“I have. And no. Not,” she added, “that I didn’t ask.”
That got a twitch of a smile out of him. “Then where?” His tone was back to normal now, as if the earlier fierceness over Lucas had been banked. Temporarily only, she was sure.
“Mongolia, actually.”
He stopped dead. “Mongolia?”
She stopped and turned back to him. “Yes. They have this centuries-old festival of archery, wrestling, and horse racing called—”
“Naadam.”
She blinked. “Yes. You’ve heard of it.”
“Not bad for a country bumpkin, huh?”
“Little defensive there, Rafferty? I didn’t give an opinion. I was simply surprised because not many people here have heard of it, unless they’ve studied or been to east Asia.”
“I read about it. Remembered it because it’s not our kind of racing, it’s more endurance than short bursts, and I liked that.”
“They are tough horses,” she said, smiling. “And that is what it’s for, to show off what the horses can do. Big difference between a mile and a half on the flat and over eighteen miles cross-country. Riders just go along…for the ride, as it were.”
“Are you saying you rode in that?”
“I did,” she said proudly. “And finished.” She grinned. “Not first, but finished.”
“On whose horse?” he asked, clearly genuinely interested.
“A local whose kid got sick. He let me work a little with the horse, and decided I’d do.” She flicked at her hair. “I was still blonde then, the only one around their village, and I think he wanted the showiness as much as anything.”
His brow furrowed slightly. “Is that why you dyed it?”
She was a little surprised he’d picked up on the undertone in her voice. “Yes. It sometimes drew the wrong kind of attention in some places.”
“I can imagine,” he said.
“When it gets a little longer, I’ll have the dark cut off. The two-tone sometimes draws the wrong kind of attention in some places, too.”
She didn’t say it with any particular emphasis, but his gaze narrowed. “Like on my front porch?”
She grinned at him. “You said it, I didn’t.”
To her surprise—no, shock—he laughed. “I’ve gotten used to it. Don’t cut it on my account.” He started walking again, and she kept even with him. “But if you want it cut, Bella’s is the place, Mom says.”
“If they cut her hair, I agree. They’re in town?”
He nodded. “Across from the big church.”
“Do they do yours?” she asked innocently.
He laughed again. Dang, he had a great laugh. “I do mine. With dog clippers. Can’t you tell?”
“And here I pictured you spending into triple digits for that trendy, every-which-way look.”
“That’s the hat,” he said, jerking a thumb back over his shoulder, where his straw cowboy hat still sat on the table on the porch. “And I’ve never been trendy in my life.”
She was grinning again, but she couldn’t seem to help it. And to her amazement he was grinning back. That dimple was just too much. Everything about him was too much.
And she liked this, when they were not going at it tooth and nail, far too much.
Chapter Eighteen
Sydney heard the blasting music when they got within about ten feet of the smaller barn. She stopped dead, listening. Not the country or Americana she would have expected less than a hundred miles from the bustling music center of Austin, or even anything else contemporary, but instead a surging, pounding piece it took her a moment to put a name to because the arrangement was unusual.
“Verdi’s Requiem?” she asked with a sideways look at Keller, who had stopped when she did. That manners thing again.
“So I’m told,” he said. “Not my thing, but he says it helps him work.”
“Pretty intense. And driving. I can see where it would. I didn’t recognize it at first, without the choir.”
Keller shrugged. “Cody put it together for him. Something about a virtual orchestra.”
“Fascinating,” she said as they started walking again, meaning it on several fronts. Not just the unexpected music, but that connection, that brotherly thing. Never having had a sibling, she had no experience with that kind of bond, the kind that was obvious within this family. Obvious and strong.
And the uncooperative Cody Rafferty clearly had more talents than just flying drones to upset the neighbors—and telling unwanted visitors they weren’t welcome. Of course, he hadn’t said it, not in words, but the message had been clear in his eyes. Eyes that were a paler, springtime green as opposed to Keller’s near-emerald.
Stop it.
He halted just outside the small door that was cut into the larger barn door; while smaller than the other barn, this was by no means a small building. A fitting studio for a saddlemaker, but again unexpected for the level of artist Rylan Rafferty had become.
“You sure you want to take your life in your hands?” Keller asked.
She looked at him assessingly. She couldn’t decide if he was warning her or merely amused at the prospect. “Will he take a break any time before Lucas gets home from school?”
“Not likely. When he gets rolling like this sometimes we don’t see him for days.”
She blinked. “Days? Doesn’t he eat?”
“Not much. He’s got jerky and water in there, and he kind of lives on that when he’s on a tear.”
She thought about Maggie Rafferty, and her fierceness about her sons. And what she’d read was normal, with normal parents. “Doesn’t your mother worry about that?”
“She’ll put her foot down if she has to, after three days. But she gives him that much time because she remembers what he was like before he found his calling, as she puts it.”
“What was he like?”
“Headed straight for trouble. Cutting school, fights, and worse.” He hesitated, then said, “He was Lucas’s age when our dad was killed. I think that’s partly why Mom is so determined to help him, because she remembers how Ry was.”
