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“Stop feeling sorry for yourself.”
“Do you think I’d even consider it if I wasn’t desperate?” she retorted angrily. “Those emus are getting bigger all the time, and it costs a fortune to feed them. Daddy’s been complaining about it for a while, but he hasn’t threatened to cut me off until now.”
“If you’d sent those birds to that great big emu pasture in the sky like I told you, this wouldn’t have happened.”
“I couldn’t do that, and you know it!
Emma was temporarily distracted from her own misery. “Emus?”
“They look exactly like ostriches that have been dipped in chimney soot,” Kenny explained. “The most butt-ugly bird you’ve ever seen.”
“They are not!” Torie protested. Then she shrugged. “All right. Maybe they aren’t too attractive, but they’re sweet.”
“And therein lies the problem,” Kenny drawled. “My sister, the genius entrepreneur, got sucked into the emu craze a few years back when people started hearing about how they could make a fortune raising the birds because they didn’t take up much land and there was going to be a huge market for emu products.”
“I needed to be self-supporting so I could get out of my marriage,” Torie interrupted. “And their oil has exceptional healing properties. It’s used to treat injuries in the NFL. Plus, emu meat has more protein, half the calories, and less fat than beef, but it tastes exactly the same.”
“How would you know, since you’ve never eaten a bite of emu in your life?”
“Someday.”
He snorted. “Unfortunately, the emu market has been slow to materialize. Not that it would have made much difference to my sister because the few times she’s had a chance to sell one or two of her birds for meat, she’s refused to do it.”
She turned to Emma. “Whenever I thought about having them slaughtered, my face broke out. I tried to sell breeding pairs, but nobody’s buying these days.”
“Now she’s stuck with feeding a growing herd of emus nobody wants.”
“It’s sort of an existentialist nightmare.” She gave a deep sigh, then the corner of her mouth quirked. “On the other hand, life always has its bright side, and at least I don’t have a tattoo of the Lone Star on my arm.”
Emma glanced down at the horrific tattoo and shuddered. She would have to wear long sleeves for the rest of her life.
Her muzzy head, the trauma of the tattoo, and the sheer force of Torie’s invasion into Kenny’s bedroom had kept her from processing the real content of their conversation, but now she began to absorb it. “Are you saying your father is trying to force you into marrying someone you dislike?”
“Or give up the charge card that’s been paying off my feed bill, not to mention a few other minor necessities like decent clothes and gas money. My daddy and Dexter’s father have me trapped. They can’t come up with any other way to arrange a merger than for Dexter and me to . . . merge.”
“Merger?”
Kenny came out of his closet, still bare-chested, zipping up a pair of chinos. “Our father owns TCS, Traveler Computer Systems. It’s located in Wynette. Dexter’s father owns Com National, his fiercest competitor. Their main plant’s in Austin, but he built a smaller research and development facility in Wynette just to get under my father’s skin. The two companies have been duking it out since the seventies, pretty much using whatever slimeball trick either man could come up with to stay on top of the other. Unfortunately, they got so preoccupied hating each other’s guts that they stopped paying attention to all the young companies nipping at their heels. Now both TCS an
d Com National are in trouble, and the only way they can survive is to merge. If that happens, they’ll be pretty much invincible.”
Emma shook her head. “I still don’t understand what this has to do with Torie. Companies merge all the time without people getting married to accomplish it, especially when their fathers hate each other.”
“Not these two companies,” he said, bringing a light blue denim shirt from the closet. “The men have pulled too many shady deals on each other—not just business stuff, personal as well. Now neither of them trusts the other, but they both want the merger.”
“So they’re making me the sacrificial lamb to hold the whole thing together.” Torie extracted a pack of cigarettes from her purse, only to have Kenny snatch them away and pitch them in the wastebasket.
Emma felt disoriented. Was there an epidemic of marriage-by-blackmail going on in the Western world? How had it happened that she’d managed to meet another woman in a similar situation? It seemed too bizarre to be coincidental, and the image of Francesca Serritella Day Beaudine came into her mind. But that made no sense. Francesca might know about Torie’s dilemma, but she didn’t know about Emma’s own.
She needed to be alone so she could think, and she rose from the side of the bed. “If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to shower, and then I need to get back to the hotel.”
Half an hour later she emerged from the bedroom and headed downstairs dressed in the short dress she’d worn last night, with Kenny’s T-shirt pulled on top to hide the awful tattoo. The thought of living the rest of her life with a Lone Star flag on her arm was bad enough, but having the word Kenny permanently etched into her skin was unbearable.
Kenny and Torie sat at the kitchen counter sipping coffee and eating donuts. Torie pointed a blue-green fingernail toward the open carton. “You want a donut, Emma? There’s a cream-filled here that your lover boy hasn’t gotten his mitts on yet.”
“He’s not my lover boy, and I think coffee is all I can handle at the moment.”
“If he’s not your lover boy, why were you naked in his bedroom?”
