Big Sky Wedding

by Linda Lael Miller

  He might as well just toss out all he supposedly knew about the fairer sex, too, he realized, because with Brylee, the ground rules were different.

  Not that he’d figured out what in hell those rules were, exactly, because he hadn’t.

  Brylee was beautiful but earthy, and she had substance, a quality that went way beyond the physical. She was also skittish, and understandably so, if all that stuff posted on the internet about her and Hutch Carmody was even partly true. He’d seen the pictures, had to swallow hard when he thought of her standing there in that jam-packed church in Parable, looking like a storybook princess in her wedding dress, clutching her bouquet, confused and furious and, behind it all, very, very hurt.

  Whoever this Carmody fool was, he had all the sensitivity of a grizzly bear with a toothache, and Zane had already made up his mind not to like him, should they ever cross paths in the first place. Which they almost certainly would, given that Parable and Three Trees—the thirty-mile distance between them notwithstanding—were basically one town, people-wise.

  Hutch Carmody. What kind of low-down, yellow-bellied SOB waited until the wedding was in full swing before opting out on the marriage, anyhow?

  Beleaguered, Zane finally set those particular thoughts aside, since they wouldn’t lead him anywhere he wanted to go.

  The reasons for not having company that night—especially this company—continued to rack up in his mind, like a passel of circus bumper cars all heading for the middle at once and crashing into one another.

  To start with, the house was a shambles. Worse than a shambles. In his L.A. neighborhood, a place like that would have been condemned.

  And as far as supper went, well, there wasn’t any decent food to speak of—canned ravioli definitely wouldn’t fill the bill—and since he hadn’t bothered to bring along his TV when he left California, the only way to watch a movie, his or anybody else’s, would be to hunch in front of his laptop like a pair of birds crowded together on a short stretch of wire.

  Not that the idea of sitting close—the closer, the better, in fact—to Brylee Parrish, under just about any circumstances, didn’t have its high points, but things had to be done right, damn it. Not okay, not passable, but right.

  This get-together was important, though Zane didn’t feel inclined to explore the reasons why he thought so, and he knew from experience that, sometimes, a man only gets one chance with a woman like Brylee. They didn’t come along every day, after all.

  Zane sensed that this was one of those times, dangerously pivotal, and he didn’t intend to blow it.

  Furthermore, he’d told Cleo they’d go to town for the stuff she needed to make the house at least semifit for human habitation, and Nash was expecting to score a TV, probably the first one he’d ever owned. Breaking a promise to the kid was no way to build trust, now was it? Furthermore, it was a Jess Sutton move for sure—get somebody’s hopes up and then decide not to be bothered.

  And if there was one person in the world Zane didn’t want to emulate, it was his waste-of-skin father.

  “Maybe another time,” Brylee said almost gently, bringing him back from his mental meanderings. She looked so earnest, sitting there on that little gelding’s back, even elegant, but, at the same time, mildly apologetic. Late-afternoon sunshine glowed in her glorious brown hair, like an aura woven directly into the strands, and he saw a certain reluctance in her eyes, along with something else that wasn’t so easy to name. Never looking away from his face, she paused, bit her lower lip and finally went on, with a shaky effort at a smile. “You’re still getting settled and all. How about coming to our place instead, you and Nash—and Cleo, of course—say, Saturday night? We could watch the movie then, all of us. And Casey says you two have met before, so she’s been planning on asking you over anyhow....”

  He’d wanted an out, Zane thought, and lo and behold, Brylee had given him one, along with an invitation for Saturday night. This was a good thing. So why did he feel deflated all of a sudden, as though she’d just shut him down, as though the main chance had already come and gone, with him barely noticing, never to come around again?

  All these emotions were foreign to Zane, being a relatively uncomplicated person, and he shook them off. He’d known Brylee Parrish for a day, and she was already making him crazy, which was either the worst possible preview of coming attractions—or the best.

  “I know Casey fairly well,” he confirmed smoothly. “We did a made-for-TV movie together once. It would be good to see her again and meet the rest of the family.”

