Bruins' Peak Bears Box Set (Volume I)

by Sarah J. Stone

  So he beat the Alpha in a Bruin challenge. No one could deny that—if anyone ever found out about it. Mattox would never tell a living soul. He would take it to his grave before he shamed Rex in front of his family. Still, he couldn’t escape the simple fact. He fought Mackenzie Alpha and won. That entitled him to take over as Alpha. It entitled him to the ranch, the family fortune, even…even Lyric.

  Mattox shuddered. He couldn’t touch Lyric. He wouldn’t steal another Bruin’s mate. He had his own pride and his tribe’s reputation to protect. He didn’t want Lyric anyway. She saw too…well, she was too…He didn’t know what she was, but he wouldn’t consider Lyric in the same sentence with the rest of this sordid mess.

  Even if he kept his victory secret, the unvarnished truth meant everything. It changed his whole outlook. It changed his position on this ranch. It changed his relationship to everyone, including himself—especially himself.

  He wasn’t the person anyone thought he was. He wasn’t the person his father and Brody thought he was. He wasn’t the person he himself thought he was. He must be capable of running a tribe after all. Brody took over as Alpha of the Farrell tribe. That left the Mackenzie tribe to Mattox.

  He buried himself in the dark, pungent barn, but the dark couldn’t wash away the mark on his soul. Rex laid his mantle on Mattox. He marked him for all time as Alpha. Nothing could change that. Mattox might spend the rest of his life bowing and scraping and molly-coddling Azer and Riskin. He might spend his life obeying them and never looking them in the eye.

  He could do all that, but he would still be their Alpha. He would do it to protect them and spare them the painful realization they were weaker than he was. Why should he protect them from that? Why shouldn’t he take his rightful place at the top?

  With a heavy heart, he flicked on the overhead lights. He moved down the barn to the tie-ups he cleaned out during the day. He came around the corner and almost collided with Lyric standing there. She narrowed her eyes at him. “What are you doing here?”

  He moved around her to the first space. A cow lay on the floor in the first tie-up. A month-old calf stood at her side. The animals blinked their soft brown eyes at Mattox, but neither showed any sign of alarm when he started working around them. “I guess I’m doing the same thing you’re doing here.”

  “I came out here to be alone. I wouldn’t have come if I thought you were going to be here.”

  “I came out here to be alone, too. I wouldn’t have come, either, if I thought you were going to be here. Life is too short to listen to insults all day long. Go back inside and insult Azer and Riskin if you want someone to insult.”

  He kept his voice low and his head bent, but he couldn’t stop a sharp edge creeping into his words. Even as they passed his lips, he felt them strike home. Lyric hugged her arms over her stomach. She paced up and down and scanned the barn for nothing in particular. “I’m sorry. I didn’t come out here to insult you. I guess I’m just…” She stopped short and stared at him. “What are you doing?”

  “Huh? What? I’m blanketing this cow and calf.”

  She studied his movements. He moved around the cow with slow, careful motions of his harms and hands. He touched the cow all over and brushed her coat until it shone. He buckled the blanket around her chest and legs. Then he did the same thing to the calf.

  “What are you doing that for?”

  “It gets cold at night these days. I just want to make sure they’re taken care of. I’m checking their feed and water for the night. That’s all.”

  Lyric frowned. “What are they doing penned up in here? They should be out with the herd.”

  “This pair don’t belong to the herd. They belong to me.”

  Lyric started. “To you? But they’ve got the Mackenzie brand—at least the mother does.”

  Mattox nodded. He took a lump of salt out of his pocket and held it out to the mother cow. She licked it off his bare palm with her languorous, slobbery tongue. She chewed it with half-closed eyes.

