Tycoon's Tryst (Culpepper Cowboys Book 10) (3 page)

“How altruistic of you.” He had a hard time telling if she was serious or sarcastic.

“That’s all this lawsuit is,” he went on. “So maybe we could work together.”

Her arms had been crossed the entire time that he was talking, and now she crossed her legs, too, slapping her flip-flop against the sole of her foot. “Why on earth should I work with you?”

Sly had to think fast. “Because I’m good at what I do. And what I do is rescuing things that are in trouble. Mostly it’s towns, but it could be companies too.”

She stopped slapping her flip-flop. “So you’re willing to drop the lawsuit?”

He cringed. He should have known she would ask that. His plan depended on the publicity the lawsuit would bring. Maybe it was a bad plan, but it was the plan he had.

He must have hesitated too long. Rachel sighed and uncrossed her arms and legs, pushing herself to stand. “I don’t have time for this. If you’re determined to sue me, whether you think you’ll win or not, then I have to prepare to fight you.” She took a step to retrieve her suitcase from where it sat next to Sly’s chair.

Sly jumped up before she could walk away. “Work with me,” he begged her. “There has to be a way we can figure this out without anyone losing out.”

She laughed sharply. “You say you’re out for your town, not yourself. Okay, so prove it. Drop the lawsuit and come up with some other way to make your town great.”

His expression went through several contortions as he chewed over her ultimatum. He wanted to take her up on that challenge, but too many things had already been put into place.

“Okay, how about this.” He shifted his weight, ready to counter her. “You said you’d go out with me.”

Her jaw dropped, and she blinked at him, incredulous. “Really?”

“Yes, really. You said you’d go out with me, so go out with me. Tomorrow.”

“Look, buster, you’re really pushing your luck.”

He shook his head and waved his hands to dispel her doubt. “Come out with me tomorrow, and I’ll show you the town. I’ll show you all of the important things that I’m fighting for. Then you’ll see that all of this is worth saving, no matter how it’s done.”

“And my company isn’t worth saving?” She was getting angrier.

“I didn’t say that.”

“Well, I did.” She took a step closer to him. “You know what Bev wants to do when she takes over Korpanty Enterprises?”

Sly cringed, sensing it wasn’t going to be good. “Hire more underwear models?”

“Sell it.” She dropped the words like a bomb.

“Your sister wants to sell your company? What would be the point of that?”

Rachel laughed mirthlessly and shook her head. “Like I told you, Bev is allergic to work. She doesn’t want to be bothered running a company, but she also doesn’t want me to run it.”

“That makes no sense.”

“Do you have a sister?”

Sly blinked at her seemingly unrelated question. “Yeah, Elvie. She’s the one who I was driving with earlier.”

“Just one?” Rachel crossed her arms again.

“Yes.”

“Then you don’t understand how sisters can be. Especially half-sisters. If I had a doll she liked, she demanded Dad give it to her, and he did. If I had a dress she wanted to wear, she took it. If I tried to complain, she went running to Dad. One year, Dad gave me a silver music box that had belonged to my grandmother—my mom’s mom, mind you. The second I opened it, Bev said she wanted it. So Dad took it right out of my hands and gave it to her. Even though it had been in my mom’s family for a hundred years and had nothing to do with her. What did she do with it? She dropped it from the second-floor balcony just to see if it would shatter. I got in trouble for tattling on her.”

Sly’s jaw dropped, dumbstruck. Were there really people in the world who were that cruel?

“Bev knows how much I love that company and how hard I work for it. She wants to sell it away from me out of spite.”

“Well I won’t let her,” Sly shot back. The funny thing was, he meant it. It didn’t matter that he’d only just met Rachel or that she currently saw him as the enemy. He wasn’t going to let a selfish little snot ruin something that Rachel had spent her life working for.

All he had to figure out was how to do that and still get Culpepper the publicity it needed.

“Come out to lunch with me tomorrow.” He repeated his invitation. “We can work through this together.”

She scoffed, shaking her head and rolling her eyes. But she didn’t march off. She glanced at him with cool assessment…and something much hotter behind her dazzling blue eyes. The same flash of interest she’d showed him before she knew his identity was still there. He needed to latch onto that spark and use it to fix everything.