  Of course Brylee was using the kinfolk as a buffer, a way to establish a polite but safe distance between them when he ventured onto her turf, but that was okay.

  Take things slow, cowboy, Zane told himself. Real, real slow.

  Brylee’s face lit up suddenly—was it the word family?—and knocked Zane back on his figurative heels a little. The woman actually glowed, like the figure of an angel in a stained-glass window flooded with sunlight, and the sight of her hit him where he lived.

  “My niece and nephew will be thrilled to meet you in person,” she went on, gathering momentum. “And Shane—that’s my nephew, of course—is just a little older than Nash, so I think they might enjoy hanging out together.”

  She’d shifted her gelding’s reins in the direction of home, a subtle clue that the ride was over and that, for the time being at least, Brylee preferred to go her way and let him go his.

  “Sounds good,” he said, by way of an acceptance, and tugged at the brim of his hat in the time-honored way of a cowboy bidding a lady “so long.”

  And Brylee Parrish was most definitely a lady.

  “I’ll get back to you with the details,” Brylee said, fully at ease now, smiling. What had changed? “About all of us getting together for supper, I mean.”

  Zane grinned to himself. Given that she’d just issued an invitation on her sister-in-law’s behalf, she probably had to clear the plan with Casey. “All right,” he agreed, reining Blackjack toward his own place. “Thanks for showing me around, Brylee. I enjoyed it.”

  A soft, peachy-pink color blossomed in her cheeks. As though stuck for a reply, she swallowed visibly and nodded, but said nothing.

  That would have to do for “You’re welcome,” Zane decided, amused and already looking forward to Saturday, which probably went to prove that he was a little shy of a truckload in the common sense department.

  They parted cordially then and, recrossing the range land that bordered his own spread way off in the distance, Zane let Blackjack trot, then lope and finally gallop full-out, the way the critter had probably been wanting to do from the second he stepped down from that horse trailer. Once Zane was sure he was out of both Brylee’s sight and her hearing, he whipped off his hat, swung it over his head in a wide loop and let out a hoarse shout of pure happiness.

  By the time Zane’s house and barn came into sight, Blackjack had slowed to an easy walk, his ebony hide glistening from the exercise.

  Seeing Nash and Slim in what passed for a yard, Zane smiled to himself. They’d been playing a game of fetch, it appeared, but the dog was doing it his way. He sat still as a monument, there in the tall, weedy grass, watching Nash throw a stick, wait in vain for Slim to go after it and finally chase it himself.

  Zane knew the boy had been waiting for him to come back, though most likely a tow truck couldn’t have dragged the admission out of Nash. The kid made a practice of not needing anybody—it was safer that way.

  Not for the first time, Zane felt a sharp pang of regret. He and Landry were about all the boy had. Why hadn’t either one of them stepped up and done something? On his part, he supposed, it had been plain old self-centered apathy. When you got right down to it, he hadn’t wanted to be bothered, take time out of his busy life, and Landry’s reasons were probably similar.

  Riding nearer, Zane heard the echo of his mother’s voice in his head. If folks would just take care of their own, Maddie Rose had often said, there wouldn’t be
so many lonesome, hurting people in this old world.

  And Maddie Rose Sutton had definitely taken care of her own—him and Landry—even though it meant taking whatever work she could get and constantly moving from one place to another and never having two nickels to rub together.

  Near the barn door, standing open as it did during the daylight hours, Zane swung down from the saddle, nodded to his younger brother and led Blackjack inside, to his stall. He was brushing the animal down, to help him cool off, when Nash sauntered nonchalantly along the breezeway and paused to watch the proceedings.

  “Are we still going into town to buy stuff?” the boy asked, going for a casual tone and manner but not quite making the grade. “Miss Cleo’s got a list, and she’s already looking up local contractors on the internet.”

  “We’re still going to town,” Zane replied quietly. Finished grooming the horse, he put the brush away, patted Blackjack on one flank and opened the stall door to step out. A grin quirked one corner of his mouth as he regarded his little brother. “I thought you were fed up with shopping, the way you groused about it earlier.”

