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Now I just needed a dog.
Since Bea took Thelma and Louise my clothes were conspicuously free of dog hair and I didn’t like it. I clicked over to a rescue website and started sending Clayton pictures of dogs we should get.
Fun fact about Clayton, he loved dachshunds. I wanted to get him twenty.
I checked my watch and realized I’d been sitting at my computer for far too long. I stood and headed out the door to the mailbox at the end of the long driveway. Sabrina never remembered to get the mail and, granted, most of it was junk, but between the wedding and the will, I didn’t want documents to get lost in the shuffle.
It was one of those staggering February days, bright and crisp and clear. The air smelled like weather and change, and I took great big lungfuls of it. I didn’t want to live on this ranch—not in the slightest—but for the first time in my life I was glad that it was in my life. That it was a place I could go. That this land, and this open space, was mine to visit.
It wasn’t home. It never really had been. But it was something besides just a bad memory.
As expected, the mailbox was jammed with stuff, catalogs literally spilling out of it onto the ground.
Dammit, Sabrina.
I gathered it all up in my arms, letters and junk mail falling down onto the gravel. One letter, a big manila envelope was covered in stamps. Panamanian stamps. And the name on the return address was Dylan King.
I dropped everything in my arms and tore open that envelope.
A small note fluttered out and landed on my shoe.
Don’t marry this dirtbag. I’m not taking his money.
I flipped over the paper in my hand and read it.
To: Dylan King
From: Clayton Rorick
CC: Madison White
January 14th, 2017
Dylan,
I am not sure if the news of your father’s death has reached you. If not - let me be the first to extend my condolences. Not that I believe you will care. All of us knew the kind of man your father was.
Do not worry about your sisters. Veronica has agreed to marry me, and I intend to take care of her — and in extension Sabrina and Bea — for the rest of my life.
In exchange - I offer you 2.5 million dollars on the condition that you don’t step foot on The King’s Land. You haven’t cared about being a King, don’t start now.
Please reply at your earliest convenience.
For a second the dots were so far apart they didn’t make sense.
It was like the words had been written in a foreign language that I only half understood. I read it again. And then again. Once more with Dylan’s note, and by that time I couldn’t not understand.
I battled the instinct to run. To walk away from that letter. Like I’d never read it. But I picked up Dylan’s note and I put them both back in the envelope. Closed the flap like I could reseal it.
Stop it from causing more damage.
The letter had been drafted the day of my father’s funeral. The day the will had been read and Clayton had found out that he inherited everything as long as Dylan never came back.
So Clayton offered Dylan money to stay away.
My hands went numb.
Maybe, I thought frantically, maybe this wasn’t what it seemed. Maybe there was an explanation.
But…God, I’d already done this. I’d already been this fool.
Did I think cuddling with me on the couch was change? Did I think meeting his father meant that he couldn’t possibly lie to me again?
Did I think that agreement would keep me safe?
He hadn’t chosen me. He’d chosen everything the King family could give him.
And me—my body, my future, my goddamn heart—I was just part of the deal.
I headed back to the ranch before I remembered that most of my stuff wasn’t here. It was in Dallas, in Clayton’s penthouse. Fuck it, I thought. I’ll leave it. All of it. I did it before, I’ll do it again. I would go back to Austin. Back to my sister.
But then I remembered how he’d insisted that I not run away, even if I was hurt and angry. I’d stay and we’d talk. He’d written it into that stupid agreement.
It didn’t matter, I told myself. It wasn’t like he meant anything he agreed to. The whole thing was null and void on account of his being a liar!
But somehow that didn’t console me. I thought of all those speeches I’d written in that first year after I ran away. How everything I’d wanted to say to him had burned me up from the inside. I wasn’t doing that shit again.
I was going to tell that asshole to his face exactly what I thought of him. And when he tried to explain how I was wrong, or it wasn’t what it seemed—I’d put a fork in him and get the hell out of there.
