Blackbird Lake

by Jill Gregory

  Why did he keep wondering what it would be like to kiss Madison in the bed of his truck, to strip her out of those dull, shapeless clothes, to taste her lips, brush his mouth down along her throat…to kiss each of her breasts and taste her with his tongue…

  “Sorry, I’ve bent your ear long enough.” Her soft words broke into the heat of his thoughts. “’Night, Brady, see you at the auction.”

  “Yeah, sure. See you.”

  It came out sounding gruff. He frowned as she turned away, springing up behind the wheel of her truck before he could even give her a steadying hand. As he watched the battered old Silverado rattle away down the mountain, an empty feeling came over him.

  Brady had kissed lots of girls in Lonesome Way, but he’d never kissed Madison. He’d never even thought about it, not once, until now. Now that they were on their way to getting along again after all these years, it definitely wasn’t a good time to start changing things up.

  Back away from the beauty queen, he ordered himself.

  But, unlike the jerk in the Spotted Pony, he knew that Madison was so much more than that title she hated.

  She was a lot more.

  And she deserved better than him and anything he could offer her.

  That thought made him curse as he climbed onto his bike, and a scowl settled over his face. He gunned the engine and tore out of the parking lot, leaving the smoke and music and scent of spilled beer in his dust.

  The moment Brady’s vehicle took the first curve down the mountain, the tall, muscular man with the close-cropped brown hair and stubbly beard stepped from behind a green van. It had been parked only a few dozen feet away from where the two young people had been talking.

  He lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply. He was nearing fifty, and he knew some folks might think he was too old for all this.

  But to hell with that. He wasn’t. Not yet.

  Not by a long shot.

  So far, he’d come up with nada, except those pictures he’d taken at the park the other day and sent through his phone. But he hadn’t gotten close enough. Time to step up his game.

  That tall kid in the parking lot had talked about instincts. Well, hell, he thought, blowing smoke into the frigid night air. He’d been born with instincts. Instincts that kept him alive. Instincts that kept him in enough dough to survive. Instincts on how to get anything he needed.

  And he needed something now. No more nosing around.

  Time to close in on the prize.

  Eyes narrowed, he began to think creatively, deciding he didn’t have time to take it slow any longer. He wasn’t getting paid if he didn’t produce the goods. Clamping the cigarette between his teeth, he loped back to his Dodge truck and hefted his powerful frame behind the wheel.

  Then he followed the other two vehicles as they snaked their way down the mountain and along the road to Lonesome Way.

  Chapter Fourteen

  “Please tell me it’s not too late to back out.”

  Laureen clutched Carly’s arm, her eyes wide as they waited in the back room of the Double Cross Bar and Grill for their names to be called. The dating auction had begun a few moments earlier, and the deafening roar of men yelling, cheering, whistling, and applauding out in the packed bar and restaurant area made them both stare at each other, not knowing whether to laugh or make a run for it.

  Big Billy, the huge tattooed bartender and owner of the Double Cross, had stuck his fierce head in the door right before the auction began and told all the women that if anyone felt uncomfortable with whoever seemed likely to win a date with them, they should wink at him, and he’d make sure Rudy, his cook, or one of the dishwashers in back topped the bid and gave them an out.

  “Nice guy, I guess, always has been,” Laureen had murmured as she stood, getting jostled, between Carly and Tansy Noble. She and Big Billy usually avoided each other, and had ever since she’d snubbed him in high school. Though once he had offered to beat the crap out of her ex-husband when word got out that he’d cheated on Laureen and they were getting a divorce. She’d thought it was awfully sweet of him, and totally out of the blue, but she hadn’t taken him up on it. Nice guy or not, there was no way she’d ask him to do her any favors.

  “There’s a lot of nice guys in Lonesome Way,” Carly said. “Let’s just hope some of them are here tonight.”

  “How did we get ourselves into this?” Worrying her lower lip between her teeth, Laureen fluffed out the skirt of her floaty blue-green dress, which fell to just below her knees.

