Big Sky River

Boone stayed a hair under the speed limit, though just barely, the whole way to the Carmody ranch, called Whisper Creek, where he found Hutch waiting beside the fancy extended-cab truck he’d purchased the year before, when he and Kendra were falling in love for the second time. Or maybe just realizing that they’d never actually fallen out of it in the first place.

Now, Hutch was hatless, with his head tilted a little to one side the way he did when he was pondering some enigma, and his hands were wedged backward into the hip pockets of his worn jeans. Kendra, a breathtakingly beautiful blonde, stood beside him, pregnant into the next county.

“Have you had anything to eat?” Kendra called to Boone, the instant he’d stopped his pickup. Dust roiled around her from under the truck’s wheels, but she was a rancher’s wife now, and unfazed by the small stuff.

Boone got out of the truck and walked toward them. He kissed Kendra’s cheek and tried to smile, though he couldn’t quite bring it off. “What is it with women and food?” he asked. “A man could be lying flat as a squashed penny on the railroad track, and some female would come along first thing, wanting to feed him something.”

Hutch chuckled at that, but the quiet concern in his gaze made Boone’s throat pull tight like the top of an old-time tobacco sack. “It’s a long stretch to Missoula,” Hutch observed, quietly affable. “You might get hungry along the way.”

“I’ll make sandwiches,” Kendra said, and turned to duck-waddle toward the ranch house. Compared with Boone’s double-wide, the place looked like a palace, with its clapboard siding and shining windows, and for the first time in his life, Boone wished he had a fine house like that to bring his children home to.

“Don’t—” Boone protested, but it was too late. Kendra was already opening the screen door, stepping into the kitchen beyond.

“Let her build you a lunch, Boone,” Hutch urged, his voice as quiet as his manner. Since the wedding, he’d been downright Zen-like. “She’ll be quick about it, and she wants to help whatever way she can. We all do.”

Boone nodded, cleared his throat, looked away. Hutch’s dog, a black mutt named Leviticus, trotted over to nose Boone’s hand, his way of saying howdy. Kendra’s golden retriever, Daisy, was there, too, watchful and wagging her tail.

Boone ruffled both dogs’ ears, straightened, looked Hutch in the eye again. Neither of them spoke, but it didn’t matter, because they’d been friends for so long that words weren’t always necessary.

Boone was worried about bringing the boys back to his place for anything longer than a holiday weekend, and Hutch knew that. He clearly cared and sympathized, but at the same time, he was pleased. There was no need to give voice to the obvious.

Kendra returned almost right away, moving pretty quickly for somebody who could be accused of smuggling pumpkins. She carried a bulging brown paper bag in one hand, holding it out to Boone when she got close enough. “Turkey on rye,” she said. “With pickles. I threw in a couple of hard-boiled eggs and an apple, too.”

He took the bag, muttered his thanks, climbed into Hutch’s truck and reached through the open window to hand over the keys to the rust-bucket he’d driven up in. Some swap that was, he thought ruefully. His old buddy was definitely getting the shitty end of this stick.

“Give Molly and Bob our best!” Kendra called after him, as Boone started up the engine and shifted into Reverse. “If there’s anything we can do—”

Boone cut her off with a nod, raised a hand in farewell and drove away.

After a brief stop in Parable, to get some cash from an ATM, he’d keep the pedal to the metal all the way to Missoula. Once there, he and Molly would explain things, together.

God only knew how his sons would take the news—they were always tentative and quiet on visits to Parable, like exiles to a strange new planet, and visibly relieved when it was time to go back to the city.

One thing at a time, Boone reminded himself.

* * *

TARA KENDALL STOOD in front of her chicken coop, surrounded by dozens of cackling hens, and second-guessed her decision to leave a high-paying, megaglamorous job in New York and reinvent herself, Green Acres–style, for roughly the three thousandth time since she’d set foot in Parable, Montana, a couple years before.

She missed her small circle of friends back East, and her twelve-year-old twin stepdaughters, Elle and Erin. She also missed things, like sidewalk cafés and quirky shops, Yellow Cab taxis and shady benches in Central Park, along with elements that were harder to define, like the special energy of the place, the pure purpose flowing through the crowded streets like some unseen river.

She did not, however, miss the stress of trying to keep her career going in the midst of a major economic downturn, with her ex-husband, Dr. James Lennox, constantly complaining that she’d stolen his daughters’ love from him when they divorced, along with a chunk of his investments and real estate assets.

Tara didn’t regret the settlement terms for a moment—she’d forked over plenty of her own money during their rocky marriage, helping to get James’s private practice off the ground after he left the staff of a major clinic to go out on his own—and as for the twins’ affection, she’d gotten that by being there for Elle and Erin, as their father so often hadn’t, not by scheming against James or undermining him to his children.

Even if Tara had wanted to do something as reprehensible as coming between James and the twins, there wouldn’t have been any need, because the girls were formidably bright. They’d figured out things for themselves—their father’s serial affairs included. Since he’d never seemed to have time for them, they’d naturally been resentful when they found out, quite by accident, that their dad had bent his busy schedule numerous times to take various girlfriends on romantic weekend getaways.

