Montana Fire_A Small Town Romance

by Vanessa Vale

  Boy, I was glad to see him. My adrenaline had worn off and left me weary and shaky. It felt really great to see a familiar face. Comforting in all the insanity. I craved a hug and a kiss right behind my ear.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” he asked through clenched teeth. Obviously, he was trying not to shout as the veins on his neck stuck out like he was about ready to stroke out.

  “Getting gas.”

  He looked from the store to my car in front of one of the pumps. “That’s it?”

  I twisted my hand back and forth. “You know, the usual stuff that happens to anyone at a convenience store. I watched some lunatic hold up the store five feet in front of me with a bowie knife before three well-armed citizens cold cocked him and held him at gunpoint.”

  “Do you have a gun?” he asked as he looked me over, as if I had a holster like the Old West slung around my hips.

  “Um, no. I don’t do guns. My part in the whole thing involved staying out of the way, then handing over a roll of duct tape I found in the household section to tie him up.”

  Ty closed his eyes and I could swear I saw him counting to ten in his head. A vein pulsed at his temple. “Are you okay?”

  He looked me over again. It wasn’t heated, but clinical.

  “Fine,” I replied. “But I forgot my tea.”

  He lifted a brow and shook his head slowly. His hands went to his hips. “Jesus,” he muttered.

  We both watched Robber carried out by two officers, held up by his armpits. They hadn’t traded the duct tape for handcuffs. Must’ve done a good trussing job. He shouted and ranted about needing money but was ignored. An EMT approached and the officers placed him face down on a gurney to be taken to the hospital.

  “That guy’s out of his mind,” Ty commented as they slid the gurney into the back of the bus and shut the door. Quiet returned.

  “He has to be on some kind of drugs.”

  “Meth. Word out is there’s a new shipment around town. Churchill fire had a mobile home burn to the ground the other night. Meth lab. Something big is happening in the area but we don’t know what yet.”

  Churchill was a tiny town fifteen minutes west of Bozeman. More Bozemanites were moving that way for cheaper home prices and a longer commute into work.

  “Great. I’d hoped my kids would grow up in a safe, drug-free place.”

  “Meth’s everywhere, even Bozeman,” he commented. “This lunatic goes into the store waving a knife around and three men jump him with guns?”

  “One of the utility workers had a knife, the other a gun. Another guy was getting gas, saw the man through the door and took his hunting rifle out of the window rack of his truck.”

  “Shit,” Ty said. He stepped back and walked around in circles swearing. He returned to face me and ran his hands over his face. “I can’t do this. You’re like a magnet for disaster.”

  “Me?” I asked. My voice rose as much as his.

  He poked a finger into my shoulder. “You! Who else would have a man steal something off their doorstep, practically get blown up and then get involved in a holdup?”

  Was he losing his mind?

  “It wasn’t my fault the guy robbed the store. I was just getting a tea!”

  “Exactly,” he countered immediately. “You weren’t even trying. I can only imagine what kind of disasters you can create when you actually try!”

  I was stunned and angry. Hurt. Now Ty was turning into a lunatic.

  Before I could even think, he grabbed my shoulders and pulled me in for a kiss, one with a really good amount of tongue. It was fierce and possessive, wild and untamed, as if the action told me everything he felt when he couldn’t say the words.

  I heard some catcalls in the background, probably from his fellow firefighters. And a few policemen. Some bystanders, too.

  He pulled back, but held onto me. Good thing, as I wasn’t steady on my feet after a kiss like that. “I can’t keep my hands off of you.” He sounded mad about that. “Fuck. But I can’t do this anymore. I can’t watch someone else I care about get hurt. Or killed.”

  Ty walked off and climbed into the back of the fire truck. I watched it pull away, frozen where he’d left me.

  8

  “What?” Goldie practically shouted when I shared the news about the robbery. We stood on her front porch. She and Paul had bought a small bungalow when Nate and I married. It was one story, over a hundred years old, and just three blocks from the store.

  “Everything turned out fine,” I replied, downplaying the entire incident.