“Okay,” she said at last. “I’ll give you one afternoon to prove yourself. If you don’t convince me that you’re here to help me instead of ruin my life, I’ll countersue you within an inch of your life.”

Instinct told him to ask what she would countersue for and crush whatever that was, but sense got the better of him. He smiled, hoping she would be as charmed as he intended her to be.

“Tomorrow, then.” He winked and turned to go. “I’ll pick you up here at noon. You won’t regret it.”

A
little voice
in the back of Rachel’s head told her she’d sleep well that night, knowing that a super-hot guy was working on a way for her to not lose control of her company.

Before she’d even got to her room, she’d ripped that voice out, strangled it, then stomped on it for good measure.

There was no way she was going to let Sly O’Donnell sweet-talk his way into getting what he wanted from her. She’d spent far too long letting everyone from her dad to Bev to members of her own board get the better of her. And while in the past she’d had enough daddy issues to start a subscription service, she was over that now. She was over the need to please and gain male approval.

But—that small, throttled voice whispered to her as she lay in her hotel bed, wide awake in the middle of the night, after a day spent jumping through hoops to get her rental car to a repair shop—it sure would have been nice to have a man care about her. Really care about her. The way that Dylan loved Jo on her favorite TV show,
Lazy Love
.

By morning, Rachel was tired and achy and out of sorts, but she had things she had to deal with. She spent her morning haggling with the mechanic, calling the car rental company where she’d picked up her lemon to demand a refund, and coming to grips that she wouldn’t have wheels to leave town for at least five days. She also endured a conference call with the lawyers who would be flying in from L.A. once the lawsuit really got going. That last worked her up even more, so by the time Sly strode into the hotel, she was ready to snarl at him.

Except that the sight of him wearing faded jeans and a crisp t-shirt and cowboy boots froze whatever words she could have spoken in her throat. He looked amazing. Rugged but well-groomed, natural but on top of his game. And there she was wearing a pant suit and her power flats.

“You look amazing.” Sly took the words right out of her mouth.

Rachel just stood there with her mouth flapping like a suffocating fish before her brain kicked into gear. “Apparently I’m overdressed.”

“Nah.” Sly waved her comment away with a grin. “You can never be overdressed if you like the way you look, especially if you’re comfortable.” He finished the long approach across the hotel lobby to where she stood. “Are you comfortable?”

Ha! What a ridiculous question. She hadn’t been comfortable in years, hadn’t been able to relax in decades, since her mother died.

“Yeah, sure,” she answered with a fake-casual shrug. “Where are we having lunch?” She summoned as much confidence as she could from the pit of her twisting stomach and marched past him toward the door. She breathed in. Dang, the man smelled like heaven. It wasn’t even his cologne either. He smelled like sunshine and fresh air.

He caught up to her, his grin still in place. “I’m taking you someplace incredibly special to me. Someplace where I hope you’ll see that I’m actually a nice guy who cares about my hometown.”

Her first instinct was to snort or argue the point with him. She couldn’t. Not when she peeked to the side and saw the honest glint of pride in his eyes as they stepped through the whooshing hotel doors and out into a sunny summer morning.

“We’re lucky to have great weather today,” Sly said. “Wyoming summers can be unpredictable. Sometimes it’s hot as blazes, other times we get freak snow showers.”

“Snow? This late in the summer?”

“Well, we are at a super high elevation.”

He walked around the back of the same convertible Rachel had seen him get out of the day before and held the door for her. Actually held the door. Her urge to castrate him for ruining her life began to erode around the edges. He couldn’t be that bad if he was this polite, could he?

As soon as she was seated, he jogged around the back of the car and hopped into the driver’s seat, turning the key in the ignition.

“So where are we going?” she asked, crossing her arms after she fastened her seatbelt.

Sly waited to answer as he backed out of the parking space and turned onto the road. “The best place in all of Culpepper.”

Instead of turning toward the heart of the tiny town, he turned the other way and headed along a road with nothing but wilderness in front of them.

“Hold on. You’re not kidnapping me to keep me from countersuing you, are you?” she snapped.