That touched her, especially now that she’d met the no-nonsense Maggie Rafferty. She needed to thank her for that. It was more than many would do. Certainly more than her own mother would ever do.
And on some level she was aware they were having a friendly, nearly normal conversation. She had the feeling she owed that to his mother as well. Apparently she had passed a test.
“And now he’s a huge success,” she said, remembering the article she’d read about the Texas man who’d turned saddlemaking into an art form and had made custom saddles for everyone from celebrities to heads of state.
“We look upon it more that he’s got an outlet for that…whatever it is that drives him.”
“A smothered artist is sometimes a dangerous thing.”
There was a touch of surprise in his expression at her words. “Yes. We learned that. Nearly the hard way.” His expression changed again as his focus seemed to shift inward. And he added one more word, barely above a whisper. “Twice.”
Local artist?
He was.
The short exchange with Mrs. Rafferty, and Keller’s stiffening at the topic shot through her mind, along with what Keller had said before, about their legacies from their father. Me, the love of the ranch. Chance, the love of country. Ry, his artistic talent. And Cody, his tactical mind. And then, because she couldn’t stop herself, she asked, very quietly, “Who painted that picture in the house?”
His jaw went rigid. “None of your business,” he ground out.
It was pain, not anger, that was obvious in his voice, in his face. And that gave her the answer he’d refused to give.
“It was your father.”
She didn’t make it a question or make her tone questioning. Because she knew. And that he looked away when she said it, giving a half shake of his head, the way he stared at the ground, only proved it. Thus far Keller Rafferty had dodged nothing, had confronted her every s
tep of the way. But this pain ran too deep, still fresh after all these years.
At first she didn’t know what else to say. But then she sensed he was about to move on, and this moment seemed too important to let slip away. Why, she wasn’t sure. Nor did she stop to analyze why it mattered to her. She simply counted on the innate good manners he’d already proven he had to keep him from walking away while she was speaking.
“I met an old man once, in a village that had known decades of strife and conflict. He was revered as a warrior, as the greatest of warriors. I heard about him long before I met him, because his image was in every home, in an honored place. When I finally did meet him, I was stunned to learn he was the brilliant artist I’d come looking for, who created incredible sculptures out of a local clay unique to the area. I asked him—through a translator, since I couldn’t speak the local dialect—how he reconciled the two.”
She paused, waited. Silence spun out for a long moment. Then, at last, his head came up. Stupidly, her first thought was how much she liked his “dog-clippered” hair, shorter but not shaved on the sides, and long enough to be almost spiky on top. There were guys in big cities who’d pay hundreds to get that look. But it wouldn’t matter, because none of them could wear it like this Texas cowboy.
Finally, he spoke, and it sounded beyond reluctant. “How did he?”
“He told me the one fed the other. That without his art he would not be the warrior he was, and if he did not fight, his art would not be what it was.”
She saw the slightest widening of his eyes, those vivid green eyes that seemed to bore right through her. His lips parted as if he were about to speak again, but instead he closed them again and swallowed visibly.
She heard the music from inside start over from the beginning. As if the portion of the piece he wanted—or needed—was on a loop. Keller turned his head, clearly having heard it as well.
“He says it just works, playing the same piece, over and over,” he said.
“So it’s there but he doesn’t have to think about it, doesn’t get caught up in it?”
“I don’t know. You can ask him, if he doesn’t take our heads off.”
The fraught moment behind them, he walked over and pulled open the small door within a door. “No lock?”
“We supposedly know better than to interrupt,” he said dryly.
She was barely two feet inside when movement drew her gaze. A man walking across a large open space, pausing in front of an easel holding a large sketch pad. Then moving again, pacing. No, not just pacing, because he wasn’t walking, he was…prowling. The man moved like a big cat, like one of the leopards she’d seen in India. His dark hair was a little long, with a couple of errant strands falling forward over his forehead, and the worn T-shirt he wore was snug enough to reveal he was built nearly as powerfully as his older brother.
There had been a photo with the article she’d read, but it had utterly failed to portray the reality she saw now. Because in the flesh, Rylan Rafferty looked more like a street fighter than an artist. And the contrast between his almost dangerous looks and the art he created, along with the classical music, was dramatic and then some.
“Try not to drool.” She heard Keller’s amused whisper in her ear and looked up at him.
“Does that happen often? Women come in here and drool?”
“No one, woman or otherwise, is usually allowed in here.”
Apparently oblivious to them, the man had stopped in front of the sketch pad again, this time making a swiping move with one hand that she now realized held a drawing instrument of some kind. He drew quickly, in long, sweeping curves, then tighter, closer lines. She couldn’t see from here exactly what it was or was supposed to represent, but the flow of it was visible and tangible.
And then it was gone, as the man ripped the page from the pad, wadded it up and tossed it, without a second glance. And it wasn’t the first time, she realized, because there were several crumpled balls of the same kind of paper on the floor behind the tall easel. He turned as if to start pacing—prowling—again. And then he suddenly spun around to stare at them.
