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“Thank you,” he whispered into her ear, so quietly he knew no one else would hear. “For my brother.”
She seemed startled, but as he released her, she smiled. “I know,” she whispered back, in those two words telling him she truly did know how worried they’d been about Chance.
Ry looked over to where that brother stood watching from the kitchen, a coffee mug in his hand—that boded well—and a slight smile on his face. Ry grinned at him. His brother actually smiling was worth a grin.
“Isn’t he pretty?” His oldest brother Keller’s fiancée, business dynamo Sydney Brock, had come up behind him. She was grinning as widely as he was, only at Ariel. “Why, he’s almost as pretty as Cody.”
Ry grimaced as Ariel studied him as if she’d never seen him before. Then, deadpan, she said, “Prettier, to me. I grew up in San Diego, where blond hunks are a dime a dozen.”
“There is that,” Sydney agreed, just as deadpan.
Ry let out a half-amused, half-exasperated sound, then headed for the coffeepot.
“I don’t know whether to be flattered or insulted,” Cody complained from the table where he was finishing up a plate of eggs and hash browns. Which actually looked and smelled pretty darn good. And there were some still in the skillets on the stove. He grabbed a plate.
“I,” his mother said from her seat at one end of the table, to the right of her youngest son, “am just delighted to no longer be outnumbered by the men of this family.”
“Hey,” Keller said from his seat at, appropriately, the other end of the table, “it’s still four to three.”
“Which makes it about even, I’d say,” Chance said, just as deadpan.
Ry turned to look at his brother, still disconcerted by the way he had come back to life since Ariel. Grateful, as he’d told her coming in, but still not used to it. He glanced at his mother, who was looking at Chance with her huge, loving heart glowing in her blue eyes.
He remembered Christmas Eve when, after Chance and Ariel had left to go back to his place, she had given them all their marching orders: they were not to disturb the pair in any way. They needed time alone. She didn’t want anything to hinder Chance stepping back into the world, so no unannounced visits, no teasing, nothing. Spoken in a tone that brooked no disobeying, so firm even Cody had toed the line.
“Welcome back, bro,” he said softly as, plate in hand, he walked past Chance and headed for the table. This alone was worth having come back home from his brief stint living somewhere else. The condo on Lake LBJ had been flashy, luxurious, and not his type at all. But then, the woman he’d lived with there had turned out to be all those things as well. And there had been no room for the way he worked, either in the condo or in Chelsea’s life. Adjusting her own ways to another person simply was not in her rule book.
Ry was nearly through the eggs and potatoes when his mother, smiling at him—as she was at everyone these days—said, rather archly, “You plan on shaving before Wednesday?”
His brow furrowed as he swallowed the bite he’d already decided would be enough. “Wednesday?”
“Told you he’d forget,” Keller said dryly, but one corner of his mouth was twitching.
“Forget wha—” He broke off suddenly. “Crap.”
“Day after tomorrow, darlin’,” his mother drawled, and now, infuriatingly, she was grinning. “Your week of celebrity bliss begins.”
Damn. He’d known when he’d agreed to this feature interview thing forTexas Artworksthat he was going to regret it. But it was hard to say no when a client who was also the former governor—and one of the maybe three politicians you could trust—was the one who sicced the magazine on you. That saddle he’d designed and made for the man was going to end up costing him almost as much in irritation as it had made him in money.
Or maybe not; the man had paid top dollar for it.
“I saw the article they did on Gabe Walker, the metal sculptor from over in Whiskey River last summer,” Sydney said. “It was nicely done.”
“He’s a great artist,” Ry said.
“Oh, yeah,” Sydney said with a roll of her expressive golden eyes, “I keep forgetting you’re not.”
Ry shrugged. It was his standard response to those who insisted on calling him that if they were someone he cared about having a relationship with. If he didn’t, he tended to snap about the third time they said it. His future sister-in-law was one he definitely cared about. He wanted that smile on Keller’s face permanently. The man had more than earned it.
He rubbed at his chin; he’d gone beyond stubble a couple of days ago. And he needed that haircut. Maybe he’d splurge and go into town and have both done. Not like he was getting anything else done here.Hey, just because the new project was a saddle for one of the biggest movie stars around, no reason to get moving on it or anything.
And so a half an hour later he was heading up Laurel to Main Street. He made the left turn and pulled into the strip mall where the barbershop was. Even through the window he could see by the two already occupied barber chairs that he was going to have to wait a bit on this Monday morning; apparently there had been a lot of not-shaving going on over the holiday weekend.
Still, he’d only been waiting about fifteen minutes when a chair opened up. As he was heading for it, Gary Klausen, an older man who worked at the hardware store in town, came in. Surprisingly, the quiet-seeming man looked as if he’d been on a New Year’s bender. Jenkins, the barber who ran the place, called out to him that it would be a while.
Gary grimaced. “I’ll have to come back later. I need to go open the store in twenty.”
Ry got up out of the chair he’d just slid into. “Take Gary first. I can come back—I’m not on a schedule.”