  “But it might have turned out far worse.” She had a hand to her neck and some color drained from her face underneath her bronzer.

  I gave her a quick hug when the boys stampeded out onto the front porch. I figured the conversation was over…for now.

  “Mom, guess what?” Bobby asked.

  “What?”

  “We got to go in the hot tub in our underwear!”

  Goldie and Paul had a hot tub in their backyard. They used it all year round, but it was fabulous for the winter. It held eight people and had special colored lights under the water. Zach and Bobby considered it their own mini swimming pool. And they didn’t have to wear swim trunks.

  “GG got us tickets to the demolission dervy!”

  I eyed Goldie, also known as GG. It stood for Grandma Goldie. Goldie, of course, refused to be called Grandma so we compromised on GG. “Tomorrow night at the county fair. We’ll go early and do the rides,” she said.

  The ‘we’ in that statement didn’t include me. I was never psyched about spending time in the hot sun at the county fairgrounds waiting in line for deathtrap rides that were ludicrously overpriced. Top that with overheated, cranky kids and it made for a day in Hell. Obviously, I had very negative feelings about the county fair. I didn’t mind walking around and seeing the animals and watching the auctions, but the rides, ugh.

  “Demolition derby? I love a good demolition derby!” I told Bobby. I really was excited about a demolition derby. Who could deny an interest in cars smashing and ramming each other? And the mud! Now I just had to get out of the fair part.

  “We’ll talk more about the other stuff later,” Goldie said as she gave Bobby a squeeze.

  “You can just watch it on the news.”

  * * *

  When I got home, I stood under the shower until the water ran cold, the boys parked in front of the TV watching the original Star Wars. I used the bath salts Goldie had given me for Christmas last year but never opened, hoping it would scrub off the layer of sleaze that had built up at Dex’s ranch. I let my hair air dry while I carried a laundry basket around the house picking up dirty clothes that had been scattered on the boys’ bedroom floors and in their bathroom.

  I had to admit my feelings were a little hurt. Okay, a whole lot of hurt. I felt a funny pang of regret, a loss of something that hadn’t quite started. Ty didn’t want anything to do with me because I was a threat to myself. Ha! Nothing, I meant nothing, exciting happened to me—until less than a week ago when I’d purchased two gnomes at a garage sale. Getting myself hurt was a silly idea because I did nothing crazy. Nothing over the top. Ever. No rock climbing, no sky diving, no crazy adventures of any kind.

  Sure, there was a definite spark and connection on a sexual level with Ty. Make that raging inferno, but Ty didn’t really know me. Just as he didn’t know much about me, I didn’t know anything about him. I knew he had parents and grew up in Pony on a ranch. I knew he’d been in the service. I didn’t know what he’d done in the service. I didn’t know how his deployments had affected him. He must have had friends and fellow soldiers who’d been hurt or even killed. And it had impacted him to such a level that he’d rather push me away before he could care about me, just in case something happened. He’d said as much.

  Was it up to me to change his mind? Or was that too much for one man to handle? Was it even fair to try? Did I even want to? I’d already had one lying cheating husband die on me. Did I wa
nt to go through that again? Did I want to get in any deeper with a guy who might walk away? Ty wasn’t the only one with scars.

  But then I smiled to myself as I poured laundry detergent into the machine. I realized he cared about me enough to push me away, and that had to be a lot. And that warmed a place in my heart I thought long frozen over like a Montana winter.

  * * *

  Kelly called once the laundry was in the dryer.

  “I saw the robbery on the news. Are you all right?” she asked, her voice laced with worry.

  The local TV station was small-time. As in teensy tiny. Not that they weren’t good. They, thankfully, didn’t have a lot of news to cover. Not much bad stuff happened in Bozeman, one of the reasons I liked living here. It hit on the current news around town, which, most of the time involved crop rotation, deep freezes and triplet calves. The excitement of the day had been a toss-up between the Best in Class awards for poultry at the county fair and the convenience store robbery.

