Big Sky Wedding

by Linda Lael Miller

  Once, he caught a brief glimpse of Cleo, in that traffic-light-green outfit of hers, sipping punch and getting to know the group of smiling women who’d drawn her into their circle.

  Another glance around the big yard proved that Nash, too, had found his niche—he was already playing horseshoes with a flock of older kids, a mixture of boys and girls.

  Zane reckoned they’d been at the party, he and Cleo and Nash, for almost an hour when an influx of new arrivals showed up, laughing and calling out greetings to friends, bringing more kids and more dogs and more food right along with them. The women, wearing either cotton dresses or jeans and short-sleeve shirts, kissed cheeks and squeezed hands, genuinely glad to see one another, while the men gravitated toward either the barbecue grill or the open bar sheltered beneath the patio roof. The food was already being served, on a buffet-style, help-yourself basis, and Zane had worked his way to the front of the chow line, and was filling a paper plate, when everything inside him went suddenly still.

  It was as if every clock in the universe stopped ticking for a nanosecond, every heart stopped beating, every sound went still.

  He turned his head and immediately saw the reason: Brylee was there, along with Casey. A baby nestled in a fleecy slinglike arrangement draped across Casey’s chest but, otherwise, they seemed to be traveling alone. Casey spotted Zane right away, beamed that searchlight smile of hers and came in his direction. Brylee, walking behind her, looked disconcerted and dragged her feet a bit as she followed in her sister-in-law’s wake.

  “I was hoping you’d be here,” Casey said, when they were nearly toe-to-toe, poking Zane playfully in the chest with one finger to emphasize her point. “I didn’t reckon you could hide out forever.”

  Zane chuckled, though he was jittery inside, and not just because of the oblique reference to the invitation he’d ducked the night before. He kept his attention focused on Casey, but he was keenly aware of Brylee standing at a small distance, clearly caught by surprise and uncomfortable, too.

  “Hey,” he said, and kissed the crown of Casey’s head. Even though she’d raised herself on tiptoe, he had to bend a little. “How’ve you been since I saw you last, Mrs. Parrish?”

  The woman literally glowed, as though she’d swallowed a whole swarm of live fireflies in a single gulp, and tipped back the baby’s blanket to show a downy head resting against her chest. “If I were any better,” she chimed in response, “I’d probably be breaking some law. This is Preston, by the way. He’s getting too big to carry, but I haven’t had the heart to break the news to him yet.”

  Zane smiled and admired the little guy, who slept contentedly on, despite the jostling and the noise. When he risked another glance at Brylee, she was looking studiously away, toward the gaggles of women at the picnic tables.

  “I’m happy for you,” he told Casey, and he meant it. She was one of a kind, with a legendary talent and a voice that caressed her listeners from the front row to the nosebleed seats whenever she performed. On top of that, she was a truly nice person. “Where’s the rest of the family?”

  “Well,” Casey said, “Walker—that’s my husband—is off chasing the rodeo, and the other kids, Shane and Clare, are with him. So Brylee and I are on our own for a while.”

  Zane nodded to Brylee, and she nodded back in a reserved way, and she still seemed poised to bolt for parts unknown as soon as a path opened through the crowd so she could get away.

  “Step up here and be neighborly,” Casey told her husband’s hesitant sister, her tone good-natured enough, but not to be ignored, either. Casey might have been little, but she was used to running the show. “We can’t have this man thinking folks in Parable County are standoffish.”

  Brylee looked miserable then, and a little annoyed, as well, even though she made an effort to smile. “No,” she said, in a voice that was smooth on top and serrated like a steak knife underneath. “We can’t have that.”

  “I’d better say howdy to Hutch and Kendra,” Casey put in. Like a spirit, she vanished into the mob.

  Brylee folded her arms and regarded Zane with a chilly challenge lurking in her eyes. She wasn’t going to make this easy, he could tell. He’d ticked her off, and she wanted him to know it.

  Zane, rarely at a loss for words, especially with women, found himself struggling for something to say. “Hungry?” he finally asked, remembering the plate in his hands and lifting it slightly, as though for her inspection.

