He lay back against the pillows. But he wasn’t a boy now, he thought wryly, he was a man, and as free as the hawk. There was no need to dream of the day he, too, could leave behind the Landon mansion and the valley it commanded.
He had done that, thirteen long years ago, and though he had returned from time to time, he had never missed this place.
With a sigh, he shoved aside the blankets, sat up and scrubbed his stubbled face lightly with his hands.
What time was it, anyway? He peered at the clock beside his bed. Six thirty-seven, said the unblinking red digital face. Zach groaned softly and put his head in his hands.
If he was at home in Boston, he’d have already been up half an hour. By now, he’d be shaved, showered and dressed; he’d be on his way downstairs to the sun room, where Howell would greet him with a polite good morning, a pot of freshly ground coffee and copies of the Boston Globe, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.
But he wasn’t in Boston, Zach thought as he rose to his feet and padded, naked, to the window. He was in Colorado. And getting up at six o’clock was no pleasure when you hadn’t gone to bed until someplace after two the night before.
A grin crept across Zach’s face. The evening had been terrific, though. Sitting around, talking and reminiscing with his brothers, was always great.
It never failed to amaze him just how easily he, Cade and Grant fell back into the patterns of their childhood when they got together. Though they were separated by time, by geography and by the demands of their very different professions, all they had to do was meet under the same roof and the years fell away. They were kids again, not just brothers but best buddies, joined by blood, by love—and by their determination to stand up to the common enemy. Their father.
The smile slipped from Zach’s face. The enemy was gone now. Charles had been dead almost a week, the funeral was over, and he still didn’t feel anything. Hell, you were supposed to feel something when you watched your old man’s coffin settling alongside your mother’s in the family mausoleum, weren’t you, something more than a faint sense of regret?
He shook his head as he ran his hand through his chestnut-colored hair. His brothers had been as stonyfaced as he. Kyra had been the only one of the Landon children whose eyes had glittered with tears, but then, his baby sister was as sweet and tenderhearted a soul as had ever lived. That she’d never been one of the old man’s victims, Zach thought wryly, proved that there was a merciful God. Charles’s tyrannical callousness, his authoritarian coldness, had been reserved for his sons alone.
With a sigh, Zach turned away from the window and headed for the attached bathroom. That was all in the past now, he thought as he stepped into the shower stall, and not just because the old man was gone. Charles had lost power over his sons a long time ago. Cade had escaped at twenty-one, giving up the life the old man had picked out for him for the dream of striking it rich in the oil fields. Grant hadn’t lasted that long; he’d made his move at eighteen, going off to the university of his choice instead of his father’s and making his way through it and law school on his own.
Zach smiled tightly as he turned his face up to the water. But he’d had less patience than either of his brothers. At seventeen, he’d walked away from this place and…
He laughed. Hell, no. He hadn’t walked away, he’d driven—in his father’s Porsche. Taking off in the hundred-thousand-dollar car had been his final act of defiance, a kind of in-your-face present from him to Charles as if to prove he was every inch the no-good punk the old man said he was.
Actually, by then, a punk was exactly what he’d become. His grades—except for science, which he loved, and math, which he could do without thinking—were in the toilet. He’d been running with a fast and loose crowd, and it had only been a matter of time before he’d have gotten in trouble with the law.
His smile faded as he stepped out of the shower. Even at seventeen, he’d hated himself for what he was turning into, but he couldn’t seem to stop.
Nothing he did was good enough to please his father. His As in math and science didn’t make up for the Bs (and occasional Cs) he got in dull subjects like social studies and languages. His position on the football team as a grunting, hurt-in-the-dirt lineman was nothing compared to the flash and dash he’d have had as a running back or a wide receiver. And his friends were the wrong ones, local boys instead of snot-nosed brats from the exclusive school the old man insisted he attend in Denver.
By the time Zach had reached the age of seventeen, it was as if he’d become determined to live down to each of Charles’s expectations.
“You’ll never amount to anything,” Charles had said, for as long as Zach could remember.
Looking back now, Zach had to admit that it might have been true. He never would have amounted to anything, not if he’d stayed in this house.
But the last angry blowup had tipped the scales. It had started over some flippant remark he’d made and quickly escalated to a summary of all Zach’s sins. At the end of it, Charles had given him an ultimatum.
“Either you live by my rules or you’ll get out,” he’d shouted.
Zach hadn’t hesitated. Seconds later, he was out the door and in the Porsche, burning rubber as he roared down the driveway and onto the narrow road that led off the estate, driving hell-bent-for-leather into Denver, never stopping until he pulled up at the Army recruitment office.
A smile twisted across his mouth as he recalled the way the scowling recruiting sergeant had looked him up and down, sucked in his cheeks and asked how old he was.
“Eighteen,” Zach said, without blinking.
“Eighteen, huh?” The sergeant smiled. “Tell you what, kid. You bring me your birth certificate and we’ll talk about enlistment.”
