Sleepless in Montana (9 page)

Then he hid a grin as Savanna rumpled his
hair, teasing him, as she left for the clinic.

Later, when Aaron’s silver Land Cruiser, a
high-class sport utility vehicle, slid into the driveway, Ben’s
heart leaped.

That’s my son,
he thought with pride
as Aaron stepped out of the four-wheeler, and shaded his eyes
against the midday sun.

From the corral where he’d been saddling his
gelding, Ben stopped to admire what he and Dinah had created.
Clean-cut and dressed in a brown-leather jacket and jeans, Aaron
immediately turned his blue eyes at Ben. The impact knocked Ben
back a step.
Beautiful
, he thought.
Perfect. A fine son.
Everything a man could want.

Mitch’s big black Harley purred into the
ranch yard. Riding without his helmet, Mitch sported rumpled black
hair, his leather jacket and biker’s boots showing his city roots.
He’d only been a quick-minded scamp when Ben caught him hot-wiring
his car in Chicago.

Now, Mitch was a man, a Kodiak who fiercely
battled the Chicago streets that had sired him, saving all sorts of
young people. He was a warrior, Ben decided. Pitting himself
against a war that he couldn’t win— all the way, but he could save
some of the children....

Ben’s heart kicked up and locked when Hogan’s
shiny new black pickup, layered with good Montana mud, pulled up
beside Mitch’s expensive rig.

His heart clenched, his gelding restless as
if he felt Ben’s tension.
His eldest son had been home for
months and hadn’t contacted him.
And goddammit, Ben was scared,
words tight in his throat, fear that Hogan would run off again and
hole up....

He’d heard stories about Hogan rebuilding the
old Holmes ranch. The jutting contemporary-styled addition with
huge silver windows glinting in the dying sun, sat exactly opposite
the Kodiak house.

Perfect
, Ben thought again as his
three sons stood together, all tough and arrogant, broad in the
shoulder and with long, healthy legs. They’d come home for Dinah
and Carley, to protect them.

They walked toward the corral, and frozen—
terrified that old Aaron would surface in him— Ben stood still. For
Dinah, he could change.
He would change.

“Good morning, boys,” he said, perhaps a
little too roughly, because his emotions were running away from
him.

“Dad,” Aaron said smoothly.

“Dad,” Mitch said, acknowledging the man who
had dragged him away from a life he had returned to— this time to
help others.

“Ben.” Hogan’s greeting was cool, his thumbs
hitched in his jeans, weight on one leg, the other apart, hip-slung
just as Ben used to do before—
What did he expect?
Ben
thought desperately.

This was the son he’d kept despite old
Aaron’s objections. Ben should have known that the boy needed more.
Dinah’s tender ways had shown Ben how it should have been—

Hogan’s hair was tied back at his nape, just
long enough to almost make Ben smile. Hogan was like that, testing
him, and Ben was proud of his son, making his own life against all
odds. He admired Hogan, what he’d achieved, but more how he’d
fought for it, reached out his fists and took what was his, what
was his right and his talent.

Ben should have left old Aaron and the Bar K
like Hogan did eighteen years ago.

Instead Ben had stayed and spread that
unloving darkness into his children. For a time, Dinah had made a
difference— until Ben had ruined it. He’d carry that sorrow all his
life, how he couldn’t bear to have her help him, look at him, feel
sorry for him.

Dinah.
His heart leaped. She’d be
coming home. Here, to him.
Beautiful Dinah....

She’d given him everything and she deserved
better than a broken down crippled old cowboy.... So he was afraid,
so what?

Ben shoved himself back to the moment and
found his three sons studying him.
What were they thinking,
these men, his sons? Did they hate him so much?

Years stood between them, harder than the
ground beneath his boots.
He’d made so many mistakes....

He suddenly realized that the leather reins
in his hands were slick with his sweat, the sweat of fear....

“Supper is at six,” Ben stated, unable to
bridge the distance between his sons and himself, especially Hogan.
His words came out more like an order—
be there on time or get
no supper.

Anger tore at Ben. He should have given Hogan
what he needed, held him more, loved him more, and now from the
hard set of Hogan’s expression, the taut line of his body, it was
too late. There would be no redemption for Ben with Hogan, but
Hogan would not fail Carley.

