Big Sky Secrets

And what was keeping him anyhow? He lived on the next place over, and he’d had plenty of time to saddle up a horse or whatever.

After pushing up her mental sleeves in preparation to do battle, Ria drew a deep breath and tried once more to scare the creature away, this time raising her voice to a near shout. “Shoo!”

Again, nothing happened, except that the floor of the ancient porch seemed to ripple slightly under her feet as Bessie heaved her gritty brown bulk against the corner of the house.

As if in answer to her exasperated wonderment of moments before, headlights swung in at the top of Ria’s long dirt driveway, and she heard wheels bumping over hard, rocky ruts as a large vehicle barreled toward the house.

Mercifully distracted, Bessie stopped the awful bawling and the assault on the cottage, and Ria put her fingers to both temples and gave a sigh of angry relief as the tension-tight muscles between her shoulder blades relaxed slightly.

As the rig drew nearer, she could make out the outlines of the trailer being hauled behind it.

Bessie’s calf, invisible before, trotted out of the darkness and stood still in the cone-shaped gleam of the truck’s headlights. The animal didn’t seem frightened, as a deer or other wild creature would have been; instead, the calf remained where it was, giving a single, low grunt. A moment later, Bessie ambled over to stand beside her baby boy.

Ria was astounded by this behavior, and annoyed, too. She’d been sure both animals would charge her if she dared step off the porch, but now they were acting like well-trained pets.

Were they tame? Hard to believe, after the way they’d carried on like banshees with bellyaches, trampling her flower beds, trying to knock down her house.

As casually as if the incident were no big deal, though admittedly an inconvenience on his part, Landry opened the truck door, activating the interior lights and thus becoming deliciously visible. He raised one hand to Ria in a desultory wave, got out of the vehicle and started toward the back of the trailer. He whistled once, low and through his teeth, and, miraculously, both buffalo obeyed the summons as readily as a pair of faithful farm dogs.

Despite her earlier intention to avoid direct contact with her neighbor at all costs, Ria didn’t disappear into the house, shut the door and wait for Landry to retrieve his stray critters and leave, as she probably should have. Instead, she remained where she was, stubborn and indignant and, though this was completely unlike her, spoiling for a fight.

She listened through the thrumming of her blood in her ears as Landry opened the rear door of the trailer, soon heard the metallic rasp of a ramp being lowered, the steely, resounding thump as one end struck the ground.

Landry muttered some gruff command, and hooves clattered like thunder as two beasts the size of mastodons clattered up the ramp and into the trailer, which seemed too flimsy to contain them.

An instant later, the ramp clanked back into place, and then the doors were closed with a bang and bolted shut.

Go inside, Ria told herself. Let Landry Sutton take his stupid bison and get out of here.

It was prudent advice, since no good could come of a confrontation, but Ria still couldn’t bring herself to back down. Anyway, it was too late to pretend she wasn’t at home, as she’d planned to do, since Landry had obviously seen her.

Finally, the rancher rounded the truck and trailer, idly dusting his hands together as he moved, probably congratulating himself on a job well done. With just the wimpy porch bulb and the truck’s headlights to see by, Ria couldn’t make out his expression, but she didn’t need to, because she caught the brief flash of his grin.

Cocky bastard.

“It took you long enough to get here,” she blurted, folding her arms tightly across her chest, as if she were cold. She had a legitimate gripe, and she was still furious, but she regretted giving voice to the complaint, because instead of getting back into his truck, turning it around and heading out of there, he approached her.

His walk was slow and easy, loose-hipped and damnably sexy.

He came to a stop at the base of the porch steps, features awash in the light from the bulb beside the front door, and his grin was affable, generously tolerant and amused.

“If they did any damage,” he said mildly, “just send me a bill.”

No remorse at all. He thought the incident was funny.

People like Landry—rich people—always seemed to think money was the solution to every problem. Ria’s belly twisted.

She glared at Sutton—they were almost at eye level, since he was standing on the ground and she on the porch—and held her folded arms even more tightly against her chest. “Maybe you’ve heard the old saying?” she bit out. “‘Good fences make for good neighbors’?”

Landry sobered a little, but a glint of mischief lingered in his eyes. “Do they?” he countered, charitably amenable.

