Big Sky Ever After: a Montana Romance Duet

by M. L. Buchman

  “You’re a lifesaver!”

  “Great!” Her change in mood was incredible. It was easy to feel swept up in it. “Do I get a prize?”

  “Sure!” She let go of his arm, grabbed him by the lapels of his jacket, and pulled him into a hard kiss.

  His thigh squished into the cold mud as he rocked toward her.

  She didn’t just make it a short, hard smack. In moments she was leaning into it as hard as he was. He got a hand around her back, though he wasn’t sure which of them he was steadying, and gave back as good as he was getting. As with everything else she did, when Julie Larson kissed him, he knew that, by god, he was being kissed.

  Then between one instant and the next, she leapt from his arms up onto her feet.

  He was far too dazed to follow.

  “I’ve got to go,” she started off, displaying a perfect muddy imprint on her butt.

  “Hey, cowgirl!”

  “What?” She stopped ten feet away and turned back to him. Her dazzling blue eyes, her blond hair caught in the light breeze, her unthinking stance of grace and power: she looked like a miracle.

  “I just want you to know,” he’d meant to make it a question, but that wasn’t how it was coming out. “I am absolutely going to be reading something into that kiss.”

  “Why?” A look of uncertainty slid across her face.

  “Because it was absolutely lethal. That’s why.”

  “Lethal, huh?” Her smile lit her up brighter than the sun playing across her hair. “I like the sound of that.”

  And then she was gone, practically skipping down the hill.

  Chapter 5

  Nathan sat in the chill mud with the taste of spring and brown mustard on his tongue.

  He’d had his share of lovers over the years.

  The ones who weren’t chefs never lasted through the maddening hours that consumed his life.

  The ones who were chefs never lasted through the maddening hours that consumed both their lives. Or the job would tear them apart: competition, opportunity elsewhere, there was always something. For a while he’d been screwing a sous chef fast and hard in the walk-in refrigerator. There was a fantastic synergy when they cooked together and it was the only bit of privacy where they could burn off the mid-dinner-service heat that consumed them in a flambé-towering burst. There was a hostess-floor manager who he’d had every night for months, but only in the back booth of Vite after everyone else had gone home. Then Nathan had learned that she had a husband—when he came to the restaurant with some business partners and wanted to meet the chef he’d heard so much about. That was the end of that lifestyle.

  For the last year since then, he had cooked. He had just put his head down and worked.

  And now he had a wet butt and had been kissed in a Montana field by the poster girl for wholesome blonde.

  What the hell?

  As Julie hurried down the trail, Nathan spotted a big truck that had just pulled up into the main yard by the barn. The driver climbed down and tried to slow Julie’s passage, but she blew right by him.

  Despite the cowboy hat, Nathan knew his walk as well as he knew his own.

  “Patrick!” His shout must have carried down the slope because the big tall cowboy turned to look and then waved both arms.

  Nathan hurried down across the meadow, following far less nimbly in Julie’s path.

  They slammed into each other and pounded one another on the back.

  “Is it the apocalypse?”

  Nathan looked up at his brother. He himself wasn’t short, but Patrick took after their dad, both of them hitting six-three. “Apocalypse?”

  “It must be for you to just up and leave New York. I was bettin’ on that happening this side of never.” Patrick had picked up a cowboy twang that sounded unnatural compared with the other people Nathan had met here, even more unnatural considering his Suffolk County, Long Island upbringing.

  “Maybe it was.” A personal apocalypse would explain a lot. “Honestly I still don’t know what happened. One moment I was cooking in a top Manhattan restaurant and forty-eight hours later I was eating Ama’s stew.”

  “And kissing granite lady.”

  “Who?”

  “Granite lady. Julie Larson: stone hard, stone cold.”

  Nathan would never apply any of those adjectives to her.

  Patrick sat back on the big truck’s bumper and leaned back against the front grill. “You sayin’ that you wasn’t just kissin’ Julie?”

