Brylee felt several emotions at once—joy, excitement and, alas, envy. “First of all, Clare, you shouldn’t eavesdrop when people are having private conversations. Second, your parents are adults, they’re still young, they’re legally married and they are very much in love. Furthermore, they’ve been up front about wanting a big family from the beginning.” She folded her arms then, watching her niece’s face, huffed out a sigh and went on. “Third, I fail to see how getting a new brother or sister will condemn you to spinsterhood. What’s the connection?”
Clare looked exasperated. Her hands gripped the arms of the spare office chair. “They won’t let me date, even when I’m old enough,” she said. “I’ll have to babysit. By the time Preston and Little Whoever can take care of themselves, all the good guys will already be taken—and there’ll be nobody left but fortune hunters! Jerks who only like me because I have a famous mother!”
Adolescent hormones, Brylee thought pragmatically, were a force to be reckoned with. She’d forgotten how crucial it was for a young girl to be like the others in her social circle, how easily molehills could be ratcheted up to mountain status. Still, Clare did face special challenges, being the child of a celebrity.
“So, you think your folks are just going to turn this baby over to you and expect you to raise him or her single-handedly while they waltz off to do other things?” Brylee asked, letting a touch of humor creep into her voice and her expression—but just a touch. “Is that what’s happened since Preston came along?”
“No,” Clare admitted, with another sniffle. “But I’ll be older when the new baby comes—old enough to babysit.”
“Clare,” Brylee reasoned, “I’m having a hard time believing you’re really this upset about something that hasn’t even happened yet. What’s really going on here?”
Clare was silent for a long time, then she started to cry again. “Shane gets to go on the rodeo circuit with Dad,” she said miserably. “I wanted to go along and Dad said no, I’d better stay home in case Mom or Preston needed me. Obviously, it’s because I’m a girl.”
“Oh,” Brylee said, frowning a little. Her brother, Walker, wasn’t a chauvinist, but he was a classic alpha male, so he tended to be overprotective, especially where his daughter was involved.
“It’s not fair,” Clare insisted, calming down a little but still riled.
There was no way Brylee was going to offer an opinion, since how Walker and Casey raised their children was their own business and certainly none of hers, but she did see Clare’s point. As a little girl, Brylee had accompanied her own father and big brother when they hauled bucking stock to various rodeos, but once she’d sprouted breasts and most of her sharp angles had turned to curves, her dad had started leaving her behind. Shaking his head sadly at her tearful protests, making lame excuses.
They’d have to share cramped motel rooms along the way, the three of them, her father had pointed out, albeit somewhat apologetically, which meant there would be zero privacy. And a young woman needed privacy. Plus, he and Walker would be busy all day and probably half the night, too, unable to keep an eye on her the way they should, and they’d be in rough company some of the time, etc, etc, etc.
The problem with that logic was, they’d always bunked in together when she was younger and, rough company or none, between the two of them, her dad and brother had kept an eye on her just fine, thank you very much.
Looking back, Brylee understood her father’s concerns, but her heart had been broken, just the same. She’d stood in the dusty driveway, watching a virtual convoy of trucks and trailers full of livestock pull out as her dad, brother and half the ranch hands on the place lit out for other towns, near and far, headed for the rodeo, and she’d wondered what she’d done wrong.
Now, Brylee brought herself back to the present moment and focused on her niece. “Did you talk this over with your mother?” she asked. A simple question, right? That wouldn’t qualify as meddling—would it?
Clare bit her lower lip. “She’s on his side. Just because I got into a little trouble that time, at the Parable rodeo—it was, like, forever ago—Mom doesn’t trust me.”
