Betting on the Cowboy. Kathleen O'Brien

he took a consciously deep breath. That was cheap bait, a quick piece of dirty chum his grandfather probably tossed out by habit. He wasn’t eighteen anymore, and he didn’t have to rise to it.

      “Exactly,” he agreed placidly. “Between jobs.”

      The older man frowned. He shifted his weight, repositioning the cane. Clearly, his injury, arthritis, gout...whatever necessitated the cane...was bothering him. And yet he equally clearly didn’t want to be the first to acknowledge the need to sit.

      For one ruthless second, Gray told himself he was glad. It served the old man right. Gray would happily stand here all night, if that meant his grandfather might know even a fraction of the pain he’d caused other people. People like Gray’s father and mother.

      But the thought died instantly. In the end, it was beneath Gray to torture an old man—it was not his way, in spite of what his grandfather had modeled for him through the years.

      So he took the nearest chair. Immediately after, his grandfather settled on the edge of the silk divan stiffly, as if his hip didn’t bend correctly anymore. He didn’t allow himself a sigh of relief, but the lines in his face eased slightly.

      “So.” He massaged his palm into the head of the cane, eyeing Gray over it. “What brings you back to Silverdell?”

      Just like that. No small talk. No “How are you?” or “Did you marry, have children, stay healthy, make money, buy a house...did you ever forgive me?”

      Simply go straight to the point. Fine. Again, two could play that game.

      “You bring me back,” Gray answered matter-of-factly.

      “Is that so?” His grandfather raised his shaggy white eyebrows. “Not intentionally, I assure you.”

      Gray shook his head a fraction of an inch. The mean old buzzard hadn’t softened a bit, had he? Well, that was probably for the best. His arrogance and unyielding antagonism made Gray’s job so much easier. As he’d journeyed back to Colorado from California, he’d wondered what he would do if the old man had grown weak, or senile, or sentimental. He’d wondered what he would say if his grandfather welcomed him home with open arms.

      This was much cleaner. Now he could just speak his piece without wasting time trying to be diplomatic. And he could get out of this house before the past swallowed him up and broke his heart all over again.

      “Nonetheless, it’s true.” He gazed at the old man, whose face was tinted a deceptively youthful pink by reflected sunset. “You really are the reason I’ve returned.”

      His grandfather frowned, as if he had a sudden gas pain. “Why? Had you heard I was sick or something? Did you hope you could breeze in at the stroke of midnight, butter up a dying man and get yourself written back into my will?”

      Gray laughed. “Nope. Hadn’t heard a thing. Believe it or not, no one out in California talks about you, your health or your money. Why, are you sick?”

      “No.” More rubbing his palm into the head of the cane, more scowling from under those unruly eyebrows. “I’m old, and my hip isn’t what it used to be. But if you’re here for a deathbed vigil, you’ll have a long time to wait.”

      “I’m not.”

      “Well, what, then?” The old man grunted, a deeply skeptical sound. “You don’t really expect me to believe the money has nothing to do with it.”

      Gray leaned back in his chair, smiling. “Oh, the money has everything to do with it.”

      His grandfather’s eyes narrowed, but he didn’t speak. He simply waited. He obviously refused to give Gray the satisfaction of asking for details.

      No problem. Gray had rehearsed this part often enough that he didn’t need prompting. He’d been rehearsing it for seventeen years, in fact. Since he was thirteen and filled with impotent fury at being so young, so helpless, so dependent on this tyrant. At being unable to summon the courage to say what ought to be said.

      By now, Gray could have delivered this news in his sleep.

      “It’s one hundred percent about the money,” he repeated. “But not your money. Mine.”

      The expressive eyebrows lifted high. “Yours?”

      “Yes. You see, I’ve decided that it’s time you returned my inheritance. I’ve come to tell you that, unless you voluntarily sign over every single penny you took from my father seventeen years ago, I intend to sue you for it.”

      In the silence that followed, the mantel clock ticked like a time bomb. Gray could hear someone, probably the plump housekeeper, running water in the kitchen, though that part of the house was at least fifty yards away.

      Finally his grandfather spoke. “Who told you I took money from him? I’ll guarantee your father never said that.”

      “Not to me. He told other people, who told me. I don’t have any proof, of course. But I will get it, if you force me to. And the world will know you stole from your own son.”

      Finally the old man rose, slowly. Gray watched how he relied on the cane, and wondered whether, without it, his grandfather would be able to stand at all. In spite of everything, pity stirred, and his words suddenly sounded cruel, too harsh for this fragile old man to take.

      Gray shut his eyes, annoyed by his own vacillating. This was why he hadn’t come back to Silverdell for ten long years. It was just too damn emotionally confusing to feel intense love and intense hatred at the same time, for the same person.

      His grandfather didn’t seem tormented by any similar ambivalence. He stared at Gray coldly.

      “I seem to remember that the last time I saw you I warned you never to mention your father in my presence again.”

      Gray nodded. “Yes. You did.”

      “Still you dare to come here and...” The old lips thinned. “You dare to defy me.”

      Gray shrugged. “Yes.” He glanced through the window, where an olive-green gloaming was overtaking the sunset. “I dare. And yet, as you can see, no lightning bolts have struck me down. The earth still turns.”

      His grandfather’s face darkened. “You always were an impertinent boy, Gray. Too clever by half. I blame your mother for that. Hannah foolishly encouraged you to think—”

      But Gray, too, was out of his chair now. “Leave my mother out of this.” He took one hard step closer. “You don’t have the right to speak her name.”

      “Perhaps not.” Undaunted, his grandfather cocked a sardonic glance toward the window. “And yet...the earth still turns.”

      For a minute, all Gray’s hard-won indifference, his emotional independence and rational perspective, melted away, and he was afraid he might hit the old man. Somehow he held himself in check, though the blood throbbed in his head, and his right hand seemed to have frozen in a tightly muscled fist.

      God, this had been a mistake. Just being in this house again scrambled his brain. He had overestimated the distance a few years could put between him and the past. Suddenly, the onslaught of memories was just too much... He saw again, as if it were real, that last night...his father standing there, right there by the fireplace, drinking too much, taking offense at everything old Grayson said...

      And his mother quietly weeping, her hand on his father’s arm, trying to keep him from finishing the last Scotch. The cold rain sheeting across the windows, the shadows of the elms fighting with the shadows of the fire.

      Then the slamming doors, the parting threats and the rain-drenched, curving mountain road...

      Damn it. Gray’s left elbow began to ache, where the bones had knitted but remained sensitive. It might as well have been days since the accident, not years. He couldn’t think straight in this room...this house. Maybe not even in this town.

      Why on earth had he imagined that he owed his grandfather