Cowboy Ever After: Big Sky Mountain

“Sex?” The word came out high-pitched, like a squeak. “Who said anything about sex?”

“You did,” Joslyn replied with good-humored certainty. “Oh, not in so many words. But you’re feeling a little jealous, aren’t you? Because you have some scenario in your head of Hutch defending Brylee’s honor at the Boot Scoot Tavern?”

“I wouldn’t call it...jealousy,” Kendra finally replied, her tone tentative.

“Okay,” Joslyn agreed sunnily. “What would you call it?”

“You’re no help at all,” Kendra accused, further deflated, but smiling now. Talking to Joslyn always made her feel better, even when nothing was really resolved.

“Let’s do lunch in a couple of days,” Joslyn said, “after Mom goes back to Santa Fe and things return to normal around here. Maybe Tara can join us.”

Still feeling like an idiot, Kendra replied that she’d enjoy a girlfriend lunch, said goodbye and hung up.

She spent the morning noodling around on her computer, carefully avoiding the “Down With Hutch Carmody” webpage, along with the temptation to add a thing or two, and answered a grand total of two inquiries by phone.

By ten forty-five, she felt so restless that she set the business phone to forward any calls to her cell, locked up the office and drove out to Tara’s chicken ranch, intending to pick up Daisy and go home. Madison still had a couple of hours to go at preschool, which she was starting to enjoy, and Kendra didn’t want to disrupt the flow by taking her out early.

Tara was outside when Kendra pulled into her rutted dirt driveway, wearing red coveralls and wielding a shovel. Daisy and Lucy frolicked happily nearby, playing catch-tumble-roll with each other.

“Don’t tell me,” Tara chimed mischievously, approaching Kendra’s car on the driver’s side. “You’re here to help me clean out the chicken coop! What a true friend you are, Kendra Shepherd.”

Kendra laughed. “You wish,” she said. It was a relief to stop thinking about Hutch Carmody and sex for a while. They were two separate subjects, of course, but she hadn’t been able to untangle one from the other since her phone conversation with Joslyn.

“Then what are you doing here?” Tara asked, looking like half of “American Gothic,” except young and pretty instead of severe.

“Can’t I visit a friend?” Kendra bantered back, pushing open the door and stepping somewhat gingerly into the muck of the barnyard. She wished she’d swapped out her Manolos for a pair of gum boots before leaving town.

Not that she actually owned gum boots.

Tara laughed at Kendra’s mincing steps, pointed out a relatively clean pathway nearby and paused to lean her shovel against the wall of the chicken coop before following Kendra toward the old farmhouse she’d been refurbishing over the past year.

The woman was the very personification of incongruity, to Kendra’s mind, with her model’s face and figure and those ridiculous coveralls.

They settled in chairs on Tara’s porch, since the weather was so nice and the dogs seemed to be having such a fine time dashing around in the grass, two flashes of happy gold, busy being puppies.

Once seated, Tara nodded in the direction of Boone Taylor’s place, which neighbored hers. “He’s finally cleaning up over there,” she said in a tone that struck Kendra as oddly pensive. “I wonder why.”

CHAPTER NINE

WHEN HUTCH ARRIVED at Boone’s place that morning, he brought along plenty of tools, a truck with a hydraulic winch for heavy lifting and half a dozen ranch hands to help with the work. Opal followed in her tank of a station wagon, bucket-loads of potato salad and fried chicken and homemade biscuits stashed in the backseat.

Boone, standing bare-chested in his overgrown yard, plucked his T-shirt from the handle of a wheelbarrow where he’d left it earlier, now that he was in the presence of a lady.

Hutch grinned at the sight, and backed the truck up to a pile of old tires and got out.

Boone walked over to greet him, taking in the other trucks, the ranch hands and Opal’s behemoth vehicle with a nod of his head. “You always were something of a show off, Carmody,” he said.

“Go big or go home,” Hutch answered lightly. “That’s my motto.”

“Along with ‘make trouble wherever possible’ and ‘ride bulls at rodeos till you get your teeth knocked out’?” Boone gibed.

“Is there a law, Sheriff Andy Taylor, that says I can only have one motto?” Hutch retorted. The Maybury reference had been a running joke between them since the election results came in last November.

“Reckon not,” Boone conceded, looking around at the unholy mess that was his property and turning serious. “I appreciate your help, old buddy,” he said.

“Don’t mention it,” Hutch replied easily. “It’s what friends do, that’s all.”

Boone nodded, looked away for a moment, cleared his throat. “What if Griff and Fletch get here and want to turn right around and head back to Missoula?” he asked, keeping his voice down so the ranch hands and Opal wouldn’t overhear.

“One step at a time, Boone,” Hutch reminded him. “Seems like the first thing on our agenda ought to be making sure the little guys don’t get lost in all this tall grass.”

Boone’s chuckle was gruff. “I laid in plenty of beer,” he said.

