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)
I didn’t say anything.
“Georgina owes a little over three hundred thousand dollars for schooling,” he continued. “That’ll pay half of it, if she’s lucky.”
I sifted through the legal mumbo-jumbo.
“Anything else?” I asked, stomach sour.
“No,” he answered, then leveled me with a look. “I’m sorry for taking you to the wringers.”
I snorted. “I somehow doubt that.”
“I do,” he repeated. “She told me that you cheated. I don’t like cheaters. It was only later that I found out that wasn’t the case. I wouldn’t have agreed to take it on had I known differently.”
For some reason, I believed him.
That didn’t change anything, though.
She got three hundred grand of my four hundred grand savings—money I was saving up for a rainy day—and would’ve gotten more had the girls not chosen to live with me.
“It is what it is,” I said as I stood. “She’s not going to know any of this, right?”
Georgina was smart as hell and would probably figure some of it out on her own.
But that information wouldn’t be coming from me.
She was a smart girl—woman—and was good about not burying her head in the sand when it came to finances.
But if she needed someone to hate for this, then I’d give her me.
I was used to being the bad guy in some people’s stories.
It started with the Air Force where I was in AFSOC—Air Force Special Operations Command—and continued on when I took on the mantle of president for the Dixie Wardens MC Montana Chapter.
Sometimes I had to be the bad guy to keep my people safe.
And a lot of people didn’t always like that.
Georgina Cain would be one of them, I just knew it.
TWO
This, too, shall pass. It might pass like a kidney stone, but it’ll still pass.
—Holly’s secret thoughts
HOLLY
I passed Denver, better known as Sinclair Windsor, coming out of the lawyer’s office.
I wasn’t surprised to see him there.
He and my dad were good friends.
It was understandable that my dad would leave him something.
However, I was very surprised when I got into the lawyer’s office to be told that not only had my dad left the land and the house I was living in to someone else, but he also had stipulations for how I would spend the money that I would be given for his life insurance.
“He wants me to pay all of my school loans off with it?” I asked, numb from what I’d just been told.
“As much as the inheritance will allow,” Trent Sheperd explained.
I swallowed hard. “And the land? Who does that go to?”
I didn’t know what I expected, but hearing “Sinclair Windsor” was not it.
Honestly, I never imagined a life where that land would not be mine.
That was all I ever dreamed of—farming that land and living off of it like the last four generations of Cains had done for hundreds of years—minus one generation that had to sell it to live. Which my mother had helped my father buy back.
And now, that was all out of sight for me.
“Will he let me stay in the house at least?” I asked quietly.
I mean, that was my one and only home.
I…
“That’s something you’ll have to take up with him,” he sighed. “Georgina…”
“Holly,” I corrected him.
He frowned. “Holly?”
“My friends, they call me Holly. I hate Georgina.”
Hate wasn’t a strong enough word.
I loathed it.
Georgina was my mom’s name. My mom had walked out on us when I was young and hadn’t looked back.
I’d stuck with the name for years, because that was what my dad wanted, but eventually started going by Holly when I started college.
It was much nicer to not be known as “that Hollywood starlet that left’s kid.” Which is what happened when anyone heard the name “Georgina Cain.”
My dad had stayed, raised me, and had loved me until his last breath.
“Holly then.” He nodded once as if committing it to memory. “I’m sorry this didn’t go the way you expected it. I told your father that he needed to talk to you about this, and I’m sorry that you were blindsided with it.”
I swallowed hard.
“It’s okay.”
And it was.
It wasn’t his fault that my dad had been bamboozled by the big, bad motorcycle club president.
Was that what he was doing this entire time? Worming his way into my dad’s life so he could buy his land?
I knew that he wanted the water rights to it.
He’d been paying a leasing fee for those since I was around sixteen.
Had he somehow manipulated my father into giving him the land instead of letting me have it?
That was the only thing that made sense here.
I stood up and gathered my things.
A letter from my dad that I refused to open right now and some paperwork telling me about the life insurance policy that would be paying out soon.
“Have a good day, Mr. Sheperd,” I said quietly.
It wasn’t his fault that things hadn’t fallen my way.