Lang Downs

by Ariel Tachna

  He bent double beneath the pain, only Sam’s and Neil’s arms keeping him from falling. “I can’t…,” he gasped. “He can’t be gone.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” the doctor repeated.

  Jeremy forced himself upright. “Can I see him?”

  “In a few minutes,” the doctor said. “They’re cleaning him up. You can wait here. An orderly will come get you when they’re ready for you.”

  Jeremy nodded and the doctor withdrew.

  “I’m so sorry,” Sam whispered as he pulled Jeremy into his arms.

  Jeremy shuddered, trying to hold back his sobs. He’d already cried once today. He could hear Devlin sneering at him for his tears. Real men don’t cry. Once had been bad enough. Twice in one day would be too much.

  “Don’t hold it in,” Sam ordered. “He’s your brother. You’re allowed to cry for him.”

  “He’d disown me,” Jeremy said around a hiccough.

  “I’ll disown you if you don’t,” Neil muttered.

  Jeremy tried not to laugh, but he couldn’t stop it. Tears streamed down his face as he cried and laughed and cried some more. “Bloody hell, Emery,” he said between sobs. “You can’t say shit like that. You’re the only brother I have left.”

  “Pretty sure there’s a few more men on Lang Downs who would give you that title,” Neil replied, “but I’ll claim you.”

  Jeremy’s laughter quieted, his grief getting the better of him again. Tears continued to leak from his eyes unhindered as he sat on the empty bed. Sam sat next to him, a bedrock of support.

  “Did Devlin have a will?” Sam asked. “Or anything to tell us what kind of arrangements he wanted?”

  “There’s a family plot on the station,” Jeremy said. “He’ll be buried there. Everyone in the family has been for a hundred fifty years.”

  He and Devlin would be the last ones.

  “That takes care of funeral arrangement, then,” Sam said, “but we’ll still need to find his will and insurance policies, if he had them.”

  “If he did, they’d be in the safe in his office. I know what Dad’s combination was. I hope Devlin didn’t change it.”

  “Can you tell me where the safe is?” Neil asked. “I can see if Molly will drive to Taylor Peak to look for it. She’s sort of family.”

  “She’s family,” Jeremy said firmly.

  “Not in a way most of them will recognize,” Neil reminded him, “but the jackaroos are still less likely to challenge her than they would be to challenge any of the men. And it’ll be faster than you driving all the way there and then having to come back to deal with everything here.”

  “The station…. There’s no foreman.”

  “So assign one,” Sam said. “Perkins or White or someone. Even if it’s just for a few days, until we can get there and see what’s what.”

  “You can worry about that tomorrow,” Neil interrupted. “Tell me where Molly should look. Everything else can wait a day or two.”

  Jeremy closed his eyes and tried to picture Devlin’s office. He hadn’t been in there since he moved to Lang Downs almost ten years ago. Even when he went to Taylor Peak to torture himself with Devlin’s continuing rejection, he never got past the living room—if he even got that far. Half the time Devlin ran him off before he reached the veranda.

  “The office is in the back of the house, to the left off the living room,” Jeremy said. “If Devlin didn’t move anything around, the safe will be in the closet. If he moved it, it could be anywhere in the house. Dad’s combination was twelve, twenty-nine, three.”

  “I’ll tell Molly,” Neil said. “Do you need anything from home? She can pick it up before she goes to Taylor Peak.”

  And wasn’t that the kicker? His home was the house he and Sam had helped build and had lived in for years, but Taylor Peak was his family legacy. Unless Devlin had written Jeremy completely out of his will—they did have a distant cousin Devlin might have given it to out of spite—Taylor Peak, with all the associated responsibilities, would be his now.

  He was going to be sick.

  “Jeremy?”

  “No, I don’t need anything from home,” Jeremy said as he struggled to swallow down the bile that rose in his throat. “Tell Molly I’m sorry she has to come all the way here.”

  “Don’t be daft. Under the circumstances, she’ll be glad to do it,” Neil said. “I’ll go call now. Twelve, twenty-nine, three, right?”

  Jeremy nodded, and Neil left.

