Sweet Home Montana

by Shann McPherson

  “Is it everything dreams are made of?” she asks, her sweet voice hopeful.

  I thought it was … I think to myself.

  Biting back my smile, I nod. “It’s … pretty spectacular.”

  She sighs, a wistful smile playing on her lips. “Daddy said one day he’ll take me. I want to go see the big Christmas tree all lit up.”

  Rylie smiles lovingly down at her daughter, brushing a wayward blonde curl away from her face. And I take the moment to glance at Rylie’s hand, her fingers, noticing no wedding ring, no engagement ring, no rings at all, in fact. But I quickly avert my gaze, keeping my nosy curiosity to myself; it is the twenty-first century, after all.

  “New York’s great, and all,” I continue, smiling at Emmy with a wink. “But being in a huge city like that, it really makes you appreciate your home.”

  My words and the hidden meaning behind them hang in the air, and they’re not lost on Rylie. She casts me a meaningful glance, her smile genuine as something unexpected passes between us, but before she can question me, the server returns to the table with our food.

  Chapter 15

  Rylie and I sit together on the bench seat outside Merle’s Toy Emporium, watching Emmy through the window as she gazes at all the toys with excited wonderment, pure joy lighting up her face with everything she stumbles across in the poky little store. She’s so beautiful, sweet and innocent, and a dull ache begins gnawing at me on the inside when my mind suddenly wanders back to the thought of Colt, and everything we could have if I’d stayed all those years ago.

  “Thanks for lunch.” I smile at Rylie, blowing on my to-go cup of coffee in an attempt to cool it down before I drink it, since I didn’t get much of a chance to finish my earlier cup.

  “Thanks for the coffee,” Rylie retorts, humming in appreciation as she takes a sip.

  We sit in a comfortable, companionable silence. That is until Rylie shifts on the seat beside me, and I can feel her curious gaze fix in my direction. I cast a sideways glance, finding her brow furrowed as she studies me closely.

  “What did you mean before?” she asks.

  I turn to her, quirking a brow.

  “When you said a city like New York really makes you appreciate home?” she clarifies, answering my unspoken question before adding with a chuckle, “Because I know no one could miss a hole like the Canyon. Hell, I’m only here because my father wanted to retire in New Mexico and didn’t trust no one else to run his damn bar.”

  I gape at her, my eyes bulging. “Wait! Duke’s your dad?”

  “You know Duke?” She answers my question with one asked with just as much surprise.

  “Yeah.” I laugh. “Duke is a legend in this town. He was really good friends with … with my father.” My gaze inadvertently wavers, the mention of my father stinging like salt in a wound that just won’t seem to heal.

  “Who’s your dad?” she asks casually.

  I shift in my seat, her question hanging in the air. I clear the lump of emotion that has suddenly found its way into the back of my throat. “Royal Wagner.”

  Suddenly, her eyes go wide, her face falling. “Oh my God, Quinn. I’m– I’m so sorry.”

  I shake my head, dismissing her apology. “Thanks, but it’s fine.” I take a sip of my coffee to avoid having to offer any further awkwardly muttered words on the topic.

  “That’s why you’re here!” she exclaims quietly as if just realizing, and I watch as she starts to make sense of everything. “You came back into town because your father died.”

  “Yeah …” I look down a moment, pressing my lips together.

  “Dad spoke a lot about your father over the years,” Rylie continues. “He was a good man.”

  “Yeah, he was.” I smile at her through the burning tears that sting my eyes, but I blink them back, desperate to change the topic of conversation from my dead father. “So, Duke moved to New Mexico?”

  At the mention of Duke, Rylie dramatically throws her head back with a groan. “Yeah. So, I grew up there with my mom. She and my father split when I was a kid. But then, a few years back he started coming down to visit more than he’d ever visited when I was a kid …” She steadies me with a sardonic glance. “Turns out, they fell in love with one another twenty years after they ended their marriage because they couldn’t stand the sight of each other.”

  I can’t help but smile.