Sly laughed. There was something in that laugh—so free and joyful—that made her toes curl.

“No. Kidnapping you is not the sort of publicity I want for this place. I’m taking you to the best spot in town for a meal.”

“Um, I don’t know if you noticed this,” she drawled, “but town is back there.”

Sly shrugged. “Out here, ‘town’ can mean anything for a fifty-mile radius.”

“You’re kidding.”

Apparently he wasn’t, even though his only answer was to glance over at her and wink. Wink! He actually winked at her. How dare he be so flirty when he was poised on the edge of crushing her hopes and dreams? And how dare she feel all warm and shivery inside over a simple gesture like that.

She wasn’t going to speak to him if he wasn’t going to speak to her. Instead, she set her jaw and searched out over the landscape as they drove further and further from anything that she would have called civilization. The land in this part of Wyoming was a strange combination of lush and barren. She knew that technically she was in the high desert, but there was some green out there. It wasn’t lush, like in southern California. More like patchy and scrubby. The cows didn’t seem to mind. They munched away where they could, bunched together or spread out. Aside from the green, the landscape was a hundred different shades of brown. There was something peaceful about it, actually.

Before she could stop herself, Rachel unwound, the muscles of her back loosening and her jaw with it. Her hair was pulled back in a tight ponytail, so she didn’t have to worry about the wind messing it up too much as they zipped along in the convertible. After a while, she leaned her elbow on the door, rested her head in her hand, and considered closing her eyes to catch up on some of the sleep she’d lost.

“Nice, isn’t it?” Sly jolted her out of her drowsy thoughts. He alternately smiled at her and kept his eyes on the road.

“I haven’t spent much time in the high desert,” she answered, not wanting to let on how peaceful the area felt. The man was her enemy, after all, and this wasn’t a real date.

“I’ve always loved it,” Sly said. “A lot of people I went to school with couldn’t wait to get out of here. They used to complain that there weren’t any opportunities unless you wanted to go into ranching or mining.”

“Are they right?”

He laughed. “Maybe for them. But my philosophy of life has always been that you can’t wait around for someone to hand you an opportunity. You have to go out and make them for yourself.”

“Like by suing innocent businesses?” The accusation slipped out before she could stop it.

Sly’s smile faltered. In fact, it morphed to something downright serious. “I didn’t think it through. I didn’t know the circumstances behind your company. I’ll make this work for both of us.”

An uncomfortable shiver swirled down her spine. Was he serious? She was so tempted to believe that she’d found an ally. A hot one.

“I did go away to college,” he went on. Rachel couldn’t tell if he had read her expression or if he’d even seen it. “I promised Mom and Dad I’d come back after four years and help with the ranch. Only, I was offered a position with a company in San Francisco after my junior year. It was the kind of thing that you can’t pass up. I talked to Mom and Dad about it, but they were…”

He let his sentence trail off. Rachel sat straighter, suddenly wondering what they were.

Sly cleared his throat and went on. “Doc, Elvie, and Arch, my siblings, all told me to go for it, no matter what our parents thought. See, we all sort of had to raise each other. It’s a long story. But in the end, their opinion mattered more than Mom and Dad’s.

“Then Dad had a heart attack and died.”

“I’m so sorry,” Rachel said with genuine concern.

Sly peeked at her, the lines on his face more pronounced. “He was way out on the ranch with the herd, and they weren’t able to get him back home or to the hospital in time. It was the kind of thing where if he’d been in town, or even if he’d been at home, they would have been able to save him.”

“That’s a shame.”

He nodded. “Mom didn’t handle it well. She liked her liquor before Dad was gone, but afterwards it got bad. She died just over a year later. The doctors couldn’t tell us if it was alcohol or a broken heart that got her.”

“That’s terrible,” Rachel all but whispered. Her heart ached for Sly. It shouldn’t, but it did. As crappy as he’d been to her, no one deserved such a sad story in their family.

And that little voice of hers wasn’t entirely convinced that he was being crappy to her now.

“Anyhow, I’d always said I would come home and help Dad run the ranch,” Sly went on. “But I was successful at that job out of college, then I started my own company and made a success of that. There just wasn’t time, and then time ran out.”

