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“What?”

“It has to benefit him, too, right? This whole thing? So I’ll find something that he needs. I will make sure that it’s something I can give him.”

“I don’t know about that,” said Fia slowly.

“I do,” said Quinn. “I do, and I will make sure that we win. I promise.”

Because in spite of everything, Quinn had always been a dreamer. Or maybe more accurately, a planner.

And what she set her mind to, she accomplished.

It was the one good thing she had gotten from her dad.

Her dad had left. He hadn’t been faithful, he hadn’t been true. He hadn’t really loved this place.

But Quinn did. And she was going to do right by it, and by Fia and Rory and Alaina. She was going to fix this. If Levi Granger was the only obstacle to getting what she wanted...she was going to plow right on through him.

Regardless of how broad his shoulders were.

“What are you going to do?”

“Well, tomorrow, I am going to go to his house, and I’m going to make him an offer.”

“And you think that’s going to work?”

“It has to.”

There was no other option.

CHAPTER FOUR

QUINN WAS DETERMINED and a little bit breathless by the time she was on the road to Levi’s house the next day. It was weird.

It was an eight-mile drive up the dirt road from Sullivan’s Point to the main road, and around a long, smooth curve. And there was Levi Granger’s property, and yet she never went there.

Ever.

And heading that direction now filled her with the kind of adrenaline she usually only experienced when she was in a rage.

Quinn was not a fighter. Well. Quinn wasn’t a fist fighter—anymore. Quinn was happy to fight with words, however. More than happy.

She hoped that it wouldn’t be necessary in this particular instance. But she’d hoped that from the beginning, and now here she was.

Hoping to negotiate. Ready to fight.

Except Levi was so problematic. Putting it mildly.

But she was armed with a plan. A plan she’d cobbled together last night in a feverish fit of desperation. She thought it was a very good plan, actually. In exchange for him allowing them to forge the road from the highway through his property to the farm store, she would offer him her advice. She had a degree in agribusiness, and she knew full well that Levi had no such thing. In fact, she’d spent the night digging through info on him and had come up with some she hadn’t had before.

“Digging through info” meant calling Colleen Brady, her mother’s old friend, and asking for anything she knew. Colleen always knew a lot. Apparently, Levi hadn’t even finished high school.

She knew he’d been running the ranch here since his parents had died—eighteen years. He knew the land, and she didn’t doubt it. But she had a feeling there was a lot he didn’t know about structuring a business, about organization and about a great many other things she’d studied. In truth, she could help him.

She was fairly excited by the prospect. Maybe excited was the wrong word, but she felt supercharged, so there was that. Because she loved a challenge. In her mind, that was the point of her education. She had gone afar, and now she could bring what she had learned back home. It was perfect. She drove up the long dirt driveway that led to Levi Granger’s homestead.

She had never actually been to his homestead.

Why would she have been? He had to be ten...maybe eleven years older than her.