Blackbird Lake (5 page)

It was only October but an early snowstorm was blowing in. An alert had gone out as well as a request for volunteers to help search. Brady heard about the missing boy and joined the hunt. He’d combed the foothills, then started on some of the back trails in higher areas. Dark was falling, the temperature had dropped, and snow was whirling, but Brady didn’t quit.

And he found Alex. The boy was discovered, cold and scared and crying, on a remote ledge. Brady had wrapped him in his own jacket and carried him in his arms through the darkness, down to safety.

He’d been written up in the
Lonesome Way Daily
, hailed as a hero—and the story had even been picked up in the national media and featured on the nightly news.

It was one of the rare bright spots in the hardscrabble life of the Farradays. A bright spot that quickly faded when Cord and Brady’s parents died in a car crash a scant two years later.

Les Farraday had always denied he had a drinking problem. Insisting he was as sober as a rock, he drove drunk one night coming home from a neighbor couple’s anniversary party at the Lucky Punch Saloon—refusing to let his wife take the wheel instead. Holly Farraday had scrambled into the car with him anyway. Les missed the turn on Mule Road leading to their house and tried at the last minute to make a sharp U-turn, but he’d spun the wheel too fast, too hard. The car plowed straight into a tree. Ned and Holly both died instantly.

But even then—even with Cord on the road, hardly ever home—Brady had hung in there, keeping up the house alone, working steadily, plugging away at life.

Until Cord died, too.

“I called Brady half a dozen times after he roared off from Cord’s funeral like a bat out of hell, but I only reached
him once,” Jake said quietly. “He sounded lower than an earthworm and two sheets to the wind. Not to mention angry. Real angry.” His brows drew together as he remembered the boy’s bitter tone. A tone so unlike him.

Brady had refused to listen to a word Jake had to say.

“He used every cussword you or I ever heard—and then some. Then he cut off the call. I figured I better check on him, see if there’s anything I can do to haul his ass back on track.” Jake sighed, remembering the pain he’d heard that day beneath Brady’s words.

“A while ago Cord asked me to promise I’d keep an eye on his brother if anything ever happened to him. Ever since their folks died, they’ve only had each other. Brady’s a great kid, but he’s had a tough life. He and Cord both.”

“You think Cord had a feeling something bad was going to happen to him?” Rafe looked surprised.

“No way. Nothing like that. It’s just that Cord couldn’t catch a break. I know for a fact he was barely scraping by. He put up a good front—kept telling me he knew things were going to get better, that he was due to win some major purses soon, but it never seemed to happen. He started diving into the bottle, just like his old man. And he found out Brady had taken a notion into his head to sell the house and try his own hand at rodeo, but Cord didn’t want him going that route. He didn’t want Brady facing the same hard times he’d found on the circuit. Besides, their grandparents had built that house, every inch of it, and he hated the idea of selling it, just letting it go to someone outside the family.”

Jake fell quiet for a moment, remembering his friend in happier days. Grade school. High school. Playing touch football or video games, fishing in Sage Creek during the summer. The two of them driving with the radio blaring to the Bear Claw bar in Livingston, armed with fake IDs when they were only seventeen, looking to buy a couple of beers and to pick up girls. Actually, they were looking not for girls but for women. Older, more experienced women. And, Jake recalled, they’d been pretty damned successful at finding them.

A few years later, home on a short break from the rodeo
circuit, Jake had also found something else at the Bear Claw. Someone else.

Melanie…

The muscles in his neck clenched as her small cameo face floated into his mind, and he instinctively shifted his thoughts away. Away from her…away from what had happened that night…

He focused them back toward Cord and Brady.

His long-time friendship with Cord had endured long after they first took up rodeo. They’d started out at the same time—two cocky young cowboys with mad roping and riding skills who dreamed of making it big.

Unfortunately, Cord hadn’t ever found even close to the same kind of success Jake had. Plagued by injuries, he’d worked like a mule just to scrape by. As time went on, he watched his earnings decrease even more.

