Big Sky Mountain. Linda Lael Miller

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      “There’s nothing you can do,” Slade confirmed.

      With that, they hustled him quickly out of the main chapel and into the small side room where the choir robes, hymnals and Communion gear were stored.

      Hutch wondered if a lynch mob was forming back there in the sanctuary.

      “You picked a fine time to change your mind about getting married,” Boone remarked, but his tone was light and his eyes twinkled with something that looked a lot like relief.

      Hutch unfastened his fancy tie and shoved it into one coat pocket. Then he opened his collar halfway to his breastbone and sucked in a breath. “I tried to tell her,” he muttered. He knew it sounded lame, but the truth was the truth.

      Although he and Slade shared a father, they had been at bloody-knuckled odds most of their lives. They’d made some progress toward getting along since the old man’s death and the upheaval that followed, but neither of them related to the other as a buddy, let alone a brother.

      “Come on out to our place,” Slade said, surprising him. “You’d best lay low for a few hours. Give Brylee—and Walker—a little time to cool off.”

      Hutch stiffened slightly, though he found the invitation oddly welcome. Home, being Whisper Creek Ranch, was a lonely outpost these days—which was probably why he’d talked himself into proposing to Brylee in the first place.

      “I have to talk to Brylee,” he repeated.

      “There’ll be time for that later on,” Slade reasoned.

      “Slade’s right,” Boone agreed. Boone, being violently allergic to marriage himself, probably thought Hutch had just dodged a figurative bullet.

      Or maybe he was remembering that Brylee was a crack shot with a pistol, a rifle, or a Civil War cannon.

      Given what had just happened, she was probably leaning toward the cannon right about now.

      Hutch sighed. “All right,” he said to Slade. “I’ll kick back at your place for a while—but I’ve got to stop off at home first, so I can change out of this monkey suit.”

      “Fine,” Slade agreed. “I’ll round up the women and meet you at the Windfall in an hour or two.”

      By “the women,” Slade meant his lovely wife, Joslyn, his teenage stepdaughter, Shea, and Opal Dennison, the force-of-nature who kept house for the Barlow outfit. Slade’s mother, Callie, had had the good grace to skip the ceremony—old scandals die hard in a town the size of Parable and recollections of her long-ago affair with Carmody Senior, from which Slade had famously resulted, were as sharp as ever.

      Today’s escapade would put all that in the shade, of course. Tongues were wagging and jaws were flapping for sure—by now, various up-to-the-minute accounts were probably popping up on all the major social media sites. Before Slade and Boone had dragged Hutch out of the sanctuary, he’d seen several people whip out their cell phones and start texting. A few pictures had been taken, too, with those same ubiquitous devices.

      The thought of all that amateur reporting made Hutch close his eyes for a moment. “Shit,” he murmured.

      “Knee-deep and rising,” Slade confirmed, sounding resigned.

      * * *

      KENDRA SAT AT the antique table in her best friend Joslyn’s kitchen, with Callie Barlow in the chair directly across from hers. The ranch house was unusually quiet, with its usual occupants gone to town.

      A glance over one shoulder assured Kendra that her recently adopted four-year-old daughter, Madison, was still napping on a padded window seat, her stuffed purple kangaroo, Rupert, clenched in her arms. The little girl’s gleaming hair, the color of a newly minted penny, lay in tousled curls around her cherubic face and Kendra felt the usual pang of hopeless devotion just looking at her.

      This long-sought, hard-won, much-wanted child.

      This miracle.

      Not that every woman would have seen the situation from the same perspective as Kendra did—Madison was, after all, living proof that Jeffrey had been unfaithful, a constant reminder that it was dangerous to love, treacherous to trust, foolish to believe in another person too much. But none of that had mattered to Kendra in the end—she’d essentially been abandoned herself as a small child, left to grow up with a disinterested grandmother, and that gave her a special affinity for Madison. Besides, Jeffrey, having returned to his native England after summarily ending their marriage, had been dying.

      Some men might have turned to family for help in such a situation—Jeffrey Chamberlain came from a very wealthy and influential one—but in this case, that wasn’t possible. Jeffrey’s aging parents were landed gentry with a string of titles, several sprawling estates and a fortune that dated back to the heyday of the East India Company, and were no more inclined toward child-rearing than they had been when their own two sons were small. They’d left Jeffrey and his brother in the care of nannies and housekeepers from infancy, and shipped them off to boarding school as soon as they turned six.

      Understandably, Jeffrey hadn’t wanted that kind of cold and isolated childhood for his daughter.

      So he’d sent word to Kendra that he had to see her, in person. He had something important to tell her.

      She’d made that first of several trips to the U.K., keeping protracted vigils at her ex-husband’s hospital bedside while he drifted in and out of consciousness.

      Eventually, he’d managed to get his message across: he told her about Madison, living somewhere in the U.S., and begged Kendra to find his daughter, adopt her and bring her up in love and safety. She was, he told her, the only person on earth he could or would trust with the child.

      Kendra wanted nothing so much as a child and, during their brief marriage, Jeffrey had denied her repeated requests to start a family. It was a bitter pill to swallow, learning that he’d refused her a baby and then fathered one with someone else, someone he’d met on a business trip.

      She’d done what Jeffrey asked, not so much for his sake—though she’d loved him once, or believed she did—as for Madison’s. And her own.

      The search hadn’t been an easy one, even with the funds Jeffrey had set aside for the purpose, involving a great deal of web-surfing, phone calls and emails, travel and so many highs and lows that she nearly gave up several times.

      Then it happened. She found Madison.

      Kendra hadn’t known what she’d feel upon actually meeting her former husband’s child, but any doubts she might have had had been dispelled the moment—the moment—she’d met this cautious, winsome little girl.

      The first encounter had taken place in a social worker’s dingy office, in a dusty desert town in California, and for Kendra, it was love at first sight.

      The forever kind of love.

      Months of legal hassles had followed, but now, at long last, Kendra and Madison were officially mother and daughter, in the eyes of God and government, and Kendra knew she couldn’t have loved her baby girl any more if she’d carried her in her own body for nine months.

      Callie brought Kendra back to the present moment СКАЧАТЬ