Big Sky River

by Linda Lael Miller

  I’ve got to go, James replied briskly, this time with no hesitation.

  And Tara knew it would be useless to argue.

  Still, she grabbed up her cell phone and dialed James’s home number.

  She got his voice mail, of course. “You’ve reached Dr. Lennox. Leave your information and I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.”

  Yeah, right.

  Tara steamed. “You can’t do this,” she protested, after the beep. “It’s wrong!”

  Nothing. If James was at the penthouse, rather than his clinic or the hospital, and she knew he must have been because he never sent personal emails from anyplace but home, he was ducking her call.

  The bastard.

  She pushed back her desk chair and got to her feet, wildly annoyed.

  What did James plan to do? Send his daughters a postcard from wherever the cruise ship stopped? Guess what, kids! You have a new stepmother—isn’t that wonderful?

  Tara paced, trying to vent some of her frustration, but pacing didn’t help. She still wanted to pick up something and throw it.

  So she marched outside, mosquitoes be damned, and headed for the vegetable garden, a shadowy, moonlit space, and ruthlessly weeded three rows of carrots. At least she hoped she’d been pulling up weeds.

  After a little while, the adrenaline began to subside, and she stood up. Left the garden. Of course the knees of her jeans were wet and stained, where she’d knelt in the dirt, as she came around the side of the barn, just in time to see headlights bumping over the cattle guard and swaying up the driveway.

  Recognizing Boone’s squad car, she waited in puzzled consternation, fitfully slapping at mosquitoes as they landed on her shoulders and bare arms.

  He parked the cruiser, shut off the lights and got out. His dog bounded out after him, a four-legged deputy trotting at his side.

  Without a word, Boone approached, took Tara gently by one elbow and squired her up the porch steps and through the front door.

  “What—?” she asked, still confused, balking once they were over the threshold.

  A single lamp burned in the entryway, and Boone looked wan in the thin light, even a little gaunt. The dog sat down at his feet, small and watchful, looking up at both of them, ready for anything.

  Boone gave a ragged sigh, took off his hat, shoved a hand through his already-rumpled hair. “Don’t ask me what I’m doing here,” he said, “because I don’t have the first damn idea what the answer is supposed to be.”

  Tara touched his arm, feeling strangely stricken. There it was again, joy and sorrow, all rolled into one. “Come in,” she said quietly. “I’ll make coffee.”

  He nodded once, but said nothing.

  As she led the way to the kitchen, Tara was aware of Boone Taylor in every fiber of her being, aware of his heat and his strength and his uncompromising masculinity.

  “You’ve done a lot with this place,” he commented when they’d reached the kitchen.

  Tara recalled that Boone had grown up in the house, looked back at him as she approached the single-cup coffeemaker on the counter. “Have a seat,” she said, indicating the table and chairs in the center of the big room.

  Boone dragged back a chair, sighed again and sat.

  Suddenly, it was ridiculously easy for Tara to imagine that he belonged in this kitchen, that they lived here together as man and wife.

  Maybe in a parallel universe, she thought sadly. In this one, they weren’t even friends—just neighbors who each wished the other one would move away.

  Tara crossed to take his hat from his hand, hung it from one of the pegs near the back door, returned again to the caffeine-machine.

  “I talked to Patsy McCullough a little while ago,” Boone said presently. It came again, that strange sense that it was normal for him to sit at this table, and tell her about his day. “Dawson’s mother.”

  Tara set a mug under the spigot of the coffeemaker and pushed the brew button. She nodded. He’d had news, obviously, about the boy who’d fallen from the water tower in town that day. Instead of speaking, Tara simply waited, letting Boone take his time.

  Finally, and with an effort that probably meant he’d dredged up the words from somewhere deep in the unfathomable silence within him, his dark eyes haunted, he continued, “The good news is, Dawson came through the surgery all right, and he’s doing as well as can be expected. The bad news is—” Here, he paused again, cleared his throat, shoved a hand through his hair once more. Tara suppressed a need to walk right over and smooth her fingers through it, offering him comfort. “The bad news is, there was some serious damage to the boy’s lower spine, and he isn’t going to walk again.”

