Big Sky Secrets

by Linda Lael Miller

  “Are you being deliberately obnoxious, or does it just come naturally to you?”

  Landry remained happily intractable. After all, Ria wasn’t the only one around here with a hard head.

  “Drink the broth.”

  “I just want to go back to bed and quietly die,” Ria protested, but instead of following through, she curled her fingers around the mug handle and hoisted it an inch or so off the tabletop.

  “Going back to bed isn’t an option,” Landry informed her, “much less dying. We’re going riding as soon as you choke down some of that broth and put some clothes on.”

  Ria looked horrified. “Riding? On horses?”

  “On horses,” Landry confirmed, immovable.

  “Out of the question,” Ria said, with a sniff. “I’m sick. I need rest.”

  “Wrong on both counts,” Landry answered, folding his arms, leaning his chair back on two legs and grinning at her. “You’re not sick—you’re hungover. There’s a difference. And what you need is fresh air and a little exercise, not ‘rest.’ That’ll only keep you thinking about how bad you feel.”

  “You are insufferable.”

  Landry smiled broadly. “Thank you,” he said.

  Ria made an exasperated sound, took a couple of cautious sips from the mug, waited a second or two to see if any kind of physical calamity would strike and, when one didn’t, kept drinking.

  “If I finish this, like a good girl,” she said acidly, between sips that were getting progressively bigger, “will you go away and leave me alone?”

  “Not a chance,” Landry answered. “You look better already.” He couldn’t resist. “The blazer is a nice touch, I must say. Who’d have thought to pair one up with a nightgown?”

  “Shut up,” Ria said, but she didn’t sound as though she had high hopes that the request would be granted. She was looking straight at him, though, and her eyes were shooting sky-blue fire. “Get this through your thick head, Landry Sutton—I am not going anywhere, especially not with you!”

  “Yeah, you are” was his casually confident response. “You just haven’t accepted the fact yet.” He pushed back his chair, rose to his feet again. “Finish the soup. Since you seem to be stuck in neutral gear, I’ll rustle up some clothes for you and—”

  Ria seethed.

  He loved it when she seethed. It was proof that her blood ran hot, a distinct advantage in bed. Provided they ever got to bed, that was.

  “Forget it,” she told him. “You can’t make me get dressed.”

  “No,” Landry admitted, on his way back to the bedroom again, “but I can do it for you if you’re going to be stubborn.”

  “I’ll call the sheriff,” she shouted after him, but Landry could tell she was bluffing.

  “Do that,” he called back. The house was small. They probably didn’t need to yell, but there it was. Their personal communication style. “My guess is, once he hears the whole story, Boone will be on my side.”

  Ria gave a small, strangled scream of sheer and unadulterated frustration and stomped after him, only to find him not riffling the contents of her closet or bureau, but sitting smugly on the side of the bed, waiting for her.

  “All right,” she said. “But if this damn fool idea kills me, it’ll be on your conscience!”

  Landry didn’t laugh, but it wasn’t easy. Damned if the woman wasn’t beautiful, even when she was mad as a wet cat and hungover as hell, both at once.

  He held up both palms, in a gesture of peace, and kept his mouth shut.

  “Get out,” she told him.

  He glanced at the door. No lock, and that was good, because she wouldn’t be able to shut herself away, thus creating a standoff. He could be forceful when the situation called for it, but kicking in the door would be going too far.

  Wouldn’t it?

  Landry sighed, got up and left the room.

  Ria slammed the door behind him, hard.

  He took up his post in the hallway, leaning idly against the wall.

  Inside the bedroom, drawers opened, banged shut again. There was a lot of foot stomping and some pretty colorful muttering.

  Landry simply waited, calm as a Zen monk in deep meditation, his expression amiable. The fact of the matter was, he was enjoying every moment of Ria’s muffled tirade.

  The conclusion he’d come to the night before, on the way to the Boot Scoot Tavern, surfaced again. He loved Ria Manning, God help him.

