Paradise County (9 page)

W
hat are
you
doing here?” Alex demanded, struggling to control the ragged breathing that threatened to turn into open sobs at any second. She glared at him. Although her vision was slightly blurred from incipient tears, his tall form in the bright blue jacket was impossible to mistake. “This is
not
a good time for me.”

“I can see that.” His voice was dry.

Instead of exercising a modicum of tact and going away, he walked on into the room and right up to the desk. One large brown hand pressed flat against the desktop as he leaned over it and held out her ring to her between his thumb and forefinger. The ring looked small and delicate in his big hand; the diamond flashed again, mocking her.

“Drop something?”

She drew a deep, steadying breath. Hell would freeze over before she would cry in front of this man.

“I didn’t drop it. I
threw
it,” she said with venom, taking the ring from him. Opening the desk drawer, she dropped the ring inside and closed the drawer with an audible snap before looking up to meet his eyes with near loathing in her own. “And I would appreciate it if you’d leave. As I said, this is not a good time for me.”

“Have a fight with your boyfriend?” He straightened away from the desk and crossed his arms over his chest, regarding her as if she were an insect on a pin.

“My
fiancé
just called to tell me that he married someone else last night.” Her voice was brittle. Why she admitted such a thing to him she didn’t know. It was certainly none of his business, and he was certainly not one of her biggest fans. Additionally, it wasn’t like her to confide her troubles in a stranger. But she’d had so many shocks over the last few weeks that, for the moment at least, she was no longer—quite—in control of herself. She was off-balance, like an acrobat teetering wildly on a high wire.

“Poor baby.” He sounded the reverse of sympathetic.

Anger stung her, and her spine stiffened. She glared at him. “Look, just go away, would you?”

“So you can sit here and bawl your eyes out?”

“I am
not
going to …” She broke off. Her vision had cleared enough to allow her to see past the jacket to the expression on his face. He was looking her over critically, his eyes narrowed so that the crow’s-feet around them were visible, and his mouth was set in a hard, straight line. Moisture gleamed faintly on his close-cropped black hair. His skin was very tan, as though he spent a great deal of time outdoors, and roughened by the heavy growth of five-o’clock shadow that darkened his jaw. The sheer size of the man seemed to shrink the room. Unwillingly, she registered his blatantly masculine appeal, and rejected it. As the saying went, pretty is as pretty does, which left this man looking like a warthog. “How did you get in here, anyway? Did you even knock? Or is it the custom around here for people to just barge into other people’s houses without an invitation?”

“Inez let me in. And yes, I did knock. Go ahead and cry if you want to. I can wait.”

The hateful man was watching her as if he really did expect her to burst into tears before his eyes. Her chin came up a notch, and she took a deep, steadying breath.

“All right, Mr. Welch, since you don’t have the good manners to go away when you’re asked to, let’s get this over with: Why are you here?”

He was studying her with more attention than she welcomed, given the fact that her eyes still felt raw and kind of tingly and were, she suspected, red around the rims. With her hair pulled back and the high collar of her black turtleneck framing her features, she felt uncomfortably exposed.

“If he broke the news to you over the phone just now, he’s not worth crying over, believe me.”

“I have no intention of discussing my private life with you. I wouldn’t have said as much as I did if you hadn’t barged in here and caught me by surprise.” The tears had receded now, and she was embarrassed to think that he had seen signs of them. Ordinarily, she never cried. It was something she prided herself on. From a girlhood spent first with a procession of indifferent nannies and then at a series of impersonal boarding schools, she had learned that crying never fixed anything. All it did was give one red eyes and a stuffy nose. Besides, her father had hated weepy women. He had divorced two wives because, he said, they were forever bursting into tears when he did something they didn’t like.

At the thought of her father pain stirred anew. She never cried—but she had cried a river for him.

“I’m not interested in your private life, Miss Haywood. What I am interested in is Whistledown Farm.”

