Thankfully, Lily had never made him feel like an employee. If she had, he would have been long gone. She’d not only given him an equal part in running the ranch, but she had also shared the profits equally with him as well. Lily had even sold him shares in the Wild Springs and allowed him to buy the land where he’d built a home for Eli and him.
Lily would have gladly given him the land and the shares. Offers she’d made multiple times, but Jonas had figured that kind of gift could put a kink in their working relationship. He hadn’t wanted any kinks or dents in that, and in the end, Lily had sold him the land and 49 percent of the shares for fair market prices.
Jonas opened his office door and welcomed the cool air from the AC. This part of Texas could be hotter than hell in August, and that heat didn’t ease up much just because the sun was about to set.
There was a stack of invoices on his desk just waiting for him to deal with before heading home, but Jonas had barely moved toward the desk to get started on them when he heard a sound. Sort of a moan. Since none of the ranch hands were on the schedule to be in the barn, he went back out. And heard it again along with some whispering this time.
Jonas followed the sounds to the supply room at the far back of the barn, and he threw open the door. A split second after doing that, he was so sorry he had. Because he saw something he definitely hadn’t wanted to see.
Eli and Hayden in a lip-lock.
Jonas made a strangled sound of his own and cursed, which clearly got their attention because both whirled around to face him. They could have been the poster kids for guilty looks. And there was a reason for that. They might have been fourteen, but they had to know the ranch foreman wouldn’t want his son kissing the boss’s daughter.
Hell.
What now? Jonas couldn’t even think of anything to say. Wasn’t sure he could form words because he had seemingly developed a severe case of lockjaw.
“Uh, we were just talking,” Eli blurted out.
It was the worst lie in the history of bad lies, but again Jonas was having trouble pointing out that he’d witnessed a kiss, not any talking.
Thank merciful heaven that both of the teenagers were fully dressed, and there’d been no tongues or groping. Well, none that Jonas had seen, but since he’d once been a teenage boy himself, he knew that kissing, tongues and groping often went hand in hand.
“Please don’t tell Mom,” Hayden insisted, and she was adding more of those pleading pleases when Jonas heard something else.
His name being called out. By Lily.
If Jonas had been in a laughing mood, he would have found it comical just how wide both Eli’s and Hayden’s eyes got. But he sure as hell wasn’t laughing. Wouldn’t be tattling to Lily, either. Not today, anyway. He already had to talk to her about what he’d found in the mailbox, and that would likely concern her enough without adding their kissing teenagers to the mix.
“Don’t do this again,” Jonas warned them, and he stepped back to intercept Lily before she came this way looking for him.
It didn’t take Jonas long to spot her since Lily was, indeed, heading his way, and he also noticed her troubled expression.
“Is everything okay?” they asked in unison. So, obviously he had an unsettled look on his face as well.
“You go first,” he insisted.
Jonas motioned for her to head into his office with him so they’d have some privacy for this chat. Also, this would give their kids a chance to sneak out the back of the barn, and maybe Lily would never be the wiser about the kissing. He added another maybe that Hayden and Eli would actually take his “no kissing” order to heart and never touch lips again.
“I think Hezzie had some skeletons in her closet,” Lily told him once she was inside his office and had shut the door.
Well, that would explain why Alma had joined in on the “troubled look” club. “Literally?”
Lily shrugged. “Alma didn’t get into specifics, but I don’t think it’s as serious as a dead body. Alma just said I might uncover stuff about Hezzie that wouldn’t be flattering.”
In the grand scheme of things, that didn’t sound like much of a deal, but then, he wasn’t a Parkman. The Parkmans had built their family legacies on Hezzie and the woman’s accomplishments. On the surface, those accomplishments were pretty darn impressive since Hezzie had not only founded Last Ride, but she’d personally run three different businesses. Successful businesses that had allowed her to leave a boatload of money to her descendants.
Some of that money had made its way to Lily in the form of a trust fund that had then allowed her to buy the ranch, so Jonas was appreciative that Hezzie was in Lily’s gene pool.
“That was in the box Alma gave you? Info about those possible skeletons?” he clarified.
“Nope. Apparently, what’s in there is what everyone believes to be the facts about Hezzie. According to Alma, some of it is, indeed, facts, or rather true-ish, she said, and she wants me to stick to the true-ish that everyone has accepted as gospel.”
Jonas was still seeing a lot of trouble in Lily’s expression. “Will you?”
She gave another shrug. “Maybe, but it does bug me that Alma wants to keep a dead woman’s secrets. I’ve also got enough curiosity to try to find out what those secrets are.” But she stopped and waved that off. “Probably best, though, not to rock any boats.”
Jonas went with his own idiom. “That’d be the path of least resistance.”
And it would mesh more with the way Lily lived her life. She wasn’t a boat rocker—not in her personal life, anyway. Maybe because she’d had her boat rocked too many times when Griff and she had been together.
“I’ll think about the research on Hezzie tomorrow.” She paused and dragged in a long breath. “Now, tell me what you found in the mailbox.”
Jonas knew she hadn’t forgotten about that, and he hoped Lily was doing a whole lot of steeling up because she just might need it.
“There was a single sheet of paper, no envelope,” Jonas explained.
Which meant the note-leaver or someone on the leaver’s behalf had actually been to the ranch. Lily didn’t have security cameras on the Wild Springs. Not enough crime in or around Last Ride to justify that. But it was possible one of the hands had seen someone drop it off, and Jonas would ask around about that.
He took the note from his center desk drawer and handed it to her. It wouldn’t take long for her to read it since it was only two sentences, but he figured the handful of words could possibly pack a punch.
“‘It’s time you hear the truth,’” Lily read aloud. “‘Call me. Love, Dad.’” Beneath the Dad, there was a phone number with a Texas area code.