His brows lowered, and she had that thought about a street fighter again. He reached out and hit something on a workbench to one side, apparently a remote that shut down the towering music.
“Sorry, bro,” Keller said into the oddly echoing silence.
Sydney almost felt the man’s focus shift to her, saw his gaze flick over her. Darker eyes, she thought. Not blue, or green like his brothers—the ones she’d met, anyway—but a smoky sort of gray. No, the gray of storm clouds. Fitting, since he was practically glaring at her for the interruption.
Then suddenly his expression changed. And he looked at his brother. “This is her?”
“Yes,” Keller said.
“She’s still pushing?”
“She wants to meet Lucas.”
“Not until we’re sure she’s really his cousin.”
“She’s right here,” Sydney said sweetly. “Don’t ruin my good impression of Southern manners.”
His gaze shot back to her. The street fighter was looking at her now. “I’m a Texan. We have our own.”
“Seems you have your own everything. Perhaps you should have stayed a Republic.”
“More than one would agree with that,” he retorted.
And this was not how she’d hoped this would go. But she’d learned early on to stand up for herself, because no one else would.
She glanced at Keller. And the darned man was grinning.
Chapter Nineteen
Keller realized with a little jolt that he was enjoying this. Or maybe it was just that watching these two spar was better than thinking about the fact that somehow she’d guessed about the painting.
Without his art he would not be the warrior he was, and if he did not fight, his art would not be what it was.
For years he, his family, and others had tried to reconcile those two things. They each had a piece of his work hanging in their rooms, and he knew that sometimes they all stared at them and wondered. They’d all understood why Chance had gone, that he’d felt compelled to pick up the mantle and defend the country they all loved so dearly. But understanding how their father, a man with the eye and soul of an artist, had felt compelled to take up arms was something else altogether. Keller had never heard an explanation that made sense to him.
Until now.
Sydney Brock had made sense of his father’s life and death with her story about the old man in a village. Had explained the dichotomy that was Rylan Rafferty in the same way. That simply she had seen, understood, and managed to explain what his entire family had never quite grasped.
“So why are you back here again?” Ry glanced at Keller. “I thought we were waiting on tests?”
“Ms. Brock is a bit impatient, it seems,” he said.
“Tough,” Ry said.
Keller looked at her. “Over to you. Convince him.”
She turned to face Keller, purposefully. “Will he even listen?”
“He’s capable of it, if that’s what you mean.”
“Why is he so resistant?” she asked, never even glancing at Ry.
“Same reason as the rest of us. Protecting Lucas.”
“Then he and I are on the same page.”
“Okay, I get it,” Ry said wryly as she continued to ignore his presence and speak of him in the third person. “I was rude.”
She glanced at him then. When he didn’t go on, she lifted a brow at him and said, “That kind of acknowledgment is usually accompanied by an apology.”
“I’m getting there,” Ry said, his mouth twisting up at one corner.
“Artistic types,” Keller said blandly. “You know how they are.”
She looked at him. “Yes. The most supremely confident or self-doubting people on earth. Often both at once.”
Ry looked startled, and Keller laughed. “Nailed you, bro.”
His brother finally let down. He leaned back against the
workbench scattered with his tools, in an almost relaxed posture. But his arms were crossed in front of him, far from relaxed. Often both at once.
She really had pegged him. But he should have realized she would, because it was what she did—deal with artists. And while Ry would deny up one side and down the other that that’s what he was, Keller knew better. He had their father’s innate sensibilities that saw patterns and designs in the world around them, and turned that into impossibly beautiful works of art. That they were found on utilitarian items like saddles, bridles, belts and the like was the way Ry had found to put a wall between himself and that world that would consider him an artist, and expect all the characteristics they had decided came with that.
He listened as she explained what she wanted and why she wanted it. And what she would do if it turned out that the DNA test proved her wrong—while again swearing it would not.
“And you want to use me to do it,” Ry said flatly when she finished.
“You’re exactly the kind of artist I would approach anyway. Or rather, you would have been before you did that magnificent piece for the governor. Now you don’t need me.”
“I’m not an artist. It was a saddle, not ‘a piece.’ And he uses it.”
“You think art can’t be both beautiful and useful?” Ry shifted slightly, and his gaze narrowed. She was getting to him—Keller could see it. “I’ve built my business on that very concept. Beautiful things that are useful.”
“The World in a Gift.”
“Yes.”
Ry sighed audibly. The crossed arms came down. And he pointed to the workbench he was leaning against, where the tool case their mother had given him last Christmas sat. The large wooden box had a lid that was an intricate bas-relief piece, which somehow produced the feel of tall, waving grass, and a perfect rendition of a small raptor soaring free above it.
Sydney lit up. There was no other way to describe it. Her eyes widened, she smiled, and those golden eyes fairly glowed. “Nikau!” she exclaimed. “Oh, he does wonderful work! I’m so proud he agreed to deal with us. Not that he made it easy,” she added with a laugh.
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