Big Sky River

by Linda Lael Miller

  “But it’s sort of our fault,” Elle told her twin, her eyes glistening with unshed tears. “Dad knows we don’t like Bethany.”

  “None of this is your fault,” Tara was quick to put in.

  Erin turned to Tara, spoke in a soft, heartbreakingly fragile voice. “Couldn’t we just stay with you?” she asked. “Please?”

  Tara’s heart broke into pieces. She tried to smile. “You’ll be here until school starts,” she assured them. “That’s longer than expected and—”

  “Bethany doesn’t want us,” Erin broke in, stiffening her spine. “She calls us brats. She and Dad will make us go to some boarding school—so why can’t we stay here?”

  Tara moved forward, wanting to take both girls into her arms and not quite daring to, because the act might unleash a lot of rash promises, ones she wouldn’t be able to keep.

  “I’d like nothing better,” she admitted. “But it isn’t my decision to make.”

  After that, the girls scraped back their chairs, stood up and left the kitchen without so much as a glance in Tara’s direction or a muttered good-night.

  Besides the arrival of Hutch and Kendra’s baby girl, this day only had one thing going for it: it was over.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  LIFE IN AND around Parable settled into a peaceful lull over the next few days, or seemed to, anyhow, but Boone didn’t trust the respite to last, and he remained vaguely uneasy, waking or sleeping.

  The medical reports on Dawson McCullough came in on a regular basis, and they were cautiously hopeful. The ruins of the old water tower were quietly cleared away, the wood burned, the metal of the tank itself cut up for scrap and hauled off. The Parable Preservation Committee pulled in its figurative horns a little, and Mayor Hale didn’t make any more noises about arrests and resignations.

  Miss Shannon Carmody, Hutch and Kendra’s new daughter, thrived, as did her happy parents.

  Zeb Winchell’s funeral was a somber affair, but well attended, and Boone brought Scamp to the services, on a leash, of course, and—this was the boys’ idea—a bright blue bandanna around his neck, for his dress-up attire. The dog seemed to understand that this was goodbye, where he and his late master were concerned, and after that he never tried to run away again.

  On the home front, Boone showed the boys Corrie’s scrapbooks, and let them choose a picture of her to enlarge in the photo department of Walmart and subsequently hang on their bedroom wall. Talking about Corrie at all, let alone sharing stories about her, was painful for Boone, like standing too close to a blazing fire with a fresh case of frostbite, but it was getting easier. He took them to her grave, over at the Pioneer Cemetery, and they solemnly set a bouquet of yellow roses in a canning-jar vase in front of her headstone and ran small fingers over the engraved letters of her name, date of birth and date of death. Over the words Beloved wife and mother.

  For all the sadness of it, and all the poignancy, something seemed to ease in both Griffin and Fletcher, though Boone doubted they really understood. Why had he never brought them here before during one of their visits from Missoula?

  It was as if just having a special place to pay their respects to the woman who’d given them life was consolation enough, at least for the time being.

  Though he didn’t let on, Boone experienced a sort of closure himself, a sense that he was relinquishing things, almost against his will, things he’d sworn he’d hold on to forever. There was a degree of guilt, and a wrenching sense of the old, familiar sorrows being torn away.

  * * *

  IN THE SILENCE of his mind, surrounded by graves and green rippling grass, by whispering pines and cottonwoods, with that amazing Montana sky arching over all of it, Boone came to terms with an uncomfortable but exciting truth: he was attracted to Tara Kendall. More than attracted, though it was way too early to go putting names to things.

  Leaving the cemetery with his boys that quiet afternoon—he’d taken them to Sunday school that morning, though actually attending church was still beyond him—and stood in some awe of the continuous, ever-deepening shift going on in the most private regions of his mind, body and soul.

  He felt like somebody waking up from a coma, even as though he was being resurrected, literally brought back from the dead. He could admit it then, at least to himself, as he herded the boys and Scamp toward the waiting cruiser: a big part of him had wanted to die with Corrie, rather than endure being parted from her.