  “I’m fine. Scary.” I was in the kitchen getting a snack. Cheese and crackers. I had the phone tucked between my ear and my shoulder while I sliced some Monterey Jack and laid it out on a plate with a bunch of Ritz.

  “It said the man was on meth.”

  “Looked like it to me,” I replied. “He was completely wigged out.”

  “My next-door neighbor’s son was arrested on Monday for possession of meth.”

  “Really? Mrs. Tanner’s son?” Mrs. Tanner taught at the university. English professor, if I remembered correctly. Her son had to be in his twenties and obviously up to no good. God, I hoped my kids wouldn’t turn to drugs and blow all the hard work I’d been doing.

  “He worked at one of hot springs, I can’t remember which one, and someone discovered him selling in the men’s locker room.”

  “A hot spring?” That was surprising. Natural hot springs were all over Montana, several within an hour’s drive of Bozeman. One was just down the road from Kelly’s house so she went often with the kids. So did lots of other families. Most have four or five pools, each with a different temperature ranging from average pool water to just-before-scalding. They always smelled faintly of rotten eggs.

  “It’s weird there were two meth incidents within a few days. It’s getting a little too close to home for me,” Kelly said.

  With seven kids, I couldn’t blame her.

  “Oh, I forgot. When Ty came to get Bobby’s arm out of the patio umbrella stand, he said they went on a few meth calls. He told me today a meth lab burned down in Churchill. And, there’s something big going on but they don’t know what it is yet.” I poured apple juice into plastic cups and called for the boys to come in from the backyard to get their snack.

  “In about ten years we’re going to be dodging all kinds of teenage crap without having to deal with drugs, too.”

  “I don’t know if I’ll be able to handle drugs, but teenage s…e…x, no problem,” I spelled out as I handed Bobby his cup.

  “Yeah, we’ll just make them sit down with Goldie for The Talk. I guarantee she’ll embarrass them into staying virgins until they’re thirty.”

  “Don’t forget Paul. He’ll probably take them to watch a teenager give birth and scare the hell out of them.”

  “Ah, you’ve got the best family.”

  * * *

  Every year in July, the Gallatin County Fair is held at the Fairgrounds, a few blocks north of Main. Contests gave blue ribbons in all kinds of categories. Horses, cows, chickens, rabbits, sheep, pigs. Quilts, pies and jams. Displays for each category were spread across various buildings of the Fairgrounds. The buildings reminded me of the old National Guard stations, built decades ago with vintage drab gray sheet metal siding. They were all shaped the same, long and narrow. Some were specifically for animals with pens running the length of the building in four long rows with two aisles to walk. The floors were dirt. The smells were intense and bad. In the chicken and rabbit building, it was also incredibly dusty and hot with feathers, fur and shavings in the air.

  Ranch life and town life mingled for the week. It seemed that night we joined everyone in the entire county. And maybe some from the next. Wranglers blended with Carhartts. Baseball hats and Stetsons. I dressed somewhere in the middle with jeans and sneakers with a pink tank top. The dust kicked up with your every step so I learned the hard way years ago to skip flip-flops or sandals. Your feet got filthy dirty and covered in all kinds of animal poop bits. I had a serious thing about animal poop.

  The sun tilted over the Tobacco Roots, the evening still warm. I had my hair up in a ponytail to keep my neck cool. I’d joined Goldie, Paul and the boys at seven after the heat of the day had passed and the boys had burned off most of their energy on rides. We had a little time to kill before the derby.

  I kissed everyone and we started our meandering, checking out the animals. “I want to see the cows,” Bobby said. “Some kids get to have one as a pet. I want one, too.”

  “Those are farm kids with lots of land. Where would you put your cow?” Goldie asked.

  “In the back yard.”

  “There’d be lots of cow poop. Everywhere!” Zach added.

  I didn’t want to share with Bobby what happened to the ‘pets’ once they grew big enough to eat so I decided to distract. “Let’s go check out the horse auction.” I pointed to the building nearest us.

  “Yeah!”