  Tara’s throat scalded, so she swallowed hard. “I’m sorry,” she said very softly. She was sorry for Dawson McCullough, sorry for his mother—and sorry for Boone, strong as he was.

  The emotion felt dangerously intimate.

  She moved stiffly as she brought him the coffee, then went back to the machine to brew a cup for herself. Now it was a certainty—she wouldn’t sleep well that night, if she slept at all. Something about the set of Boone’s shoulders, the look in his eyes, a combination of vulnerability and stubborn courage, made her nerves pulse with a kind of sweet urgency that reminded her of desire. She was stunned to realize that, more than anything, she wanted this man to hold her, even make love to her.

  And damn the consequences, forget the morning after.

  She took an automatic step back, nearly spilling the cup of coffee in her hand.

  Boone’s gaze held steady—no way he could know what she was thinking, what she was feeling—the man wasn’t psychic. At least, she hoped he wasn’t.

  Fingers stinging from the mild burn, Tara took herself resolutely to the table and sat down opposite Boone, wishing he would leave, wishing he would stay.

  The inner conflict was so intense, so tangled, that heat surged into her face, and she set her cup on the tabletop, hoping Boone would think the blush was a reaction to hot coffee.

  “I shouldn’t have come here,” he said gruffly, scraping back his chair, abandoning the coffee she’d made for him only minutes before. He started to rise.

  “Stay,” Tara heard herself say. “Please.”

  Boone slowly lowered himself back into his chair. The dog, having shot to its feet, lay itself down again with a resigned little sigh.

  Boone smiled at the critter.

  Tara smiled at Boone.

  Watch it, warned her better judgment.

  “I’m sorry,” Boone told her, “for busting in on you like this. I ought to be at home, putting the boys to bed.”

  “They’re watching movies with Opal and the twins,” Tara said. She propped her elbow on the tabletop, cupped her chin in her palm and regarded Boone as objectively as she could, given the crazy gyrations of her nerves. “And there’s no reason to apologize for dropping in. We’re neighbors, aren’t we?”

  His grin was a mere tilt of one corner of his mouth, but his eyes danced behind that sheen of weariness. “If you say so,” he allowed lightly, taking a sip of his coffee and savoring it for a long moment before going on. “But we got off on the wrong foot, you and I. There’s no denying that.”

  “No, I guess not,” Tara said, wondering what had changed between the two of them, and when. She’d never hated Boone Taylor, but she hadn’t liked him, either. He was too sure of himself, too good-looking, too hardheaded, too everything.

  He drew a deep breath, let it out slowly and met her eyes. “Today was a hell of a day,” he said, as though coming to a quiet realization.

  “You probably get a lot of those in your line of work,” Tara offered. “Maybe you just needed to tell somebody about it, in a familiar kitchen, over a cup of coffee.”

  Boone regarded her solemnly, but a touch of amusement lingered in his eyes. “Maybe,” he admitted. Then he looked around. “Not that this kitchen is all that familiar. When we lived here—Mom and Dad and Molly and me, I mean—it had ugly gold applian
ces, scuffed linoleum and bad wallpaper. Really bad wallpaper.”

  Tara laughed then, surprising herself.

  Had she ever laughed in Boone’s presence before? No. She’d hardly even smiled.

  The title of an old Bob Dylan song ran through her mind.

  The times were definitely changing.

  CHAPTER TEN

  NOTHING HAD HAPPENED between him and Tara, Boone silently insisted as he and Scamp left her place later that evening, but something had changed, something profound, and it was a burr under his hide trying to figure out exactly what the shift meant.

  Hell, he still wasn’t sure why he’d wanted to see Tara so badly in the first place, and never mind her tentative suggestion that, after a hard day, he’d probably just “needed to talk to somebody.” The fact was, there were plenty of people he could have spent time with—close friends, any of his deputies (except McQuillan), the bartender over at the Boot Scoot Tavern. The waitresses at the bowling alley snack bar, for God’s sake.

