Big Sky Wedding

by Linda Lael Miller

  Maybe she couldn’t hold on to a man, but damn it, nobody made a better salad.

  Casey wandered on in, Preston nestled against her right shoulder, patting the baby’s tiny back distractedly. When she focused on the array of food and cooking accoutrements set out on Brylee’s center island, a tiny frown creased the porcelain-perfect skin between her eyebrows.

  “What?” Brylee prodded good-naturedly, though Casey’s troubled expression had her a little worried.

  Casey scanned the produce and the frozen game hens once more, and then sighed a big, shoulder-moving sigh. Her beautiful necklace, a gift from Walker, specially designed, with a heart and two tiny, dangling Western hats, one representing her, the other, her husband, gleamed between the lapels of her faded cotton shirt. Somewhat nervously, she ran her free hand down the side of her respectably worn jeans.

  “Something came up,” Casey said, at long last, and her effort to overrule her reluctance and say what she’d come to say was painfully obvious.

  Preston stirred a little, made baby sounds and Casey soothed him with another back pat and a gentle, “Shush now, sweet pea. Everything’s fine.”

  The infant settled down right away.

  “Something came up,” Brylee repeated. “Such as?”

  Not that she didn’t have a sneaking suspicion what the answer was going to be. She’d made such a scene the night before, at the Boot Scoot, that Zane must have decided to back off, keep a prudent distance.

  Funny how that realization, which should have provided a modicum of relief, opened a trap door in the pit of Brylee’s stomach instead, one she thought she might just fall right through, end over end, forever, never quite hitting bottom.

  Casey’s reply confirmed everything Brylee had already guessed. “Zane isn’t coming to supper,” she said sadly, and Brylee knew her sister-in-law wasn’t sad for herself, or for Walker and the kids, much as they’d all been looking forward to entertaining a genuine movie star. Oh, no. Casey was sad for her, Brylee, the spinster—the woman who had made a lifestyle of being kicked to the curb by every man she found attractive.

  “Oh,” Brylee said, because that was all that came to her and because hiding things from the ultraperceptive Casey had proven impossible from the very beginning.

  Casey looked pained, and though she tried to smile, the effort faltered on her mouth and failed to stick. “Something must have come up,” she hastened to add. Again, she checked out the baby potatoes, the perfect brussels sprouts, the game hens just beginning to thaw in the island sink. “He said they’d come over some other time, he and the rest of his outfit. Sometime soon.”

  Sometime. Soon. In a pig’s eye. Zane Sutton was on the run, thanks to her. He probably wouldn’t come within a country mile of Timber Creek, ever.

  Brylee was definitely not going to cry, she decided, even though, for some inexplicable reason, she wanted very much to do exactly that. Maybe the alternate personality, she of the red dress and the sexy shoes and the hey-sailor hairstyle, was trying to reassert herself, take over again and cause even more trouble.

  She, the crazy fringe persona, might feel bad that Zane would be a no-show for supper, but the authentic Brylee, the person she truly was and wanted to remain, thank you very much, was glad to be spared an unavoidably awkward evening.

  Really glad, damn it.

  “Whatever,” she said, with a breeziness that, of course, didn’t deceive Casey for a second. She gestured toward all that carefully chosen food laid out on the island. “I’ll cook this stuff up, anyway—no sense trying to jam it into the fridge. We’ll have a nice family dinner, just you and Walker, Shane and Clare, and me.”

  The look in Casey’s expressive green eyes wasn’t one of pity, but she was trying too hard to project good cheer and optimism for Brylee’s comfort. Obviously, Casey knew the truth: that her sister-in-law’s already-tattered pride had just been rubbed raw. “You’re sure?” she asked hesitantly, gently. “I mean, really, that seems like a lot of work to go to, just for us.”

  “‘Just for you’?” Brylee asked, summoning up another smile, though this one felt as though it had been cemented to her mouth and was already beginning to crumble because there was nothing to hold on to. “‘Just,’ nothing, Casey Parrish. Nobody is more important to me than all of you. Nobody.”