  The boys ran ahead, Goldie following as best she could in her gold toned pumps. They didn’t go well with the dust and uneven ground, but they definitely matched her black Capri pants and tank top that had been attacked by the Bedazzler.

  “I delivered Joann Jastrebski’s baby yesterday. A boy,” Paul said. I’d been friends with Joann in college and kept in touch through social media and every once in a while, saw her around town.

  “That’s great.” I was excited for other people to have babies, but it had been a hard time for me when I had Bobby. A three-year-old and a newborn without a dad. By that point, Nate had lived in Hamburg and a few months away from being dead. But even with the joy of a new baby, I had been heartbroken for what could have been.

  Paul touched my shoulder and gave me a smile. A knowing one. What I liked most about him was his ability to understand, to have an entire conversation with just a brief touch or eye contact. He, too, remembered what his son had done to me.

  The horse auction was in full swing when we took our seats on the bleachers. The stands circled the room and looked down on a center ring with a packed dirt floor. Plenty of people were there to buy, sell or just watch the action. Obviously, I had no plans to buy a horse so I fell under the watch category. After my unusual and graphic lesson the day before, I’d seen more horses in two days than I had in my entire life.

  Horse sex didn’t appear to be the main attraction, at least. In fact, it all looked fairly boring. Someone rode a horse around the pen, slow and fast, for those interested in buying to see what they’d get while the auctioneer did his fast-talking routine. I couldn’t tell what made one horse better than another, but they seemed to sell for all kinds of prices. From several hundred dollars on up. Paul took the boys to stand down at the fence for a close-up view. Zach and Bobby stood on the bottom rail and Paul stood between them as they talked and pointed at various things.

  Goldie and I sat quietly and watched first one horse, then another go up for sale. As the third horse came in, the announcer called, “This quarter horse is from the Rocking Double D ranch.” My stomach lurched when I saw Drake Dexter ride his horse around the ring. He was definitely at home in a saddle, that was for sure. He wore jeans and boots and the same hat from the other day. Today’s shirt was navy blue and the sleeves were rolled up to show his strong, tan forearms. Out of all the people in the audience he had to hone in on me as if he had some kind of weird ESP-type skill. His eyes met mine and he tipped his hat, old fashioned style.

  “Well, well,” Goldie said, looking the man over.

  “That’s Drake Dexter.”


  “That’s one handsome cowboy. He melts my butter.”

  I had to admit he was handsome, but butter? He more like curdled my milk. But looks were only skin deep. When he opened his mouth, the man gave me the creeps.

  I wasn’t paying any attention to the auction. My thoughts drifted to Dex and our first, very weird meeting.

  “Sold!” the announcer shouted over the loudspeaker. Dex guided his horse over to the fence and lifted his arm in a casual wave to me.

  “He wants to talk to you. Mmm, mmm. Go on down. Talk to the man. Maybe I’ll send him a box of goodies.”

  “I have a feeling he already has a goodie drawer,” I told her. Probably an entire goodie room, like say, a dungeon.

  I smiled, admittedly weak, as I carefully stepped down from the bleachers and approached Dex.

  “Hello,” he said. “You look nice in pink.” He stared at my tank top which meant he was taking in the cleavage. Being large-chested, I tried to buy the most modest tank style I could find with a higher scoop neckline than most, but when a man sat atop a horse he could see right down to your belly button.

  “Um, hi.” I crossed my arms over my chest and realized too late that only made things worse. I hadn’t learned from the last time with Ty. Did I look as awkward as I felt?

  “I’m surprised to see you here.”

  “I’m with my family.”

  He handed the reins to a man who’d joined us at the rail. Dex climbed down and the man and horse walked off. Dex put his forearms on the top bar and leaned in. I could smell some kind of spicy aftershave, which I had to admit, smelled nice. He held a short riding crop in his hands. I hadn’t noticed it before.

  “I didn’t realize you whip your horses.”

  Dex looked at the whip. “Sometimes they need a little gentle prodding.”

  “Ah.” I didn’t know what else to say. This was one uncomfortable conversation and it had only just started. I wasn’t a fan of hurting animals…or people.