“Well,” Hutch replied, heading around to the back of his pickup to haul out shovels and electric Weedwackers, “don’t bring it out while Opal’s around or we’ll get a rousing sermon on the evils of alcohol, instead of all that good grub she was up half the night making.”

Boone’s chuckle was replaced by a gruff burst of laughter. “If she’s brought any of her famous potato salad, she can preach all the sermons she wants,” he answered, and went to greet the woman as she climbed out of her car and stood with her feet planted like she was putting down roots right there on the spot.

Out of the corner of his eye, Hutch watched as Boone leaned down to place a smacking kiss on Opal’s forehead.

Pleased, she flushed a color she would have described as “plum” and pretended to look stern. “It’s about time you got your act together, Boone Taylor,” she scolded. Right away, her gaze found the toilet with the flowers growing out of the bowl and her eyes widened in horrified disapproval. “That commode,” she announced, “has got to go.”

She summoned two of the ranch hands and ordered them to remove the offending lawn ornament immediately. Two others were dispatched to carry the food and cleaning supplies she’d brought into Boone’s disreputable trailer.

“If it isn’t just like a man to put a toilet in his front yard,” she muttered, shaking her head as she followed her willing lackeys toward the sagging front porch. “What’s wrong with one of those cute little gnomes, for pity’s sake, or a big flower that turns when the wind blows?”

“Does she always talk to herself like that?” Boone asked, helping himself to a Weedwacker from the back of Hutch’s pickup.

“In my limited experience,” Hutch responded, reaching for a plastic gas can to fill the tank on the lawnmower, “yes.”

The next few hours were spent whacking weeds, and the result was to reveal a lot more rusty junk, numerous broken bottles and the carcass of a gopher that must have died of old age around the time Montana achieved statehood.

Opal occasionally appeared on the stooped porch, shaking out her apron, resting her hands on her hips and demanding to know how any reasonable person could live in a place like that.

“She thinks you’re reasonable,” Hutch commented to Boone, who was working beside him, hefting debris into the backs of the several trucks to be hauled away.

“Imagine that.” Boone frowned, shaking his head in puzzlement. He’d worked up a sweat, like the rest of them, and his T-shirt stuck to his chest and back in big wet splotches.

“And don’t think I didn’t notice all that beer in the fridge!” Opal called out, to all and sundry, before turning and grumbling her way back inside that sorry old trailer to fight on in her private war against dust, dirt and disarray of all kinds.

“Beer,” one of the ranch hands groaned, his voice full of comical longing. “I could sure use one—or ten—right about now.”

Later on, when the sun was high and all their bellies were rumbling, Opal appeared on the porch again and announced that the kitchen was finally fit to serve food in, and the thought of her cooking rallied the troops to trail inside, take turns washing up at the sink and fill plates, buffet style, at the table.

The ranch hands each sneaked a can of beer from the fridge—Opal turned a blind eye to those particular proceedings—and wandered outside to eat in the shade of the trees.

Opal sat at the table in the middle of Boone’s freshly scrubbed kitchen, and Boone and Hutch joined her.

“You’re a miracle worker,” Boone told her, looking around. The place was still scuffed and worn, just this side of being condemned by some government agency, but all the surfaces appeared to be clean.

“And you’ve been without a woman for way too long,” Opal retorted, with her trademark combination of gruffness and relentless affection.

Boone loaded up on potato salad—he probably hadn’t had the homemade version since before Corrie got sick—and helped himself to a couple of crunchy-coated chicken breasts. “I’m surprised at you, Opal,” he teased. “To hear you tell it, women are made to clean up after men. If that gets out, militant females will burn you in effigy.”

She expelled a huffy breath and waved off the remark for the foolishness it was. After a moment or two, her expression turned solemn and she studied Boone as though she’d never seen him before, peering at him through the lenses of her out-of-style eyeglasses.

“This isn’t what Corrie would want, Boone,” she said quietly. “Not for you and certainly not for those two little boys of yours.”

Boone put down his fork, still heaping with potato salad, and stared down into his plate in silence. He looked so stricken that Hutch felt a crazy need to come to his friend’s rescue somehow, but he quelled it. Intellectually, he knew Opal was right; maybe she could get through to Boone where he and Slade and a lot of other people had failed.

“We weren’t planning to live in this trailer for more than a year,” Boone said without looking up. “It was just a place to hang our hats while we built the new house.”

“I know,” Opal said gently. “But don’t you think it’s time you moved on—built that house, brought your boys home where they belong and maybe even found yourself a wife?”

At last, Boone looked up. The misery in his eyes made the backs of Hutch’s sting a little.

“I can’t marry a woman I don’t love,” he said hoarsely, “and I’m never going to love anybody but Corrie.”

A silence fell.

Boone took up his fork again, making a resolute effort to go on eating, but his appetite was clearly on the wane.

“It was a hard thing, what happened to you,” Opal allowed after some moments, her voice quiet and gentle to the point of tenderness, “but Corrie’s gone for good, Boone, and you’re still alive, and so are your sons. They need their daddy.”

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