Her Forever Gift (Big Sky Mavericks Book 5)

by Debra Salonen

  "Bailey won't stay in Marietta as long as she thinks Paul hates her and the whole town is judging her."

  Oscar sniffed--a pale imitation of the sort of reaction he normally would have shown. "What makes you think Paul doesn't hate her? He barely makes eye contact with me when I go into the hardware store. His dad's civil enough, but I don't think young Paul and I have exchanged more than a 'hello' in fifteen years."

  Louise dragged the hard plastic visitor chair closer to his bed and sat gingerly, her side tingling slightly. "Well, what do you expect? In his mind, you talked his girlfriend into having an abortion. Who's he supposed to blame?"

  Her husband's big, calloused hands curled into a fist. His shoulders bunched--a sad mockery of the power that once emanated from what was reputed to be a killer right hook. "It was the right thing to do, Luly. I don't want to hear any more about it. You should have asked someone else to give her a ride."

  A ride. As if that was the sole purpose of asking Paul to pick up Bailey.

  Louise rocked back, her gaze dropping to her hands clenched in her lap. Her world was a nanosecond away from imploding. Diffusing a few of the land mines she and Oscar had laid so carelessly during their years of childrearing was her only chance to save them all.

  She'd come to that conclusion at two a.m. two nights before. Sleeplessness--her new reality. Desperation and fear could overcome any reluctance to open a proverbial can of worms, she now realized. And this particular can was well past its expiration date.

  Luckily, when Paul came to finish the new ramp she'd hired Big Z Hardware to install, he arrived alone. He and his crew had knocked out the majority of the work in a single day, but he'd run out of material for the handrail and had promised to return this morning.

  A man of his word who didn't let old grievances keep him from making money off people he hated. Although Louise knew some of the credit for mitigating the weight of the grudge he no doubt still carried was due to her efforts to help his daughter with her reading skills.

  Chloe Zabrinski was a sweet kid with a diagnosed learning disability. Chloe's mom picked Louise as her daughter's tutor without asking Paul, Louise was certain. Luckily, the two had clicked. In part, because Chloe reminded Louise so much of Bailey when she was the same age.

  "Paul," she'd said, approaching the tall handsome man with a confidence she didn't feel. "I was hoping to catch you before you left."

  The boy had grown into a more commanding personality and presence than she would have predicted all those years back. Smart. College-educated. Innovative. He saved the family business from Big Box intrusion and turned it into a thriving, competitive business.

  As strange as it sounded, Louise was proud of him. Like a mother. Or the mother-in-law she could have--should have--been to him.

  He picked up a big, bulky power saw and started wrapping the cord. "I still have about half an hour of clean-up. How does the ramp look?"

  She barely glanced at the new switchback tacked to the steps of her modest wood and rock home. "It's wonderful. I was sure surprised yesterday to see the owner doing the grunt labor."

  "Our regular crew is a little backed up. I knew this one was on deadline. When does OC get to come home?"

  "Tomorrow...if he starts eating."

  Paul's lips pressed together and he gave a nod. He'd grown into such a handsome man. Every bit as strong, forceful and confident as Oscar had been at the same age. But unlike her husband, Paul didn't wear his demons on his face, in his actions and attitudes. "Heard about the leg. That's tough. Marietta's lost a colorful character."

  Her back stiffened. "He's not dead yet."

  "Sorry. I just meant...from what they're saying he won't be doing a lot of fishing anytime soon."

  The sickness in her belly percolated. "He's been counted out before."

  Stay away from that illiterate roughneck, her father had warned. He'll bring you nothin' but grief.

  "Things will be different when Bailey gets home."

  Paul dropped the heavy saw so abruptly its leading edge half-buried in the soft grass. He turned to unbuckle his tool belt. "You talked her into coming back, huh?"

  A little too disinterested? A good try, but Louise didn't buy it. Never had. She'd known he wasn't over her daughter when she met his new wife. Jennifer. College girl. Pretty brown hair and green eyes. A Bailey clone. Close but...no cigar.

  And eventually she divorced him and returned to Bozeman to marry a man who loved her for who she was, not who she wasn't.

