Big Sky Ever After: a Montana Romance Duet

by M. L. Buchman

  “Right now, one of them is cleaning up the kitchen; the other is seeing to the child. Luke is making sure there’s a piece of pie waiting for you when you hop on your broomstick and rejoin them at the dinner table.”

  “You think so?”

  “I think they scurry better than you notice. This drink is exquisite.”

  Real men didn’t describe fruit drinks as exquisite, but Bridget had every reason to know that Magnus was a real man.

  She fixed herself a glass and put the juice and fizzy water back in the fridge. Magnus had ordered a crisper full of fresh veggies, several different kinds of cheese, artisan bread, butter, eggs, and…

  And Bridget was snooping, so she closed the door to the refrigerator and put on her trial-lawyer face.

  “You want to talk,” she said, “I’ll listen.” She’d hated the courtroom, but had found that out only after devoting three years of her life and all of her savings to law school.

  Magnus held a chair for her at the small round table by the window. Bridget pulled the curtains closed, lest any nosy brothers get to spying, and took a seat. Magnus sat across from her, and for a moment, she battled with the pleasure of simply beholding him.

  She’d parted from him yesterday morning, telling herself she’d stored up a fine little memory, but she’d also stored up a fine little heartache to go with it. She liked Magnus—or liked the Magnus she’d met at the Bar None—and had steeled herself against never seeing him again.

  Now, she wanted to know if there was a way to keep liking him without losing her distillery or her pride.

  He slid her drink across the table to her. She ignored it, though even the sight of his hands brought back memories.

  “Did you, or did you not,” Bridget said, in her best cross-examination-from-hell voice, “know that you were taking the manager of the Logan Bar distillery up to your hotel room Friday night?”

  “I did not.”

  That was the right answer, delivered with more of that growled indignation. “Can you prove it?”

  He looked around the room at cheerful red-checked curtains, hardwood floors, handmade cabinets, and gleaming white appliances. The dish towels matched the curtains, and a tree of red ceramic mugs sat near the coffeemaker.

  Mama would have had some daffodils in a mason jar on the table and a few homemade muffins wrapped in cellophane on the counter.

  “I told you my name, Bridget,” Magnus said. “How many Magnuses have you met? Do you expect me to believe you didn’t know even the first name of a guest who’d booked this place for two weeks?”

  “Shamus handles the bookings.”

  “If that’s the same quilted jacket you wore Friday night, then my business card is in the inside pocket.”

  Bridget fished out a cream stock card with gold embossed lettering. “You didn’t give me this card, and I never use the inside pocket.”

  He took a sip of his raspberry juice. He would have made a good trial attorney, with a poker face like that.

  “You never asked me for it. I tucked it in there while you were in the shower yesterday morning. You never gave me your last name, never offered a phone number or email address.”

  “Did that bother you?”

  He gave her a look that brought to mind the feel of him easing inside her, the sheer pleasure of his touch on her back and shoulders, a dozen small acts of consideration.

  I have been smoldered. For the first time, hopefully not the last, I have been well and truly smoldered.

  “I gave you my card, Bridget. Make of that what you will.”

  She studied that card: H.R.M. Cromarty, Distiller, with one of those complicated British addresses that happened when a house, village, and neighborhood all had names. If all the arrangements had been made by internet, Shamus would never have heard Magnus’s Scottish accent, and Scotland was, technically, British.

  “Now that I see it in writing,” she said, “the name is familiar. H.R.M. Cromarty—M for Magnus, I suppose. I know your twelve-year-old, and I think you put out an eighteen-year-old single malt, but I can’t recall it.”

  Magnus finished his drink and took the glass to the sink. “You don’t know the eighteen-year-old because I don’t export it. The twelve-year-old has been to some competitions.”

  That a man could be sexy washing out a juice glass surely qualified as a grave injustice.

  “I don’t export anything,” Bridget said. “Don’t have the volume, don’t have anybody to handle the red tape. So you and I just ran into some bad luck on Friday night? Two people destined to be on opposite sides of a range war ended up in the same bed?”

