Montana Wishes

by Amy Vastine

  “Don’t judge me. Just take me back so I can grab it.” Lily probably didn’t want any reminders of the wedding she had run away from, but maybe that was a good reason to bring the book. Amanda could share it with the staff at the Blackwell Ranch so they knew what not to do. Lily wouldn’t want anything from the first wedding to make it into the second one.

  The book was right there on her kitchen table where she had left it. She snatched it up and ran back to the car. Blake had her phone in his hand. “Here she is.” He held it out for her. “It rang as soon as you jumped out. Caller ID said it was a doctor, so I answered it.”

  Amanda felt panicked. She grabbed the phone from him and climbed back out of the car. There was no way she would be having a conversation with a doctor in front of him.

  “Hello?”

  “Amanda Harrison?” the voice on the other end of the line asked.

  “This is Amanda.”

  “This is Farrah from Dr. Waters’s office. She wanted me to give you a call to see if you wanted to schedule your surgery.”

  Amanda’s legs almost gave out. This was not what she needed today. Could she schedule her hysterectomy and then get in a car with Blake for two days? She could already feel the tears pricking at the corner of her eyes.

  She cleared her throat and stepped farther away from the car. She didn’t want Blake to hear anything. “I’m going to be gone possibly the rest of this month. I’m not sure I’m prepared to schedule anything right now.”

  “Oh, that’s okay. We actually don’t have anything available this month. Dr. Waters’s schedule fills up so fast we wanted to give you a chance to get something on the calendar if you wanted to get this done before the end of the year. Right now, we have an opening in the morning on the third Tuesday in October or the first Thursday in November.”

  Amanda pressed her hand against her stomach, a stomach that would never be swollen with a baby. It was a reality she had to accept. “Let’s do the third Tuesday,” she forced out.

  “All right. I will put you down for Tuesday, October 20. We will contact you again as it gets closer to give you some instructions.”

  “Thank you.” Amanda hung up and cringed. Had she really just thanked the woman who’d called her to schedule one of the worst days of her life? She had, and it made her want to throw up her breakfast.

  Composing herself wasn’t as easy as she needed it to be, but she had to do it. She kept the phone to her ear so he wouldn’t know she was no longer on the call. Telling Blake what was going on wasn’t an option. She didn’t want him to know how defective she was. She couldn’t deal with the way he would look at her once the truth was out. The pity and the discomfort would kill her.

  Amanda knew Blake as well as she knew herself. As soon as he found out she couldn’t have children, it would make him self-conscious about mentioning wanting kids or sharing with her when he was going to have kids. It would ruin their friendship because what he wanted more than anything was the one thing she would never have and that would make him feel terrible.

  Amanda never wanted Blake to feel bad about having his own children, so this secret had to be buried. It had to be buried as far down as she could push it.

  Three deep breaths and she pretended to end the call. Her heart calmed but was still very much torn in two. She turned and walked back to the car.

  Predictably, Blake asked, “What was that about?”

  Amanda buckled her seat belt. “Nothing. I need to get a mole removed and they wanted to get something on the calendar.”

  Instead of pulling back out onto the road, Blake kept the car in Park. “Since when do you have a suspect mole? Where is it? What does it look like? Is it not round? Is it discolored? Let me see it.”

  So overprotective. He was worse than her dad sometimes. “It’s on my back and I’m not undressing in the car so you can look at a mole that I’ve already had a doctor look at.”

  “Did they do a biopsy? Why didn’t you tell me you had a doctor appointment? When did you go?” His questions came so rapidly that he wasn’t even giving her a chance to answer.

  “Can we get going? If we’re going to make it to the first stop by a reasonable hour, we need to get going. Drive.”

  Blake was in full panic mode. “You have cancer, don’t you? That’s why you’ve been acting weird lately. You have skin cancer, and you didn’t tell me because you didn’t want me to worry.”

