Chapter 13
Chapter thirteen
Connor
THE MISSING MILLIONAIRE
Hayden’s eyes lit up when he was telling me about his new book and how easy the words flowed after our time together. I know he’s only here for the Christmas Experience, but I’m trying not to let the impermanence of what we’re doing overshadow how amazing he makes me feel, too.
I drop down into my seat at the table, my legs aching and my back stiff from spot cleaning the mini barn and re-laying straw.
It’s winter, so we won’t do a full cleanout until the spring because the extra layers underneath make for better insulation.
Spot cleaning helps keep the smell down and the animals clean and dry.
“Dude, you stink, could have showered before dinner. Sally-May said it will still be another ten minutes or so,” Nial complains from his seat beside me.
“I’m good,” I reply, pushing back to balance on the back two legs of the chair and linking my fingers behind my head. “Move if you don’t like the way I smell.”
“Not even Satan would like the way you smell right now,” he replies, waving his hand over his nose.
“Not all of us have a little helper taking on half our jobs.”
“Denver was busy with his goats today. I got everything done on my own and had time to shower, thank you very much.”
Denver is the eldest son of the farm next door. He helped out on Beaker Brothers last year after Dean broke his leg, and just never stopped coming around, even after he set up his goat herd.
“How is the young Royal going with his goats? He has seventeen of his girls expected to have their first babies in late winter, early spring, right?”
“Nineteen, actually, last Preston checked.”
“What did I check now?” Preston asks, walking in and sitting opposite Nial.
Since they moved in, he’s taken the seat on Dean’s right, Perry is happy to move down one, two when Poppy is here and not at her grandparents’ or mother’s place in Savannah.
Her mom moved there last year to pursue her art.
She put it all to the side when she had Poppy, and given Preston only found out he was a father when he retired to town almost a decade after her birth, he was more than excited at the idea of her staying with him so that he could really get to know her better.
He’s a great dad, and Poppy is an amazing kid.
I never thought I’d want any kids. I mean, I was always told I would have to have children, and basically, as soon as I was married, too, so maybe that played a huge part in my distaste of them, but since spending more time with Poppy, I can actually see myself maybe having a kid of my own one day.
Sally-May walks in, and I immediately push forward, my arms flailing a little as I try to steady my seat, so that she doesn’t catch me leaning back on the chair.
“Denver’s goats. Nial said he’s up to nineteen kidding in a few months.”
“Yeah, maybe twenty-five if we’re lucky.”
“That’s almost his whole tribe,” Nial exclaims.
“He has two pretty keen bucks there. We divided the tribe between them, so it’s nice to see an almost identical success rate. Now we’ll just have to see what kind of ratios they produce to prepare for the next heat cycle.”
“Fuck, I remember when we had a bad season and delivered more bulls than heifers. Sending the majority of them off to the cattle ranch was tough,” Nial says, and I nod in agreement.
We’re all ranchers, and we eat meat, well, all of us except Preston and now Poppy.
Since moving to the farm and seeing all the animals up close, she quickly decided to follow her father’s footsteps in that regard, too.
But even though we’ll eat it, sending off your own animals to a ranch where they’re bred for slaughter is hard.
I’d spent my life on those ranches learning the business I was supposed to take over.
You never forget the way those places smell.
There was one cattle farm that did its own slaughtering, and when I tell you that you never forget the smell of death, I mean it.
It has been twenty years since I first visited that place, and even just thinking about the sickly sweet scent turns my stomach.
“Oh shit,” Nial says, sitting up straighter, bringing his phone toward his face, the light illuminating him in its white glow.
“Language,” Sally-May says, but Nial doesn’t apologize, he’s too wrapped up in whatever he’s reading.
“What is it?” Preston asks as Dean and Poppy walk in, Cuddles and Lulu following close behind with their tiny hooves pitter-pattering down the hall.
I dropped her off here earlier for a playdate.
Poppy has obstacle courses set up in a spare room upstairs for them to play with, and they love chasing each other around it.
Whatever helps wear Lulu out is okay in my book.
“Why are we all looking at Nial?” Dean asks, sitting down as Perry and Atlas join us and take their seats.
“What’s up?” Atlas asks, reaching for a bread roll, but Sally-May swats his hand away without even looking his way. Nial doesn’t answer; he’s still too engrossed in his phone.
“Nial, what’s going on?” Dean asks. Still no answer. Dean looks to me, and I shrug.
“Nial, dear, what is it?” Sally-May asks, and he finally lowers the phone with a deep frown etched in his brow.
“Theodore Richmont and his grandson were killed in a plane crash yesterday.”
“What the fuck?” I think my pulse doubles its pace as my chest tightens and I struggle to draw breath. I have to have hallucinated just now. No way did I just hear that name spoken at this table.
“What happened?” Dean asks.
“The Richmont private jet went down over the Atlantic,” Nial reads, and my stomach sinks like a black hole has formed within me, and slowly all my organs will sink into the abyss.
“They could still be alive, like washed up on some island somewhere, right?” Preston asks, but Nial is shaking his head.
“They’ve already recovered the wreckage, only the co-pilot survived, and he’s in critical condition. They said he jumped from the plane as it was nearing the water; the others didn’t get the chance. They were found still strapped in their seats.”
“That’s terrible,” Sally-May says, sitting down beside Perry.
She glances my way, lips pressing together in a tight smile, like some silent apology.
But that would imply she knows who I really am.
Who they were to me. She can’t. She would have said something before now, wouldn’t she?
Her attention turns to Perry. “You met the Richmonts, didn’t you, Hun?
” she asks him, and my pulse quickens. How do I not know this?