  He stayed at the sink and turned to face her. “In the same bed, making passionate love. All three times. If you can put that behind us so we can discuss mutually advantageous business opportunities, I can. In fact, I already have.”

  “Bridget stays out all night for the first time in years,” Luke muttered, “then she comes sashaying home without a word of explanation for a wickedly happy smile. We start the spring rental season with the only ray of financial hope this ranch has had since the last time I beat sense into you, and she tears a strip off Cromarty before I can do my welcome-to-the-Ponderosa speech.”

  Shamus wrung out a washrag at the kitchen sink. “Bridget texted Martina on Friday night. I knew where she was, right down to the room number.”

  “You aiming to strangle that rag?”

  Shamus wanted to strangle something. “I should have texted Bridget. She should have texted me or you. Put the damned ketchup away. It gets all cruddy if you leave it in the lazy Susan.”

  The ketchup was already cruddy, but Shamus needed to grouse and Luke was the safest target. Went with being the oldest brother and the biggest, and sometimes the asshole-est.

  “You were busy,” Luke said, unscrewing the cap to the ketchup. He washed off the lid and wiped off the ketchup bottle.

  “I was busy with Martina. If she could bother to send a text, I could have. I’d seen Bridget dancing with Cromarty and wished her good hunting.” Without a thought for her safety, which might be a compliment to her self-sufficiency, but it was no compliment to Shamus’s fraternal loyalties.

  Luke put the ketchup in the fridge. “They danced together? As in, boot-scoot-rooty-toot-toot or something else?”

  “Slow danced, and that was weird as hell. I’ve seen Patrick prowling around any number of dance floors, and that’s just getting his weekend on, but Bridget isn’t Patrick.”

  “Bridget isn’t happy,” Luke said, using a fork to take a bite of apple pie right from the one-third remaining in the pie plate. “Damn, this is good.”

  Shamus snapped him with the rag. “Don’t eat from the pie plate.”

  “You already washed my dish.”

  That retort was twenty years old. “Say we sell this guy our distillery. Then what?”

  “Then we have money,” Luke mumbled around a bite of pie. “You said so.”

  “We have money, but what does Bridget have?” Martina had asked that question, in the patient, long-suffering tones of a veteran first-grade teacher trying to coax one right answer out of the kid who’d been held back.

  “If we sell the distillery,” Luke replied, “Bridget has a place to live, three brothers and a niece with a roof over their heads, a law degree she refuses to use, also some money in the bank. Whoever buys the distillery will have to either rent the property from her or buy a few acres. She could run this ranch one-handed, but she’d rather compete with distilleries ten times her size.”

  “She loves that distillery.” Possibly more than she loved the step-brothers who’d been foisted on her when she was eight years old, a horse-mad girl who’d yet to grow into her front teeth.

  Luke took another bite of pie. “Comes a time when you put away your toys, Shamus. You do the work that needs doing. Nobody needs to drink whisky.”

  “Nobody needs to eat beef,” Shamus countered. “Pretty soon, nobody’s going to need oil and gas, at least not at the p
rices they’re paying now. Nobody needs to go fishing or skiing or hiking or horseback riding, but thank God, they spend money doing it anyway. That distillery has been in her family for a hundred and fifty years.”

  “We’re her family now.”

  Family didn’t work like that, but Luke was in his mule-in-the-manger mode, so there was no point trying to reason with him. He could be the peacemaker and voice of reason, but he could also be the older brother who came close to bullying anybody who disagreed with him.

  Because he believed he knew best, of course, not because he was a mean-ass son of a bitch with a wide streak of close-mindedness and a few too many personal frustrations stuck in his craw.

  “We should move some hay to the mares’ pasture tomorrow,” Shamus said. “If the snow is as bad as predicted, they’ll need it.”

  “And if the snow doesn’t show up, or melts by Tuesday afternoon, we’ll have wasted four of our last stash of round bales.”

  “Foaling season is coming. No time to be putting the ladies on short rations, Luke.”