The Marine recruiter down the street wasn’t as picky, especially because Zach, wiser if still not older, had paused just long enough to get his hands on a doctored driver’s license before he put in an appearance.
The Marine had looked at Zach, then at the license.
“You got a birth certificate to back this up, son?” he’d drawled.
“Yes, sir,” Zach had answered. It wasn’t a lie, not when you considered that his order for the certificate was already in the works.
“And you’ll produce it tomorrow?”
“Yes, sir,” Zach had said again, his posture erect and his green eyes firmly fixed on the wall just beyond the Marine’s head.
The recruiter had shrugged and shoved a stack of papers across his desk.
“Read ’em, sign ’em, and we’re in business.” As Zach had reached for the papers, the man’s callused hand slapped down hard on his wrist. “Just be sure you know what you’re doing, son.”
Zach had pulled his hand loose and looked up, his eyes suddenly the color of a storm-tossed ocean.
“I’m not anybody’s son,” he’d said coldly, “and I know exactly what I’m doing.”
But, Zach thought now, he hadn’t known a damn. He smiled ruefully as he began dressing. Boot camp and Parris Island had seemed a worse hell than the one he’d escaped—except that at the end of it, the Corps had welcomed him to its bosom in a way his father never had.
For the first time in his young life, Zach had found a home.
By the time he left the Marines four years later, he had a sense of discipline, a yearning for success and a twenty-thousand-dollar stake. On two continents and in half a dozen Corps barracks, his take-no-prisoners attitude, coupled with his head for numbers, had turned him into a steady winner at high-stakes poker.
After that, it was easy. The money had seen him through a couple of years of college, where his finance courses had taught him two things.
The first was that he knew more by instinct about stocks and bonds and market shares than his professors.
The second was that playing poker wasn’t all that different from playing the markets, it was just that the markets paid off bigger.
At twenty-three, Zach had left school
. He’d dabbled in arbitrage for a year, in high-risk corporate takeovers for another. At twenty-five, with a couple of million dollars under his belt, he’d decided to settle down. He’d bought himself a seat on the Exchange.
Now, at thirty, he was head of his own firm, one of the most successful young stockbrokers in America.
And one of the most bored.
Zach frowned and paused with his hand on the hanger that held one of the three almost identical dark blue suits he’d had Howell express here from Boston. It was the truth. He was bored out of his mind. It was terrible to admit, but if there’d been one benefit to this last week, it was that it had, at least, ripped him away from the unvarying routine of his days.
He shook his head. What was the matter with him? He’d come here straight from the Himalayas, where he’d been anything but bored, skiing a mountain that pierced the clouds and making it—well, almost making it—with…with whatever her name had been.
What he needed was to get back to work. He had to get back to work. There were fat-cat clients to wine and dine, a dozen dull meetings to chair…
“Hell,” he said, under his breath, and he reached quickly past the three suits, hanging shoulder to shoulder like the three Marx Brothers, pulled out the Harris tweed jacket he’d taken with him to the Himalayas and strode from the bedroom.
* * *
The house was quiet, just as it had always been. Even when he and Cade and Grant were kids, they’d tried not to make any noise here, automatically saving their rough-and-tumble for the stables or the endless lawns and pastures. There was something about the Landon mansion, Zach thought as he made his way down the wide staircase, that didn’t inspire the sound of childish voices lifted in glee.
It didn’t inspire the sound of voices at all, he thought, his mouth tightening. The dozens of guests who’d come back here after the funeral had stood around whispering to each other, and there’d been no doubt in Zach’s mind that it was the house they were deferring to and not the occasion.
What an incredible circus the funeral had been! Judges, politicos, bankers, CEOs and board presidents from damned near all the Fortune 500 companies in the West had shown up, all of them looking solemn—and all of them trying to figure out which Landon son was the one who was going to take Charles’s place.
A smile tugged at Zach’s lips as he followed the wonderful aroma of Stella’s coffee toward the dining room. What would all those bigwigs say when they learned that they wouldn’t have the chance to genuflect to any of the Landons? Yesterday, after the reading of their father’s will, the brothers had taken all of two minutes to agree that not a one of them wanted any part of Landon Enterprises.
Zach would check out Landon’s corporate worth and put a price on its head. Grant would handle the legal end. Cade would decide which lost and forgotten, poverty-stricken dots on the map were most in need of hospitals and schools, courtesy of the sale.
And that would be the end of it. Charles Landon’s gift to his sons would go the way of the dodo bird, a fate it surely deserved. Zach and his brothers would be free; only Kyra would keep any ties to the old man, but that was as it should be.
His face softened as he thought of his sister. She was a sweetheart, the light of all their lives. He could hear her voice now, soft and musical, drifting from the dining room.
“…still can’t believe Father left the place to me,” she was saying.
Zach smiled as he stepped into the room.