  Casey couldn’t seem to make herself leave, though she did turn slightly, angling one shoulder toward the door she’d come through just minutes before. “There’s probably a good reason,” she reiterated lamely. “After working sixteen hours a day with Zane on the set of that TV movie we did a few years ago, I know he’s not the type to change his mind on a whim....”

  What Casey didn’t know, of course, was that Zane had kissed Brylee, just the night before, kissed her like she’d never been kissed before, at the edge of a gravel parking lot, beneath a sparkling spill of stars, and she’d not only liked it, she’d wanted a whole lot more. She’d let him know it, too. Then, as if that wasn’t bad enough, she’d flipped some emotional switch and gone from a red-dress, spiked-heel-wearing buckle bunny on the make to a sniveling, half-hysterical child—in a matter of a few heartbeats, no less.

  The man had probably thought she was screwed up enough to qualify for a whole slew of twelve-step programs, and who could blame him? He’d probably encountered obsessed fans who were more rational, and those poor souls at least had the excuse of needing medication.

  Worst of all, he’d never even met the real Brylee.

  “Don’t worry, please,” she told Casey, smiling so hard now that she thought her face might actually crack. Fake it till you make it. Wasn’t that one of the stand-by slogans in the recovery movement? “I’m fine. Really. I don’t even like Zane all that much.”

  Oh, no, not much. She’d merely have gone home with him, and straight to his bed, if he’d kissed her even once more, that was all.

  Casey wasn’t buying any of it, of course, but she nodded compliantly and retreated into the other part of the house, humming under her breath to the baby as she went.

  “Well, hell,” Brylee told Snidely, who, as usual, was stuck to her like a postage stamp with too much glue on the back.

  Snidely gave a philosophical-sounding sigh and meandered to the back door, wanting to be let out.

  Brylee crossed the room, opened the door for him and watched as he zipped through the space, as if anxious to be shut of her for a while and find himself some better company to hang out with.

  There seemed to be a lot of that going around lately.

  * * *

  ZANE HAD GONE to bed feeling like a damn peckerhead the night before, and he woke up with the same low opinion of himself. Rolling off his crumpled air mattress, he stood, rooted through dresser drawers until he found clean shorts and some socks. He put them on, then snatched yesterday’s jeans from the floor and got into those, following up with a colorless T-shirt and his shit-kicking boots.

  After brushing his teeth, splashing water on his face and neck and deciding categorically not to shave, even though he already had a pretty good stubble going, he made his way to the war-torn kitchen in search of coffee.

  Cleo, frying up bacon and eggs on a double-burner hot plate, the stove having been junked right away, gave him a wry glance. “Bad night?” she asked, looking like a ride at Disneyland in the bright primary colors she was wearing.

  Zane ignored the question, figuring the answer was obvious enough to go unspoken, found a mug and filled it with black coffee. “Where’s Slim?” he asked, looking around for his faithful dog. The critter had been right there last night, when it came time to bed down, but he’d been gone when Zane opened his eyes.

  Cleo chuckled. “He’s outside, with Nash,” she replied.

  “Why is it so quiet around here, anyhow?” Zane quizzed, after a few restorative sips of Cleo’s excellent java.

  “It’s Saturday,” the housekeeper reminded him. “Everybody needs time off, now don’t they? Especially construction crews, since they work so ha
rd during the week and all.”

  Zane sighed. “Good,” he said. “Maybe I can have two thoughts in a row without a handsaw screeching or a rain of plaster dust falling on my head.”

  Cleo puckered her lips and frowned, but her eyes were dancing with kindly disdain. “Poor you,” she said. She lobbed some of the food she’d just cooked onto a throwaway plate and held it out to him. “What, may I ask, has gotten under your hide so early in the morning, Boss Man?”

  “How much time do you have?” Zane retorted grimly, taking the plate she offered, his mouth already watering and his stomach rumbling. He would have sworn he had no appetite at all, and damned if it wouldn’t have been perjury. “It’s a long freakin’ list.”

  * * *

  WALKER CASUALLY DROPPED in at Brylee’s apartment for coffee and a visit in the early afternoon, trying to act as though the idea had been his own. Just a brotherly whim, not a rescue mission.

