Chapter 8
Rowe
“Who was that?” Cristina asks when I swagger victoriously into the living room.
“No one.”
Tallulah glances up from her spot on a quilt. There’s a lot of hurt feelings in her eyes. She wanted to let thatliarpet her, and she’s mad I wouldn’t allow it.
“Traitor,” I mumble.
The nerve of my favorite pet, approaching my newest enemy like he’s her friend.
“Rowe?” Cristina asks.
I plop back on top of the quilts. “Yes?”
“Whowasthat?”
I wave away her question and turn back to my margarita, which is now melting into a sad, sloshy mess. “I don’t know. Some guy who said he wanted to help me with the farm.”
She sits up quickly, which makes Buster the Cat, who’s been lying at her feet, flinch. “What?”
“Don’t get excited. He was obviously a spy sent by Sally and Luke.”
A wrinkle worms its way across her forehead. “What if he wasn’t?”
“Oh, he for sure was.”
“What was his name?”
“I don’t know. Maddox something. Pane Maddox? Something weird like that. Said his family’s famous.”
Cristina’s eyes nearly pop out of her head. “Pane Maddox? Like, from the Maddox Hotel family?”
“Maybe?” I say around a yawn.
She grabs her phone and starts typing. A moment later, Cristina shoves the device under my nose. “Was this him?”
The phone is way too close. I push her hand away and squint at the image. It’s a picture of a man leaving a restaurant with a woman on his arm. He looks to be in his early thirties, and he’s got the same dark hair and knee-buckling green eyes as the man from the front porch, who is now officially the third person on my shit list, right behind Luke and Sally. Wait. Those two are tied at number one. Okay, stranger is number two.
“Um. Yeah, that looks like him.”
Her jaw drops. “Rowe, this isthePane Maddox from the Maddox Hotel chain. He’s, like, superrich. What’s going on?”
I blow my bangs out of my face. Man, does my breath smell like alcohol. “First of all, he’s the guy from this morning, the one who was so rude and awful.”
“You didn’t say anything about him being rude and awful.”
“Well, he was. And he was snobby.”
“Of course he was snobby. He’s, like, a gazillionaire.” She straightens, looking down her nose at me. “So what did he want?”
“Just what I said—to help the farm.”
There is an incredibly long pause, which makes me think that Cristina has forgotten how to talk. “You are kidding me.”
“No.”
