Montana Creeds: Logan Read Online Free PDF

space to grow up in, within her constant, unruffled affection.
    “You look so much like Teresa,” she said quietly. “Especially around the eyes.”
    Logan didn’t answer. Cassie was thinking out loud, not making conversation. She
never
made conversation, not the small-talk variety, anyway.
    Teresa, his mother, had been Cassie’s foster daughter, so they weren’t really related, he and this “grandmother” of his. Still, he loved her, and knew she loved him in return.
    Cassie looked around, sighed. “The place is a shipwreck,” she said, still petting Sidekick, who was sucking up the attention, snuggling close against Cassie’s side. “You should come and stay in my guest room until the contractors are through.”
    “Your guest room,” Logan said, “is a teepee.”
    Cassie laughed. “You didn’t mind sleeping out there when you were a boy,” she reminded him. “You used to pretend you were Geronimo, and Dylan and Tyler always fussed at me because you wouldn’t let them be chief.”
    The memory—and the mention of his brothers—ached in Logan’s rawest places. “You ever hear from them, Cassie?” he asked, very quietly and at a considerable amount of time.
    “Do you?” Cassie immediately countered.
    Logan shoved a hand through his hair. He still needed a trim, but there were only so many things a man could do on his first day home. “No,” he said. “And you knew that, so why did you ask?”
    “Wanted to hear you say it aloud,” Cassie said. “Maybe it’ll sink in, that way. Dylan and Ty are your
brothers,
Logan. All the blood family you’ve got in the world. You play fast and loose with that, like you’ve got all the time there is to make things right between the three of you, and you’ll be sorry.”
    Logan approached at last, found a perch on the bottom step. His first inclination was to get his back up, ask why it was his job to “make things right,” but the question would have been rhetorical bullshit.
    He
knew
why it was up to him. Because he was the eldest. Because nobody else was going to open a dialogue. And because he’d been the oneto start the fight, the day of their dad’s funeral, by speaking ill of the dead.
    Okay, he’d been drunk.
    But he’d meant the things he’d said about Jake—that he wouldn’t miss him, that the world would be a more peaceful place without him, if not a better one.
    He’d meant them
then,
anyway.
    Cassie reached out and mussed his hair. “Why did you come back here, Logan?” she asked. “I think I know, but, like before, I’d like to hear you say it.”
    “To start over,” he said, after another hesitation.
    “Sounds like a big job,” Cassie observed. “Getting on some kind of terms with your brothers—even slugging terms would be better than what you have now—that’ll be part of it.”
    Logan nodded, but he didn’t speak. He didn’t trust his voice beyond the three-word sentence he’d offered up last.
    “I’ll give you their numbers,” Cassie said, shifting enough to extract her purse from between her right thigh and the porch rail, taking out a notepad and a pen. “You call them.”
    “What am I going to say?”
    For all the figuring he’d done, all the planning and deciding, he’d never come up with a way to close the yawning gap between him and Dylan and Tyler.
    Cassie chuckled. “Start with hello,” she said, “and see where it goes from there.”
    “I shouldn’t need to tell you where it
might
‘go from there,’” he replied.
    “You’ll never know if you don’t try,” Cassie told him. She scrawled two numbers onto the notepad, quickly and from memory, Logan noted, and tore off the page to hand to him. Having done that, she stood with the elegant grace that always surprised him a little, given her size. She patted Sidekick once more and descended the steps with the slow and purposeful motion of a glacier, leaving Logan to step out of her way or get run over.
    Sidekick remained behind on the porch step,