  “I’m thinking that’s between the lady and me.”

  “Crap, Nathan. You’re such a stick in the mud. Is that what it takes to get to her? She won’t give me the goddamn time of day, though the lord knows I try some fair bit. I’m gone for a couple days and you’re all over her.”

  “I’m not all over her.” He sat down on the bumper beside his brother.

  “I just can’t believe you’d cut me out like that.”

  “Cut you out? I’m not cutting anybody out.”

  “You kissin’ Julie Larson is gonna piss off a whole lot of boys around here. You’re my brother so I’ll give you a pass. But it’s a close thing, I can tell you.”

  Julie stood close by the truck’s door, just out of sight of the two brothers.

  She’d caught up with Mac in the barn and he had loved the idea of the yurts. Now she’d doubled back to tell Nathan before hurrying off to do more research.

  And he and his brother were talking about her as if it was up to anybody other than her who she kissed. As if she was a commodity for exchange like a side of beef.

  Anger built in her until she was shaking with it; it wasn’t an emotion she was used to. Just moments ago life had been so good. The solution of replacing the cabins with yurts. The bone-melting kiss Nathan had delivered almost made her think something good could happen with a man, no matter how little time he was going to be in Montana.

  And now—

  She turned and was stalking away, she didn’t know where, when Emily stepped out of the barn and flagged her down.

  “I had a question for you…” Emily trailed off. “But I’m guessing this is the wrong moment.”

  Julie swallowed down her fury, blinked away the burning sensation in her eyes. “No, now is fine.” Her throat felt as if she’d been chewing glass.

  Emily’s eyes called Bullshit!

  “I’m fine. What’s up?”

  Emily scanned around, caught the two voices at the front of the pickup. Julie couldn’t hear what they were saying at this distance, but she could still hear the bantering tone they’d been using to talk about her. Emily’s sigh was sufficient. It was nice to have another woman around.

  Ama was so reserved that she rarely spoke, and Chelsea was so young that she did little else.

  Emily looped her arm through Julie’s and guided her away toward the barn.

  She braced herself for some conciliatory talk or empty reassurances that she had every right to be mad. Instead, Emily was quiet as she led Julie into the warm, horsey air of the barn.

  She would not remember the easy fun of finding Nathan’s car corralled down at the end of the row, or the consideration he’d shown for not wanted to start the engine inside the barn. Last night he’d been intriguingly different. Now he was just like all the other cowhands, though he’d gotten further than most with that kiss. He could read anything he wanted into it now, she was a closed book as far as he was concerned.

  At the center of the building was a built-out set of rooms. To one side, two large tack rooms were filled with neatly arranged saddles, blankets, and halters. On the other side was a room filled with brushes, hoof picks, and a locked cabinet with all of the medical supplies necessary when the nearest vet was thirty miles away, and an office. Chelsea was there keeping up the paperwork on all of the horses.

  “Hey, girlfriends. What are you two up to? Ooo, sad face,” she scrambled out from behind the desk and gave Julie a surprising hug. “I saw that kiss,” she pointed toward the window in her of
fice. “You’re not supposed to be wearing ‘sad face’ after a whopper like that. Was Nathan a bad kisser? I thought he was kinda cute. I had hopes for him. Or is he leaving already?”

  Julie couldn’t even catch her breath under the barrage. Any thoughts that her private life was somehow…private died fast deaths.

  “What’s up with him anyway? Is he—”

  “Chelsea,” Emily sad softly, which ground Chelsea to halt.

  “Oops! Running off at the mouth. I’ve really got to watch that.”

  Chelsea’s preferred mount, a big dapple gray named Snowflake, stuck her head out the first stall by the office at the sound of Chelsea’s voice. Without hesitation, Chelsea shifted over to scratch Snowflake’s cheek and straighten her forelock. Julie could forgive her a lot for that thoughtless bit of care for her horse.