  Of course, Casey must have been behind this sudden decision, because Walker was always busy around the ranch, even on Saturdays, tending to the surprisingly constant needs of bulls and broncos, the lifeblood of his stock-contracting business. On top of that, rodeo season was well under way, and he’d be heading for Colorado soon, with half a dozen loaded trucks and a good share of his crew. And that meant even more work than usual, with all the preparation such trips required.

  “Coffee on?” he asked, nodding a greeting to Brylee before drawing back a chair and sitting down at her table. She was already pouring him a cup, black, the way he liked it.

  She smiled, welcoming the interruption, because for hours now, she’d been marinating poultry, cleaning and slicing each little brussels sprout into neat halves, to be seasoned and roasted with the hens, peeling just a stripe around what seemed like jillions of baby potatoes and leaving the rest of the skin intact, just to make them showy. Except for a couple of runs outside with Snidely, the supermarket foray and a visit to the barn to groom her horse, Toby, in his stall, she hadn’t taken a break.

  “I’m fine,” she said, preempting the inevitable how-are-you. She filled a coffee mug for herself and joined her brother at the table, trying to shift her sisterly viewpoint to a more objective one and see what Casey saw when she looked at him.

  Walker was undeniably handsome, the rugged, outdoorsy type, at home on horseback or mending fences, inseminating cows with bull semen, or loading and unloading rambunctious rodeo stock in a din of bawling and neighing and kicking and clouds of throat-parching dust. His brown hair was attractively shaggy, his greenish-gray gaze was piercing and he had the classically square jaw of a movie cowboy.

  Oops, Brylee thought, with an inner wince. Stay off the movie-cowboy trail, girl, because it leads straight to Zane Sutton, and you don’t want to go there.

  “Did I say you weren’t fine?” Walker challenged, leaning forward in his chair a little, a grin flickering in his eyes and doing an almost imperceptible jig at one corner of his mouth. He needed a shave, but he must have showered recently, because his tanned skin looked scrubbed and his hair was still a bit damp. His clothes were clean, too.

  Busted.

  Brylee sat back, folded her arms, tilted her head to one side. “Casey sent you,” she asserted mildly. “Big brother rushes to smooth his spinster sister’s ruffled feathers.”

  Walker gave a mild snort and shook his head, as though marveling at the range of her wild imagination. “That’s not true,” he said, after a thoughtful sip of his coffee.

  “You just dropped everything to stop in and have coffee?” Brylee chided. “I think you even took a shower and changed clothes for the occasion. Come on, Walker. I might not be a rocket scientist but, please, give me some credit.”

  He cleared his throat, looked serious for a moment, then recovered his usual low-key but cocky attitude. “Actually,” he said, pleased to contradict her, “Casey didn’t send me. Clare did.”

  “Clare?” Brylee frowned, puzzled. Surely Clare didn’t know enough about the situation with Zane, if it could be called a situation, to be worried about her aunt, but if she had been, the girl would surely have paid a visit herself instead of sending her dad as an emissary.

  Walker sighed as though the weight of the world had just settled onto his broad shoulders and was fixing to stay there a while. “She wants to tag along to Colorado with Shane and me,” he said. “She’s managed to get her mother to come over to her way of thinking, but I’m still holding out. The road isn’t a place for a teenage girl, Brylee. You ought to know that better than anybody, but for some reason, my lovely daughter thinks you might be able to change my mind.”

  So that was it. A soft, sweet sadness swept through Brylee as she sat there, remembering how searingly lonely it felt to be left behind when her dad and Walker and some of the ranch hands hauled stock to some rodeo, near or far. They—the men— stayed in motels and took all their meals in restaurants, and there were always new things to see and do, as well as the deliciously familiar ones, old friends you never ran into anyplace else, and new people to get acquainted with, as well. It was hard to believe those same wonders would appeal to Clare, who’d grown up aboard her mother’s tour bus and had been literally everywhere, including the White House and Buckingham Palace. But to that younger Brylee, a country girl looking at the very same scenery every day of her life, it had been an amazing adventure. A gift.