  "I asked." She didn't know how extensive the town's gossip tree was these days. "You knew she lost her husband in a car accident, right?"

  He nodded. "Tough deal. Got hurt, too, I heard."

  "Broken ankle. Opposite leg as her dad. Strange coincidence, isn't it? Luckily, she's younger and healthier. She's walking now."

  His eyes showed more interest than his measured, "Oh."

  "Actually, Paul, I have a problem, and I was hoping you might be able to help me out." She took a deep breath. All he can say is no.

  "Chloe told me she and Mark are going to their mother's tomorrow. I don't know what time you usually go, but I thought, if it wasn't a huge imposition, you might pick up Bailey at the airport then drop her here on your way past?" She rushed to add, "If I'm not with Oscar, he won't eat or drink. And he torments the poor nurses so. Partly the medicine, but partly...well..."

  "He's a snarly wolverine."

  She bit her lip. Why contradict the person she was soliciting help from?

  "Text me her arrival information. I'll let you know if the time works." He'd picked up his tools and walked to his truck before she could thank him.

  She checked her phone again. Even allowing for slow baggage claim, Paul should have dropped Bailey off at the house by now. Her finger hovered over the text app a moment before she changed her mind and shoved the phone in her pocket.

  What she and her daughter needed to say to each other had to be done in person. Louise's moment of reckoning was coming...in more ways than one.

  Available now on all platforms: MONTANA COWGIRL

  ###

  I know what you're thinking...Austen?

  What can I say? I love a challenge--even a PITA (pain in the arse) like Austen Zabrinski. Maybe he just needed the right woman to whip him into shape.

  Please enjoy the first chapter of MONTANA COWBOY:

  Austen Zabrinski's horse spotted the snake before he did.

  Probably because Austen was texting his ex-not-quite girlfriend, Sheri Fast. Not quite girlfriend, but definitely ex, if the hostile tone of her text was any indicator.

  "Whoa. Shit. No. God dammit."

  The last came in one of those slow motion howls that got big laughs on TV, but sent the fear of broken bones through the person crying out.

  His impact with the parched late August earth of south western Montana blasted the breath from his lungs like a kid popping a blown-up paper sack. The ringing in his ears and bright shards of light dancing across his vision made him wonder if someone had set off a bomb nearby. Was that what made his horse shy?

  "No," his half-functioning subconscious shouted. "Snake!"

  He shot to his wobbly legs like a drunken pledge and looked around. No coiled rattler ready to strike. Thank God.

  No horse, either.

  "Mother f--"

  He mumbled the rest of the epithet. His mother had been on his case for cursing in front of Emilee and Hunter, his twin sister's kids who were staying at the Zabrinski family homestead until Mia got her life back on track--or moved home--whichever came first.

  Austen had flown to Cheyenne twice in the past couple of weeks to 'help,' but other than ferrying the kids to Marietta in time for the Big Marietta Fair and delivering one box of crap to his ex-brother-in-law, Austen couldn't say he'd done much.

  When they were kids, he and his twin were inseparable. Then competition happened. There could be only one winner and each wanted that title, whether it was Valedictorian or first to pass the Mo
ntana bar.

  Austen won his share and then some, but Mia was first to marry, first to have kids--their parents' first grandchildren--and, unfortunately, first to divorce.

  And I thought my life was f-ed up. He almost muttered the thought. But talking to oneself in the middle of nowhere beneath a clear blue Montana sky was a sure sign of impending craziness. A point Sheri had made in her last text: U R crazy. Nobody gives up a promising career in politics to be a cowboy. NoBody. The capital B proof she was texting heatedly. With passion.

  Sheri Fast did everything to the hundred and tenth degree. Her focus and drive drew him to her, but she loved the fast, highly connected life they'd each embraced in Helena ...before everything turned to shit. She attributed his decision to give up politics to hurt feelings.

  "Pull up another layer of big boy pants," she'd advised, never one to mince words. "You're a politician. Things get ugly. What did you think would happen when you work for a snake? Sometimes, the snake handler gets bit."

