“Your mom?” Shane asked gently.
For a second Brandee was tempted to give a short answer and turn the topic aside, but part of her wanted to share what her childhood had been like after losing her dad. “It wasn’t easy living with someone who only wants you around so she can steal your money.”
“I can’t imagine.” Shane shifted his upper body in her direction until his shoulder came into companionable contact with hers.
Brandee welcomed the connection that made her feel both safe and supported. “It didn’t make me the ideal daughter.”
“You fought?”
“Not exactly.” Brandee let her head fall back. Her eyes closed and images of the cramped, cluttered house filled her mind. A trace of anxiety welled as memories of those five suffocating years rushed at her. “She yelled at me, while I said nothing because I’d tried arguing with her and she’d just freak out. So I learned to keep quiet and let her have her say. And then I’d rebel.”
“By doing what?”
“The usual. Partying with my friends. Drinking. Drugs. For a while my grades slipped, then I realized she didn’t give a damn about any of it and I was only hurting myself.”
“So, what happened?”
“I cleaned up my act. Not that she noticed anything going on with me.” Or cared. “But I continued to avoid the house as much as possible.”
“That sounds a lot like how I spent my teen years. I made sure I was gone as much as possible. That way I wasn’t around when it came time to help out on the ranch. It drove my dad crazy.” Shane fixed his gaze on the hypnotic dance of the flames, but didn’t seem to be seeing the fire. “He was a firm believer in hard work, a lot like your dad. He was fond of telling me I wasn’t going to make anything of myself if I wasn’t willing to work for it. I didn’t believe him. I was pretty happy with what I had going. I had a lot of friends and decent grades. I was having a good time. And all he cared about was that I wasn’t in love with ranching like he was.”
Brandee didn’t know how to react to the bitter edge in Shane’s voice. She loved her ranch and couldn’t imagine giving it up. That ranching was something Shane only did out of obligation was a disconnect between them that reinforced why she shouldn’t let herself get too emotionally attached.
“What was it about the ranching you didn’t like?” she asked, shifting to face him and putting a little distance between them.
“I don’t honestly know. One thing for sure, I didn’t see the point in working as hard as my dad did when there were more efficient ways to do things. But he wouldn’t listen to anything I had to say. He expected me to follow exactly in his footsteps. I wasn’t going to do that.”
“What did you want to do?”
“Justin asked me that today, too. I guess I just wanted to have fun.” He grinned, but the smile lacked his typical cocky self-assurance. “Still do.”
She let that go without comment even as she was mentally shaking her head at him. “So, how’d you get into real-estate developing?”
“A buddy of mine in college got me into flipping houses. I liked the challenge.” Satisfaction reverberated in Shane’s voice. He obviously took great pride in his past accomplishments. And present ones, too. From everything she’d heard, The Bellamy was going to be quite a resort.
“I got my first job when I turned sixteen,” Brandee said. “Stocking shelves at a grocery store after school and on weekends. It gave me enough money to buy a used junker with no AC and busted shocks. I didn’t care. It was freedom. I used to park it around the corner from the house because I didn’t want my mom knowing about it.”
“What would’ve happened if she’d known about it?”
“She would’ve given it to Turtlehead or Squash Brain.” Those days were blurry in her memory. “Mom always had some loser boyfriend hanging around.”
“She lived with them?”
Brandee heard the concern in his voice and appreciated it more than she should. “They lived with her. She rented a crummy two-bedroom house right on the edge of a decent neighborhood because she thought it was great to be so close to people with money. I don’t know what she was like when my dad met her, but by the time I went to live with her, she wasn’t what anyone would call a class act.”
“What did she do?”
“She actually had a halfway-decent job. She cut hair at one of those chain salons. I think if she had better taste in boyfriends she might have been more successful. But all she attracted were harmless jerks.” She thought back to one in particular. “And then Nazi boy showed up.”
“Nazi boy?”
“A skinhead with the Nazi tattoos on his arms and all over his chest. For a while I just hung in there figuring he’d soon be gone like all the rest.”
“But he wasn’t?”
“No. This one had money. Not because he worked. I think he and his white-supremacist buddies jacked cars or ran drugs or something. He always had money for blow and booze.” She grimaced. “My mom took a bad path with that one.”
“How old were you?”