The SEAL's Secret Heirs(30)

It was another tangle he didn’t know how to unsnarl, so he left it alone until he could figure it out. Besides, no one was chomping at the bit to change the current living situation and for now, Kyle, Liam and Hadley shared Wade House with Maggie and Maddie. Which meant that it would be ridiculous to tell Hadley not to pick up one of his daughters when she cried. So he didn’t.

Plus, he was deep in the middle of growing the cattle business. Calving season was upon them, which meant days and days of backbreaking work to make sure the babies survived, or the ranch lost money instantly. He couldn’t spend ten or twelve hours a day at the cattle barn and take care of babies. That was his rationale anyway, and he repeated it to himself often. Some days it rang more true than others.

A week after Grace had told him he’d earned custody of his daughters, Kyle spent thirty horrific minutes in his office going through email and other stuff Ivy, Wade Ranch’s bookkeeper and office manager, had dumped on his desk with way too cheery a smile. The woman was sadistic. Death by paper cuts might as well be Ivy’s mantra.

God, he hated paperwork. He’d rather be hip-deep in manure than scanning vet reports and sales figures and bills and who knew what all.

A knock at his door saved him. He glanced up to see a smiling Emma Jane and he nearly wept in relief. Emma Jane had the best title in the whole world—sales manager—which meant he didn’t have to talk to people who wanted to buy Wade Angus. She handled everything and he blessed her for it daily.

“Hey, boss,” she drawled. “Got a minute?”

She always called him “boss” with a throaty undertone that made him vaguely uncomfortable, as if any second now, she might declare a preference for being dominated and fall at his feet, prostrate.

“For you, always.” He kicked back from the desk and crossed his arms as the sales manager came into his office. “What’s up?”

With a toss of her long blond hair, Emma Jane sashayed over to his desk and perched one hip on the edge, careful to arrange her short skirt so it revealed plenty of leg. Kyle hid a grin, mostly because he didn’t want to encourage her. God love her, but Emma Jane had the subtlety of a Black Hawk helicopter coming in for landing.

“I was thinking,” she murmured with a coy smile. “We’ve mostly been selling cattle here locally, but we should look to expand. There’s a big market in Fort Worth.”

Obviously she was going somewhere with this, so Kyle just nodded and made a noncommittal sound as he waited for the punch line.

“Wade Ranch needs to make some contacts there,” she continued, and rearranged her hair with a practiced twirl. “We should go together. Like a business trip, but stay overnight and take in the sights. Maybe hit a bar in Sundance Square?”

First half of that? Great plan. Spot-on. Second half was so not a good idea, Kyle couldn’t even begin to count the ways it wasn’t a good idea. But he had to tread carefully. Wade Ranch couldn’t afford for Kyle to antagonize another employee into quitting. Liam still hadn’t replaced Danny Spencer, and Kyle was starting to worry his brother was going to announce that he’d decided Kyle should be the ranch manager.

“I like the way you think,” he allowed. “You’re clearly the brains of this operation.”

She batted her lashes with a practiced laugh, leaning forward to increase the gap at her cleavage. “You’re such a flatterer. Go on.”

Since it didn’t feel appropriate for the boss to be staring down the front of his employee’s blouse, no matter how obvious she was making it that she expected him to, Kyle glanced over Emma Jane’s shoulder to the window. And spied the exact person he’d been hoping to see. Grace. Finally.

He’d been starting to wonder if she was planning to avoid him for the next ten years. From the corner of his eye, he watched her park her green Toyota in the small clearing outside the barn and walk the short path to the door. His peripheral vision was sharp enough to see a sniper in a bell tower at the edge of a village—or one social worker with hair the color of summer wheat at sunset, who had recently asked Kyle to give her space.

“No, really,” he insisted as he focused on Emma Jane again. Grace had just entered the barn, judging by the sound of the footsteps coming toward his office, which he easily recognized as hers. “You’ve been handling cattle sales for what, almost a year now? Your numbers are impressive. Clearly you know your stuff.”

Or she knew how to stick her breasts in a prospective buyer’s face. Honestly, there was no law against it, and he didn’t care how she sold cattle as long as she did her job. Just as there was no law against letting Grace think there was more going on here in his office than there actually was.