  “I can’t do this,” Jeremy said to Sam when they were alone.

  “Do what?” Sam scooted closer to Jeremy.

  “Give up the life we built together, take the station, step into Devlin’s shoes—any of it. Even if I wanted to, I wouldn’t know where to start.”

  “At the beginning,” Sam said, “and going to Taylor Peak doesn’t mean giving up our life together. I can work remotely part of the time and drive to Lang Downs the rest of the time. Caine will find a way to make it work for us. You know that.”

  “That assumes I want it to work,” Jeremy said. “What if I want to say forget the whole bloody thing and just go home?”

  “Then that’s what we’ll do,” Sam said, “but you still have to figure out what to do with Taylor Peak. If nothing else, Devlin hired men to work the station for a season and you have livestock you can’t abandon. If you want to get through the season, sell off the whole mob and let the land go unused, you can, but then you’ll continue to have the yearly taxes and everything to deal with without any income.”

  “I could sell it,” Jeremy said. “Hell, I’ll give it away. Or maybe I got lucky and Devlin left it to someone else. Then I won’t have to worry about it.”

  “We’ll worry about that when Molly gets here,” Sam said. “But whatever you decide, we’re in it together. Nothing can change that.”

  CAINE LOOKED up when Molly walked into the office. The look on her face told him all he needed to know. “It’s bad, isn’t it?”

  Molly nodded. “Taylor died this morning. Neil asked me to go to Taylor Peak to see if I could find the will and then to take it to them in Canberra. Linda said she’d watch the kids for the day, but I don’t know if I’ll make it back tonight.”

  “Macklin and I can keep an eye on them tonight if Linda can’t,” Caine said. Kyle’s wife Linda frequently exchanged child-care services with Molly and Neil, although Linda’s daughter was old enough now to be the one watching Molly’s young children. “Give Jeremy our condolences and let me know if there’s anything we can do. In Canberra or on the station.”

  “I will,” Molly said. “I’ll call when I get to Canberra or if I hear anything else from them before then.”

  She left the office, and Caine leaned back in his chair with a heavy sigh. He’d barely known Devlin Taylor and hadn’t particularly liked what little he knew, but his death still left Caine shaken. For better or worse, he’d been a fixture in the local landscape.

  He’d been an experienced grazier and a competent horseman, and he’d still been thrown and hurt so badly the fall killed him. Caine shuddered. How easy it would be for the same thing to happen to any of the jackaroos on Lang Downs.

  To Macklin.

  Rationally he knew Macklin was fine. He was spending the day working around the main buildings of the station, repairing tack, checking fences, and any other regular maintenance that he could find to do. He’d chosen those tasks specifically so he would be nearby if they got news from Jeremy. The panic clawing at Caine’s throat wasn’t rational. He grabbed his hat and headed outside. He had to see for himself that Macklin was fine.

  He found Macklin a few minutes later outside the shearing shed with a hammer in his hand and a handful of nails between his teeth. Relief flooded through him.

  Macklin finished sinking the nail on the repair he was making, set the hammer down, and grabbed the nails. “Caine? What’s wrong?”

  “Molly’s gone to Taylor Peak. Devlin died this morning. And I might have freaked out a littl
e thinking how easily it could have been you or someone else on the station.”

  Macklin pulled him into a hug—he always knew exactly what Caine needed—and held him tight. “We take precautions. We never ride out alone. We train the horses not to spook at unexpected noises or movement in the bush. We do everything we can to make sure everyone will come home at the end of the day. And sometimes accidents happen anyway.” He tipped Caine’s chin up so their gazes met. “But the same thing is true anywhere. Car accidents, house fires, you name it. Accidents happen no matter how careful people are. How’s Jeremy holding up?”

  Caine swallowed hard. “I didn’t talk to him, and I don’t think Molly did either. I told her to let us know if we could help, but I don’t know what that would be.”

  “It might be as simple as sending a couple of men to Taylor Peak to keep things running until Jeremy can get his feet under him,” Macklin said. “Devlin never asked for help, but I remember Michael sending people to help out when old man Taylor was still running the place and had a lot of damage from a tornado that hit Taylor Peak but missed us.”