  Nash flashed a grin and, once again, Zane got a glimpse of the man the kid would grow up to be, given half a chance, a little love and a reasonable amount of guidance. “That was before you said you’d buy me my own TV,” he replied.

  Zane laughed and slapped Nash lightly on the back. Slim ambling alongside, they headed for the house.

  The moment they stepped inside, it was clear to Zane that Hurricane Cleo had made landfall. Hardly a decorator’s dream before, the kitchen strongly resembled a federal disaster area now, with the flooring rolled up in big, ragged curls and most of the cupboards torn from the wall as if by brute force.

  The president would probably arrive with a boots-on-the-ground task force any minute now, accompanied by the Red Cross and various other relief agencies. Most likely, Oprah already had semis rolling, loaded with blankets, medicine, bottled water and brand-new issues of her magazine.

  Zane sighed, shoved a hand through his hair. Good thing Brylee hadn’t taken him up on that invite to supper, he reflected ruefully. One look at this place, and she’d have been scared off for sure—and maybe for good.

  Cleo, still in her floral-print scrubs, her hair wild around her round face, now that it was no longer contained by the hat with the bobbing flower, rose and met Zane’s stunned gaze with a fierce glower, clearly expecting a fight. Her jaw clamped down visibly, her eyes flashed and she folded her arms across her ample bosom. “What?” she challenged.

  Zane laughed, looked around again and said, “Talk about shock-and-awe. Tell me you didn’t do this all on your own.”

  “I helped,” Nash put in proudly. “We found a sledgehammer in one of the sheds and, after that, it was easy.”

  “No chain saw?” Zane quipped.

  Nobody got the joke.

  “Just making things easier for the contractors,” Cleo said, mellowing out a little now that she figured Zane wasn’t fixing to hit the roof over the mess she and Nash had made. Given that he’d never so much as raised his voice to the woman in all the time she’d worked for him, he was amused that she’d braced herself for trouble the way she had. “They’ll start putting in their bids first thing tomorrow morning. By the next day, this whole place will be swarming with construction people.”

  “Yeehaw,” Zane murmured dryly, thinking of the noise and the sawdust and the general disruption. Not that he’d planned anything for tomorrow that required concentration.

  “You had a phone call,” Cleo informed him as a brisk afterthought, indicating the cell Zane had left behind on the charger when he left to go riding with Brylee. “I don’t know who it was, but they’re persistent.”

  Zane shook his head and approached the counter, one of the few things in that kitchen that was still standing. He picked up the phone, touched the screen to bring the thing to life and frowned. Three messages, all from a Chicago number.

  Landry? Wasn’t he in Berlin or somewhere, wheeling and dealing?

  Curious, he thumbed the voice-mail icon and put the device to his ear. “Call me,” Landry said. No explanation, no “if you have time,” not even a simple “Hello.” Just a snapped answer and a hang-up.

  He didn’t bother with the other two messages. In fact, Zane’s strongest impulse was to ignore the calls entirely, or return them whenever he got around to it, if that ever happened, but he couldn’t do that. Landry rarely contacted him—the announcement that Nash was winging his way to Montana on a commercial jet was the first Zane had heard from his brother since a two-line email sometime around Christmas.

  So he hit the callback button.

  He wandered into the big, empty living room, waiting for Landry to pick up. Cleo hadn’t gotten that far with her sledgehammer, but the space looked like the aftermath of a no-holds-barred demolition derby just the same.

  “Zane?” Landry’s voice was clipped, brusque. He sounded almost irritated, as though he’d been doing something vital to the future of the free world and Zane had interrupted him for a mundane chat.

  “Just returning your call,” Zane said, with an easy affability he didn’t feel. There was a lot wrong between him and Landry, though they’d been close once, and he’d long since decided to steer clear.

  “Good,” Landry ground out. “That’s good. Er—thanks.”

  “I’d say ‘you’re welcome,’” Zane drawled in reply, “but that would be stretching the truth, little brother. What’s up?”

  Landry huffed out an exasperated sigh. “I called to ask if the kid—Nash, I mean—got there okay.”

  “Nice of you to ask,” Zane gibed, keeping his tone cordial. “He’s here and he’s fine. And how come you’re not in Germany doing whatever it is you do?”