  “So, he wanted to retire, and move down to be with Mom. But he didn’t want to sell the bar,” she continues. “I’d just broken up with asshole … number seventeen, I think,” she says in mock considering before smirking. “So, I told Dad I’d come up here and look after the place for him,” she deadpans, grabbing a hold of my forearm. “And here I am … seven years later.”

  I laugh because I know what she means. A place like the Canyon, the beautiful scenery, the kind people, the charming, effortless lifestyle, it can trick you into falling in love with it, trapping you without you even realizing until it’s too late. By the time you realize it’s probably time to move on, you’re so deeply rooted here, it’s impossible to leave.

  Rylie smiles, regarding me for a long moment. “I knew I’d like you from the moment you stepped foot in the bar with a three-thousand-dollar handbag hanging from your shoulder.”

  I chuckle, meeting her eyes. “Likewise.”

  “So, tell me …” she presses, arching one of her perfect brows. “What’s got you thinkin’ you might stay indefinitely? Because I can tell, Quinn … It’s more than just your daddy’s passing.”

  “Am I that transparent?” I scoff, glancing down at my coffee.

  “Not really,” she answers truthfully. “But, doll, I saw a sadness in your eyes that first night in the bar; your heartbreak radiates from you. And I know whatever it is, you need someone to talk to.”

  She’s right. I do need someone to talk to. I have no one. I can’t talk to Cash; we’ve never had that kind of relationship. I certainly can’t talk to Tripp; he hates me and can’t seem to stand the sight of my face. Rylie may be a relative stranger, but I have a feeling she might be the only person to even come close to understanding what I’m going through right now. If I can’t trust a girl like her with my jaded past, then who the hell can I trust?

  I meet her kind eyes, and I release a heavy sigh. “I don’t even know where to start, so I guess I’ll just start from the beginning?” I cast her an uncertain glance.

  She nods, her hand remaining on my forearm.

  I take a deep, fortifying breath, considering my words. “Do you … do you know Colt Henry?”

  My question hangs in the air for an unnervingly long few beats. Rylie’s brows draw together slowly, her expression falling as she stares at me for a long, overwhelming moment, recognition flashing in her eyes and something else, something I can’t quite decipher within her gaze before finally she nods. “So you’re that girl?”

  And there it is. The proverbial elephant of my life. My scarlet letter.

  “Yep. I’m that girl …” My shoulders fall in resignation. I was that girl. I’m not anymore, though.

  Rylie swallows hard, and she casts a furtive glance in through the window to check on Emmy before moving closer beside me, her hand squeezing my arm, reassuringly. “It’s okay, Quinn. You can talk to me.”

  I look up to the gray sky, searching the clouds for what, I don’t even know. Raking my teeth over my bottom lip, I continue. “I was in love with Colt before I even knew what love was.” I smile through my emotion, glancing briefly at Rylie. “His mom took off when he was just a baby. His dad went to prison when Colt was only a child, and he never came out. Colt had a really horrible life as a kid. His grandmother looked after him as well as she could, but she was an old woman, and he was a handful. Always getting into trouble. He’s been best friends with my brother for forever. Tripp?”

  Rylie nods and gives a small smile. “I know Tripp.”

  “Colt practically lived with us, and he and I grew close. Then, when his grandmother passed
away, Colt was only sixteen, and he had nowhere to go, no one to go to. So my dad kind of took him in. He lived in a cabin on our ranch. He still does …” I pause a moment, racking my brain with the memories that consume me. “Colt and I started dating when we were just fifteen. But it moved so quickly, it didn’t feel like a normal teenage relationship. I loved him. It was as if he was another part of me, if that even makes sense.” I stop to shake my head, fearing I sound utterly ridiculous.

  “It does.” Rylie pats my arm, encouragingly.

  “Colt had this crazy dream that he wanted to be a professional cowboy.” I smile at the thought. “When he came to stay at the ranch, he started doing some work on the weekends and after school for my dad. One of the ranch hands took him under his wing and showed him the ropes, and Colt had this weird ability to stay on a bucking bronco for way longer than eight seconds. So, he decided that that was his calling. He was going to join the circuit and become a champion.”

