by A. J. Downey
I sat up and stretched, yawning tiredly. It was hot and the sun beating down was uncomfortable. I stared down at him for a moment and twisting my lips in indecision finally blurted out, “I’m hot, I’m going for a swim.”
He laughed, and said, “Go on with your bad self.” The twinkle in his eyes turned to a spark of desire when I started to lose the clothes, though. When I pulled off my boots, he stood up and pulled his shirt over his head. I paused for a moment and he shrugged.
“Sounds like a good idea to me.”
I smiled and stripped the rest of the way down to my bra and panties. Not Rush, though. He apparently didn’t wear underwear, so he followed me down the river bank buck naked.
I waded out into the water knee deep and he came in right behind me, hiding the front of himself up against my back crying, “Holy shit, that’s cold!”
I laughed, I couldn’t help it. “It’s river water, which usually comes from snow melt and glacier runoff; of course it’s cold.”
“Oh, shit. You totally can’t judge because there’s gonna be some shrinkage.” I threw back my head and laughed for real at that and he wrapped those huge arms around me picking me up and tumbling back into the deeper water. I quickly held my breath as we plunged beneath the surface and both of us came up sputtering.
“Oh my god, I can’t believe you did that!” I cried as the shock of the cold water shot through my system.
“That’s what you get for preying on one of man’s worst fears!”
“Oh, you have got to be kidding me!”
We bantered, we played, and for the first time in a long time despite the horror and sorrow of the last couple of days, I remembered what it was like to relax and really be myself. The real me, not the over cautious and paranoid me that dragged me so far left of center as to be so rude. I wasn’t brought up that way. I had seriously been rattled when I’d seen Dray and Rush on my porch.
“Hey, Rush?”
“Mm?”
“Thank you.”
“For?”
“Everything you’ve done so far despite me being a total bitch.”
“Like?” I turned in his arms to see the smile I could hear in his voice and I felt one of my own spread across my lips. I twined my arms around his neck and looked him in the eyes. I should have figured he wouldn’t make this easy.
“I was raised by a proper southern mamma,” I said. “So please accept my formal apology for being so rude the day you showed up at my house with her. Also, my sincerest thanks for providing the fencing material to make my north pasture safe. I wasn’t really sure how I was going fix it to make it any kind of usable with everything having to go through Caleb.”
Rush’s expression changed then and he searched my face. “What’s with that, anyways? You own the place so I don’t get why everything has to go by him.”
I sighed, and rested more fully on my elbows, crossing my legs at the ankles behind his back. It felt good, clinging to him, and letting him take the weight for a minute as we bobbed in the river water, his feet firmly planted in its bed. I tried to figure out how to answer the question without insulting his intelligence. I mean, I didn’t know how much he knew about how probate and everything else worked.
“Dumb it down for me, Bailey. I’m not stupid, but I have no idea how your world works. Things are a lot simpler in mine and I’d kind of like to keep it that way for now.”
I laughed at little and nodded, “You kind of read my mind,” I said.
“Not hard, baby. Your face says right what you’re thinkin’.”
I rolled my eyes, “Tell me about it, I could never get away with anything growing up. Philip is the one that got all the talent for lying.”
“Don’t see it as a bad thing; I don’t. Somethin’ to be said for an honest face like yours.” He reached up and tweaked my nose with a fingertip and I laughed, jerking back from the affectionate move, cold water dripping from my nose.
“Right, so my dad left the farm to all three of us; me, my mother, and Philip.”
“But?”
“But, he didn’t think we were savvy enough to make the business decisions, and so he put a trustee in place to help us.”
“And that’s Caleb, I follow.”
“Right, and Caleb’s job is to help oversee the farm’s finances and make sure that sound business decisions are being made so that the farm doesn’t fall apart.”
“So if your daddy doesn’t want the place falling apart or whatever, enough to put his best friend into the mix to make sure things are running right, why wouldn’t he put anything in there about the farm not being sold, or whatever?”
