Heart Of A Cowboy

“They’ll say yes,” Sasha said confidently, beaming now. “I ride with Mom all the time.” The smile faded. “We mostly just ride in arenas and stuff, because Seattle’s such a big city. In France, we probably won’t get to do it at all. But this is real riding, on a real ranch, just like in that movie, City Slickers.”

Tricia and Carolyn exchanged looks, both of them smiling now.

Somehow, they’d gone from being acquaintances to being friends.

“Not too much like it, I hope,” Tricia said. “And that’s what we are, isn’t it? A pair of city slickers?”

“Speak for yourself,” Sasha joked, folding her arms decisively in front of her little chest and jutting out her chin. “I might live in a city, but I know how to ride a horse.”

“Yes, you do,” Tricia conceded. “Now, what do you say we head for home? Valentino probably needs to go out for a walk, and Winston likes to have his supper early.”

“Can we give Winston sardines?” Sasha asked. “It’s Sunday, and he always gets sardines on Sunday. That’s what you said.”

“It is indeed what I said,” Tricia answered, nodding to Carolyn as the other woman waved goodbye and walked off. “And I am a woman of my word.”

“Good,” Sasha said, in a tone of generous approval.

Tricia took the little girl’s hand. “Let’s go thank Matt’s dad and mom for inviting us to the barbecue,” she said. “Then we’ll go home and walk Valentino and give Winston his sardines.”

Sasha yawned widely and against her will, politely putting a hand over her mouth. It was still fairly early in the day, but she’d been running around in the fresh air for a couple of hours now, laughing and playing with a horde of energetic country kids, and she probably wasn’t over the jet-lag of the trip from Seattle.

By the time Sasha had had a warm bath and watched part of a Disney movie on DVD, she’d be asleep on her feet.

“Can I send the text to Mom and Dad?” she asked, when goodbyes and thank-yous had been said, and the two of them were back in Tricia’s Pathfinder, headed toward home. “I know how to do it.”

Tricia smiled, remembering the message she’d received from Sasha before, from the aquarium in Seattle. “Sure,” she said. She pulled over to one side of the road, just long enough to extract the cell from her purse and hand it to Sasha. “Remember, your mom and dad’s plane didn’t leave Sea-Tac until this morning, so they’re still in transit.”

Sasha sighed in contented resignation. “And that means they won’t get the message until they land. I know that already.”

“I did mention it before, didn’t I?” Tricia admitted, in cheerful chagrin.

“That’s okay, Aunt Tricia,” Sasha said, already pushing buttons on the phone like a pro. “You’re probably tired, like me.”

Love for this child welled up in Tricia, threatening to overflow. “Probably,” she agreed, her voice a little husky.

By the time they pulled into the driveway alongside Natty’s venerable old Victorian, Sasha had finished transmitting a fairly long text message to her parents and put the phone aside.

They could hear Valentino barking a welcome-home from the bottom of the outside stairway, and he was all over Sasha with kisses the moment Tricia unlocked the door.

She was about to reprimand the dog when Sasha’s delighted giggles registered.

They were having fun.

“I’ll get the leash,” Tricia said, stepping around the reunion on the threshold. She set her purse and phone on the counter and glanced at her computer monitor, across the room, wondering if Hunter had sent her any emails. There would be plenty of time to check later, she decided, collecting Valentino’s sturdy nylon lead from the hook on the inside of the pantry door.

Sasha and Tricia took the dog for his much-needed walk, bringing along the necessary plastic bag for cleanup, and Winston was waiting when they got back, prowling back and forth on his favorite windowsill and meowing loudly for his dinner.

Sasha fed the cat an entire tin of sardines from Natty’s supply downstairs, while Tricia gave Valentino his kibble and freshened his bowl of water.

Since both Sasha and Tricia were still stuffed from all they’d eaten at the barbecue, supper would be contingent on whether or not they got hungry and, if they did, it would consist of either leftover pizza from the night before or cold cereal, sugary-sweet.

They watched a movie together, then Sasha went into the bathroom to bathe, don her pajamas and dutifully brush her teeth, all of these enterprises closely supervised by Valentino. In the meantime, Tricia folded out the living room couch, retrieved the extra bed pillows from the coat closet and fluffed them up so Sasha would be as comfortable as possible.