  The horses were a sore point. Every ranch needed reliable mounts to go with its reliable vehicles, reliable equipment, and—for the larger spreads—reliable aircraft. The horses were a legacy from Judith. She’d scheduled and paid for breedings last year, and the results could start showing up any day.

  Or night. Mares delighted in dropping foals at three in the morning.

  “You can take a couple bales out,” Luke said. “One of us will have to babysit Cromarty if Bridget’s going to stay on her high horse.”

  “You take one more bite of that pie, and Ima hafta whup up on you, Lucas.”

  “You want the last piece?”

  “The last piece is for Bridget.”

  Luke set his fork down, and guilt flashed in his smile. “Little bitty thing like her doesn’t need a whole lotta pie.”

  That taunt was also twenty years old. “She needs her piece. Did anybody stack firewood for the guesthouse?”

  “Phooey. Don’t we have ranch hands around here somewhere?”

  “It’s Sunday. You stack the firewood, and I’ll check on Patrick and Lena.”

  Put like that, Luke was heading for the kitchen door. “Two bales for the mares, Shamus, and then you can take his lordship skiing.”

  Shamus loved the thought of triple black diamond spring powder, but babysitting a greenhorn wasn’t his idea of fun. They invariably underestimated the toll eight thousand feet of elevation took on them and got sidetracked flirting with the lifties.

  “Bridget can take him skiing if he’s that keen to go. I have first-quarter bookkeeping to catch up on.”

  “You can do that when we’re snowed in on Tuesday. Gotta love Montana.” The kitchen door swung shut, leaving Shamus with the rest of the mess to clean up.

  Nobody had to love Montana. The place was beautiful, demanding, and full of contrasts. There was tons of money if you knew where to look, but it was hard to make a living. A frontier mentality jostled right up next to Hollywood living, and the weather had to be experienced to be believed.

  Cleaning up after one more Sunday supper that had disintegrated into bickering and unhappiness, Shamus admitted that he wanted out. He wanted off the damned ranch, and out of Montana, and away from the people he loved most in the whole world.

  If they sold Bridget’s distillery, she’d have one less reason to stick around the Logan Bar ranch. So maybe selling out to Magnus Cromarty would be doing her a favor. Shamus had seen her slow dancing with Cromarty—twice.

  His lordship might have scheduled this trip in hopes of acquiring a distillery, but he was already on the way to lassoing Bridget’s heart.

  And that was a good thing—Shamus hoped.

  Magnus would never forget the feel of Bridget in his arms, the soft rhythm of her breathing as she drowsed beside him in bed, her voice bellowing off-key over the sound of the shower: It’s nice to git yore ass outta bed in the moooooorning.

  But nicer to stay in bed.

  There would be no putting that night behind him, but he needed time to think, to move chess pieces, to adjust to fate’s latest practical joke on a tired Scottish lad far from home.

  Bridget clearly needed breathing room too, and what Bridget needed mattered to him.

  “I thought the distiller at Logan Bar was Mary MacDeaver,” Magnus said. “You’re Bridget Logan.”

  Bridget tipped her chair back on two legs. “Don’t they have Catholic girls where you come from? I’m Mary Bridget MacDeaver. My mother married Dan Logan when I was eight years old. Her property and his shared boundary, and they’d both lost a spouse.”

  She apparently didn’t account these as happy recollections.

  “Can you do business with me, Mary Bridget MacDeaver? I’m here to explore the possibility that my distillery and yours could develop some mutually beneficial schemes, up to and including one of us buying the other out.”

  Even under the influence of the most beguiling twenty-eight-year-old single malt, Magnus would never consider selling his business. Uncle Fergus often grumbled about the benefits of teaming up with a larger outfit, but the aunties would haunt Magnus through eternity for even thinking of such treason.

  “I have no interest in acquiring any asset of yours, Magnus, and I’m not interested in your schemes.”

