Big Sky Wedding

by Linda Lael Miller

  Zane shook his head. “That can wait until tomorrow,” he said. Blackjack was anything but fragile, but he’d been cooped up in small quarters all the way from California, and just as the driver had said, he might be pretty jumpy for a while. No sense in asking more of the animal than necessary, after a long trip.

  Nash brought the bridle over, handed it to Zane. “Will you teach me to ride?” he asked, with such hope in his voice that Zane hated to have to douse him with cold water.

  “Not on this horse,” he said, easing the bit into Blackjack’s mouth and slipping the bridle over his head. After soothing the animal for another few moments, he swung up onto his back, waited to see how he’d react.

  Nash had prudently moved back out of kicking range, but he was scowling and patches of red glowed in his cheeks. “I don’t see any other horses around here,” he said. “So that means I’m just shit out of luck, right?”

  A quiver went through Blackjack’s frame, from his shoulders to his flanks, but he didn’t buck or go into a tight spin, one of his favorite ways to unseat a rider.

  “Watch your language,” Zane said mildly. “You’re only twelve, remember?”

  “How am I supposed to learn to ride a horse if you won’t even let me try?” Nash demanded, ramming his hands into the pockets of his new jeans.

  Zane sighed, eased Blackjack into a slow walk. “I didn’t say you couldn’t learn to ride,” he pointed out reasonably. “I said you couldn’t learn on Blackjack.”

  Nash was still testy. “Why not?”

  Because I said so. Zane almost said it, but then he remembered how much it had rubbed him raw as a kid, hearing those words from any adult, and he bit them back. “He’s high-strung,” he said instead. “He’s also big, in case you missed that, and it takes an experienced rider to handle him.” He paused, relaxing into Blackjack and, by that strange and inexplicable synergy that had always existed between them, becoming a part of the animal.

  “Which leaves me up sh—up the creek,” Nash protested.

  “We’ll get you a horse,” Zane assured the boy. “But that means you’ll have to look after the critter. There’s a lot of work—and a lot of responsibility—involved.”

  Nash stared up at him, practically gaping. “You’d buy me a horse?” he asked, in a tone of stunned disbelief. “One that would be just mine?”

  “Yes,” Zane answered, as Blackjack moved along the rutted driveway.

  Nash hurried alongside, as did Slim. “For real?” he quizzed, breathless. “I could name him myself, and have my own saddle and everything?”

  “Your own saddle and everything,” Zane confirmed, hiding a grin. “Don’t be expecting Seabiscuit or Man o’ War, though. We’re talking about a kid-horse here, even-tempered and slow-moving.”

  Nash was frowning again. “Not a pony,” he specified.

  Zane chuckled. “Not a pony,” he agreed, figuring the kid was probably picturing a Shetland. Even at twelve, Nash was too tall for one of those—his feet would drag the ground when he rode, and the experience wouldn’t be all that good for the horse, either.

  “I’ll feed him and groom him and all the rest,” Nash volunteered eagerly, mollified now that he knew he wouldn’t be learning to ride on a four-legged refugee from some petting zoo or crummy kiddie carnival.

  “You sure will,” Zane answered, letting Blackjack have his head when the horse began to pull a little, making the reins go taut. “Keep that in mind when you figure you’d rather watch TV or play video games than muck out stalls and fill feeders.”

  Impatient now that he was no longer confined to a trailer or a stall, Blackjack broke into a trot, then a gallop, and they soon left the boy far behind, though the dog managed to keep up for a while.

  There was a lot that was unsettled in Zane’s mind and in his life—he had career and business decisions to make, a ranch house and barn to rebuild, a twelve-year-old brother to look after—but on the back of that horse, he felt the peculiar and perfect happiness of being an ordinary cowboy again. Just a man on a horse, nothing more and nothing less.

  It was pure bliss.

  Ten minutes later, back at the stone barn, Zane dismounted and led Blackjack into the largest stall. He’d picked up a few bales of grass hay and some feed on the shopping junket to town the day before, and had cleaned out the water trough and filled it from the garden hose.

  He showed Nash, who was leaning against the stall gate and watching like a hawk, how to check the horse’s hooves for rocks or other common problems, how much hay to put in the feeder, how to brush the animal down after a ride.