  “I don’t have cancer. I am having a mole removed from my back that is not skin cancer. I swear on my mother’s grave that I do not have cancer.” Who knew that declaring something completely honest would be the easiest way to get out of this debacle?

  “You swear?” He took off his sunglasses and stared at her hard. The way concern emanated from his eyes made the guilt feel a bit heavier.

  “I swear. I definitely do not have cancer. Can we please start driving in the direction of my sister?”

  Blake seemed satisfied that she was being truthful, and he put the car in Drive and carefully pulled away from the curb. He placed a gentle hand on her leg and his touch unleashed a swarm of butterflies in her stomach. “Promise me that you won’t shut me out if there’s anything really wrong. You’re always so good at taking care of others but really bad at letting others take care of you.”

  “I let people take care of me,” she tried to argue. “You know how my dad dotes.”

  He put his sunglasses back on and both of his hands returned to the steering wheel. “Oh, come on. Your dad micromanages all of you girls. He practically shoved Danny down the aisle. Had your grandpa not shown up to help Lily escape, she would have ended up married to someone who wasn’t in love with her and who she wasn’t really in love with, either.”

  Amanda had been so jealous of Lily marrying her best friend that Amanda hadn’t noticed how unsure her sister had been. But it was something else that Blake had said that struck a major chord. “Don’t call Elias Blackwell my grandpa. He’s not my grandpa. He was basically a sperm donor. Great-Aunt Pru raised Thomas on her own. Elias didn’t even know he had a son.”

  “Yeah, but it’s not his fault he didn’t know. As soon as he found out, he went right to work trying to find everyone in his family. He’s doing everything he can to find Thomas. Family is clearly important to him. I think that makes him, at the very least, worthy of a chance to be a grandfather to you and your sisters.”

  Amanda’s face felt hot. “If this is your way of supporting me, I think I’ve changed my mind about letting you come with me on this road trip. Clancy will keep me company and won’t try to convince me to let strangers invade my life.”

  Blake chuckled. “I love it when you get all dramatic. It’s actually very entertaining.”

  “Don’t laugh. I mean it. There is a lot on my plate right now. I can only handle one thing at a time, and right now, I want to focus on Lily.” Anything other than her impending surgery, the reality that she would never have children of her own, the sad fact that the man she was in love with was getting married to someone else. She couldn’t confess that to him, however. “I’m not ready to figure out where Elias Blackwell fits into my life. And I’m really not ready to process that there’s some other man out there who’s my biological father. Please don’t push me.”

  He reached over and took her by the hand. The butterflies were too mad to react this time. “I’m sorry, Harrison. I don’t want to stress you out. I know this isn’t easy for you and I don’t mean to make fun.”

  His sincerity may have triggered a few of those butterflies. “‘There is one way you can make it up to me,” she said, knowing that she should take full advantage of this time they had together. Once he and Nadia said “I do,” there would be little chance for Amanda and Blake to do things that weren’t work related.

  “What would that be?”

  Amanda’s lips curled up in a devious grin. She turned up the radio,
and, based on his grimace, he immediately knew where this was headed. “Road-trip karaoke, of course!”

  Blake groaned and Clancy poked his head in between the two front seats to see what was going on. “Please don’t make me.”

  Road-trip karaoke was something that Amanda and her sisters had done growing up anytime they were forced to spend hours together in a car for a family vacation. Everyone got a chance to search through the available stations for a song they were familiar enough with to sing along to. Blake had been subjected to a few rounds over the years, like when he joined Amanda and Lily on their first trip to Vegas, and the time he went with Amanda, Lily and Fiona to Florida for spring break when her baby sister was a senior in college.

  “You know it’s my favorite. And you are here to keep me sane during this very long trip.”

  “But don’t you want to wait until we at least get out of San Diego?”