  “There was a change of plans,” Landry answered, after a beat or two. His tone was still grudging, but, though the change was nearly imperceptible, he’d backed off a little.

  Something in the way his brother sounded made Zane uneasy. Landry didn’t usually have any trouble speaking his mind, but he was choosing his words carefully now, and there was an air of awkwardness around them.

  “You okay?” Zane asked, after a few moments of silent debate with a part of himself that would rather leave this alone.

  Landry gave a ragged sigh in response. “I’m just feeling kind of restless, I guess,” he said. It was the closest he’d come to opening up, at least to Zane, since before their mother died. “You know that old bit about climbing the rungs to success and then finding out you had your ladder against the wrong wall?”

  Zane let out his breath. “Been there, done that,” he said, and waited.

  Another pause followed, then Landry answered with a sort of deliberate cheer. “I thought I might come out there for a week or so—to Montana, that is—and have a look at that ranch of ours.”

  “All right,” Zane said, mildly baffled. Landry had never shown an interest in Hangman’s Bend, beyond plunking down a sizable amount of money for his half of nearly three thousand acres and signing the appropriate papers. Though he’d had no more intention of actually living out here in the boondocks than his brother had, Zane had paid extra for the existing house and barn, so on some level, he must have figured on winding up there at some point.

  “What’s the nearest town?” Landry asked, in a distracted tone, as though he might be taking notes but already chafing to get on to the next item on his agenda.

  “Place called Three Trees,” Zane answered.

  “I thought it had some Bible name,” Landry mused. Zane could picture his brother frowning.

  “That’s the next town over—Parable,” he said.

  “Right,” Landry said. “Is there a hotel?”

  Zane grinned. He hadn’t done a whole lot of research on the area himself, but he knew Parable County boasted several run-down but respectable motels, the kind that used to be called “motor courts,” along with a few bed-and-breakfast type establishments. Landry, the
city boy, was probably picturing his usual accommodations—say, the Peninsula or the Ritz.

  “You can stay here,” he replied, expecting a refusal. “It’s rustic, but we have plenty of room.”

  “Who’s doing the cooking?” Landry wanted to know. “Not you, I hope.”

  Zane almost laughed. “Cleo is in charge of grub,” he replied, picking up on his brother’s indirect reference to an episode when they were probably nine and ten years old. One night, home alone in a motel room in some dusty Texas town clinging to the crumbling sides of a road all but obsolete now that the freeways were in, they’d been especially hungry, so Zane had decided to whip up a meal instead of waiting for their mom to bring home whatever was left of that day’s special at the café. Since the room didn’t have a kitchen, Zane had set the secondhand hot plate on the desk in front of the window, heated the burner to a red glow and proceeded to fry up a few slices of bologna in an empty aluminum pie tin.

  Five minutes into this culinary endeavor, the cheap curtains had caught fire, and he and Landry had fled, panicked and coughing up their socks, into the weedy gravel parking lot. Black smoke billowed through the open door and the manager appeared, sweating and swearing, wielding a fire extinguisher that sprayed one shot of foam and then fizzled.

  Fortunately, the volunteer fire department had arrived promptly to put out the blaze, and the whole place hadn’t burned down, but the room was pretty much trashed—walls blackened, floor and furnishings swamped with water from the heavy canvas hoses.

  When their mother got home from work, less than half an hour later, a boxed supper of leftover meat loaf and mashed potatoes in hand, she’d been greeted by the manager, who was, of course, raving by then. He’d reminded her loudly that the use of hot plates and other such appliances in the rooms was strictly forbidden, and now his insurance rates were going to go up, and then told her to load her brats in the car and hit the road.

  Relieved that the kids were alive and unscathed and she wasn’t being asked to pay for the damage, Maddie Rose Sutton hadn’t said much at all; she’d simply listened to the old man’s diatribe until he’d run out of steam, then loaded up what few personal belongings she could salvage, gestured to her wide-eyed boys to get into the battered station wagon, settled the motel bill with what was probably her last few dollars and driven away.