Though the two of them branched off onto starkly different paths, they’d kept in touch and caught up whenever they happened to be in the same town or even the same state. But over the last ten months, the losses and the injuries and the stress had taken an increasing toll on Cord. He’d turned to drinking in a big way, steeping his troubles in a pint of whiskey whenever he was scrabbling for enough prize money to keep going.

Jake had lent him cash several times to help him get by, had paid his hospital bills, had tried to talk sense into him. He’d recommended AA, tried to convince him to cut out the liquor, take a break from rodeo until he’d fully healed.

But Cord insisted he knew what he was doing, that he could handle it and was going to win some big-time prize money soon.

Instead, two months later he’d been thrown from a bull at seven seconds. He hit the dirt hard and got stomped on before either the clowns or anyone in the stands could do more than blink. Cord’s chest had been crushed. He’d died before he even reached the hospital.

It was a horrific accident but not a completely surprising one.

Jake knew just how dangerous the rodeo could be, and bull riding posed the most danger of all.

Those eight seconds you needed to stay on that bull didn’t seem like a long time unless you were the one riding that two-thousand-pound beast. Then those eight seconds ticked by as slow as frozen syrup while those monsters heaved and bucked. Jake was used to it—he had the rhythm of the ride in his veins, pulsing through his blood.

He’d had his close calls, plenty of them—all the times he’d needed to roll aside real fast, but the rodeo clowns had always dashed in front of him, arms waving, distracting the bull before it could reach him once he was bucked off.

Cord hadn’t been as lucky that night. The clowns had raced in—but the enraged bull had cut toward Cord even faster. And Cord had been too stunned by the impact of the fall to roll or leap out of its path….

Jake still found it hard to believe he was gone. Everyone who’d ever met Cord Farraday took to the guy. Total strangers bought him drinks within minutes of the most casual conversation.

Even his ex-wife still loved him, though they’d been divorced for more than a year. Tiffy Farraday couldn’t take the stress of the rodeo life, of not having money to pay the bills, of not seeing Cord for weeks, sometimes even a month at a time. She’d given him an ultimatum and he’d chosen rodeo over her.

Still, when he died, she handled all the funeral arrangements and buried him in a plot near her home in Mesa. She’d cried in Jake’s arms at the funeral and there was a world of regret, anger, and lost dreams in her red-rimmed eyes.

Brady had been there, too, but the boy hadn’t seemed to really grasp what was going on. When Jake threw an arm around his shoulders and tried to offer his condolences, the kid had pulled away. He’d seemed still half in shock. Brady had remained mute during the entire service, his eyes almost glazed—then, the moment Cord was lowered into the ground, he’d roared off on his motorcycle without a word to anyone.

Jake had been trying to get in touch with him and make sure he was all right ever since.

“If there’s anything I can do to lend a hand, let me know,” Rafe told him quietly. “If Brady decides he wants to have a go at ranch work, I know the Double J is shorthanded. I can talk to Jerry Johnson, put in a good word for him.”

“Thanks, bro, I’ll tell him.” Jake didn’t mention the idea that had been circling in his head for a while now. It had first come to him a year ago, just a vague notion. With his schedule, he hadn’t had time to really develop it. But every once in a while, it returned and began taking hold in his mind.

Now, while he was here in town, with Brady needing a job and all, maybe it was time to set things in motion.

“Any idea if Brady’s still living out at the house?”

“Seems like the logical place, but I can’t say for sure. Not too many people have spotted him since he got out of jail.”

“Well, I’ll be heading over there later to find out. Soon as I check out my cabin, see if it’s habitable for tonight.” Jake got to his feet, mindful of the lightly snoring mutt whose golden head still rested on his boot. He eased his foot away but even as he did, the thin dog clambered up, staring at him with deep, worried brown eyes.

“Come back and have supper with us,” Rafe suggested as they headed to the kitchen door. “Sophie will bite my head off if you don’t. And you can always bunk here if your cabin needs work before you can spend the night. When are you heading over to Travis’s place?”

“Right after I scope out the cabin, clean up a little. Been driving for ten hours and don’t want to hug little Miss Zoey wearing my travel dust.” Striding out the door, just as a horse whickered from the corral, Jake noted wryly that the dog was still right there on his heels.

