Eighteen
The woman was pure evil, sitting on the other side of their boardroom table, teasing Ryder with her freaking cupcakes.
Cup. Cakes.
Tiny little cakes with creamy icing, made from sweet and floury ingredients to create cupcakes.
But the way Bree was eating them was pure torture. She gave a small sexy moan, with her eyes rolling every time she took a bite of the cupcake. The sound had him shifting in his seat.
But when she started licking the cream from her fingers, his stomach and brain dropped to his groin. He couldn’t think of anything else.
But it got worse.
Much. Worse.
That tiny tip of her pink tongue flicked along her luscious lips. It forced him to gulp down his searing hot coffee to try and control a once very calm, controlled, and emotionless person. But not with Bree. He always struggled when it came to Bree. It was like she was defrosting his defences that had once been filled with ice, was now flushed with the heated desire to pick that redhead up by her hips, while swiping the junk from the table, to lay her down and have his wicked way with her.
If Dex wasn’t in the room Ryder might have lost control over his emotions—which never happened. But when it came to Bree…
Until she dropped the bomb. Like she always did. ‘I heard those gunshots.’
‘Where the hell were you?’ Ryder leaned over the table, his hands in fists, his heart hammering in fear for the redhead calmly eating a freaking cupcake on the other side of the table.
‘Out riding.’
‘Give me details, Bree.’ He ground his teeth, noting the irony at how some days it was like pulling teeth to get a straight answer out of her.
‘I was riding along the east side checking for any damage from the landslide.’
‘You were at Starvation Dam.’
‘Correct.’ For once, it was a straight answer. Even if she used her fingertip to scoop some cupcake cream that she then popped into her mouth and sucked. Slooowly .
Ryder roughly rubbed a hand over his face to concentrate. ‘And?’
‘The last time the station suffered a landslide was when Leo and his band of balding gorilla’s damaged the dam.’
Ryder glanced at Dex. They hadn’t thought of that.
‘Don’t stress, boys, the dam is fine. But…’ Then those luscious lips parted, her mouth widened to take another bite of her cupcake, where she chewed with shiny eyes.
The dramatic pause was driving him nuts.
And she knew it!
‘Bree?’ Ryder’s scowl got deeper—as did his voice. How in the hell did the simplicity of Bree eating a cupcake become the sexiest thing he’d ever seen on a woman. Who knew there was such a thing as seduction by cupcake!
But then Bree dusted her hands, her humour swapped with the sexy serious side of Bree. And that had him worried.
‘What did you find?’
‘One very long, industrial irrigation pipe.’ She scrolled through her phone to bring up a set of images and, without hesitation, she handed it over. ‘The irrigation pipe is embedded deep into the dam’s wall, then buried under the topsoil. It was pure luck I found it.’
‘And you followed it? To where?’ Because that’s what Bree did. She was fearless. And that had Ryder worried enough to start giving him ulcers. But at least Bree had come to them first and not gone off on her own—which was a big move for the brassy redhead who was so stubbornly independent. The woman set crocodile traps before breakfast, but here she was doing a show-and-tell.
‘I’ll give you one guess where it ran to.’
‘Leo’s.’ Ryder raked fingers through his hair.
‘Correct, cupcake. Don’t you get a gold star for being king of the class?’ She grinned, dragging over the station’s map that lived on the table. ‘I found the pipe here, and it runs in this direction. From the fence line, I saw nothing, no cameras, just yours. But I heard the two shots fired here.’ Using the map, she tapped at the station’s eastern border. ‘Monet flew over me, coming from the same direction where that little itty-bitty irrigation pipe had disappeared into the scrublands. Now what do you boys think Leo’s doing in there if he’s game enough to shoot at planes?’
‘He’s growing dope,’ Dex said with a scowl.
‘Aww, look who gets named dux of the class.’
Not Dex. He may have been expelled from school, but Dex was the underworld’s bare-knuckle champion, regularly known for brushing shoulders with the seedier side of life, who didn’t mind the recreational weed.
‘How big a crop are we talking about?’ Ryder asked Dex.
‘It must be substantial enough for Leo to steal our water supply like that.’
‘Did Finn ever mention anything to you about Leo?’ Ryder asked Bree, who double-blinked at him, as if struggling to understand how calmly her ex-husband fit in their conversation.
What would Finn say to Ryder about sneaking in kisses with Bree?
‘Finn warned me to watch my arse with Leo and to stay away from him.’ She then sat forward, to play with the handle of her coffee cup. ‘But I have a theory, if you want to hear it?’
Hell, yeah! ‘Sure.’
‘It’s about time,’ mumbled Dex. ‘Don’t hold back.’
‘Do I ever?’ She gave Dex a grin. ‘Is it true Leo’s lawyers are always fighting you?’
‘Correct.’
‘It’d have to be costly keeping a legal team on a retainer like that.’
It was costing Ryder a fair chunk, too.
‘Out of all the legal matters that Leo is contesting, like the turkey nests and carbon credit scheme, does he have any chance of winning? Or is he just doing it to waste your time and money?’
Ryder rubbed the back of his neck. He was getting daily emails over some trivial matter from Leo’s lawyers. But the way Bree was watching him, she was seeing it from another angle. Bree also had the clever skill of reading people, too. ‘Do you think Leo is using the lawyers as a distraction for something else? You’ve known Leo a while—you’d know who we’re dealing with?’
The corner of her lips barely curled, subtly indicating she knew a hell of a lot more than she was letting on. ‘I think Leo’s up to plenty of naughty things—like laundering money to pay for his lawyers while relishing the game of pissing you off.’
‘Dammit!’ He stood so fast his chair flung back against the wall, gripping the top of his head as all those pieces fell into place.
‘What?’ Dex stopped swinging, to sit forward with a hard clunk on his chair.
Ryder started pacing the length of the room. ‘I can’t believe I didn’t see it sooner.’
‘It’d be nice if you shared with the rest of the class, cupcake.’
‘Tell me if this makes sense… Leo is growing a cash crop and working for another organisation while owning a run-down cattle station. Publicly, he’s claiming to build a lithium mine and painting us as the enemy in a legal battle over water and land zoning. He’s keeping us distracted while using the so-called mine to launder money—funnelling cash from illegal activities through fake contractors and investments tied to the project. And where’s that money going? Some of it pays his lawyers to keep the pressure on us.’
‘It makes sense to me.’ Bree nodded at Ryder. The intelligence on this woman was just another tick as to why she fascinated him so much.
After this conversation, he was going to buy her a dozen cupcakes. Jeez, at this rate, he may as well find a decent cupcake recipe to get up at sunrise to bake the things when Charlie was baking his bread.
‘Here, I can’t eat them all.’ She pushed the cakebox towards Dex.
‘Nah, Ryder bought these for you.’
She arched her eyebrows at him in disbelief.
Hell, yeah. He was definitely going to buy her more just for the conversation.
‘Bribery will only get you so many places.’
Oh, honey, if you only knew the places I want to explore with you.
When she took another bite of her small cake, her eyes rolling at the heavenly flavour, he couldn’t stop watching.
‘The Station Hand’s wife, Queen Elizabeth, made this one, I can tell. She’s perfected the red velvet cupcake.’ Bree washed it down with a sip of her coffee. ‘So, who’s up for a sneaky midnight visit to the neighbours?’
And there it was. The real reason why Bree was here telling all—she didn’t want to do this on her own.