  The obvious flaw in that logic was this—he was alive. He had two boys to bring up. He had a job he loved, ninety percent of the time, anyway. He had a prime piece of land, however underdeveloped it might be, and for the first time since he and Corrie got together, he wanted something more from a woman than no-strings-attached sex.

  All those were things to be grateful for, he thought, as he and the kids and the dog drove away, leaving the cemetery—and a lot more—behind. And none of it was a guarantee against the shit-storm he knew was gathering on the horizon.

  “Can we get restaurant food?” Griffin piped up from his booster seat in back, behind the cruiser’s sliding metal grill. He and Fletcher liked to pretend they were bad guys, being hauled off to the hoosegow—Boone hoped it was a phase.

  “Scamp’s with us,” Boone reminded his son. “No dogs allowed inside the Butter Biscuit Café.” A pause. “Guess we could leave him in the car while we went inside and chowed down, but it’s pretty hot out, and if we leave a window open, he might head for the hills.”

  Scamp, riding shotgun as usual, looked at him askance, as though indignant at the suggestion that he might bolt. Since Zeb’s funeral, he’d settled into his new family with an air of resigned relief.

  “We could get burgers and fries at the drive-through,” Fletcher put in. Though Boone suspected the kid still entertained ideas of hitching back to Missoula to live with Molly and Bob again, he seemed more accepting of the current situation. Probably, he was just biding his time, convinced that this visit would end at some point, like all the others before it.

  “That way Scamp wouldn’t have to wait for us all alone,” Griffin added. “And he could have a cheeseburger.”

  Boone smiled. “Good plan,” he said, his voice a little gruff, and headed for the local fast-food joint. In defiance of modern trends, Bernie’s Best Burgers had held its own against the franchises over in Three Trees. The establishment boasted a covered outdoor dining area, with metal picnic tables painted army-green sometime in the late sixties. A neon sign shaped like a curvy girl—at night, the electric flapper winked and jutted one hip in and out—went back even further in time.

  He was only slightly taken aback to pull into the lot and find Tara and her stepdaughters already there, along with Lucy, the golden retriever.

  The girls smiled and waved from their picnic table when they spotted Griffin and Fletcher, and Scamp got all excited, too, probably thrilled to have another stab at making friends with Lucy.

  Tara’s gaze locked with Boone’s as he got out of the car, soon followed by the boys and the dog. She didn’t look away, and neither did he, but nobody smiled or spoke, either.

  Boone nodded an acknowledgment and walked over to the window to place an order, with a lot of input from Griffin and Fletcher.

  When he was through—the food would be delivered by one of half a dozen teenagers hired for the summer—Boone turned, half expecting Tara to be gathering up trash, suddenly eager to hit the road, put some space between the two of them.

  Instead, she gestured for him to sit down at her table.

  The kids and the dogs had wandered over to explore what passed for a play area, Bernie’s only nod to the franchises. That was where the old man drew the line, though—there were no low-cal/low-fat/low-carb choices on his menu. Everything came with a high fat content and plenty of refined carbohydrates—one memorable offering was a burger called the Big Butt Special, and more than a few longtime Parable residents could attest to the accuracy of the name.

  Boone sat down across from Tar
a, at a loss for words—not an unusual occurrence for him, though this was different. This encounter, like all the ones before it, was charged.

  Tara, apparently, suffered from no such inhibition. She leveled those too-blue, gold-flecked eyes of hers at him and asked, straight out, “Is it just me, or is something happening between us, Boone Taylor?”

  Boone was used to direct questions—hell, he was direct to the point of bluntness himself under normal circumstances—but Tara’s words knocked him back on his figurative heels for a moment. Feeling like seven kinds of idiot because his ears and neck were suddenly burning—he might have been fourteen and all feet instead of a grown man—he cleared his throat. Cleared it again.

  Tara simply waited and watched him. She did not look at all happy with the conclusion she’d drawn.

  “I think maybe you’re right,” he finally said. Then, awkwardly, he hastened to add, “Not that it’s love or anything.”

  She smiled first, and then she laughed, though not unkindly. Checked to make sure all four kids were still out of earshot and lowered her voice to a near whisper just in case. “Nobody said anything about love,” she informed him. “We have to put a stop to this, whatever it is. Now.”

