SLAMMED DOWN the phone. Jason Murdock, his friend and the rancher Logan had been buying stock from for years, had just given Logan a much-too-sweet deal on some Angus.
Hell.
Much more of this and Logan was going to beat the crap out of somebody. Especially the next person who was overly nice to him or gave him a sweet deal on anything.
For the past three months since the mess with Helene, nearly everybody who called or came into the office was walking on sonofabitching eggshells around him, and it not only pissed him off, it was disrespectful.
He’d run McCord Cattle Brokers since he was nineteen, since his folks had been killed in a car crash, and he’d run it well. In those early years people had questioned his ability to handle a company this size.
Silently questioned it, anyway.
But Logan had built the image and reputation he needed to make sure those questions were never spoken aloud. He’d done that through ball-busting business practices where nobody but nobody walked on eggshells. Yet, here they were all still doing just that. After three months.
Not just his family, either.
He’d halfway expected it from Riley, Claire, Lucky and Cassie because they’d been at the scene of what Lucky was calling the great proposal fuckup. Logan expected it, too, from his assistant, Greg Larkin, since he was the sort who remembered birthdays and such shit.
But everybody in Spring Hill who’d had a reason to come to Logan’s office door had looked at him with those sad puppy-dog eyes. He could only imagine how bad it was when those puppy-eyed people weren’t right in front of him. All the behind-the-hand whispers were no doubt mumbles about poor, pitiful Logan and what Helene had done to him.
Logan tried to make a note on the business contract he was reading and cursed when his pen didn’t work. He yanked open his desk drawer with enough force to rip it from its runners, and got another reminder he didn’t want.
That blasted gold watch.
Why he still had it, Logan didn’t know, but every time he saw it he remembered his night with Julia. Or whatever the hell her name was. She should have been nothing but a distant memory now and soon would be once he found her and returned the blasted watch. Until then, he moved it to his bottom drawer next to the bottle of Glenlivet he kept there.
Of course, if it hadn’t been for the Glenlivet, he probably wouldn’t have slept with Julia and wouldn’t have had the watch in the first place.
Logan moved it to the bottom drawer on the other side.
Damn it all to hell!
The engagement ring was still there, too. The bottom drawers of his desk were metaphorical land mines, and this time he made a note. Two of them.
Get rid of the ring.
Find Julia and have someone return the watch.
Logan didn’t want the ring around because he was over Helene. And as for the watch—he didn’t want it around in case there was something to the blackmail/extortion theory he’d had about her. Even though it had been three months since their encounter, that didn’t mean she wasn’t out there plotting some way to do something he wasn’t going to like. That’s why he’d hired a private investigator to find her, but so far the PI had come up empty.
“Don’t,” Logan barked when Lucky appeared in the doorway of his office.
He hadn’t heard his brother coming up the hall, but since Lucky was wearing his good jeans and a jacket, it probably meant he was there for a meeting. Lucky certainly wouldn’t have dressed up just to check on him.
“Don’t interrupt you, or don’t draw my next breath?” Lucky asked. He bracketed his hands on the office door, cocked his head to the side.
“Both if you’re here to talk about anything that doesn’t involve a cow, bull or a horse.”
“How about bullshit?”
Logan looked up from the contract to see if Lucky was serious. He appeared to be. Just in case, Logan decided to clarify. “Bullshit that’s not specifically related to anything that involves my ex?”
“Well, unless Helene has started secretly pooping in the pastures, it doesn’t,” Lucky confirmed.
Logan was almost afraid to motion for Lucky to continue, but he finally did. Curiosity was a sick thing sometimes.
“You haven’t been to the house, well, in a couple of months,” Lucky went on, “but I had thirty bulls delivered to those pastures and corrals we talked about using.”
So, definitely not a Helene problem. And Logan knew which pastures and corrals Lucky meant. The pastures were on the east side of the house, and with the right mixture of grasses for the young bulls they’d bought so they could be trained for the rodeo.
“The wind must have shifted or something because, this morning, all you could smell was bullshit in the house. Everybody’s complaining, even Mia,” Lucky added.
A first for Mia. To the best of Logan’s knowledge, the four-year-old girl never complained about anything. Unlike her thirteen-year-old sister, Mackenzie. Lucky and Cassie had guardianship of the pair, but the girls were yin and yang. If Mia was complaining, Logan didn’t want to know how much Mackenzie was carrying on. Or the longtime housekeepers, Della and Stella, who also lived at the ranch.
“You’re sure it’s bullshit and not cat shit?” Logan asked. Because along with inheriting guardianship of the girls, Lucky and Cassie had also inherited six cats. Five of those cats were now at the ranch.
Lucky shook his head. “Definitely bullshit, and I should know because I’m a bullshit connoisseur.”
Since Lucky had been riding rodeo bulls for more than a decade, that did indeed make him an expert. Not just on the crap but the bulls themselves.
“That means I’m going to need to move them,” Lucky went on, “and I was thinking about the back pastures. But Rico said you were planning on putting some horses back there.”
He was. Or rather, Riley was since he was in charge of the new cutting horse program that they’d started. And Riley and Logan had indeed discussed that with Rico Callahan, one of their top ranch hands.
Logan sat there, debating on which would smell worse—horseshit or bullshit. It was a toss-up. “Move the bulls to the back pastures,” Logan finally said. “When the horses arrive, I’ll have Riley split them in the other pastures for the time being.”
It was a temporary fix since Riley would eventually want the cutting horses together so they’d be easier to train, and that meant they needed to prep one of the other two pastures they weren’t using. The problem at the McCord Ranch wasn’t enough land—there was plenty of that—but with their operation expanding, they needed someone who could manage the ranch grounds themselves. Someone more than just the hands.
“Hire whoever you need to fix this,” Logan told his brother.
Whenever he was talking to Lucky, his twin, Logan always tried to tone down his voice. After all, Lucky could have been co-CEO, but in his will, their father