  “Azer gave me this cow,” Mattox said. “She was born in your family herd, and Azer mated her with your prize bull. She was due to have her calf, but she had trouble with the other cows. She kept getting into fights and got injured. Azer couldn’t keep her with the herd, and he and Riskin didn’t have time to take care of her separately. He was going to put her down, but I said I wanted her, so he gave her to me. I’ve been keeping her here, and she gave birth to this calf a month ago. No one was using these tie-ups, so I’ve been taking care of them here in my free time.”

  “What do you want them for?”

  He stole a peek at her. “I just didn’t want to see the cow shot for no good reason. Lots of heifers get into trouble before they have their first calf. They settle down once they start lactating. It’s normal. I’ve seen it a thousand times if I’ve seen it once. That’s no reason to get rid of them.”

  Lyric smacked her lips. “If you’ve seen it a thousand times, you know any decent cattleman can’t spend all his time raising calves by hand. I’m sure you could find half a dozen other heifers in that herd with yearling trouble. I don’t see you raising them by hand. What’s so special about this cow and calf, that you want to make pets out of them and brush them and feed them and care for them like your own children?”

  He muttered something under his breath and kicked an invisible speck of dirt on the floor. “I dunno.”

  “Come on, Mattox. You’ve been playing dumb around here for six months. If I thought you were strange before, you showed me this morning you don’t do anything without some good reason.”

  His head shot up, and his eyes shone bright over the cow’s back. “All right. If you really want to know, I’ll tell you. I asked Azer to give her to me because this cow belongs to an old line of pedigree your father developed when he first took over this ranch. He developed a line of cattle better suited to the Peak’s climate and heavier in the flank. That’s how he built up the ranch’s fortune in the first place, but Azer and Riskin don’t use that line anymore. They introduced faster growing cattle that come up lighter at the scales. This calf combines the old pedigree with the Mackenzies’ prize bull. I thought…well, I don’t know what I thought.”

  “You thought you could start a new line.”

  A light came on in Mattox’s face, and he started talking faster. He’d never spoken about this to anyone before. He never thought he would. “Don’t you see? By combining these two lines, we can create a stronger breed of cattle than either the new one or the old one—at least, I can.”

  Lyric pursed her lips. “And this cow and calf, and the new line, will be all yours, won’t it? Azer gave you this cow. We won’t be creating a new, stronger line. You will. You’ll build your own fortune and ride off into the sunset. Isn’t that what you really mean?”

  Mattox looked sideways. “Well, not exactly.”

  Lyric stared down at the cow. Little by little, her eyes crept up to his face. “How did you learn all this? How did you find out about the old pedigree, and how did you find out about this cow and calf?”

  He inclined his head and waved his hand. He led her to a door in the sidewall. That door opened into the old tack room. The Mackenzies kept their saddles, bridles, brushes, halters in there—all the trappings of bygone days when they did all their work on horseback. Mattox stepped inside and switched on the light. He bent over a stack of hay bales in the corner.

  Lyric came to his side and found him flipping the yellowed pages of a leather-bound book. “Azer has made me clean out every square inch of this barn since I got here. I guess he and Riskin never took much time to do it themselves. When I showed up, they saw the chance to finally get it done.”

  Lyric rolled her eyes. “No, they never cleaned this place out. I’ve never seen it so clean as it’s been since you came.”

  “I found this book in the hay loft a couple of days after I first came to live here.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s a ledger your father kept
of all his breeding activity. It lists every cow, every steer, every mating he ever performed with every single animal.”

  “But that’s thousands of animals. There must be a couple hundred thousand entries in this book.”

  “That’s right. I’ve been reading this book and studying your operation since I moved into your house. It’s amazing what you can accomplish when no one will talk to you.”

  “So what did you find out?”

  “Take a look. Here are the tag numbers for all your cows. This number lists the tag number for that cow’s mother. That’s how I found out she belonged to your father’s old pedigree.”

  Chapter 8

  Lyric stared at the book. Row upon row of seven digit numbers lined every page, along with microscopic scribbled notes. By squinting hard, she could just make out notations related to which bulls mated with which cows. That book contained a detailed record of the parentage of every animal on the ranch.

  She lifted her eyes to his face one more time, but she didn't see the Mattox Farrell she thought she knew. Who was this man? “Have you been studying this book…what—every night and weekend in the whole six months you’ve been here?”

  He flipped the pages back and forth. “Yep, just about. Every spare minute I have, I read this. Your father put a lot of information in here.”

  She didn't look at the book again. She couldn't take her eyes off him. “If you're telling the truth, you must know a lot more about this ranching operation than Azer or Riskin.”

  He shot her a sidelong grin. “Does that surprise you?”

  “Do they know what you're doing here?”

  “Of course, they do. Azer gave me the cow himself. He knew she was in calf, and they know I'm in here taking care of them now. They think I'm cracked in the head.”

  Lyric turned bright red. “What are you saying? Are you saying Azer and Riskin don't know anything about this ranch?”

  He shrugged and turned away. “They know what they want to know. If anything comes along they don't want to know, they ignore it, kind of like…” He trailed off and headed out of the room.

  Lyric stared after him. What had he been about to say? She knew what she would say if she had to finish that sentence. If anything came along Azer and Riskin didn't want to know, they ignored it, just like they ignored him.

  Her mind whirled in a thousand directions, and none of them made sense. Mattox Farrell discovered a secret book that told him everything he needed to know about the Mackenzie cattle ranch. He learned all this in his free time when Azer and Riskin thought he was picking daisies and staring into space. Mattox Farrell, of all people!

  Now he'd gotten his hands on a calf crossed between her father's old pedigree and the Mackenzies' prize bull. He was building his own breeding line, a stronger, fitter, heavier line than anything Azer or Riskin could dream of.

  Where would it end? Once he built this line, he would…He couldn't. He didn't dare threaten the ranch, not after the way her father took him in when he lost his place with his own tribe.

  Lyric shook her head, but she couldn't clear her thoughts. Why shouldn't he threaten the ranch, after the way the guys treated him—after the way Lyric herself treated him? He owed the Mackenzies no loyalty. She wouldn't blame him if he did everything possible to drive them into the ground.

  Of course, he hadn't told Azer and Riskin what he found in that book. They would ignore that, too. They would find a way to torment him about that along with everything else.

  She heard him open the tie-up gate. He was back in there now, checking on his prize cow and her calf. The calf was a heifer, too. Nothing could set Mattox up better to carry out his plan to develop his own pedigree. A moment later, the light switch thunked. He moved down the barn floor, turning off the lights and getting ready to leave for the night.

  She couldn't wait any longer. She hurried out of the tack room, but she didn't exit the barn the way she came in. She dashed the other way and snuck out behind his back. What could make her slink around her own home like a thief? Why did finding out what Mattox was doing stab her heart with guilt? His conscience didn't bother him, so why should hers?

  She raced back to the house and into the living room. Riskin stood at the kitchen counter spooning ice cream into a dish. Melody sat on the couch with her feet tucked under her. She read a romance novel and didn't look up when Lyric entered.

  Riskin cast a glance in her direction and went back to his spoon. She marched right over and rounded the counter, but he started talking first. “Listen, darling, I'm sorry about what I said earlier. I know you're still mad at me, but....”

  Lyric cut him off with a wave of her hand. “I want to talk to you, Riskin. It's important.”

  His eyes popped open. “You do? Okay. I thought you wanted to handle all the wedding plans on your own, but if you need help with anything…”

  “Will you put a sock in it for two seconds and listen to me? This has nothing to do with wedding. I said this is important.”

  He frowned. “Our wedding is important.”

  “Did you know Mattox is raising a cow and calf by hand in the barn?”

  His face hardened. “So, this is about Mattox? That's not important.”

  Lyric shut her eyes tight. “Did you know about it or not?”

  He licked his spoon. “Sure, I knew about it. He can dress in women's clothing and hang around in bars in his free time, for all I care. He's some kind of idiot. That's the only thing I can figure. That must be why his father passed him up.”

  Lyric gritted her teeth and lowered her voice to a snarl. “Will you shut your mouth? I swear to God, if you say one more word about that, I'll slap you silly. I'm talking about something important. Do you and Azer have any plans to develop the herd? Do you have any breeding program to improve our weights at the slaughterhouse or introduce new genetics to make us competitive?”

  “Why would we want to do that? Our genetics are good enough the way they are, and we make a whopping profit on our current weights. I see no reason to change that, and neither does Azer. Heaven knows we've got enough to deal with without changing things.”

  “You could improve our weights and our profits if you changed something.”

  “Changing something is always a risk. We could destroy the ranch that way. I'm for keeping things the way they are.”

  “Have you ever thought maybe we're already going downhill by staying the same? Maybe things used to be better, and the way they are now is worse than it used to be. Maybe you're so busy keeping things the way they are you haven't noticed them going down. Did that ever occur to you?”

  “Well, we wouldn't know that unless we had some way of measuring the present against the past. We don't have that, so we can only go on the present.”

  Lyric threw up her hands. “You and Azer don't have a clue what's going on around this ranch.”

  He hitched his hand on his hip. “And you do? You've been stuck in the kitchen for years. You should stay out of the ranching business and leave that to us.”

  Lyric narrowed her eyes at him. She started to argue back when she thought better of it. What was the point of arguing with these guys? They didn’t have the first clue what Mattox was up to. They had no plans of their own. They would never do anything to improve the ranch. They kept their eyes on the ground in front of them. They never so much as glanced at the future.

  Lyric nodded. “Okay, Riskin. Enjoy your ice cream. I'm going to see Papa now.”

  He called after her, “Hey, what about....?”

  She hurried away to her father's room and shut the door. She didn't want to think about the encounter with Riskin they planned at breakfast that morning. Did that peaceful moment in front of the kitchen sink happen just this morning? How could so many things change so fast?

  A night light shone behind her father's bed. No other light disturbed her sleeping father’s tranquility. Lyric sat down in the arm chair by the bed and gazed at him in deep thought.

  This man built the ra
nch into a Bruin powerhouse. He developed unique breeding lines to turn a bare patch of Bruins' Peak into one of the most profitable businesses in the county. He built a legacy that survived long after his usefulness as a person died away. Not all the drunken gambling and destruction could wipe out his accomplishment.

  The work Rex put into this ranch remained recorded in that book. Now Mattox held the ranch's destiny in his hands. No one else came close to her father in vision and talent.

  She sat still for hours. Her eyes never wavered from her father's face, but inside, she was in turmoil. Riskin wasn't the man she thought he was. He attacked her in the barn, and now she saw him through Mattox's eyes. He knew nothing about the ranch's prospects or its future. He didn't want to know. How could she marry him, after everything that happened?

  Mattox wasn't the man she thought he was, either. Nothing was what she thought it was. Her world rocked on its foundation until nothing remained. She always planned to dedicate her life to the ranch by marrying Riskin. If she didn't marry him, who should she marry to give the ranch its best chance?

  Why should she sell herself for the ranch anyway? Why shouldn't she have some crumb of happiness in this whole tragic situation? She'd lost her mother. She might as well have lost her father, for all the good he did her. She lost everything she ever knew about herself, and now she'd lost Riskin, too.

  What on Earth did she really want? If she could put out her hand and receive her heart's dearest wish, what would she wish for? Would she go back to this morning and wipe out everything she learned today? Would she go back to thinking Mattox was a dolt and Riskin was her one true love?

  She couldn't go back to this morning, and she wouldn't close her eyes to the truth, either. Riskin wasn't her one true love, and Mattox was no dolt. If Riskin wasn't her one true love, who was?

  Could Melody be right about all that true love stuff? What if, by some twist of fate, one man out there really did belong to her for all time? How could she give Riskin the time of day, when her true mate waited for her out there?