Condescending SOB. He was nettling her on purpose and, worse, he was enjoying it.

Ria glowered back at him. She was a sensible person, so what was stopping her from just turning around, without another word, and marching straight into her house and slamming the door in his handsome face for good measure?

No answer came to her.

Landry sighed heavily, as though sorely put-upon, his broad shoulders rising and falling slightly as he inhaled and then thrust out a breath. “Look,” he said, sounding resigned now. “I’m sorry about what happened, but all I can do is apologize and make restitution—”

“You could also build better fences,” Ria suggested tersely. Who was this snippy woman inhabiting her body? Her normal self was pleasant and friendly, at least most of the time, but there were things about Landry Sutton—some of them impossible to put into words—that just plain got on her last nerve and stayed there.

Now he folded his arms. Was he doing that rapport thing, reflecting her stance? Trying to win her over with body language?

Fat chance.

“My fences,” he replied tautly, “are just fine. Most likely, somebody left a gate open somewhere, that’s all.”

“That’s all?” Ria sputtered, still wondering why she was prolonging this conversation when all she wanted was to go back inside, take a hot bath, read for an hour and then fall into the warm oblivion of a good night’s sleep. Once she drifted off, she wouldn’t have to think about her too-sexy neighbor, her demanding half sister, Meredith, or the fact that she’d bought a flower farm in the heart of Podunk County, Montana, and was barely making a go of the enterprise, even without the perils of free-range buffalo. “These flowers aren’t just for decorating my yard, Mr. Sutton,” she added primly. “I earn a good part of my living selling them. I won’t know for certain until morning, when I can see clearly enough to assess the damage, but there’s a reasonable chance that some or all of my crop has been wiped out.” She sucked in a breath, huffed it out. “Surely, you can see why I’d be concerned?”

Her tone implied that he couldn’t, being oblivious and all.

At this, Landry looked both exasperated and apologetic. He sighed again, shoved a hand through his hair. “Yes,” he answered, in a measured tone. “If I didn’t say it before, I’m sorry.”

“You didn’t,” Ria said briskly. She hadn’t intended to say what came out of her mouth next; it just happened, and she didn’t have the luxury of unsaying the words. “Why can’t you raise cattle or chickens or hogs or sheep, like everyone else around here? Why does it have to be buffalo?”

A muscle tightened in Landry’s fine jaw, relaxed again, as if by force of will. “Well, for one thing, I’m not like ‘everyone else around here,’” he retorted. Then he narrowed his eyes, studied her for a long, scrumptiously uncomfortable moment and added, “And unless I miss my guess, Ms. Manning, you’re not, either.”

Heat suffused Ria’s entire body, and a rush of—well, something—quivered in her belly and hardened her nipples and set her heart to pounding. All her life, she’d wanted to fit in, to belong, though something inside her always rebelled, in the end, causing her to go her own way instead of following the herd.

She’d thought, until this night, until this instant, that no one else knew her secret, that she was different. Even her late husband, Frank, had never seen through the act, as intimate as they’d been, and now here was Landry Sutton, of all people, calling her out, subtly questioning the facade she’d worked so hard to maintain.

Damn him.

“Since this conversation is getting us nowhere,” she said, quietly reasonable, “it would probably be best if we said good-night.”

The evening, balmy before, had grown chilly, and goose bumps rippled across Ria’s flesh. Conversely, her insides felt molten, like lava about to blow out the side of an otherwise tranquil mountainside.

Landry chuckled, but it was a rueful sound, a little raw, a little broken. He looked away, looked back, and, inside the trailer, Bessie and her huge “calf” fidgeted impatiently, and it seemed possible, at least to Ria, that they might actually turn the whole thing over, right there in her driveway.

“You’re probably right,” he conceded, without a trace of generosity. “But I’ll be back tomorrow. We can look the—crops—over together, and come to some kind of agreement.” A brief pause. “Not that I can really picture you agreeing with me about much of anything.”

By then, Ria was fresh out of bluster and ready comebacks—civil ones anyhow.

So she let the gibe pass, nodded stiffly and, at last, went back inside the cottage. Once over the threshold, she shut the door hard behind her and turned the dead bolt with a reverberating click.

Through the door, she heard Landry Sutton laugh.

* * *