Big Sky Country

by Linda Lael Miller

Joslyn lapsed into a reflective mood, thinking about the house they’d just left and how different the inside was from the outside, with its peeling paint and sagging boards and the gap-toothed state of the shingles on the roof.

  For some reason, she thought of Kendra. On the exterior, her friend was a beautiful, confident woman with a thriving business and an amazing house. On the interior, though, Kendra was as insecure as anybody else. She’d lost faith in the very thing that seemed to be most important to her: love.

  Joslyn jumped back into the present moment, landing with all the gentle grace of a paratrooper wearing steel-toed boots. “You don’t want to be sheriff anymore?” she asked.

  Slade chuckled. “You don’t do segues, do you?”

  “No,” Joslyn admitted. “Mostly not.”

  He slowed to the in-town speed limit as they passed the high school, shifting gears again. Flexing those muscles. “I haven’t made a formal statement to the effect that I won’t be running for reelection,” he said mildly.

  “But?”

  “But,” Slade conceded, with a smile, “I’m not wild about the man I believe will take my place if I leave.”

  He signaled a turn, and they were back on Rodeo Road.

  “Who would take your place?” Joslyn asked.

  Slade hesitated, bringing the truck to a stop in front of Kendra’s palacelike home and place of business. His gaze was fixed on something beyond the windshield while he considered his answer—if indeed he planned on giving one.

  “Never mind,” he said, at last. “You don’t know him.”

  “I might,” Joslyn replied, peeved again.

  “I’ve said all I plan to say on the subject,” Slade informed her, pushing open his door.

  She didn’t wait for him to get around to her side but unbuckled her seat belt and got out of the truck on her own while he was still walking around it. “Then I guess you shouldn’t have brought the matter up in the first place,” she challenged as she worked the latch on Kendra’s front gate.

  “You’re right,” Slade said, standing on the sidewalk. “I shouldn’t have.”

  She looked back at him, exasperated all over again, but determined to be polite, businesslike. Or at least civil.

  “Shall I have Kendra call you?” Joslyn concluded that, since her friend’s car wasn’t in the driveway, she was probably still out.

  Slade shook his head. “No need,” he said. “I’ll catch up with her before the end of the day.” With that, he got back into his truck and drove away.

  Joslyn hurried into the house and made a beeline for the kitchen. She washed her hands, pulled on the apron she’d been wearing before Slade interrupted her day and got back to work on her baking project for tomorrow’s barbecue.

  By the time Kendra got back an hour or so later, Joslyn was mostly over the encounter with Slade, and the kitchen smelled marvelously of fresh bread laced with herbs.

  Kendra carried a grocery bag in each arm. Joslyn hurried over to relieve her of one of them, setting it on a nearby counter, and both women spent the next few minutes carrying in the rest of Kendra’s purchases, jammed into every nook of her small car. When she threw a party, evidently, there were no-holds-barred.

  She’d bought soda for the children, wine and beer for the adults, enough steak, hamburger and hot dogs to feed the cast and crew of a sword-and-sandal movie, plus condiments, paper napkins, plastic cups and cutlery.

  “The rest is being delivered,” she told Joslyn when they’d brought everything in.

  “The rest?” Joslyn echoed with a small grin. “What else could you possibly need?”

  “Potato salad, of course,” Kendra said breezily. “They’re making that up special at Mulligan’s, along with a few desserts.”

  “Good heavens,” Joslyn said, unpacking bags and stowing things in the refrigerator. Fortunately, the appliance was huge, and there was plenty of room inside, since Kendra seemed to live on yogurt and string cheese. “You must have invited half the county.”

  Kendra smiled and kicked off her high heels with a little wince of relief. “And they’ll bring the other half,” she said.

  “I showed a property today,” Joslyn admitted, still emptying bags.

  Kendra padded over to a cupboard, took a tall glass down, got herself some ice and poured in a diet soda. “So I hear,” she said, with just a hint of merriment in her voice. “I ran into Slade a little while ago at Mulligan’s. He was buying canned dog food—turns out Jasper is something of a picky eater.”

  The mention of Slade’s name gave Joslyn that now-familiar teetery feeling, so she got even busier putting away groceries. “Jasper,” she said, “is a force of nature.”