  “Nope. Me first.” She scanned through the stations. Amanda loved Lily’s SUV because she had satellite radio. That meant so many more songs and genres to choose from. She settled on the Beach Boys channel. They were her dad’s favorite band. He played them all the time when he was home and they had backyard barbecues.

  “Good Vibrations” was on, and she belted it out like she was one of the boys. Blake shook his head, surely rolling his eyes behind those sunglasses. By the end of the song, he was definitely bopping along with the beat. It was impossible not to.

  When it was over, it was Blake’s turn. “Start searching. I bet there’s a Lady Gaga channel for you. We both know you know every word to her songs,” Amanda teased.

  “You’re so funny. But if you are going to make me do road-trip karaoke, I will be torturing you with your favorite genre of music.”

  Amanda’s curiosity was piqued. His sarcasm was clear, but what it was that he thought she would loathe was less. Blake scanned through the channels using the buttons on the steering wheel. When he took the ramp to get on Route 163, he stopped the radio on an unfamiliar channel. “Oh, this one is perfect,” he said.

  On the screen it was described as the best of folk past and present. There was no way Blake would know the words to any of these songs. He was bluffing. He tapped his fingers on the wheel to the beat, but he didn’t sing a word.

  “The karaoke part means that you have to sing along. If you don’t know the song, we have to move on.” She attempted to start scanning again.

  He stopped her. “Wait. I want to see what’s on next. I might know it. My mom used to play James Taylor songs all the time. And I would say Mumford and Sons is kind of folksy. I like them.”

  Sure... How long would they have to wait for one of those songs to come on? “If you don’t know the next song, you have to move on. That’s the rules.”

  They both suffered through the end of some song neither one of them had ever heard before. The next song was introduced by the DJ. “One of my favorite songs of all time is ‘Butterfly Blue’ and this new one by Chance Blackwell is equally as good, if not better, in my opinion. Give ‘Sounds Like Home’ a listen and let me know what you think.”

  “Don’t be mad, but Nadia has been listening to this song on repeat ever since she figured it out.” Blake cranked up the volume.

  In the distance he sees what he never saw. Laughter ringing like wind chimes in a summer storm. Across rocky tipped horizons and cloudless skies. And just like that he knows...the sounds of home.

  Amanda used her hands to cover her ears. Nadia had been the one to make the family connection. Chance Blackwell was Elias Blackwell’s grandson. That made the singer/songwriter Amanda’s cousin. Blake thought it was “so awesome” to have a famous relative. Of course he did. He found all blood relatives fascinating, thanks to his lack of them.

  “You’re the one who forced me to play this game. Don’t look so salty,” he said when the song was over.

  “Of all the songs in the world, that’s what you had to sing?” Amanda couldn’t escape this new connection to the Blackwells even if she tried.

  “Harrison, you need to work on changing your mindset. These could be good people. People you’ll be fortunate to know. You love your dad. No one is asking you to not love him anymore just because he isn’t your biological dad. Liking the Blackwells doesn’t mean you can’t be a Harrison.”

  He was right. It was so hard, though. “Lily says that all the Blackwell cousins and their wives are good people. I just can’t imagine how any of them think this isn’t incredibly weird. How can they open their arms to Lily without any reservations? One month ago, she was no one to them, and suddenly she’s part of the family. Not just related but living on the ranch and helping train horses. Like she’s been some kind of cowgirl her whole life.”

  Blake laughed. “Lily as a cowgirl. I still have to see this with my own eyes. Lily does yoga on a paddleboard. Lily likes mountain towns where she can ski and drink expensive coffee. Montana? A ranch? Cowboy boots? Horses? So not Lily.”

  “Exactly!” It felt so good to hear someone say what she had been feeling from the beginning. Her sister loved the beach. She wasn’t a huge fan of red meat. She liked fresh fish that didn’t have to be shipped across multiple state lines. She also didn’t fall in love with guys she’d known for a little over a week. Lily had been an adventure seeker, but she wasn’t out-of-her-mind reckless.

