It was like someone had shot him in the stomach with a cannonball. He couldn’t even breathe; it felt like all of the air had been shocked right out of his body. His eyes widened, and he stared at his brother with utter disbelief.
“You’re lying,” Derrick said. It had to be the case. Logan might be an asshole these days, but the one thing that Derrick would bet on was that Logan wouldn’t do anything like that to his best friend.
“You’d like to think that, wouldn’t you?” Wyatt asked, and Derrick had to force his eyes to close, make himself blink. Wyatt was just too smugly pleased with himself. He was lying, of course, but what if he wasn’t lying? Logan had been acting so strange lately.
“Come on, Jess,” Derrick said suddenly. He had to get out of there. Away from Derrick, away from Logan, away from the whole question.
Jessica linked her arm into Derrick’s, glaring at Wyatt as she and Derrick left together. Wyatt didn’t try to stop them, which was probably a good thing. Derrick didn’t consider himself a violent man and certainly not toward his own family, but this was a special situation, and he might be willing to make an exception.
“I don’t like him,” Jessica stated, and Derrick gave a wry little laugh. They had been heading back to the house for dinner, but Derrick, at least, didn’t feel that hungry all of a sudden, so they turned and walked away from the house, past the barn. Maybe a long walk would put things into perspective.
“No one likes him, as far as I can tell. But he’s still my brother,” Derrick said, reminding himself at least as much as he was telling her. The way Wyatt was acting, it was sort of hard to believe that he was related to Derrick and his other brothers at all. He was a completely different person, even more than studious Derrick himself was.
“Do you think that Logan really is going to try to get Malcolm to sell?” Jessica asked, and Derrick just shrugged. Under normal circumstances, he would have said that it was absolutely impossible, but he just didn’t know anymore. The man that he had known since they had both been boys was a stranger to him. And people said sex was supposed to draw people together.
“I wish Malcolm would come home,” Jessica said when it became clear that Derrick wasn’t going to say anything. Derrick still didn’t say anything, but his fervent nod, he figured, said everything that needed to be said.
He was in way over his head. Malcolm would be back any day, though, and he knew that Malcolm, with all of his experience, would somehow know what to do.
