The Virgin Cowboy Billionaire’s Secret Baby(2)

Beside him, Beth had flinched. God knew the woman desperately wanted a family, but as Matt had also found out, pouring your heart, soul and time into a business had a way of interfering with all those other plans.

“We don’t have families yet, Mom,” Beth had replied. “And if it’s that important to keep the property in the family, why don’t you have a problem with Adam turning it into—”

“I trust Adam because he has his priorities straight,” Mom had snapped back. “If having a family was a priority for either of you, then—”

“I’m done.” Beth threw up her hands, and her voice cracked as she added, “I’m out.” Then she’d stormed out of the office.

Matt watched her go, grimacing. “Mom, that’s a touchy subject for her.”

“As well it should be. And as for you, Matthew, there isn’t a woman in Aspen Mill who wouldn’t be thrilled to be the next Mrs. Coolidge.”

He barely resisted rolling his eyes. “So should I just go offer a random woman some money so she’ll marry me?”

“Of course not.”

“Then…what?”

Her lips tightened like they always did when she was pushed to her limit. “Listen, I’m not dictating how you two run your lives. You’re both free to do what you will. But I’m not obligated to leave the family’s property to someone who’s chosen not to have a family.”

He knew damn well she wasn’t just playing games either. Her own brother had been cut out of their parents’ will until the day he’d married, which hadn’t been until he was almost forty. And though the farm had belonged to the Coolidge side of the family, Dad hadn’t had a lot of interest in continuing his parents’ farm, so Mom had taken the reins, as it were, and he’d happily given her control over the whole thing. He wanted no part of anything, including the current power struggle.

Mom had pushed Matt to his limit this morning, and there was no point in arguing with her—there’d be time to do that next time she brought all this up—so he’d let the subject drop. After his mother left, Matt had stayed in the office for a few minutes, but he’d needed to decompress as quickly as possible to ward off a stress migraine. A “Mom migraine”, as his sister had dubbed them. He couldn’t argue with that description.

When he’d left the office, Beth was already in the arena with a client, so he’d go back and check up on her when she was free. She was a champ at shaking off Mom’s relentless pressure to marry herself off and dutifully procreate, but he knew it hurt. For the moment, though, she was giving a lesson in the arena, so he didn’t want to bother her.

Instead he’d grabbed his baseball cap and sunglasses out of the truck, thrown a saddle on Brandy and gone riding.

And two hours later, his teeth were still grinding.

This was getting old fast, but their mother refused to let the issue go. When she’d figured out a few years back that neither Beth nor Matt was hurting for money, and that they didn’t care—and had never cared—about her money, she’d changed her tactics. For the past year, she’d been threatening to give Adam his inheritance early, which would give him carte blanche to bulldoze the property and start his development while Beth scrambled for a new barn to set up shop.

Matt didn’t care about the money. He had more of that now than he could ever spend. And he wasn’t even that sentimental about the family’s farm. This wasn’t about him at all—it was about his sister and his hometown.

Beth could get a job as a trainer anywhere. Her name was well-known throughout the region, and her clients would follow her anywhere, but she’d built Coolidge Stables from the ground up. Or rather, coaxed it from the ashes of their family’s three-generation-old farm that had nearly crumbled under the weight of a few too many hard-hitting recessions. The farm had just kept itself afloat in its best years, and teetered precariously on the brink of foreclosure during the worst. She was solely responsible for all its success over the last five or six years.

Even before Matt made his own fortune, he’d implored their parents to will the property to Beth. It was still in the family because of her, and she deserved the right to continue with her own thriving business.

But thanks to their mother, who’d lorded her will over all three kids ever since they were teenagers, there was an increasingly good chance the property was going to Adam, their younger brother.

No amount of money could persuade their parents or Adam to sell the property to her either. The only way they were keeping it was if the property was willed to Beth or divided among the three of them. In that case, Adam wouldn’t have much choice but to either keep his stake or let his siblings buy him out. Turning the place into a shopping mall would no longer be an option.