Her Tycoon to Tame
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He calmly lifted the cookie and took another bite. His insolence stung like a slap in the face. Then as she focused on the cookie she realized she wasn’t the only one who would be blindsided by today’s disastrous news. She swung to her father who had followed her onto the patio.
“What about Nellie? She’s lived with us since Mom died. She has no other home, no other family. Just us. You can’t turn her out to pasture. She’s too young to retire, and jobs are hard to find right now.”
“Wyatt has promised to continue employing Nellie.”
Wyatt has promised. Right. And she trusted him about as far as she could throw all six feet plus and two hundred whatever rock-solid pounds of him. She glared at him. “What about the other employees, the clients’ horses and the stables? Are you going to do a clean sweep?”
Most new owners brought in their own teams, and she hated to think of the people she’d known and loved like an extended family being scattered across the globe—that was if they were able to find jobs with so many farms downsizing.
“I’ll maintain the status quo while I assess the property and the business.”
“And then what?”
“My decisions will depend on what I discover about the operation.”
“What’s to discover? You bought a world-class stable—”
“Hannah,” her father interrupted, “Brink will go over the particulars of the agreement with you. All you need to know is that Wyatt has agreed to keep the current staff for a full year unless obvious incompetence leads him to decide otherwise.”
Her shoulders snapped straight at the insult. “Sutherland Farm doesn’t employ any incompetents.”
“Then no one need be concerned,” Jacobs said.
Desperation clawed at her throat. “Daddy, please don’t do this. I’m sure there’s a way you can undo the paperwork. Give me a chance to prove to you that I can run the farm and—”
“Hannah, we closed the deal a week ago. Today was merely the first time Wyatt and I could meet personally to discuss the transition.”
“A week ago,” she parroted. Her world had crashed and she’d been oblivious. Head reeling and legs shaking, she tried to make sense of the upheaval to come.
“I’ve already purchased a townhome and the movers have been scheduled,” her father added, sending another shockwave rippling through her.
Jacobs stiffened. “A townhome? What about the cottage?”
My cottage! Ohmigod. Where will I live?
Her father’s expression turned cagey. “Hannah lives in the cottage.”
Jacobs’s hands fisted by his sides and anger lit his eyes.
Confused by the exchange, Hannah looked from the interloper to her father. “My home and my job are part of Sutherland Farm. Where will I go? Where will I live and work?”
Her father sighed and turned toward the bar cart. “I’ll let Wyatt explain.”
“Luthor excluded the cottage and two acres inside the stone fence surrounding it from the deal. You’ll get to keep your house. And, as your father has already explained, like any other employee you’ll be kept on staff as long as the quality of your work meets my standards.” Jacobs’s voice carried about as much warmth as liquid nitrogen.
The man would be her boss.
“Your standards?” From his tone she gathered his standards would be impossible to meet.
Her cottage, the original Sutherland homestead, sat smack in the middle of Sutherland Farm. She’d be surrounded by enemy territory. But at least she’d have a roof over her head.
She swallowed her panic and fought to clear her head. “When is all this upheaval scheduled to take place?”
“I’m taking over as CEO today and moving into this house as soon as your father has vacated.”
In other words, life as she’d always known it had ended.
Two
Anger licked along Wyatt’s nerve endings like kindling catching fire. Luthor Sutherland had deliberately deceived him.
The man had no intention of “retiring” to the original homestead as he’d led Wyatt to believe when he’d insisted the parcel be excluded from the sale, and Sutherland’s daughter was one of the employees Sutherland had been so eager to protect. If Wyatt had known, he would never have signed the employee agreement Sutherland had insisted on.
But if Luthor expected Wyatt to cut his princess any slack, he’d be disappointed. If Hannah couldn’t carry her weight, she’d be fired—per the performance clause Wyatt had included.
What incensed him the most was that he knew he had no one but himself to blame for deception getting past him. He’d been neck-deep in closing an international distribution deal and because he didn’t have the time, interest or knowledge in running a horse farm, he’d delegated the job of finding a self-sufficient operation—one that wouldn’t require him to be on-site—to the best buyer’s agent in the business.
Sutherland Farm met all his criteria. He couldn’t help wondering if there were any more surprises in addition to the leggy brunette liability yet to discover. Whatever the issues, he would find and eradicate them.
He had enough problems without having to deal with a pampered heiress who had been living out of her daddy’s deep pockets. The snippets of conversation he’d overheard through the patio door made it clear that description fit Hannah Sutherland from her silk shirt to her polished high-heeled boots.
He’d bet his seven-figure investment portfolio that Hannah had coasted through life on her beauty and pretty-please smiles. His gut warned him she’d be nothing but trouble. And his instincts about people were rarely wrong. He didn’t need to see the two carats of diamonds in her ears or the watch on her wrist so pricey that a thief could pawn it to buy a car or her short but perfectly manicured nails to confirm her overindulged status.