I gathered them and then reordered them, forcing myself not to violate his privacy by looking. Many of them were trail guides and local information, some flyers and menus from the few diners in town.
But I started when I saw the unfolded sheaf of papers with letterhead from Pohlman’s Law Office —a lawyer whose name I recognized. Not long ago, I’d looked over similar paperwork handed to me by my mother. The letterhead of my mom’s lawyer.
This was the same lawyer—one of only two in town—who had officiated the paperwork for my mom’s anonymous benefactor. The one who had invested in the ranch as a silent partner, taking a mere twenty percent of any profits accrued, if and when we ever stood to make a profit.
My hands shook. Because now I had to find out why Adam had my mom’s paperwork. But as I read on, I discovered that it wasn’t Mom’s paperwork. It was Adam’s. Because Adam was Mom’s benefactor. And at the bottom of the page, his signature said so, and the date, showing he’d signed those papers today.
My heart thumped so hard it was painful. The deal had been initiated before the auction. Weeks before we’d ever met in person. I felt like the coyote in that old cartoon who’d had the floor sawed out from under him. He stood there waiting—waiting for the fall. And the room spun from my disorientation and my hands shook.
I dropped the paperwork onto the desk and scurried out of that room as fast as I possibly could, stooping to pick up the towels and bottles. But I wasn’t fast enough because Adam stepped onto the porch at that moment and I jumped so hard I dropped everything. Towels went flying and bottles went bouncing.
“Here, let me get those,” he said.
“No!” I shrieked, still shaking. “No. I’ve got it.” And I bustled around like a freak trying to pick up every last thing while he watched me with the most obvious puzzlement I’d ever seen on his face.
“Emilia, what’s wrong?”
“Mia—” My mom showed up right behind me. “I’ll get the towels.” And with a huff of frustration, and still shaking as if it was forty below outside instead of a toasty ninety-five, I shoved them into my mom’s arms and walked away.
“I gotta…I need to be alone for a while,” I gasped and then headed out toward the front of the house. What I really wanted to do was get in my car and screech the hell out of the driveway, but I wasn’t about to stop everything, go inside and start searching for my car keys. So I set foot to the highway instead.
I walked for about ten minutes before I noticed a long shadow moving up behind me. The way it moved, the way it gained on me even when I stepped up my pace, I knew exactly who it was.
I stopped so abruptly that he almost ran into me. We were standing on the roadside along an empty lot. I ducked through the ranch-style fence into the field. Of course, he followed me.
“What has you so freaked, Emilia?”
I kept walking, this time, not trying to outpace him but the words were rolling around in my head so that I could hardly round them up to form a coherent sentence.
Then I turned on him. “You tell me,” I ground out.
He shook his head, utterly confused.
“Why do you have paperwork in there declaring yourself as my mother’s secret investor?”
His mouth set. “You went through my papers?”
“I knocked them on the floor because I’m a fucking clumsy housekeeper. If you didn’t want me to find them, you shouldn’t have left them sitting out there like that. It not like they were locked in a document safe.”
He shifted his stance, looking away. I could tell he was pissed. So the fuck what if his secret was out? It was just another one in his long string of secrets. “I set them down there because I just got them today, in town, from the lawyer. I had no idea you’d be going into the room.” He looked back at me with narrowed eyes. “You were never supposed to see those.”
I tried to breathe while gesturing wildly with my hands. “I don’t get—Why did you—how could you have known—when—?”
And I would have continued on like that if he hadn’t put his hands on my shoulders, pulling me to face him. “Take a deep breath and calm down. You are shaking like you saw your own ghost.”
And I was. And no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t control it.
“Emilia,” he said again, this time quietly and I looked in his eyes.
And then I scowled and smacked his chest with the back of my hand. “You tell me everything now, Adam Drake, or… or I’ll beat the shit out of you.”