Laredo did not walk in the front door until nearly midnight. He was stone cold sober, so Darren knew that his brother hadn’t been out drinking. Honestly, Darren would have been glad to have to go pick up his older brother at a bar somewhere. It would have proved that the man was still capable of having more than a pulse.
“What is wrong with you?” Darren muttered when Laredo stepped into the living room. “Did you even think to call and tell your daughter goodnight?”
“Did you?” Laredo asked snidely. “Or rather your son, right? I forget, since you’ve never actually seen the kid.”
Darren jumped to his feet. The quick movement pissed off just about every joint in his body, but it was worth it. He hauled back and let fly a fist that connected square with Laredo’s jaw. His brother staggered back and grabbed his face. The briefcase he’d been carrying clattered to the tile floor along with his smartphone. Darren didn’t care. He didn’t waste a second before landing another punch to the back of Laredo’s neck and shoulders that sent his brother flying toward the ground.
Laredo crashed to the floor, but he was up again in a flash. “You asshole. Why would you do that?”
“Why would you say that?” Darren snarled. “You have a daughter living right here with you who absolutely believes you have no time for her and that you’re okay with that.” Darren took a deep breath and went for broke. “Yes. I have a son. He’s five. I’ve never seen him before in my life. I pay out the nose for child support to a hell bitch who doesn’t want anything but my money and who told me earlier tonight that she’s planning on finding a judge who will make me pay for his private school without ever getting to introduce myself to him. I’m nothing but a paycheck to them. I’m a damn ATM machine, and you’re going to sit here like some snide asshole and poke fun at that? Screw. You.”
Laredo’s expression was impossible to read in the near darkness, but he left his briefcase on the floor and headed into his study. “I need a drink. Want one?”
“Sure.” Darren knew he shouldn’t, but right now, he couldn’t think of why not. Alcohol sounded good. It sounded like relief. At least for a little while.
Laredo went to the sideboard and poured two snifters of whiskey from his good stash. He picked one up and swirled it around before handing the other to Darren. Then Laredo walked to the window of his study and braced his forearm against the sill. He took a sip of his whiskey and seemed to deflate right there before Darren’s eyes. It was more than a little disturbing. Laredo was the strong one. He was the one who didn’t give a shit. Darren didn’t realize how much he had come to count on that fact even when it annoyed the crap out of him.
“You have no idea what it’s like to work for Dad,” Laredo finally said in a slow drawl. “He’s like a meat grinder, and the older he gets, the pushier and greedier he gets.”
Darren shrugged. “He’s still the president of the company, right? Maybe it’s time for him to retire. Has he ever talked about it?”
“Are you kidding me?” Laredo snorted and threw back the rest of the whiskey. He walked to the sideboard to pour himself another drink, and Darren wondered if his brother was about to get drunk. It wasn’t a usual state of events. “Dad would never retire. At the moment, he’s obsessed with the Collins ranch.”
“Why?” Darren flopped down onto a leather sofa and ran his fingers restlessly through his hair. He threw back his own drink and felt the familiar and welcome burn of alcohol on his throat. “The Collins ranch isn’t ours. It never was. It belonged to Rawling and Amelia Collins. They passed it via trust to their daughter, Jesse. At least that was how I understood things.”
“I don’t think we understand things correctly,” Laredo muttered. “Dad keeps talking about Rawling double-crossing him. It’s hard to tell what’s really happened though because Dad isn’t really remembering things the way he used to. Maybe he’s forgotten what really happened. Or maybe he’s making things up in his head because he wants them to be true very badly.”
That was a disturbing state of events. Darren thought about the very few conversations he’d had with his father since coming back to Denver. Joe Hernandez sounded normal, but it was hard to tell if sounding normal was being normal. Joe was getting up into his seventies. Maybe he’d taken one too many falls off a horse and hit his head.
“Dad is absolutely set on me getting Jesse to sign over her ranch to us. He keeps telling me that the woman should know better than to think she can run it.” Laredo threw back that second whiskey and poured a third. His speech was slower now and most definitely less tense. “I don’t think we need the Collins ranch. I don’t understand what the big deal is.”
“And Dad won’t explain?” Darren didn’t really need confirmation of that. Joe Hernandez rarely explained himself to anyone.
“He just keeps saying that we need to keep Jesse away from that place and that no good will come of her being there.”
Darren thought back over the years to the time when Jesse had just come to live with them. “Do you remember how her folks died? I can remember her showing up on our doorstep with Mom. I can remember the boxes that came along with her moving in. I think the basement was full of them for years until some stuff finally got purged.”
“Sort of.” Laredo shrugged as though he hadn’t really thought it mattered. “She was a brat.”
“She was grieving the loss of her parents, you ass.” Darren had never thought Laredo treated Jesse particularly well. “You acted like she needed to be grateful that we were letting her move in.”