Tara’s golden retriever, Lucy, napping on the shady porch that ran the full length of Tara’s farmhouse, raised her head, ears perked. In the next instant, the cordless receiver for the inside phone rang on the wicker table set between two colorfully cushioned rocking chairs.

Hurrying up the front steps, Tara grabbed the phone and said, “Hello?”

“Do you ever answer your cell?” her former husband demanded tersely.

“It’s charging,” Tara said calmly. James loved to argue—maybe he should have become a lawyer instead of a doctor—and Tara loved to deprive him of the satisfaction of getting a rise out of her. Then, as another possibility dawned on her, she suppressed a gasp. “Elle and Erin are all right, aren’t they?”

James remained irritable. “Oh, they’re fine,” he said scathingly. “They’ve just chased off the fourth nanny in three weeks, and the agency refuses to send anyone else.”

Tara bit back a smile, thinking of the mischievous pair. They were pranksters, and they got into plenty of trouble, but they were good kids, too, tenderhearted and generous. “At twelve, they’re probably getting too old for nannies,” she ventured. James never called to chat, hadn’t done that even when they were married, standing in the same room or lying in the same bed. No, Dr. Lennox always had an agenda, and she was getting a flicker of what it might be this time.

“Surely you’re not suggesting that I let them run wild, all day every day, for the whole summer, while I’m in the office, or in surgery?” James’s voice still had an edge to it, but there was an undercurrent of something else—desperation, maybe. Possibly even panic.

“Of course not,” Tara replied, plunking down in one of the porch rocking chairs, Lucy curling up at her feet. “Day camp might be an option, if you want to keep them busy, or you could hire a companion—”

“Day camp would mean delivering my daughters somewhere every morning and picking them up again every afternoon, and I don’t have time for that, Tara.” There it was again, the note of patient sarcasm, the tone that seemed to imply that her IQ was somewhere in the single digits and sure to plunge even lower. “I’m a busy man.”

Too busy to care for your own children, Tara thought but, of course, didn’t say. “What do you want?” she asked instead.

He huffed out a breath, evidently offended by her blunt question. “If that attitude isn’t typical of you, I don’t know what is—”

“James,” Tara broke in. “You want something. You wouldn’t call if you didn’t. Cut to the chase and tell me what that something is, please.”

He sighed in a long-suffering way. Poor, misunderstood James. Always so put-upon, a victim of his own nobility. “I’ve met someone,” he said.

Now there’s a news flash, Tara thought. James was always meeting someone—a female someone, of course. And he was sure that each new mistress was The One, his destiny, harbinger of a love that had been written in the stars instants after the Big Bang.

“Her name is Bethany,” he went on, sounding uncharacteristically meek all of a sudden. James was a gifted surgeon with a high success rate; modesty was not in his nature. “She’s special.”

Tara refrained from comment. She and James were divorced, and she quite frankly didn’t care whom he dated, “special” or not. She did care very much, however, about Elle and Erin, and the fact that they always came last with James, after the career and the golf tournaments and the girlfriend du jour. Their own mother, James’s first wife, Susan, had contracted a bacterial infection when they were just toddlers, and died suddenly. It was Tara who had rocked the little girls to sleep, told them stories, bandaged their skinned elbows and knees—to the twins, she was Mom, even in her current absentee status.

“Are you still there?” James asked, and the edge was back in his voice. He even ventured a note of condescension.

“I’m here,” Tara said, after swallowing hard, and waited. Lucy sat up, rested her muzzle on Tara’s blue-jeaned thigh, and watched her mistress’s face for cues.

“The girls are doing everything they can to run Bethany off,” James said, after a few beats of anxious silence. “We need some—some space, Bethany and I, I mean—just the two of us, without—”

“Without your children getting underfoot,” Tara finished for him after a long pause descended, leaving his sentence unfinished, but she kept her tone moderate. By then she knew for sure why James had called, and she already wanted to blurt out a yes, not to please him, but because she’d missed Elle and Erin so badly for so long. Losing daily contact with them had been like a rupture of the soul.

James let the remark pass, which was as unlike him as asking for help or giving some hapless intern, or wife, the benefit of a doubt. “I was thinking—well—that you might enjoy a visit from the twins. School’s out until fall, and a few weeks in the country—maybe even a month or two—would probably be good for them.”

Tara sat up very straight, all but holding her breath. She had no parental rights whatsoever where James’s children were concerned; he’d reminded her of that often enough.

“A visit?” she dared. The notion filled her with two giant and diametrically opposed emotions—on the one hand, she was fairly bursting with joy. On the other, she couldn’t help thinking of the desolation she’d feel when Elle and Erin returned to their father, as they inevitably would. Coping with the loss, for the second time, would be difficult and painful.

“Yes.” James stopped, cleared his throat. “You’ll do it? You’ll let the twins come out there for a while?”

“I’d like that,” Tara said carefully. She was afraid to show too much enthusiasm, even now, when she knew she had the upper hand, because showing her love for the kids was dangerous with James. He was jealous of their devotion to her, and he’d always enjoyed bursting her bubbles, even when they were newlyweds and ostensibly still happy. “When would they arrive?”

“I was thinking I could put them on a plane tomorrow,” James admitted. He was back in the role of supplicant, and Tara could tell he hated it. All the more reason to be cautious—there would be a backlash, in five minutes or five years. “Would that work for you?”