Big Sky Wedding

In that moment, Zane could see his late mother—an inveterate optimist, their Maddie Rose—in such vivid detail that she might as well have been standing right there in his kitchen. She’d waited tables for a living, and the three of them had lived out of her beat-up old station wagon more than once, when she was between waitressing gigs, but life had been good with her, despite all the Salvation Army Christmases and secondhand school clothes and food-bank vittles. She’d had a way of “reframing” a situation—her word—so that moving on, when a job ended or a romance went sour, always seemed like an exciting adventure instead of the grinding hardship it usually was. Even when it involved considerable sacrifice on her part, Maddie Rose always made sure they stayed put when school was in session, come hell or high water, and she’d checked their homework and encouraged them to read library books and made them say grace, too.

As always, he wished Maddie Rose had lived to see her elder son become something more than a rodeo bum, wished he could have set her up in a good house and made sure she never lacked for anything again, but, too often, life didn’t work that way.

She’d died in a hospital somewhere in rural South Dakota, a charity case, suffering from an advanced case of leukemia, before Zane could so much as cash his first Hollywood paycheck, let alone provide for her the way he would have done, given the chance.

Although he and Landry usually avoided the whole topic of Maddie Rose’s death, it lay raw between them, all right, like a wound deep enough to rub the skin away, and, even now, it hurt.

“Send Nash to Missoula,” Zane heard himself say. “Let me know when he’s getting in, and I’ll be there to pick him up.”

“Good.” Landry almost murmured the word. “Good.”

It wasn’t a thank-you, but it would have to do.

Zane didn’t ring off with a goodbye. He simply hit the end call button and sent his phone skittering across the tabletop, causing Slim to perk up his mismatched ears and straighten his knobby spine.

Zane grinned, then ruffled the hide on the dog’s back to reassure him. “You’re not in any kind of trouble, boy,” he told Slim. Then, with a philosophical sigh, he added, “And that makes one of us.”

* * *

THE NEXT AFTERNOON, Zane was late getting to the airport in Missoula, and it was easy to spot Nash, since the kid was standing all by himself, next to the luggage carousel, a battered green duffel bag at his feet. Earbuds piped music into his head, and his blondish-brown hair stood up in spikes, as though he’d been accidentally electrified. Seeing Zane, he scowled in recognition and dispensed with whatever tunes he’d been listening to while he waited.

“Montana sucks,” Nash said sullenly, and without preamble. “I thought I was going to Hollywood, and now I find out I’m stuck here.”

“Life is hard,” Zane replied, smoothly casual, “and then you die.”

Nash rolled cornflower-blue eyes. His clothes were a sorry collection of too-big jeans, cut off at the knees and showing a good bit of his boxers, sneakers with no laces, a ragged T-shirt of indeterminate color and a pilled hoodie enlivened by a skull-and-crossbones pattern in neon green. “Thanks for the 411,” he drawled, making it plain he’d already mastered contempt, even before hitting his teens. “I probably couldn’t have figured that out on my own.”

Zane sighed inwardly and reminded himself to be patient. Maddie Rose had seen that he and Landry had it good, in comparison with most poor kids, but Nash had been through the proverbial wringer.

“You hungry?” he asked the boy, stooping to pick up the duffel bag by its frayed and grubby handle.

“I’m always hungry,” Nash replied, without a shred of humor. “Just ask Dad. I’m a royal pain in the ass, wanting to eat at least once a day, no matter what. Too bad the kind of motels he could afford didn’t have room service.” A beat passed. “I was lucky to get a bed.”

Zane felt a clenching sensation—sympathy—but he didn’t let it show. He remembered all too well how poverty ground away at a person’s pride, how he’d hated it when people felt sorry for him and Landry. “Let’s get out of here,” he said. “We’ll find you some food once we’ve left the airport.”

Nash said nothing. He simply put his earbuds back in and rocked to some private serenade, ambling alongside Zane as they left the terminal and made their way to the outdoor parking area, where the truck waited.

Slim was there, pressing his nose against a partially lowered window as they approached. He gave a happy yelp of welcome and scrabbled to and fro across the backseat, unable to contain his excitement.

“You have a dog?” Nash asked, opening up his ears again and almost, but not quite, smiling.

“His name is Slim.” Zane confirmed the obvious with a nod, as he opened the truck’s tailgate and tossed the duffel bag inside. “Knows a thing or two about hard luck, I guess.”

“Then we ought to get along,” Nash replied, sounding far too world-weary for a twelve-year-old. “The dog and me, that is.”

CHAPTER THREE

NASH LOOKED AROUND the ranch house kitchen with a discerning eye—surprisingly discerning, in fact, for somebody in a skull-and-crossbones hoodie, with six inches of underwear showing above his belt line.

“Man,” he said, quickly evaluating the long-neglected space surrounding them. “This place is seriously underwhelming.”