  Boone was warming to the subject. He rested his forearms on the surface of the picnic table and leaned in a little. “Why?”

  “Because it could never work,” Tara said tautly.

  “What if it’s just a simple case of lust?” he suggested mildly.

  To his satisfaction, she blushed a peachy pink. Was it an all-over kind of thing, or confined to her face?

  “Of course it isn’t lust,” she blustered out.

  He chuckled. Let her simmer in the idea for a few moments.

  It didn’t seem possible, but Tara’s color actually heightened. Her eyes widened and flashed. “It isn’t,” she insisted. She was even more beautiful when she was royally pissed off. “Just because you’re drop-dead gorgeous, Sheriff Taylor, and women probably throw themselves at you day and night, don’t go thinking I’m like that, because I’m not!”

  Boone arched an eyebrow, felt a strange, quickening sensation somewhere in his core. Drop-dead gorgeous? Him? He’d have said he was presentable enough in the looks department if somebody dragged the admission out of him with a team of wild horses, but he was just a guy.

  And it wasn’t as if women “threw” themselves at him, day or night. But the fact that Tara thought they did came as a pleasant surprise.

  He merely shook his head, confounded.

  “Passably handsome, perhaps,” she clarified, embarrassed.

  Boone’s food came then, and that brought the kids and the dogs back from the so-called playground.

  “We should probably be leaving,” Tara announced, with a sort of fretful reluctance that only served to deepen Boone’s intrigue.

  Elle and Erin busily cleared the table, said goodbye to Griffin and Fletcher and, by extension, Boone, and went off to load the retriever into Tara’s spiffy SUV.

  Griffin and Fletcher were busy unwrapping hamburgers from greasy paper, dividing the spoils and making promises to a very attentive Scamp, so they barely managed a response to the twins’ farewell. Tara and Boone were completely off the radar—which was fine with Boone.

  He shifted awkwardly from one foot to the other.

  “Casey’s benefit concert is next weekend,” he said, “out at the fairgrounds.” Never mind that everybody in three counties knew that—the show had sold out so quickly that there was talk of a second performance over at Three Trees. “Want to go? With me, I mean?”

  Smooth, Boone mocked himself silently.

  Tara blinked. “What about the children?” she ventured, whispering again.

  Boone had planned on taking the munchkin contingent along, but now, unbelievably, he was picking up some very different—and very interesting—signals from Tara. Was it even remotely possible that the lady had a whole other kind of evening in mind? Okay, maybe she wasn’t thinking sex—Boone could barely think of anything but sex, now that they’d broken the proverbial ice—but some adult conversation might be a welcome prospect, maybe even a quiet dinner before the main concert and, what the hell, a little dancing afterward, since most everybody was bound to wind up over at the Boot Scoot Tavern once Casey took her final bow, too. They’d be too wound up by the fun and the music to head straight home.

  Just imagining the scenario made Boone’s nerves twitch under his hide. The last time he’d gone on a real date, he’d been taking Corrie to their high school prom. Pathetic.

  “What about the children?” he countered at long last, wanting the ball to land in her court. She’d been the one to bring up the subject of kids, after all.

  Tara bit her lower lip, and the move, though unconscious and completely ordinary, stirred Boone’s blood, sent it buzzing through his veins. Damned if he didn’t want to haul off and kiss the woman right there beside Bernie’s Best Burgers, in broad daylight, where half the town would be sure to see.

  “Casey’s putting on a special early show at her place, for the kids, I mean. Afterward, there will be games and prizes and clowns and stuff, and then there’s a campout in her backyard—with plenty of supervision, of course.” Tara paused, dragged in an audible breath, and Boone wondered, with some amusement, if she was wishing she hadn’t brought up their attraction in the first place. “Elle and Erin have their hearts set on going—Casey has a son and daughter close to their age—and there will be a lot of little ones there, too, so...” Her words trailed off into a flummoxed silence.

  God bless Casey Elder, Boone thought. Not only was she raising a serious chunk of money for the McCullough family, she was offering the local adults a chance to whoop it up for one night, babysitting provided.

