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