Page 94 of Snowed In with her Mountain Men
“I’m afraid he did.”
“Sarge didn’t talk about the diamonds to anyone,” Oakley noted. “Much less some brother he never told us about.”
“I know he took them from a sultan’s palace,” the man they’d called Bryce Tyler went on. “He told me as much. It was the last time I ever saw him.”
I saw the curtain of denial fall. The last of the made-up pretenses just dropped away.
“When?”
“A long time ago,” said Bryce. “Colton showed up on my doorstep one night, stinking of whiskey. That stuff right there, in fact. The one with the red label.” He pointed to a particular bottle among the dozen or so on the bar. “I’ll bet you still drink that slop because he drank it, don’t you?”
The guys paused to look at each other. Eventually, Oakley nodded.
“Sentimental assholes. That’s the cheap stuff.”
“Never mind that,” barked Ryder. “Keep going.”
The man struggled some more; against wrists that were raw and chafed. Eventually, he gave up.
“Anyway, my brother was drunk as hell that night,” Bryce went on. “He told me what he’d done, and how he’d kept it a secret. Then he opened his palm. He showed me the diamonds.”
Oakley stiffened in visible excitement. “You’ve actually seen them?” he squinted.
“Yes. They were incredible stones, too; all big and uncut and gleaming in the moonlight. And Colton had a whole fistful of them.” Bryce shook his head and swore. “He told me he’d split them with me, if we could go back to the way things were. But first he wanted me to apologize. He wanted me to make amends.”
“So?”
“So I told him to go fuck himself,” he recalled angrily.
“And why in the hell would you do that?” demanded Jaxon.
Bryce laughed bitterly and shook his head. “You didn’t know my brother.”
“To hell with that,” Ryder spat, his voice suddenly deadly serious. “We served with your brother. We loved him, went to war alongside him, and never once did he mention you. We knew him far better than you did.”
“Fine,” the man grunted. “You didn’t grow up with him, then. You weren’t there when our father would step on our toys and crush them, just for leaving them out. You weren’t there when he was throwing our mother around, with a broken arm. Or backhanding us, if we uttered a word in protest.”
The room clicked over to stunned silence for a while, save for the crackle of the fire.
“And you definitely weren’t there on the night we put an end to all that,” Bryce said distantly, “with a couple of tire irons and a gallon of gasoline.”
The guys exchanged menacingly grim looks. Despite the heat of the fire, my blood ran cold.
“I wanted to kill him,” Bryce seethed. “I didn’t give a damn about us, but I wanted to see him burn for what he’d done to our mother. I had the match in my hand, ready to strike. But Colton wouldn’t let me. He cut the son of a bitch loose instead, and that was the last we ever saw of him.” His eyes glassed over, focusing on something very distant and far away. “I never forgave him for that. And our mother never forgave us, either.”
A new silence settled over the room, this one even more awkward than the last.
“That’s horrific,” I said sullenly. “What happened to you, I mean.”
Bryce wouldn’t even look up. He was still lost in the memory.
“Why didn’t you just tell us?” Oakley asked abruptly.
“Tell you what?”
“Who you were, for starters,” Ryder agreed. “You could’ve come to us, told us you were Sarge’s brother. That he’d told you about the diamonds. That you were looking for the same thing we were.”
Bryce’s laughter was abrasive, his voice grating. “If I had, would you have cut me in?” he asked. “Given me my fair share of—”