“Legally you can’t give something to someone and force them to keep it. You can just make it really hard for them to give it up completely. My mom, for example, while she doesn’t hate the farm, she never really enjoyed it or was any kind of enthusiastic over it. Not like me and Dad.”
“That why she sold her part to you?”
“Yes, but the provision in the will was that she had to sell it for fair market value, which is why it took everything I had to buy her out of it. I wanted it to stay in the family while she was willing to offload her piece to just anybody. We actually had a big fight about it, both ended up crying our eyes out before she realized how much Blue Hills meant to me.”
“And Philip?”
I snorted, “God, he hates anything our parents remotely love. He wants to raze the farm to the ground and build some sort of amusement park on the land. Some big developer tried to get my dad to sell it before he died and he said no… Honestly, Blue Hills was just about the only thing Daddy and me agreed on…” I sighed, “It’s the only thing we really shared. So yeah, I want to keep it. It’s the only real link to the good times I had with my dad. Our love of horses.”
“Dad sounds like a cold piece.”
“Pretty sure he would have been a lot happier if I was the one born a boy instead of Philip.”
“Let me guess, your brother’s the spoiled rich kid of spoiled rich kids?” He bobbed us in the water and I still clung to him, comfortably suspended in his arms.
“Pretty much. He hit his teenage years and it suddenly became all about drugs and partying with his ‘friends.’” I took my arms from around his neck just long enough to make air quotes around ‘friends’ and Rush eyed me critically, his hands automatically drifting to my back to hold me up until I could do it for myself again.
“What about you?”
I snorted, “Too busy trying to stay an A+ student and make my parents notice I existed. Didn’t matter, though. Philip still got all the attention.”
“The squeaky wheel usually is the one that gets the grease, babe.”
“Yeah,” I murmured, and tried not to let the hurt show. I lost track of how many achievements of mine my parents missed completely because they were off trying to clean up one of my brother’s messes. I seriously just wanted them to see me… and now that was too late now that my dad was gone. I shoved down the hurt with a little more anger at my brother and just tried to be grateful that my mom was coming around, as weird as that felt.
I mean, talk about confusing. She hated everything biker related. Had railed against it my entire life. Going on about how her sister could do so much better and about how my uncle was a no good criminal and how he was dragging my cousin Dray down the same path. It was like every foundation I had ever stood on had been thrown into the air and I was falling, falling, falling, with no direction and nowhere to land that wasn’t going to obliterate every part of me.
I was grasping at anything to catch myself on, and there was just nothing. It was supposed to be Blue Hills… but Philip was intent on taking even that from me.
“Why’d you do it?” he asked softly.
“What?”
“Pick me out of every other guy in that bar?”
I put on a brave smile and said, “Seemed like a really good idea at the time,” I tried.
He nodded, and said, “It’s okay; you ain
’t got to tell me right now.”
I swallowed hard and nodded and he leaned in, hand grazing the side of my face, drawing me closer. I went and kissed him, because for some reason, kissing him made everything feel like it made sense right now, and it was, at least, something to grab onto.
Chapter 11
Rush
Fucking citizens always gotta come around and ruin a good thing. This time it was some old lady and her fuckin’ dog. I was getting into her kiss when this batty old bitch starts screaming at us from the riverbank about being ashamed and blah, blah, blah threatening to call the park’s services or some shit. All it took was me setting Bailey down where she was safe to stand, and me walking up out of the water in the buff for the bitch to start power walking her fat ass back down the trail.
Bailey followed me out of the water laughing with this bright eyed expression that made the whole thing worth it. We hurried up and got dressed and passed the woman on our way out the park. I gave her the good ol’ one fingered salute as we went by and took me and Bales the fuck out of there before she could get into any shit.