  Instead, he’d chosen Tara Kendall, of all people. The pseudo chicken rancher. The big-city sophisticate who looked down on his battered double-wide, his sorry-looking yard and, most likely, she disapproved of the fact that he’d left the boys with Molly and Bob for so long.

  To her, he was probably still just the redneck sheriff of a nowhere county, irresponsible to boot. Secretly, she probably marveled that he had all his teeth and no broken-down appliances rusting on his sagging porch.

  Okay, yes, Tara had been genuinely concerned about Dawson McCullough, the McCullough family and the accident that, even in the best-case scenario, would turn Patsy and her children’s lives upside down. Anybody with half a heart, with a shred of compassion for their fellow human beings, would care about a tragedy like that, and care deeply.

  What nettled Boone was that he hadn’t just wanted to be with Tara, hadn’t simply chosen to be with her. It was that he’d needed to, the way he needed his next breath, his next heartbeat. Bottom line: he hadn’t had a choice.

  And Boone didn’t like not having choices. Before tonight, he would have sworn he didn’t have an impulsive bone in his body. Despite all that, he’d left the office with the dog, hours after his usual quitting time, and driven straight to the chicken farm, like he was on autopilot or something, a moth winging its bumbling way into the bright core of a flame.

  Finally home, but still sitting in his cruiser, with the headlights washing over his weedy yard and Scamp watching him expectantly from the passenger seat, pointy ears perked and fuzzy head tilted to one side, Boone tightened his grip on the steering wheel, remembering Corrie and how much he’d come to love her after the first dazzling passion began to let up a little.

  They’d been nothing but kids when they got together, he and Corrie, awash in hormones and the kind of reckless optimism only the very young can sustain for long, but all too soon the realities of grocery bills and rent and car payments, along with an unexpected pregnancy, had matured them considerably. For all the challenges, totally against the odds, they’d made their marriage work.

  “If we don’t give up,” Corrie had said to him once, after a yelling match and a bout of Olympic-quality makeup sex, “we’ll be okay, Boone. All we have to do is keep trying to get this right, and, one day, we will.”

  Boone’s heart clenched as he recalled those wise words and felt again the softness of Corrie’s cheek resting on his bare shoulder, the warmth of her skin, her blind confidence that they had a future together, a good long one.

  They were both naive and idealistic. Neither of them had much of an adult support system, with Molly gone off to live the life she’d put on hold for his sake. His folks were dead by then and hers were far away, divorced from each other and disapproving their one common link: their daughter. Back then, Boone was making next-to-no money as a brand-new sheriff’s deputy, a job he’d immediately loved. He’d pulled overtime whenever he could get it, just to make ends meet, and taken extension courses through the community college over in Three Trees as well as online.

  His goals had been clear: he’d wanted to be a good provider, a good husband and father. The rest, he’d figured, would take care of itself.

  The plan, simple as it was, had made sense to him and to Corrie, too. They’d had the piece of land Boone had gotten after his and Molly’s parents had died, and a ramshackle trailer bought for less than a thousand dollars, the entirety of their combined savings. They’d had a baby coming and they’d had each other, and for the time being, anyway, all of that was enough.

  In a few years, with discipline and more hard work, they’d reasoned, they’d be on track financially. They’d have more children and later on, Corrie would go back to school, get a degree of her own.

  Trouble was, it turned out that “a few years” were all they were ever going to get.

  By the time Boone earned his degree in criminal justice, he and Corrie had two fine, healthy sons, and they’d paid off their secondhand car, too. Nights and weekends they spent hours sketching out preliminary designs for the house they meant to build, doing much of the work themselves. The place would be modest, definitely not a mansion but big enough to accommodate a growing family. There would be a fenced yard, and Boone planned on building a play area for the boys. They’d even had a construction loan in place, one that could be converted to a mortgage later on, when the earth flipped on its axis.

  One ordinary morning, while showering, Corrie found a hard, pea-sized lump in her left breast. She’d called Boone in from the kitchen, where he was overseeing Griffin’s cold-cereal breakfast and spoon-feeding Fletcher in his high chair, a hand-me-down from Molly’s kids, and there was a slight quaver in her voice.

