Wild Zone (Rough Riders Hockey 4)

Olivia frowned, “What hou—”

She sucked a breath and shook her head. “No. No, you didn’t.”

Quinn’s gaze lifted to hers with a spark of defiance, the one she got whenever she felt unjustly challenged. “I didn’t.”

Which meant their mother had.

“It was paid off.” Everything inside Olivia crumbled. She slammed the laptop and shoved it away. “Dad worked his ass off and sacrificed so they’d have that house paid off in fifteen years. He knew how much that house meant to us, and he never wanted mom to have to worry about finding the money to pay for it if something happened to him.”

“It’s not our house, Liv. It’s mom’s.”

Olivia shook her head. “You’re going to lose it, aren’t you? I don’t see any money anywhere to make the next payment.”

“We won’t lose it if we can keep these jobs through to the end. When the money starts coming in, we’ll be able to pay everything back.”

“To what end? Just to make the same mistakes over again? Five hundred thousand dollars, Quinn. How in the hell are you going to pay that back?”

“In payments, the way everyone pays house loans. With the income we get from the company.”

Olivia put up her hands, palms out. “Whatever. I can’t talk about this now.” She pushed to her feet, one hand on her forehead, one at her hip. “When does the distributor need the money?”

“By five-thirty.”

Olivia looked at her watch. “In an hour?” This just got worse and worse. “Are you serious?”

“It’s Friday. They’re closed tomorrow.”

“Fucking sonofabitch.” She squeezed her eyes closed to focus. “I have to find Tate.” She dragged her phone from her back pocket, tapped into Tate’s number, then just stared at it. Another wave of nausea rolled through her gut. “Oh my God, how am I going to explain this?”

She exhaled, closed her eyes and tried to form a concise way to tell him about this mess. It was a mess for him. A catastrophe for her.

“You won’t have to.” Quinn’s words pulled Olivia’s eyes open and she swore the last two weeks fell on her shoulders all at once.

“What?”

“You won’t have to explain much. He already knows most of it.”

Her dazed brain didn’t absorb any of what Quinn just said. “What? What does he already know?”

“About the house. About the company struggling.”

Olivia shook her head at the ludicrous statement. “How could he possibly know that?”

“He overheard mom and me talking at Lily’s party.”

No, she wasn’t hearing this right. She couldn’t be hearing this right. “Okay…” She shoved her phone back into her pocket. “You’re telling me that Tate knew that the company was leveraged against the house and that the company was in trouble?”

Quinn nodded. “Mom was telling me that after the senator’s christening, we only needed one more job to get enough to pay off the balloon payment coming due.”

Olivia shook her head. “You only thought he heard you. He wouldn’t keep that from—”

“Mom asked him not to tell you.”

Olivia didn’t respond. Her mind was spinning, her world shattering.

“It put him in a really bad position,” Quinn said. “Mom did exactly what she did to me, snowed him with the assurance that it would be fine. That the new business would solve all our problems.”

Olivia felt a time bomb at the center of her chest. Tick, tick, tick.