a while. It was entirely disheartening.

“Don’t tell me that the farm is rubbing off on you,” Scott grinned. “I mean, if you can’t bring yourself to leave, then I could put you to work here on the farm. Can’t pay you, though, so not sure how that would work out.”

I laughed and seized the opportunity to plug my offer to him again. “Maybe my company can rub off on you if you come to work with me,” I said.

Scott gave me a jab in the arm and chuckled. He never did seem to take the offer seriously, even though I was dead serious about it.

Clara walked past both of us with an air of discontent. “Enough dick-measuring, both of you,” she said with a frown. She looked even more stressed today than she had the day before. “There’s too much to be done, and we still have to harvest.”

I looked around the fields and then out past to the fields beyond this one. There was a lot of stuff that still needed to be picked and brought in. I had little idea how to harvest a farm this big, but even I could see that there were fruits and vegetables on the plants that were bursting to the brim.

“What happens if you don’t get all this stuff harvested in time?” I asked.

“It will rot on the plants,” Clara said. “All the food will go to waste, the farm will be a mess that will take twice as long to clean up, and we’ll lose the revenue that we need.” The look on her face was so stressed that it looked as if she was wearing a migraine.

I had to help.

“The tractor just blew again, and now we’ve just lost the harvester, too,” Scott said. Even he looked as if he was on the verge of a massive stress headache.

“Can you fix it?” I asked.

“Not without a massive expense and about three days of repairs.”

I looked down at which shoes I had on and was glad that I had chosen to wear jeans. Then I rolled up my sleeves.

“All right,” I said with conviction. “I’ll help.”

“You’ll help what?” Clara asked with a raised eyebrow.

“Harvest the things that need harvesting,” I answered.

She laughed. “DeShawn, the three of us can’t possibly harvest this entre farm by hand without either the proper working machinery or a whole crew of people. There’s no way that we’ll get it all done.”

“Well, at least we’ll get some of it done,” I said to her.

She could go ahead and be stubborn with me if she wanted to. But I wasn’t backing down.

“Doesn’t it make more sense to do as much as we can and lose as little of the harvest as possible? At least we can save some of it and keep the farm in better-off shape. Besides, I bet if the three of us really put our backs into it for the entire day,