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Of course, having their employees see her was the least of their problems.
If the initial reports were true, then Billy Lee had basically screwed them six ways to Sunday by embezzling a fortune. And after doing that, he’d disappeared.
Much as her ex-fiancé had done.
Too bad her heart hadn’t done a vanishing act along with them because she wasn’t sure how much more she could take. The panic was rising inside her. The pressure in her chest, too, and if this was some dream, she prayed she’d wake up from it soon.
Sophie forced herself to her feet, and while dodging Marcum’s pacing pattern, she walked to the floor-to-ceiling window in Garrett’s office. It was identical to hers, which was just next door. The view of downtown Austin was one of the best in the city, and it normally gave her a jolt of pride.
This was theirs.
The company their great-grandfather Zachariah Taylor Granger had built from the ground up. To remind them of that, there was a massive twelve-foot-high oil portrait of Z.T. on the wall of Garrett’s office. Not an especially good portrait, Sophie had always thought, what with his stern gaze, slightly narrowed eyes and a “don’t screw this up” sneer.
Garrett and she hadn’t screwed it up. They’d nearly doubled the size of what customers affectionately called Cowboy Mart, had put it on the Texas financial map. It’d made them wealthier. Happier. It’d made them who they were.
It had to stay that way.
Marcum finished his latest call, but he didn’t stop pacing. He kept moving until he was right in front of Garrett’s desk. That cued her brother to make a quick end to his conversation.
“You want the good news or the bad news first?” Marcum asked them.
“Bad,” Garrett and she said in unison.
Despite their quick agreement, Marcum still took a couple of moments to answer. “Billy Lee robbed you blind. We don’t know how exactly, not yet, but he embezzled nearly ninety percent of the company’s operating funds.”
Sophie decided it was a good idea to sit down, but since there wasn’t a chair nearby, she just sank to the floor.
“Fuck,” Garrett growled.
Sophie wanted to growl something, too, something equally as bad as the f-word, but she couldn’t get her mouth working.
“How?” Garrett added. It was also growled.
Marcum shook his head. “That will take some time to unravel, but Billy Lee must have had the pieces in place for a while to do this. I don’t suppose you had any checks and balances on him?”
“No,” Garrett and she answered in unison again.
“He’s my godfather,” Sophie added. “Our late father’s best friend.”
Garrett had his own adding to do. “Billy Lee’s worked for the company for forty years and never gave us any reason not to trust him.”
Until now.
God, until now.
“What’s the good news?” Sophie asked Marcum.
“I don’t think Garrett and you will have to go to jail.”
Sweet baby Jesus in the manger. “Is that stating the obvious, or was there actually a chance of that happening?” she pressed.
“A chance,” Marcum answered without hesitation. “It appears that over the past couple of months, Billy Lee might have dabbled in some money laundering with the funds he was embezzling.”
Sophie thought she might not be able to stave off that puking any longer. Her stomach balled up into a knot, started dribbling like a point guard on the basketball court and she got to her feet in case she had to make a run to the bathroom.
“Billy Lee must have snapped,” Garrett mumbled.
That stopped her for the time being, and she latched on to that like a lifeline. Yes, that had to be it. Because with the stomach knot and crushed heart, Sophie couldn’t grasp that a man who was part of their family had done this to them.
“Maybe someone set Billy Lee up?” she suggested.
Both Garrett and Marcum made sounds of agreement. Weak agreement, though. But it was another lifeline that Sophie was choosing to grab.
“What do we do now?” Sophie asked.
“Get drunk,” Marcum readily answered.
“Will that help?” And she was serious.
Marcum shrugged. “Only if you drink enough to pass out.”
Sophie decided to keep that as an option.
Her phone buzzed at the same time that Marcum’s rang, and Marcum stepped into the hall to take it. Maybe because he didn’t think it would be wise for them to get another dose of bad news so soon after the last one.
But it was too late for that.
Brantley’s name was on her phone screen.
