Broken (Brody Brothers Book 4)
BROKEN
(Brody Brothers, Book #4)
Stacy Gail
BROKEN
***TRIGGER WARNING*** This book contains a heroine who suffered sexual abuse as a child, and a hero who suffered physical and emotional abuse. If you have issues with these elements, this book is not for you.
“The Hatfields and McCoys have nothing on the Brodys and Smileys.”
The feud was all Winnie Smiley heard about while growing up next door to those arrogant cowboys, the Brodys. Smiley homestead might be a dilapidated eyesore that she’d run away from as a teen, but it did possess something the Brodys had schemed in vain to get—Smiley Lake. Now, with the region crippled with drought and her monstrous father burning in hell, Winnie stands to inherit the lake. She knows that’s why Des is suddenly everywhere she turns, but that doesn’t matter. She’d never had a chance to grab at happiness before, so even if it’s just the lake Des wants, she’s going to make damn sure she’s part of the deal.
“The Smileys live to screw with the Brodys.”
After nearly dying on the horns of a murder-happy bull, former rodeo star Des Brody now has to figure out his place on Green Rock Ranch. All his brothers are settled with their new families, and they know exactly what to do to make Green Rock run. But Des? All he can do is try to make sure the empire they’ve built doesn’t shrivel up and blow away in the drought. Landing Smiley Lake is key to stabilizing Green Rock’s water supply, but there’s an obstacle—Winsome Smiley. Only she’s not really an obstacle. More like a meal begging to be eaten.
And he’s hungry as hell.
“I’m a Brody, and a Brody always gets what he wants.”
When Winnie doesn’t inherit Smiley Lake, she assumes she and Des are finished before they even began. To her shock, Des has other ideas and shows her an undiscovered world of pleasure. But just as she starts to believe Des wants her solely for herself, she discovers he hasn’t been totally upfront with her. Now she had a choice to make—trust her heart, or believe her ancestors had it right in saying that a Brody can never be trusted.
***This contemporary romance is the fourth and final book in the Brody Brothers series. While it may be read as a standalone, I suggest reading the first three books, BRANDED, BRACED and BRUISED for a more enjoyable read. This book contains multiple sex scenes and lots of swearing. It also contains a bossy Alpha who may compel you to throw your Kindle at the nearest wall (please don’t). No cheating, no love triangles, no cliffhangers. HEA guaranteed. Due to adult language and sexual content, this book is not intended for people under the age of eighteen***
103,000 words
Discover Other Titles by Stacy Gail:
Bitterthorn, Texas Series (Carina Press):
Ugly Ducklings Finish First
Starting from Scratch (novella)
One Hot Second
Where There’s A Will
Earth Angels Series (Carina Press):
Nobody’s Angel
Savage Angel
Wounded Angel
Dangerous Angel
House Of Payne Series:
House of Payne: Payne
House of Payne: Scout
House of Payne: Twist
House of Payne: Rude
House of Payne: Steele
House of Payne: Max
House of Payne: Tag
House of Payne: Ice
House of Payne: Styx
House of Payne: Loki
Scorpio Duology:
Year of the Scorpio: Part One
Year of the Scorpio: Part Two
Brody Brothers Series (Carina Press):
Branded
Braced
Bruised (Indie published)
Broken (Indie published)
Novellas:
Crime Wave in a Corset (Part of the steampunk holiday anthology, A Clockwork Christmas)
How the Glitch Saved Christmas (Part of the Sci-Fi holiday anthology, A Galactic Holiday
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Copyright
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher is unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author. Characters and names of real persons who appear in the book are used fictitiously.
Copyright ©2020 Stacy Gail
Cover image ©2020 by Arthur-studio10. Shutterstock photo ID: 187025555
Acknowledgments
I dedicate this series to my father, Ben, who died during the writing of the second book, BRACED. He was such a sucker for a good cowboy yarn. Without his encouragement, I probably never would have answered a Carina Press submission call for contemporary cowboy romances.
It’s done, Dad. Love you forever.
CONTENTS
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Epilogue
Note from the Author
About the Author
Connect with Stacy Gail
Chapter One
“While not many of Bitterthorn’s citizens knew Able Smiley, God knew and loved him. Able’s family—his stepmother, Heavenly and his daughter, Winsome—should take comfort in that. And while I’m not well-versed in the Quaker faith that Able once belonged to, I do know he was one of God’s children, put upon this earth for a purpose. Now that his purpose has come to an end, Able has been called home to receive his just rewards.”