“Kind of like your manners,” Zane retorted lightly, but without rancor. In the few hours he’d spent with this young half brother of his, he’d begun to understand the kid a little better. Nash probably thought he was doing a good job of hiding what he felt, but he was scared all right, jumpy as a cat in a room full of cleated boots. Ready to be shunted off at a moment’s notice to the next place where he wouldn’t fit in, and determined not to let anybody know he gave a damn when it happened. He’d consumed three cheeseburgers, a double order of curly fries and a milk shake when they stopped for lunch on the outskirts of Missoula, prompting Zane to wonder if Landry had fed him a meal or two before hustling him on board the first westbound plane with an available seat.

And then there were those god-awful clothes. Going by appearances, his duds being rumpled, worn-out and not recently washed, the kid might have made the whole trip in the cargo hold instead of the main cabin. Landry, the multimillionaire investment whiz, couldn’t have sprung for a few pairs of jeans and some T-shirts?

Most likely, Zane thought, with a stifled sigh, his brother hadn’t wanted to be bothered with anything so mundane as taking the boy to the nearest mall and outfitting him with the basics. After all, he had to get to Berlin, where he had an Important Meeting.

The message in that was obvious: the meeting was important, but Nash wasn’t. Susan, the soon-to-be ex-wife—again—had probably come to the same conclusion about her own place in Landry’s high-octane life.

Zane seethed a little, feeling self-righteous—until he recalled that, up until Landry’s phone call, he couldn’t have said where Nash was, what he was doing, who he was with. He hadn’t kept any better track of his kid brother than Landry had.

The boy was blood. How had he been able to ignore that fact for so long?

“Where do I put my stuff?” Nash asked, breaking into Zane’s rueful thoughts, having reclaimed the duffel bag when they got out of the truck a few minutes before. “By the back door, maybe?”

“You plan on making a quick getaway?” Zane countered evenly, as he refilled Slim’s water bowl and set it on the floor so the thirsty dog could drink.

Nash responded with a mocking grin. “You never know,” he said. He made a hitchhiking motion with one thumb. “I’m a travelin’ man.”

“You’re a kid,” Zane pointed out, after taking a few seconds to rule out the snarky answers that came to mind ahead of that one. Leaning back against the sink, he folded his arms while Slim lapped loudly from the bowl of water. “And you ought to know, better than most, how mean the big world out there can really be.”

Nash didn’t bat an eyelash; he was already a hard case—at twelve, for God’s sake. “But I’m safe now, right?” he drawled, dripping sarcasm. “No worries. You’re going to give me a home, right here on the range.”

A familiar desire to find Jess Sutton and throttle the man with his bare hands washed over Zane, but it was quickly displaced by a flash of admiration for Nash. The kid might be a smart-ass, but he had a quicksilver brain.

“Where, as it happens,” Zane responded, playing along, “the buffalo don’t roam.”

Nash rolled his eyes, then his shoulders. He was on the small side, and skinny and raw-boned, but he’d match Zane’s six-foot height one day in the not-too-distant future, maybe even exceed it.

“Can I take a look around?” the boy asked, sounding glum. Obviously, he wasn’t expecting much.

“Be my guest,” Zane answered. “Pick out a bedroom while you’re at it. There are plenty to choose from.”

Offering no comment, Nash wandered off to explore the premises. He was gone for a while, Slim trailing faithfully after him, which gave Zane a chance to assess the grub situation, peering into the fridge, opening and closing cupboard doors. Despite yesterday’s shopping trip in Three Trees, it wasn’t a pretty picture.

“Don’t you have any furniture?” Nash asked, upon his return.

Zane shook his head. His household goods were still in L.A., in his condo, and he already knew there was no point in having all that expensive junk trucked to Montana. None of it would look right here—especially his bed. It was a gigantic, mirrored thing, a monument to unbridled hedonism, lacking only notches on one of the pillar-size posts to tally his conquests.

He would miss the water-filled mattress, though.

All the other pieces—chairs and couches, a dining room set, a TV so big it took up a whole wall—were decorator-approved and half again too fancy for a run-down stone ranch house. Like the bed, they’d be so ostentatious as to be an embarrassment.

Not that he’d be showing off his sleeping quarters anytime soon, of course.

When an image of Brylee Parrish seeped into his mind like smoke, he nearly laughed out loud. As if, he thought. She’d probably already written him off as a hedonistic, interfering movie star, but even if she hadn’t, she would once she checked all the online gossip sites and found his name on practically every one of them.

“Just moved here myself,” he finally replied, feeling a distinct lack of nostalgia for the old place back in L.A., and the fast-paced life that went with it. “I haven’t had time to make a plan, let alone shop for a houseful of stuff.” By then, he was sitting at the card table in the center of the kitchen, with his laptop open. It was time to do a little research on child-rearing. “Anyway, there’s a lot to be done around the place, as you’ve probably noticed.”