Alex frowned direly. Looking up at him was making her neck stiff, but if she stood she feared her knees might give way. She needed to be alone, needed time to assess the damage Paul had inflicted on her and paper over the fresh rent it had made in her already lacerated heart. If it killed her, the picture she presented to the world was not going to be one of caterwauling defeat. She would hold her head high and keep putting one foot in front of the other until things got better or until the end of time, whichever came first.

At this point, she was about ready to put her money on the end of time.

“If you’re here to try to talk me into changing my mind,” she said, “don’t bother. What I said earlier stands.”

His gaze assessed her. His jaw tightened, and his eyes grew bright and hard.

“’Fraid not, Princess. I have a contract.”

Alex gave a brittle laugh. “This is getting annoying, Mr. Welch. Exactly what part of
you’re fired
don’t you understand?”

“That’s precisely my point. You can’t fire me. Like I said, I have a contract. You know, one of those legal instruments between a party of the first part and a party of the second part? You can’t just give me thirty days’ notice and tell me to sell all the horses and then shove off.” There was a hint of triumph in his voice. “It doesn’t work that way.”

Alex stared at him. Gritting her teeth, she mentally counted to ten.

“Go away,” she said, slowly and distinctly.

“Are you hearing what I’m telling you?” His voice was rough, impatient, as he totally disregarded her words. His gaze was hard on her face. “I have a contract allowing me to manage Whistledown Farm as I see fit that runs through December of next year. That means, to begin with, that there is not going to be any fire-sale of the horses.”

Why would this man not simply give up? He was looking at her as if he held all four aces in a hand of poker. The thing to do was to keep her own cool, spell the situation out to him in terms he could understand, and then maybe he would finally leave her in peace.

“Where is this contract? Can I see it?”

“It’s in my office. It’s legally valid, believe me.
Your
lawyers drew it up.” There was the faintest hint of mockery in his tone.

Alex’s patience stretched nearly to the breaking point. “So you have a contract. Well, good for you! Tell me, Mr. Welch, did you ever hear the expression, you can’t get blood from a stone?”

His eyebrows knit, and he regarded her suspiciously. “A time or two. What about it?”

“My father’s estate is the stone. In other words, if you still don’t get it, there is no money. If your contract is valid—which I am going to leave up to my lawyers to determine because at this point I really just don’t care one way or the other—the estate may be able to come to some arrangement with you about the salary you’re owed. Or maybe not, depending upon the finances involved. But either way, there is simply no money to be spared for the continued operation of Whistledown Farm. Everything
has to be closed down, contract or no contract. My father’s estate will be lucky to escape bankruptcy.”

“Don’t give me that. Your father is—was—one of the richest men in the world.”

“Was
being the operative word. Some of his investments were high-risk. They went bad. When the news of his death got out, the value of his company plummeted. Then everything else he owned went down the toilet after the company stock. There is nothing, or at least very little, left. Almost everything my father owned is being sold.” She managed to say it with cool matter-of-factness, revealing none of the shame and disbelief and fear with which she still faced the news.

He was staring at her as if she’d suddenly sprouted horns. “Is that the truth?”

“Cross my heart.” Her reply was flippant. She was proud of that. Never let them see you bleed. It was one of her father’s axioms.

Another pang of grief assaulted her.

“Is that why he … no.” Welch stopped himself before he could finish, looking slightly uncomfortable for the first time since she had met him.

“Why my father killed himself?” Amazing how she could so coolly say these things that were tearing her up inside, Alex thought with dispassion.

“That’s what I was going to say, yes.” The man no longer looked uncomfortable. He looked insolent instead.

“There’s no reason for you not to call a spade a spade, after all, is there, Mr. Welch? To answer your question—the one you almost asked but didn’t—I don’t know. He had made some bad investments, but if he hadn’t died he might have been able to recover. Our own company’s stock was still strong. I don’t know why he did it. We may never know.”

“Like I said before, I’m sorry for your loss.” There was no softness in his voice or expression.

“You found his body, didn’t you?” The question was abrupt. Her hands curled around the smooth leather arms of the chair for support.

