The Maverick & the Manhattanite (Montana Mavericks: Rust Creek Cowboys)

by Banks, Leanne

  “It won’t happen, Mary Jane,” she answered, quietly sure of herself, suddenly. “Spruce Bay is different. Spruce Bay is home.”

  Mary Jane looked at her curiously. “Is that how you feel? Even after ten years away?”

  “It is. More than I expected. It hit me just now. I love it here.”

  “Well, okay, then.”

  A new peace settled between them.

  “And as for the landscaping,” Daisy continued after a moment, “it makes much more sense to have the structural work for that done when Spruce Bay is already closed for the interior work, rather than waiting until spring. Obviously the actual planting will have to wait, but that’s only a small part of what needs doing.”

  “True,” Mary Jane conceded. “We’re behind on the planning for all that. The decisions and plans on the interiors took more time than I expected, especially the cabins, and Mom and Dad have been stalling. They think the grounds are fine as they are.”

  “They’re not.”

  “I know. But maybe it’s too late and we’ll have to leave it till spring after all.”

  “No, we won’t, because I called Reid Landscaping yesterday, and I’ve set up a meeting for tomorrow. I’m hoping that if we can make our decisions and plans quickly, work can get started—”

  Mary Jane stood up, looking horrified, and didn’t wait to hear when it was that Daisy hoped work would start. “You what?”

  “Set up a meeting. Tomorrow at ten.”

  “With Reid Landscaping.” It wasn’t a question. More of a thud. Like the dropping of a shoe. All the more obvious because just a few seconds ago they’d had a strong moment of closeness.

  “They’re the best in the area,” Daisy pointed out briskly. “And we’ve known—”

  “Tucker Reid’s company?”

  “Yes.”

  The simmering stress behind Mary Jane’s recent bout of laughter burst through the facade and came out as anger. “You cannot be so clueless, Daisy! Tucker Reid!”

  “Wait a second…”

  “Tucker. Reid!” You could have cut the fake patience in Mary Jane’s tone with a knife.

  Oh, for crying out loud! It wasn’t as if Daisy wasn’t getting this. Of course she got it!

  “It was ten years ago, Mary Jane,” she said, gentleness not quite winning out over frustration. Here was her older sister sniping at her again. “It was a broken engagement, not an acrimonious divorce, and it was mutual. Lee and Tucker announced their decision together, remember. Not to mention that Lee is two thousand miles away in Colorado.”

  Lee, the middle Cherry sister, the meat in the sandwich between responsible, energetically organized Mary Jane and not-nearly-as-blonde-as-she-looked baby sister Daisy.

  “Do you honestly not have any idea?” Mary Jane cut in. She was angry. Needlessly angry, Daisy thought. “Do you honestly not know why Lee and Tucker canceled their wedding?”

  “I was there, wasn’t I? Because they realized it wasn’t right, and weren’t dumb enough to take such a step when they weren’t one hundred percent sure. Because Lee wasn’t ready. And Tucker wasn’t, either. They were pretty young. I think it was a very wise decision.”

  “She was twenty-three, he was twenty-four. Not that young. We were all so incredibly happy when they got engaged. Do you honestly think that breaking it was her choice?”

  “Lee is incredibly happy with her life now.”

  “Now. Yes. But it took a while. It took a long while. Years.” Mary Jane said that last word as if she knew all about things taking years. Alex Stewart again.

  “And you’re saying that’s all because of Tucker Reid?”

  “He dumped her! They might have pretended that it was mutual, but it wasn’t. It was down to two things.” Mary Jane checked the first one off on her fingers. “Because of the accident, and because—” But even though the second finger came up, she stopped abruptly, closed her mouth, and the second reason didn’t get spoken.

  Daisy’s attention had caught on the first reason, however. “The accident? Really? You think it was down to that? Because Lee had some scarring?”

  “In large part, yes.” But she sounded hesitant and awkward.

  “You think Tucker is as superficial as that?” Daisy was shocked about it, for some reason. Disappointed. It had never occurred to her to question the motives of Lee’s ex in such a way. She’d taken the whole canceled wedding at face value. They’d both had second thoughts. They’d sensibly called it off. It happened.