“Hmm,” Brylee said, remembering that particular incident. Clare, feeling rebellious, had swiped something from one of the vendors’ booths on the rodeo grounds and subsequently gotten herself arrested, hauled away in a police car. Casey and Walker had dealt with the situation admirably, and the charges were dismissed, but the tabloid press had a field day, running pictures of Clare in handcuffs, Clare being marched into Parable’s tiny police station, Clare leaving said station, subdued and ashamed, with a grim-faced Walker at her side. The headlines had petered out pretty quickly, but they’d been humiliating, not only for Clare herself, but for Walker and Casey as well and, by extension, even for Shane.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Clare accused, though she seemed to be running out of emotional steam. “That I blew it and now I have to take the consequences. But that was a long time ago, and what? I’m supposed to stay grounded until I’m fifty?”
Finally, Brylee smiled. “There was that thing about the boy you met at youth group, and the bus trip to Helena,” she said.
Clare sighed, sagging back in her chair. She was, as Shane often claimed, the original drama queen. Even without a rose between her teeth and a limp hand against her forehead, she was the very embodiment of hopeless martyrdom.
“One more reason I’ll be an old maid,” the child lamented forlornly. “Because, through no fault of my own, I happen to have Casey Elder for a mother, and if some guy likes me, it’s only because he’s trying to get to her.”
Brylee chuckled then, drew her niece to her feet and gathered her in her arms for a brief but heartfelt hug. “Trust me,” she said, holding Clare by the shoulders again and leaning back just far enough to study the girl’s tearstained face. “When you’re ready, as in grown up—” she paused, sighed, went on “—and, alas, you’ll probably have to kiss your share of frogs along the way, like most of us do—you’ll definitely find Mr. Right. Most likely, you’ll have your choice of several Mr. Rights, and the lucky man you fall in love with won’t care whose daughter you are. He’ll love you for your smart, beautiful, funny self, I promise.”
Clare’s angst gave way to curious concern, and her brow wrinkled with a slight frown as she looked back at Brylee. “Your Mr. Right turned out to be a frog,” she said, not unkindly.
Innocent though it was, the remark struck Brylee like a blow, the kind that leaves bruises but doesn’t show. She managed a small laugh. “Hutch Carmody wasn’t Mr. Right, but he wasn’t a frog, either. He’s a very nice man, actually—with the good sense to see what a mistake we were about to make.”
“Why didn’t you see it?” Clare asked, her eyes liquid with sympathy. The poor child was a hopeless romantic, that was obvious. No doubt there would be other tear storms and hissy fits as she traveled the difficult road to womanhood.
Brylee thought a few moments before she answered. “I guess because I didn’t want to see the truth,” she admitted, not only to Clare, but to herself. “I was in love with love, and I had stars in my eyes. I wanted a husband and a home and babies and I was out to make it all happen, by hook or by crook.” She touched Clare’s cheek gently. “Don’t be in such a hurry to grow up, honey. Just trust that everything will work out in the long run, because it will.”
Clare hesitated, then accepted the advice with a little sigh and another sniffle.
“If you say so,” she finally murmured.
Now, Brylee thought, hugging her brother’s child once more for good measure, if she could just convince herself that Hutch Carmody hadn’t represented her very last chance at happiness...
CHAPTER TEN
ZANE SMILED TO himself as he saddled Blackjack early the next morning, when the sky was still more peach and gold than blue and he was feeling a sudden and specific need for lots of wide-open spaces around him. Dinner with Brylee and her family Saturday night, a barbecue at W
hisper Creek Ranch on Sunday—and he’d thought the Hollywood scene was a social whirl. What was next? A barn dance? A hayride, maybe, followed by hot dogs and beans spiced with tall tales swapped around a campfire?
Grinning at his own whimsical turn of mind, he led the gelding out of the barn and mounted up, leaning forward slightly in the saddle to pat the animal’s neck and speak a few words to him. Slim, losing interest in the whole project by that point, though he’d supervised the goings-on in the barn, ambled over to the porch, curled up near the kitchen door and dozed.
Since Landry’s part of the ranch, beyond a line of trees at the far end of the pasture, with its fallen fences and weedy ground, seemed as good a destination as any, Zane headed that way. Nothing helped him think like riding alone, way out in the countryside, choosing his course as the spirit moved him.