  She shook her head. And she waited.

  Zane, realizing that he was damming the flow past the buffet table, stepped out of line. And then he said something even more unimaginative. “Looks like it’s going to rain.”

  Brylee’s mouth twitched at one corner, ever so slightly, but the freeze was still on. “Looks like it,” she agreed.

  He gestured for her to precede him and, somewhat to his surprise, she did. She led the way to one of the few unoccupied places in the yard, a corner flower bed with a wide, knee-high brick wall edging it.

  She sat.

  Zane sat. He didn’t remember being this nervous since he was in high school and made a move on a rodeo queen who happened to be two years older than he was, and that confounded him more than a little bit. What was it about this woman that turned him into a tongue-tied rube?

  “I’m sorry about last night,” he said, when nothing better came to mind, letting the plate rest on his lap, untouched. “I just—well, I thought maybe you’d need some space, after...”

  After the kiss of the century.

  Brylee’s shoulders, left bare by her green sundress except for tiny straps holding the garment up, moved in a very slight, shruglike way, then fell back into graceful alignment again. “I guess you didn’t expect to see me here,” she surmised, and a mischievous twinkle sparked in her hazel eyes now.

  Zane didn’t know what to say to that, so he just sat there like, to use his mother’s favorite cliché, a bump on a log.

  “You’re probably not the only one, considering what happened between Hutch and me, I mean,” she went on, her tone almost breezy now. “Or, to put it more accurately, what didn’t happen.”

  High above, thunder boomed again, loud but still distant, and a cloud briefly blocked the sun, spilling shadows over the amiable gathering for a few moments.

  “You mean the...non-wedding?” Zane asked stupidly.

  She nodded. “So you already knew about that,” she said.

  “Yeah,” Zane admitted, picking up the plastic fork that had burrowed into the baked beans on his plate and immediately putting it down again. He’d been ravenously hungry fifteen minutes ago; now his throat was as dry as an empty creek bed in a drought, and he didn’t figure he could manage so much as a bite of food.

  “It was all over the internet,” Brylee mused lightly, smoothing the gossamer skirt of her sundress over slender thighs.

  Where, Zane wondered, a little frantic, was this conversation headed? “Things happen,” he said. Eloquence on the hoof, that was him.

  “Yes,” she agreed, with a philosophical sigh. She smiled a wisp of a smile that tugged at an especially tender place in Zane’s heart and, taking in the milling guests, the brightly colored paper lanterns dangling from tree branches, the astounding spread on the buffet table with a sweep of her beautiful eyes, went on. “Things worked out for the best,” she added softly, watching as an obviously pregnant Grace Kelly–blonde moved through the gathering, accentuated by a shaft of sunlight that seemed to shine only on her. “She’s beautiful, isn’t she?” Brylee asked, very softly. Then, with more spirit, she finished with, “Rats. I don’t even know why I’m telling you all this. I apologize.”

  Zane followed the blonde’s progress for a second or two, saw her draw up alongside Hutch, who was still officiating at the barbecue grill, and slip an arm around his waist. He grinned down at her with a love so plain it could have been seen from outer space, like the Great Wall of China and the lights of New York City, and gave her a gentle squeeze and a peck on the fo
rehead.

  This would be the woman Carmody had chosen over Brylee, back in the day, Zane reflected. “Yes” was all he said, in the end, because Brylee was right—the lady was a looker, though for his money, their hostess was no match for the vision sitting right beside him in a floaty green dress.

  “I guess I’d better circulate a little,” Brylee said, sounding resigned but not unhappy. “Otherwise, Casey will never let me hear the end of it. She made me come with her, but being here is probably better than sitting home alone.”

  The reference to her sister-in-law was made softly, with a note of wry humor to show she felt no resentment at being dragged along.

  Brylee rose to her feet then, and Zane automatically stood, too, nearly spilling the contents of his plate into the grass because he’d forgotten, at least for a moment, practically everything but his own name. All along, on a subliminal level, he’d been reliving last night’s mind-blowing kiss, outside the Boot Scoot Tavern. Now, the recollection slammed into him like a body blow.