“One can only hope,” Winnie Smiley muttered under her breath. A gust of furnace-hot wind rustled the Live Oak leaves above them to drown out her words. The weather had been god-awful for months now in South Texas—desert-dry and as blistering hot as the devil’s own breath. She had a vague memory of rain at some point around Christmas. Now it was August, and with each day that passed without so much as a cloud in the sky, their region broke new drought records. With the exception of Smiley Lake, a spring-fed oasis on her family’s property bordering the Brodys’ legendary stronghold, Green Rock Ranch, the world had become a yellowed, sunbaked hellscape.
Seated beside her in her seldom-used wheelchair, Granny touched her arm. “What was that, Winnie? Do you want to say a few words?”
“No.” She did, but the words raging in her head should never be aired at a funeral. Then she focused in on her grandmother, with her fragile, birdlike frame dwarfed by the chair in which she sat, and her hardened heart softened. “Would you like to say something, Granny?”
“Good heavens, no
, child.” She looked to the man standing behind her chair, Rufus Wright, the homestead’s former foreman who was nearly as ancient as Granny, and the man who had quietly gone about saving both of them five years ago, when Winnie had been seventeen. “Rufus?”
“Hell, no. Let’s just get the bastard planted already.”
Winnie looked to Granny, who nodded sadly. There were no other opinions to be had; no one else had attended her father’s funeral. Not a surprise. From start to finish, Able Smiley had been a cold-hearted hermit who’d long ago been disavowed from the Quaker community. His life had been littered with one misery after the next, a misery he’d shared with all who’d known him.
That was who Able Smiley had been.
Thank God he was dead.
She’d tried explaining this sentiment to the nondenominational minister after she’d approached him to conduct her father’s funeral service, but at first he hadn’t seemed to believe her. He’d even asked her to think back to the first memories she’d had in life that had included her father, assuring her that not only was there some good there, but that he’d use those good memories she had in his eulogy.
When she’d shared how her father had stomped a puppy to death right in front of her to teach her not to bring home strays, the poor man had promised to come up with something appropriate on his own.
She wasn’t sure why he bothered. Considering that only she, Granny and Rufus attended Able Smiley’s funeral, that said more about who her father had been far more than anyone ever could.
As the minister wrapped up the ceremony, a flash of movement on the edge of Bitterthorn’s tree-studded cemetery caught Winnie’s eye. Automatically she glanced over before her eyes narrowed at the two men making their way through the rows of headstones.
Unbelievable.
“Granny.” As soon as the minister was done offering his final condolences, Winnie bent to look into her grandmother’s watery blue eyes. “We’re about to have company.”
“What?” The sorrow in Heavenly’s expression vanished under a cold mask as she looked past Winnie to the approaching men. “Oh, my stars. It’s those horrible Brody boys.”
They weren’t boys anymore, Winnie thought, and had to bite her lip to keep from saying it out loud. Des and Fin Brody had been young teens when she’d gotten her first up-close look at them. She’d been a gawky eleven-year-old who’d been raised on stories of how the Brody clan had tried and failed throughout history to steal Smiley Lake out from under her family.
So of course she’d been fascinated by them, this latest generation of Brodys.
That fascination soon ended when Fin and Des Brody constantly made a point to sit close to her on the rural-route school bus they’d had to share, as the brothers had been too young to drive. Being next-door neighbors, she and the Brody brothers had lived at the end of the bus route, so that meant they’d had a ton of empty bus seats to choose from.
Yet the brothers always sat wherever she was.
She’d sit in the front. So would they.
She’d try the back. Same thing.
No matter what seat she chose, Des, followed by Fin, would sit next to her.
Then they’d proceed to extravagantly ignore her existence.
Not once did they speak to her.
Not even a simple hello.
At first she’d been grateful for that. But as time went on and they continued to sit right next to her and then pretend she wasn’t there, she’d realized what they were doing. With an arrogance and cruelty that appalled her to this day, the Brody brothers had been telling her without words how utterly insignificant she was. As far as Des and Fin Brody were concerned, she was nothing.
Even now, the humiliation burned.
To make it worse, she came to the point where she’d ached for them to talk to her. They’d been in high school at that time, cool and sleek like pampered show horses, and hands-down the cutest boys she’d ever laid eyes on. Not that she’d allowed herself to look at them. Not only was she a Smiley, a family that had been feuding with the Brodys since the Wild West era, but the clothes she’d been forced to wear back in the day had been of her own making—little more than rags stitched together. Shame, and a painful stinging in her pride, had always kept her eyes averted from them.
But she knew them. Especially…
Des.
She took in a slow breath and hoped for calm. “What do you want me to do with them?”