  Back then, as a deputy, he’d worn starched uniforms, and he carried Fletcher with him, tucked in the curve of one arm and held at a little distance, in hopes that the toddler wouldn’t drool or spit up on his shirt.

  He’d found Corrie shivering in the tiny bathroom, a towel clutched around her otherwise naked body, her eyes huge.

  Without a word, she’d guided his hand beneath the towel to the soft underside of her breast. He’d felt a distinct swelling beneath her silky, still-damp flesh.

  They’d just looked at each other for a long moment, both of them struck silent by cold, elemental fear.

  Just an hour later, the babies were in a neighbor woman’s keeping and Boone and Corrie were on their way to the local clinic. Blood tests, exams, a mammogram and lots of frightening questions followed. A biopsy was scheduled for the next morning.

  Of course the news was bad, and the fear grew into something that made Boone’s breath catch in his lungs and the backs of his eyes scald like fire.

  Ever the devoted sister, Molly came right away, leaving her own kids in Bob’s care, and Corrie had undergone the dreaded double mastectomy. Since radiation would be required, reconstructive surgery had to be put off until later.

  Boone still choked up when he recalled the first words she’d said to him, his beautiful, funny, tenderhearted wife, when she woke up and saw him standing beside her hospital bed.

  “You’ll still love me, won’t you, Boone? Now that I’m flat-chested and scarred?”

  He’d nearly lost it then, replied hoarsely that he’d always love her, no matter what.

  “But you’re a breast man,” she’d said with a small, sad flicker of a smile.

  “I’m your man,” he’d managed to get out in a raspy whisper. “Nothing’s going to change that, Corrie. Nothing.”

  At first, they’d been hopeful. After all, Corrie was young, and otherwise healthy, and cancer wasn’t an automatic death sentence the way it used to be; what with all the new drugs and streamlined treatments and experimental programs, people recovered from the disease all the time. Went right on to enjoy happy, productive lives.

  Things didn’t happen that way for Corrie and Boone, though. An infection swept through her already-weakened system and, despite massive doses of antibiotics, she couldn’t fight back.
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  Slowly, bravely and sometimes painfully, when she’d refused her meds because they made her “dopey,” Corrie had wasted away, become a ghost weeks before she’d actually breathed her last in Boone’s arms.

  Forcing himself back into the present moment, if only because he couldn’t stand the past, Boone squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, tried to shake off the images. Scamp let out a little whimper and scrabbled at the inside of the car door, tired of being confined.

  Methodically, as though he’d been programmed like a machine, Boone shut off the headlights and the engine, leaned across to open the passenger-side door so Scamp could jump to the ground. He hoped he wouldn’t have to chase the critter back to Zeb Winchell’s again, because he was just plain tuckered out by then, physically and emotionally.

  He pulled that door shut, opened his and got out of the cruiser.

  To his relief, Scamp lifted a leg against the side of an old tire, took care of business and then trotted off toward the porch, just as the door swung open. A rectangle of yellow light splashed into the yard, and Opal Dennison’s tall, sturdy frame filled the gap.

  “Their movie is almost over,” she said, evidently referring to the kids, stepping out onto the rickety porch to greet Boone. “It’s an ice-age cartoon—” Opal paused, chuckled appreciatively, having the gift of finding joy in little things, shook her head as though there were no end to the marvels of ordinary life. “One of the characters is a wooly mammoth with an Elvis haircut, believe it or not. And here are all those folks claiming the King is dead.”

  Boone chuckled wearily, mounted the steps, walking into the double-wide behind Opal. He locked away his service revolver first thing, like always, then put his cell phone on the charger. While he washed up at the kitchen sink, leaving his badge on the windowsill beside a potted plant he didn’t recognize, Opal scooped two huge slices of pizza from a box on the counter onto a plate, long strands of cheese trailing, and zapped the works in the microwave.

  Boone didn’t have the heart to tell this good woman he wasn’t hungry and probably wouldn’t get that way, at least in the immediate future. His brain was wrung out, his emotions were as snarled and spiky as a coil of rusted barbed wire and his stomach was as cold and heavy as if he’d swallowed a bowling ball.