Long Way Home. Gena Dalton

smiled at the little girl, then threw Monte one of her famous looks.

      “Yes, we do, sugar,” she said. “We’ll work on his manners.”

      “Monte, why didn’t you close your eyes during the prayer?” Lily Rae asked.

      He busied himself crumbling biscuits and drizzling gravy onto them. Maybe if he ignored her, she’d go away.

      Maybe all of them would forget about him and talk about something else.

      No such luck.

      “Yeah, Monte,” Clint drawled. “I’d think you’d want to bow your head and close your eyes and thank God for showing you the way home.”

      Monte’s stomach tightened.

      But not so much that he couldn’t eat. This was the first home-cooked food he’d had for months. The gravy smelled heavenly.

      “Ma,” he said, “I haven’t had a decent biscuit since I’ve been gone and no restaurant in the world can make sausage gravy like yours.”

      “Well, at least you remember Ma’s cookin’,” Jackson said. “For the last several years we were star-tin’ to think you’d lost either your map or your memory.”

      Monte shot a defiant glance at him and then one at Clint.

      He’d have to have it out with his brothers before too many days went by. But then, he had known that for six years now.

      “Why do you have my mommy’s horse?” Lily Rae said, attacking from another direction.

      She was just like her mother. Same determination. She was going to make him talk to her, one way or the other.

      He looked at her then, and tried his fiercest glare. Her wide, blue eyes never wavered. She took a big bite of a biscuit oozing with honey.

      “Annie’s my horse,” he said finally. “I bought her at a sale.”

      Lily stared at him thoughtfully while she chewed.

      He could feel Jo Lena’s amused eyes on him. Delia’s, too. Everybody was listening.

      “Annie was my mommy’s horse since she was a little foal,” Lily Rae said as soon as she could talk again.

      “Yeah,” Delia put in, “she was. I remember when Annie was born, and when she was two I remember Jo Lena used to ride her.”

      Delia’s voice was full of suppressed laughter.

      Suddenly, aggravated as he was, Monte felt he was really home. Delia, at least, was going to treat him the same way she used to.

      Well, to be truthful, so were Jackson and Clint, even if their baby brother was now thirty-one years old. Great irony in that.

      He threw his sister a warning glance but, as always, she only laughed at him and raised her eyebrows, demanding an answer as Lily Rae asked another question.

      “Are you going to sell Annie to us?” Lily said.

      If Jo Lena thought this mouthy little girl was cute enough to make him change his mind about that horse, she had another think coming. He hadn’t bought the mare just so Jo Lena could own her again.

      Matter of fact, at this moment, he couldn’t quite remember the reason he had bought her. Maybe for old times’ sake—memories had flooded through him like a river when he saw Annie come up the ramp onto the sale podium.

      No. He had bought her for the foal she carried. The Quick Tiger and Sunny Meridian bloodlines could be a better cross to get a great cutter than most people might think.

      “No,” Monte said shortly. “There’s no reason to sell her to you. You live on the same place with Annie and I’ll let you ride her anytime you want to.”

      This shocked Lily Rae, who looked at him as if he’d lost his mind.

      “Nuh-uh! Mommy and me don’t live here. We live at our house!”

      She turned to Jo Lena for confirmation.

      Reluctantly, Monte stopped eating. Thoroughly annoyed, he glared at Jo Lena.

      “You said…”

      “You jumped to conclusions,” she said coolly. “I have my own room here—to change in. I ride nearly every day.”

      “’Cause I like to play at Lupe’s,” Lily Rae said, naming the wife of Manuel, the ranch foreman. “She takes care of me and Maria.”

      She took a long drink of milk, holding the glass with both hands.

      Then she smiled at Monte with her milk mustache shining above her lip.

      “I can ride, too,” she said, “and Mommy says Annie is a perfect horse for me.”

      His whole family was watching and listening as if this was a movie.

      Well, too bad. Let them think whatever they wanted. They already judged him as selfish to the core, so he’d just prove them right.

      “I’ll let you ride Annie but I won’t sell her,” he said firmly. “Annie’s a good mare and I have plans for her.”

      As those words left his mouth, he knew why it was that he’d bought the mare and why he was hanging on to her so fiercely.

      It wasn’t that he wanted to keep Jo Lena hanging around him from now on, begging to buy her.

      Annie was nine years old and she’d never had a foal. She was possibly a great mare who’d never been taken to her full potential. She’d never even competed in a big cutting futurity. He could train her for that and he could see what he could do with her first foal.

      She might prove to be the nucleus of a broodmare band he could build up—one that would be the best in the industry, bar none. He had a lot of winnings in the bank that he’d never had time to spend.

      Yes, the reason he had bought the mare and the real reason he had come home was the same: he needed to prove himself where somebody who mattered could see it.

      That realization was all Monte could think about after breakfast, when Bobbie Ann shooed her three sons out onto the back porch and firmly shut the kitchen door behind them. He did care what his brothers thought of him, much as he hated to admit he did.

      And his sisters. And his mother. And Jo Lena.

      He cared what all of them thought, even though he’d give anything if he didn’t.

      “Let’s go over to the barn,” Clint said. “Show Monte some winning horses.”

      “Good thing you didn’t say winning bulls,” Jackson said, but his tone was light enough that Monte knew he was teasing, not taunting, him.

      “Yeah,” Monte drawled. “I’ve seen enough winning bulls to last me for a while.”

      “When did the doctor say you could ride again?”

      That was Clint. Always wanting to plan ahead, needing to get everything under control.

      “That depends,” Monte said evasively, “on a lot of things.”

      They walked toward the barn with him in the middle, carefully keeping to his slow pace, as if they aimed to keep him under control. Of course, Jackson couldn’t walk much faster than him.

      Which certainly wasn’t fast enough to outrun the other subject on his mind.

      “Say,” Monte said casually, “who did Jo Lena marry, anyhow?”

      They both looked at him.

      “She didn’t,” Clint said, “far as I know.”

      Jackson shook his head.

      “Jo Lena’s never even dated much,” he said. “Not since you left the county.”

      A whole new shock raced along Monte’s