“I’ll work it out with Kingsley.” He spoke in an offhand voice, but inside he seethed.
***
Jack cursed himself for being an idiot as he drove out to Kingsley Tucker’s farm after finishing the round of golf. He’d known the Tuckers had money troubles and did plenty of due diligence before agreeing to build their golf course. He used an accountant, a lawyer, and a title company to protect himself before striking the deal for partial ownership of the golf course. The property survey clearly included the Roost, and somehowthe Tuckers played a shell game after their deal to score a mortgage on the land where the Roost sat.
Jack turned his pickup onto the gravel drive leading to Kingsley Tucker’s farm. Unlike his son Kyle, who lived at the ostentatious Cherrywood mansion, the family’s patriarch lived in a newly renovated 1890s farmhouse. After thirty-five years in the banking industry, Kingsley reinvented himself as a gentleman farmer. His four-acre property featured a white clapboard farmhouse, a barn, and a dozen goats. Staff milked the goats and made artisanal cheese and goat milk soap. As far as Jack could tell, Kingsley’s job was confined to walking about the grounds in work boots and tweedy clothes while sampling the cheese and petting a goat or two.
He was out at one of the goat pens tossing kitchen scraps into a trough when Jack arrived, still sweaty from his round of golf.
“Good afternoon, Jack,” Kingsley said with a friendly wave.
“How much is the lien on the Roost, and why didn’t you tell me about it?” he demanded.
Kingsley looked so shocked he almost dropped the bucket of scraps. A young man who did the actual work on the farm was busy at a milking stool, and Kingsley glanced nervously over. The Tuckers were good at hiding their genteel poverty, and the farm worker likely had no idea how precarious their financial situation really was.
Kingsley frowned and unceremoniously dumped the rest of the bucket into the trough. “Come on, let’s head inside to talk. We can have something cold to drink.”
“Is your wife inside?”
“Yes.”
“Then we’ll stay outside.” Tearing a man to shreds while his wife could overhear wasn’t Jack’s style, but he needed to get to the bottom of this. Kingsley gestured him to a bench beneath the shade of a cottonwood tree. The old man suddenly seemed morestooped and tired than he had two minutes earlier. Kingsley sat, but Jack remained standing.
“Well?” he demanded. “How much is the lien and who owns it?”
“Sixty thousand. A bank in Richmond is holding it.”
“Did you tell them that I had an interest in the property?”
A bead of sweat trickled down the side of Kingsley’s face. “I don’t remember.”
“You went all the way to Richmond so they wouldn’t know about me,” Jack bit out. “You went to a lot of trouble to pull the wool over my eyes and scam the bank out of sixty thousand dollars.”
Kingsley stood. “Now hold on. We intend to repay the bank. It’s no skin off anybody’s nose.”
“It was fraud against the bank and against me. A felony.”
Kingsley held out his hands in supplication. “Hold on. We can work something out.”
The temptation to walk away from the entire deal clawed. Suing the Tuckers would mean a nasty lawsuit, and Jack was an outsider in Virginia. He’d be in Japan, busting his tail to earn a buck to compensate for this financial sinkhole while the Tuckers would be glad-handing the locals who admired and respected them.
Jack hated the situation, but he needed to avoid a lawsuit. He was already four million dollars in debt over his third of the golf course. He couldn’t walk away over sixty thousand dollars, but he wasn’t going to make this easy on Kingsley.
“I’ll pay off the mortgage, but you’re going to sign the Roost over to me. All of it. The building, the land, and Saint Helga’s Spring. I’ll have a lawyer write up an agreement, and we can conclude the deal tonight.”
Kingsley sputtered. “The land alone is worth a quarter of a million!”
“That’s the price of fraud, and those are my terms. Otherwise, I’ll see you in court about the mortgage and seek criminal charges for the fraud.”
Kingsley fanned himself with his straw hat, frowning as he surveyed his goat farm. As the patriarch of the Tucker dynasty, he probably believed he was worth so much more than these four acres and modest farmhouse. He’d been gambling for decades to resurrect the family fortune, and had staked it all on that golf course and country club.
Neither one of them was happy over this deal. Jack needed to find an additional sixty thousand he hadn’t budgeted for, and Kingsley would lose a valuable plot of land.
And yet, by the end of the day Jack had the title to the Roost and the surrounding five acres in exchange for paying off the lien. He now had the freedom to develop it however he wanted. It would either be the best investment of his life, or lead him straight into bankruptcy.
Chapter Fifteen
Alice drove out to the Roost, curious as to what had Jack so all-fired impatient to see her. He’d texted a message to her last night a little before midnight:
