LITMIR.BIZ

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his mind a lot? About visits and things like—”

      Alec cut her off with a glum look and a nod. “I just want to see him, Mom. I know he might not come.”

      Briana’s throat cinched tight. Vance was always chasing some big prize, some elusive victory, emotionally blindfolded, stumbling over rough ground, trying to catch fireflies in his bare hands. Their marriage was over for good, but he still had their sons. They were smart, wonderful boys. Why were they always at the bottom of his priority list?

      “I know,” she said, at last. “I know.”

      CASSIE STROKED the dog as she regarded Logan in her thoughtful way, seeing way inside. She looked completely at home in her skin, sitting there on the porch step. Unlike most of the women Logan knew, Cassie never seemed to fret about her weight—it was simply part of who she was. To him, she’d always been beautiful, a great and deep-rooted tree, sheltering him and his brothers under her leafy branches when they were young, along with half the other kids in the county. Giving them space to grow up in, within her constant, unruffled affection.

      “You look so much like Teresa,” she said quietly. “Especially around the eyes.”

      Logan didn’t answer. Cassie was thinking out loud, not making conversation. She never made conversation, not the small-talk variety, anyway.

      Teresa, his mother, had been Cassie’s foster daughter, so they weren’t really related, he and this “grandmother” of his. Still, he loved her, and knew she loved him in return.

      Cassie looked around, sighed. “The place is a shipwreck,” she said, still petting Sidekick, who was sucking up the attention, snuggling close against Cassie’s side. “You should come and stay in my guest room until the contractors are through.”

      “Your guest room,” Logan said, “is a teepee.”

      Cassie laughed. “You didn’t mind sleeping out there when you were a boy,” she reminded him. “You used to pretend you were Geronimo, and Dylan and Tyler always fussed at me because you wouldn’t let them be chief.”

      The memory—and the mention of his brothers—ached in Logan’s rawest places. “You ever hear from them, Cassie?” he asked, very quietly and at a considerable amount of time.

      “Do you?” Cassie immediately countered.

      Logan shoved a hand through his hair. He still needed a trim, but there were only so many things a man could do on his first day home. “No,” he said. “And you knew that, so why did you ask?”

      “Wanted to hear you say it aloud,” Cassie said. “Maybe it’ll sink in, that way. Dylan and Ty are your brothers, Logan. All the blood family you’ve got in the world. You play fast and loose with that, like you’ve got all the time there is to make things right between the three of you, and you’ll be sorry.”

      Logan approached at last, found a perch on the bottom step. His first inclination was to get his back up, ask why it was his job to “make things right,” but the question would have been rhetorical bullshit.

      He knew why it was up to him. Because he was the eldest. Because nobody else was going to open a dialogue. And because he’d been the one to start the fight, the day of their dad’s funeral, by speaking ill of the dead.

      Okay, he’d been drunk.

      But he’d meant the things he’d said about Jake—that he wouldn’t miss him, that the world would be a more peaceful place without him, if not a better one.

      He’d meant them then, anyway.

      Cassie reached out and mussed his hair. “Why did you come back here, Logan?” she asked. “I think I know, but, like before, I’d like to hear you say it.”

      “To start over,” he said, after another hesitation.

      “Sounds like a big job,” Cassie observed. “Getting on some kind of terms with your brothers—even slugging terms would be better than what you have now—that’ll be part of it.”

      Logan nodded, but he didn’t speak. He didn’t trust his voice beyond the three-word sentence he’d offered up last.

      “I’ll give you their numbers,” Cassie said, shifting enough to extract her purse from between her right thigh and the porch rail, taking out a notepad and a pen. “You call them.”

      “What am I going to say?”

      For all the figuring he’d done, all the planning and deciding, he’d never come up with a way to close the yawning gap between him and Dylan and Tyler.

      Cassie chuckled. “Start with hello,” she said, “and see where it goes from there.”

      “I shouldn’t need to tell you where it might ‘go from there,’” he replied.

      “You’ll never know if you don’t try,” Cassie told him. She scrawled two numbers onto the notepad, quickly and from memory, Logan noted, and tore off the page to hand to him. Having done that, she stood with the elegant grace that always surprised him a little, given her size. She patted Sidekick once more and descended the steps with the slow and purposeful motion of a glacier, leaving Logan to step out of her way or get run over.

      Sidekick remained behind on the porch step, but he gave a little snort-sigh, sorry to see Cassie go.

      Logan opened the door of her car, like a gentleman. Why Cassie didn’t buy herself something decent to drive was beyond him—she received a chunk of the take from the local casino twice a year, as did the other forty-odd members of her tribe.

      “Next time I see you,” she said, shaking a finger at him, “you’d better be able to tell me you’ve spoken to Dylan and Tyler. And it wouldn’t be a bad idea to shave and put on something with a collar and buttons.” She paused to tug at his T-shirt. “In my day, these things were underwear.”

      Logan laughed. “I’ve missed you, Cassie,” he said, leaning in to kiss her cheek. “Sidekick and I will stop by tomorrow—I’m taking him to the vet and I have a meeting with my contractor. I can promise the shave and the button-down shirt, maybe even a haircut, but whether I’ll have called my brothers or not… well, that’s a crapshoot.”

      “Longer you put it off, the harder it will be,” Cassie said, making no move to get into the car. “Are you going to stay, Logan, or are you just blowing through to spit on your father’s grave and sell your share of this land to some actor?”

      “I hope you’re not going to stand there and pretend you were the president of Jake Creed’s fan club,” Logan said.

      “We had our tussles, Jake and me,” Cassie admitted. “But he was your father, Logan. In his own crazy way, he loved you boys.”

      “Yeah, it was right out of Leave it to Beaver, the way we lived,” Logan scoffed. There was a note of respect in his tone, but it was for Cassie, not Jake. “I guess you’ve forgotten the year he cut the Christmas tree in half with a chainsaw. And how about that wonderful Thanksgiving when he decided the turkey was overcooked and threw it through the kitchen window?”

      Cassie sighed, laid a hand on Logan’s shoulder. “What about the time you and Dylan decided to run away from home and got lost up in the woods? It was November, and the weatherman was predicting record low temperatures. The sheriff gave up the search when the sun went down, but Jake…? He kept looking. Found you and brought you both home.”

      “And hauled us both off to the woodshed.”

      “If he’d given up, you’d have been hauled off to the morgue. I know he took a switch to you, and I’d have stopped him if I’d been here, but it wasn’t anger that made him paddle your hind end, Logan Creed. It was plain old ordinary fear.”

      “Today, they call it child abuse,” Logan pointed out.

      “Today,” Cassie argued, “they’ve got school shootings and

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