  Kendra chuckled. “So is Slade,” she replied. “Of course I invited him to the barbecue. Shea and her mom, too, if they get here on time.”

  Joslyn absorbed that. Of course Kendra had invited Slade. He was an old friend, a neighbor, a pillar of the community. If Joslyn herself was a little uncomfortable with the idea, well, that was her problem, wasn’t it?

  “Did he ask you about renting or leasing the ranch house he’s been looking at?” she asked, hoping she sounded casual.

  “It’s a done deal,” Kendra answered, after taking a sip from her glass of soda. “I called the heirs—they’re distant cousins of the original owners with no interest whatsoever in a run-down Montana ranch—and they’re open to a six-month lease.”

  “That’s good,” Joslyn said.

  “Stop fiddling with those bags,” Kendra commanded good-naturedly, “and sit down for a minute. I need a break, and so, obviously, do you, my friend.”

  Joslyn took a seat at the fancy modern table, even though it was about the last thing she felt like doing at the moment.

  Kendra eyed her speculatively.

  “What?” Joslyn finally asked with a touch of impatience.

  Kendra smiled. “I thought so,” she said.

  “What?” Joslyn repeated, wanting to make some excuse and bolt.

  Kendra looked delighted. “You have a thing for Slade Barlow,” she said.

  CHAPTER SIX

  “I DO NOT HAVE A ‘THING’ for Slade Barlow!” Joslyn replied too quickly.

  “Says you,” Kendra challenged, smiling. Idly, she rattled the ice cubes in her nearly empty glass of soda. “You blush every time you hear the man’s name, and whenever the two of you happen to be in the same room together—”

  The timer dinged on the super-stove, a six-burner monstrosity imported from England, and Joslyn was grateful for the excuse to jump up from her chair at the table and hurry over to take four fragrant loaves of bread out of the oven. “Nonsense,” she said, but she didn’t sound very convincing, even to herself.

  “He’s available, you know,” Kendra said coyly, pushing back her chair and standing. “Slade, I mean. And he’s one of those rare men who actually like being married.”

  Joslyn shoved four more pans of bread dough into the oven to bake, set the timer and went back to unloading grocery bags. She didn’t respond, but Kendra went right on talking just as if she had.

  “Slade probably thinks you’re still interested in Hutch Carmody,” she said. “And, as you must remember, those two have issues with each other.”

  That statement stopped Joslyn with her hand still inside a bag full of hot dog and hamburger buns. She knew that Slade and Hutch were half brothers—everyone did—and she recalled the rows they’d gotten into as boys, but they were grown men now. Surely they were over all that now.

  “Once and for all, Kendra,” she said evenly. “I don’t care what Slade Barlow thinks.”

  In a pig’s eye, you don’t, taunted that annoying voice in her head.

  “I don’t believe you,” Kendra said, closing the refrigerator door and joining Joslyn at the long counter, still lined with bulging bags of supplies for tomorrow’s barbecue.

  “Besides,” Joslyn said, with considerable bag-rattling, “Hutch and I went together in high school, a hundred years ago. I stil
l consider him a friend, but whatever the attraction was when we were kids, it’s gone.”

  Kendra tried to hide it, but she was clearly relieved. Maybe the whole point of the conversation, from her perspective, had been to find out if Joslyn still cared for Hutch in a romantic way.

  The thought cheered her a little. Okay, so Kendra claimed she didn’t believe in love anymore. But that, it seemed to Joslyn, was like not believing in gravity, or the phases of the moon. Some things simply were, whether a person believed in them or not.

  “I know you’re attracted to Hutch,” she told Kendra gently. “You’re both adults, presumably unattached, so why not go for it?”

  Kendra bit her lower lip, looked away briefly. “We’re too different, Hutch and I,” she said.

  Joslyn merely raised both eyebrows and waited.

  Little red circles pulsed in Kendra’s cheeks, like blooming flowers. “I’ll admit there’s a certain—well—spark between us.”

  “Think so?” Joslyn teased.

  Kendra sighed. “We were discussing you and Slade,” she pointed out, “until you cleverly turned things around.”