  “It’s for the animals,” Carly muttered. “Just think about the animals.”

  “I am. The animals out there.” Laureen managed a weak smile as she jerked her thumb toward the main room of the bar, where “It’s Raining Men” blasted from the jukebox.

  Carly took a breath and tried to tune out all the noise and shouting.

  She wished the auction were over already. She wondered how Jake was doing back at home with Emma and that bag-of-bones dog of his.

  Hopefully Bronco wouldn’t howl. Or hide Bug. Or eat Bug. If he did, Jake was going to have a pretty rough evening.

  But he should be able to handle it, she told herself. He’s handled crazed bulls and the fevered chaos of the rodeo, and women throwing themselves at him.

  He could handle a good-natured little girl with flyaway strawberry curls.

  Restlessly, she glanced around her. There were a lot of younger women in their twenties packed in the room, all of them laughing and primping, seeming more excited and confident than uneasy. They were mostly wearing skirts that barely covered their thighs, or scoop-necked, tight-fitting, sparkly tops that didn’t leave much to the imagination.

  Except for Madison. She looked different from all of the other girls. She’d gone in the opposite direction.

  Madison wore faded jeans and black boots and a simple lavender sweater. Her sable hair was brushed, caught in a low, smooth ponytail at her nape, and her only makeup was a blush of cameo pink lip gloss. There were tiny silver studs in her ears.

  But she was biting her lips. And pacing. Carly knew Madison must be dreading setting foot on that stage, and as the girl met her eyes, and started toward her, she offered an encouraging smile.

  “It’ll be over before we know it, right?” Carly said as lightly as she could.

  “Can’t be soon enough for me.” Surprisingly, Madison didn’t sound quite as agitated as Carly expected. Before she could ponder this, Madison’s friend Delia and a couple of other young women swooped toward her and they all circled around her, chatting excitedly.

  Carly glanced toward the doorway leading to the stage Big Billy had allowed to be brought in for the auction, bracing herself for her name to be called.

  She felt comfortable enough in her tan suede skirt, chocolate brown boots, and sleek ivory sweater. There was a hint of frost in the air tonight and she’d dressed accordingly. If no man out in that throng wanted to bid on a fully clothed thirty-year-old mother dressed for the chilly fall weather, so be it.

  She figured her outfit must look pretty good, though. Jake had seemed to like it.

  “You looking to cause a stampede in that bar?” he’d asked her with that slow smile of his when she opened the door to admit him and his dog. Against her will, her heart had fluttered at his words and the appreciative light in his eyes.

  The compliment didn’t mean anything, though, she told herself. Jake Tanner was a man who probably flirted easily and instinctively with every woman he encountered. He’d have told Laureen or Madison or even one of his sisters-in-law the same thing. Laid-back cowboy charm and politeness came as naturally to him as breathing.

  Or riding.

  Or lovemaking.

  Just as she pushed that last, pulse-quickening thought from her mind, the crowd suddenly went quiet. Then she heard Ava’s voice, calm and sweet as always, announcing Laureen’s name.

  “Go!” She met her assistant’s frozen stare. “You’re up! It’s going to be okay.”

  But Laureen st
ood frozen, her face panicked.

  “Laureen, honey. You go on out there now.” Dorothy Winston, the former school principal and one of the architects of the auction, materialized suddenly. “Hurry up. We have a long ways to go and Big Billy wants us cleared out of here by eleven.”

  There was no arguing with that authoritative tone, which had been used to deal with everything from tardiness to spitballs to swearing, not to mention cheating, whispering, and scuffling in the classroom.

  “Crap crap crap!” Laureen muttered under her breath. She looked like she wanted to bolt out the back door, but, with a grimace, she squared her shoulders, then marched out into the madness. Carly drew a breath of relief and grinned to herself as cheers erupted from the crowd.

  Dorothy slipped out and disappeared into a seat in the audience. When Laureen stumbled backstage a few moments later, she looked more than a little dazed.