She debated letting it go to voice mail. Debated answering it just so she could curse him. Debated the getting drunk option again. But after five rings, Sophie hit the answer button.
“Are you all right?” Brantley blurted out before she could curse him.
No, she wasn’t, but her pride prevented her from saying that. “If you’re calling to grovel, it won’t work. I won’t take you back after what you did to me. How could you do this to me? How?” Now, she added some of that profanity.
“I’m not calling to ask you to take me back,” Brantley interrupted. His words sounded a little slurred or something. “I meant it when I said I can’t marry you.”
That stomped on her pride and her heart some more. “Then why the heck did you ever propose to me?”
Silence. Which was just another form of heart stomping. The least Brantley could do was apologize and call himself some of the names she’d just called him, but the silence dragged on and on.
“Look, I’m busy,” she finally said in the same moment that Brantley said, “I thought I loved you, Sophie. But I was wrong.”
Mercy. Each word was like another little dagger. He hadn’t loved her? “You did a darn good job of faking it, then.”
“I know. I’d fooled myself, too. It’s because we’d been together so long. I kept thinking it was time for the next step, but the next step should have been for me to break things off.”
That stomach ball started to bounce against her other internal organs. She was definitely going to puke.
“I should have never let things get as far as they did,” he said. At least that’s what she thought he said, but he was slurring.
“Are you drunk?” she snapped.
“Uh, no. It’s nothing. I’m fine, really.”
“I don’t care a rat’s butt if you’re fine or not. And I have to go,” Sophie insisted.
Brantley blurted out something just as she hit the end call button. Something about a belt. She probably should have been concerned that he was about to hang himself, but her concern meter for him was tapped out. Besides, Brantley had plenty of faults, but he wasn’t the sort to kill himself.
Sophie put her phone in her pocket, looked at her brother, and that’s when she realized he had his attention nailed to her. Marcum did, too, though he was still talking on his phone.
“Anything about Billy Lee?” she asked Garrett as a preemptive strike. Sophie definitely didn’t want to talk about Brantley and what he’d just said to her.
He hadn’t loved her.
The anger ripped through her. A better feeling than the soppy tears because she didn’t need to blow her nose, but she needed to blow off some of this rage. She yanked off her two-carat engagement ring and threw it against the wall. Probably not the smartest idea she’d ever had because it hit the oil painting of their great-grandfather and made a dent in the canvas just below his left nostril.
“I’m guessing that call didn’t go well,” Garrett said on a heavy sigh.
“But please tell me your call went better.”
Garrett lifted his shoulder. “It was Chief McKinnon. He was checking on you.”
Great. Now, her date was chiming in on this. She didn’t want anyone checking on her. Especially anyone who’d seen her make a fool of herself. At the moment, though, that included pretty much everyone in Wrangler’s Creek. Later, in a day or two, she’d need to call him and apologize. Perhaps blame what she’d done on the tequila and temporary insanity.
Marcum finished his call, glanced at the two-carat ring that was now on the floor, before his gaze volleyed between Garrett and her. “You want the good news or the bad news first?” he asked again.
“Bad,” Garrett and she said in unison for a second time.
Marcum nodded. “The company’s assets will be frozen while the feds investigate the money laundering charges.”
Sophie’s mouth opened but no sound came out.
“Frozen?” Garrett snapped. “For how long?”
“I’m not sure. These things can take awhile.”
“Define awhile.” Garrett’s snap was even snappier that time.
“Months. Maybe years. And it’s possible everything will be seized if Billy Lee really was using this company as a money laundering operation.”
Still no sound. Her breath had vanished, and she figured it was a good time to sit back down on the floor again. Good thing, too, because the bad news just kept on coming.
“The frozen assets include both your apartments here in Austin since they’re company holdings,” Marcum added. “Your cars, too.”
No car, no apartment. It wouldn’t be as great of a loss to Garrett as it was for her because he split time between Austin and Wrangler’s Creek. And she doubted he’d ever even started the company car since he still drove their late dad’s truck. But for her, the apartment was, well, home.
