I retrieved the Blake family seal from my pocket. “This.” I let it fall into my palm and closed my fingers around it. “We’re going to Blake’s ranch. I’m going to use this to get past the gates. And I’m going in alone.”
“I have a professional obligation to tell you that I don’t like this plan.”
I gave Oren a sympathetic look. “Would you like it more if I told you that I’ll be doing a press conference right outside his gates so that the whole world knows I’m inside?”
Vincent Blake couldn’t touch me with the paparazzi watching.
“You going to put a stop to this, Oren?” Nash ambled toward us, clearly having overheard our exchange. “Because if you don’t, I will.”
As if drawn by the chaos, Xander chose that moment to pop in, too.
“This doesn’t concern you,” I told Nash.
“Nice try, kid.” Nash’s tone never advertised the fact that he was pulling rank, but no matter how casual the delivery, it was always one hundred percent clear when that was what he was doing. “This ain’t happening.”
Nash didn’t care that I was eighteen, that I owned the House, that I wasn’t actually his sister, or that I would put up one hell of a fight if he tried to stop me.
“You can’t protect the four of us forever,” I told him.
“I can damn well try. You don’t want to test me on this one, darlin’。”
I glanced at Jameson, who was well-acquainted with the pitfalls of testing Nash. Jameson met my gaze, then glanced at Xander.
“Flying leopard?” Jameson murmured.
“Hidden mongoose!” Xander replied, and an instant later, they were crashing into Nash in a truly impressive synchronized flying tackle.
In a one-on-one fight, Nash could take either one of them. But it was hard to get the upper hand when you had one brother on your torso and another pinning your legs and feet.
“We should go,” I told Oren. Nash was cursing up a storm behind us. Xander began serenading him with a brotherly limerick.
“Oren!” Nash hollered.
My head of security didn’t so much as hint at any amusement he might have felt. “Sorry, Nash. I know better than to get in the middle of a Hawthorne brawl.”
“Alisa—” Nash started to say, but I interjected.
“I want you with me,” I told my lawyer. “You’ll wait with Oren, right outside.”
Nash must have smelled defeat because he stopped trying to dislodge Xander from his feet. “Kid?” he called. “You sure as hell better play dirty.”
CHAPTER 77
Vincent Blake’s ranch was about a two-and-a-half-hour drive north, stretching for miles along the Texas/Oklahoma border. Taking the helicopter cut our travel time down to forty-five minutes, plus transit on the ground. Landon had done her part, so the press arrived shortly after I did.
“Earlier today,” I told them in a speech that I had rehearsed, “the remains of a man that we believe to be William Blake were found on the grounds of the Hawthorne estate.”
I stuck to my script. Landon had timed the leak about the body perfectly—the story she’d planted was already up, but it was the footage of what I was saying now that would define it. I sold the story: Will Blake had physically assaulted an underage female, and Tobias Hawthorne had intervened to protect her. Law enforcement was investigating, but based on what we’d been able to piece together ourselves, we expected the autopsy to reveal that Blake had died from blunt-force trauma to the head.
Tobias Hawthorne had dealt those blows.
That last bit might not have been true, but it was sensational. It was a story. And I was here now to pay my respects to the deceased’s family, on behalf of myself and the remaining Hawthornes.
I didn’t take questions. Instead, I turned and walked toward the boundary of Vincent Blake’s property. I knew from my research that Legacy Ranch was more than a quarter of a million acres—nearly four hundred square miles.
I stopped under an enormous brick arch, part of an equally enormous wall. The archway was big enough for a bus to fit underneath. As I approached, a black truck barreled toward me from inside the compound, down a long dirt road.
Beyond this wall, there were more than eighty thousand acres of active farmland, more than a thousand productive oil wells, the world’s largest privately owned collection of quarter horses, and a truly substantial number of cattle.
And somewhere, beyond this wall, on these acres, there was a house.
“You’re about to trespass on private property.” The men who exited the black truck were dressed like ranch hands, but they moved like soldiers.
Hoping I hadn’t miscalculated—because if I had, the entire world was witnessing that miscalculation—I replied to the man who had spoken. “Even if I have one of these?”
I opened my fingers just far enough for them to see the seal.
Less than a minute later, I was in the cab of the truck, barreling toward the unknown.
It was a full ten minutes before the house came into view. The driver, who was definitely armed, hadn’t said a word to me.
I looked down at the seal resting in my palm. “You haven’t asked where I got it.”
He didn’t take his eyes off the road. “When someone has one of those, you don’t ask.”
If Hawthorne House looked like a castle, Vincent Blake’s home called to mind a fortress. It was made of dark stone, its square lines interrupted only by two giant round columns rising into turrets. A wrought-iron balcony lined the front perimeter on the second floor. I half expected a drawbridge, but instead there was a wraparound porch.
Eve stood on that porch, her amber hair blowing in the wind.
Blake’s security followed me as I walked toward her. When I stepped up onto the porch, Eve turned, a strategic move designed to force me into following.
“This all would have been so much easier,” she said, “if you’d just given me what I asked for.”
CHAPTER 78
Eve didn’t lead me into the house. She led me around back. A man stood there. He had suntanned skin and silver hair shorn to the scalp. I knew he had to be in his eighties, but he looked closer to sixty-five—and like he could run a marathon.
He was holding a shotgun.
As I watched, he took aim at the sky. The sound of the shot was earsplitting and echoed through the countryside as a bird plummeted to the ground. Vincent Blake said something—I couldn’t hear what—and the largest bloodhound I’d ever seen took off after the kill.
Blake lowered his weapon. Slowly, he turned to face me. “Around here,” he called, in that smooth, borderline-aristocratic voice I recognized all too well from the phone, “we cook what we shoot.”
He held out the gun, and someone rushed to take it from him. Then Blake strode toward us. He settled down on a cement wall near a massive firepit, and Eve led me right up to it—and him.
“Where are Grayson and Toby?” That was the only greeting this man was going to get out of me.
“Enjoying my hospitality.” Blake eyed the large box I carried in my hands. Wordlessly, I opened it. I’d stopped in the vault to retrieve the royal chess set. Once I’d been granted admission to Blake’s lands, I’d had Oren surreptitiously hand it to me.