  “I’ll text Sam and offer,” Caine said. “I don’t even know if they’ve let the jackaroos at Taylor Peak know.”

  “I know you want to help, but don’t overstep your bounds,” Macklin cautioned. “Jeremy will have to find his own footing with the Taylor Peak jackaroos, just like you did when you arrived. We can’t undermine that by stepping in too quickly or too often.”

  “At least he knows what he’s doing,” Caine said. “I couldn’t have been any more of a blow-in if I’d tried when Uncle Michael died and I came to see if I could run a station.”

  “True, but he’ll be fighting the same distrust you did, with the disadvantage of everyone knowing from the start that he’s gay. It wouldn’t surprise me if he lost people the same way we did the second summer. He’ll recover if he can stick it out, but he’s in for a rough road.”

  “You tell me that, and then you tell me not to step in?” Caine said. “You don’t really expect me to sit by and do nothing, do you?”

  “No, but I expect you to let Jeremy decide what kind of help we give and how often,” Macklin said. “We run as much of a risk of making things worse by helping too much as by not helping enough.”

  Caine wasn’t convinced, but arguing with Macklin was pointless, especially since he couldn’t do anything until Jeremy came back to the station and they saw what the situation really was. Maybe they were all worrying for nothing and Jeremy would step into Devlin’s shoes seamlessly.

  Six

  SETH LAUGHED at Jason’s joke and pushed his hair out of his eyes. With his bruised and battered hand.

  “What did you do to yourself?” Jason asked, grabbing his wrist.

  “Nothing,” Seth said, heart pounding at the thought of Jason finding out what he’d done. He wouldn’t understand. No one did. The pain steadied him, but that didn’t make sense in anyone else’s head. Just in Seth’s. “Just skinned my knuckles fighting with a stuck bolt this morning.”

  It was a flimsy excuse at best, but he hadn’t been able to come up with a better one. In school, before he came to Lang Downs, he’d been able to excuse it away by saying someone had picked a fight with him—a fight he’d always provoked, but subtly enough no one attributed it to anything more than hotheaded adolescence. He couldn’t use that excuse now. He was no longer an adolescent who could get away with stunts like that. He had responsibilities, and that meant finding other ways to steady himself when the noise in his head became too much to bear.

  “Did you get someone to look at it?” Jason asked. “You don’t want it to get infected.”

  “I cleaned it out when it happened,” Seth said. He’d learned more than enough first aid in his attempts to hide his injuries to keep the scrapes clean. He hadn’t covered them because it would have made working this morning difficult, but he’d do that before dinner. People would notice the gauze more than a few scrapes, but if they couldn’t see the marks, they couldn’t question his story.

  “That must have been one hell of a bolt,” Jason remarked. “So what else is on the agenda today?”

  “I have to drive out to a couple of the drover’s huts to get the lay of the land. I heard a rumor about solar generators and windmills. It’s not my area of expertise, but I had a couple of classes on green energy, so I should be able to get an idea of what might work. But for that I need to see the huts, because each one will be different. You don’t have to go with me if you don’t want to. It won’t be particularly interesting work.”

  “It’s not about the work,” Jason said. “It’s about spending the day with you. We haven’t had a day together in a long time. Even if you have to spend this one working, at least we can be together. I can take notes for you, if nothing else.”

  Take the bloody excuse not to come, Seth thought miserably. He craved spending the day with Jason, but having him there and yet so far away was salt in the wounds on Seth’s heart. He could deal with physical pain, but the pain in his heart made him want to run for the nearest knife. “Sure. You got something to write with?”

  “No, but I’ll get something from Mum. Give me five minutes and I’ll be good to go.”

  Seth nodded as Jason walked out of the tractor shed. The minute Jason was out of sight, Seth slumped against the tractor. Fuck, he was a glutton for punishment. Why had he decided to come home again?

  As easy as it was to wish he’d stayed in Sydney, he’d been miserable there too. Maybe not the cutting kind of miserable, but more a numb, dead inside kind of miserable. The kind cutting couldn’t fix. As hard as it would be to see Jason every day and know he went off with Cooper every night, at least he was home.