  “There is no Slade-and-me,” Joslyn said. “Yes, he’s hot. Yes, I’ve thought about what it would be like to go to bed with him. But, fortunately, I came to my senses. He’s got a chip on his shoulder, Kendra—to him, I’m still the spoiled little rich girl speeding around town in a convertible and looking down her nose at everybody.”

  “He said that?” Kendra asked, after drawing in a breath. Evidently, she’d forgotten to breathe for a few moments there.

  “In so many words, yes,” Joslyn answered.

  “Oh,” Kendra said, sounding deflated.

  Joslyn patted her friend’s arm. “Let’s get these groceries put away,” she said.

  They worked well together, their movements quick and efficient, and there was no more talk about Slade Barlow or Hutch Carmody.

  “I appreciate your help, Joss,” Kendra said when the last of the bread was cooling on the counter and all the bags had been emptied, folded and stuck into the recycle bin. “Stay for supper?”

  Joslyn shook her head and smiled. “No, thanks,” she said. “Maybe I’ll have a bowl of cereal or a sandwich later, but right now, I’m on food overload. All I want at the moment is a bubble bath and a good book to read.”

  Kendra smiled back and nodded. “Sounds like an idea to me,” she replied.

  After a quiet “sleep well,” Joslyn left by the back door, crossing the screened-in porch that had been her mother’s sanctuary for so long. With a pang, she realized how much she missed her mom and how much she still missed Opal. And she had the strangest sense of having lived two distinctly separate lives, albeit as the same person—the young, self-absorbed Joslyn and the woman she was now.

  It was late afternoon by then, and the flowers nodded in their beds as she passed, heading for the side door of the guesthouse.

  She stopped a few feet short of it, surprised to see a hefty gray cat sitting on the welcome mat, grooming one forepaw. The creature wore its bushy tail jauntily, like a boa, and its eyes were an arresting shade of amber.

  The animal eyed her calmly, as if to say, “There you are—it’s about time you got back.”

  First Jasper and now this cat. What was she? Some kind of magnet for stray pets?

  Unlike Jasper, the cat wasn’t wearing a collar. It looked clean and well fed, though, and surely belonged to someone.

  “Meow,” it said conversationally.

  “Go home,” Joslyn said, though not unkindly. “Someone is probably looking for you.”

  The cat didn’t move, except to perk up its ears and cock its head to one side.

  “Well, alrighty, then,” Joslyn said, resigned. “You might as well stick around until I can find out who you belong to. I don’t happen to have any cat food on hand, but how do you feel about fat-free coffee creamer?”

  She stepped past the cat, opened the door and entered her tiny kitchen.

  The cat followed, its fluffy tail switching gracefully back and forth, like a question mark in motion.

  As she’d told Kendra, Joslyn wasn’t hungry, but she figured the cat might be, so she poured creamer into a saucer, tore a piece of bread into bite-sized morsels and set the works down on the floor.

  The new arrival began to eat without hesitation.

  Joslyn filled a cereal bowl with water and put that on the floor, too.

  Then she headed for the bathroom, filled the old-fashioned tub with semi-hot water and stripped off her clothes.

  She was soaking, bubbles tickling her chin, when the cat strolled in, leaped nimbly onto the closed lid of the toilet seat and regarded her with an expression of benign expectation.

  “I’m not going to get attached to you,” Joslyn said. “Either your owners will show up, or you’ll decide you’d rather hang out with Slade Barlow, like Jasper did.”

  “Reoww,” said the cat.

  “Furthermore,” Joslyn went on, feeling only slightly silly for carrying on a conversation with a four-legged companion, “I can’t keep calling you ‘the cat,’ so you’ll need a name. A temporary one, of course.”

  The cat did the boa thing with its tail again, and from her present viewpoint, Joslyn could tell the animal was female. Judging by the size of its belly, it was probably pregnant, too.

  That’s just great, she thought ruefully.

  “To me, you look like a Lucy-Maude,” Joslyn said aloud. “I’ve always liked that name.”

  Lucy-Maude regarded her calmly, all elegance, striking a coquettish pose.

  After her bath, Joslyn pulled a cotton caftan on over her head and proceeded barefoot into the living room, where she booted up her laptop.

