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