  Austen had been bit hard. For a time, it had appeared as though he'd be censured by the Montana Bar Association and lose his license. Fortunately, he'd invested well and he owned his ranch, the Flying Z, free and clear.

  The ranch had originally been named the Crooked K, supposedly a nod toward the curious bend in the creek that meandered through his property. The silly name seemed down right ridiculous when the new owner was a lawyer, so Austen changed it.

  He'd bought the place a few years back as a tax write-off. Ever since the proverbial buffalo dung hit the fan earlier this year, his log home had become a haven of a different kind. A place he could use to figure out what he wanted to do with the rest of his life. A fact nobody seemed to accept--especially the people who knew him best. His family.

  Mia seemed the most affronted by his plan to sell his condo in Helena and move to the log home he'd had built to impress his city cronies twice a year, once when hunting season opened and then throughout the spring when he courted favors for Jim "Crandy" Crandwell, Austen's boss, mentor, and, Austen had believed wrongly, friend.

  Logically, Mia's refusal to accept his decision to bow out of politics was less about Austen giving up and more about the fact her relocation from Cheyenne to their hometown of Marietta, Montana, was not one of her choosing. She'd been at the top of her game when a double whammy blindsided her. First, her husband of nearly fifteen years knocked up his summer clerk--not necessarily his first affair, Mia came to find out, but the first he cared enough about to leave his wife for, then her monthly self-exam showed an anomaly that turned out to be Stage 1--thank God she caught it early--breast cancer. But Mia, who never did anything halfway, chose the most extreme treatment possible. Every step in the process depleted her strength, and the soul-crushing circumstances surrounding her divorce sapped her spirit.

  Austen hated feeling so damn powerless to help when the person closest to him was in pain. But what could a single, presently unemployed, lawyer dealing with his own monumental failures do to help two kids who were angry, confused, and disillusioned?

  Disillusioned. The word came up a lot lately.

  "Where's my fu-frigging phone," he muttered, scanning the clumps of sagebrush and dry grass.

  He spotted his hundred and eighty-five dollar Larry Mahan hat playing chicken with a dust devil and took off on a run... or, rather, a hobble. His hip hurt and his shoulder started singing the blues the moment he reached for the filthy, tan felt brim.

  "Crap." He liked the hat. A lot. It was the first one that didn't make him feel like an 'all-hat, no cattle' imposter.

  Technically, he could call himself a cowboy. He owned a ranch. He owned cattle--a hundred-plus head, according to his foreman, Stuart Briggs. And despite his graceless nosedive a few minutes ago, he wasn't a rank amateur when it came to horses. He'd ridden with the Sheenan boys every summer growing up.

  But the bottom line--Sheri's favorite expression--was undeniable.

  "I'm no cowboy."

  He put the hat on his head and did a slow, achy-breaky three-sixty. He needed a massage from Lani, his favorite therapist in Helena.

  Thinking about the life he'd left behind in Montana's capitol city aggravated the precursor to an ulcer his doctor had warned him about. "The stress of this lousy job of yours is eating you alive," the specialist he'd seen for chronic indigestion told him. "Austen, you've got the gut of a seventy-five-year old man. Get out of politics while you can still enjoy real food."

  He unconsciously rubbed a tender spot right above his belt line.

  His doctor got his wish. Austen was out of politics. He'd been the sacrificial scapegoat--and again not by choice--who took the fall for the man he'd loved like a father and once admired for his honesty and convictions. Austen's fall from grace didn't hurt nearly as much as the blistering process of having his rose-colored blinders sandblasted from his eyes.

  "Where am I?"

  About as far from his three-bedroom cedar log home as possible on his two-hundred-and-fifty-acre ranch. He didn't ride this area often. Actually, he rarely saddled up when he was at the ranch. He'd acted on a whim that morning... or, maybe, he was still processing the long talk he'd had with his brother's future father-in-law, OC Jenkins.

  "You know what your problem is, Austen?" Marietta's so-called Fish Whisperer had asked. "You don't know how good you have it. You're smart, healthy, and young. You live in God's country... hell, you own a big piece of it, but you're too busy trying to be a somebody to enjoy what most every nobody like me would give their eye teeth to have."