The little girl insisted on checking Tricia’s cell phone, just in case there had miraculously been an answer from Diana and Paul, and seemed mildly disappointed when there wasn’t. “Missing your mom and dad?” Tricia asked softly, sitting down on the hide-a-bed mattress while Sasha squirmed and stretched, a settling-in ritual she’d been performing since she was a toddler.

“A little bit,” Sasha admitted wisely. “But I like being here with you and Valentino and Winston, too.”

Tricia kissed her forehead. “And we like having you here,” she said. “In fact, we love it.”

Sasha snuggled down in her covers, while Valentino took up his post nearby, eschewing his dog bed for a hooked rug in front of the nonworking fireplace. “And you love me, too, right?”

Tricia’s throat tightened again, and she had to swallow a couple of times before she replied, “Right. I love you very much.”

Sasha’s eyes closed, and she sighed and wriggled a little more. “Love—you—” she murmured.

And then she was sound asleep.

CHAPTER SIX

BRODY AND CONNER stood in the side yard of the main ranch house that blue-skied morning, keeping the length of a pitchfork handle between them, watching as two shiny RVs pulled out onto the county road, one after the other. Both horns tooted in cheery farewell and that was it. Melissa and Steven and the kids were on their way back to Stone Creek, Arizona, in the Bradmobile, while Davis and Kim were heading for Cheyenne, where they intended to pick up their just-weaned Yorkie pups.

And Conner was alone on the place with his brother, which was the only thing worse than being alone on the place period. Brody served as a reminder of better times, when they’d been twin-close, and instead of assuaging Conner’s loneliness, it only made him feel worse, missing what was gone.

Since country folks believe it’s bad luck to watch people out of sight when they leave a place, especially home, Conner turned away before the vehicles disappeared around the first bend in the road and made for the barn. He’d saddle up, ride out to check some fence lines and make sure the small range crew moving the cattle to the other side of the river, where there was more grass, was on the job.

The crossing was narrow, through fairly shallow water, and the task would be easily accomplished by a few experienced cowpunchers on horseback, but Conner liked to keep his eye on things, anyhow. Some of the beeves were bound to balk on the bank of that river, calves in particular, and stampedes were always a possibility.

Conner was surprised—and not surprised—when Brody fell into step beside him, adjusting his beat-up old rodeo hat as he walked.

“So now that the family is out of here,” Brody said mildly, “you’re just going to pretend I’m invisible?”

Conner stopped cold, turning in the big double doorway of the barn to meet Brody’s gaze. “This is a working cattle ranch,” he reminded his brother. “Maybe you’d like to sit around and swap lies, but I have things to do.”

Brody shook his head, and even though he gave a spare grin, his eyes were full of sadness and secrets. “Thought I’d saddle up and give you a hand,” he said, in that gruff drawl he’d always used when he wanted to sound down-home earnest. He came off as an affable saddle bum, folksy and badly educated, without two nickels to rub together, and that was all bullshit. No one knew that better than Conner did, but maybe Brody was so used to conning people into underestimating him, so he could take advantage of them when they least expected it, that he figured he could fool his identical twin brother, too.

Fat chance, since they had duplicate DNA, and at one time they’d been so in sync that they could not only finish each other’s sentences, they’d had whole conversations and realized a lot later that neither of them had spoken a single word out loud.

“Thanks,” Conner said, without conviction, when the silence became protracted and he knew Brody was going to wait him out, try to bluff his way through as he’d do with a bad poker hand, “but it’s nothing I can’t handle on my own.” Like I’ve been doing all these years, while you were off playing the outlaw.

Of course, Conner had had plenty of help from Davis along the way, but that wasn’t the point. The ranch was their birthright—his and Brody’s—and Brody had taken off, leaving him holding the proverbial bag, making the major decisions, doing the work. And that, Conner figured, was a big part of the reason why he didn’t have what he wanted most.

