Rode Hard, Put Up Wet: Cowboy Romance (Rebels & Outlaws 2)

"Then we'll get to it."

Chapter Thirty

Morgan Lowe's phone, pressed into her shoulder, buzzes, and she jerks awake with a gasp. She'd been having another dream. The ones she doesn't like. It's been happening more and more since Dad died.

She reaches down and flicks to answer the call, hoping to get it before Phil wakes up beside her, and she pads, still nude, out of the bedroom before she puts the phone to her ear.

"Hello?"

It's a woman's voice on the other line, and it takes a minute before she realizes who it is.

"Hello, Miss Lowe. How are you doing this morning?"

She rubs the sleep out of her eyes and tries to pretend she didn't just wake up.

"Things are going great," she says. It's true, as far as she knows. But it would still be nice to know why she's getting a call at five in the morning from anyone on her board, never mind Andrea Neill, who's never been keen on her to begin with.

"Oh, I didn't wake you, did I?"

Morgan presses her eyes shut and tries to get the stinging to go away, but no matter what she does, it doesn't seem to work.

"No, not at all. I was just getting ready to jump in the shower."

"I'm glad to hear it."

Morgan presses her forehead into the wall.

"It is a little early, though. Did you need something? Is everything alright?"

"Oh, of course," the woman on the other end says.

She's not a young woman any more. Well… that would be one way to put it. The polite way. The extremely polite way, even. A less polite way to phrase things would be to point out that she's the eldest member of the board by almost ten years.

For a woman her age, it's a surprise that she gets out of bed in the morning. For a woman her age, with her money, it's a surprise that she makes calls for herself. But she's a woman who knows what she wants and makes sure she's in a position to get it.

"Yes, it's about what we discussed during the phone conference, the other day. You recall, don't you?"

She did. She remembered that they'd discussed things for nearly an hour, and that was before they'd started their bimonthly barrage of questions. "Yes, of course. You didn't need to call, you know. The next conference call is only in a couple of days, I'm sure you've got more important—"

"I'm sure that you're just being polite, Miss Lowe, but if I wanted to wait, I would have. I'm not so old as that."

"I didn't mean—"

"Of course you didn't. Now, about the Callahan ranch, specifically."

"What about it?"

"How is progress going?"

Morgan looks back over her shoulder. He'll still be in bed for another couple of minutes, no doubt. In a job like his, you rise early, but five in the morning might still be early for him.

"It's not clear at this point. I'm not sure if I'm going to continue to pursue it."

The woman on the other end of the line is silent. There's no part of Morgan that believes for a moment that she doesn't have an opinion. Given their prior interactions, there's only a very small part of her that believes that opinion is going to be positive.

"That would be a mistake, dear," she says. If her tone is what she arrived at after calming down for a moment, Morgan's concerned how stern the rebuke would have sounded if she'd spoken immediately.

"I'm continuing to look at the situation from all available perspectives, of course, but as the situation has developed—"