Page 49 of Tempting Wyatt (Triple Creek Ranch #1)

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

ivy

I’M FINALLY GETTING the hang of poker when the knock comes at Wyatt’s door.

Granted, I’m sitting in my tank top and underwear and all he’s taken off is his socks from the round he let me win, but still. I was confident I was going to win the next hand.

I only hear parts of his conversation with the man in the bowtie, but it’s enough.

Enough to know I’m out of time. I have to send my agent what I have of my screenplay and see if she can get the advance from the production company as soon as possible.

They already made a tentative offer based on the success of Random Hearts and how quickly I’d produced Captive.

All I had to do now was finish the final synopsis of Welcome to Paradise and the advance would be mine.

Except that was the hard part. I didn’t know the ending yet.

I suspect my ending, when Wyatt finds out what I do for a living, won’t be a very happy one. But remembering what Isaac said about the ends justifying the means and hearing what I just heard from a banker on Wyatt’s porch, means it’s time.

I need to talk to Laurel Logan. I need her to help me break the news to Wyatt.

I want to run out there and hug him, hold him together while everything else in his world is falling apart.

He works so damn hard. Harder than anyone I’ve ever known. And he could still lose everything. My heart breaks for him.

I curl up on the couch as their conversation continues. Sounds like the banker is leaving, and I don’t want Wyatt to come in here and know I overheard.

I grab a knit blanket and pull it over my lower half while I wait. My body is heavy and tired from the long day.

I have a feeling Wyatt and I won’t be finishing our poker game tonight.

I hear him pacing outside. I know him well enough to know he’ll come inside when he’s ready, so I close my eyes and wait.

When I wake up on Wyatt’s couch, it’s still dark outside, but a glow of light comes from the kitchen.

Scrambling to find my phone tangled somewhere in the blanket, I check the time. It’s well after midnight.

If Wyatt’s still up this late, he won’t get much sleep. The man wakes with the rooster I think.

Rubbing the sleep from my eyes and shoving my mess of hair from my face, I make my way into the kitchen. Wyatt’s blue and black flannel is draped over a chair. I put it on over my tank top and panties.

He’s so busy scribbling notes on stacks of paper at the kitchen table that he doesn’t notice me.

“Did you get any sleep?”

He jerks his hand forward and spills his coffee all over the stack of papers in front of him.

“Oh God, I’m so sorry.” I rush to grab some paper towels and begin soaking up the spilled black coffee.

“It’s okay. I got it.”

Somehow, Wyatt has aged several years in the hours since I’ve seen him. The bruises on his face from the bar fight have faded away, but the shadows under his eyes are dark. He’s exhausted.

Once we clean up the mess, I set a few nearly ruined papers on a hand towel to dry. Upon closer inspection, I see that they’re invoices. Past-due notices and threatening letters from multiple creditors.

The table is full of them.

“Wyatt, these are—” I begin, but he holds a hand up.

“It’s fine. I’m fine.” He waves his hand across the table—thankfully, there’s no more coffee to spill. “Just couldn’t sleep, so I was trying to get ahead on some of these.”

Stepping closer, I lean over his shoulder and see columns of addition and subtraction problems he scrawled in the margins. There’s no getting ahead of them. From the looks of it, they’re already several months behind.

“What’s the math mean?”

He sighs heavily, and I see it. The weight of the world on his shoulders.

“Trying to figure out how to pay these without letting anyone go. We currently have twenty people on payroll. Twenty families who’d be devastated by the loss of income.” He rakes his hand through his hair.

I don’t know what to say, so I just settle a hand on his shoulder.

“Winter in Montana is brutal. For us, for our employees. There’s only so much we can do. And we’ve stretched every resource as thin as we can.”

“Anything I can do to help?”

His eyes meet mine like he’s seeing me for the first time. “Like what?”

I shrug. “I don’t know. I’ve worked on lots of fundraising campaigns. I had some ideas about marketing that your mom could do to help sell her pies and such and maybe even self-publishing a cookbook.” I nod to the table. “Or I can just make some more coffee and help you organize these?”

I don’t know if I help at all, but for the next few hours, his shoulders lift just a little.

I make coffee. I sort invoices by vendor and date. I use my trusty, dusty writing accessories from my purse—highlighters, sticky tabs, binder clips, and colored pens—to help him make sense of it all so we can put it in a spreadsheet.

I watch in awe of this man who cares so much about everyone else that he goes without sleep. We do all kinds of creative math to try and salvage every cent we can without costing anyone their job.

My brain compares him to Malcolm without me consciously deciding to. Malcolm got off on firing people, celebrated it, made a scene of it. He regularly used destroying people’s lives to set an example, he called it, anytime anyone had disappointed him or disobeyed him on set.

This man—this beautiful, bruised, larger-than-life, world-weary man—loses sleep, trying to figure out how to save everyone and their jobs.

In less than a week, I’ll be cut off. Cold turkey.

No more teasing, no more watching him watch me. No more Wyatt, no more ranch, no more Logan family dinners or making jam.

And I already know the withdrawal is going to be hell.

I might even miss the stubborn ass. And Jasper, too.

When the sun comes up, I curl myself into his lap and start to doze off. And I fall a little bit in love with a man I might never see again after this week ends.