“Asher and Cole?” I asked.
Devon raised a brow. “Do we have any other wayward cousins?”
Okay, that surprised me, and very few things surprised me anymore.
Yeah, they owned the land, but I had assumed they were never coming back to Crystal Fork.
The two of them owned one of the most successful tech companies on the planet.
It was based in Austin.
“Why in the hell are they coming back here?” I asked.
He shrugged. “They plan on breeding horses. Rumor has it that they’re turning their everyday operations over to a CEO and stepping down. If that’s the case, it probably doesn’t matter where they live.”
In some ways, that made sense. Asher was around Kaleb’s age and Cole was only two years younger. They’d been busting their asses for a long time to become billionaires. My brothers and I had considered doing that ourselves, but now that our company was established, we didn’t really need to turn things over. We could pick and choose our acquisitions.
Asher and Cole’s tech company was a whole different business.
They’d probably spent every waking moment running that company.
My cousins were the offspring of my uncle, my father’s younger brother.
My father and his brother had never been close. My uncle had been a heavy drinker, and he’d never been a pleasant person to be around.
My dad had always hoped he’d get rehabilitated at some point, but that had never happened, and he’d had some pretty questionable morals.
Eventually, my father and my uncle had stopped speaking.
My uncle had owned the land next to the ranch because it had been inherited from my grandfather. My dad had gotten the majority of the land for his ranch when my grandpa had passed away, but my grandfather had never entirely disinherited his second son, even though he’d been an asshole.
That property wasn’t as vast as my dad’s ranch, but it was significant acreage.
“How does Mom feel about that?” I asked.
“She’s thrilled,” Devon replied. “You know her. She always wants family back in Crystal Fork. Maybe our family was never close to our uncle or his kids, but she’s hoping she can repair that relationship.”
“The town probably won’t be thrilled,” I said drily. “Half of the people here still think they murdered their father.”
There was a huge scandal when Asher and Cole were younger.
My uncle had been murdered when my cousins were younger. Asher had taken Cole to Austin because their mother had died years ago, and I didn’t think the two of them had ever looked back.
The murder was still unsolved, but the police had never had any evidence to prove that Asher and Cole had done it.
But the gossip had been rampant in Crystal Fork.
Some believed that my cousins had murdered their father.
Some didn’t.
“I don’t think they did it,” Devon informed me. “I talk to Cole once in a while. I think part of the reason they’re coming back is to figure out who murdered their father.”
“I don’t think they did it, either. You talk to Cole?” I questioned. “Hell, I’ve tried to reach out to Asher a few times, but he’s never taken my call.”
We barely knew our cousins. They had both been standoffish as kids, and incredibly unsocial, just like their father.
Then again, with the father they had, I was surprised they were still sane.