“The investigators will be going through everything in the offices,” Marcum continued. “The vehicles and apartments, too.”
They wouldn’t find anything. Well, they wouldn’t unless Billy Lee had truly gone bonkers and stashed some stuff there. Though with the way her luck was running, there’d be a counterfeiting machine, a kilo of cocaine and Jimmy Hoffa’s body beneath her bed.
“Your personal bank accounts are also frozen for the time being,” Marcum went on. “But I feel that’s something we can resolve faster than the company assets.”
There was no way for the ball in her stomach to get any tighter or bounce any harder.
“So, basically everything we own, including where we live, has just been taken away from us, and we might never get it back?” she asked.
“Pretty much,” Marcum agreed.
“I’d like to hear that good news now,” Sophie grumbled.
“The ranch.” And apparently Marcum thought that was enough of an explanation. It wasn’t. Sophie motioned for him to keep going. “The ranch and the operation there aren’t part of the company or your own personal assets. That’s because Roman legally owns it, and he has no connection to the company.”
She gave Marcum a very blank look.
“So, you know what this means, right?” Marcum asked.
Sophie thought Marcum might be trying to tell them something more than the obvious here. “We won’t lose the ranch,” she concluded.
“It’s more than that. It means you’ll have a place to live. I just got the okay from Roman, and you and Garrett will be closing things down here in Austin and moving back home.”
* * *
HOME SUCKED.
This was not what Clay had in mind when he’d moved to Wrangler’s Creek. He’d come here to take over for the retiring sheriff. Also for some peace and quiet and to keep an eye on his kid sister, April. At the moment, neither was happening.
There was a toilet in the corner of what was supposed to be his living room. The bathtub was where he’d hoped to have a sofa. The toilet was obviously hooked up to some sort of plumbing because it was making a loud gurgling sound that Clay could hear even over the tile saw that was screeching in the kitchen.
“Yeah, I know,” Freddie said, scratching his head. Freddie Shoemaker was the only contractor in Wrangler’s Creek, and that’s the reason Clay had hired him to renovate the old house he’d bought.
Freddie was clearly an idiot.
“The guest bathroom’s not right,” Freddie conceded. “They put the plumbing in the wrong place so they just hooked it up where the fittings stopped. I left instructions with my crew, but they musta read it wrong.”
Yeah, or else they were idiots, too. Since the crew consisted of Freddie’s two sons and a nephew, that was a strong possibility.
“I don’t guess you could get used to having it this way?” Freddie asked. “It’d save you a lot of money if we didn’t have to undo all of this.”
No one had ever accused Clay of having a friendly face. It was a by-product of having been a cop for twelve years. First in Houston. Then, here in Wrangler’s Creek. And Freddie got a whopping big-assed dose of that nonfriendly face.
“Put the guest bathroom fixtures in the guest bathroom,” Clay snarled. “And no, it won’t cost me a lot of money because I’ll only pay for the work you do right.”
Freddie mumbled an “okay, you’re the boss” and headed toward his rust-scabbed truck parked just outside. Apparently that meant he was done for the day even though it was barely 3:00 p.m.
Clay tried to call April again. Again, no answer. He wasn’t ready to sound the alarms just yet because April wasn’t the most reliable person, but it’d been two days since he’d heard from her. Her boss at the hair salon where she worked had said April had asked for time off. She hadn’t been at her house, either, when he’d dropped by, which meant something was up. With April, something was up usually went hand in hand with trouble. She was twenty-three, eleven years younger than Clay, but plenty of times she still acted like an irresponsible teenager.
Clay growled out another voice mail for April to call him, and he followed the sound of the tile saw into the kitchen. The saw was going all right, but no one was cutting the backsplash tiles. In fact, no one was in the kitchen at all. Clay unplugged the saw to kill the noise and went in search of any signs of progress or intelligent life.