Brody sighed heavily, tilted his head to one side, as though trying to work a kink out of his neck, and looked at Conner with a mix of anger, amusement and pity in his eyes. Then he rubbed his stubbly chin with one hand. “This place,” he said again, and with feigned reluctance, “is half mine. So are the cattle and the horses. While I’m here, I mean to make myself useful, little brother, whether you like it or not.”

Conner unclamped his back molars. “Oh, I remember that the ranch is as much yours as it is mine,” he responded grimly, forcing the words past tightened lips. “Trust me. I’m reminded of that every time I send you a fat check for doing nothing but staying out of my way. That last part, I did truly appreciate.”

Brody chuckled at that, but his eyes weren’t laughing. “God damn, but you can hold a grudge like nobody else I ever knew,” he observed, folding his arms. “And considering my history with women, that’s saying something.” He paused, taking verbal aim. “You want Joleen back? Go for it. I’m not standing in your way.”

Conner spat, though his mouth was cotton-dry. “Hell,” he snapped. “I wouldn’t touch Joleen with your pecker.”

Brody lifted both eyebrows, looking skeptical. “You know what’s really the matter with you, little brother? You’re jealous. And it’s got nothing to do with Joleen or any other female on the face of this earth. It’s because I went out there and lived, did everything you wanted to do, while you stayed right here, like that guy in the Bible, proving you were the Good Son.”

Conner’s temper flared—Brody’s words struck so close to the bone that they nicked his marrow—but he wasn’t going to give his brother the satisfaction of losing it. Not this time. “You’re full of shit,” he said, turning away from Brody again and proceeding into the barn, where he chose a horse and led it out of its stall and into the wide breezeway. Brody followed, selected a cayuse of his own, and the two of them saddled up in prickly silence that made the horses nervous.

As usual, it was Brody who broke the impasse. He swung up into the saddle, pulled down his hat yet another time, which meant he was either rattled or annoyed or both, and ducked to ride through the doorway into the bright October sunshine.

“What would you say if I told you I’d been thinking about retiring from the rodeo and settling down for good?” he asked, when they were both outside.

“I guess it would depend on where you planned on settling down,” Conner said.

“Where else but right here?” Brody asked, with a gesture that took in the thousands of acres surrounding them. The Creed land stretched all the way to the side of the river directly opposite Tricia McCall’s campground. “I respect Steven’s decision to buy a place with no history to it, make his own mark in the world instead of sharing this spread with us, but I’m nowhere near as noble as our cousin from Boston, as you already know.”

Conner made a low, contemptuous sound in his throat and nudged his horse into motion, riding toward the open gate leading into the first pasture. The range lay beyond, beckoning, making him want to lean over that gelding’s neck and race the wind, but he didn’t indulge the notion.

He didn’t want Brody thinking he’d gotten his “little brother” on the run, literally or figuratively. “You’re right about this much, anyway,” he said, his voice stony-quiet. “You’re nothing like Steven.”

Brody eased his gelding into a gallop just then, but he didn’t speak again. He just smiled to himself, like he was privy to some joke Conner didn’t have the mental wherewithal to comprehend, and kept going.

The smug look on Brody’s face pissed Conner off like few other things could have, but he wouldn’t allow himself to be provoked. He just rode, tight-jawed, and so did Brody, both of them thinking their own thoughts.

About the only thing he and Brody agreed on, Conner reflected glumly, was that Steven, as much a Creed as either of them, should have had a third of the ranch and the considerable financial assets that came along with it. Steven had refused—hardheaded pride ran in the family, after all—and set up an outfit of his own outside Stone Creek.

He’d met and married Melissa O’Ballivan there, Steven had, and he seemed happy, so Conner figured things had worked out in the long run. Still, he could have used his cousin’s company and his help on the ranch, since Brody was about three degrees past any damn use at all.

It might have been different if Steven had ever wanted for money, but his mother’s people were well-fixed, high-priced Eastern lawyers, all of them. Steven, whom Brody invariably called “Boston,” had grown up in a Back Bay mansion, with servants and a trust fund and all the rest of it. Summers, though, Steven had come west, to stay on the ranch, as his parents had agreed. And he’d been cowboy enough to win everybody’s respect.