  “Are you nervous the Blackwells won’t like you as much as they like Lily?”

  “What? No.” Amanda couldn’t believe he would ask such a question. She didn’t care what the Blackwells thought about her. She wasn’t going to Montana to win over the hearts of some cousins she didn’t even want. She was going to convince her sister to come back to San Diego so they could have lunches at Casa Bonita and go Rollerblading along the boardwalk by Mission Beach. It wasn’t the Blackwells she wanted to love her. “Maybe I’m worried Lily will love them more than she loves me.”

  Blake turned his gaze on her. “Stop right there. Don’t even think it. You and your sister have something no one else can compete with. I know that if the three of us were on a sinking ship and you could only save one of us, you’d save Lily.”

  He was right. Sort of. “I’d make you save her and sacrifice myself. I truly couldn’t bear to live in a world without either one of you.” The pain in her chest was back because that felt like what was happening. Blake would get married and start his family with Nadia, leaving Amanda behind. Lily, on the other hand, was already starting her life with Conner in Montana. She had people named Hadley and Katie looking after her. She didn’t need Amanda anymore.

  “Actually, let’s not kid ourselves. If the ship was sinking, I would simply have to save both of you gorgeous Harrison ladies and be the ultimate hero of the story.”

  Blake had always been the hero in Amanda’s life story. That was why she was madly in love with him. Nadia was the luckiest woman in the entire world. She was getting the very best man the world had to offer, and it made Amanda want to cry.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE LITTLE TOWN just south of Salt Lake City where they spent the night was not the most interesting town in the United States, but it did have one of the cleanest hotels that accepted pets Blake had ever stayed at. Their continental breakfast wasn’t too bad, either.

  Always the early riser, he had gone down to grab something to tide himself over until they stopped for lunch and some coffee for Amanda, who had been blissfully snuggling with her dog when he got up.

  “You ready to hit the road again?” he asked his sleepy-eyed companion upon his return to the room. She was up and dressed but had dark circles under her eyes. After ten and a half hours in the car yesterday, Amanda looked like the last thing she wanted to do was get back in that SUV.

  “Let me take Clancy for a quick walk and then I’ll be ready to go.”

  “I can come with you,” he said, handing her the coffee he had gone down to the lobby to get for
her.

  She smiled. It was slight, but it was something. Her eyes closed as she inhaled the aroma. “Thank you for this, and we would love if you joined us.”

  He waited for her to slip on her shoes and grab Clancy’s leash. Just as they were walking out the door, his phone rang. Nadia was calling. He had cut things short last night when they had been driving only because it had felt a little weird having a conversation over the car’s Bluetooth with Amanda sitting right next to him.

  “Nadia?” Amanda guessed. “You talk to her—I’ll walk the dog.” She smiled, but it was strained. He’d been noticing it more and more lately. He didn’t like it. The more he tried to encourage her to get to know Nadia, the less the two of them seemed to make it work. He needed the two of them to be friends because Amanda was always going to be his person.

  “Good morning, sweetheart,” he said as he answered the phone.

  “Good morning. Are you guys back on the road? Am I on Bluetooth again?”

  “We haven’t left yet, so it’s just you and me right now. Amanda took Clancy for a walk.”

  “Thank goodness,” she replied with a sigh.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s silly.” She had clearly switched him to speaker. She went on and on about what a busy day she had yesterday and how she was looking forward to the same thing today. “It doesn’t help that I didn’t sleep very well, thanks to you.”

  “Thanks to me? How did I ruin your sleep?”

  “I made the mistake of telling my mother that you were on this trip with Amanda, and thanks to all of her feedback, I proceeded to have the worst nightmare.”

  “Worse than the one I had about Amanda’s driving? She is a terrible driver, but don’t tell her that I said that. Did you have a nightmare about her driving me off a mountain like I did? I promise I will offer to be the only one behind the wheel today. We’ll be safe.”