Chapter 70
CHAPTER 70
CHARLIE
I was stuck in a nightmare. Olivia was gone. Scarlett was around here somewhere—mercifully keeping her distance for now. The fucking ranch—my home —was covered in people having fun, screaming and laughing, and I was absolutely gutted.
I went back to the fair after she left, stalking around and trying to distract myself by getting back to work, but I couldn’t take it anymore. It was like everywhere I looked, all I could see was the absence of Olivia and it was killing me.
Eventually giving up, I stormed to the main house. It was the closest structure to the fair and I needed some privacy. Now .
As soon as I slammed my parents’ front door behind me, it felt like someone had stabbed me right in the chest. Pain seared through me, my breaths coming out in pants as a groan escaped my lips. I would’ve thought I was having a heart attack, but this wasn’t that.
This was heartbreak. I’d felt it before, that day I’d found out about Scarlett, but it hadn’t been nearly as intense as it was now. This was bad.
I sucked in breath after breath, trying to calm myself down, but instead, I felt my grip on my control slipping. Fucking Scarlett. I knew something like this was going to happen as soon as that toxic scorpion set her feet on this property again.
Fuming and unable to stop myself from losing it, I growled and started pacing, stomping up and down in the foyer and fighting for every breath that refused to provide oxygen to my damn lungs. Angrier than I had ever been, I couldn’t even force myself to think straight.
Somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew there were questions that needed to be answered. I knew I had to figure out what the hell had happened back there, but red splotches flashed in my vision and my muscles were so tense that they were starting to ache.
All I wanted to do was break shit. It took everything I had to keep from smashing my great-grandmother’s vase against the motherfucking wall. Grunts tore right out of my lungs, my hands ripping at my hair as reality dawned.
I lost her. I love her, and I lost her. Because of Scarlett. Because of a woman who not only didn’t want me in the first fucking place, but still seems to be harboring some kind of illusion about getting her name on my bank account. I’d burn it all down before she got a penny.
“Charlie?” Mom asked from somewhere behind me, and my heart dropped. I’d thought I was alone. I’d been convinced of it. “What’s going on, son? What’s wrong?”
I spun around to face her, chest still heaving, but I couldn’t find a single word to say. Instead, I just stared back at her, those red splotches still blurring my vision. I saw her brow crinkling, her eyes filling with worry.
“Charlie? Calm down, boy. Talk to me.” She came closer and put her hands on my shoulders, her fingers so strong even though she was getting older. “What happened, Charlie?”
“Scarlett.” I forced out that one word and the rest came out in a rush after it. Once I’d told her the whole story, I felt marginally calmer. Calm enough to sit down and talk it out with her, anyway. “I’m so in love with Liv and now she’s gone, Mama. She’s gone and she’s not coming back. Not this time.”
“We all know Scarlett was lying, honey,” she said evenly. “I remember the day that bombshell dropped and I know how long it took you to come to terms with what happened back then, but I also know what you’re like with Olivia. She means more to you than Scarlett ever did. That much is sure.”
“Yeah,” I admitted miserably. “Not that it matters. We might know that Scarlett was lying, but Olivia believed her and I don’t even blame her. Scarlett had the whole thing planned out. Showed her proof and everything.”
Dad came bursting in through the front door, his cheeks pale and a deep crease between his silvery eyebrows. “What’s going on? Dallas told me to get here right away.”
I groaned and dropped my head into my hands, but quickly repeated the highlights of the whole sordid story. By the time I was done, Dad’s entire face was wrenched up in confusion, his mouth pulled to one side, his lips parted, and his nose wrinkled.
“Wait, she has your grandmother’s ring?” he asked incredulously. “Where did she get that?”
I shook my head, but it was a damn good question. “I don’t know. I have no clue if the ring she showed Liv even was Grandma’s. It might just have been a lookalike.”
“Maybe.” Dad swiped his tongue across his lips. “You never actually gave it to her, right?”
I scoffed. “Definitely not. The one good thing that happened back then was that everything came out before I could go through with the proposal.”
“Right.” Dad nodded slowly. “Right, but she had it today?”
“She had something she said was Grandma’s ring.” I buried my head in my palms again, my head back to spinning with disbelief. “It couldn’t have been Grandma’s, though. Not unless she stole it.”
I said it offhandedly, but as soon as the words were out, I felt my mom stiffening beside me and I looked up. Dad grew even paler, his gaze on hers. Suddenly, she was on her feet and Dad was turning, striding toward his study.
“What, you really think she stole it?” I shot up, following them as they raced to the desktop computer in the home office.
My heart started pounding. I didn’t trust Scarlett as far as I could throw her, but she wouldn’t steal my grandma’s ring. Would she? Shit, is there anything she won’t do?
I hadn’t even planned on giving her that ring. Grandma had always said she wanted me to have it though, which was why it’d been at my place. I’d figured I would be dishonoring her memory if I didn’t at least consider using her ring when I’d been planning on proposing to Scarlett, but it’d just never felt right.
