meal, Brylee would have chased the housekeeper off, good-naturedly, of course, so she and Zane could clear the table and load the dishwasher. They’d talk about their day—Zane, no doubt, would offer a comical account of Landry’s bronc-riding episode, and Brylee would elbow him and tell him to be nice, and then she’d blush as they both remembered summer-afternoon lovemaking.
Whoa, Landry thought, derailing his previous train of thought by shoving his chair back from the table and getting to his feet. He carried the remains of his supper—gourmet fare by anybody’s standards, so he had no business complaining on that score—over to the sink. There, he tossed the bones in the trash bin and scraped and then rinsed his plate and stowed it in the machine, along with his utensils and the wineglass.
Maddie Rose Sutton had raised her boys to clean up after themselves, swearing she wasn’t about to unleash a couple of slobs on a world full of women who had enough to do as it was, without kid-gloving some man. By now, it was a habit.
Landry stood still, there at the sink, remembering his mom. She’d had it tough, Maddie Rose had, but she’d never complained, as far as he could recall. Just when he was getting established and Zane was about to sign the contract to make his first movie, and they could have been assets to their mother for once, instead of liabilities, she’d come down with a case of flu that turned out to be some virulent strain of leukemia instead. After a week in a small hospital in the backwater Dakota town where she’d been waiting tables for the past few months, Maddie Rose had breathed her last.
Worse, she’d been alone when the time came, except for a friend or two from the café where she’d worked. He and Zane had both been far away, doing their own thing, blissfully unaware that Maddie Rose’s flu wasn’t flu at all.
Once they were informed, it was too late to say goodbye, or thank you, or I love you, Mom.
Landry sighed. Maybe one of these days, he’d be able to think of his mother without guilt and regret, but, just now, that day seemed far off.
He should have been there for her—Zane, too. The way she’d always been there for them.
He was just about to shut off the lights and retreat to his bedroom, to read or watch TV or maybe just lie down and stare at the ceiling with his hands cupped behind his head, waiting in vain for sleep, when the wall phone rang.
Landry scowled at the thing for a moment or two, tempted to ignore it. Unlike the phones in his bedroom and home office, this one hadn’t come equipped with caller ID, wasn’t even cordless. Highbridge’s doing, he recalled grimly—the butler didn’t entirely approve of too much modern technology, was suspicious of what he considered unwarranted convenience.
So Landry picked up the receiver, in case something was wrong over at Zane and Brylee’s, or those damn buffalo had broken through a fence line somewhere and made for Ria’s flowers again. He answered with a rather brisk “Hello?”
If the caller turned out to be a telemarketer or a survey taker, he might just take the person’s head off, long-distance.
The reply was a low, rumbling laugh, gratingly familiar. “Landry? Is that you, boy?”
Jess Sutton—his father.
“What do you want?” Landry asked. He didn’t hear from the old man for years at a time, and when he did, it was because a favor was about to be asked, so there was no point in beating around the proverbial bush.
Jess gave another chuckle. “Is that any way to talk to your old dad?” he chided, with just the slightest edge in his voice.
Landry said nothing. He knew what was coming, and saw no reason to make it easy.
His father sighed, long-suffering, patient as the day was long. As if. “I was wondering how Nash is doing,” Jess went on quietly, letting it be known that he was hurt but magnanimous enough to generously overlook the injury.
“In that case,” Landry replied, frowning, “why didn’t you call Zane and Brylee’s place? Nash lives with them—but I guess you were aware of that, since you signed him over like a quit-claim deed.”
A long silence followed; then Jess cleared his throat. “Hell, Landry,” he finally muttered, “I know I was a lousy father to all three of you. No need to rub it in.”
Landry relented, but only a little. “Lousy” didn’t begin to describe the kind of parent Jess Sutton had been—back when he and Zane were growing up, the man had mostly steered clear, and they’d liked it that way. After a while anyhow.
At first, they’d missed him to the point of genuine pain. They’d waited for him to change, come and get them and their mother, bring them home for good. They’d all live happily ever after then, like a real family. Not.
“Okay,” Landry said. “But I’d still like to know why you’d call here looking for Nash, when you know he’s elsewhere.”
“Zane and I don’t get along very well,” Jess said, aggrieved. He never seemed to relate consequences to anything he’d said or done, but that was nothing new. Most likely, he regarded himself as the innocent victim of betrayal, misunderstanding and just plain bad luck.
“He won’t ask you for child support, if that’s what you’re worried about,” Landry supplied ungenerously. Zane had had himself a successful movie career, a kind of lucky fluke, before he’d come to Three Trees to settle down and marry Brylee, and money wasn’t a problem.
“Do you ever let up?” Jess asked sadly.
Poor, beleaguered Jess Sutton. Good-looking, smooth-talking and not worth the powder it would take to blow him to hell.
“Look,” Landry replied, wishing he hadn’t answered the call in the first place, “as far as I know, Nash is fine. He’s grown about a foot in the last year, he does all right in school, he likes girls and he’s rodeo-crazy. All pretty normal.”
If only Jess actually cared about any of those things, or about the boy himself. The truth was, asking about Nash was just a way in, a conversation starter.
“I’m in a little trouble,” Jess said, after another silence, this one so long that Landry had been about to hang up, thinking the connection had been broken, when the man finally spoke.
Landry closed his eyes. Waited. Here it comes.
“Are you still there?” Jess asked.
“I’m still here,” Landry confirmed, opening his eyes again, shoving his free hand through his hair. He’d been expecting this, but that didn’t make it any easier to handle.
“I need a small loan,” Jess thrust out.
Landry felt a stab of pity then, but he didn’t let on—not because he was trying to spare his father’s pride, though. Jess was the classic con man, always on the lookout for a soft spot, and if he found one, he’d zero in on it like a suicide bomber.
“How small?” Landry asked. With Jess, the word loan was a misnomer. Handout was the better word, since he had no intention of paying it back.
“Five thousand dollars,” Jess said, and now the edge was back in his voice.
Landry gave a low whistle. Five thousand dollars wasn’t a lot of money to him personally, not these days anyway, but