We rode back to the farm, having no place else to really go and with her energy seriously flagging after more than twenty-four hours of being awake. Dray was sitting on the porch steps fucking around on his phone, one of those fancy black cigarettes that smelled more like incense rather than a proper smoke dangling between his fingertips. He took a drag off it and tucked his phone back into his cut as we pulled up and I tapped Bailey to get off.
He exhaled a cloud of fragrant smoke and grinning said to his cousin, “Look at you all badass! What d’ you think?”
Bailey stretched her fingertips to the sky and worked the chinstrap to her brain bucket free and called out, “I think I finally understand the appeal.”
“Yeah?” He put his sunglasses on his head and gave me a tight lipped smile that said I was so getting my ass beat later. Hopefully I could get an explanation in before we had to hurt each other.
“And you,” he said to me. “Takin’ my cousin for a ride.”
“Oh for god’s sakes, Dray-Dray. Give it a rest,” Bailey said and rolled her eyes.
“Yeah, Dray-Dray… give it a rest.” Dragon got up from the table up on the porch and stubbed his cigarette out on the bottom of his boot before putting it into an empty soda can. I hadn’t even realized he was sitting there.
“Jesus Christmas, Bailey Lynn… look at you all grown up,” he declared.
He came down the steps to give her a hug and Bailey said softly, “Hi, Uncle José.”
“Wish you’d call me Dragon, sweetheart. Only your mamma calls me José and that’s only because she knows I don’t like it.”
“Sorry, Uncle Dragon,” Bailey said shyly.
He smiled at her and shook his head, “Lord, child. You are the spittin’ image of my Tillie.”
“My mom says so, too.”
“How’re you doin’ sweetheart?” Bailey went with him to the porch and they talked softly. She would nod and the mantle of her responsibilities was back, weighing down her shoulders.
Dray stood next to me and growled, “You’re seriously fucking my cousin, aren’t you, you bastard?”
“One, it’s more like she fucked me… remember the story about the brunette hottie in the back of The Spot?” Dray’s head jerked back and a look crossed his face that clearly said he was impressed – with her, not me.
“And two?” he demanded.
“You already know I’m a bastard, so why don’t you try an insult that isn’t actually true?”
He snorted and the ice was broken enough that I figured I was saved from some kind of ass beating to defend his cousin’s honor. Not that she needed it. She was pretty fierce, she’d just lost her way some with everything being so overwhelming. Hell, I knew grown ass men who wouldn’t be holding their shit together half as good.
“You know if you hurt her, I’m still going to have to kill you, right?”
“That some kind of fucked up blood family clause thing?”
“Yeah.”
“Meh, yeah, I could see it,” I said and nodded.
“You boys get yer asses up here and let’s talk,” Dragon called. Dray and I exchanged a look, shrugged and went up to join them.
“Wait, let me get us all something cold to drink, I’m dying,” Bailey said and got up. She went into the house and it was just the three of us guys again.
“What do you think happened to the horse?” Dragon asked.
“Poison, I’d bet my fuckin’ life on it. What’d your sources say about Renaldo?”
“Now that was interesting, turns out he did owe some local loan shark some money, but not enough to warrant a beat down that fuckin’ bad. Bein’ a jockey, it stood to reason he’d still played the ponies from time to time.”
“So the local players were legit just trying to get their money?”
“I think it was just a good excuse to cause a little chaos,” Dray said.
“Any rate, we ain’t gonna have any more problems from the local criminal element,” Dragon said.
“Why’s that?” I asked.
Dray snorted and smirked, “They called us fallin’ all over themselves to apologize for overstepping.”
“Yeah, I know they saw my ink, didn’t think it made that much of a difference, though.”
“Oh you bet your ass it did,” Dragon said.
“They give up their backer?”
“Yep,” Dragon said, pulling a cigarette out of this silver case etched with his namesake etched on it. If I had to guess it was another Dani Broussard original. It matched that silver dragon ponytail holder he had a little too well to be anything else.
“The brother?” I hazarded.