  “They’ll want to be there, all right,” Boone said with a glance at his boys, who continued to gobble up their food, oblivious to the grown-ups but sharing liberally with Scamp, while Boone’s own meal grew cold in its leaky paper holder—not that he gave a damn.

  He was going out with Tara Kendall, and Saturday night couldn’t come soon enough to suit him.

  “Then I guess it’s decided,” Tara said with great dignity, the breeze making a tendril of her dark brown hair dance against her cheek.

  “I guess so,” Boone replied, with a grin.

  After favoring him with a pointed glare, Tara said a warm goodbye to the boys and Scamp, walked over to her SUV, where the twins were already waiting, and climbed behind the wheel. She looked back at Boone once, her face a study in annoyed bewilderment, and gave a halfhearted wave.

  You started it, lady, Boone thought. He responded with a crooked grin and a motion of his right hand that was part casual salute and part “so long.”

  Tara drove away.

  “Yes!” he said, under his breath, before turning back to the boys, the table, the burger awaiting him in a puddle of sauce and melted lard.

  Griffin and Fletcher looked up at him, curious and munching away, but neither one of them spoke.

  Boone sat down, picked up his burger and ate with rare appetite.

  * * *

  “AM I OUT OF MY MIND?” Tara asked Joslyn over the phone an hour later, her tone plaintive. Before her friend could offer an opinion, one way or the other, she rushed right on. “What possessed me? Boone Taylor, for pity’s sake—I have exactly nothing in common with the man!”

  Joslyn chuckled. “Apparently you’re both Casey Elder fans,” she teased. “That’s something.”

  Tara, alone on the back porch, looked down at her faded overalls, ragbag T-shirt and work boots, which, no matter how often she hosed them down, were speckled with chicken manure. “Who isn’t a Casey Elder fan?” she all but snapped. “Joslyn, I’m serious here. I think I’ve taken leave of my senses—”

  “Or you’re just a red-blooded woman in need of a good time,” Joslyn put in. Her voice took on a note of benign slyness—by “good time,” she didn’t mean a movie date, with shared popcorn and hand-holdi
ng. “Know what I think, my friend? I think Boone scares you half to death, that’s what. He is, after all, one hot cowboy-sheriff. As long as the two of you were sparring over chickens and yard upkeep, you felt safe enough. But now that he’s turning up the fire, you’re terrified.”

  “Next,” Tara whispered, “you’re going to say that’s how it was with you and Slade—that you could barely stand each other at first but boy-howdy, look at you now!”

  Joslyn laughed again. “You know it’s the truth,” she said. “And remember how Hutch and Kendra butted heads every time they happened to cross paths? It’s called passion, Tara.”

  “Passion!” Tara practically spat the word, glancing anxiously toward Elle and Erin. With some “help” from Lucy, they were busy feeding the chickens. “Sometimes, things are just exactly what they seem, you know. Boone and I took an instant and completely mutual dislike to one another on sight!”

  “Then why didn’t you just say no when the man asked you out?” Joslyn asked, pretending to be confused.

  Tara felt her shoulders slump a little. “I don’t know,” she admitted.

  “Well, I do,” Joslyn replied with confidence. “You’ve been alone and lonely for too long, and so has Boone, and the sexual tension has reached critical mass.” Another pause. “The tipping point, you might say.”

  “There will be absolutely no tipping!” Tara burst out.

  That only made Joslyn giggle again. Then, recovered, she went on to say, “You called me, remember? What did you think I’d tell you, Tara? That, oh, horrors, you’d made a terrible mistake and ought to call off the whole thing?”

  Tara was at a loss. “I don’t know,” she repeated miserably.

  “I’m going to make a rash suggestion here,” Joslyn warned, full of mischievous cheer. Five seconds after they eventually hung up, Tara suspected, Joslyn’d be on the phone to Kendra, the two of them tee-heeing like crazy.

  “What?” Tara hardly dared to ask. She was clenching her cell so tightly that her fingers began to ache.

  “Stop making such a big deal out of this,” Joslyn counseled reasonably. “Go out with Boone, have some fun and see what develops. Just don’t write a script in your head based on what you went through with James, because Boone is an entirely different kind of person and, anyway, you can’t possibly know how things will shake out.”