Cowboy Ever After: Big Sky Mountain. Maisey Yates

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       CHAPTER EIGHT

      AFTER TAKING A quick shower and putting on clean clothes, Hutch traveled a round-about road to get to the Boot Scoot Tavern that night—a place he had no real interest in going to—and the meandering trail led him right past Kendra Shepherd’s brightly lit rental house.

      In simpler times, he wouldn’t have needed a reason to knock on Kendra’s door at pretty much any hour of the day or night, but things had certainly changed between them, and not just because she had a daughter now. Not even because he’d almost married Brylee Parrish and Kendra had married Sir Jeffrey, as Hutch privately thought of the man—when he was in a charitable frame of mind, that is.

      No, there was more to it.

      The whole time he’d known Kendra, she’d coveted that monster of a house over on Rodeo Road. As a kid, she’d haunted it like a small and wistful ghost, Joslyn’s pale shadow. As a grown-up, she’d found herself a prince with the means to buy the place for her and after the divorce she’d held on to it, rattling around in it all alone for several years, like a lone plug of buckshot in the bottom of a fifty-gallon drum.

      Now all of a sudden, she’d moved into modest digs, rented from Maggie Landers, opened a storefront office to sell real estate out of and switched rides from a swanky sports car to a Volvo, for God’s sake.

      What did all of that mean—beyond, of course, the fact that she was now a mother? Did it, in fact, mean anything? Women were strange and magnificent creatures, in Hutch’s opinion, their workings mysterious, often even to themselves, never mind some hapless man like him.

      Kendra had, except for staying put in Parable, turned her entire life upside down, changed practically everything.

      Was that a good omen—or a bad one?

      Hutch wanted an answer to that question far more than he wanted a draft beer, but since he could get the latter for a couple of bucks and the former might just cost him a chunk of his pride, he kept going until he pulled into the gravel-and-dirt parking lot next to the Boot Scoot.

      The front doors of that never-painted Quonset hut, a relic of World War II, stood open to the evening breeze, and light and sound spilled and tumbled out into the thickening twilight—he heard laughter, twangy music rocking from the jukebox, the distinctive click of pool balls at the break.

      With a smile and a shake of his head, Hutch shut off the headlights, cranked off the truck’s trusty engine, pushed open the door and got out. The soles of his boots crunched in the gravel when he landed, and he shut the truck door behind him, then headed for the entrance.

      Once the place would have been blue with shifting billows of cigarette smoke, hazy and acrid, but now it was illegal to light up in a public building, though the smell of burning tobacco—and occasionally something else—was still noticeable even out in the open air. He caught the down-at-the-heels Montana-tavern scent of the sawdust covering the floor as he entered, stale sweat overridden by colognes of both the male and female persuasions, and he felt that peculiar brand of personal loneliness that drove folks to the Boot Scoot when they had better things to be doing elsewhere.

      Hutch nodded to a few friends as he approached the bar and then ordered a beer.

      Two or three couples were dancing to the wails of the jukebox—he thought of Opal’s description of the tavern and smiled at its accuracy—but most of the action seemed to center around the two pool tables at the far end of the long room.

      Hutch’s beer was drawn from a spigot and brought to him; he paid for it, picked up the mug in one hand and made his way toward the pool tables. By the weekend, when the rodeo and other Independence Day celebrations would be in full swing, the crowds would be so thick in here, at least at night, that just getting from one side of the tavern to the other would be like swimming through chest-deep mud of the variety Montanans call “gumbo.”

      Finding a place to stand without bumping elbows with anybody, Hutch watched the proceedings. Deputy Treat McQuillan, off duty and out of uniform but still clearly marked as a cop by his old-fashioned buzz haircut, watched sourly, pool cue in hand, while another player basically ran the table, plunking ball after ball into the appropriate pocket.