Page 52 of Snowed In with her Mountain Men

CAMRYN

“It’s not that bad, really.”

“Not that bad?” I rebutted, my face still drawn with worry. “Seriously?”

“Trust me,” Oakley laughed. “I’ve had worse.”

He kicked his other leg up on the couch, and reached for the whiskey again. The wound had been clean at least, and hadn’t hit anything major. It took two dressings, but the blood had finally stopped.

“Call them,” I urged. “See what’s happening.”

Oakley took a long pull from the amber liquid and shook his head. “Can’t. They didn’t take their phones.”

For the better part of the past hour I’d been pacing the living room, throwing logs on the fire. By now it was so hot we were sweating.

“Sarge’s brother…” Oakley sighed again, shaking his head. “I still can’t believe it.”

“He looked like him,” I agreed. “That’s for sure.”

“Looked like him?” he avowed. “He even stood like him. Moved like him. Carried himself, exactly like Sarge.”

He touched his ribs, wincing painfully.

“He fought like him, too.”

I paced another lap, picking out another few splinters of wood I’d missed while cleaning up their giant mess. Jaxon and Ryder were tough, but the man who’d torn through here was decidedly dangerous. Knowing where he was going was one thing. But backing him into a corner…

That part worried the hell out of me.

“Listen, if—”

The sound of the Marauder’s engine came out of nowhere. It roared into the driveway, and shut down just as quickly. For several long moments there was only the howl of the wind outside. Then we heard the ‘ka-chunk’ of the truck’s big doors opening and slamming shut.

Jaxon and Ryder burst through the front door, dragging something behind them. My shoulders slumped with relief, as I realized what it was.

“Oh, thank God!”

The man was bruised and bleeding, his hair flopping into his face as they dumped him unceremoniously in the center of the foyer. He was wet and dirty; zip-tied, hand and foot. His breathing was slow and shallow, but at least he was still breathing.

“Holy shit,” huffed Oakley. “What the hell happened?”

I followed his gaze with a gasp of my own. Ryder’s upper lip was twice its normal size, and his left eye was swollen completely shut. Jaxon’s face was lacerated across the nose, and covered in blood. He was also limping.

“What do you think happened?” he growled.

“I think you got your asses kicked,” Oakley said smartly.

The man on the floor suddenly laughed. It was a deep, wheezing laugh, but a laugh nonetheless.

Ryder reared his leg back and kicked him.

“Stop!” I said, for no particular reason. “Don’t do that…”

“And why the hell not?” spat Jaxon.

“Because, well… I dunno. Because he’s tied up. He’s helpless.”

“Helpless?” the man jeered. “Cut my ties. Let me show you how—”

Ryder grabbed the man violently, screwing his fists into his shoulders. I leapt forward to stop whatever happened next, but all he did was yank their captive into a sitting position.

“Everyone, meet Bryce Tyler,” he grunted. “Brother to Colton.”

Oakley was already off the couch, and hobbling closer. His face was painted in disbelief.

“Holy fucking shit,” he breathed. “You look just like—”

“Yeah, yeah,” the man on the floor snarled. “I look like my brother. Get over it already.” He turned his head and spat. “Actually, he looks like me. I was first, you know.”

It was uncanny, really. I kept glancing back and forth between our new prisoner and the photo with Sarge, which now hung at a slight, but annoying, angle. They were the same man, in almost every aspect. Physically, anyway.

“Sarge never told us he had a brother,” Jaxon said flatly.

The prisoner only smirked. “He never told me he had three snot-nosed, wanna-be sons, either,” he said icily. “And yet here you are.”

Ryder looked ready to kick him again. A hard look from Jaxon stayed him.

“What the hell do you want?” asked Oakley. “Why do you keep coming here?”

“Same reason as you,” the man spat again.

“Enlighten us.”

“Fine,” he sighed wearily. “You need to hear it? The diamonds.”

For once, no one looked at anyone else. The boys’ gazes remained fixed, their mouths tight-lipped and silent.

“Are you really going to play stupid now?” the man asking, mockingly. “After all the holes I’ve watched you dig? After all the searching, the sifting—”

“Assuming there are diamonds,” Jaxon interjected coldly, “how would you know about them?”

“Simple. My brother told me.”

Wincing in pain, Jaxon shifted his weight off his bad leg. “No he didn’t.”

“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—”

“YES,” Oakley and Ryder said, in perfect unison.

Their gazes shifted immediately to Jaxon, who remained utterly silent. So did mine.

“Fine,” he eventually admitted. “Yes. We would.”

The man on the floor blinked a few times, looking suddenly nonplussed. As if, for some reason, their answer seemed utterly absurd to him.

“You’re forgetting that Sarge was our brother too,” Ryder explained, stepping forward. “Every bit as much as he was yours.”

He reached behind himself for a moment, and produced a long, wicked-looking knife. The polished steel flashed dangerously in the firelight.

“We honored him in life,” Ryder went on, as he dropped to one knee. “It goes without saying we extend that honor in death.”

His arm jerked violently for a moment, as he cut through the zip-ties holding Bryce’s wrists together. Pausing to stare him down one last time, he freed his ankles next.

Bryce rose slowly, stretching and uncoiling his body. Eventually he stood at his full, intimidating height.

“What exactly does that mean?” he asked cautiously.

“It means if Sarge wanted to share the diamonds with you, that’s all we needed to hear.”

Bryce was only slightly less confused. He looked at them one by one, sizing them up, but in a much different way than he had before. I couldn’t help but gasp when he whirled on me.

“I’m sorry,” he said gravely. “For striking you.”

Those deep-set eyes still blazed with an innately fearsome intensity. But for the first time, I actually noticed their color: a swirling, stormy gray.

“Guess I can’t really blame you,” I shrugged, still holding his gaze. “I was swinging a rifle around.”

He nodded before turning away.

“And I’m sorry to the rest of you,” he added, rubbing his wrists. “For… you know.”

Oakley looked at his friends and chuckled. “For delivering an ass-kicking?”

Bryce gave a shrug of his massive shoulders. “Sure.”

“I still can’t believe he beat both your asses,” Oakley prodded. “I mean—”

“He kicked your ass too, numbnuts,” barked Jaxon. “If it weren’t for us, you’d still be wearing the staircase.”

“Yeah,” Ryder agreed. “I have to say, you fight like—”

“Colton?” Bryce smirked. “Where’d you think my brother learned to fight? It wasn’t all at boot camp, I’ll tell you that. We fought and boxed and wrestled like maniacs, all through our childhood.” His voice went lower, growing more introspective. “Even more so, after it was just us and mom.”

The tension in the room drained away, leaving only the glowing warmth of the fire. I found myself grateful and relieved. I was still hurting from the blow to my head, but it wasn’t anything a couple of Ibuprofen couldn’t fix.

For a while the five of us stood there, silently licking our wounds.

“Alright then,” said Oakley at last. “You’re in.”

When he dropped a hand on Bryce’s shoulder, the man didn’t even flinch.

“At least now you can help us dig during the daylight, instead of sneaking in and out of the woods at night,” he went on. “We still don’t know what the hell your brother did with the diamonds, but—”

“Yes we do.”

The words came bursting out of me, along with an ear-to-ear smile. Four very tired, pain-filled gazes shifted my way.

“What if I told you I had some really good news?”