  Jason hadn’t said anything, of course. He was too discreet for that. But Seth had seen the way he sat carefully, the way he’d winced when he shifted on the hay bale from time to time. Seth might not have any personal experience with it, but he recognized the lingering signs of a good fuck when he saw them. He just wished he’d been the one to leave Jason feeling that way.

  Far too quickly, Jason popped back into the tractor shed. “I have a notebook and pencil. I’m ready to go when you are.”

  “Let’s go.”

  They headed toward the gravel car park where they kept the station’s utes when they weren’t in use. Seth climbed in and found the keys in the ignition. “Ready?” he asked Jason.

  “I was born ready,” Jason retorted.

  The familiar comeback made Seth smile. How many times had they had that exact exchange before a test for School of the Air? God, it was so easy to fall back into all the old habits with Jason, but they weren’t teenagers anymore, and Seth knew a little more about himself than he had then. Would things be different if he’d been able to put a name to the warmth in his chest when he was sixteen or eighteen? He doubted it. He was Jason’s best friend, the buddy he joked around with, studied with, played tricks with, but not the lover Jason took to his bed. No, someone else had that privilege. Seth wanted to be happy for Jason. Really, he did. If only Jason’s happiness didn’t come at such a price.

  He’s worth it, he told himself. And boyfriends come and go. Best friends are forever.

  He just had to keep reminding himself of that until he believed it. He’d dated more than one person while he was in Sydney, and Jason had more than one relationship during vet school, but nothing had shaken the core of their friendship. Not even Jason leaving him to go away to school could weaken that foundation. Seth just had to cling to that and let the rest alone. If he stopped obsessing over Jason, maybe he’d even find a jackaroo of his own.

  The thought turned his stomach. He could imagine being with Jason in every way known to man, but the minute he tried to replace Jason’s face with another, he felt sick. He didn’t trust any other man the way he trusted Jason.

  “You’re awfully quiet,” Jason said, breaking Seth’s train of thought.

  “Sorry, just trying to remember what I learnt about orien
ting solar panels. It’s been a while since I took that class.”

  “Yeah, I feel that way about some of the small-animal stuff I learnt in my first year of vet school,” Jason said. “I learnt it well enough to pass the class, but I always knew it wasn’t what I was going to do with my life, so I didn’t bother trying to retain it beyond that.”

  “Except that you really don’t need it, and now I do,” Seth said.

  Jason shrugged. “That’s what the Internet is for. You can use Mum’s computer if you don’t have one of your own and look up anything you’ve forgotten or didn’t learn in school. That’s what I do if I need to check something.”

  “I have a laptop,” Seth said. “And I will double-check everything before I start installing anything. I’d do that even if it was my field rather than something I studied for a semester on a whim.”

  “Aren’t you glad now that you did?”

  “Caine has a way of making you glad for everything you do for him.”

  Jason laughed. “Isn’t that the truth! So what are we looking for?”

  Seth settled into an explanation of storage capacities, panel angles, relative exposure, and cost versus output ratios. From the look on Jason’s face, more than a little of it went over his head, but he asked questions occasionally that pushed Seth to consider things from a different perspective. By the time they reached the first hut, the sick tension in Seth’s gut had faded and their easy camaraderie had returned. Maybe the afternoon wouldn’t be all torture.

  BY THE time they drove back into the valley for dinner, Seth had managed to forget most of his worries and bask in the warmth of Jason’s presence. They’d only visited two of the dozen or more drover’s huts scattered around the station, but Seth had a much better idea of what he’d need to look up and calculate in order to make Caine’s dream of a generator in each hut a reality. They didn’t need much. Enough for a refrigerator, a lamp, and a space heater, and only the refrigerator would be a constant drain on the stored power. They’d only need the heater in the winter and the lamp on the nights someone was using the hut. The two huts they’d visited that afternoon were both south facing and in full sun most of the day. A couple of solar panels on the roof and a good storage capacity on the associated battery would be plenty. If any of the huts had trees around them that would block the sun for part of the day, they might have to look at different options, but he’d worry about that later. For now, he had something to report for his first day on the job.