  Lucy-Maude came along, taking up a new post, this time on the arm of the big easy chair, with its somewhat tattered floral slipcover.

  The laptop came alive, and Joslyn, suppressing a sigh, sat down in front of it and logged on. There were half a dozen emails from her mother.

  Dana Kirk—she’d taken back Joslyn’s father’s name after the divorce from Elliott and never bothered to change it when she got married for the third time—usually practiced a healthy detachment from the more mundane details of her daughter’s life. They talked on the phone once a month and emailed each other fairly often between calls, but neither of them needed constant reassurance of the other’s affection.

  Dana had been a loving, attentive mother while Joslyn was growing up and a rock during and after the Elliott debacle, and Joslyn had always known her mom was in her corner.

  Feeling mildly guilty for not checking in sooner, Joslyn tapped into the first message. Then the second, then the third.

  The first few were calm and chatty—how was the trip? What’s it like to be back in Parable after all this time? Say hello to Kendra for me; she was always such a nice girl.

  After that, though, the messages took on a note of steadily rising anxiety.

  You’re all right, aren’t you?

  Then, Joslyn Lee, what’s going on?

  And finally, Damn it, Joslyn, answer your email!

  Joslyn smiled as she opened a new message window to respond. Sorry if I worried you, Mom, she wrote, trying to sound reassuringly perky. I’m fine, just busy settling in and all that. So far, nobody has taken a potshot at me, but I’m sure word’s all over town that Elliott Rossiter’s stepdaughter is back.

  She went on to update Dana on Kendra, mentioned tomorrow’s big barbecue and finished with an account of Lucy-Maude’s arrival on her doorstep.

  All that time, Joslyn was just as aware of what she was omitting from the missive as what she was including.

  She didn’t say that Kendra’s disillusionment with love hurt her heart, for example, though it did. Kendra was a class act, and she’d be a wonderful wife and mother, just as she was a wonderful friend.

  She didn’t say that she had real misgivings about the reception she might get from some of the townspeople at her friend’s barbecue
the next day or that she’d have to steel herself to go.

  And she sure as heck didn’t mention the crazy way Slade Barlow made her feel—all achy and sweetly scared, and not at all like her usual, practical, computer-savvy left-brained self.

  Dana believed in an easygoing, one-step-removed approach to parenthood, especially now that Joslyn was an adult, but that didn’t mean she wouldn’t fret.

  The email was lengthy by the time Joslyn ended it with, love you, and hit Send.

  Because she hadn’t been online since she’d come back to Parable, Joslyn’s mailbox was full to bursting.

  She deleted the junk, sent short, chipper replies to various friends in Phoenix, assuring them all that she was “fine, just fine,” and answered a few technical questions for the IT people at the corporation she’d sold her company to.

  And then she logged off.

  It was time for a bowl of cereal and a good book.

  * * *

  SLADE CALLED LAYNE THAT night, told her he’d leased a house in the country and said he and Shea could make a run to Missoula one day soon to pick out furniture.

  Layne sounded distracted—unlike him, she had a life—and said she and Shea would arrive in Parable sometime on Sunday afternoon. She’d call as soon as they were settled at the Best Western hotel.

  Slade asked to speak to Shea, and Layne said she was at the mall with her friends, buying jeans, boots and tank tops to bring to Parable.

  The image made Slade smile. He said goodbye, hung up the receiver and turned to Jasper, who sat in the middle of the kitchen floor, waiting patiently for his kibble.

  Slade fed the dog, opened a beer and stepped out onto that pathetic little patio of his. The house on the ranch needed some work, and he and Shea would both be sleeping on air mattresses and eating their meals at a card table for a while, but it would sure beat living here.

  Jasper joined him outside, once he’d finished his supper, and sat next to Slade’s lawn chair, a companionable, peaceful presence.

  Slade ruffled the dog’s ears gently and thought about the woman on the other side of that back wall, living in Kendra Shepherd’s guesthouse.

  Joslyn’s not your type, cowboy, he told himself silently. She’s big-city sophisticated and you’re mud-flap country. And she’s back in Parable for a reason, whether she’ll admit it or not, and when she’s done whatever it is she came here to do, she’ll hit the road and be gone for good.