Page 57 of Brother In Arms

The whole thing was just so damn depressing, so I fought to look on the bright side. To do something nice for myself and for Rush. A quiet evening in. I think we both needed it. I’d even bought ice cream.

I set about the kitchen, pulling out ingredients and utensils, setting up pans that I would need and setting out the steaks to rest. I was busy chopping up the vegetables I was planning to roast for the recipe when I froze. The front door opened and I looked up from what I was doing. I’d locked it. I know I’d locked it, and there were very few people who had a key. Philip, my mother, Caleb, and Renaldo… Rush didn’t, in fact, the person who came through the door shouldn’t, but then again Ken was my brother’s best friend so it wasn’t like I needed more than one guess as to where he got the brass colored key he used to let himself in.

“What do you think you’re doing?” I demanded by way of greeting.

“You’re locking your doors now, Bailey? Since when?”

“Since a bunch of men beat the shit out of my lead groom and someone poisoned my horse; that’s when, and when were you going to answer my question?”

I set down my knife on the cutting board and leaned on my hands. If I had to guess, I’d say it’d been a half hour or so since I’d gotten off the phone with Dray. That meant I only had to hold out as long as it took Rush to get here. I most definitely didn’t trust Ken but we’d known each other since we were all kids, so while I didn’t trust his motives, I didn’t think he would do anything to physically hurt me.

He sighed and his shoulders dropped, he turned the chair at the head of my table out so he could face me and dropped into it.

“Wow, this whole thing about the farm has really done a number on you guys.”

“No, really? I hadn’t noticed.”

He held up his hands palm out, the offending keys to my house dangling from his thumb, “Woah, girl. I’m not the enemy here.”

“No, you’re just my brother’s best friend which doesn’t exactly put us on the same side here, Ken.”

He covered his heart with his hands and said, “Ouch, Bales, that really hurts.”

I tried to see if he was being genuine, but you never could tell. Not with the jet set. Fortunes were built and equally destroyed by thinking the wrong person was your friend. You had to be shrewd, you had to be cutthroat to really belong to the upper crust. Qualities that I may possess, but didn’t really have the heart to act on.

I sighed and came around the kitchen island and leaned against it, crossing my arms. The least I could do is listen to Ken’s pitch, even though I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to like it.

“Fine, why don’t you just tell me whatever it is that Philip sent you here to tell me.” I said it tiredly because I was tired. Tired of the whole damn thing.

Ken looked me over and sighed, “I really hate seeing you guys go through this, and Philip didn’t send me over here to do anything. This is all me. That being said, I do have to ask, why won’t you consider the offer on the table? You stand to benefit from it the most, being the majority owner of the place. They’re offering a lot of money Bailey. Enough you could buy yourself another horse farm.”

“I don’t want another horse farm, Ken. I want my dad’s farm. Blue Hills is way more than just another Kentucky thoroughbred racehorse farm. It’s one of my dad’s legacies, and my granddad’s before him. I can’t imagine that he would leave it to the three of us and want us to immediately sell it.”

Ken snorted and leaned back, kicking one leg out; his pressed jeans fitting him well. He had the rich playboy look. Handsome, like he belonged as a poster boy for J. Crew. He was too perfect, and it didn’t appeal anymore. Granted, I’d crushed hard on him when we were teenagers but we weren’t teenagers anymore and I was disillusioned. I wanted something real. I wanted a man like Rush. Honest, what you saw was what you got with him. It wasn’t always pretty but I was realizing honesty won out over pretty any day of the week.

“We talking about the same ol’ man?” he asked, and I heard my brother’s disdain for our father echoed in his voice. I hung my head and shook it.

“He may have been a shark in the boardroom, but he had some sentimentality when it came to a few things.”

“Like what?”

“Like this place, like our mother, like us...” I wanted to believe it, but sometimes I had a hard time believing. My dad had been multifaceted, that’s for sure. Strict and not always fair, but I sometimes wondered how much of that was him and how much of it was the way he’d been raised.

“Is that why he shipped you off to boarding school then?” Ken asked.

I knew why I’d been shipped off to Connecticut. The problem was, no one else did. My mother and father did it to protect me from the reporters surrounding the rape allegations against my brother. What they didn’t realize was that they couldn’t protect me from the scandal itself, not even so far away. I could read and use the internet, not that I really needed to. Not when my classmates were following it so closely and never gave up the opportunity to fill the rapist’s sister in on what was going on. They grilled me about Philip every chance they got until the faculty caught on and held an assembly telling the school to leave it and me alone.

It did more harm than good, I was pretty much shunned except for a close circle of friends. I was okay with that, though, keeping my circle small. You sort of had to in this lifestyle. God forbid your friend’s parents meet because of you and started brokering deals. I’d seen it destroy more than one friendship, burning everything to ash. This life was just pretty on the surface, believe me.

“You don’t know everything, Ken, stop pretending that you do.”

He sighed and got up, coming to me and putting his hands on my shoulders, giving me a little shake. “Bales, it’s me, seriously, there’s no need to get hostile. I’m just trying to figure out where your head is at on this, that’s all. You seem to be going through a lot of stuff and it’s like you’re not thinking clearly. I’m worried about you.”

I stared up into his hazel eyes, warning bells going off inside my brain. One of those moments where if you tried to explain precisely what it was that was freaking you out about a situation, people would look at you like you were crazy. I mean, Ken was a friend to my family, not just my brother. Hell, he’d been my first kiss as embarrassing as that was to recall right now.

I’d been seventeen and – hey, don’t judge, all girl’s boarding school, remember? Anyway, he was twenty and I was home for spring break. There was an abandoned quarry in the county that had filled with water and made a fantastic swimming hole. Much safer than a lot of the lakes and rivers in the area. River drownings were especially common because of unexpected currents, so we used the quarry.

I’d been the one to kiss him, and he’d let me down pretty easy considering. We’d been horsing around in the water and it just sort of happened. He’d set me back and had told me thanks but no thanks and said I was his best friend’s little sister, and how weird would that be? It’d hurt and been embarrassing, but as far as I knew, he’d kept it to himself. Still, it was embarrassing for me, even to this day which is why his proximity made me blush so hard right then.

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