Linda Lael - Cowboy Country

Conner was scowling up at him, through swirls of settling dust, and he looked as though he’d like to grab hold of Brody, haul him off that horse and beat the holy bejesus out of him. So much for personality improvements resulting from wedded bliss!

“Oops,” Brody said cheerfully, because he knew that would piss off Conner and he still enjoyed doing that now and again, even though they’d been getting along well for a respectable length of time. “Sorry.”

He swung down and faced Conner, who was taut with annoyance, his shoulders squared, his fists clenched and his attitude contentious.

“Damn it, Brody,” he growled, “am I having one of my invisible days, or are you going blind? You darn near ran me down, and it’ll take me the better part of the morning to get this mare calm enough to work with again!”

Prior to the leap, Brody hadn’t noticed his brother or the pinto mare, now nickering and tossing her head over on the far side of the corral, but he didn’t think it would be smart to say as much. Instead, he decided to come from a place of helpfulness.

“You starting horses yourself these days, instead of letting one of the wranglers do it?” he asked, bending to pick up the lightweight saddle the mare must have tossed when he and Moonshine came over the fence.

Conner grabbed the saddle and jerked it out of Brody’s hands. “Yes,” he snapped in response. “You dropped out for a decade, Davis broke both legs the last time he rode a bronc and Clint and Juan are downright creaky at the hinges. Who the hell did you think was starting the horses?”

“Whoa,” Brody said, recoiling slightly and still grinning. “What’s chewing on you? Did you have a fight with the little woman or something?”

“No!” Conner yelled.

Brody chuckled, adjusted his hat and then turned to get Moonshine by the reins. After the river crossing and the hard run over the range, not to mention that spectacular jump, he figured the horse deserved some stall time, free of the saddle and bridle. “Well, what’s the matter, then?” he asked reasonably, starting toward the side door of the barn.

“Nothing,” Conner bit out, setting the dusty saddle on the top rail of the fence and turning to the mare.

“Something is,” Brody insisted calmly, pausing.

Conner looked at Brody then, through the haze of slowly settling corral dirt, and sighed. “Tricia and I might have had words,” he said grudgingly.

“Trouble in the vine-covered cottage?” Brody teased, knowing it couldn’t be anything serious. He’d never seen a man and a woman more deeply in love than his brother and Tricia were.

“She says I’m overprotective,” Conner said, taking off his hat and swatting his thigh with it before putting it back on.

Brody flashed a grin. Rubbed his beard-stubbled chin with one hand. “You?” he joked. “Overprotective? Just because you’d wrap the lady in foam-rubber padding, if she’d let you, so she wouldn’t stub her toe?”

Conner glared, but there was a grin to match Brody’s brewing in his blue eyes. He held it off as long as he could, but then it broke through, like sunlight penetrating a cloud-bank.

“Put your horse away,” Conner said. “I might as well turn the mare out to graze for the rest of the day, now that you and that gelding scared her out of three years’ growth.”

Brody led Moonshine into the barn, put him in a stall and gave him a couple of flakes of hay. When he left by the main door, Conner was waiting for him in the yard, throwing a stick for the Lab-retriever mix, Valentino.

In Brody’s opinion, that was a prissy-assed name for a ranch dog, but the poor critter had already been saddled with it when Conner and Tricia took up with each other. Conner had tried calling him “Bill” for a while, but the former stray wouldn’t answer to that, so Valentino it was.

Brody looked around. There was no sign of Tricia, or the Pathfinder she drove.

“She’s gone to town to help Carolyn at the shop,” Conner said. He usually had a pretty fair idea what Brody was thinking, and the reverse was also true. “The woman is pregnant out to here.” He shaped his hands around an invisible basketball, approximately at belly level. “What would be so wrong with staying home for one day? Taking it easy, putting her feet up for a while?”

Brody chuckled and slapped his brother on the shoulder. “She’s running a small-town art gallery, Conner,” he said, “not bungee-jumping or riding bulls in a rodeo.”

Conner’s face tightened momentarily and, once again, Brody knew what was on his twin’s mind because they so often thought in tandem.

“There’s no connection between our mom’s pregnancy and Tricia’s,” Brody added quietly. “Stop looking for one.”

Conner sighed, managed a raw kind of grin. Nodded.

It struck Brody then, though not for the first time, of course, just how vulnerable loving a woman made a man. And after the baby came? It would be way worse.

Brody shivered, momentarily swamped with recollections.

“What happened to your clothes, anyhow?” Conner asked, looking him over. He tended to get around to things in his own good time.

“Moonshine got a little overenthusiastic crossing the river,” Brody replied.

They headed into the house, the dog trotting behind them, and Brody ducked into the laundry room to swipe a pair of jeans, a T-shirt and some socks from the folded stacks on top of the dryer. After a quick shower to thaw out his bone marrow, he dressed in the room he and Conner had shared as kids, with their cousin Steven joining them in the summertime, and emerged to find his brother still in the kitchen, brewing a cup of coffee with one of those fancy single-shot machines designed for the chronically caffeine-deprived.

“How’s the new place coming along?” Conner asked, holding out a steaming mug, which Brody took gratefully.

“It’s a slow process,” he replied, after a sip of java. “The builder swears up and down that it’ll be move-in ready by the middle of August, though.”

Conner gave a snort at that, retrieved a second cup from under the spout of the shining gizmo and raised it slightly, in a little salute. “Nice clothes,” he observed wryly. “I once owned some just like them.”

* * *

CAROLYN SIMMONS HELD her breath as she watched her very pregnant friend and business partner, Tricia Creed, making her wobbly way down from the top of a ladder. Tricia had just hung a new batik depicting a Native American woman weaving at a loom. The work of a local artist, the piece wouldn’t be in the shop long, which was possibly why Tricia had placed it so high on the wall. No doubt she reasoned that if the picture wasn’t within easy reach, she and Carolyn could enjoy it for a while before some eager buyer snatched it up.

With her long, dark braid, loose-fitting cotton maternity clothes and attitude of serene faith in the all-around goodness of life, Carolyn thought Tricia resembled the weaver a little.

Taller than Tricia, with artfully streaked blond hair, Carolyn wore her usual garb of jeans, boots and a fitted T-shirt. Tricia liked to joke that if an opportunity to ride a horse came up, Carolyn was determined to be ready.

“What were you doing on that ladder?” she asked now, propping her hands on her hips as she regarded Tricia. “I promised Conner I’d keep an eye on you, and the minute I turn my back, you’re teetering on the top rung.”

Tricia dusted her hands together and smiled, stepping back a little way to look up at the batik. “I was nowhere near the top rung,” she argued cheerfully, her face glowing in the sunlight pouring in through the big front window. She sighed. “Isn’t she beautiful?”

Carolyn, following Tricia’s gaze, nodded. Primrose Sullivan, the artist, had outdone herself this time. The weaver was indeed beautiful. “I think some of our online customers would be interested,” she mused. “I’m not sure it would photograph all that well from this angle, though—”