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Fury held him immobile. How dare his father threaten Violet. This was a battle between businessmen. But JT should have been prepared for this. It wasn’t the first time Preston Rhodes had intim
idated someone who tried to take him on.
“I’ll deal with him.” JT took a healthy swallow of his beer and swallowed his irritation. No need to get Violet any more worked up than she already was. This wasn’t her fight. It was his. That his father chose to confront Violet instead of him let JT know that he was feeling threatened. “It’s just a threat to distract us while he shores up support amongst the other shareholders.”
“But he said that it would tie up the stock until after the August stockholders’ meeting. And that if he keeps control of the company he’s going to do to you what he did to Tiberius.”
As threats went, it lacked teeth. “There’s no immediate family to turn against me,” JT reminded her. “As for ejecting me from the company, I was ready to go out on my own before we found out about Tiberius buying stock.” JT liked her fierce defense of him. It gave him an urgent need to pull her into his arms and offer her his ardent thanks. “Besides, if he wanted me gone, he could make that happen at any time. He hasn’t. He doesn’t want to risk losing the support of what shareholders he has at the moment.”
“I suppose.” She didn’t look convinced. “But why should we risk the lawsuit and your reputation when there’s a simple solution.”
JT grew apprehensive when he realized she’d concocted a plan in that nimble brain of hers. “And that is?”
“We appear as if we’re truly married. I’ll move in here. We’ll let ourselves be seen around town looking like lovebirds. Meanwhile you keep talking to your family.”
A simple solution? Maybe on the surface. Definitely for her. But with Violet living here, JT knew it was only a matter of time before he trampled their bargain and made her his wife for real. And then what? He just let her go in a month? Impossible. Once he made her his, there was no going back.
“Sounds perfect,” he heard himself say and wondered just how long it would remain so.
* * *
Beneath Scarlett’s watchful eye, Violet packed a suitcase full of essentials and ignored most of her sister’s questions.
“At least tell me this,” Scarlett said. “Are you going to give the man a chance to rock your world?”
Violet sat down on the bed beside her sister. “I’m afraid that if I do that by the time we get divorced I’ll be madly in love with him.”
“But wouldn’t it be worth discovering he’s madly in love with you, too?”
“JT’s right. Your happiness with Logan makes you want everyone else to find love.” Violet shook her head. “It’s not where JT and I are heading.”
“You’re just afraid. Before Logan, I was afraid, too. But trusting him—trusting myself—let me see with my heart as well as my head. All I’m suggesting is that you do the same thing.”
“JT doesn’t want to let me in. Trying to get to know him is like slogging through mud. Forward progress is slow and exhausting.”
“But it’s still progress.”
“And what if I do get to know him only to discover that he’s been damaged so badly he won’t be able to accept love much less return it.”
“If anyone can fix him, that person is you.”
Scarlett’s faith strengthened Violet. Was it possible that what had started out as an inspired business strategy could become a viable, satisfying and permanent merger?
“We’re having a party at JT’s ranch on Tuesday. I need you, Logan and Harper to come for moral support.”
“Of course we’ll come, but you don’t really need us. You and JT will do great together. I think you make a wonderful team. I’ll bet Tiberius did too. It’s probably why he left the stock to you instead of to JT with the caveat that you couldn’t dispose of it until far in the future.”
Ever since the reading of his will, Violet had wondered about Tiberius’s motivation for doing so as well. Why had he given her the stock and forced her to hold on to it knowing that she wouldn’t be able to vote?
Plagued by questions she’d never know the answer to, Violet drove to JT’s ranch and arrived at three in the afternoon. JT’s housekeeper took charge of Violet’s luggage and informed her that JT was in the barn. Curious, Violet went in search of him.
To describe JT’s property as a ranch was a little misleading. What he had was a first-class training facility for show horses. The barn was a state-of-the-art structure with an impressive lobby whose walls were lined with large photos of expensive-looking horses doing dressage or jumping fences. The centerpiece of the room was a large bronze horse and female rider. Violet wondered if it had been modeled after JT’s grandmother.
Off the lobby were several offices, currently empty. A door toward the back had a sign on it that indicated it led to the barn. Violet pushed her way through. She expected to be hit with heat, noise and stench, but it was a comfortable eighty degrees, and the few sounds that reached her ear were muted crunching and an occasional nose clearing. As for the smell, whatever air conditioning JT had incorporated into his design also pulled the dust from the air as well as the strongest of the horsey odors of hay, sweat and manure.
The concrete floor between the stalls was newly swept and free of dust. Violet wandered along, peering into stalls as she went. With each step she took, she found herself growing more and more calm. By the time she rounded a corner and spotted JT, down on one knee, wrapping some sort of poultice around a horse’s knee, she was humming.
“Hi,” she said, stopping ten feet from the large horse.
