Colt smirked. “She sent him a nude while we were doing the stakeout last week. He choked on a cookie.” Weston snickered like he’d just seen panties for the first time, while the other guys looked at me with varying degrees of shock.
I scowled at Colt, who was moving himself lower and lower on my preferred person list. “Did you know I hate you?” I sat down on the couch, resting my head back against it.
“People still send nudes?” Joseph asked. “Hot.”
“That’s what I said,” Colt laughed.
“But the real question is who is this chick?” Beau asked with a hint of amusement in his voice.
“Doesn’t matter,” I replied, staring at the ceiling, reevaluating my life and every mistake I’d ever made. The first one was befriending these assholes when I was a kid. “We ended things.”
“Oh shit,” Weston said. “That sucks.”
I swallowed thickly, forcing down the knot in my throat. “Yeah,” I rasped. “Sucks is about right.” Sucks was a colossal understatement. I wiped the burn out of my eyes and sat up. “I didn’t come over here to talk about this.”
I glanced at Levi. I practically watched his stomach drop in real time. “What did they do?”
“My buddy, Jack, did some digging and he uh”—I ran my hand over my mouth—“found something.”
Levi’s eyes drifted shut behind his glasses. He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees, and steepled his hands together over his mouth. “What did he find?”
I ripped off the band-aid. “Sterling has been committing tax fraud since ’82, and Preston is embezzling money from his clients.”
Levi’s eyes shot open. “You’re fucking kidding me.”
“Holyshit,” Weston shouted.
“Not kidding,” I told Levi. “So now we need to get an anonymous tip to the IRS so they open an investigation.” He fell back against the loveseat, covering his face with his hands with a heavy, defeated breath. “Or we could leave it,” I offered, quieter.
“Leave it?” Beau snapped. “No way in hell can we just leave somethin’ like that.”
“It’s not up to us,” I replied, voice stern. “It needs to be Levi’s call. They’re his family.”
Levi sat upright, shaking his head. “No, they’re not. I don’t want anything to do with them—or this, if I’m being honest. Do whatever you have to.” He got up. “I gotta go check on my wife. I’ll touch base with you guys tomorrow,” he said and left without another word.
Beau’s screen door slammed shut with a deafening smack. And I couldn’t help but feel guilty for being the one to break the news. I couldn’t imagine how it felt for him to keep getting reminded just how terrible the people he related to were. I would’ve run home to my person too—if I had still had one.
I turned to Colt and cleared my throat. “Was thinking we could get Rhett to be a kind of whistleblower. Is he still at the jail?”
“That’s not a bad idea,” Weston said.
Beau nodded along slowly, thinking. “Tell him we’ll drop the charges for the tack room if he does it.” I was thinking that, but didn’t know if they’d go for it. It was a lot of damage to let him off the hook for.
“Yeah, he’s still at the jail,” Colt confirmed.
“Let’s go then.” I stood and finished the rest of my beer. “Wanna get this shit over with and be done with these assholes once and for all.”
19
Ch 18 - Delilah
“I’m gonna make sure the tarps in the south pasture are all tied down,” Beau said through the walkie-talkie.
Emmett’s low voice came crackling through. “Roger that.”
Hearing his voice was like dragging a blade over skin that hadn’t finished healing. But seeing him was even worse. Even though a week had already gone by since we ended things, he looked as terrible as I did. I wasn’t sleeping. Hardly eating. Keeping to myself. I missed him in ways I didn’t know you could miss a person. And pretending that my heart wasn’t in pieces made it that much worse.
I watched as Beau rode Daisy at a full gallop toward the Cavendish training arena construction site, kicking up mud. Protecting it from the storm was our top priority right after securing the animals. Devastating wouldn’t even cover how bad it’d be if something happened to it when it was only weeks away from being finished.