  And he definitely wanted her. But as long as Ria wore her late husband’s wedding band, he wouldn’t do anything more than kiss her—there had to be some reward for all this nobility and self-control, didn’t there? And there were certainly plenty of ways to make her want him.

  It was a challenge, and Landry thrived on those. A little mental foreplay, plenty of Sutton charm and Ria would be his in no time.

  Landry’s native confidence wavered, very slightly and very briefly.

  He sure hoped she’d come around anyway, because if she didn’t, he’d be fresh out of bright ideas.

  * * *

  RIA WAS FEELING better with each passing moment, which was great in every way but one: it made her wrong and Landry right. Again.

  She practically yanked on her clothes—fresh underwear, jeans and a T-shirt, socks and her one pair of boots. Then she swiped deodorant into her armpits, brushed her teeth for the second time that morning—the first pass had been more about desperation than hygiene—and ran a comb through her hair, briskly dispensing with a bad case of bed head.

  What was wrong with Landry Sutton anyhow?

  He’d seen her at her worst—silly drunk, throwing up alongside the road and, this very morning, dressed like a homeless person and so ornery that she was starting to offend herself.

  She sighed once, heavily, hoping to vent at least some of her frustration, and stood still in front of the mirror above her vanity table, studying her reflection and wondering what the hell Landry saw in her.

  Frank’s ring caught a stray beam of light just then, and Ria remembered how Landry had taken her hand the night before, when she’d made an idiot of herself by asking why he wouldn’t make love to her, held it up in front of her nose and said, “This is why.”

  Now she fidgeted with the band—even started to take it off—but something stopped her. What made her hesitate?

  Love for a man she would never see again?

  No. She’d accepted Frank’s death long before she got to know Landry; she realized that now. What she felt for her brave, goofy, lost husband was fondness, not love.

  The truth was, the ring was a kind of shield, a magical talisman that kept men from getting too close. For a long, long time, Ria not only hadn’t wanted that kind of intimacy, but she’d feared it. Her soul had been too raw, her heart and mind and faith too bruised, to open herself up to such pain by taking a chance on trusting somebody.

  Who, after all, should have been more trustworthy than Frank?

  Unable to help herself, Ria went right on looking backward, into the unreachable past. At first, people had left her alone, respected her grief and her fierce need for solitude, for time to think and remember and sort through a lot of paradoxes—like the fact that Frank had loved her very much, she knew he had, and yet he’d risked everything for a one-night stand.

  Sure, he’d tried to clear the air. He’d wept, something she’d never seen him do before, and he’d apologized and promised to be faithful from then on. On some level, Ria had believed him. She’d taken him back into her heart, tried to pretend nothing had happened, eventually convinced herself that nothing had to change, that she and Frank could just go on as before.

  When she was truly honest with herself, though, Ria knew she hadn’t carried off this feat of self-deception, simply because the pain of being betrayed by the person she’d trusted most, the person who had made sacred vows in front of an altar, had never actually gone away. She’d submerged it, that was all, and then Frank was dead, and sorrow buried her as surely as if the whole side of a
mountain had given way, come down on top of her, crushed her.

  Come what may, there was no changing the fact that Frank had, for one night at least, forgotten that he loved her.

  Ria drew a deep breath, let it out and left the wedding band right where it was, on her left-hand ring finger. Weird? Maybe. But, like it or not, she still needed that thin golden boundary. Without it, she could be swept away all over again and, eventually, hurt all over again.

  One betrayal by a man she loved had nearly destroyed her. Another would finish the job.

  Finally, Ria turned away from the mirror, vaguely troubled by the woman she’d seen looking back at her in the smooth glass, and left her room.

  Landry was waiting in the hall. She made a face at him.

  He laughed.

  And, remarkably, that was the beginning of a good day.

  Leading the way outside, Landry untied the mare and introduced her to Ria as Butterball.

  It was a fitting name, but the horse was a sweetheart, and Ria, who’d ridden a little when she was younger, taking weekly lessons until the phase passed, took an instant liking to the animal.