The lines around his eyes deepened as he met her gaze, and his mouth tightened.

“Yeah, I did.”

“Tell me about it.” The demand came out of its own volition. Breathe, she reminded herself. Breathe. That she disliked this man had no bearing on anything. Her need to know about the last chapter of her father’s life overrode all else.

He hesitated before replying. “What do you want to know?”

“Anything. Everything. The details.”

He shook his head. “What for? There’s no point in getting yourself all upset.”

“No point in getting myself all upset?” Her laugh was devoid of mirth. “No point in
getting myself all upset?
Upset is not the word for what I am. I am devastated, to put it mildly. And I have been ever since I learned of my father’s death. Nothing you say can make me feel worse, believe me. You think I came all the way out here to the boonies just to fire you? No. To tell you the truth, I don’t give a flip if you’re fired, or hired, or have a contract, or don’t have a contract: you can duke that out with the lawyers until you all turn blue in the face. I’m here because I need to be where my father was, to know what he was doing, what he was
feeling,
the night he—died.” She paused, took a breath. “And you can help me, if you would. Please.” It went against the grain to plead with this man, but she was hungry, starving, for every last scrap of information about what had taken place.

He looked at her without speaking for a moment, his blue eyes suddenly almost dark. Then he nodded once.

“I’ll tell you what I know,” he said. “It’s not all that much.”

Without waiting for an invitation, he snagged the back of one of the pair of small Chinese Chippendale armchairs positioned by the fireplace, swung it over in front of the desk backward, and sat down. His worn jeans straddled the fragile green silk seat while her eyes widened reflexively at the sheer sacrilege of treating valuable antique furniture so cavalierly. Seeming unaware of her visceral dismay, he folded his arms along the back of the chair, leaned forward, and regarded her grimly.

“All right, so here goes: I found him around one
A.M.
He was in the barn, the barn here at Whistledown, sitting with his back against the
wall. I touched him and he slumped over. I checked him, felt for a pulse. He was already dead.”

“What were you doing in the barn so late at night?” Again she had to remind herself to keep breathing. The picture his words conjured up made her feel sick.

“I was checking on the horses.” He paused, then continued almost reluctantly. “I’d been asleep, but something woke me up. Looking back, I think I may have heard the shot that killed him.”

“Oh, my God.” Alex felt the blood leaching from her face. Unable to keep up appearances any longer, she leaned her head against the rolled back of the chair and deliberately drew in great gulps of air. “Oh God. Oh God.”

“Damn it, I knew this wasn’t a good idea.” He stood up abruptly, swinging the chair out of his way, and came around behind the desk so that he towered over her. His expression was harsh. “You’re not going to faint on me, are you?”

“No, I’m not,” she said, willing the words to be true. If she had been in the presence of someone who displayed an ounce of sympathy, she might have done exactly that. But in front of him? No way. He was scowling down at her, his thick black brows almost meeting over the bridge of his nose. She gathered herself together to meet his gaze head-on.

“Good.” The single word was curt.

“I’m sorry.” She was breathing normally by sheer force of will, hoping she didn’t look as limp as she felt. He still towered over her; she kept her head tilted back against the seat so that it was less exhausting to look up at him. “I just—get sick whenever I think of him—what he did. I can’t believe it. I keep asking myself why. Why?” There was anguish she couldn’t prevent in the question.

“He’d been drinking.” He said it as though he was offering her, and her father, an excuse.

“What makes you think that?” Her gaze sharpened on his face.

“Because …” He hesitated, then shook his head. “Look, Miss Haywood, enough, okay? I’m no sadist. I don’t believe in torturing helpless
animals, small children, or bereaved women. If you want any more information, you’re going to have to get it from another source.”

“I want to know why you think my father had been drinking when he died.” Her voice was fierce. “My father didn’t drink. He is—was—a teetotaler.”

“The odor of whiskey was so strong around his body that I could smell it clear across the barn.” His rebuttal was almost brutal.