“I’m doing you no favors by continuing to coddle you.” He paused and glanced at his friend. “I won’t always be here to support you, Hannah. It’s time you learned to take care of yourself.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m cutting you off.”
Shock followed by a chaser of panic sent her staggering backward. “What do you mean?” she repeated.
“I will no longer support you or your lost causes.”
“Why? What did I do? How will I survive?”
“You’ll have to learn to live on your salary.”
Hurt, fear and betrayal ignited like a barn fire beneath her breastbone. “Couldn’t we have talked about this before you made such a drastic decision?”
Her father shrugged and realigned the pen beside a thick pile of papers on his desk. “What good would that have done?”
“I would have talked you out of it. Somebody should have talked you out of it.” She shot an injured and confused glance at the attorney who shrugged apologetically. “This farm, this property has been in our family for generations. There are a lot of people depending on you and me and—”
“It’s too late, Hannah.” Her father sighed and suddenly the starch left his spine, making him look old and tired. He refilled his drink, then sank into the leather chair.
She turned to Brinkley. “Can he do this? What about my mother’s share of the business?”
“Your grandparents put the farm in your father’s name before he married your mother. Her name was never added to the deed. You received the only inheritance you’ll get from her estate when you turned twenty-one.”
And most of that was gone. She’d spent the money on her horses, confident in the belief that her father would continue to fund her efforts.
Then realization clicked, jolting Hannah out of her stupefaction. Wyatt Jacobs must be the one who’d bought the farm right out from under her. The sneaky, conniving, inheritance-swindling bastard.
Cold eyes, cold heart, Nellie had always said.
Hannah’s pulse galloped in her eardrums like stampeding hooves. If she couldn’t make her father or Brinkley see sense, she’d have to talk to the jerk who had usurped her and convince him to renege on the deal. Then she’d figure out a way to change her father’s mind before he found another buyer.
She stalked through the patio door and spotted the interloper at a table, calmly eating from a plate of Nellie’s cookies and drinking a glass of milk as if he hadn’t just blasted the foundation right out from under her life. She marched toward him and pulled up at his elbow.
“This is my home. You can’t waltz in here and steal the property. My father is having a momentary bout of senility and—”
Jacobs rose to tower above her, his face like granite. “I didn’t steal Sutherland Farm, doc. I paid more than fair market value.”
He calmly lifted the cookie and took another bite. His insolence stung like a slap in the face. Then as she focused on the cookie she realized she wasn’t the only one who would be blindsided by today’s disastrous news. She swung to her father who had followed her onto the patio.
“What about Nellie? She’s lived with us since Mom died. She has no other home, no other family. Just us. You can’t turn her out to pasture. She’s too young to retire, and jobs are hard to find right now.”
“Wyatt has promised to continue employing Nellie.”
Wyatt has promised. Right. And she trusted him about as far as she could throw all six feet plus and two hundred whatever rock-solid pounds of him. She glared at him. “What about the other employees, the clients’ horses and the stables? Are you going to do a clean sweep?”
Most new owners brought in their own teams, and she hated to think of the people she’d known and loved like an extended family being scattered across the globe—that was if they were able to find jobs with so many farms downsizing.
“I’ll maintain the status quo while I assess the property and the business.”
“And then what?”
“My decisions will depend on what I discover about the operation.”
“What’s to discover? You bought a world-class stable—”
“Hannah,” her father interrupted, “Brink will go over the particulars of the agreement with you. All you need to know is that Wyatt has agreed to keep the current staff for a full year unless obvious incompetence leads him to decide otherwise.”
Her shoulders snapped straight at the insult. “Sutherland Farm doesn’t employ any incompetents.”
“Then no one need be concerned,” Jacobs said.
Desperation clawed at her throat. “Daddy, please don’t do this. I’m sure there’s a way you can undo the paperwork. Give me a chance to prove to you that I can run the farm and—”
“Hannah, we closed the deal a week ago. Today was merely the first time Wyatt and I could meet personally to discuss the transition.”
“A week ago,” she parroted. Her world had crashed and she’d been oblivious. Head reeling and legs shaking, she tried to make sense of the upheaval to come.
“I’ve already purchased a townhome and the movers have been scheduled,” her father added, sending another shockwave rippling through her.
Jacobs stiffened. “A townhome? What about the cottage?”
My cottage! Ohmigod. Where will I live?
Her father’s expression turned cagey. “Hannah lives in the cottage.”
Jacobs’s hands fisted by his sides and anger lit his eyes.
Confused by the exchange, Hannah looked from the interloper to her father. “My home and my job are part of Sutherland Farm. Where will I go? Where will I live and work?”
Her father sighed and turned toward the bar cart. “I’ll let Wyatt explain.”
“Luthor excluded the cottage and two acres inside the stone fence surrounding it from the deal. You’ll get to keep your house. And, as your father has already explained, like any other employee you’ll be kept on staff as long as the quality of your work meets my standards.” Jacobs’s voice carried about as much warmth as liquid nitrogen.
The man would be her boss.
“Your standards?” From his tone she gathered his standards would be impossible to meet.
Her cottage, the original Sutherland homestead, sat smack in the middle of Sutherland Farm. She’d be surrounded by enemy territory. But at least she’d have a roof over her head.
She swallowed her panic and fought to clear her head. “When is all this upheaval scheduled to take place?”
“I’m taking over as CEO today and moving into this house as soon as your father has vacated.”
In other words, life as she’d always known it had ended.
Two
Anger licked along Wyatt’s nerve endings like kindling catching fire. Luthor Sutherland had deliberately deceived him.
The man had no intention of “retiring” to the original homestead as he’d led Wyatt to believe when he’d insisted the parcel be excluded from the sale, and Sutherland’s daughter was one of the employees Sutherland had been so eager to protect. If Wyatt had known, he would never have signed the employee agreement Sutherland had insisted on.
But if Luthor expected Wyatt to cut his princess any slack, he’d be disappointed. If Hannah couldn’t