Quinlan: Foster’s Pride – Lion Shapeshifter Romance (Foster's Pride Book 3), Kathi Barton [management books to read TXT] 📗

I’d never do that. You’ve been honest with me. Honesty is always the best way to go. But this thing with my son? Well, it’s going to take me a minute or two to think on it.” He looked at her then, straight in the eye as she’d done with him when she’d spoken to him. “I think I knew he was screwing around with the horses and such. Not to the point you’re telling me about, but that don’t mean I’m not believing you. It’s hard to…well, he’s my son no matter what comes of this.”

“Yes, sir.” Billy looked over at her Aunt Rogue, a woman he’d come to admire more than he could remember ever thinking of a person he’d only just met. “This is a lot to give you at one time. I understand that. I only came here to tell you about the way I can talk to your horses. But you asked me what they’d told me, and I will never lie to you. I understand this might be something that will keep me from working for you—the knowledge that I’m not a normal kid. But I—”

“Listen, kid. There ain’t a soul in this world that is normal. I don’t know why that word even applies to anything anymore. Normal went out the window the day Adam was created. Nothing is just as it seems either. There are always things that will change, or even just tweak something, and it becomes the new normal.” Robby laughed a little. “I like you, Billy. A great deal. You’re smart, honest, and you have a good head on your shoulders. I like that in any person, male or female. And I want you to work for me, more now than before. You can tell me things I’d never get from that uncle of yours or even a man that has been training my horses as long as I’ve been selling them. Things that will make me a better horse owner and a man who cares about the animals that put bread on my table. You remember this when you’re out there and one of them people is telling you they’re normal. They ain’t, no more than you and me are. Now. I’ve had me a bit of thinking time, and I want you to tell me once again how you know about Robin and the pigs. Then I’ve got me some things I’ll ask you about it, so I have my ducks all planted in the same row. All right?”

She told him, leaving out nothing at all this time. When he asked her a few things, she not only had the answers for him on most of them, but she was true to her word and told him honestly what she knew and what she didn’t. There wasn’t much of the latter, however.

“Now, these here pigs. Do you know what farm they’re on?” She told him they were on his place. “I figured you were going to say that. I’ll have to find them. Unless, of course, you have an idea where they are.”

She not only knew but handed him a small piece of paper with the directions on how to get there. He didn’t ask. Robby wanted to know who had given them to her, but he was afraid the answer was going to freak him out again. It never occurred to him how much more the animals knew about his farm than he knew. Like there not just being a pig farm on the land, but ponds he could be utilizing for the place too.

Something occurred to Robby as he was looking at the handwritten directions. Not that it hadn’t occurred to him before, but now it wasn’t just something that was a passing thought. He was in over his head when it came to his only child. Robin, for all his trouble, was even worse than he’d thought he was.

“I’ve messed up here. Not just with the horses. I can take care of them to the best of my ability, and I think I now have the best people on board to help out. But this thing with my son. I have a feeling I’m going to need more than just a little help on this.” He looked at Rogue. “I know you offered, several times now, for you and your family to help me out with this, but I have only just realized I’m going to be messing it up because of what he is to me.”

“No, I don’t think you will, Robby. I think, and this could be just me listening to what you’re saying, you’ve had an idea that your son was doing things you wouldn’t have approved of for some time now. Billy here only gave you the proof.” He said that was it. “We’ll help you. We’ll help you in any way you want. Or, and I think this might be best for you, we just go ahead and take over the problem and do it the way you’d want it done if he’d been anyone else.”

“I’d have just shot him and been done with it.” She didn’t so much as blink at him when he said that. Robby wasn’t sure he didn’t think this was just the way it should be handled. Robin was killing people and profiting from it and using Robby’s ranch to do it from. “All right. I think I’d like you to take it over. I do want to know, but perhaps not until it’s necessary that I do. I have it in my head that I’m also going to have to take some heat about this. I’ll be all right with that so long as I know things are—”

“He’s coming.” No one moved when Billy spoke. The front door opened, and he could hear Robin bitching about the weather, which had turned out to be a rainy day instead of one of the nice sunny ones they’d had of late. Opening the door to