Page 46 of Stolen By the Billionaire
“I don’t want to talk to him.”
Blaze ran his hand through his short hair, a skin fade on the sides with a little more on top. “I don’t know what happened with your family. We never received details about why Logan stayed with his grandfather in New York City during vacations rather than returning to Iowa to see his parents or why he wouldn’t eat corn. I didn’t even know you existed.”
“I still think ConAgra or Monsanto sent those guys.” Sarah crossed her arms, rubbing where his plastic ties had reddened her skin. “Monsanto-hired killers makes far more sense than my own aunt the historian, whom I’m on fine terms with, suddenly sending assassins after me.”
Blaze squinted at her because she was making no sense. “Why would a corporation like Monsanto try to kill you?”
“Because I save my garden seeds, of course,” she said, flopping her arms to her sides like she was exasperated at him. “My corn is grown from Monsanto’s proprietary seeds, and I buy those anew every year from the company because you have to. If you don’t buy seeds from them, they will send inspectors to test your corn for their proprietary genes and sue you if they find them. But I save seeds from my vegetable garden produce and replant them because they’re heirloom varieties that breed true. I know how to save seeds. I learned it in 4-H.”
That was not what Blaze had assumed was going on in farming. When he’d read Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books a million years before, in the book The Long Winter, those two bachelor farmer brothers got in trouble when the town was starving because no supply trains with food could bulldoze through the snow. The two guys were hoarding their wheat for seed. They had a false wall or something to hide the grain behind it. A knot in the lumber was the hole, and it had a cork in it. Pa Ingalls figured them out and took the wheat from them to save the town.
Because they were saving the wheat for seeds for the following year.
Because farmers always saved part of their crop for seeds for the next year.
“What?” Blaze asked.
“Seeds!” Sarah snapped at him. “I replant my garden seeds! Monsanto will sue you if you try to save their seeds and replant them. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if they sent goons to rough people up for saving seeds. That’s why I don’t sell my produce at farmers markets. I don’t want to attract attention.”
Blaze raised his eyebrow at her because he could not figure out if she was kidding. “Those guys weren’t from Monsanto, and I don’t think they care about your heirloom tomatoes. Logan told me that Mary Varvara Bell was sending men, I mean people, to kill you to prove to the other mafias that she had no weaknesses, and he told me that before they got there. So, it stands to reason that, since Logan knew ahead of time what was going to happen, he was right.”
She lifted her chin and looked away. “That’s not how I see it.”
Arguing was getting them nowhere, and warm wetness was seeping from the back of his left arm into his shirt sleeve. “If you’re hungry, my housekeeper left supper for us. If you don’t like what she left, we can order delivery for you.”
“Do you want delivery?” she asked, examining his expression.
“I’m eating what Julieta left for me. She gets testy if she thinks I don’t like her cooking.”
“Okay then, I’ll eat what she left, too.” Sarah looked around, peering at the corners of the room as if somebody else might be in the house to save her. “You have a housekeeper?”
“Don’t even think about it. I gave my house staff the week off.”
She looked right at him. “Just one week?”
Blaze raised his hands, helpless at talking sense into this girl. The crease on the back of his arm ached. It was time to see to that. “We’ll see what happens next week. Do you want supper or not?”
“Yeah, sure,” she said, looking through the kitchen, then shifted her weight to her other foot. “Uh, do you have a—”
He pointed at the door to the half-bathroom off the kitchen. “Facilities are right there.”
While she toddled off to the necessary for a few minutes, Blaze retrieved first aid supplies from a crowded drawer on the kitchen’s island.
Scattering gauze rolls and other supplies across the dark wood, he planted himself in a low-backed chair at the head of his dining table on the other side of the kitchen to remedy his bullet wound situation.
Afternoon sunlight streamed over the house, reflecting on the pool and lake outside the house’s rear windows.
When he released the red-soaked bandage he’d tied around his triceps earlier, the cotton tore at the red stripe of raw meat between the edges of his skin and came away stiff.
The horizontal wound interrupted the black ink of the skeletal tattoo lacework on the back of his arm, which he regretted.
Ouch, not too bad, but he felt himself make a face. He needed to watch that.
The wound was just a crease, but it was a pretty deep crease.
Deep soreness ached in his right shoulder when he’d reached with his right hand to rip the bandage off.
Oh, when she’d smashed him with the metal toolbox, right. That was going to be a deep bruise.