Even though he could have had an equal share of the Colorado holdings, which included the ranch itself, some ten thousand acres, a sizable herd of cattle, and a copper-mining fortune handed down through three generations, multiplying even during hard times, Steven had wanted two things: a family and to build an enterprise that was his alone.

And he was succeeding at both those objectives.

Conner, by comparison, was just walking in place, biding his time, watching life go right on past him without so much as a nod in his direction.

Brody had accused him of jealousy, back there at the barn, claiming that Conner had played the stay-at-home son to Brody’s prodigal, and was resentful of his return. The implications burned their way through Conner’s veins all over again, like a jolt of snake venom.

Conner had to give Brody this much: it was true enough that he’d gotten over Joleen with no trouble at all. What he hadn’t gotten over, what he couldn’t shake, no matter how he tried to reason with himself, was being betrayed by the person he’d been closest to, from conception on.

The idea that Brody, so much a part of him that they were like one person, the one he’d been so sure always had his back, would sell him out like that, with no particular concern about the consequences and no apology, either, well, that stuck in Conner’s gut like a wad of thorns and nettles and rusted barbed wire. It chewed at him, on an unconscious level most of the time, but on occasion woke him out of a sound sleep, or sneaked up from behind and tapped him on the shoulder.

Brody’s presence wasn’t just a frustration to Conner—it was a bruise to the soul.

Reaching the herd, the brothers kept to opposite sides, helping the four ranch hands Conner and Davis employed year-round—there had been three times that many at roundup—drive nearly three hundred bawling, balking, rolling-eyed cattle across the ford in the river.

The work itself was bone-jarringly hard, not to mention dusty and hot, even though summer had passed. It took all morning to get it done, because cattle, which, unlike dogs and horses, are not particularly intelligent, can scatter in all directions like the down from a dandelion gone to seed. They get stuck in the mud and sometimes trample each other, and many a seasoned cowboy has fallen beneath their hooves, thrown from the saddle. Once in a while, the man’s horse fared even worse, breaking a leg or being gored by a horn.

Brody proved to be as good a hand as ever, considering that he probably did most of his riding for show now that he was a big rodeo star, but what did that prove? Good horsemen weren’t hard to come by in that part of the country—lots of people were practically born in the saddle.

Good brothers, though? Now, there was a rare commodity.

Once all the cattle were finally across the river, enjoying fresh acres of untrampled grass, their bawls of complaint settling down to a dull roar, Conner spoke briefly with the foreman of the crew and then reined his horse toward home. He wanted a shower, clothes he hadn’t sweated through and a sandwich thick enough to cut with a chain saw. For all his lonesomeness, an emotion endemic to bachelor ranchers, he wanted some time alone, too, so he could sort through his thoughts at his own pace, make what sense he could of recent developments.

No such luck.

Brody caught up to him as he was crossing the river, their horses side by side, drops of water splashing up to soak the legs of their jeans.

It felt good to cool off, Conner thought. At least, on the outside. On the inside, he was still smoldering.

“That old house sure has seen a lot of livin’,” Brody remarked, once they’d ridden up the opposite bank onto dry land, standing in his stirrups for a moment to stretch his legs. The ranch house, though still a good quarter of a mile away, was clearly visible, a two-story structure, white with dark green shutters and a wraparound porch, looked out of place on that land, venerable as it was. A saltbox, more at home in some seaside town in New England than in the high country of Colorado, it was genteel instead of rustic, as it might have been expected to be.

In the beginning, it had been nothing but a cabin—that part of the house was a storage room now, with the original log walls still in place—but as the years passed, a succession of Creed brides had persuaded their husbands to add on a kitchen here and a parlor there and more and more bedrooms right along, to accommodate the ever-increasing broods of children. Now, the place amounted to some seven thousand square feet, could sleep at least twelve people comfortably and was filled with antique furniture.

Conner, spending a lot of time there by himself, would have sworn it was haunted, that he heard, if not actual voices, the echoed vibrations of human conversation, or of children’s laughter or, very rarely, the faint plucking of one of the strings on his great-great-grandmother Alice’s gold-gilt harp.

Spacious and sturdily built, the roof solid and the walls strong enough to keep out blizzard winds in the winter, the house didn’t feel right without a woman in it. Not that Conner would have said so out loud. Especially not to Brody.