  He opened his mouth, ready to ask Brylee not to go, but she swept away in a flurry of soft green fabric, trailing a flowery but utterly unique scent—her scent—behind her. He didn’t even get a chance to say goodbye before she vanished like thin smoke caught in a sudden breeze.

  With a sigh of his own, Zane sat down on the brick wall again and silently listed all the reasons he ought to tackle the grub piled on his plate, starting with starving children in China, another of his late mom’s old standbys, invariably trotted out when he and Landry were kids, prone to balk like mules when anything set before them at mealtime happened to be green. His improved understanding of good nutrition notwithstanding, even now he couldn’t quite work out how a bunch of kids on the other side of the world would benefit if he ate his broccoli, or spinach, or string beans.

  He took a few bites—in an effort at good manners—but it was a lost cause. All he could think about was Brylee Parrish, how it felt to kiss her, how much he wanted to do that again—and a lot more. Finally, he carried the meal to the nearest trash receptacle, tossed it and decided he ought to do a little more circulating himself.

  After fifteen minutes or so, during which Zane caught intermittent glimpses of Brylee, smiling that killer smile of hers and chatting with people she’d obviously known all her life, he began to get restless. Well, more restless. Maybe it was the weather, which was turning more ominous by the minute, now that the wind had picked up, ruffling the hems of tablecloths and women’s skirts, tossing the paper lanterns and sending empty paper cups and plastic glasses skittering across the yard.

  He was trying to make heads or tails of an in-depth discussion of local politics, spearheaded by two elderly ranchers, when Cleo edged up alongside him, holding down her flying hairstyle with one hand and grinning as broadly as if she’d just won first prize in a church raffle.

  “When you get ready to leave,” she told him, raising her voice a little to be heard over the wind and another crack of thunder, “don’t you trouble yourself about me. I’m making friends right and left, and it’s bingo night in Parable, so a bunch of us are going to try our luck. Mabel Evans goes right past your place on her way home, and she’ll drop me off after.”

  “Okay,” Zane said. Hadn’t Cleo claimed to be a bust at bingo, somewhere along the line?

  Cleo had barely trundled off to rejoin the gambling contingent when Nash materialized at his elbow. “There’ll be fireworks after it gets good and dark,” he announced. “Can we stay?”

  Zane wasn’t keen on the idea; nightfall was still several hours away, and he had a horse and a dog that would need to be fed eventually, and he was still thrown by the unexpected encounter with Brylee—not that he’d have missed it. “Well—”

  “Those kids over there on the patio, by the soda cooler...” Nash interrupted, pausing to point out the adolescents in question. “A couple of them are from Three Trees, and Jack Carlson—he’s the one in the Che Guevara T-shirt—said I could catch a ride home with them later, if you didn’t feel like sticking around.”

  Zane frowned slightly. First Cleo had seemed to assume he was waiting for a chance to bail, and now Nash had apparently come to the same conclusion.

  Was it that obvious?

  “Who’s driving?” he asked his kid brother.

  “Jack’s dad,” Nash answered, in the tone of one deigning to react respectfully to a really lamebrain question. He scanned the yard again, found the man he was looking for. “That’s him,” he went on. “The guy by the wheelbarrow full of—whatever those yellow flowers are called.”

  Zane chuckled. “We’ll see,” he said, knowing his own desire to head for home was exceeded only by Nash’s excitement over the upcoming fireworks display and a chance to spend more time with kids his own age. God knew when he’d enjoyed that simple pleasure—maybe never.

  He crossed the yard, approached the man, put out a hand and introduced himself as Nash’s brother. Andy Carlson replied with his name and a friendly grin and shook Zane’s hand.

  Carlson, it turned out, was a high school math teacher who spent his summers fighting forest fires and working part-time as a paramedic. He definitely seemed like a solid citizen, Zane reasoned. Probably wouldn’t have been invited to this shindig in the first place if he hadn’t been.

  Andy said he’d be more than happy to bring Nash home after the fireworks. It was likely to be around midnight when they got there, though.

