Linda Lael - Heart Of A Cowboy

“Never mind,” Tricia said, focusing in on the rest of Hunter’s email.

It amounted to online foreplay, essentially, and she closed it with a self-conscious click of the mouse. Then she deleted it entirely. And felt even more foolish than before.

In that moment, she would have given just about anything to exchange some girl talk with Diana, despite the sure and certain knowledge that her best friend would tell her to kick Hunter to the curb and get on with her life.

With her friend in another time zone, though, and Sasha right there in the same room, a chat simply wasn’t feasible.

“Don’t you have to work today?” Sasha asked. Tricia hadn’t heard her push back her chair to rise, but the little girl was standing at her elbow now, studying her thoughtfully.

Tricia couldn’t find a smile. Maybe, she thought, with rueful whimsy, she could pick one up at the rummage sale.

“There isn’t much to do, with the camping season coming to an end,” she said. “We’re all ready for the weekend, so I thought we’d go over to the community center and help set up for the rummage sale.”

Sasha, who had probably never rummaged for anything in her admittedly short life, lit up at the prospect. “Awesome!” she enthused. “Can Valentino come, too?”

“I don’t think he’d enjoy that,” Tricia answered diplomatically. “What do you say we get ourselves dressed and take a certain dog out for a quick walk?”

CHAPTER EIGHT

BRODY WAS DEFINITELY up to something, though damned if Conner could figure out what it was. He’d helped himself to a pair of Conner’s own jeans, Brody had, and one of his best shirts, too, and he’d shaved for the first time since his return to Lonesome Bend. If his hair hadn’t been longer than Conner’s, and way shaggier, they’d have been mirror images of each other.

And if all that wasn’t bothersome enough, Brody not only had the coffee on by the time Conner wandered into the kitchen, after making the run into town to check on Natty McCall’s pipes, he was cooking up some bacon and eggs at the old wood-burning stove.

Conner meandered over to the counter, took the carafe from its burner and poured himself a dose of java. He’d been thinking about Tricia ever since he’d scared the hell out of her at the top of Natty’s basement steps that morning, and irritation with his brother provided some relief.

“Mornin’,” Brody sang out, as if he were just noticing Conner’s presence.

Conner squinted, studying his brother suspiciously. He’d gotten used to living his life as a separate individual since Brody left home, and it was a jolt to look up and see himself standing on the other side of the room. Gave him a familiar but still weird sense of being in two places at once.

“Since when do you cook?” he asked, after shaking off the sensation and taking a sip from his mug. Only then did he take off his coat and hang it from its peg by the back door.

Brody laughed at that. “I picked up the habit after I left home,” he replied easily. “Believe it or not, I find myself between women now and then.”

Conner rolled his eyes. “So then you just knock some hapless female over the head with a club and drag her back to your cave by the hair? Tell her to put a pot of beans on the fire?”

Brody slanted a look at him, and there was a certain sadness in his expression, Conner thought, unsettled. “I didn’t mean it like that,” Brody said, his voice quiet.

“Right,” Conner said, his voice gone gruff, all of a sudden, with an emotion he couldn’t name. He looked his brother up and down. “So what’s up with the clothes?”

Again, the grin flashed, quick and cocky. Brody speared a slice of bacon with a fork and turned it over in the skillet before looking down at Conner’s duds. “All my stuff is in the laundry,” he said. “Hope you don’t mind.”

Conner scowled and swung a leg over the long bench lining one side of the kitchen table, taking more coffee on board and trying to figure out what the hell was going on.

“Would you give a damn if I did mind?”

Brody didn’t say anything; he just went right on rustling up grub at the stove, though he did pause once to refill his own coffee cup, whistling low through his teeth as he concentrated on the task at hand. That tuneless drone had always bugged Conner, but now it really got on his last nerve.

“If you insist on staying,” he told Brody’s back, “why don’t you bunk in over at Kim and Davis’s place?”

Brody took his sweet time answering, scraping eggs onto a waiting platter and piling about a dozen strips of limp bacon into a crooked heap on top.

“I might have done just that,” Brody finally replied, crossing to set the platter down on the table with a thump before going back to the cupboard for plates and flatware, “except that they’ve already got a housesitter, and she happens not to be one of my biggest fans.”

Conner stifled an unexpected chuckle, made his face steely when Brody headed back toward the table and took one of the chairs opposite. They ate in silence for a while.

Kim had mentioned hiring somebody to stay in their house while she and Davis were on the road, Conner recalled. Most likely, it was Carolyn Simmons; she was always housesitting for one person or another.

“Carolyn,” Conner said, out loud.

Across the table, Brody looked up from his food and grinned. “What about her?”

Conner felt his neck heat up a little, realizing that there had been a considerable gap between Brody’s remark and his response. “I was just wondering how you managed to make her hate you already,” he said, somewhat defensively, stabbing at the last bite of his fried eggs with his fork.

“I didn’t say Carolyn hated me,” Brody explained, the grin lingering in his eyes, though there was no vestige of it on his mouth. “I said she isn’t one of my biggest fans.”

He paused, finished off a slice of bacon, and finally went on. “We have a—history, Carolyn and I.”

To Conner’s knowledge, Brody hadn’t been anywhere near Lonesome Bend in better than a decade, and Carolyn hadn’t moved to town until a few years ago. Which begged the question, “What kind of history?”

Brody sighed deeply, crossed his fork and knife in the middle of his plate and propped his elbows on the table’s edge, his expression thoughtful. Maybe even a little grim. His gaze was fixed on something in the next county.

“The usual kind,” he said, at some length.

“How do you know her?”

Why, Conner wondered, did he want to know? He liked Carolyn, but things had never gone beyond that, attraction-wise.

Brody met his eyes with a directness that took Conner by surprise. “It’s a small world,” he said. After a beat, he added, “You interested in her? Carolyn, I mean?”

Conner made a snortlike sound, pushed his own plate away. “No,” he said.

“Then why all the questions?”

“What questions?”

“‘What kind of history?’” Brody repeated, with exaggerated patience. “‘How do you know her?’ Those questions.”

“Maybe I was just trying to make conversation,” Conner hedged. “Did you ever think of that?”

“Like hell you were,” Brody scoffed, with a false chuckle. “You can’t wait to see the back of me and we both know it. But here’s the problem, little brother—I’m not going anywhere.”

Something tightened in Conner’s throat. He might have said he was sorry to hear that Brody was staying, but he couldn’t get the words out.

Brody shoved back his chair and stood, picking up his empty plate to put it in the sink, the way Kim had trained all three of “her boys” to do after a meal, from the time they could reach that high. “I could tell you a few things, Conner,” he said hoarsely, “if I thought there was a snowball’s chance in hell that you’d listen.”