  She’d been twenty-one years old at the time, and excitedly absorbed in her own life. She remembered giving her first impression of Tucker in a drawled aside to her mother. “Well, he certainly seems like the strong silent type…”

  She hadn’t meant it as a compliment, but it hadn’t been a statement of dislike, either. She’d shared the family’s happiness about the upcoming wedding and had thought of Tucker as someone who’d be great for Lee, but not for herself—definitely not her type.

  “Do Mom and Dad think this, too?” she asked her sister.

  “Mom and Dad think it even more,” Mary Jane retorted with spirit. “But that’s because they never saw—” She stopped suddenly, and her face was shuttered.

  “No one has ever said this!”

  “They’ve said so plenty to me. You haven’t been here. And when you are here, usually Lee is here, too, so we don’t talk about it.”

  “Plus it was ten years ago,” Daisy reminded her.

  “There’s that,” Mary Jane conceded. She’d calmed down a little. The angry pink in her cheeks began to fade. The violent eddies of emotion filling the room began to settle. Daisy wondered just how much Alex Stewart had to do with all this, how much Mary Jane was still regretting the fruitless years she’d spent waiting for him to get serious, make the full commitment, and then he never had.

  After a moment she said, treading carefully, “Is there something else going on, Mary Jane? You seem—”

  Wrong thing to say. “Oh, because it couldn’t possibly be you, could it? Or Tucker himself, for that matter. It has to be me.”

  “Well, no, okay, but if there is something, if there’s ever anything, I want you to know that you can talk to me, that’s all.”

  She reached out her hand and touched Mary Jane’s arm, and at least her sister didn’t throw her off. The atmosphere between them eased a little, once more. They were sisters, after all. There was a strong bond, even when they disagreed.

  “Look, you’re going to Africa,” Daisy continued. “It’s going to be amazing.”

  “Y-yes. Oh, it is!”

  “I’m sure you still have a ton of stuff to do to get ready. I do understand what you’re saying. I’m…a little shocked, actually.”

  “Shocked?”

  “About Tucker.”

  Mary Jane muttered something that was impossible to hear.

  “You said there were two reasons…”

  “Yeah, well, no, not really. No.”

  “You said—”

  “Look, that’s not important.” There was a stubborn set to Mary Jane’s mouth now that told Daisy she could spend all day trying to coax more out of her sister and still get next to nothing.

  “Let me talk to Lee,” she offered, letting the was-there-or-was-there-not-a-second-reason thing go. “And I’ll talk to Tucker himself. If there really does seem to be a good reason not to go ahead, our meeting tomorrow is just the initial consult so that he can put together an estimate if we ask him to. We’re not committed yet. And if some of his personal choices and attitudes aren’t quite what they should be, does that matter? I mean, it’s…yeah, disappointing…”

  Mary Jane huffed out an impatient breath as if she could have come up with a different word.

  “But he’ll be doing our landscaping, and that’
s all,” Daisy continued. “It’s a business arrangement. It’s not like he’ll be part of the family, the way we once wanted. It’s not as if we need to love everything about him.”

  “Lee—”

  “Lee is way stronger than you think. She’s—” A lot happier about being single than you are, sis.

  Daisy managed not to say it out loud, while Mary Jane retorted, “Lee was way more upset than you think about the canceled wedding.”

  “But since none of this actually involves Lee because she has a whole life that she loves, ski instructing and mountain guiding in Colorado, that she’s not planning to change anytime soon—”

  “Oh, I give up,” Mary Jane muttered and stalked into the front office, closing the door very firmly behind her just in case Daisy was in any doubt that the conversation was over.

  “You know what?” Daisy said out loud to the empty room. “I give up, too!”

  * * *

  That statement wasn’t quite true, however. She hadn’t given up at all. Why else would she have found herself forty minutes later, wearing a fresh outfit, climbing out of her car in the parking lot at the front of Reid Landscaping’s building? She’d tried to call Lee to talk about all this, but Lee’s phone was switched off, so she’d left a message.

  She didn’t have an appointment with Tucker. That was tomorrow. But if there was any chance of hosing down Mary Jane’s overreaction before she flew off to Africa tomorrow, then why not go after it. You had to put the right energy into a problem if you wanted results. Daisy put energy into everything she did.

  The headquarters of Reid Landscaping was an impressive advertisement for the company’s abilities. She hadn’t seen it before. Ten years earlier, the landscaping business had been only an ambitious plan simmering in Tucker’s head that he hadn’t spoken of very much, even to Lee. Since then, and having lived in California until so recently, Daisy had never happened down this quiet street on the edge of the woods during vacation visits home.