  “How come you know so much about horses?” Nash asked presently. “You’re an actor. Those guys just pretend they’re good at stuff like that.”

  Zane chuckled as he gave Blackjack a farewell pat, slipped the bridle off over the horse’s head and passed through the gate into the wide breezeway, forcing Nash to step back out of the way. “Before I was an actor,” he said, “I followed the rodeo circuit.”

  Nash’s blue eyes were practically popping out of his head. “No shit?”

  Zane gave him a level look. He swore himself, on occasion, but then, he wasn’t twelve years old.

  The kid corrected himself. “For real, I mean?”

  “For real,” Zane said.

  “Did you ride bulls?” Nash was double-stepping alongside as Zane strode out of the barn and into the sunlight.

  “No,” Zane answered. “Broncs.”

  “Were you any good?”

  “I collected my share of prize money,” Zane said, smiling again, thinking that maybe—just maybe—this whole crazy idea might work, after all, him and the boy living under the same roof on a permanent basis, forging some semblance of a family.

  It was a nice thought, and Zane almost immediately shied away from it. This was the real world, he reminded himself, not some movie guaranteed to have a happy ending. Nash had problems. He had problems. Solving them wouldn’t just take effort, it would require luck, too. And lots of it.

  “And buckles?” Nash pressed. “Did you win any of those?” He didn’t wait for Zane to answer, but rushed right on, carried away by his enthusiasm. “I watch rodeo on ESPN sometimes,” he blurted, “and some of those buckles are so fancy you can’t believe it.”

  Zane grinned, called to the dog as they drew nearer the house. “I might have a buckle or two,” he said. In truth, he’d lost count of how many he’d won over the years, before he got suckered into the Hollywood scene. The only good thing that had come out of that was money. More money than he knew what to do with, actually.

  “Can I see them? The buckles, I mean?”

  “Sure,” Zane said. “Right now, though, they’re still at my place in California.”

  They’d reached the ramshackle porch and, instead of going inside, by some tacit agreement, they sat down on the steps. Slim nuzzled up close to Nash, and the boy stroked the dog’s back, though his attention was still fixed on Zane. “I guess you must be planning to go back there,” the kid speculated, with all the subtlety he could manage, which didn’t amount to a whole lot. “If you didn’t bring your stuff with you or anything.”

  Zane felt another twinge of sympathy for the boy, one he was careful to hide. “Stuff is stuff,” he said. “I can live without most of it.”

  Nash frowned, thinking hard. “If you go back to California,” he finally asked, “what happens to me?”

  “I’m not planning to go back there—not to stay, anyhow,” Zane answered gently. “If—when—I go to L.A. to tie up some loose ends, you can go with me. Unless it’s during the school term, that is.”

  Skepticism and hope did battle in Nash’s earnest face, and there was no telling which of them won, because an expression of studied disinterest fell like a mask over his features. “And if school is on, I have to stay here, all by myself?”

  “Cleo will be around,” Zane reminded his kid brother lightly. A silence took shape between them, both of them gazing toward the horizon. “
You spend a lot of time by yourself, Nash?” Zane asked, at some length.

  Nash shrugged his narrow shoulders. “Once in a while, Dad stashed me someplace where he figured I’d be all right on my own for a few days. It wasn’t any big deal, though.”

  “What kind of ‘someplace’?” Zane persisted quietly.

  “You said it yourself, before,” Nash said, with a note of defiance in his voice, indicating the house behind them with a nod of his head. “Shelters. Juvie, once or twice. One time, I spent a whole week in this really cruddy motel on the outskirts of St. Louis, but Dad left me money for the vending machine, so I didn’t go hungry or anything.”

  Zane turned back to the horizon, not wanting the boy to see the look on his face. “Good old Pop,” he murmured. “Always keeping his bases covered.”

  “To hear Dad tell it,” Nash retorted defensively, “you and Landry didn’t have it all that good living with your mom, so don’t go acting all superior, okay?”

  Zane felt a surge of rage, rage that had nothing to do with Nash and everything to do with Jess Sutton. “Things were tough when we were kids,” he conceded, still keeping his face averted. “But Mom was always there. There weren’t many extras, but she made sure we went to school, saw the dentist and the doctor when necessary—no small thing, since she never earned more than minimum wage and a few dollars in tips. Health insurance was an impossible dream for her.”