  Julie stepped over to greet Snowflake and to let Chelsea know it was okay. But she definitely needed a subject change. “Emily, you had a question?”

  Chelsea jumped right back in, “She wants an office out here in the barn, but I need mine. We could convert one of the stalls, but I’d hate to lose the horse space, that’s already at a premium. How much space do you need, Emily?”

  “It’s not a question of space really. A couple of chairs, a few computers. It’s a question of security.”

  “Security?” Chelsea seemed glad to carry Julie’s half of the conversation as well.

  “Sound and electronic. I want to run a small but secure communications center.”

  Julie resisted the urge to ask why and looked about the barn.

  For once Chelsea was stymied as well. Emily shared a smile with Julie at that.

  Julie nodded and looked around again. “What about up there?”

  A narrow stairway led up between the two tack rooms across the main aisle from Chelsea’s office. On top of the rooms was the big open loft close under the barn’s roof. It was filled with the normal detritus that accumulated around horses: worn leather that might still be useful someday, ropes in need of splicing, old saddles that someone hadn’t wanted to throw out, buckets of rusted horseshoes and nails. Once the three of them had climbed up to survey the space, it was clear that most of it was crap that simply hadn’t been dealt with.

  “Really?” Chelsea held up a rusty pitchfork missing a tine and a shovel with a broken handle. She tossed them back down in disgust. “I can clear all this in an afternoon. Well, most of it.” There were some things worth keeping.

  Julie paced out the space atop one of the tack rooms as well as she could, threading her way through the debris. “What if you boxed in an office on top of this room? On top of the other one, you could build a couple sets of shelving and hooks to organize the rest of this.”

  “Works for me,” Chelsea shrugged.

  Emily stepped over as if entering her new office.

  “It’s close under the slope of the roof, but you’d have full height for most of the space,” Julie could see it taking shape. “Insulate the roof here. Maybe punch through a skylight down here on the slope so you’d get sunlight as well as a view out over the property. And if you want a more open feel, a couple of windows inside overlooking the barn as well.”

  Julie liked the view from here. She could look down into a dozen or so of the horse stalls. Some were sleeping, some tugging at the hay in their feeders, one or two watching what the three women were up to so high in the air.

  Emily followed her gaze. “You really love the horses.”

  “Born to them,” Julie shrugged. “Never was much of a one for the cows. That’s my dad and brothers. They’d just as soon use an ATV as a horse—they see them both as just tools. I’ll take Clarence any day of the week.”

  “Yet you’ve never come here, to a horse ranch, to work.”

  “Sure I have. In fact, I should be working now. I’ve got to do some research and then get back up to Ponderosa. That bathroom won’t fix itself.”

  “I meant to work with the horses.”

  Julie shrugged. Mac was a great rider and Ama rode like a dream as well. Doug had been born to horses as much as she had and Chelsea was a natural athlete at anything having to do with the outdoors. “The ranch has always had all of the horse people it needed.”

  Emily kept whatever her next thought was to herself, which was just as well. Instead she took one more tour through the junk, then nodded her head.

  “So, you like the idea?”

  “Yes,” Emily nodded. “When can you have it finished?”

  “Excuse me, what?”

  “I don’t have the skills to build it.”

  “Me neither,” Chelsea agreed. “Though I’d be glad to help if you need an apprentice. Always cool to learn how to do something new.”

  “I was just helping you figure out what you needed,” Julie wasn’t sure why she was protesting. She didn’t have any other work lined up after the cabins for Mac. She’d rather hoped that the work and his recommendation would generate some more business at other ranches around.

  Time to change her tune if she was going to make a go of it as a contractor.

  “Building a space is easy. I can build you a space. Sound insulation is no problem; good ventilation and heating isn’t hard. I can run in any power you need, but I don’t know anything about electronic security.”

  “I have some friends who can help us there. Let’s worry about physical security. A stout door, with a good locking mechanism. Your job if you want it,” Emily finished.

