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“Gloria has several expensive habits that she expected Nash to take care of.”
Mama was a bit spoiled, but that didn’t lead to Nash having financial difficulties.
“She sometimes borrows money,” Kaz informed me.
I frowned. “You are confusing my mother with?—”
“She has a shopping addiction. You know that, don’t you?”
I stared at him, absolutely confused. “She likes to buy stuff.”
“She can’t afford to buy the stuff she buys, Duke. Cartier bracelets. Million-dollar necklaces? Nash was busting his ass to pay for her habit.”
I knew that. And I’d wondered more than once if he’d already started selling off pieces of the ranch—quiet, private sales, the kind ranchers did under the radar to keep the community from seeing the cracks. No one wanted to be known as the man losing his legacy.
That’s when my phone rang and wouldn’t you have it—it was my mother.
I sighed, stepping away from the main arena and ducking into the shadows near the horse trailers before answering.
“Mama.”
The moment I spoke, she was already wailing. “Duke, you can’t do this to me! You just can’t!”
I closed my eyes, pinching the bridge of my nose.Here we go.
“What’s this about, Mama?”
She cried out something incoherent.
“Mama, calm down.”
“Calm down?” she screeched, her voice shaking with hysteria. Shit, she sounded just like Fiona when she was screaming. “You’re breaking up with Fiona and for”—she sucked in a sharp breath—“thatslut.”
Right!
“Mama, my relationship with Fiona is not your business.” I’d always had problems setting boundaries with my mother—which came from being her life-saver as a kid. But not this time.
She gasped like I struck her. “How can you say that, baby?” She went from screeching banshee to Victorian ingenue.
“Mama, Fiona works for me, and that’s it. She shouldn’t have told you about?—”
“Of course, she should’ve. We talk every day.”
No shit!Well, this was worse than I thought.
“Are you sleeping with that whore’s daughter?”
I closed my eyes. I couldn’t ask my mother to check her language when it came to Maria or Elena because I’d been calling them that for years.
“Mama, who I sleep with is also not your business.” I kept my voice calm, cowboy to spooked mare. “And I don’t have a relationship of any kind with…Elena.”
Probably because I fucked up so bad that every time she sees me, she either looks through me or wants to stab me.
“Don’t say her name,” Mama shrieked. “Do you know that she sleeps around? Do you? According to Mindy, she has something going on with Hunt and Maverick Kincaid. She’s a whore.”
“You already said that, Mama.”
But she was past this conversation being a dialog because she went on like I hadn’t spoken. “You think people won’t talk? You think they won’t say the same things about you as they did about Nash?”