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“That’s brilliant.”
“It is, indeed.”
“Well, that’s fine. Because if you’ve dumped my brothers, there’s no need for me to hold back.”
Addison barked out a laugh.
Jake’s mouth thinned.
“That ranch you own? It’s worth exactly what you paid for it.” He smirked. “Unless, of course, you put a higher price on what you gave the poor sucker who left it to you than those services were truly worth—”
Addison slapped his face.
Hard.
The imprint of her hand stood out on his cheek in crimson relief.
“Oh, man,” Travis said, but the words were lost in the sound of a hundred shocked party guests dragging air into their lungs all at the same time.
“No wonder your brothers want to keep you where they can see you,” she said. “You can’t be trusted in polite society.”
His dumbfounded expression told her she’d just scored a perfect shot.
Why hang around and ruin it?
Addison turned her back and faced the crowd.
“Move,” she said, and a path opened like the parting of the Red Sea.
She stomped down that path … and stopped, halfway to the front door. What the hell, she thought, and she turned to face him one last time.
“You’re also a nasty, egotistical, despicable jerk.”
The crowd gasped again, then erupted in a frantic buzz of delighted whispers.
She’d given Wilde’s Crossing enough to talk about for the next decade.
So what?
She was out of here. Not just the Wilde house. She was out of the town, out of the state of Texas.
Back home, at least, she knew the enemy. She wouldn’t be taken in by a pair of brothers who looked like they’d stepped out of an old John Wayne movie, or by a man so tragically beautiful he’d made her heart ache.
Someone stepped out in front of her. A Wilde sister, Emma or Lissa or whatever in hell her name was.
“Miss McDowell. Please—”
“It’s Ms. McDowell. And you have my deepest sympathy.”
Addison stepped around the sister, yanked open the door and stepped into the night.
Travis and Caleb watched her go.
Then they looked at each other, grabbed Jake by the elbows and quick-marched him in the other direction, out the French doors that led to the patio.
“You,” Caleb said, “are an effing idiot.”
“You two are the idiots,” Jake snarled. “Thinking a woman like that could use her wiles to keep me in town—”