And Zane needed to think. He felt swamped by choices and options—not that either was a bad thing; it was just the way his mind worked. Despite his accidental career in the movies, he was a planner at heart and he was always happier if his ducks were in a row.
The first leg of the ride took fifteen minutes or so, the air pleasantly chilly and the sky so big and sprawling and blue that he ached to look at it. When he emerged from the stand of pines and cottonwoods and scrub brush that served as an informal boundary line between the two properties, Zane found himself at the edge of acres and acres of wind-rippled, sun-washed meadow grass. A wide creek cut through the area to the east, shining like mercury in the daylight. He’d been here before, of course, in the truck, but taking it all in on horseback was a different experience altogether.
All that grass and domed sky, edged with green foothills and, in the distance, framed by snow-capped mountains that couldn’t adequately be described even by the word majestic, lassoed his breath somewhere around his gizzard and hog-tied it.
Zane simply waited, letting all that peace and quiet settle over him, a balm to his spirit and his usually busy brain.
Presently, Zane stood in the stirrups for a few seconds, stretching his legs and recalling how he and Landry had divided Hangman’s Bend Ranch in the first place—by swapping plat maps via the internet, drawing property lines, dickering by email and redrawing said lines until they were both satisfied.
Zane didn’t regret any of the choices he’d made where the joint purchase was concerned—he saw potential in both the old house and the stone barn, and the scenery on his part of the spread still caught him by surprise now and then, pumping a little jolt of adrenaline through him at unexpected moments, kicking his heartbeat up a notch. Now, surveying Landry’s share of the land, he knew the deal he’d made with his brother was a fair one, on both sides.
Which wasn’t to say that Landry was likely to lay eyes on the place, anytime soon. Oh, sure, he’d made noises about coming out for a look around when they talked on the phone before, but Zane knew the man preferred bright lights, big cities and a ready supply of sexy, sophisticated women. They’d both grown up ragtag, he and Landry, living in cheap motels and run-down trailer parks and, back then, neither of them had felt particularly deprived, despite the things they did without.
Zane still had a pretty clear idea of what he genuinely needed—not much more than food, freedom, shelter and the regular company of dogs and horses, even now—but Landry had changed, and changed a lot. Sometimes it was hard to believe he’d ever been that eager kid with freckles and a buzz cut, wearing secondhand clothes and ratty sneakers with the laces always broken off, and always ready for the next adventure.
If Landry even owned a pair of jeans these days—and it wasn’t a sure bet by any stretch of the imagination—they were probably the custom-made kind that cost as much as a decent used car. And that kind of getup was bound to be an embarrassment in a place where all the men and many of the women wore one particular brand of denims, the known favorite of country people everywhere, readily available at any discount store for a price regular folks could manage when the mortgage was paid and the kids didn’t need shoes.
Zane shifted in the saddle, loosened the reins when Blackjack tossed his head, letting it be known that he’d stood still long enough and wanted to get on with whatever it was they’d headed out to do.
So they proceeded, man and horse, the grass, rich and fragrant, actually smelling green, reaching almost to Blackjack’s breast in places. They came to the creek and splashed across it, raising jewel-bright sprays to sparkle on all sides. Reaching the other shore, Blackjack hauled himself up the steep bank and then paused to shake off the water like a dog after a hosing down.
Zane’s boots were soaked, and so were his jeans, right to his knees, but he not only didn’t care, he barely noticed. He could have stayed out there on the range for days on end, he reckoned, sleeping under a black-velvet canopy dappled with stars at night, following that bright, twisting creek wherever it led, letting the song it sang ease his parched soul, wash away every memory save the good ones.
He sighed at the thought—he really was getting fanciful in his old age—and crested a rise, letting the horse choose his own path now, and that was when he saw the fields of flowers on the next place, more colorful than any rainbow. He didn’t know the names of a single one of those blossoms—well, except for the roses and the lilacs, anyway—but just looking at the tidy rows of orange and yellow, blue and red and pink and white, stretching almost to the horizon, was somehow inspiring.