  “Well, what do you know? Three guys bid on me. One was a ranch hand from the Wild Hills Ranch. Kind of cute, too! The other was Andy Ford, the mayor’s nephew. The last man was someone I didn’t recognize. Martha came over and whispered that he’s a rancher from Livingston in town buying some horses from Rafe Tanner and decided to stick around for the auction. Guess they all must be blind, right?”

  “Oh, please, will you stop? Just tell me who won the grand prize.” Carly’s stomach began doing crazy flips as she half listened for her own name to be called.

  “The rancher. His name is Cal Meeks. He’s kinda handsome, too. I guess he’s going to call me to set up the date.” She shook her head as if she couldn’t quite comprehend it. “Holy cow, it’s over with. And it wasn’t even a total disaster!”

  Here’s hoping I can say the same, Carly thought, and at that moment Ava announced her name.

  “You’re going to raise enough money to build the whole shelter!” Laureen squeezed her arm.

  Carly relaxed her shoulders right before she stepped out onto the stage. For a moment all she could take in was a massive sea of men. What seemed like a hundred cowboy hats waved in the air. There were some piercing wolf whistles.

  Great, just great.

  She noticed Big Billy looming behind the bar, his hugely muscled arms crossed over his massive chest, his gaze watchful.

  Then all of the men either grinning, whistling, or cheering as they stared at her on the stage suddenly swirled into a blur.

  I may have to kill Ava, she told herself as she sashayed across the stage, pivoted as Dorothy had instructed before the auction began, then returned to the center of the stage, her heart hammering.

  A Kenny Chesney hit rocked from the jukebox.

  In the front row, she spotted Martha and Dorothy watching her eagerly. Ava was doing the same from the podium at the far left of the stage.

  Their eyes were lit up like jack-o’-lanterns, and smiles of pure amusement beamed from their eighty-something faces as the single men of Lonesome Way applauded and whistled and stamped their feet.

  Here we go, then. Setting back the women’s movement a good sixty or so years, Carly thought, trying to suppress a wry grin as she pivoted again.

  No wonder Sophie was fond of calling those three elderly meddlers Bippity, Boppity, and Boo. They seemed to think their sole purpose in life, besides quilting for charity, was to serve as a trio of fairy godmothers. Matchmaking fairy godmothers.

  God help us all, Carly thought, as Ava blew her a kiss from the sidelines, Martha gave a thumbs-up from the audience, and Dorothy jabbed her elbow into the stocky man in his late thirties sitting beside her.

  With a little jolt of alarm, Carly realized who he was. Roger Hendricks. Dorothy’s divorced nephew. He’d been single for the past seven years and Carly had a pretty good idea why. Roger wasn’t exactly a catch. He was blunt and argumentative by nature. According to Lissie, he’d been a nasty bully as a kid and still had a tendency to try to barrel right over people.

  Oh, please, no. Don’t let it be him, she thought in a panic as his arm shot up and he yelled out a bid. She didn’t catch the amount because her brain was screaming: Why did you ever let Ava talk you into this?

  Then she looked again at the gathered throng, and blinked. Suddenly she didn’t see only Roger and a faceless throng of men. Slowly, she made out the faces of the waitresses striding around tables full of men with drinks and platters of burgers and nachos and fries set before them.

  One waitress was Evie Stone, who had bought fabric for a quilt for her new daughter-in-law last week. Evie waved at her. Another waitress was Charity Morton, who also worked at Pepperoni’s Pizza and was putting herself through college. She’d come into the quilt shop with her mother about a month ago—she was just learning how to quilt and needed a beginner’s pattern.

  Then Carly saw Luke Pierce, foreman of the Circle M Ranch, and several of the nice young ranch hands from the Tall Trees spread. She saw Adam Fletcher, the new young doctor at the hospital, and Beau Carpenter, who owned a fly-fishing guide business, and Stan Wells, who owned most of the real estate on Main Street.

  She saw men she recognized. Nice men. Men she passed every day on the street, men she spoke to at A Bun in the Oven or whom she ran into on her daily errands in town.

