Betting on the Cowboy. Kathleen O'Brien
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this had been a mistake. Just being in this house again scrambled his brain. He had overestimated the distance a few years could put between him and the past. Suddenly, the onslaught of memories was just too much... He saw again, as if it were real, that last night...his father standing there, right there by the fireplace, drinking too much, taking offense at everything old Grayson said...
And his mother quietly weeping, her hand on his father’s arm, trying to keep him from finishing the last Scotch. The cold rain sheeting across the windows, the shadows of the elms fighting with the shadows of the fire.
Then the slamming doors, the parting threats and the rain-drenched, curving mountain road...
Damn it. Gray’s left elbow began to ache, where the bones had knitted but remained sensitive. It might as well have been days since the accident, not years. He couldn’t think straight in this room...this house. Maybe not even in this town.
Why on earth had he imagined that he owed his grandfather a warning? Had he really dreamed the old man might have grown a conscience and would meekly agree to admit his error and make restitution?
Fat chance of that. Old Grayson Harper had never been wrong in his life.
Besides, what constituted restitution, anyhow? Had Gray really thought that getting back his father’s money could begin to restore his losses? Grayson had killed Gray’s parents, as surely as if he’d put a gun to their heads. He could fill the Harper Marble Quarry with hundred-dollar bills, and it wouldn’t begin to make up for what he’d really stolen from that terrified thirteen-year-old boy.
The boy who had awakened in the hospital the next morning, his arms and legs and ribs broken, his head bandaged and his family dead.
With effort, Gray peeled his fingers away from his palm and pumped them to force sensation to return. He had been a fool to come. Warning? Ha. He should have just hired a lawyer, filed the suit and let the fur fly.
“Go ahead,” his grandfather said quietly, glancing pointedly at Gray’s tense hand. “Do it.”
Gray shook his head slowly. “I don’t hit people.”
“No.” The scoffing noise his grandfather emitted was eloquent. “And that’s the problem in a nutshell, isn’t it? You don’t do anything. You’re just like your father. You drift, charming and completely useless in your expensive suits, trying to get by on your clever one-liners and your smarter-than-thou attitude.”
He shook his head, as if to shake away the internal image. “You want money? Try earning some! If I’d ever seen you do a lick of real work, hard work, I’d leave it all to you. Every goddamn penny. Hell, if I could see you hold a real job for even one month, just four lousy weeks, I’d write you a check for the whole kit and caboodle!”
Dismissive old coot! Gray’s shoulders twitched, and he felt his legs burn slightly from the urge to stride out the door. The judgmental bastard was so clueless. He hadn’t understood his own son, not for a day of his life. Horrified at Gray’s father’s desire to be a musician, Grayson had forbidden it entirely, and steered him into a dozen “real” careers, each more ill suited than the one before.
And because, in the end, Grayson couldn’t make a successful pig farmer out of a poet, he decided the poet was a slacker and a fool.
Gray hesitated, fighting the urge to lash out and give the old man as good as he had dished. But if he let himself stalk off in a huff, what would he have accomplished? He calmed his pulse and considered what his grandfather had said. If Gray could hold a job, he’d return the money. Surely that was almost as good as an admission of guilt.
Could this be the opening he’d hoped for?
For several seconds, fury warred with common sense. Finally, common sense won.
He didn’t really want to bring a lawsuit. It would take forever, and it would cost a fortune on its own. He had no interest in humiliating his grandfather publicly. He wanted only the personal, private admission that the old man had wronged Gray’s father—and, in doing so, Gray himself.
He eyed his grandfather narrowly. “Will you put that deal in writing? If I do what you ask...if I hold a ‘real’ job for four weeks straight without bolting, you’ll write a check for every penny my father ever gave you to invest for him?”
The old man squinted at him in return as if he suspected a trick. “Not just any job. A hard job. A dirty job. The kind you turned your nose up at all your life.”
Gray wanted to ask him, “What do you know of my life?” The last time they’d seen each other, Gray had been nineteen, reckless, defiant and mixed up as hell. Because he’d refused to come back to Silverdell over his college summer breaks and dig marble in the family quarry, the old man had decided Gray was afraid of real work. Just like his father.
How could old Grayson have been so stupid as to miss the truth? Gray wasn’t afraid of work. He was afraid of Silverdell and what madness the memories might create in his heart. He was afraid of what living in this house another summer might make him do to his grandfather.
“Of course,” Gray said with feigned calm. “I’ll accept a job as dirty and demeaning as you want it to be. The only thing I won’t do is take a job at the quarry, or anywhere I would report to you.”
The old man worked his lips, clearly thinking fast and hard. “It would have to be here. In Silverdell, I mean. So that I could check on you. So that I could be sure it’s not a scam.”
“Of course.” Gray’s smile felt twisted. “I wouldn’t dream of asking you to trust me.”
If old Grayson recognized the sarcasm, he didn’t deign to acknowledge it. He scanned his grandson’s face so thoroughly it felt like a scouring.
“Then yes,” he said, finally. “If you can hold a real, Joe Lunchbucket job here in Silverdell, one with physical labor and no fancy title, and you can keep it for four weeks straight without bolting, or complaining, or getting yourself fired, I’ll write a check for any amount you ask.”
CHAPTER TWO
IT WAS TWO in the morning, and though Bree and Penny had been talking for hours, the conversation showed no signs of sputtering out.
They were ensconced in Penny’s suite in Aunt Ruth’s beautiful old San Francisco Victorian town house. The sitting area was close enough to Ruth’s sickroom to hear her if she called out, but private enough to let them chat in peace. They both still wore their day clothes because getting into pajamas seemed too much of an admission that the night might end.
Bree had been visiting her little sister for three whole days—a true luxury, since ordinarily the entire breadth of the country, and their respective obligations, lay between them.
When the sisters had been split up after their father went to jail, sixty-five-year-old Aunt Ruth had taken Rowena and Penny into her home. But she’d declared herself unequal to mothering all three sisters. After a tense period in which the state seemed likely to get involved, their mother’s college roommate had stepped up. Kitty Afton, a Boston divorcée with no children, had always been fond of Bree, and was glad to offer the teenager a home.
Bree had lived in Boston ever since. She told herself she loved it. And yet, three days in a new place, with a fresh perspective and her little sister’s calming presence, had done her a world of good. After the mess with Charlie...
She looked at Penny, suddenly wishing she could scoop her up and take her along when she returned to Boston. Without Charlie, without Breelie’s, her “perfect” life in the city seemed hollow. Even the trendy Brighton-area condo she’d snagged a year ago—but never had time to decorate—felt lonely and sterile, and she could hardly bring herself to set foot in it again.
But Penny would never agree to leave San Francisco. Ruth, now in her early eighties, had congestive heart failure and needed full-time care. She really ought to be in a nursing facility, Bree thought, but Penny would never abandon the old lady who had put a roof over