  Until it abruptly stopped, that is. She sat up a little straighter and ran her hands down the thighs of her sweatpants, choosing her words carefully. “Walker,” she said, “you know I don’t interfere in these things. You and Casey set the rules for your family, and that’s the way it should be—”

  “But?” Walker asked, arching one eyebrow.

  Brylee expelled a long breath. Well, hell, if he was going to force her to meddle, she’d do it. “But,” she said, picking up where her brother left off, “it’s a real bitch of a thing to be part of something for a long time and then suddenly find yourself shut out of the action, left behind at home like an extra saddle, just because you’re growing up.”

  Tears formed in her eyes, an unexpected development to be sure, and she blinked and looked away in an effort to hide them, even though she knew it was already too late for that.

  Walker reached across the table, squeezed her fingers together briefly with a steely strong, calloused hand. “Is that how you felt way back when, Brylee?” he asked, with a gentle gruffness that was very nearly her complete undoing. She was already on emotional overload, after all, barely keeping it together, and stuff just kept on coming at her, right and left. “Left behind?” he added. “Shut out?”

  She sniffled and squared her shoulders, determined to hold on to what was left of her dignity. “Yes,” she said. “That’s how I felt. I know Dad meant well—he probably thought I’d get in trouble with a boy when he wasn’t looking or come down with cramps and need Midol and a hot water bottle, or do some other girlie thing he wasn’t prepared to handle, but it hurt, Walker. Mom was gone most of the time as it was, and then you and Dad bailed on me, too—seemingly without reason and definitely without any solid explanations.” She paused. “What would you have thought, in my place?”

  Walker sighed heavily. “About what you did, I reckon,” he admitted solemnly. “But Dad was trying to protect you, honey, not break your heart—I can promise you that much. And bad things do happen on the road—trucks break down in the worst possible places at the worst possible times, stock gets loose and has to be rounded up and sometimes somebody gets trampled in the effort. Most cowboys are good men, I grant you, but they’re people, just the same, and there are always a few bottom-feeders hanging around.”

  Brylee breathed deeply and slowly for a few moments, stunned at how deep the bruises went, even after all these years. She hadn’t even been conscious of them, in fact, until the other day, when Clare had expressed the same desire to be included and the same confusion because that clearly wasn’t going to happen.

  “I know all that, Walker,”
she managed, after a long time, her voice rickety and a little thick. Afraid another crying jag might be coming on, she dragged herself back from the emotional brink, sat up straighter in her chair and closed her hands around her coffee mug. “I was young, but I wasn’t stupid. I grew up on this ranch, just like you did, and I was a pretty fair wrangler, if I do say so myself. But I still got thrown into the penalty box, when push came to shove, for the crime of being a girl.”

  Walker swallowed hard, visibly moved. This was one of the many things Brylee loved about her brother, as Casey surely did, though obviously in a very different way—for all his rock-hard muscle, cowboy know-how and bone-deep self-assurance, he could put himself in another person’s place, and not only see things from their point of view, but empathize.

  “I’m sorry, sweetheart. I know Dad would be, too, if he were here to listen to your side of things.” A sheen brightened Walker’s eyes, promptly disappeared. He gave another sigh, so heavy it raised and lowered that powerful set of shoulders. “Damned if the kid wasn’t right,” he added, dryly rueful.

  “What kid?” Brylee asked, having temporarily forgotten the genesis of this conversation.

  “Your niece? My daughter?” Walker teased, rapidly becoming his ordinary self again. “Clare and Casey both said I was being bullheaded about this, and they were right. You made me see that.”

  Brylee smiled a genuine smile, and her spirits rose measurably. “So you’ll let Clare join you on the rodeo circuit?”

  Walker grinned, but he held up an index finger to indicate that a stipulation was forthcoming. “Once,” he said, with conviction. “If she behaves herself, then fine, she can be a regular part of the crew, until she gets tired of the hard work and the impossible schedule, anyhow. On the other hand, if that little girl gives me any cause at all to be concerned for her safety and her well-being, she’ll find herself right back here on the ranch, before she can say jack—anything about it. And for the duration, too.”