  These weren’t strangers for the most part, though perhaps some of the men had come in from neighboring towns. But these were mostly men she knew.

  And suddenly she relaxed.

  This wasn’t Boston or New York or some seedy bar in a big city. This was Lonesome Way.

  It was all going to be okay.

  She blanked out as the bidding began, overwhelmed by the volume of the music, the shouting, the cheers.

  And then somehow it was over.

  “Wash Weston!” the normally genteel, silver-haired Ava called out in a voice that pierced the bedlam.

  Wash Weston. She had a date with a widower in his early fifties who owned a prosperous three-thousand-acre wheat farm, and who had once bumped into her as she was coming out of A Bun in the Oven and caused her to drop a banana cream pie, which had splattered across the sidewalk. He’d outbid some cowboys in their twenties and the new doctor at the hospital.

  It could have been worse, much worse, but as Carly gave him a wave and a smile and ducked backstage, she couldn’t help but grin at Jake’s notion that he’d have to protect her from some unwanted overtures on the night of her “date.”

  Wash Weston with his grave face and slow deliberate walk seemed about as tame a man as you’d find in all of Montana. She doubted he’d try to get her into his bed—but he might just put her to sleep.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The knock on Madison’s door came at midnight, right after she’d stripped off her sweater and jeans and pulled on a comfy pale green sleep tee that reached halfway to her knees.

  The knock made her heart skip a beat as she whirled toward the door, fighting panic.

  Nobody ever knocked on her door this late.

  “Who’s there?”

  She tried to sound calm and tough, but her voice seemed shaky to her own ears. At least she got the words out through the thickness in her throat.

  “Madison, it’s me. Brady. Open up.”

  Brady? Glancing ruefully down at her tee and her legs, bare from the thighs down, she bit her lip and strode to the door. “What are you doing here?”

  “What do you think?”

  His Stetson half hid his dark, unreadable eyes, and he straightened from a careless slouch as she stared at him.

  “Oh. Right. Of course.” He wanted the money she’d promised him. Vivid color flooded her cheeks. “I’m sorry I didn’t get a chance to meet you and pay before the auction started, but I had to wait at my grandparents’ house for my grandmother’s birthday gift to be delivered. It took forever. And it didn’t arrive until much later than I expected. It was a piano—from my grandfather—and it took almost an hour for the deliverymen to haul it inside and load her old piano onto the truck—”

  “Hold on,” he interrupted. “I’m not here about
the money.”

  “You’re not? But then…why?”

  “Making sure you got home and safely inside, that’s all. I tailed you on my bike.”

  Tailed me? On your motorcycle? Madison blinked, startled. “But I never saw you….”

  Brady’s grin gleamed as bright as lightning. It flashed, then was gone. “I stayed back behind a few cars. You still have the feeling someone’s following you? If so, tonight it was me.”

  “Well, I haven’t felt anything too weird, not lately….” She paused a moment and gave a wry shrug. “I didn’t notice you following me, so I must not be as alert as I think I am.”

  Brady was trying hard not to stare at her lush body, outlined so sensuously in that thin whisper of a tee. It fell to only a couple of inches below her shapely little butt. Unlike the sweatshirts she usually wore, it skimmed close to her body, revealing every sumptuous curve.

  His throat went dry. His body felt rock hard. Every-where.

  It took effort, but he managed not to gape like a twelve-year-old who’d never seen a girl up close before. He forced himself to look only into her eyes when he answered her.

  “Well, that’s what I’m here for. To keep watch. At least until our date. I laid out good money for that date and I don’t want anything getting in the way of it.”

  Despite herself, Madison broke into a smile. Brady had followed her home. He was standing here at her door. Was he really here only because he was worried about her?

  “Thanks for sticking to our agreement.” She was feeling her way now. “You want to come in? I’ll get what I owe you—”

  “I told you I don’t want your money, Maddy. Never did.”

  He sauntered after her into the tiny apartment. His tall, strapping body seemed to fill the small space. He swept off his hat, tossed it on a chair, and glanced around.