  She’d never bumped into Tucker himself, either, and she knew nothing about his life now. He could be married with two or three children, or seriously attached. He could be divorced, for that matter, or wedded to his career, or maybe a player with no plans ever to settle down.

  The building itself was a gorgeous, purpose-built structure in modern log cabin style, with richly varnished golden wood and huge double-glazed, south-facing windows that would catch the sun at all the right times. On the upper level, there seemed to be a private apartment with a balcony orientated to face summer sunsets. A round wooden table and two chairs invited the idea of cool drinks on warm, lazy evenings, while now, in fall, there were wooden tubs planted with chrysanthemums in gold and bronze and deep red.

  But it was the exterior landscaping that really showed itself off. Even though the fall foliage had passed its peak of color, everything still looked beautiful. There were plantings that would offer color according to the changes of the season, a long boardwalk-style entrance ramp zigzagging from the parking lot to the front door, garden features in stone and wood and acid-rusted metal that provided structure to the greenery…

  There was much more that Daisy didn’t have time to take in right now, but she would definitely want a closer look when it came to planning the detail on the relandscaping of the Spruce Bay grounds.

  She went up the entrance ramp and entered the building, hearing a bell jangling to announce her arrival. “I’m hoping I might be able to see…uh…Mr. Reid for a few minutes. Is he around?” she asked the woman at the main desk. “I’m Daisy Cherry, from Spruce Bay Resort.”

  “Oh, right, yes, we’ve spoken. Spruce Bay, that’s along the lake between Mission Point and Back Bay? Gorgeous setting. By the way, I’m Jackie. I’m the office manager.”

  “That’s the place. Nice to meet you, Jackie. Something’s come up, you see, and I’m hoping for five minutes now, to set us up for the longer meeting.”

  “Let me check for you.”

  “Would you? Thanks so much.” Daisy sat down in a sleekly comfortable leather chair while Jackie made some finger movements over something on the desktop, apparently sending a text message via cell phone to her boss, which meant that Daisy was left not knowing whether Tucker was actually on site or not.

  And that was frustrating because she really, really wanted to see him right now, since she really, really didn’t want her sister to wing off to Africa in the wrong mood. At times, you could almost suspect that Mary Jane was actively dreading the trip.

  Daisy sat, and kept sitting.

  Had Tucker checked his phone yet?

  Had Lee?

  Jackie went on with her work, and Daisy looked around. On the wall to her right there was a whole gallery of photos, beautifully enlarged and mounted. Before-and-after shots of Reid Landscaping projects, candid pictures of the team at work. Here was Tucker himself, perfectly dressed in a dark suit, hair cut short, beard like Orlando Bloom’s, accepting an award for a big landscaping project. The award plaque was right here on the wall, also.

  And here he was again in another photo, very differently dressed, leaning on a shovel and grinning at the camera. This time he was clean-shaven, his shirtsleeves rolled up, his legs bare and tanned in faded green shorts. He had a couple of staff members standing on either side—a young man with knobby knees and a tall, pretty, fair-skinned brunette with a belt cinching the top of her cargo pants against her very slender waist. It was the closest thing Daisy could find to a personal photo.

  Tucker looked the same as he did ten years ago, and yet not. His frame had filled out with more muscle. He had more laugh lines around his eyes, especially when wearing that satisfied, outdoorsy grin.

  His presence dominated the whole photo and he looked more confident than he had been the last time they’d met. He gave off a sense of energy and presence, the way a man did when those big plans in his head from years ago have become a reality better than he’d ever dreamed.

  And, oh, that grin! Strong and content and full of life.

  Daisy didn’t really recognize the grin, when she thought about it. He’d been tense during those few days she’d spent in his company around the time of the canceled wedding. Prickly and uncomfortable and too watchful sometimes. Strong and silent, as she’d said to Mom. He hadn’t grinned much. Had he smiled at all? She hadn’t really felt that she’d gotten to know him at all.

  With nothing to do but wait, and with Mary Jane’s accusations from earlier this morning still fresh in her mind, she found herself thinking back in a way she hadn’t done in…oh…ever.

  ISBN: 9781460318416

  Copyright © 2013 by Harlequin Books S.A.

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