  “That sounds like Colt.” Rylie smiles, looking straight ahead, her gaze focusing on Emmy through the window as the little girl talks animatedly with Merle, the store owner.

  “I’d always wanted to get the hell out of here. Away from the ranch. Away from Montana. Away from everything. New York was my dream ever since I was a kid … kind of like Emmy.”

  Rylie laughs quietly.

  “I got accepted to NYU. But Colt wasn’t going anywhere. Originally, we’d talked about leaving this place, together. But, when it came down to it, he realized this is where he belongs.” I look around at the town surrounding me. “He wanted to stay here. I-I had to leave.”

  At that, Rylie questions me with a glance, and I know she wants to ask.

  “My mother killed herself when I was kid …”

  Her eyes widen at my confession.

  “We don’t really talk about it …” I shake my head, adding a nonchalant shrug. “She was just so sad. She loved my father more than anything. He was her one and only,” I say with a sad smile. “But she felt like she’d lost herself here. She gave up everything to stay here in the Canyon with my dad, and I guess that regret ate at her on the inside, so much, she couldn’t handle it.”

  “Oh my God, Quinn.” Rylie gasps. “I’m so sorry.”

  I avoid her apology, continuing, “I didn’t want to leave Colt, but I couldn’t stay. My mother made me promise that I would never give up on my dreams, and I owed it to her. I had to live my life because she didn’t get to live hers. I had to go to New York. And I did. And I loved it. I had planned on going on to grad school. And staying in the city afterwards to start my dream career in business. But then, Colt flew out to see me, and … he proposed to me.”

  Rylie blinks at me, hanging on to every one of my words.

  “He asked me to marry him, and of course I said yes. And I had all intentions of marrying that boy. He was the love of my life and I couldn’t imagine living without him.” I look down at my hands, as the reality of my past comes flooding back to me. “But the closer it got to the wedding, the more I started to question it. Did he really want to marry me? Or was it all just a big elaborate scheme to stop me from staying in New York? To bring me back home to the Canyon? Was this his way of forcing me to give up on my dreams? Could I really give up everything I’d worked so hard for, to marry Colt and wind up just another rancher’s wife? Could I break the promise I made to my mother? It was all so much. Too much. I was terrified that I was going to end up like her.”

  “So … You didn’t go through with it.”

  I meet her knowing gaze, her eyes sad. “I hate myself for what I did. I wish I could change it all. I wish I could go back and break up with him before I left for college. I wish I could go back and decline his marriage proposal. I wish I could go back and at least call off the wedding before he’d got dressed in a suit and stood at the altar with Reverend Jackson in front of all our friends and family. But I didn’t do any of that because I knew it would hurt too much to lose him. Because I was too goddamn selfish, and I put my feelings before his.”

  “What happened … after you left?” Rylie asks, her voice soft and cautious.

  I blink hard and a tear slips free, trailing down my cheek, but I quickly wipe it away with my gloved hand, sniffling back the rest of my tears as best I can. “I left. And I didn’t think I would ever come back. I really thought when I was standing there in the airport saying goodbye to my father, that I was never going to come back to the Canyon. I knew I’d ruined everything. I’d broken Colt’s heart. The look in his eyes when he came to find me after … It killed me. I’ll never forget that look for as long as I live. So, like the coward I am, I ran away back to New York, and I pretended as if my past didn’t exist.

  “But a few months later, it slowly started to kill me from the inside out. I couldn’t sleep. I barely ate. I wasn’t focusing on school. And I knew it was because the guilt was eating at me. The guilt of breaking his heart. The guilt of breaking my promise to my mother. The guilt of cheating myself. I’d made a horrible mistake, and I wanted nothing more than to take it all back.” I sigh heavily. “I booked a flight home for the coming weekend. And I wrote down this big long speech that I was planning on giving to Colt, to beg him for forgiveness, to plead for him to take me back. I was willing to give everything up for him, if he would just take me back.”

  I wipe my nose with the back of my hand. “But then I got a phone call in the middle of the night from my father. He told me that Colt had wrapped his truck around a tree. He’d been drinking a lot after the breakup. He wasn’t handling it. And so one night, he got behind the wheel, and at eighty miles an hour, he drove head first into a big old fir tree on the side of Old Prairie Road, and left himself for dead in the middle of a cold January night.”

