For the time being, though, the will stated that Adam would inherit everything. And that wasn’t changing until some wedding rings and babies came along. The fact that Beth and Matt had spent their twenties and thirties getting businesses off the ground didn’t matter to their mother. She wanted grandchildren, and so far, Adam was the only one who’d obliged.
“He has a family,” she’d told Matt and his sister thousands of times, “so he gets the family’s farm.”
Matt rubbed his eyes under his sunglasses again and swore into the stillness. Beneath him, Brandy snorted as she kept plodding down the well-worn trail.
He patted her neck. “You have no idea how lucky you are.” Though now that he thought about it, Brandy’s dam was the type to make her opinion known to the rest of the herd, usually by way of a piercing squeal or a solid kick. Just as well horses couldn’t own property, he supposed.
Even that couldn’t make him laugh. He patted her again, and they continued through the trees toward the south pastures where the broodmares were peacefully grazing. A couple of this year’s foals were glued to their moms’ sides. One was sprawled out so flat, she almost disappeared in the clover. Three more mares were ready to foal any day now—he made a mental note to come by and check on Whiskey and Lady this afternoon. Whiskey could not possibly get any bigger, and Lady was due any second. In fact, after he put Brandy away after their ride, maybe he’d come out and bring those two mares into the barn. Just in case.
Despite his baseball cap and sunglasses, the light was starting to bother his eyes, so he turned Brandy around and headed back into the woods. The auras and throbbing hadn’t started yet, so maybe he could still fend off this bastard migraine—the light sensitivity was a bad sign, but it wasn’t a point of no return.
He closed his eyes, letting Brandy navigate, and took some slow breaths. The kind his therapist had taught him to take when the stress got out of control. They didn’t help much, but it was something to focus on besides…
Fuck. Why do I let Mom get under my skin?
Well, that answer was simple enough—because she knew which nerves to pluck to make her son and daughter toe the line. She knew this was one area where she had total control over them, and no amount of money in Matt’s bank account or reputation on Beth’s résumé could negate that.
Matt would happily buy his sister an even bigger and more state-of-the-art property if it came down to it. Or she’d work for another breeder in the area. If they lost the property to their brother, they’d make it work.
What worried them both was what Adam intended to do with the property once it was his. He was a property developer, and Goldmount, the small town where he and his wife lived fifty miles up the interstate, had exploded into a bustling city over the last several years. No small part of that explosion had come from Adam buying up family farms and turning them into an asphalt jungle of endless strip malls.
He looked around at the trees, and, just beyond them, the neat white fences sectioning off pastures full of horses between here and the facility—a newly renovated barn, a covered arena and just out of his sight, a dressage arena. The thought of all this turning into parking lots and big-box stores was nauseating.
Aspen Mill didn’t need that. It didn’t need to mutate into a glass-and-pavement wasteland. The place wasn’t perfect, but it didn’t need to become Chicago, where Matt had spent too many years of his life. This was one of those small towns that still had more gossips than stoplights. Divorces were still scandals, and it didn’t take much to become a social pariah. That had always bugged Matt, and it still did, but it had some renewed charm after he’d spent a decade in a place where you could die on today’s front page and be forgotten by tomorrow.
The people here didn’t want it to change either. For better or worse, they liked it this way. Those who didn’t had left a long time ago. Some, like Matt, had returned when they realized how much they preferred this life after all, and those who hadn’t come back had been replaced by the families who’d trickled in from bigger cities. This lifestyle was one they guarded jealously—there were even people who’d given him the evil eye when he’d come back to town last year. They were convinced he’d brought his money here from Chicago and had plans to turn this place into a gleaming metropolis.
Far from it. He hoped never to see a skyscraper again as long as he lived.
He adjusted his baseball cap and sighed. Aspen Mill was a long way from skyscrapers, but it wouldn’t take much to turn it into concrete and glass. And that would be a goddamned shame.