Page 109 of Stolen By the Billionaire
“We? You mean your parents. Your parents had a farm. You were seven. It wasn’t your responsibility.”
“The farm is my responsibility,” she said. “Because he left, so now it’s one hundred percent my responsibility.”
“Now, it is.”
“Yes, now.”
“But it wasn’t then,” Blaze said, confirming his point.
“The farm is my responsibility.”
“Yes, and I respect how you’ve been responsible for it.”
“I’m entirely responsible for it!”
“Yes.”
“And I need help!” The last part came out like the last squeak of an exhausted mouse.
Sarah clapped her hand over her mouth and stared at him wide-eyed.
Blaze snapped his view back to the road. “Yes, you do need help. It’s too much for one person. It’s too much for several people.”
“But I can’t hire someone to help for what I could ever pay,” she said, her voice choking.
Blaze said, very gently because he’d had similar conversations with many an overwhelmed vet, “Maybe you should consider selling it.”
Her face squeezed like her head was being crushed, and she flopped forward with her face in her hands. “I can’t. I can’t do that to my parents.”
Oh, yes. Sarah felt as trapped as Blaze’s vets did.
He reached over with one hand and rubbed her back, her delicate spine knobbly under her thin tee shirt. “Sarah, they’re gone.”
“I know,” she said in a tiny, pathetic wail. “I know. And I’m always doing my best, but it’s not enough.”
He rested his hand on her back as he drove on the divided highway of the Ohio Turnpike. Darkness drifted down from the sky and fell across the farmland.
The little snufflings she made while trying not to cry were breaking his cold, dead heart. “Do you want me to pull over?”
“No,” she puppy-whimpered.
He dragged the steering wheel sideways and drove the car onto an exit road. “Yes, it is, then.”
At the end of the ramp, he shoved the gear shift into Park and opened his arms to her. “Come here.”
Sarah flipped away from him, opened the car door, and bolted into the twilight cornfield.
“Dammit, Sarah!”
29
Getaway Attempt
Sarah
As soon as Blaze’s car was rolling slowly over the gravel on the side of the offramp, Sarah leaped out, left the door open, and ran as fast as her farm chore-strengthened legs could carry her, thighs pumping and farm boots digging into the soft earth.
If she could reach the corn, she could lose herself among the stalks. She’d played hide-and-seek in the cornfields a million times as a kid. Surely she could—
