“Thank you.” Ted let out a soft sigh. “Please be safe. I’ll see you soon.”
The second the call ended, Brandon squeezed my hand. “We really should have the cops meet us there. It’s going to take them a bit to get over the bridge anyway.”
True. Not to mention the second we called bullshit on this whole thing, Steele was going to try and throw out some legal jargon to get me to allow them both to stay. Or flash whatever paperwork they’d gotten a judge to sign off on. He also had a lot to lose if he was caught getting twisted up in Ana’s schemes.
No amount of funds or whatever else Ana promised him to help her would save his career.
“Why don’t you call them, then,” I suggested. “We’ll have them meet us down at the gate.”
He nodded and slipped his phone out of his pocket. “You got it.”
My heart wasin my throat driving up to my family’s property.
As expected, there was already a familiar sports car parked in my driveway, along with a moving truck with the ramp down and two guys loading what looked like a vanity set into the back of it. Anger boiled in me. To be that brazen with stealing my shit was out of this world.
Even if this situation was still somehow legitimate and she was entitled to half of my family’s things, I wasn’t getting a say in any of what she was currently taking from me—which was exactly what all of us had come to a tentative agreement on weeks ago that this wouldn’t fucking happen.
Her arrogance was going to be her downfall.
As soon as I had the car parked, I threw my door open and slipped out into the warm air. The ironic part about today was how nice it was outside despite the deep turmoil that chilled me. This would’ve been the perfect day to sneak Brandon away from the shop for a little while under the guise of running an errand with me.
Or better yet, a date.
Instead, we were here dealing with this mess and a half.
Coming up the drive behind us were two officers from Palmerston, both of who were eager to swing by with their patrol cars and a possible K9 unit on the way as backup once Brandon had gotten on the phone with dispatch. Normally, I’d consider it overkill, however, there wasn’t typically much activity going on in our small towns, so any excuse to bring out the so-called ‘big guns’ got the local PDs excited.
Fine by me. The more that were on our side, the better.
Leaving Brandon to handle filling in the officers, the sound of my door slamming grabbed the attention of the two movers, their necks jerking toward the noise as they paused halfway up the ramp.
“Afternoon, gentlemen,” I called out, my tone clipped.
“Mr. McAllister,” one of them said, look like a deer caught in headlights. “We were told you were out of town for the week.”
“Is that so.”
Figures. If Alexander Steele had one thing going for him, it was the impressive amount of balls he had commandeering not only a moving company but most likely my staff inside, too, to do his bidding for him.
Though how they got my gate code was an entirely different story. One I fully intended to get out of Steele before banning him and his mistress from my property.
Bypassing the two movers, I headed up the stairs and through the open doors of the mansion. In the foyer were already a few pieces of furniture laid out on dust sheets, stacked in a row and ready to be lifted out of the door and into the truck. None of it was furniture that I recognized, so where they were pulling it from was probably one of the guest rooms.
A few of my staff were stiffly milling about, looking lost in the chaos that was slowly turning the once grand entrance into a college move-in day imitation.
Clacking heels brought my attention toward the left of the foyer. The doors to the secondary hallway were propped open, leading down to a few of the guest bedrooms on the first floor. Two voices were heard coming my way, causing my body to tense as they drew near.
The second Ana and Steele moved past the archway and into the foyer, they stopped short at seeing me.
“Ah, Mr. McAllister.” Steele shot me a brief smile. “We were told you’d be out today.”
“Really, I wasn’t aware I was supposed to be expecting guests.”
Ana remained tight-lipped while she stared at me. The sheer fabric of her dress clung to her swollen belly, making it seem much more pronounced than the last time I’d seen her. The stilettos she wore were of an impressive height, making her almost as tall as Steele when she stood next to him.
“I didn’t want to bother you,” Steele explained.
Popping a brow, I said, “So you hopped my gate instead?”
