Cowboy Ever After: Big Sky Mountain. Maisey Yates

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СКАЧАТЬ Mr. Carmody was in a big hurry, and he asked me to tell you goodbye and say he was sorry he had to rush off.”

      Madison, being an intelligent child, looked skeptical and unappeased, but she accepted the fib—to a degree. “I heard mad voices,” she challenged Kendra after a few beats.

      They’d been so careful not to yell, she and Hutch, though she’d wanted to and it was probably safe to assume Hutch had, as well. Madison had picked up on the energy of the exchange, rather than the actual words.

      “It’s time for your bath and a story,” Kendra said moderately, striving for normalcy. How could Hutch claim, for one moment, that she’d been the one to break them up? He’d virtually handed her over to Jeffrey and walked away whistling.

      “You should be nice to people,” Madison lectured. “That’s what you always tell me.”

      Kendra placed splayed fingers gently between her daughter’s shoulders and started her in the direction of the main bathroom. “Let’s have this discussion another time, please,” she said.

      Daisy’s toenails clicked on the hardwood floor behind them as she and Madison headed down the hall, Madison resisting ever so slightly as they went.

      “But you forgot supper,” the child reasoned.

      Sure enough, Kendra realized, the evening meal had completely slipped her mind. “You’re right,” she replied, at once chagrined and glad to find common ground, even if it was a little shaky. “Tell you what—we’ll feed Daisy and then, after you’ve had your bath, I’ll whip up a couple of grilled cheese sandwiches for us. How would that be?”

      Madison looked up at her and something in her small, obstinate face relented. “I like grilled cheese sandwiches,” she admitted.

      Kendra smiled. “Me, too,” she said.

      With Madison stripping and Daisy supervising the whole enterprise, Kendra managed to prepare the little girl’s bath—a few inches of warm water with bubbles.

      Madison climbed in and Daisy rested her muzzle on the edge of the bathtub, watching her small mistress, brown eyes shining with love.

      “Can Daisy get into the tub, too?” Madison asked, reaching for her pink sponge and the duck-shaped bar of soap she favored.

      “Not this time, sweetie,” Kendra said, since that seemed better than a flat no.

      Madison huffed out a sigh and began her ablutions, perfectly capable of bathing herself.

      A few minutes later, she announced, “I’m clean now, Mommy!”

      Smiling, despite the quiet but persistent ache in the region of her heart Hutch still claimed, Kendra gave her a kiss and reached for a towel.

      * * *

      HUTCH HAD ALWAYS been good at letting stuff roll off his back—he’d had to be—but that tangle with Kendra back at her place made him want to fight.

      With anybody, about anything.

      When the lights of Boone’s cop car flashed behind him, just before the turn-in at Whisper Creek, it almost pleased him to pull over.

      “What?” he snapped, rolling down the window on the passenger side of the truck so Boone could peer in at him.

      “You headed for a fire?” Boone countered. “I clocked you at fifty in a thirty-five back there.”

      Hutch swore under his breath, tightened his grip on the steering wheel. “Sorry,” he lied, glaring through the windshield at the dirt road ahead. It did some twisting and turning, that old road, before it joined the highway and rolled right on into Idaho and Washington.

      At the moment, he sure felt like following it till it ended at the Pacific Ocean.

      “Look at me, Hutch,” the sheriff said, and he sounded dead serious.

      Hutch turned his head, met Boone’s gaze. “Write the ticket and be done with it,” he growled.

      “Well, who spit in your oatmeal this morning?” Boone asked, folding his arms against the base of the window and studying Hutch intently.

      “I’ve got a lot on my mind right now,” Hutch snapped. “All right?”

      Boone sighed, shoved a hand through his dark hair. “I know that,” he said, “but I can’t let you go speeding around my county, now can I? Pretty soon, folks will be saying I turn a blind eye when my friends break the law and I can’t have that, Hutch. You know I can’t.”

      “So write the ticket,” Hutch reiterated. He just wanted to be gone, to be moving, to be riding hard across darkening ground on a horse or climbing Big Sky Mountain on foot—anything but sitting still.

      “Have it your way,” Boone said. He took his ticket book from his belt, scrawled on a piece of paper, ripped it free, and held it out to Hutch, who snatched it from his hand and barely managed to keep from chucking it out his own window out of sheer cussedness.

      “Thanks,” Hutch told him, glaring.

      Boone laughed. “I’d say ‘you’re welcome,’ but that would add up to one too many smart-asses per square yard.” He wouldn’t unpin Hutch from that penetrating gaze of his. “I’m off duty and I was headed for home until you went shooting by me like a bat out of hell,” he said companionably. “Why don’t you follow me back over to my place? We’ll have a couple of beers and feel sorry for ourselves for a while.”

      Hutch had to chuckle at that, though it was against his will and he resented it. “All right,” he agreed at last, and grudgingly. “Long as you promise not to run me in for drunk driving after plying me with liquor.”

      “You have my word,” Boone said with a grin. “See you over there.”

      With that, he backed away from the window and strolled back to his cruiser where the lights were still swirling, blue and white, causing the few passersby to slow down to gawk.

      Boone’s land, situated on the far side of Parable from where they started, was prime, fronting the river and sloping gently up toward the foothills, but it had the look of a place bogged down in hard times. The double-wide trailer was ugly as sin, and there were a couple of junked-out cars parked in the tall grass that surrounded it.

      The double-wide had rust around its skirting, the makeshift porch dipped in the middle, and there was an honest-to-God toilet out front, with a bunch of dead flowers poking out of the bowl. Boone and his wife, Corrie—she’d never have stood for a john in the yard—had planned to live in the trailer only until they’d built their modest dream house, but when Corrie died of breast cancer a few years back, everything else in Boone’s life seemed to stall.

      If he’d had a dog, folks said, he’d have given it away. He had sent his two young sons, Griffin and Fletcher, off to live with his sister and her family in Missoula, where he probably figured they were better off.

      Running for sheriff, after Slade announced that he wouldn’t be seeking reelection, had been the first real sign of life in Boone since Corrie was laid to rest and for a while optimistic locals had hoped he’d get СКАЧАТЬ