  It was a simple structure. A couple of walls. Windows and a skylight. A subpanel for the electrical, maybe with a battery backup of some sort or a small generator. Better yet, solar on the roof. She’d been dying for a chance to tinker with solar. And with Chelsea’s help she could knock out the shelving on the other side in a couple of afternoons.

  “Okay,” Julie took a deep breath. “How fast do you want it built?”

  Emily’s smile was as close to a laugh as Julie had ever seen on her. “Imagine me, retired, leading people on fishing trips.”

  Chelsea actually snorted out her laughter.

  Julie smiled back at Emily, “So, that would be soon?”

  Over the next couple of days, Nathan couldn’t get near Julie.

  She was in some kind of a whirling dervish mode that was worthy of a New Yorker. One minute she’d be ripping the floor out of the Ponderosa cabin’s bathroom. The next she’d be loading a dumpster in the barn. When he tracked her to the equipment shed, she and Mac were so involved in hooking up a nasty piece of spiral-shaped steel auger, two-feet across and a person tall, to a backhoe that she didn’t even notice him there. Then they were up on the hill punching holes into the ground with it. After that she was back to ripping out the broken window on Larch. She was working sunrise to sunset and often as not Mac or Emily took her a lunch. Mark was soon involved as well.

  And Nathan could feel his welcome growing thin.

  His few attempts to get near Julie had been met with a reaction he couldn’t quite understand.

  She mostly appeared to be too busy to stop when he was around, but every now and then he’d catch her getting busy the moment she spotted him.

  The longer it went on, the more sure of it he became.

  Patrick was no goddamn help. “Granite lady. Like I told you. She’s as hard as those hills,” he pointed at the snow-shrouded peaks of the Front Range.

  It was almost a stumbling shock when one day she simply wasn’t there. He was on his twentieth foray from the kitchen to see if she’d arrived, when Emily came walking along the path from the barn to the house.

  “Have you seen Julie?”

  “Not today.”

  Nathan sighed. “I’m starting to think she’s avoiding me.”

  “Starting to?” Something in Emily’s tone confirmed the worst of his fears.

  He’d spent most of the week trying to figure out if he’d done something wrong. It wouldn’t surprise him, but he had no idea what it could be. They’d kissed, and then she’d gone
invisible with no apparent transition in between. The word “flighty” had fit other women in his past, but not Julie. Moody too didn’t seem to be her style, based on what little he knew of her. The only option that was really left was pissed—but he couldn’t think of why.

  “She’s not avoiding you today, if that makes you feel any better.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “It’s Sunday.”

  “Oh,” he’d lost complete track of time here. He’d arrived…Monday, Tuesday…he wasn’t sure. It wasn’t like when he was a chef with every night blending one into the next until there was no difference. Out here each day was so distinct it could have been sliced from the sky in discrete chunks. But which day it was seemed to have little meaning. Horses and ranch hands had to be fed. Today there was less of the frenetic pace that seemed to fill the rest of the week, but not enough to really stand out. So this was Sunday on a ranch.

  “I expect she’s at church with her family.”

  “Where’s the nearest—” but he knew, it was the same as everything else out here.

  “Choteau,” he and Emily said in unison.

  “Do you have any idea…no, sorry. I told her I didn’t want to drag her down with my own worries. I’m guessing that you don’t want to be dragged into this either.”

  “Can’t say that I do,” but Emily waved for him to follow her into the barn.

  He hadn’t been out here since the night he and Julie had found his car together. He wished he could find some way to rewind to that night.

  Emily led him up a flight of stairs to a set of framed walls covered in bright plywood. He didn’t remember this being here.

  “Her work?” He didn’t know enough to tell if it was good or bad, but it looked solid.

  “She’s building me an office,” Emily sat down on a saw horse in the middle of the space.

  Nathan sat on one opposite her.

  “I can’t tell you what, but I can tell you when.”

  He really didn’t want to put Emily in the middle of it all, but was helpless on what else to do.