I now knew it had been because Scarlett had never been the woman for me, and somewhere inside, I’d always known that. If it’d been Olivia, I wouldn’t have hesitated for a moment. I had absolutely no doubt that she was the one for me.
Yep, one of the cruelest jokes on humanity is that hindsight is twenty-twenty.
As I watched, Dad pulled up the security camera footage of the outside of all our homes, scrolling through the last few hours until finally, we saw her. Right there on the computer screen, we watched Scarlett sneaking into the back of my house.
The timestamp put her break-in right about the time that Olivia and I had been on the Ferris wheel, and I felt my stomach catapult when I saw her slip inside, eventually coming back out and stuffing a little red box into her sweater.
I cursed under my breath, my language so bad that I thought my mother would admonish me, but instead, she simply sighed and folded her arms across her chest. “Well, at least we know the ring is still on the property. Jack, call security. We did hire a company to help with access control at the fair, right?”
“That, we did.” Dad grimaced and pulled his phone out of his shirt pocket. “I wasn’t expecting to have to use their services for something like this, though.”
He put in the call immediately, quickly outlining the situation and making sure the guards knew to bring her to us without causing a scene. The last thing any of us wanted was to alarm the people enjoying the fair. Above all else, our neighbors and members of our community needed the money it was generating and we needed to make sure that personal drama didn’t cause any disruptions.
Scarlett had been part of the briefings with the security company earlier in the week, so the guards knew exactly who she was. They tracked her down within minutes, letting Dad know that they were on their way up. I walked out of the study with my parents, my hands in fists but my head held high.
I had known Scarlett was capable of being pretty ruthless, but I’d had no idea she’d go this far. I couldn’t even really comprehend that she had. That she’d snuck into my house and stolen a valuable family heirloom.
I filed into the foyer with Mom and Dad, the three of us united when the door opened and the guards brought her in. She was red-faced and pouting, her eyes brimming with outrage and indignation as she tossed her hair over her shoulder and pointed at the guard closest to her.
“Charles! Oh, thank heavens. These thugs?—”
“The ring, Scarlett,” I said coolly and held my hand out, palm facing up as I beckoned for it. “We’re not interested in hearing you deny it. We’ve got you on camera coming out of my house with it and I know you showed it to Olivia. Give it to me. Now.”
Her cheeks drained of color, her eyes widening. “I don’t know what you’re?—”
“Didn’t I just say that we weren’t interested? Give it back, or those thugs will have to search you.”
“But it’s mine !” she protested, tears springing to her eyes as she looked at me with desperation melting the indignation from her features. “You were going to give it to me. It’s mine.”
“That ring was never going to be on your finger.” I realized the truth of the statement as I said it. “My grandmother meant for me to give it to the person I was going to grow old with, and I know now that was never going to be you. One way or another, I would’ve found out that you weren’t who you pretended to be. Not that it matters now. The point is that you stole that ring and we want it back before these men escort you from our property.”
A keening cry tore out of her when I took a step forward, but finally, she reached into her jacket pocket and pulled it out, throwing it at me instead of just handing it over. The guards didn’t wait for another word to be said before they turned and motioned for her to follow them.
She put up a fight, yelling and yanking her arms out of their reach when they tried to take her, but eventually, she left the house with one of the men. The other turned to look at my dad, who inclined his chin at him.
“We’re pressing charges,” Dad said. “Get her off our property and make sure to hand her over to the police.”
The guard nodded, unclipping a radio from his belt and lifting it to his lips as he followed Scarlett and his partner to their car. We watched them load her into their vehicle to drive her to the main entrance, and just like that, the trash had been taken out.
I bent over to pick up the ring just as George walked in. He frowned as he looked at my dad, his features tightening when he crossed his arms over his chest.
“Scarlett is being taken away by security who are insisting that they’ve been instructed to escort her off the grounds. What is the meaning of this?”
Dad quickly outlined the situation again, wasting no time in making him aware of his daughter’s actions. He showed him the footage and explained what had happened with the guards. By the time he was done, George was mortified. “On behalf of my daughter, I’d like to apologize to all of you. I had no idea she would do something like this.”
After some back and forth about it, Dad allowed him to stay on the property for the rest of the fair. It wasn’t his fault his daughter was a liar and a thief and it’d become quite clear that her family didn’t know about our history.
When he finally left, Dad came to stand next to me and clasped my shoulder, his presence a calming force that I desperately needed. “Let’s finish out the fair. Then we’ll take this on as a family. If Olivia walks away based on the truth, that’s one thing, but this is a bunch of cow manure. She deserves to know that.”
I inhaled a deep breath, feeling like I was hanging on by the merest of threads as I nodded. “Yeah. Okay. Let’s do it, but if you talk to Nathan in the meantime, tell him I’m sorry. I doubt Olivia is going to want to hear from me, but I’m going to try telling her the same thing.”