A small, slender woman, clad in worn jeans, a long-sleeved flannel shirt and sneakers, carrying a box from the back of an old truck toward the modest wooden house, spotted him and Blackjack approaching right away, hesitated visibly and finally waved. As Zane rode nearer, she set the box on the edge of a rickety porch, pressed both hands to the small of her back and stretched, clearly weary even though the sun hadn’t been up all that long.
She had a short cap of dark hair, round blue eyes and an expressive mouth. Smiling, she crossed the yard, shading her face with one hand as she looked up at him.
“Zane Sutton,” he said, by way of introduction, and tugged at the brim of his hat.
The woman stretched out one hand, so he leaned from the saddle to clasp it briefly in greeting. “I know,” she responded, with a little twinkle and a lot of reserve. “I’m Ria Manning, and I’m new here, as you’ve probably guessed.”
“Me, too,” Zane said, wishing he hadn’t gone and made himself famous, because it was so often a barrier that made the prudent and practical types hold back. Hell, even his own name had been hijacked, belonging more to his big-screen persona than to him. “This is quite a layout.”
The house and the outbuildings weren’t much, but Zane wasn’t inclined to share that opinion. After all, considering the shape Hangman’s Bend was in, he didn’t have room to talk.
Ria drew a deep breath, hugged herself with both arms as she looked around at the acres of flowers and, finally, sighed happily. “It sure is,” she agreed. “Lots of work to be done, since the owner died a few years ago, and except for a few kindly neighbors stopping by to water and do a little weeding, nobody’s turned a hand since then. Still, I’d say the place is in pretty good shape, all in all.”
A shapely gamine type with an air of tired mischief about her, Ria Manning was the type—read: unHollywood—who would surely have caught Zane’s eye, before he’d met Brylee, that is. His interest in her now was cordial, in a neighborly way, period. And that was a little unsettling, given all the years he’d spent chasing women. He wondered distractedly if it was some kind of curse, this sudden feeling that there was only one woman in the world he could hope to share a life with, and that woman seemed to think he was—what?
He didn’t rightly know what Brylee thought of him, that was the problem. One moment, she treated him with benign disdain, as if he’d been molded from plastic, like some toy action figure instead of a flesh-and-blood man, knitted together in his mother’s womb like everybody else on the planet. The next, she was cautiously friendly, going so far as to invite him to sup
per—with Nash and Cleo and a full contingent of family around to run interference, of course.
Ria watched him, arms akimbo, head tilted to one side, probably waiting for him to leave so she could get on with her day, polite though her expression was. “I’d better get back to work,” she finally said, and that was when he reined in his wandering thoughts and noticed the gold band on the ring finger of her left hand. Married, then. Odd that the husband didn’t seem to be around, helping out with the lifting and carrying, but maybe he was working or something.
Zane nodded in response to her statement, shifting the pressure of the reins from one side of Blackjack’s neck to the other. He’d have offered to lug boxes for her, but he figured that might make her uneasy, since she was evidently alone. She’d recognized his face and his name, but that didn’t mean she trusted him. He was still a stranger, after all.
He cocked a thumb over one shoulder, indicating Hangman’s Bend. “I live on the next place over,” he told her. “Old house, stone barn. If you need anything, don’t hesitate to let me know.”
“Thanks,” Ria said, after another hesitation, brief but thoughtful.
Then she raised a hand slightly in farewell, summoned up a semblance of a smile, picked up the box she’d set on the edge of the porch a few minutes back and got on with it.
Zane, wondering about Ria Manning—there was a brave fragility about her that gave him pause—reined Blackjack around and headed for home.
* * *
BRYLEE SAT AT her office desk, studying the same columns of figures over and over again and making no sense of them whatsoever.
She gave a groaning sigh and Snidely, napping under the desk, muzzle resting on her left foot, crept out of his dented metal burrow to look up at her with concern.
Brylee chuckled ruefully and patted his head. “No worries, buddy,” she said gently. “I do seem to have misplaced my handy-dandy Protestant work ethic, though. Seen it around anywhere?”
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