“You guessed it,” Dray said.
“Where’s that leave us?” I asked.
“Probably nowhere good,” Dray muttered darkly.
“We’ve dealt with this kind of thing before, been a couple a years but it didn’t end well for the guy.”
“Oh yeah, who was that?”
“Sunshine’s ex-douchebag, but somehow I don’t think we can employ the same tactic here.” Dray said.
“Similar, to be sure, but not same,” Dragon agreed.
“I don’t know the full scope on that one to agree or disagree,” I told them. Dragon looked back over his shoulder into the house and grunted, “Later.”
“How much of this you plan on telling Bailey?” I asked quietly but didn’t get an answer because she was backing out the screen door with a loaded tray of lemonade this time.
“Here we go,” she said and filled four glasses from the big glass pitcher on the tray. She sat down across from Dragon, between me and Dray and sighed out harshly.
“Well, sweetheart, you ain’t gonna like this, but I think It’s time our man Rush here took up some space on your couch,” Dragon took a swallow of the offered lemonade and Bailey looked from Dragon to me.
“I don’t know about that,” she said shifting uncomfortably and I couldn’t say I disagreed. I mean, I wanted her, sure, who wouldn’t? But, I wanted to do things right – in a way that was a little more familiar to her. The whole pick her up on a Friday or Saturday night for a date kind of thing. Didn’t look like that was gonna be in the cards, though, and if it’s one thing I did well, it was adapt to survive. I could adapt to this even easier.
“Here, I can get to and deal with something faster than if I’m at the club,” I said with a shrug.
Bailey’s phone started buzzing across the table where she’d put it after pulling it out of her back pocket when she’d gotten to sit down. She picked it up and swiped across the screen with a “Sorry, have to take this.”
“Hello?” she said into it, and immediately an angry voice basically started screaming at her out of the earpiece. She was too far away from me to make anything out except a whole bunch of Charlie Brown’s teacher; “Wa whah wah wa, wa, wa?”
Dragon, Dray, and I all exchanged a worried look, the ‘wh
at now?’ etched into all of our faces.
“I understand, Mr. Fairchild and no, nothing is wrong with any of the horses in the client stables. No, sir… it was only my own horse, Boaz. Yes, thank you, sir. It’s very hard, I loved him very much. No sir, Two Drops in a Bucket is fine.”
“I hate that horse,” I said out of the side of my mouth quietly to Dray. “We like to call him Two Men Shitting in a Bucket.”
Dray had to put his hand over his mouth to keep from laughing, still, he snorted and Bailey scowled at us both, getting up and walking to the opposite end of the porch.
“No, sir, Mr. Fairchild, sir… just a couple of my farm hands talking about a topic unrelated to this one. No one is laughing at the severity of the situation, I assure you.”
She paused and listened to whatever the rich SOB on the other end of the line was saying and was nodding along, “As soon as I have the results of the necropsy, I will let everyone know, but I believe that it is far too early to assume that any one of your horses are in any danger. We simply don’t know what happened to Boaz and we won’t for a while, yet.”
Anger flashed across her face and she said, “My brother only holds one-third of this farm and isn’t here on a day to day basis, like I am. I’m not sure why you would get any of your information from him seeing as we only spoke briefly this morning about the situation. I assure you, everyone’s animal is fine and that this was an isolated incident.”
Another long pause and her shoulders dropped, “I understand, and that is your right, however, I must remind you that the stud fee has been paid and you are contractually obligated to see the pairing of Two Drops in a Bucket and A Midnight Dreary through.”
“I do believe that would be best. Yes, sir. I agree completely. I have men here who will be upgrading our security cameras in the stables. Yes, they’re here as we speak. Yes, sir. We already have twenty-four hour monitoring. Yes, sir. Yes, sir. I absolutely understand. Yes, I do know how much Two Drops in a Bucket is worth, if you recall, he was bred and born here.”