  She managed to mount Butterball, with just a leg up from Landry, and the cloudless blue sky, the cool breeze and the sight of acres of flowers seemed to saturate her entire being as she looked around. Even the sun, her worst enemy when she’d been forced to open her eyes that morning, seemed benign now, blanketing her in gentle warmth.

  “You’re not half-bad at this,” Landry commented, keeping his eager gelding reined in so Butterball could keep up without giving herself a heart attack from overexertion. “Riding horseback, I mean.”

  Ria laughed. “Thanks,” she replied. “I think.”

  For the next hour or so, they simply rode, through meadows and woods, along the banks of the Big Sky River and, finally, back around to Ria’s farm.

  Quinn was sitting on the front steps when they arrived, Bones cavorting in the grass at her feet. The girl grinned and waved, then bounced up off the step and hurried toward Ria and Landry, though her attention was mainly fixed on the horses.

  Watching her niece, Ria reflected that, against all odds, she’d had a wonderful time on the ride, at least partly because she and Landry had avoided serious talk. He’d told her funny stories about growing up on the road, and some of the things he and Zane had done, which were the stuff of memoir, in her opinion. He’d described a gypsy’s childhood, often low on money or gas for the car or even food, but none of that seemed to bother Landry—he didn’t say so outright, but he’d been a happy kid. Yes, they’d moved from town to town, this hapless little family, the boys starting school in a new place every year, but their mom had always managed to spin the next challenge as an adventure. Listening, laughing now and then and tearing up at times, too, Ria had found herself wishing she’d known Maddie Rose Sutton—clearly, she’d been one heck of a woman.

  Ria came back to current reality, somewhat reluctantly.

  Quinn, who’d evidently been prattling away right along, patted Butterball’s damp neck while Ria climbed down from the saddle, doing her best not to wince when her feet hit the ground.

  “Can I ride sometime?” Quinn asked eagerly.

  Landry smiled, his face shadowed by the brim of his hat, but he didn’t reply.

  “We don’t actually own a horse,” Ria reminded her niece, with gentle humor. Lord, but she was going to be sore after this ride, and Quinn was bound to notice, but, to Ria’s way of thinking, that was still better than if she’d witnessed her aunt’s hangover.

  “Clare’s family has a whole bunch of them,” Quinn pointed out, beaming. “Her dad is a stock contractor. He goes to rodeos all over the place, and sometimes Clare goes with him, too. He used to take her brother and leave her at home, but—”

  The girl blushed and fell silent. If she’d been texting a girlfriend, she probably would have explained her sudden hesitation this way: TMI.

  Too much information.

  “Lots of ranchers around here,” Landry said quietly, addressing Quinn but looking at Ria—all of Ria, if the nerves jumping under every inch of her skin were any indication. “It shouldn’t be too hard to scare you up a horse.”

  “Great!” Quinn crowed, over her brief spate of chagrin. “How about now?”

  Ria gave the girl a mock glare. “How about later?” she countered. “It may be Sunday, but we have chores to do—fields to water, weeds to pull.”

  Landry chuckled at that, tugged at the brim of his hat and waited while Quinn gathered Butterball’s reins and handed them up to him. He took them, nodded farewell and turned both horses away, heading slowly along the driveway, toward the road.

  Shading her eyes with one hand, Ria watched him go.

  Funny about this Landry thing. That morning, before the broth and the horseback ride, she’d done everything she could to run the man off. Now she wished she could call him right back again. She was like a magnet, it seemed to her: one side repelling Landry, the other pulling him to her and holding him there.

  Another wave of pure heat went through Ria then.

  Quinn finally nudged her lightly to get her attention. “If I were you,” the girl said, grinning, “all grown up and stuff, I mean, I sure wouldn’t have made a guy like that sleep on the couch.”

  “Quinn Whittingford!” Ria scolded, but she couldn’t help laughing a little. “What kind of talk is that?”

  “The straightforward kind,” Quinn replied. “I’m seventeen, remember? We had sex education way back in sixth grade—all the gory details—so it’s old news. Besides, my generation isn’t hung up on stuff like that.” The grin widened, and her voice dropped to a confiding whisper. “I saw the pillow and afghan on the sofa when I went inside to put my things away.”

