dicing up your father’s body and feeding it to vultures. I’d rather try to reach an agreement with a single buyer. Even Darling. Maybe he’d let the four of us stay here, work the place for him.”
Levi recoiled, and Beth felt nausea shake her by the shoulders.
“This land isn’t going to Darling,” Levi said, and he spoke it like a vow.
His tone jarred Beth’s forgotten nightmare loose from her sleepy memory. In half a second she recalled everything: She and Levi standing at the creek. A wolf with a bloody muzzle sleeping at her feet. Levi raising the rifle to his shoulder and taking aim.
At their father dressed in white, standing on the opposite bank.
The rifle shot and impact were silent and weightless. The weapon didn’t recoil when it was discharged. Her father didn’t reel when hit. But his blood was gushing and noisy, falling into the creek water like a sudden heavy rain.
Dream and reality tangled long enough for Beth to believe Levi had murdered their father, which was ridiculous. Her eyes darted through shadows of the kitchen and porch, looking for a rifle, for blood. Of course, there was neither in this space. There was only the notable absence of any sorrow for the man who had loved them all so much.
Beth shook off the horror of the dream but couldn’t shed her rising wariness of her big brother.
“I can’t leave this place,” her mother said. “I can’t even think of it now. Maybe if your father were with me—I thought I could, but I need . . . I need time.”
“What if I told you that you wouldn’t ever have to leave it?” Levi said. “That I know a way to keep you here forever, without another day of worry about how we’re going to make it?”
Her mother’s profile was like a child’s in the lamplight, with a hopeful, lifted chin.
“I called Sam Johnson today,” Levi said.
The name filled Beth with as much dread as Darling’s did.
“The developer?” Rose’s voice reflected Beth’s shock. She stood now, nearly as tall as her firstborn. Between them, Herriot’s growl rose a notch and the glistening tips of her fine fur rose off the back of her neck.
“Of course the developer.”
“We can’t sell the land Sam wants to buy.”
“We can sell it, it’s just that no one wants to.”
“Don’t act so dense. It’s prime,” Rose argued. “Two thousand acres of our best land—the best irrigated, the best soil. We sell that, and the cows can’t survive. The ranch can’t survive. If you think I’ll parcel off little plots to that man and give up the Blazing B just so I can live in this house”—she stomped her foot on the drum-like floorboards—“you don’t understand my love for it at all.”
“Settle down. He doesn’t want those acres anymore.”
“Then what on earth does he want?”
“Sam’s a generous man, Mom. He only wants what’s best for us.”
“That’s not how I would have characterized the proposal he presented to us last year.”
“But this time I was the one with the proposal. And he was very interested in my thoughts.”
Beth leaned in, placed her hand on the cool metal door frame of the open slider, not wanting to miss a word. If Levi was about to be her savior, she’d be stunned. Grateful, but stunned. And a little frightened of what he might demand from her in return.
“Is it too much to ask that you share those thoughts with me before you go around making business proposals with the world?” Rose asked.
Levi took a step back and pretended to look wounded. “What’s wrong with you? I’m standing here with a plan to bail us out of an impossible situation, and you’re treating me like I’m still a kid. We all have to grow up now, don’t we? Dad’s gone and I’m the only one who can see straight. It’s you and me now, just the two of us to save this place.”
Rose took a deep breath, silenced whatever words bubbled on her lips, and turned her palm up toward him. Fine. Continue.
“I asked Sam to become an investor.”
“No sane man would pour his cash down a drain like this.”
“Not an investor in the Blazing B, per se. But a partner of sorts.”
“In what, Levi?”
“In the Blazing B Resort.”
Beth’s mind crawled with an image of fat city slickers in shiny new cowboy boots and too-tight jeans riding Hastings and Gert.
“A dude ranch?” Rose’s tone was disbelieving. “You want to turn our home into a dude ranch?”