Free Rough (RRR #2) by Kimball Lee Page A

rugs, zebra, bear, and lion skins layered on the mesquite floors. Fine western paintings and ancestral portraits line the walls, they’re hung from the floor all the way up to the soaring ceiling, collected and added to by each successive Campbell wife. The furnishings are all polished and gleaming, a mix of styles, every one of them museum-quality antiques.
    “That was my mother, Meredith Campbell McCauley,” Campbell says as I stop to admire one of many life-size portraits of the imperious-looking Campbell women. The painting in front of me is of a lovely but sad-looking woman poised with her fingers on the keys of a grand piano. “She was an extraordinary woman and a mother to all of us, Holt included, and Emma-Lee was like a daughter to her…. Mother was born in this house, the others were courageous women who left their civilized homes to brave this harsh country beside the men they loved. This one is the grand-dame of our ranching empire, Tallulah Walker, wife of Captain Jon Campbell. She came to Texas from Scotland at the age of seventeen to marry my great, great grandfather, he honored her by establishing the town and naming it after her. This beauty was a socialite from Houston, Lucinda Wylder, she married Tallulah’s son, Jon-Walker, in the largest, three-month-long wedding celebration in Texas history. And this was my mother’s mother, Mary Kate Hennessey, she was from Scotland, too. Graduated from the University of Edinburgh with degrees in music theory and art history, she passed her love of art and music to her only child. My mother played the piano like an angel, she tried to teach us boys but we weren’t having it, but Emma-Lee couldn’t get enough, she learned to play at my mother’s side.”
    “Emma-Lee?” I ask cautiously, his voice is shadowed with tenderness and regret which is at odds with his impenetrable façade.
    “Emma-Lee was like a kid sister to all of us, before Campbell fucked that up,” Holt says, and Campbell’s eyes flash dark and dangerous. “But who didn’t love Miss Meredith? I doubt I would have survived childhood without her iron will, no one else ever stood up to Tom Corrigan. Are we gonna go over the entire history of your inbred family tree, Campbell? Don’t know about you but I’m starving and the smell of hot rolls and chicken and dumplings is calling to me.”
    I look Campbell over and wonder how he’s going to respond, he’s pure alpha-dog, through and through. I can see that Gigi would want a taste of him, but he’s too much, too in-your-face-in-charge-God-complex to appeal to me. He’s all about power and money, and even though he’s essentially Holt’s boss until the redo on the fishing lodge is done, Holt doesn’t give a damn, he tells it like it is, holds his own and never backs down. That’s the difference between them—underneath all his gallant, rich rancher persona, Campbell is mean-alpha and Holt is strong-yet-gentle-alpha, big, big difference.
    “Let’s eat, then, Maudie will be chasing us to the table with a flyswatter if we don’t get in there soon,” Campbell says, collecting himself, and we settle in yet another dining room, this one is slightly smaller than a football field, thankfully. Campbell refers to it as the ‘little room where the family eats’.
    The meal is so good and I eat so much that Maudie comes out of the kitchen and rattles off a rapid-fire barrage of Spanish words. Holt and Campbell can’t stop laughing, they tell me she’s full of praises for the ‘beautiful, too skinny, city girl with an appetite like a field-hand’.
    I ask Campbell if he knows where Gigi is, are she and Jon-Wylder together, is she coming back to the ranch?
    He pushes his plate away and pours a glassful of scotch offering the bottle to me and then Holt, but we both decline.
    “Pridey is running in the Preakness… I might join them… Jon-Wylder’s a spoiled dick, don’t know how long this thing with Gigi will last,” he mumbles and drains