Running away from his emotions and the
inability to deal with them, Ben swung up into the saddle. “I’ve
got work to do.”

He sat ramrod straight, riding away, and his
gut clenched with every hoofbeat.
Hell, they knew he wore a
prosthesis, what did it matter how he looked, swinging up a little
too much, his hands nervous on the reins?

“Still the same,” Aaron stated flatly as the
brothers watched Ben ride to the natural grass fields where the
small longhorn herd— descendants of old Jubal, a Texas bull— were
grazing.

“The place isn’t,” Hogan said. He wasn’t
prepared for the visual close-up of the house. Using binoculars,
he’d seen that the house badly needed painting, one window was
broken and patched with linoleum.

But close inspection revealed a worse
picture: The front porch needed boards, the door wasn’t hanging
straight on the hinges, and the roof’s shingles needed replacement.
“I’ve got the power tools. We’ll bring them over.”

He glanced at Ben, back ramrod straight as he
rode away. At that moment, he knew that Ben feared what his sons
and his ex-wife would see, and he was ashamed.

His earliest memories included Ben working to
make the house presentable to the woman he would marry— Dinah.
Hogan had been eager to help, eager for his father’s approval,
which never came.

Now, he scanned the twenty horses in the
field; once there had been two hundred and a nice income after they
were broken. But back then, he’d done his share of breaking and
showing the horses.

Hogan missed that, handling horses, talking
to them softly, and gaining their trust. He enjoyed the full mound
of a mare’s belly, the unborn foal’s tiny leg protesting the touch.
The wonder of birth always stunned and pleased him— and shapes
stirred around him, colors and images, never defined.

Hogan slid back into his thoughts, prying at
the images, trying to understand, because he knew as surely as he
was in Montana, that the sensations came to him for a reason. They
came and settled deep within him, lodging there, waiting for
something....
What was it?

“Home sweet home,” Mitch said, taking in the
two-story building. “It really was. When Ben brought me here, I had
enough to eat for the first time. And I was thinking every minute
what I could take when I ran. What I could turn into cash. But I
stayed. As long as I played by the rules, life was okay. When I
didn’t, Ben let me know hell. Kids sometimes need that, to know the
rules, what is right from wrong, because they haven’t been
taught.”

“That fat psychology degree probably taught
you that, not Ben,” Aaron stated.

“Ben told me that I wasn’t a street kid
anymore, that I was a Kodiak with a new name and a new start and
that now there were new rules. I respected and hated him at the
same time.”

Hogan stepped inside his emotions, not
listening to his brothers. He watched Joe Blue Sky try to chop
wood. The feeble old man had been a child when he first came to the
Bar K, working for old Aaron Kodiak.

Joe had seen Hogan through those first years.
When Joe turned to him, shadows moved across the old man’s face and
Hogan wondered what tangled inside him.
Memories? Sadness? Hope?
An old man, seeing youth, and recognizing his age?

Maxi Dove hurried out the back door with the
slop bucket for the pigs. Hogan didn’t want to think about the work
that needed to be done inside and braced himself against the
memories that could swallow him.

Hogan glanced at his brothers. “Fixing up
this place is going to cost.”

“Plenty,” Aaron agreed. “And that’s not
counting the barn— it needs shoring up, part of the metal roof is
torn off. Look at that fence—”

“May as well see what’s inside,” Hogan said,
and walked toward the house. He’d spent his young life there,
fearing and hating Ben, and never free of his shadows. This time,
he intended to settle his life. “It looked just like this before
Dinah came. He put it back together for her. I guess we can do the
same.”

“He’s too cool,” Aaron said quietly, studying
Hogan’s set expression, the knee-locked, wide spread of his legs,
as if nothing could tear him away from Kodiak land.

“Too much is going on inside him. He’s
holding.”

Aaron winked. “Jemma never did like that—
when Hogan pulled back into himself.”

“True,” Mitch agreed with a grin. “She’ll get
under his skin in no time.”

“Twenty dollars says it’ll take one
week.”

“I’ve got fifty on the first day. She’ll
track him down like a dog the first day, and destroy that famous
cool.”

Hogan lifted a wary eyebrow; his brothers
knew too well how Jemma could hound him into a corner and test his
control. He turned to look at the knoll overlooking the Bar K. Ben
sat in his saddle, looking down at the ranch yard, a pose as
eternal as the West.