“Only once, he tried to buy the ranch when it was still your grandfather here running things,” Perry says.
“No way Gramps thought about selling,” Nial replies.
“It crossed his mind, like it does all ranchers at some time or another. We were struggling, and Theodore Richmont knew it, offered pennies on the dollar, and I bet you can imagine what your gramps’ reply was, too.”
“Probably a few words we can’t say at Sally-May’s table.” Dean laughs.
“You’d be right there,” Perry replies. “Not to be looking for a bright side in death or anything, but this could bring us some relief on feed prices.”
“Won’t the heir just continue things on their farms?” Atlas asks.
“The heir was on the flight, too,” Nial replies.
“Wasn’t there another heir?” Sally-May asks, and I grab my glass of water, drinking it down, my mouth still impossibly dry.
Please, no. Don’t take this away from me.
I don’t want to leave this, leave them. Surely my cousin married, has a kid by now, they will be heir, and sure, even if they’re too young to take over the board, they can stay in control until they come of age.
But what if there isn’t, and they start looking for me?
This can’t be it for my time here; this place was supposed to be my forever.
Atlas taps his finger on his lips as he tries to recall the name that’s on repeat in my brain right now, the one I ran from all those years ago.
“It was a young-looking guy, used to be all the girls at the diner would talk about when he was splashed on the cover of all those magazines. What was his name?”
“Wasn’t he named after his father and grandfather?” Perry asks, and Atlas nods.
“Yes, you’re right. They called him Teddy,” he replies with a smile of satisfaction, while my heart is being ripped out.
“He was hot, that’s all that I remember about him, oh, and he was on television for a while there, some dating show, right?
” Nial adds, and I grab the jug, refill my glass of water, and drink the whole thing down again, hoping it keeps the flush of my face in check.
My whole body feels like it’s on fire, like I’m a struck match or the end of a fuse, burning brighter with each fact they recall until surely one of them brings up an old photo and recognizes me through my short beard and mess of hair that’s nowhere near enough of a shield to hide the truth, I’m sure. My whole world is about to implode.
“He went missing years ago, didn’t he?” Nial asks. “The missing millionaire, that’s what they called him,” he says, and I swear I haven’t taken a breath in minutes.
“Well then, they’ll have to restructure their operations, and if demand for feed goes down, so will the prices,” Perry says, and I nod, trying to remain calm on the outside, despite the tornado of emotions swirling through me.
“We’ll just have to wait and see,” I say, grabbing the tongs and handing them over to Sally-May. “I’m starving, are we good to eat?”
“Yes, sorry, you boys have all had a long day, here,” she says, taking the tongs and loading up Perry’s plate with a steak to kick us off, and thankfully, the growl of our stomachs wanting to be filled pushes the talk of the missing millionaire to the back of everyone’s minds. At least…for now.
***
I check my phone on the way back to my cabin. There is no mention of anyone looking for me just yet. If they start looking, though, I’ll need to run again. I love this place, but I can’t bring that world here. This place is too special. Too important.
“You okay?” Hayden asks, and I jolt. I’d completely forgotten about our plans.
“Umm, yeah.”
“You sure? Because you don’t look so great.”
I turn my hat in circles in my hands, and he steps closer, resting his warm palm over my forearm.
“How about a walk?” he asks. I nod, and he links his arm with mine, and we make our way down the low-lit path deeper into the property.
We don’t talk, just walk together under the bright winter sky, cool night air filling our lungs as the sounds of the ranch surround me like a soothing melody.
We’ve made it almost all the way round past the other cabins when I break the silence.
“Are you close to your family?” I ask, kicking the crushed quartz pathway, sending rocks skipping ahead of us.
“My parents passed a long time ago, so it’s just me now.”
“It’s just me, too,” I say, and he squeezes my arm a little.
“You seem to have found a family here on the ranch, though.”
“Yeah, actually, I’m probably closer to these guys than I ever was to my family.”
“I get that. My parents passed when I was nineteen, so it was just me for a really long time, and well, it took a while for me to find someone who could look past all my…eccentricities. Then I met Wen.”
“What kind of eccentricities are we talking about?” I ask, and even in the light of the moon, I can see his cheeks flush.
“I’d rather not shatter the almost normal impression you have of me just yet.
” He laughs, but there is a nervousness behind it like he’s genuinely worried about me knowing more about him.
It’s not like I am exactly forthcoming about my past. But it’s like there is this small part of me that wants to tell him, wants him to know everything about me, my past, the family and future I ran from that might be racing full speed toward me now.
The truth. That I am the only surviving Richmont heir.
I checked online if my cousin had married or had a kid, but he was single and had been for some time.
What even happens to a company, fuck, an empire, if there is no one left to run it? Does it break apart? Do I care?
“Is that okay?” Hayden asks.
“It is. But just so you know, I have a few of those of my own.”
“Eccentricities?” he asks with a raised brow.
“Yeah, I mean, you kind of saw how much I like to be…handled in the bedroom,” I say, pulling him to me, his body fitting perfectly against mine.
“I did notice that. In case you didn’t notice, I liked handling you, too.”
“This is nice,” I say, and he smiles up at me, big eyes gleaming in the moonlight.
“The moon is so big out here. You hardly see it past the smog in the city,” he says, tilting his head back to look up at it.
“Not the moon. This. Talking to you, sharing…things we like.”
“Oh,” he says, smirking with a devilish grin. I cup his face with my hand, the pad of my thumb brushing lightly over his bottom lip.
“Can I kiss you?”
“Anytime you like.”
I close the gap between us, his warm, soft lips pressing against mine, and all the stress and worry and fear weighing me down lifts, and there is just him and me under a moonlit sky.