Revenge Read Free

the damned letters. He felt as if acid had been poured into his gut because, until he found out the truth about Skye and why she’d left him, he’d never be satisfied.
    He kissed his mother goodbye and left her sitting in the rocker staring sightlessly out the window to the dry, rolling fields dotted with white-faced Herefords. Somehow the ranch would survive. He wasn’t so sure about his mother.
    Avoiding further conversation with Kiki, he snatched his hat from its hook and strode outside to his pickup. He climbed in and saw the wadded-up letters on the seat. Growling an oath under his breath, he switched on the ignition and tromped on the accelerator. Within seconds, he was tearing down the lane at a breakneck pace, dust and gravel spewing behind him, pine trees and fence line flashing by in a blur.
    He didn’t want to think about Skye. Not now. Not ever. Thoughts heading in her direction invariably led to dangerous territory. Besides, what was done was done. If he’d wanted her— really wanted her—back then, he would have gone after her, wouldn’t he have?
    Frowning darkly, he switched on the radio, looking for sports scores. Instead, a Bruce Springsteen song of love gone bad drifted out of the speakers. Tell me about it, Bruce, Max thought grimly as he squinted through the dusty, bug-spattered windshield.
    The asphalt road he barreled along on stretched for miles in either direction, a straight, paved line that cut through this valley where the John Day River flowed swiftly between the rolling hills of dry grass and sparse juniper trees.
    When he finally reached town, he stopped at the feed store, bought several sacks of grain and loaded them into his truck before walking the short distance to the Black Anvil. Where his father, just the week before, had consumed too much liquor before ending up at the bottom of Stardust Canyon, the nose of his Jeep plunged deep into the swift waters of Wildcat Creek. Jonah’s blood alcohol level had been near the stratosphere, he’d cracked his head on the windshield and died of heart failure, according to the county medical examiner. Jonah Phineas McKee, a Rimrock legend, had died, and the town had mourned.
    Max would miss him, though for the past few years they hadn’t gotten along.
    Ever since Skye.
    Shoving open the swinging doors to the bar, Max strode past the cigarette machine to the interior where smoke hung in a hazy cloud near the ceiling and the air-conditioning system clattered and coughed. Men, just off work, clustered at the bar where they eyed a television suspended from the ceiling, sipped from frosted mugs of beer, picked at complimentary pretzels, and complained about the game, the weather and their wives.
    Max ordered a beer and slid into a booth near the window. He stared outside, past a flickering neon sign advertising beer, to the street where heat waves rose like ghosts, though the sun was beginning to dip below the mountains.
    â€œDidn’t expect to find you here.”
    Max lifted one side of his mouth at the sound of his brother’s voice. “Can’t say the same for you.”
    Jenner, a half-filled mug of beer in hand, slipped onto the opposite bench. Two years younger than Max, Jenner had always been the rebel, never doing one damned thing that was expected of him. Didn’t even finish high school—just up and left to join the rodeo circuit. A cowboy’s cowboy, he had only come home to roost a few years ago when his body, barely thirty, had been broken and taped together too many times from tumbling off wild broncs and Brahma bulls or crashing into the fists of indignant husbands. “Yeah, well, someone’s got to keep this place in business,” Jenner drawled with his go-to-hell smile stretching from one side of his face to the other.
    Max and Jenner had been oil and water. Max, for years, had always tried to please their old man, while Jenner had done his best to thwart Jonah at