  Since that conversation at the Big Marietta Fair, Austen had taken a cold hard look at his life. He'd even sat down with a yellow legal pad and made two columns: pros and cons.

  As much as it galled him to admit it, OC was right. The Flying Z was a huge asset that he'd basically ignored or was content to use as a tax haven. He might not have any natural aptitude or experience when it came to ranching, but he'd graduated from frigging Harvard, for God's sake. He ought to be able to figure out a plan.

  So, he'd saddled up Jake... Johnny Boy... the brown horse that Stuart claimed was kid-proof and set off to take stock of his assets.

  Unfortunately, the Flying Z was bigger than it looked on paper and his sense of direction wasn't that acute when he was on the ground.

  He turned toward the nearby hillock. His nostrils crinkled and his stomach lurched. If the whiff of animal stink was a valid indicator, he was within hailing distance of his brother's place. According to Stu, Paul Zabrinski had rented the former Jenkins's ranch to a California woman some were calling a "hot llama mama."

  "Lord," Austen muttered.

  His imagination supplied an image of a hippy-dippy chick in long skirts and a tie-dyed shirt. He hadn't met her. Didn't even know her name. Hell, he wasn't a hundred per cent certain he knew what a llama was. It wasn't a breed of cattle, he knew that much. And people in Montana raised cows. Period.

  He set off at his usual places-to-go/people-to-see pace but froze when he heard the most dreadful sound of all.

  Not a rattle.

  A crack.

  He looked down. Sure enough, when he lifted the toe of his black, triad skull and crossbones boot, the lens of his brand new iPhone sparkled like a shattered crystal spider web.

  He picked it up and kept walking... his cuss words painting a blue streak against the bright Montana sky.

  #

  The low rumble in Beau's throat quickly escalated from suspicious question to full-on bark. The big, quaking woof of a Great Pyrenees who took his job of protecting hearth, home, and master very seriously was not something you ignored--even if you could.

  "Is Jason here?" Serena James asked, abandoning the sloppy, icky mess of mucking out a stall filled with ancient... well, many years old... horse manure. She kept a firm grip on her flat-nose shovel, just in case the call to alarm involved a slithering vertebrate with rattles, and followed the big white dog to the open doors of the barn. "It's about damn time."

  She'd
been waiting over an hour for her recently hired high school helper to show up. She'd hung a 'Help Wanted' sign on a community board at the Marietta Library last week. Jason... she couldn't remember his last name... had been the only call back so far.

  "I need someone on Friday morning. I pay fifteen dollars an hour. Cash."

  Since school didn't start until Monday, she figured she'd get some kind of response from kids who spent their wad at the fair and needed a buck or two. Jason promised to show up.

  She turned her ratty, old ball cap--stolen from her brother, Peyton, years ago--bill forward again before reaching the bright sunlight. She'd worn it backwards to avoid banging her crown on the built-in feeding bins. Someone had taken good care of the animals at some point in the old barn's life. She didn't know who that person might be, because she'd only arrived in Marietta, Montana, a week and a half ago.

  "Where is he?" She turned toward the road, squinting as her eyes adjusted from the gloom. "I don't see a truck turning in." She hadn't heard an engine, either, but that wasn't surprising given the fact she'd had the volume turned up on her snazzy little portable mobile speaker, which was tuned to the "Mostly Country" playlist on her iPod.

  "Woof."

  The thick white hair on Beau's back rose like a two-inch Mohawk. His gaze pointed her in the opposite direction. "Holy smokes. That's something you don't see every day."

  A person. On foot. Crossing the open field beyond the gate that adjoined her farm's property to her neighbor, a man she believed to be her landlord's brother.

  "You'll probably never see my brother," Paul Zabrinski mentioned when she signed the lease agreement. A year seemed fair and the price had been right since Paul deducted a generous amount for feeding and watching over his five horses. "He's an absentee landowner."

  Serena watched the man striding as if on his way to conquer his next piece of the known world. Not a hired hand, she decided. Even in jeans, a pale blue shirt with rolled up sleeves, and boots, he gave off a sort of I've-got-money-and-attitude vibe.