Granny made a hissing noise. “What can you do with rattlesnakes that have no shame?”
“They’re Brodys, Granny. Shame isn’t a part of their lexicon.”
“Want me to deal with them, Miss Heavenly?” Rufus’s words emanated from beneath a massively bushy white mustache that Sam Elliott would have been proud of. “’Cause I will. You know I will. If only there weren’t two of them. And damned if I didn’t have this trick back—”
“One of them got hurt in a rodeo up north,” Granny muttered, still giving the slowly approaching men the evil eye. “They say the youngest one got his liver taken by a bull, or some such nonsense.”
“Des Brody had a liver transplant due to some kind of goring injury,” Winnie said, repeating the gossip she’d overheard at Abel’s Market. “It was such a bad injury it ended his rodeo career, but that was like two years ago. He’s made a full recovery.”
“My point exactly,” Rufus nodded, his hands going to his back. “That boy’s fully recovered. Mind you, I’m sure I could take them both on, but they look to be in fine fighting shape, so—”
“Rufus, don’t worry about it, really. Just do me a favor and get Granny bundled into the truck and out of this god-awful heat, all right?” Winnie straightened, hoping she looked more imposing than her painfully average height, in a black sleeveless dress she’d designed herself. At least nowadays the beautiful clothes she created weren’t made out of rags. “I’ll take care of this.”
“Winsome.” Her grandmother caught her hand, her gnarled, wrinkled fingers holding on with surprising strength. “Don’t you get too near those Brody boys, you hear me? Remember, they’re rattlers, even if they’re injured. And rattlers strike when you least expect it.”
“You mean like during a funeral?” Unaccountably furious at the brothers’ obvious lack of manners and clear sense of entitlement, Winnie’s face hardened along with her resolve. “They’re the ones who need to worry, Granny. Not me.”
“That’s my girl.” Granny patted her hand before letting her go, and Rufus turned her wheelchair around while Winnie aimed herself at the incoming hostiles.
At least it wasn’t all four of them, she tried to console herself as she headed slowly toward them. Unfortunately, the two who’d decided to show such poor taste by crashing a funeral were her long-ago, fellow school bus passengers, Fin and Des.
Because of course, she thought, mentally flipping the finger at whatever fate had sent the Brodys her way. Who else would come to kick her while she was down and an emotional mess over the passing of her demon of a father?
To make matters worse, she could see the cute boys who’d once tormented her on a daily basis had grown into breathtaking men.
Naturally.
Brodys never did anything by half-measures. Not only were they richer than God with their swanky Green Rock Ranch and their famous Black Angus stud business, they also had college degrees and doctorates up the wazoo. The two approaching her now looked like they had fallen from the same Ruggedly Handsome Tree and hit every branch on the way down. Both had long, rangy legs, slim hips, and lean middles that sharply veed up into powerful chests and Atlas-style broad shoulders.
Oh, yes.
Definitely ruggedly handsome.
With a splash of holy-freaking-gorgeous thrown in for good measure.
But who cared about all that when they were nothing but venomous vipers put upon this world to bite anything that got in their way?
They were a beautiful trap, nothing more.
She’d do well to remember that.
Her gaze slid over them as they moved toward one another like gunslingers readying for the final showdown. When Bitterthorn’s townies talked about the billionaire Brody brothers—which was all the time in the tiny town outside of San Antonio, Texas—everyone remarked how physically alike the four Brody brothers were. That wasn’t how Winnie saw it. Sure, they were all magnificent specimens of masculinity; that was a given. And all four brothers shared that Brody black hair that waved to varying degrees, as well as a commanding presence that was as much a part of them as their vivid green eyes.
But Des Brody was different.
Maybe it was because Des was the out-of-wedlock result of a torrid affair his father once had. Winnie didn’t know all the circumstances of how Des came to live under the Brody roof; all anyone knew was that Des had been unceremoniously dumped on the Brody doorstep when he was little more than a toddler, which soured the marriage between Des’s father and his wife.
But there was no mistake—Des was clearly a Brody both in looks and arrogant, swaggering attitude. Even so, there was something about him that set him apart from his brothers. His eyes were a startlingly pale peridot, while his brothers’ eyes were all much darker shades of emerald. The dramatic sweep of his cheekbones hollowed out his cheeks and emphasized his aggressively angular jawline. All those sculpted angles created an almost unearthly masculine beauty that, at least in her opinion, his brothers—or half-brothers—simply didn’t have.
In her eyes, Desmond Brody was the hottest of them all.
And the most charismatic.