Page 33 of Brother In Arms

“Sounds like a good idea to me.”

I smiled and stripped the rest of the way down to my bra and panties. Not Rush, though. He apparently didn’t wear underwear, so he followed me down the river bank buck naked.

I waded out into the water knee deep and he came in right behind me, hiding the front of himself up against my back crying, “Holy shit, that’s cold!”

I laughed, I couldn’t help it. “It’s river water, which usually comes from snow melt and glacier runoff; of course it’s cold.”

“Oh, shit. You totally can’t judge because there’s gonna be some shrinkage.” I threw back my head and laughed for real at that and he wrapped those huge arms around me picking me up and tumbling back into the deeper water. I quickly held my breath as we plunged beneath the surface and both of us came up sputtering.

“Oh my god, I can’t believe you did that!” I cried as the shock of the cold water shot through my system.

“That’s what you get for preying on one of man’s worst fears!”

“Oh, you have got to be kidding me!”

We bantered, we played, and for the first time in a long time despite the horror and sorrow of the last couple of days, I remembered what it was like to relax and really be myself. The real me, not the over cautious and paranoid me that dragged me so far left of center as to be so rude. I wasn’t brought up that way. I had seriously been rattled when I’d seen Dray and Rush on my porch.

“Hey, Rush?”

“Mm?”

“Thank you.”

“For?”

“Everything you’ve done so far despite me being a total bitch.”

“Like?” I turned in his arms to see the smile I could hear in his voice and I felt one of my own spread across my lips. I twined my arms around his neck and looked him in the eyes. I should have figured he wouldn’t make this easy.

“I was raised by a proper southern mamma,” I said. “So please accept my formal apology for being so rude the day you showed up at my house with her. Also, my sincerest thanks for providing the fencing material to make my north pasture safe. I wasn’t really sure how I was going fix it to make it any kind of usable with everything having to go through Caleb.”

Rush’s expression changed then and he searched my face. “What’s with that, anyways? You own the place so I don’t get why everything has to go by him.”

I sighed, and rested more fully on my elbows, crossing my legs at the ankles behind his back. It felt good, clinging to him, and letting him take the weight for a minute as we bobbed in the river water, his feet firmly planted in its bed. I tried to figure out how to answer the question without insulting his intelligence. I mean, I didn’t know how much he knew about how probate and everything else worked.

“Dumb it down for me, Bailey. I’m not stupid, but I have no idea how your world works. Things are a lot simpler in mine and I’d kind of like to keep it that way for now.”

I laughed at little and nodded, “You kind of read my mind,” I said.

“Not hard, baby. Your face says right what you’re thinkin’.”

I rolled my eyes, “Tell me about it, I could never get away with anything growing up. Philip is the one that got all the talent for lying.”

“Don’t see it as a bad thing; I don’t. Somethin’ to be said for an honest face like yours.” He reached up and tweaked my nose with a fingertip and I laughed, jerking back from the affectionate move, cold water dripping from my nose.

“Right, so my dad left the farm to all three of us; me, my mother, and Philip.”

“But?”

“But, he didn’t think we were savvy enough to make the business decisions, and so he put a trustee in place to help us.”

“And that’s Caleb, I follow.”

“Right, and Caleb’s job is to help oversee the farm’s finances and make sure that sound business decisions are being made so that the farm doesn’t fall apart.”

“So if your daddy doesn’t want the place falling apart or whatever, enough to put his best friend into the mix to make sure things are running right, why wouldn’t he put anything in there about the farm not being sold, or whatever?”

“Legally you can’t give something to someone and force them to keep it. You can just make it really hard for them to give it up completely. My mom, for example, while she doesn’t hate the farm, she never really enjoyed it or was any kind of enthusiastic over it. Not like me and Dad.”

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