Cheats and scoundrels were among Gracie’s favorite people. Negotiating with them and winning thrilled her almost as much as terrific sex. Not that she’d had much experience with either lately.
She studied the real estate man carefully. “You’re sure about this, Johnny? Selling real estate’s how you make your living. You don’t mind if I track down this Kevin Patrick Daniels and deal with him directly?”
“Suit yourself,” he said with an indifference that rivaled Max at his worst.
“Where can I find him?”
When Johnny remained stubbornly, steadfastly silent, it was Jessie who gave her directions. “Believe me, you won’t be able to miss it. There’s not another place like it on that road. Think of Tara and then exaggerate.”
The man lived on a blasted plantation and he allowed that beautiful old Victorian to fall to ruin? Gracie decided she might come to dislike Kevin Patrick Daniels almost as passionately as Johnny did. That would make buying the house for a pittance of its worth all the more satisfying.
If, of course, she decided she really wanted it.
Which she didn’t, she insisted. This was purely an exercise, a gathering of facts. Nothing more.
Two hours later she was searching a country road for the lane that would take her to Kevin Patrick Daniels, current manager of the property. If that run-down state was his idea of management, he ought to be a quick sell.
She knew the type. Never spend a dime unless the roof is actually falling down. Which it was. No doubt he’d rather accept her offer than put a new coat of paint or a new roof on the place. Her adrenaline pumped just thinking about the negotiations. She felt more alive than she had in months. Hopeful.
And that was before she glimpsed the Daniels estate. Jessie hadn’t exaggerated a bit. It was Tara on steroids. Every bush was tidily trimmed, every blade of grass on the rolling hillside had been neatly shorn to the precise same length. The house and the columns across the front were pristine white, which probably required regular touch-ups. The windows, tall and stately, glistened.
Oh, yes, indeed, Gracie thought, staring at it with a mixture of awe and disgust. Stealing that neglected Victorian from Kevin Patrick Daniels was going to make her day.
3
The discussion had gone on for an hour, about fifty-nine minutes longer than it needed to, Kevin thought. Most of it had covered the same ground over and over. It was time to put an end to it.
“Absolutely not,” he said with finality, leveling a look straight into his cousin’s eyes. “I will not finance another one of your ridiculous, get-rich-quick schemes, Bobby Ray. It’s time you grew up and got a job, like the rest of us.”
“When did you ever hold down an actual job?” his cousin retorted. “All you do is play around with your inheritance—and ours, I might add—like it’s Monopoly money.”
“That Monopoly money has kept you and Sara Lynn afloat for the past five years,” he reminded Bobby Ray. “That’s about four years longer than the marriage would have lasted without it.”
Bobby Ray didn’t even flinch at the shot. Kevin’s opinion of his marriage was clearly old news to him by now. Kevin had repeated it often enough. He’d seen Sara Lynn for the little gold-digger she was from the minute she took up with Bobby Ray. His cousin, reeling from his second divorce and unable to handle life as a bachelor, had jumped straight from the frying pan into the fire.
“If I’d had that money, I could have been a rich man by now instead of living off what you dole out,” Bobby Ray complained bitterly. “I feel like a damn beggar.”
They had been over this turf again and again. Kevin actually felt a certain amount of sympathy for the position his uncle had left Bobby Ray in, but Uncle Steven had known what he was doing. Bobby Ray might be the same age as Kevin, thirty-six, but he had the attention span of a five-year-old. He was on his third wife, even though it was Kevin’s opinion that his heart remained with the first one. Kevin had lost count of the number of jobs he’d had and the number of failed business ventures he’d tried, then lost interest in.
“Unfortunately, you gave your father proof-positive that you lack a certain financial savvy,” he said, wishing there were a kinder way to state the obvious. There wasn’t, so he hammered home his point…again. “Be grateful your father had the foresight to put your trust into my hands so you couldn’t blow all of it. Maybe if you’d shown the slightest evidence of responsibility, he wouldn’t have done that. Instead, you took thirty thousand dollars from him and sank it into a taco stand.”
“It was a fried chicken franchise,” Bobby Ray protested, his expression sullen.
“Oh, yes, that’s right. Next door to a Kentucky Fried Chicken,” Kevin reminded him.
“This chicken was better. It was Ella Mae’s recipe. Everybody in the Northern Neck of Virginia loves Ella Mae’s chicken.”
“Maybe so, especially when she cooked at your mama’s house and served it up free. But you don’t take on a national franchise with a thirty-thousand-dollar investment and an advertising budget of zilch. The only people who ever ate there were related to you, and as big as our clan is we couldn’t support an ice cream stand on the boardwalk in summer, much less an entire restaurant year round. This latest scheme of yours is every bit as ill conceived. Get a job, Bobby Ray. It’ll do you good.”
“Go to hell.”
“No doubt about it,” Kevin said. Bobby Ray Daniels wasn’t the first member of his family to wish him a speedy end and a fiery destination.
The Daniels family wealth,