  Zane nodded and thanked Jack’s dad. Each man keyed the other’s cell number into his phone, and then Zane turned to go in search of Nash, only to practically stumble over the kid, he’d been hovering so close behind him.

  Grinning, Zane broke the good news, though he was sure the boy had overheard his conversation with Andy Carlson.

  Nash gave a whoop of triumph, just the same, and rushed off to blend in with the other kids.

  There was another game of horseshoes in the offing. Horseshoes. Probably another new experience for the self-proclaimed travelin’ man.

  Zane watched his little brother for a few moments, then made the rounds, finding Kendra Carmody and thanking her for the hospitality. She smiled warmly, even prettier up close than she was at a distance, prominent baby bump and all, and said the party wouldn’t be over for a long time yet. Dessert hadn’t even been served, and then there were the fireworks to cap off the evening. Was he sure he wanted to leave so quickly?

  He was sure, he realized. The sky was angry, the color of slate, threatening to bust the sky wide-open and dump torrents of rain through the cracks, but that wasn’t what made Zane so jittery—no, that had begun when his and Brylee’s gazes connected, right after she and Casey and the baby had arrived at the party.

  He looked around for Brylee once more, after saying goodbye to the lovely Mrs. Carmody, but she was nowhere in sight. Casey, however, was nearby, beaming with pride while a bevy of grandmotherly types admired her baby boy.

  Since Hutch had finally stopped playing chef, filled a plate for himself and sat down at one of the picnic tables to eat, surrounded by jocular friends and neighbors as before, Zane decided not to interrupt the man’s meal to say his farewells, and headed for the spot where he’d surrendered his truck.

  As soon as he was out in the open, the downpour started in earnest—no preliminary sprinkle, no gentle mist—just a hard, sudden fall of rain, warm as bathwater and roaring like a forest fire.

  The kids parking cars had on yellow slickers now. They’d taken refuge under a nearby tree, but one of them sprinted off after Zane’s rig, evidently stashed somewhere down on the road.

  He waited, idly wondering if the storm would let up before the fireworks were scheduled to start, heedless of the moisture plastering his shirt to his torso and his back, dripping off his hair and soaking his jeans through.

  He’d have laughed at himself, and his all-fired hurry to get back to Hangman’s Bend, if it hadn’t been for the light tug at his right shirtsleeve.

  He turned, and there, to his s
urprise, was Brylee, nearly transparent dress clinging to every perfect curve, hair hanging in wet clumps around her face, smile brighter than the flashes of lightning that split the sky every few moments.

  “Casey wants to stay and show off the baby for a while,” she said, over the pounding din. “After that, everybody will want her to sing, so—”

  Mud splashed around them as drops the size of quarters pummeled the ground and formed puddles. The downpour went from loud to deafening.

  Zane stared down into Brylee’s wet, smiling face, confounded by everything he felt. He knew he ought to say something—anything—but he didn’t have a damn clue what. Meanwhile, his truck sped through the ranch gate and fishtailed up the driveway toward them.

  “Can I catch a ride with you?” Brylee asked, after waiting in vain for Zane to stop gawking at her and speak.

  He nodded, a strange, wild joy coursing through him, and took her hand. They both ran through the rain, toward the waiting truck, and she scrambled inside, holding her white sandals in one hand.

  Zane tipped the kid-valet, wrenched open his own door and climbed behind the wheel. Rain sheeted the windshield, all but swamping the wipers.

  Brylee wriggled her muddy feet, grinned at him and, holding up one calf to show him a long run in her stockings, said, “I’m hell on a pair of panty hose.”

  He laughed then, a deep letting-go that cleared his muddled brain and soothed his soul, and she laughed with him.

  * * *

  SHE’D KNOWN IT was going to happen; Brylee could admit that now, to herself at least. What she wasn’t so sure about was why—why she’d made the rash decision that it was time to stop living in limbo and find out, once and for all, what—if anything—was actually going on between her and Zane. All she knew for certain was that she was bone-tired of hovering on the sidelines, waiting for her turn at—whatever. Life, maybe.