“She should have been!” Laredo shot back. “We took her in. We didn’t have to.”
Darren lifted his glass and tipped it toward his brother. “And yet she came with a dowry fit for a princess. The Collins ranch is a hundred thousand acres of prime grazing land, good water, and excellent winter forage. You’ve said even now that Dad doesn’t want to let it go. The federal grazing leases in addition to the actual owned land are what? Another two hundred thousand acres? Dad brags all the time that that Hernandez Land & Cattle Company boasts over six hundred thousand acres, but half of that isn’t even ours. You tell me if Jesse should have been beholden to us, or if Dad should have been beholden to her.”
Laredo opened his mouth but snapped it shut without speaking. It was plain that in a decade’s worth of time, he had never viewed Jesse’s situation quite like that. Then Laredo tilted his head to one side and turned around to pace from one side of the room to the other. “If something happened to me and someone else—God forbid—took in my kid, I would want them to make her inheritance lucrative and keep it going.”
“But would you want them to keep it once she was old enough to take up the reins and run it herself?” Darren asked his brother. There was no doubt in his mind what Laredo’s answer would be.
“I suppose I would want anything that kept my hell bitch of an ex-wife from taking Bella’s inheritance from her.” Laredo sounded so bitter that for just a moment Darren wondered how much money he’d had to pay his ex to get custody of their daughter.
Darren could not resist. Not given his current circumstances. “How did you do it?” Darren asked Laredo. “How did you manage to get full custody?”
“Her mother didn’t want to stay in Denver. If she had been willing to stick around, there was no way the court wouldn’t have given her at least partial custody.” Laredo sat in his leather executive chair and leaned way back. He set his empty glass on the desk and laced his fingers behind his head. “That bitch wanted money from me. That was it. She wanted enough for her new husband to buy a spread of his own so he could be his own boss instead of being a ranch hand.”
“Did she try to take part of our ranch?” Darren could only guess what another woman like Carly would try to get from someone like Laredo who actually stood at the helm of the Hernandez Land & Cattle Company.
“Actually, she tried to take the Collins ranch.” Laredo was chuckling to himself. “She claimed it was a perfect settlement because it already has a house on it.”
“But that’s not even ours.” Darren wondered how the woman could be that stupid.
Laredo tilted his head. “That was the first time Dad started to get upset about the Collins ranch. The judge told my ex-wife that he could not award her land that did not even belong to the Hernandez family. I think it startled Dad. He’d thought of the Collins place as his own for so long that to have a legal official like a judge literally laugh off the suggestion that that land belonged to us was throwing the truth in poor Joe’s face. He did not own that land. It was in trust for Jesse. And that was when Dad started having me very quietly start checking into why officially adopting Jesse into our family hadn’t changed anything about the way that ranch was inherited.”
“So, that’s why he was so insistent about the adoption thing,” Darren mused. “I always wondered.”
“Dad was insistent about a lot of things that didn’t make sense unless you thought about them with his brain.” Laredo’s sarcasm was almost bitter in nature.
Darren had often wondered what the cost was of being their father’s favorite. Apparently, the position came with a full set of anxiety and depression symptoms. That was really nice to know. Now Darren didn’t feel like he was at all jealous of his brother’s position in their family at all. Wow. What a load off.
“You’re laughing at me,” Laredo said suddenly. “I can see it on your face.”
“You can’t see anything on my face,” Darren lazily argued back. “It’s dark in here.”
“Okay. I can feel it.”
“I’m not laughing at you.” Darren sighed. Laredo was obviously paranoid. What a nice thing to experience. “I was actually thinking that I’ve always assumed being Dad’s favorite put you in a better position than the rest of us.”
“Yeah. Right.”
“Exactly.” Darren held out his hand and made a careless gesture with his empty glass. “Now I know that having Dad’s admiration isn’t what it’s cracked up to be and that having him count on you is even worse.”
“I don’t think you ever had to worry about that,” Laredo said bitterly. “He just enjoyed watching you play football and telling people that his son was a pro player.”
“I was like the bottom of the pro food chain,” Darren snorted. He thought about the Super Bowl ring in his bag. “I was so far down on the list that the only reason I got a ring that year was that even the janitors get one.”
“I heard that.” Laredo was gloating, but Darren did not begrudge him that. “I heard they give them to every single member of the team’s staff. Even the towel boy gets a ring.”
“They’re slightly different, but yes. That’s pretty much how it goes.” Darren shrugged. “I still have a Denver Broncos Super Bowl ring.”
Laredo pointed at Darren as he got up and poured himself another drink. “Maybe you can trade that to Carly for visitation rights with your son.”
“You’ve had worse ideas,” Darren told his brother. He didn’t want to think about Carly or Jaeger or anything else right now. He was ready to end the day and just move on. And maybe if he was lucky he would dream about Maggie.