“I guess the old place has seen some living, all right,” he allowed, after letting Brody’s comment hang unanswered for a good while.

“Don’t you get lonely in that big old house, now that Kim and Davis are living in the new one?”

Conner didn’t want to chat, so he gave an abrupt reply to let Brody know that. “No,” he lied, urging his tired horse to walk a little faster.

“You remember how we used to scare the hell out of each other with stories about the ghosts of dead Creeds?” Brody asked, a musing grin visible in spite of the shadow cast over his face by the brim of his hat.

“I remember,” Conner answered.

They were nearing the barn by then. It was considerably newer than the house, built by the grandfather they’d never known, after he came home from the Vietnam War, full of shrapnel and silence.

He’d died young, Davis and Blue’s father, and their mother hadn’t lasted long after his passing. Now and then, in an unguarded moment, Conner caught himself wondering if he’d stayed single because so many members of the family had gone on before their time.

“You ever smile anymore?” Brody asked casually, as they dismounted in front of the barn. “Or say more than one or two words at a time?”

“I was thinking, that’s all,” Conner said.

“All the way up to five words,” Brody grinned. “I’m impressed, little brother. At this rate, you’re apt to talk a leg right off somebody.”

Conner led his horse inside, into a stall. There, he removed the gear and proceeded to rub the animal down with one of many old towels kept on hand for that purpose. “I don’t run on just to hear my head rattle,” he said, knowing Brody was in the stall across the aisle, tending to his own horse. “Unlike some people I could name.”

Brody laughed at that, a scraped-raw sound that caused the horse he was tending to startle briefly and toss its head. “You need a woman,” he proclaimed, as if a man could just order one online and have her delivered by UPS. “You’re turning into one of those salty old loners who talk to themselves, paper the cabin walls with pages ripped from some catalog, grow out their beards for the mice to nest in and use the same calendar over and over, figuring it’s never more than seven or eight days off.”

A grin twitched at Conner’s mouth at the images that came to mind—there were a few such hermits around Lonesome Bend—but he quelled it on general principle. “That was colorful,” he said, putting aside the towel and picking up a brush.

When Conner looked away from the horse he was grooming, he was a little startled to find Brody standing just on the other side of the stall door, watching him like he had a million things to say and couldn’t figure out how to phrase one of them.

Sadness shifted against Conner’s heart, but he was quick to dispense with that emotion, just as he had the grin.

“Sooner or later,” Brody said, sounding not just solemn, but almost mournful, “we’ve got to talk about what happened.”

“I vote ‘later,’” Conner replied, looking away.

“I’m not going anywhere, little brother,” Brody pressed quietly. “Not for any length of time, anyway. And that means you’re going to have to deal with me.”

“Here’s an idea,” Conner retorted briskly. “You stay here and manage the ranch for a decade, as I did, and I’ll follow the rodeo circuit and bed down with a different woman every night.”

Brody laughed, but it was a hoarse sound, a little raspy around the edges. “I hate to tell you this, cowboy, but you’re too damn old for the rodeo. That stagecoach already pulled out, sorry to say.”

The brothers were only thirty-three, but there was some truth in what Brody said. With the possible exceptions of team and calf roping, rodeo was a young man’s game. A very young man’s game, best given up, as Davis often said, before the bones got too brittle to mend after a spill.

Again, Conner felt that faint and familiar twinge of sorrow. He was careful not to glance in Brody’s direction as he made a pretense of checking the automatic waterer in that stall. The devices often got clogged with bits of grass, hay or even manure, and making sure they were clear was second nature.

“What now, Brody?” he asked, when a few beats had passed.

“I told you,” Brody answered, evidently in no hurry to move his carcass from in front of the stall door so Conner could get past him and go on into the house for that shower, the triple-decker sandwich and some beer. “I’m fixing to settle down right here on the ranch. Maybe build a house and a barn somewhere along the river one of these days.”

“There’s a big difference,” Conner said, facing Brody at long last, over that stall door, “between what you say you’re going to do and what you follow through on—big brother. So if it’s all the same to you, I won’t hold my breath while I’m waiting.”