“Hey, buddy, you’re staying put,” he said firmly, as Starbucks and Tidbit trailed eagerly after their skinny new pal. “You’ve got yourself some friends now. Ivy and Aiden will want to get to know you, and if I know my brother, even young Aiden knows how to be gentle with animals. Trust
me, you don’t want to hook up with me. I never stay in one place too long and it’s no life for a dog.”

Rafe had stopped for a moment to speak to his foreman, but he caught up with Jake as his brother opened the door of his truck.

“So how long
are
you sticking around Lonesome Way this time?” Rafe asked drily.

“Not too long, bro. I’m taking off for the Bighorn Bull Rodeo in Wyoming two days after I sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to Zoey.”

Though it was tempting, he decided against telling Rafe yet about the plan he intended to set into motion. It had been rattling around in his brain for a while, but things had really begun clicking into place when he got involved in the antibullying crusade. Then he learned about Brady quitting his job and suddenly—now that he was back in Lonesome Way—there was a picture in his head of how this all might come together.

It was the right time. And the right place. He’d get it started, and after he took off, he could get updates from the road. With the right builder in charge—and Jake knew just who that builder ought to be—all he’d have to do was give his okays via phone or email and foot the bill.

“Wait until you see Zoey.” Rafe’s words interrupted his thoughts. “She’s a hoot. She might be the spitting image of Mia—only tiny—including all that blond hair, but trust me, she’s got a will of iron, just like Travis. That’s one fearless, plucky little girl, and you won’t believe how she idolizes Grady.”

Grady was Travis’s adopted stepson from his first marriage. A brilliant kid, all of thirteen, and last year he’d won first prize in the countywide science fair.

“I’ve seen her picture. Looks like an angel. But if she’s anything like Travis, heaven help him and Mia,” Jake said with a grin.

The smile stayed on his lips as he thought about his niece. Mia had been emailing him photos since the day Zoey was born. He had them all saved on his phone, along with pics
of Grady, and the ones Sophie had sent of Aiden and Ivy.
Ivy
. His teenaged niece was morphing way too fast into a knockout young woman. It scared the hell out of him. And his sister emailed him pictures practically twice a day of her beautiful four-year-old, Molly, who’d snagged his heart the moment he set eyes on her—which happened to be the day after Sophie and Rafe got married, when Lissie barely made it to the hospital in time for the delivery.

He was crazy about all of his nieces and nephews. Which was probably why every time he talked to Lissie, she kept pestering him, telling him he’d make a great dad and since he was now thirty-four he needed to seriously think about settling down. First she wanted him to snag himself a wife, then get started on a passel of kids. Lissie insisted he didn’t know what he was missing.

But Jake saw things differently. Marriage, kids, a normal life, that wasn’t for him. His life suited him; it was exactly the way it should be. He had freedom with all that riding and competing, every week a different crowd, a different town. And best of all, no one depended on him. He’d failed once at the most important commitment he’d ever made. He’d decided after Melanie died that he wasn’t going to make any more promises to anyone—especially a woman—that he might not be able to keep.

So he planned to go right on winning championships until he was too old to saddle a horse. He relished being in a position to raise awareness and funds for the charities and causes he supported.

Rafe and Travis kept razzing him, telling him he’d feel differently if he met the right woman. They didn’t have a clue why he intended to ride right away even if he did meet her. They didn’t get it. He wasn’t cut out for long-term relationships or marriage or promises that needed to be kept. He’d known the truth about himself since he was twenty or so, when he was young and stupid and just starting out in professional rodeo. Melanie Sutton had danced into his life one night bright as a candle, incandescent.

And he’d failed her.

After that, Jake knew that family life and the kind of love Rafe had with Sophie, and Travis had with Mia, wasn’t in the cards for him. Not ever. Maybe if he’d stayed with Melanie that night, things could have been different….

But he hadn’t stayed. And Melanie…

Jake had met a lot of smart, cool, sexy women in subsequent years, and he’d liked them all—enjoyed them all. All shapes, all sizes, blond, redhead, brunette.

But if he hadn’t been there for Melanie, how could he promise to be there for anyone else?