  “Dad homeschooled me,” Nash said, almost triumphantly.

  “Oh, yeah?” Zane asked. “How? By parking you in front of the Discovery Channel once in a while?”

  Nash reddened, and his fists, resting on his bony knees now that the dog had gone off to track something through the tall grass, tightened until the knuckles went white. “No,” he said furiously. “He bought those special books at Costco or somewhere, and I had to do all the lessons in them. I can read as well as anybody, and I’m good at math, too!”

  Zane sighed. He hadn’t meant to rile the kid up again, but when it came to their father, he had a hard time being tactful. “Have you ever gone to a real school?” he asked evenly.

  “Lots of them,” Nash said, in a so-there tone of voice.

  “I’ll just bet,” Zane replied, with another sigh.

  After that, things just kept right on rolling downhill. They heated up a frozen pizza for supper, when mealtime came around, and ate in stony silence at the card table in the kitchen.

  Then Nash fed the dog while Zane disposed of their paper plates and plastic knives and forks, the bachelor equivalent of doing the dishes.

  Cleo would have a cow when she got a look at this setup. Smiling a little at the thought, Zane opened his laptop and logged on, while Nash and Slim disappeared into Nash’s room. They returned to the kitchen almost immediately, and Nash slammed a thick paperback down on the flimsy card table, next to Zane’s computer.

  “I read this,” Nash said, shoving the words through his teeth. “Twice.”

  Zane glanced at the cover of the book. Saw that it was a four-in-one volume, containing The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy. With a grin, he picked up the tattered tome in one hand, enjoying the heft of it—and the memory of consuming the Tolkien stories, one by one, courtesy of whatever library happened to be close enough to visit. Long past bedtime, he’d read the books voraciously, in the time-honored flashlight-under-the-blankets way of sneaky kids everywhere.

  “All right,” he said dryly, “you’ve convinced me. You can read. What grade are you supposed to be in, come fall?”

  “I tested out of seventh,” Nash answered, plunking down in the chair opposite Zane’s and reclaiming the book, an obvious treasure. “So I guess I’m in eighth. Or even ninth.”

  “We’ll see,” Zane said.

  “Not that I’ll probably be here,” Nash said. “Dad’s bound to show up, soon as his luck takes a turn for the better.” Then, with a stubborn set of his chin, “When he comes to get me, I’m leaving with him.”

  The hell you are, Zane thought, but what he said was, “Let’s cross that bridge when we get to it.”

  That seemed to satisfy Nash, but just barely. He was definitely in a recalcitrant frame of mind. “I’m going to bed,” he said, as though expecting an argument.

  “You do that,” Zane replied affably.

  Nash left the room, taking the book along, but this time the dog didn’t go with him. Instead, Slim gave a deep sigh and stretched out at Zane’s feet for a snooze.

  The rest of the evening dragged by, and Zane didn’t sleep much that night, between thinking about Brylee Parrish and wondering how a person went about raising a twelve-year-old boy. The window-framed sky was still spangled with silvery stars when he gave up on getting anything like eight hours’ sleep and rolled off the air mattress—he’d set the new bed up in the room Cleo would occupy—pulled on jeans, a shirt, socks and boots, and wandered outside. Slim went along.

  Night sounds filled the air, a natural chorus of owls and crickets and critters scurrying through the grass. The three-quarter moon, along with all those stars, provided plenty of light.

  Zane headed straight for the barn, made his way to Blackjack’s stall, braced his forearms against the top of the gate and let his gaze range over the shadowy bulk of his horse.

  On his feet, Blackjack gave a soft nicker of greeting, then went back to his midnight snack, the last of the hay Zane had given him earlier.

  Zane felt a strange, swelling gladness in his chest, looking at that horse, but there was some sorrow, too. Or was it guilt? Before Hollywood, he’d taken Blackjack with him wherever he went. Afterward, he’d been lucky to get to the gelding once a month, what with all the demands of making movies, promoting movies, reading scripts for more movies.