  He ignored the double meaning. He couldn’t ignore how different Bridget looked in this spotless rented kitchen from how she’d looked yesterday morning. Then, she’d been relaxed, rested, and equal to a plate of American pancakes complete with bacon, maple syrup, and butter.

  Now she was tense, drawn in on herself, and ready for battle.

  “The word scheme has a less sinister meaning in the United Kingdom,” Magus said. “You’d probably use the word plan.”

  “Not interested in your plans either.”

  Such magnificent stubbornness. “Your people were Scottish.”

  “Great-Great-Grandpa came over in the 1860s in search of gold. His daddy had been in the whisky business back home. When Jack MacDeaver got tired of looking for gold, he decided he’d distill it instead.”

  That much lore was on the Logan Bar distillery website. “So do what Jack MacDeaver would have done, Bridget: Keep an eye out for opportunity at all times, even when you’re mad as hell, half starved, and winter is closing in. Never let sentiment get in the way of imagination.”

  She rose and refolded the towel hanging over the oven handle. “Is that some sort of Scottish battle cry?”

  More of a business motto. “One of my cousins consults to nonprofits. Elias is a canny fellow, and he says much business comes down to common sense. I’m here for the next two weeks. Use those two weeks to assess what I can do for your distillery, if anything.”

  “My distillery is in honking good shape, thank you very much. I’ll be civil to you, Magnus, and let bygones be bygones, but I don’t care how much cash you wave at the pack of jackals I call brothers. I’m not selling.”

  “Then don’t sell. This dance goes on all the time in Scotland. The big outfits that sell blended whiskies are forever pitting one small house against another, forgetting to move inventory out of a warehouse that’s been promised to a competitor, and otherwise conducting what you’d call a range war, all very amicably.”

  She shoved back to sit on the counter. “I get the sense at the whisky competitions that for most of your kind, distilling is a vanity business. A frolic and detour to entertain visiting busloads of Swiss businessmen. The distillery and the land it sits on are all I have left, Magnus. I’m deadly serious about preserving my heritage.”

  He treasured that about her, though she was wrong about the Scottish whisky industry. “Then we understand each other. We aren’t competitors, much less enemies, Bridget. We don’t even sell in the same markets. I’m here for two weeks, our previous dealings don’t impact our business relationship, and we can be cordial without creating any confusion about motives or agendas.”

  Bridget’s thoughtfu
l expression said she was buying his load of tripe. She didn’t want to hate him, though she might before Magnus had packed his bags and returned to Scotland. He might hate himself, come to that.

  “If you can forget we met on Friday night,” Bridget said, hopping off the counter, “I can.”

  Not exactly what he’d proposed, and her characterization was a bit lowering. “We have a bargain.”

  Magnus met her in the middle of the kitchen, hand extended. She shook firmly, then passed him a set of keys.

  “If you need help figuring out the woodstove, ask over at the house. Don’t smoke up the whole place because you’re too proud to get directions. We’re due for a load of snow on Tuesday, and Montana weather can be deadly. Always—and I do mean always—have warm clothes, food, and water in your vehicle. Always be sure somebody knows where you’re headed and when you should be back.”

  Exactly like traveling in the Highlands.

  “Yes, ma’am. I will scurry to comply with your every order.”

  She smiled, a sad echo of the grin she’d flashed on Friday night. “Keep your scurry handy, and we’ll get through the next two weeks. You’re not getting your Scottish paws on my distillery, though, Magnus. That’s a vow.”

  It wasn’t her distillery, in a business sense, or not exclusively hers. Her brothers had been clear about that. Magnus wasn’t too concerned about the details of ownership. He’d like to buy her business if he could find terms she’d accept, but what he needed more than the title to the Logan Bar distillery was her.

  He needed her, rather desperately.

  Patrick was an artist, or had been prior to his wife’s death. Lena had apparently inherited his proclivities, because when she was upset, she drew. Her tongue peeked out of the left side of her mouth—her mom had done the same thing when concentrating—and her expression was furious.

  “What are you drawing there, Lena Lilly Logan?” he asked.

  “Horses.”