“So much for homecoming,” Aaron muttered
darkly.

“He doesn’t know how to handle it,” Mitch
said quietly and glanced at Hogan, who stood apart, staring up at
Ben. Hogan’s expression lacked emotion.

Aaron inhaled, already preparing for the old
battles. “He won’t like you footing the bill for repairs, Hogan.
We’re all chipping in.”

“Uh-huh.” Hogan remembered Ben, clenching
every dollar, resenting the needs of a growing boy who had worked
like a man.

Aaron and Mitch looked at each other; they
knew that quiet, thoughtful tone. Hogan wasn’t backing off this
time. With the experience of a peacemaker, Mitch hooked his arms
around Hogan’s and Aaron’s necks and said, “Well, sons of Ben
Kodiak, we only have a week to get this place in shape before Dinah
and Carley arrive. Jemma will have our hides if we don’t pitch
in.”

“She can be nasty. I remember that time she
tied me up in the bedsheets, sat on me, and told me just how nice I
was going to be at the supper table. And if I said anything to make
Carley think about the poor dead bunnies we were eating— that were
her pets— Jemma had a backup plan to murder me— slowly.” Aaron
groaned and shuddered.

But Hogan moved aside, his stare locked on
Ben and the sunlight between the two men seemed to shimmer with
memories and emotions.

*** ***

“My mud flaps are going to be dirty.” Jemma
grimaced when her custom camper-van hit a solid Montana rock on the
way to the Kodiak Bar K.

She glanced in the opposite direction to
Hogan’s stark home, the bleak windows catching the evening sun. In
mid-April, white-faced black calves were frolicking in the field,
the snow-covered Crazy Mountains rose behind Ben’s home. The
rambling red barn and various sheds softened the no-frills
house.

A yearling colt ran beside the fence, racing
with Jemma’s van and then veered off into the field. Foals nursed
at the mares, and she remembered how young Hogan had looked,
walking among the horses, talking, and touching them. She adjusted
her sunglasses to buffer the brilliant sundown ricocheting off the
gold van. “Hogan had better be at the ranch. If he isn’t, I’ll hunt
him down like a dog and drag him here.”

“Ben said that he would be and neither one
ever breaks a promise.” Dinah turned to her, a cool, classy woman,
dressed in a gray merino sweater and neatly tailored slacks.

She’d tried to hide her excitement and fought
the flush on her cheeks— she was, after all, too old to be feeling
so heady about seeing her first love again.
Would she look old
to Ben?

She quickly glanced down at her body, still
trim, but not the same. She almost placed the simple gold band Ben
had given her back on her finger, and then had scoffed at herself
for dreaming.

Ben had been so terrifyingly masculine, so
rugged and yet incredibly gentle and somewhat afraid of the lady he
had captured. His shyness of her, yet his need, was more potent
than heady wine and fancy words. “If Ben isn’t there, we’ll make
ourselves at home. It’s not like we haven’t all lived at the ranch,
one time or another. But he’ll be there.”

In the rear seat, Carley drew the sight of
Kodiak land into her, holding it close to her heart.

Unwillingly, her eyes slid to the distant
rise— beyond that lay the stream that watered Ben’s cattle.

There, in the willow and brush, she’d been
shoved down and— she pushed away the terror that always found her,
her father needed her desperately. “I can’t believe Dad is so ill.
He was just fine last fall when I flew back to see him.”

“Things happen fast,” Jemma said, and prayed
the Kodiaks would catch Carley’s stalker soon. She was terrified
that her plan wouldn’t work, that Carley’s stalker would
succeed.

Worse.
She was afraid she’d do more
damage than good in the stormy Kodiak family, hurting them all.
Every one of them were hers to keep and to love; she couldn’t bear
it if anything went wrong... if the stalker got Carley.
Well, he
wouldn’t. He just wouldn’t
, she promised silently.

“Ben,” Dinah said simply, tasting the
name.

She’d loved him on sight that gentle,
quiet-spoken cowboy who stooped to help her with her parcels. Her
hand trembled as it rose to smooth her hair, a neat boy-cut in
silky gray. He’d always loved smoothing her hair, a little
embarrassed as he brushed it, a rawhide-rough Montana cowboy
tending his wife’s hair. And then the accident—