“Time does have a way of running out.” Rachel sighed, thinking of all the things she’d never gotten to say to her mother all those years ago. It seemed that she had something in common with Sly that ran far deeper than business and a tendency to dress up.

“Of course, Doc had his veterinary business up and running at that point, Elvie was in Denver working as a vet too, and Arch was making a name for himself as an architect in high demand from Denver to San Francisco. Still, I kept promising to come back and help.” He paused to glance sideways at her. “I had to hire a Culpepper local to run the ranch for us. Bud Watson’s ranch adjoins ours, and let me tell you, he was more than happy to take on the extra acreage, the extra herd, and the extra cash I pay him to keep it all going.”

He slowed and put on his turn signal, even though there wasn’t another car on the road for as far as Rachel could see. She sat up a little straighter and searched around for a clue as to where they were heading. Way, far off the road, a homey-looking house stood on the only patch of pure, dark green she could see for miles. A few trees that looked non-native were planted around the house. Sprinklers fanned across the lawn.

“Honey, we’re home,” Sly teased her.

It didn’t feel like teasing. It felt like something warm and swirly pooling in the pit of her stomach. Worse still, something about driving up the drive and parking in the wide gravel space near the house, next to a huge truck, gave her the feeling of genuinely coming home. It was so right that it was completely wrong.

“Where are we?” she asked, trying to keep her emotion to herself.

“This is home,” he explained, cutting the engine then jumping out of the car. He ran around to open her door and give her a hand up. “This is where I grew up.”

“You live here?” She glanced around at the beautiful house, the careful landscaping, and the out-of-place maple trees.

Sly laughed. “Not exactly. I have an apartment in town where I actually live. The four of us kids still own the house and the ranch, though. Split equally in four parts. Arch and Elvie live here right now.” He reached for her hand, escorting her around the front of the cars to a flagstone path that led to the front porch. “Elvie should be at work right now, but that’s Arch’s truck. He must be working from home today.”

No sooner had Sly made that prediction then the front door opened and another jaw-droppingly gorgeous man stepped onto the porch. He had the same solid build as Sly, but with sandy-blond hair and green eyes instead of Sly’s dark hair and hazel eyes.

Wait, since when had she noticed what color Sly’s eyes were? Wait again, why was she holding his hand?

She pulled her hand out of his grip, instantly missing him. To hide her internal scoffing at herself, she stepped up onto the porch and held out a hand. “You must be Arch.”

“I am.” Arch smiled and shook her offered hand. He had an openness and warmth about him, and mischief in his eyes. “Who are you?”

Sly practically jumped to her side, as if laying claim to her. “This is Rachel Korpanty.”

Arch’s smile slipped. “You’re kidding.”

“Pleased to meet you,” Rachel drawled.

“I’m sorry.” Arch shook himself, looking apologetic. “I don’t mean to be rude, it’s just that you’re the last person I would expect my brother to bring out here.”

“I’ve come to show Rachel that I’m not a horrible, selfish guy intent on destroying her empire.”

Rachel’s brow flew up. There’s no way she would ever have been as honest with Bev. Then again, there were actually siblings in the world that got along, and after everything Sly told her about his family…

“I’m still deciding whether I’m going to kick his butt from here to Timbuktu in court.” She smiled at Arch, avoiding Sly entirely.

Arch’s grin widened. “Is that what the picnic in the fridge is all about?”

“Yes.” Sly edged past Rachel toward the door to the house. “So if you wouldn’t mind leaving us to it.”

Arch laughed as Sly disappeared into the house. “Sorry about him,” he said in a low voice. “He’s always been a dreamer and a schemer, but he means well. Did he tell you he has no intention of winning this stupid lawsuit against you?”

Rachel crossed her arms. “Did he tell you it doesn’t matter, I’ll probably still lose my company one way or another if he goes forward with it at all?”

Arch’s face dropped to a tragic expression. He pushed a hand through his hair. “Want me to talk him out of it?”

Her first instinct was to ask, “Can you?”

Instead, she said, “I intend to do exactly that myself.”