  “D-did-did he try to …” Rylie trails off, unable to finish her question.

  “The road accident investigators deemed it an accident. Driving under the influence,” I say with a shrug. “But Sheriff Dwight told my dad there were no skid marks, nothing to show that he swerved. He willingly got behind the wheel of his truck with a bottle of whiskey, and he did what he did.”

  “Jesus,” Rylie hisses under her breath, looking down a moment. “I didn’t know.” She mutters something unintelligible, shaking her head.

  “Colt doesn’t know, but I came in on the next available flight. And I sat with him in the intensive care unit, right by his bedside, holding his hand, for … days, and nights. I refused to leave him because when he woke up, and I knew he would, despite what the doctors were trying to tell us, I wanted him to see me there. To know that I came back to him. That I would never leave his side again.”

  “What happened?”

  I shake my head, dismissing Rylie’s question. “It doesn’t matter.”

  A silence sits between us, heavy with overwhelming emotion. And although the story of my past brings with it that same unbearable pain I’ve tried so hard to hide for ten years, it feels good to finally let it all out. It’s almost as if a weight has been lifted off me. Like I can finally breathe again.

  “He’s the reason you’re still here, huh?”

  My gaze moves to Rylie, and I find a sad, yet knowing smile ghosting over her lips, the gleam of unshed tears sparkling in her red-rimmed eyes. “Colt,” she says, even though it’s obvious. “You still love him.”

  “More than anything.” I nod. “I never stopped. I just tried to force myself to forget.”

  A few beats pass, and I meet her gaze as she studies me so closely.

  “You know what I said the other day?” she continues. “About redeeming yourself?”

  I nod again, smiling at the thought of her strangely accurate words.

  “I meant it, Quinn. Yeah, sure”—she shrugs a casual shoulder—“you’ve made some mistakes in your life. I mean, who the hell hasn’t? But you’re not a bad person. You’re definitely not an asshole. Trust me. I can spot ’em a mile away. For some reason, I attract them. It’s like a sixth sense, or the force, witho
ut the cool lightsaber. I attract assholes. It’s my God-given gift.”

  I laugh as fresh tears fall from my eyes, and she smiles at me.

  “I can see it in your eyes. What you feel for Colt is true and honest, and so incredibly real. And love like that doesn’t come around too often.” Her voice is strained, and I can hear her own emotion in every one of her words. It’s difficult for her to say them. She’s been hurt before. “Don’t let it get away, Quinn.” She offers a sad smile, squeezing my hand.

  “You’re right.”

  “Of course I’m right.” She gives me a smug wink.

  My gaze drifts over her. Taking her in from her lipstick, to her nail polish, to the tattoos inked into her fingers. She’s enviably confident and strong. But beneath her facade I can sense an almost debilitating sadness. She may keep it hidden behind her tough exterior, but she’s not as strong as she makes herself out to be, as she wants people to believe. I can tell.

  “If you ever wanna talk …” I say, looking into her eyes, and when I do, I know I don’t have to finish offering.

  She simply smiles, nodding once, but before any more can be said, Emmy comes tearing out of the toy store with a box clutched under her arm, an infectious smile beaming from ear to ear.

  “Mommy, look what Mr. Merle gave me!” she squeals, holding the box up in the air.

  “A five-hundred-piece Empire State jigsaw puzzle,” Rylie reads the box out loud, casting me a deadpan glance. “How fun.”

  I chuckle to myself.

  “I told him how much I love New York, and he said I can have it. No foolin’!”

  “Lucky girl.” Rylie glances over her daughter’s head, to Merle standing in the window, the elderly man smiling with a wave. She waves back.

  “I’m gonna see if Daddy wants to help me put it together!” Emmy starts jumping up and down on the spot, giggling.

  “We should go.” Rylie quickly turns to me, her lips pressed together in a tight smile. “Someone needs to go home and sleep off the sugar rush she’s about to start coming down from.”