Total pages in book: 70
Estimated words: 70566 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 353(@200wpm)___ 282(@250wpm)___ 235(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 70566 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 353(@200wpm)___ 282(@250wpm)___ 235(@300wpm)
Only when she was gone did Holly step up to my side.
“What happened?” she asked as she slowed to keep in step with me.
I gave her the rundown of Juliana’s entire visit, finishing with, “I have to head over to Nate Ryder’s place and talk to him about selling. Then I have to talk to the town council. This ski resort will happen over my dead body.”
She looked at me worriedly. “You think you can change the town council’s mind?”
I grinned. “I know I can.”
ELEVEN
Don’t worry about what people think. They don’t do it very often.
—Denver to Hux
DENVER
The first place I visited was Nate Ryder’s place.
He was an elderly man in his late eighties on his last leg. I’m talking stooped over, could barely lift his cane, shuffling all the way across the house at a speed that was alarmingly slow.
He’d been farming his land for so long that you could see the toll it’d taken on his body.
He held out his hand to me when I arrived at his front door.
“I was wondering if you’d ever come talk to me again.”
His words had my back straightening.
I frowned. “I was here last week. Fixed your tractor for you, remember?”
He nodded. “I do. But I wasn’t home. Had a doctor’s appointment. I’m sorry to hear from your wife that you don’t want to buy this land from me anymore. What happened? Your wife said financial hardship.”
I counted to ten before I explained everything that’d happened. Trying not to curse my ‘wife’ the entire time.
His mouth dropped open. “You’re divorced?”
“For six months now,” I promised. “What exactly did she tell you?”
“Well, we ran into each other in town after my doctor’s appointment. And I told her that I was ready to sell. That I couldn’t handle the work anymore. To relay the information.” He patted his chest. “Got kidney failure. They said I might need to go on dialysis very soon. I need a bigger city for that. So I’m going to move in with my kids in Missoula.”
Fuck.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said, truly sorry to hear. He was a great neighbor to have, and had been standing up to the powers that be that wanted his land for years. “She never relayed anything to me. Which I’m assuming is when she told you about our supposed financial hardship?”
He nodded his head. “I’m only in the early talks with them. We’re not actually under contract. I just wanted everyone to stop bombarding me with offers. You still interested?”
“Yes,” I answered immediately.
Then he jerked his chin toward the door. “Then let’s go hash everything out.”
So we did.
Everything.
I even wrote him a check on the spot using the Windsor trust.
I didn’t do anything with this cattle operation without going through the trust. It was mine just as much as it was Boone’s, as it was Sawyer’s, as it was Sorcha’s.
I called the tax assessor’s office and my lawyer, and we got them lining everything up on their end.
It was about midafternoon when I headed out to meet with the city.
The first person I saw was my ex-wife, smirking smugly as if she’d caught the canary.
The damn snake.
I ignored her and walked past her.
“He’s just going to ignore you like you’re not the mother of his children?”
That was Juliana’s sister, Morgana.
I ignored her, too, for the sake of my freedom, and headed inside the city’s main offices, which just so happened to be a small building that, funny enough, they rented from the Windsor Corporation.
We owned a lot of the land and even more of the businesses in both Sawtooth and Bear Pass. But Bear Pass, which was where we lived, was the one that was always trying to get ski resorts in the area.
We already had one that was just outside of Jawbone, and Jawbone had practically been overrun with tourists now. Even Sawtooth was getting there.
Bear Pass was my refuge, and if I had to instill my own damn council in there, I fuckin’ would.
There wasn’t a single Bear Pass resident that wanted that damn ski resort, and Juliana didn’t count. Because deep down, she didn’t want it, either. She’d been pretty damn vocal over the years that the ‘tourists are ruining skiing for everyone else.’
The first person I saw was Knox Teller and Marcellus Figley.
Two of the worst people on the damn board, mostly because the motherfuckers didn’t live in Bear Pass at all. How and why they were on the board for Bear Pass, I didn’t know. But that might be my next step—to evict them from their proverbial thrones.
The fact that they thought they could sneak a damn ski resort in here without me knowing…
“Uh, hey, Denver.” Marcellus looked all of a sudden nervous.
He should be.
I was going to ruin him by the time I was done.
He’d spent years trying to pass laws that just wouldn’t work for us—trying to make us a bigger city when, in fact, we were anything but. Residents wanted the small-town life. We didn’t mind a tourist or two. We didn’t mind people visiting to see our beautiful land. But we didn’t want their ideals changing our way of life when all they were going to do was leave as fast as they arrived.