e?”
“She was so compliant, so under her father’s sway I expected it to be easy to get her to marry me. But she’s changed.”
I felt pride at that, knowing what I did about our girl, that she was slowly finding herself, finding her place in the world, and I was thankful to have a spot in it.
“You underestimated her.”
“It seems so.”
Ava came around the fence, a coiled rope in her right hand. She’d been ready for the steer roping when we’d all been interrupted. “You’re not here to wish me well, Perry. What do you want?” Before he could reply, she continued. “And if I don’t give it to you, are you going to extort money out of me as well?”
Perry turned to face her. We were forgotten. Bad move.
“Extortion?” he asked. “I haven’t extorted anyone.”
I heard the others come up to the fence behind us, but stayed quiet.
“Right, extortion only applies to money. I’m just an object you were trying to gain.”
He shrugged a shoulder. “When you put it that way, it sounds so callous. I prefer wife.”
Ava arched a pale brow and waited.
“We’d have been good together.”
“Our bed would have been a little crowded with you, me and my money.”
Perry tipped his head toward me and Tucker.
“Seems you like a crowded bed.”
While Ava flushed, she held her ground, kept her chin tipped up. She wasn’t ashamed of us of what we shared.
“Your father’s going to jail,” he told her. “With what the SEC has on him—”
“That I’m sure you helped them find,” she added.
He held up his hands in surrender. “It can all go away.”
“You’re saying you can make the evidence against my dad just disappear? Because why, Perry? Because it’s fake or because you did everything and have pinned it on him?”
Yeah, she was right on target. His jaw clenched and besides him being a slimy bastard, the look he shot Ava was downright mean.
“I had no involvement in the sale of Investicorp stock.”
“Really? Because the meeting you had with the company’s CEO last month at the country club was just a golf game?”
Everyone was watching the back and forth like a tennis match. Quiet, perhaps even holding their breath, to see what would happen.
“What do you know of that?”
She shrugged, fiddled with the rope in her hands. “You have your sources, I have mine. Let’s just say you’re not the only one being watched.”
Ah, so she’d been a busy girl working her connections.
“That meeting was nothing. There’s no proof of my connection to the early stock report.”
“Who said anything about a stock report?” she countered.