Big Sky Wedding

“Big fat deal,” Cleo scoffed furiously. “I work my fingers to the bone for you for almost four years, Zane Sutton, years I could have spent looking after somebody who appreciated me, mind you, and one fine day, you just go off on your merry way without a word of farewell?”

Reminding her about the note would be a mistake, so he didn’t. While the gears clicked away in his head, he focused on Slim, visible through the arched doorway opening onto the hall, waiting for Nash to come out of the bathroom. The dog’s patience was rewarded when the kid suddenly emerged, preceded by billows of steam.

Zane smiled. “Cleo,” he said, “I have missed your sweet and gentle ways.”

“I’ll sweet-and-gentle you,” Cleo shot back. “With a horsewhip!”

He laughed. “You know,” he teased, “you sound a little like a woman scorned.”

She made a disgruntled sound. “As if I’d ever throw in with the likes of you, cowboy, even if I wasn’t a good thirty years older than you are.” A pause. “Darn it, I’m not ready to retire. I’m unlucky at bingo and I don’t knit or crochet. And, anyways, I can’t sleep nights, for worrying that you’re living on fast food and wearing wrinkled shirts in public.”

Nash came through the archway and headed for the fridge, looking like a different kid in his jeans, boots and sweatshirt. Except for the hair, of course—it looked as though he’d been cutting it himself lately, with nail scissors. Or maybe hedge clippers.

“Are you listening to me, Zane Sutton?” Cleo demanded, when he failed to reply to her previous diatribe.

“I’m listening,” Zane said.

“Where are you?” Cleo wanted to know. Would know, by God, if she had to crawl through the telephone system and drag the answer out of him.

“I’m on my ranch,” he said. “Outside Three Trees, Montana.”

“Well, you get me a plane ticket for day after tomorrow,” Cleo commanded. “I need some time to pack and say goodbye to folks. Make it one way, this ticket, and I had better be sitting in first class, too, after all you put me through. And don’t you stick me in row one, neither. I need to be able to get to my purse when I want it, and in a bulkhead seat, they make you put it in the overhead.” She made another huffy sound. “My blood pressure is through the roof,” she added.

Importing Cleo wasn’t a bad idea, Zane thought. The lady might be prickly sometimes, but she could cook and clean, and she’d be the ideal person to oversee the forthcoming renovations, too.

Plus, he’d been telling the truth when he said he missed her.

“You’d do that?” he asked, moved. “Leave L.A. for Montana? It’s real rural out here, Cleo. And we’re roughing it—not much furniture to speak of and plenty of things in need of repair.” Or replacement.

“Sure I would,” Cleo answered briskly. “You might be used to living luxuriously, Mr. Movie Star, but I’m no stranger to doing without, let me tell you. Didn’t I raise four kids by the sweat of my brow, with no man to help out? And didn’t I do that in a part of the city a lot of folks would be afraid to set foot in, even in broad daylight?”

She was laying it on thick, Zane knew. The four kids she’d raised were all well-educated and prosperous professionals now, scattered all over the country and contributing generously to their mother’s bank account. And Cleo had been living in staff quarters in his condo since she came to work for him, so it wasn’t as though she took buses to and from the ghetto every day, dodging bullets as a matter of course.

“All right,” Zane heard himself say. “I’ll book your flight for the day after tomorrow and email you the itinerary.”

“Good.” Cleo huffed out the word. “Get me out of LAX bright and early. And there’s one other thing, too.”

“What’s that?” Zane asked, a grin quirking at one corner of his mouth. Nash, meanwhile, peeled a banana and stuck half of it into his mouth, so both cheeks bulged.

“Who’s ‘we’?” Cleo asked bluntly.

“Huh?”

“You said ‘we’re roughing it.’ Plural. Have you taken up with some pretty cowgirl? Is that what this is all about, you suddenly wanting your housekeeper back and all? Because there’s somebody you want to impress?”

Zane laughed. He hadn’t “taken up” with anybody, though he did want to get to know Brylee Parrish a little better. Okay, a lot better. “It’s just me, my kid brother and my dog, Slim,” he replied. “And I’m warning you, Cleo—we’re a motley crew.”

“You mean Landry’s there with you? Did he split up with that crazy wife of his again?”

“No,” Zane said, feeling no particular need to comment on Landry’s marital situation. “I mean Nash.”

“Who’s that?”

“You’re going to have to wait and find out for yourself,” Zane answered. “The situation defies description—over the phone at least.”

“You get me that ticket,” Cleo blustered, letting the Nash question go, for the time being, anyhow. “I’ve got my computer turned on, and I’ll be watching for new messages.”

Again, Zane chuckled. “I’m on it, Cleo,” he promised.

Nash gave the remaining half of his banana to Slim, who gobbled it up eagerly.

“First class,” Cleo reminded him.

“It’s as good as done,” Zane said, glaring at Nash and shaking his head. As in, don’t do that again. Human food wasn’t good for a dog, and that meant Slim wasn’t going to have it.

Fifteen minutes later, he’d gone online, purchased Cleo’s one-way, first-class ticket, in seat 3B, and zapped a copy to her in L.A.

“Who was that?” Nash asked conversationally. By then, he and Slim had been outside and then returned.

“That,” Zane answered, logging off and shutting the lid on his laptop, “was Super-Cleo. She can bend steel with her bare hands, leap over a tall building in a single bound—and she’s faster than a speeding bullet, too.”

No sense adding that she was as wide as she was tall, with ebony skin and gray hair that stood out around her head like a fright wig. A person had to meet Cleo to comprehend her, and even then, it took some time.

She yelled and flapped her apron when she wanted the kitchen to herself, and she had a tongue sharp enough to slice overripe tomatoes clean as the oft-mentioned whistle, but she also had a heart as expansive as the big Montana sky.

Nash’s brow furrowed. Now that he’d showered and put on clothes that wouldn’t get him beat up on the school grounds, he looked his age, which was an improvement over his former parody of a fortysomething homeless person in need of psychotropic drugs.

“This Cleo—is she your girlfriend?” he asked suspiciously, an indication that his previous experiences with girlfriends, probably his father’s, had been memorable for all the wrong reasons.

Zane laughed again, partly because he was amused at the idea of Cleo as his main squeeze, and partly to hide the stab of sympathy he felt for Nash in that moment. “Nope,” he said, with a shake of his head. “Cleo and I are definitely not romantically involved.”

Nash looked relieved, and a bit sullen. “I guess we’ll have to buy another bed, then,” he said. “Because from what I gathered, she doesn’t seem like somebody who’d want to sleep on an air mattress.”

“You’re right about that,” Zane confirmed, with a chuckle. “If we know what’s good for us, we’ll have all new appliances, including a washer and dryer, before she gets here.”

Something changed in Nash’s face, an indefinable shift that might have meant he was beginning to trust this hairpin turn in his life and luck—or simply that he was mentally reviewing some felonious plan B, like burning down the house in the dead of night or committing murder with an ax.

Or both.

“Do I really get to stay here?” the boy asked, very quietly.

Zane had to swallow before he answered. “Yep,” he said. “You really get to stay here.”

“Zane?”

“What?”

“Thanks for not calling me ‘Studebaker,’” Nash said. “Or Edsel.”