  His ex, Tiffany, had been after him to sell Blackjack, every hour on the hour, from the day of their hasty Las Vegas wedding to the moment the ink dried on the hefty settlement check he’d handed her when their divorce became final. Now, hindsight being twenty-twenty, Zane knew the marriage had been doomed from the first, if only because Tiffany had never been able to wrap her narcissistic little brain around the fact that he loved this horse, that getting rid of him wasn’t an option because Blackjack was as much a part of him as his arms and legs. Forced to make a choice, he’d probably have sacrificed one of his limbs, if it meant he could keep the gelding.

  To Tiffany, all animals were mere nuisances, shedding on her clothes, chewing up her shoes, in constant need of some kind of care and attention—God forbid. Not that Tiffany’s antipathy to critters was the only reason things didn’t work out. There were plenty of other problems.

  Remembering their relatively brief but tempestuous time together, Zane shoved a hand through his hair, annoyed with himself, even now. Sleeping with Tiffany had been one thing—he’d been a free man at the time, after all—but marrying her? What had possessed him to do a stupid thing like that? They’d had nothing in common, outside the bedroom.

  Tiffany, the daughter of a very successful Beverly Hills cosmetic surgeon, had never worn secondhand clothes in her life, unless they were “vintage,” of course, with a pedigree to prove they’d been owned and worn by some famous actress like Vivian Leigh or Loretta Young or some other paragon from the golden age of motion pictures. She’d never had to wonder where she’d sleep that night, or whether there would be anything for supper. She liked to think of herself as an actress—they’d met when she was an extra in his first movie—but the truth was, Tiffany was basically a party girl, living on a generous allowance from Daddy until she and Zane were married. Once they were legal, she spent his money at warp speed, pouted when he said he wanted to get a dog, dragged him to black-tie shindigs where he found it easier to identify with the household help than the other guests.

  She’d never loved him, he knew that now. If she had, she wouldn’t have lobbied to get rid of Blackjack the way she had. To be fair, though, he hadn’t loved her, either. He’d loved going to bed with her. He’d loved the idea of a wife and eve
ntually a family, which was, like dogs and horses, definitely not on Tiffany’s to-do list, as things turned out.

  Kids? Was he serious? Pregnancy would ruin her admittedly remarkable figure, she’d informed him coldly, not to mention tying her down like some housewife and putting an end to her social life—though she’d been careful to avoid the subject of children until after his wedding band was on her finger.

  One night, Tiffany had finally leveled with him. He’d been away on location, and they’d just had sex—even that had been more fizzle than fireworks by then. They’d been lying in their dark bedroom, with what seemed like an acre of icy sheets between them, and she’d told him, her voice dripping with contempt, that her friend Annette was expecting a baby. Four months in and she was already as big as a bus, Tiffany scoffed. Well, that wasn’t for her, she went on, chattering away in the lonely gloom, while Zane silently resigned himself to a pile of broken dreams and the sad certainty that he and the missus would be calling it quits sooner rather than later.

  A week later, the papers were filed, the tabloids were having the usual field day, with speculations of extramarital affairs on both sides, and Tiffany had gone directly home to Daddy. By then, Mommy was in her third or fourth stint at rehab—not that she’d ever taken an active role in her daughter’s life.

  Zane had bought that stupid mirrored water bed an hour after leaving the courthouse with his lawyer. Now, a little over a year later, here he was, in Montana. For the first time in recent memory, he had a sense of peace, of belonging somewhere.

  He had a sexy neighbor named Brylee.

  He had a young brother, who might be a good kid or not—the jury was still out on that.

  And he had his horse with him again.

  What was he supposed to do next? Zane didn’t know, beyond getting the house and barn in decent shape, but he felt like the most fortunate man who’d ever drawn breath, just the same.

  Finally, after a lifetime of rambling, he was home.

  * * *

  CLEO CAME BARRELING out through the security gate at the airport precisely at two o’clock the next afternoon, her round ebony face set in an ominous scowl. She wore ugly orthopedic shoes, thick stockings wrinkled at the ankles, a tweed coat that fairly swallowed her up and smelled of mothballs and a little round hat adorned by a red velvet rose the size of a man’s fist. Her purse was patent leather and big enough to fend off a whole flock of angry crows bent on pecking out her eyeballs, if the need came up.