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Soon, he told himself, this ranch wouldn’t be his problem. Soon, he’d be working at his own spread instead of simply checking in with his own foreman every couple days. He steered the truck down the oh so familiar drive and wondered how many thousands of times he’d driven this route over the years. Then he figured it didn’t matter. He hit the Bluetooth speed dial, listened to the ring and when the foreman at his own ranch answered, Liam started talking. “Joe, you get everything tied down over there? Looks like a beast of a storm headed in.”
“Just saw that, boss.”
Liam smiled to himself. If there was one thing you could count on with a man who worked the land, it was that he always kept a sharp eye on the skies. Hell, weather was the one thing a rancher—or a farmer—couldn’t control. So when there was a potential enemy always ready to rain down misery on you, well, that kept a man permanently on his guard.
“The boys are bringing in the mares now,” Joe said. “Looks like we’ve got some time yet. Heck, storm might pass us altogether. But if it doesn’t, we’ll have everything set before it hits. Don’t worry.”
“I’m not,” Liam lied. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust his foreman or the other men working for him, it was only that he’d feel a hell of a lot better if he was there, taking care of things himself.
He’d worked most of his life toward getting a ranch of his own where he would call the shots. He’d made sharp investments years ago, patented a couple of ideas he and his friends had come up with while he was at MIT and now had enough money to do what his heart had always demanded.
Funny how that had worked out. Liam’s father had been the Perry ranch foreman for years, and when he died, Sterling had offered to put Liam through college with the understanding that once he graduated, Liam would come back to the ranch and work off the debt as foreman. With no other options, since his father had left more debts than money, Liam had gratefully accepted the deal.
And it was that college education and what it had enabled him to do that was allowing Liam to finally strike out on his own. He’d come out of MIT with a degree in genetics, and enough money to do what he wanted. Now he was set to undertake the breeding program he’d always dreamed of. By the time he was finished, people would be clamoring to buy mares from his herd.
There were four prize mares in foal on his ranch right now, the beginnings of that remuda he’d been working toward, and he sure as hell didn’t want some storm coming in and wiping it all away before he had a shot to enjoy it. “I’ll come by once the storm blows over,” he told Joe.
He hung up and noticed the wild oaks lining the Perry Ranch drive were beginning to do a dip and sway in the rising wind. Scowling some, he cursed Chloe Hemsworth for dragging him away from what was important for a meeting about some camp.
Liam had never met Chloe, but he knew her type of woman. Money. Pedigree. Always moving from some charity dinner to a luncheon at the “right” place with the “right” people. She’d run with high society until she’d up and decided to open a business in Houston. According to Sterling, Chloe was running her own event planning business out of the city now.
“Figures,” he muttered, steering his truck onto the road that would take him into the city. “The woman’s been doing nothing but partying most of her life. Who better to throw the damn things?”
He didn’t know much about her. Only that she’d been calling the Perry Ranch almost daily for weeks to pitch her idea for a cowgirl camp.
Liam had no problem with women as working ranch hands. Hell, he had a couple women working for him at the Perry place. What he didn’t like was the idea of a bunch of young kids running around a ranch where they would disrupt the workdays and, worse yet, get hurt. But Sterling had ordered him to take the meeting with Chloe and hear her out. If Liam approved her ideas, Sterling would go along with it.
“Just another good reason to stop being anybody’s foreman,” he muttered.
His tires whined along the asphalt, and in his rearview mirror, those clouds looked darker and bigger. “This is going to be the shortest damn meeting on record.”
