Billionaire's Second Chance (Billionaires #16) - Jennifer Hartley Page 0,36

picked up. “I need a mechanic. Not just any mechanic, but one who knows how to fix farm machinery like tractors. And I need one that can walk me through a repair on video chat. I don’t care how much it costs; just find me someone who knows what they’re doing and can get on a call with me within the hour.”

There was dead silence on the phone. I thought my secretary believed I had lost my mind. But when I repeated myself again, she was quick to appease my request. Within twenty minutes, she had arranged a video call with one of the best mechanics in Texas. After we had gotten past the likes of this guy not knowing how to work a video call, I showed him the guts of this old tractor through the camera.

“Wow,” he said. “That thing is older than the hills.”

“Does that mean it can’t be fixed?” I asked.

“Of course not,” he laughed. “Old machinery is usually made pretty damn good. Just hard to find parts for, and the parts will cost you an arm and a leg. But the repair itself is easy as pie once you get the parts.”

I spent the next hour on the phone with him as he told me exactly which parts I needed, and then we arranged a second call for him to walk me through the repair once the parts arrived. Then I called my secretary back, had her order all of the replacement parts, and have them overnighted to the farmhouse. By tomorrow afternoon, I should be able to have the tractor up and running. I wasn’t quite sure why I hadn’t thought to leverage my wealth in a way that would be of the most help here, but now I wouldn’t make that mistake again. I had the ability to help Scott and Clara, and I was damn determined to do it.

15

Clara

I wished that I could have woken up from my dream right before the good parts turned bad.

I didn’t dream very much, and I was glad for that. I liked to be able to feel some sense of control over what was happening to me, and when I dreamed, there was no such feeling of control. I had never liked dreaming, not even when I was a little girl. But after our parents had died, I hated it even more. Not just because of all the nightmares that I had following their deaths, but also because I needed even more than before to feel like I was in control of at least some aspects of my life. Having my parents taken from me in a sudden, freak accident was the epitome of losing control. There was nothing that I could have done to prevent their deaths, and afterward, I felt like I needed to be in control of everything that I could be. It was weird how grief manifested oppositely for Scott and me. He wanted to run away from responsibility after our parents died, and I wanted to have control over it.

My dreams were the place where I had absolutely no control. And although this one started out great, it quickly disintegrated.

I found myself in a white dress, gazing down an impossible aisle with a burst of beautiful flowers in my hands. For a moment, I stood there, looking down at the lace sleeves and silk bodice as if I were assessing myself. It looked like a fairytale, and although I wasn’t quite sure what was happening yet, I knew that I was supposed to start to walk. I slowly made my way up the aisle, looking around me to see who else was there, but there was no one. It was odd. If this were indeed a wedding, there wouldn’t be anyone here aside from me. It was also odd that when I looked ahead and tried to strain my eyes to see down the impossibly long and winding aisle, that there didn’t seem to be anyone at the end of it, either. I kept walking, thinking that eventually, I would reach the end, and eventually, other people would show up around me. But the longer I walked, the more it seemed like the journey lengthened. Finally, I saw my brother.

“Scott!” I called out in happiness and relief to see him here inside my dream with me.

But I should have known by the way that he jumped out from the side of the aisle out of nowhere that something wasn’t right. He