Cherished (Steel Brothers Saga #17) - Helen Hardt Page 0,6

along with your mother. So in that vein, I’m pretty damned grateful to him.”

“Should we help him?” my brother asks.

“He hasn’t asked for our help,” I say.

“No, he hasn’t,” Dad agrees. “But I’d be willing to offer to pay for rehab. Get him off the sauce.”

“Why?” I say. “He abandoned us. And he was kind of a dick to you. You punched him, if I remember correctly.”

“You punched him?” Donny chuckles. “Go, Dad!”

Dad resists smiling. “He’s still your biological father.”

“Would you do the same for yours?”

Dad’s face goes pale. His own father, Bradford Steel, passed away in a prison cell not too long after Donny and I came to Steel Acres.

Neither Dad nor his siblings ever talked about him. The most we ever got out of anyone was that he’d made some bad decisions and had to pay the price. We knew his wife, our grandmother, was mentally ill and institutionalized for most of her adult life. The two of them died within forty-eight hours of each other, though in different places. The only information we’ve been able to find indicated Bradford Steel tampered with federal evidence.

Donny and I are the only grandchildren old enough to even remember them, and we never met either of them.

“My father is not the issue here,” Dad finally says.

Donny and I are both stunned into silence.

We’ve known it all along. Want to get our dad—or his brothers and sister—to go silent?

Mention Bradford Steel.

No other records exist of him. Nothing. Donny and I did our share of snooping when we were teenagers. The other kids, to my knowledge, never did. Our grandfather is a nonentity to them. Henry, Brad, Dee, and Ava were babies when it all happened, and the others weren’t born yet.

Finally, I clear my throat. “Until he asks for our help, I see no reason to give it.”

“I agree with Dale,” Donny says. “Though I guess I should meet the guy.”

“You don’t have to,” I say.

“It’s curiosity, mostly,” he admits. “I’ll drive home in a few days.”

“Your call,” Dad says. “We just didn’t want to tell you this news in a phone call.”

“To be truthful,” Donny says, “I’m not sure how I feel about it. I should be angry, I guess. But I’m not.”

“I’m angry enough for both of us.” I clench my hands into fists without meaning to.

“It’s in the past, bro,” Donny says.

“A lot of things are in the past.” I grit my teeth.

“Requisite words are ‘in the past,’” Dad says. “I don’t want this having a negative effect on you boys. Anger is okay. But let it pass.”

“Exactly what do you know about it?” I ask. It’s a valid question.

“More than you know,” Dad says. “More than you’ll ever know.”

Chapter Five

Ashley

Jade sent Darla home early as it’s just the two of us for dinner.

“I thought we could go into Snow Creek and try that new Italian place,” Jade says to me.

“There’s a new Italian place?”

She nods. “They opened up over the weekend. Have you been into town yet?”

I shake my head. “When would I have the time?”

She laughs. “Touché. Let’s go. We’ll take a walk before dinner, and I’ll show you around.”

A half hour later, Jade parks her Mercedes on a side street. “Small-town parking is always a challenge. I never learned to parallel park until I moved here.”

I laugh. “I can’t parallel park to save my soul.”

“I once had to do it in Talon’s pickup. It was at least a hundred maneuvers. I swear!”

We laugh together.

I like Jade Steel. I like her a lot. Already, I know we have a lot in common. She came to Steel Acres when she was twenty-five, like me.

And she fell for a Steel heir who seemed unattainable at the time.

Things worked out for her.

Will they work out for me as well?

Who knows? Right now, the object of my affection is in Denver with his father and brother. I have no idea why, and I know better than to ask Jade. She clammed up when I asked why she called Talon a “broken man.”

We walk off the side street onto the main thoroughfare. “This is Main Street. Colloquial, huh?”

“Does every small town have a Main Street?” I ask, laughing.

“Pretty much. There was a petition years back to change to the name to Steel Avenue, but Talon and the others wouldn’t hear of it.”

“Why?”

“It’s not their thing. They’re not in any of this for the glory.”

Interesting. Dale said the same thing about his winemaking. He does it for the joy of the art, not

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