Irena curled her fingers around her cell phone. Taking it out, she held it up. “I take it there’s still no cell phone reception.”
He surprised her when he didn’t automatically confirm her assumptions. “There’s some, actually. But it plays by its own set of rules. Reception has a tendency of whimsically going in and out.”
Irena laughed. “Not all that different from the lower forty-eight.”
She saw the corners of his mouth curve. Unlike Ryan, Brody’s smile was boyish—or at least it had been, she realized. There was something almost sexy about it now. Or was that just her imagination, running off with her like it had when she’d first glimpsed Brody and thought he was Ryan?
“What?” she asked, wanting to be let in on the joke if there was one.
“Nothing, you just sound like a tourist instead of a native.”
“I’m not a native anymore,” she told him. “My home is in Seattle these days. I just came…” Suddenly, her voice failed her. For a second, emotion choked her throat, blocking her words. This was silly, she silently insisted. Fighting past it, she tried again. “I just came—”
“For closure?” Brody supplied.
Closure. My God but that sounded so trendy, so pretentious. She wasn’t here for closure; she was here to say goodbye to her youth. To love, because she’d loved Ryan Hayes with all of her young, naive heart. Loved him the way she’d never loved again and in all likelihood, would never love again.
“To pay my respects,” she finally concluded.
Brody stared at her for a long moment. “I doubt if you really mean that.” He saw the surprise on her face. She opened her mouth to protest. He cut her off. “He was my brother and I loved him, but Ryan didn’t deserve anyone’s respect. Because he never gave any.”
She hadn’t expected that from Brody. He’d always been so easygoing. “You’ve gotten harder than I remember.”
“Not harder, just more honest,” he corrected. “But I should have been harder. Maybe if someone had gotten tougher with Ryan, if someone took the trouble to shake him up a little and made him fly right, he might still be around.”
It wasn’t easy keeping the sorrow out of his voice. He still hadn’t worked through the anger he felt. Anger because at bottom, he felt what Ryan had done was a waste. It was a terrible, terrible waste of a human life.
Looking back, he supposed it had been a waste for a very long time.
She placed her hand on his arm, feeling his pain. Brody had never been one to talk about his feelings. Maybe they could help one another.
“What happened, Brody?” she asked softly. “My grandfather said that Ryan…that he died by his own hand.” It was a polite way of saying that he committed suicide, but she just couldn’t bring herself to use the words. It was just too awful to imagine Ryan willingly killing himself.
“That was the immediate cause of death,” Brody confirmed. Ryan had been found in a pool of blood, holding the gun that he’d used to end his life. “But the process for Ryan started long before this Monday.” He saw the look that came into her eyes and instantly realized what she was thinking. Irena had a tendency to take things on, to shoulder blame where there wasn’t any. “No, not ten years ago. You’re not to blame,” he said firmly. “Hell, you were the best thing that ever happened to him, but he was too dumb at the time to realize it. And as for what I just said, Ryan started destroying himself long before you left.”
Guilt still spouted, taking root at the speed of light. If she’d remained, maybe she could have helped Ryan, kept him from destroying himself.
“But if I hadn’t left—”
Brody shook his head. In his own way, when it came to Irena and Ryan, it was Ryan who had the strong personality. He could always bend Irena to his will.
“If you hadn’t left, Ryan would have probably managed somehow to take you down with him.” A hint of a smile surfaced again. “Although I don’t know. You were always pretty strong.”
She laughed at the notion, shaking her head. “I certainly didn’t feel strong.”
“Well, you were,” he contradicted. “Nobody else ever walked out on Ryan. When you did, it really shook him up. I thought—hoped—that it would wind up being a wake-up call for him. Instead, he just wound up drinking a little more.”
She knew it wasn’t his intention, but the words cut deep. “Then it was my fault.”
“No,” he insisted. Damn you, Ryan, you’re dead and you’re still messing with her. “It wasn’t your fault any more than it was my fault.” He took her hands in his as he spoke. “Don’t go down that path, Irena. It’s self-destructive, and there’s nothing to be gained. Ryan was a big boy and he was responsible for himself. He had looks, money, charm. He could have done anything, but he wanted to be a drunk.” Brody’s mouth twisted in a cynical smile. “Not the wisest of career choices. My father certainly proved that. His death should have served as a warning to Ryan. But it didn’t.”
Her eyes searched his face. “How did you manage to escape?”
Brody shrugged. It was a question that he’d asked himself more than once in the last decade, whenever a sadness gripped him or when his spirits plummeted so low he couldn’t even locate them.
“I supposed what saved me was that I wanted to be everything that they weren’t. Instead of focusing on me, I looked around and saw that I could be accomplishing things with my life, with my money, beyond just making Ike a wealthy man.” He grinned. “No offense to Ike.”
She didn’t quite follow him. “Ike? How does he figure into it?”
“Ike and his cousin, Jean Luc, own the Salty Dog, the saloon that Ryan practically lived in during the last few years of his life. Whenever he was there, Ike would cut him off at a sensible point or refuse to allow him to be served if Ryan came in already a couple sheets to the wind. But—I don’t know if you heard—Ike and his cousin have a number of irons in the fire these days, and he divides his time between different establishments when he’s not home, doting on his wife and kids. I couldn’t expect him to be Ryan’s guardian angel.”
“I heard about the first part,” she told him, “but not the second. Ike’s married?” It seemed impossible to imagine. Almost as impossible as imagining Ryan married, but for a different reason. Ike was, or had been, a flirt, but he’d made no secret of the fact that he loved women and felt that each had a unique quality all her own. “Ike, the eternal bachelor?”
Brody grinned again. “Not anymore. His sister, Juneau, died, leaving her baby daughter for him to raise. He got really domestic after that. And when Dr. Shayne Kerrigan’s wife had her best friend come up for a visit, Ike just lost his heart.”
Pausing in his narrative, Brody looked up at the sky. It was swiftly turning an ominous shade of gray, and once again, the wind was picking up.
“You know, I don’t mind catching you up this way, but I think that we should either do it inside the house, or better yet, drive over to your grandfather’s before it snows and strands us here.”
Although,