  Embarrassed, caught out on something she hadn’t actually done, Ria steered her niece toward the house, where they could grab some bottled water and put on a little sunscreen. She’d find out more about Quinn’s views on sex later, when she’d thought of a way to broach the subject. Hopefully, the girl had enough sense to abstain for a few more years.

  “So,” she asked, “did you have fun at Clare’s party?”

  Smiling, and using the word awesome a lot, Quinn was in verbal overdrive again, spilling all the delightful details.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  HIGHBRIDGE WAS IN the kitchen, as usual, when Landry finally couldn’t delay going inside any longer. He’d returned Butterball to her stall in Zane and Brylee’s barn, brushing the animal down and checking her hooves for rocks or other irritants before he patted her on the nose and took his leave.

  If anybody besides Cleo had been around, he might have stayed awhile, just to burn through another hour or so, but the housekeeper explained that (1) some folks had to work for a living, so she didn’t have time to sit around jawing for half the day, if that was what he had in mind, (2) Brylee had gone over to her company, Décor Galore, for a meeting of some kind, no telling when she’d be back, and (3) Zane and his darned dog were off someplace, up to God only knew what brand of fresh foolishness, and young Nash had gone with them lest they find themselves one fool short.

  Well, that pretty much sized things up.

  So Landry had tipped his hat to Cleo, hiding a grin, turned away from the screen door he’d just had the bad judgment to knock at, crossed the porch and the yard and gotten back on his horse.

  Now, all too soon, he was home.

  Highbridge turned his head at Landry’s entrance, gave him a generous dose of the stink-eye and went back to what he’d been doing—peeling and chopping vegetables to add to the big Crock-Pot waiting on the counter next to the sink.

  Although he’d hoped to cut a wide swath around his disapproving butler before, the attitudinal winds had shifted. Landry’s back was up; it was past time for a showdown, and he was damned if he’d leave the room without one.

  Highbridge seemed to guess that. He heaved a great, long-suffering sigh and turned to face his employer, wiping his hands
on a ruffled apron that would have struck Landry as damn funny—if he hadn’t had his tail in such a twist.

  “It’s good to know you’re alive and well, sir,” Highbridge remarked as an idle aside, delicately barbed.

  Game on, Landry thought. Bring it.

  “You were in doubt?” he countered dryly.

  Highbridge’s thin shoulders rose and fell in a faint pantomime of a shrug. “Not really,” he said, and just when Landry thought the old coot had finally seen fit to drop the “sir” from the tag end of just about every sentence he ever uttered, he tacked it on after all. Went on to say, “You made your intentions quite clear yesterday. And from the gossip zipping around the internet, you made good on them.”

  Landry narrowed his eyes. “What gossip?”

  Highbridge sighed. “Don’t tell me you’re surprised, sir,” he said, moving to set the plug in the Crock-Pot and settle its lid in place. “Many of your fellow revelers felt compelled, evidently, to chronicle your escapades at the—” here, the intrepidly nosy butler paused to sniff in refined disdain “—the Boot Scoot Tavern—some of them even took photographs.”

  Landry lifted one hand, increasingly miffed by Highbridge’s tone and a few other things, too. “Hold it a second—you’ve lost me. I’m stalled out back there at the word escapades. What, exactly, did you mean by that?”

  Highbridge regarded him dolefully for a long time and then completely ignored the question and asked one of his own. Maybe Landry wasn’t the only one around here who wanted to have this out, once and for all.

  Had the Englishman been a younger man, they’d probably have been outside by now, having themselves a good old-fashioned brawl.

  “How could you, sir?”

  “How could I what?”

  “How could you have gotten Ria Manning drunk—and in such a public place? I can assure you, sir, that the lady in question isn’t going to like some of those photographs. Or the harm they may well do to her reputation.”

  Landry lowered his eyebrows and slitted his eyes in pure consternation. “Maybe I’d better have a look at these pictures before we continue this conversation,” he said in a taut undertone.