Chapter One
B oone Carey lived his life according to three simple principles.
Some men preferred whiskey, others had Jesus.
It wasn’t Boone’s job to criticize or condemn, so he kept his thoughts on those choices to himself.
The way he kept most of his thoughts to himself, the world being a little too full of loud opinions voiced by the confidently misinformed, as far as he was concerned.
None of that was his business and besides, he had better things to think about.
Boone had been born and bred in the enduring, demanding Montana Rockies, ten miles up from pretty Marietta and around the back of Copper Mountain, a peak so wily it had lured in all kinds of miners and produced nothing—except the wildly independent and hard-to-kill former miners and other such folks who’d stayed behind when the mining companies left, and had made themselves some settlements out here where the sky and the land were as majestic as the wildlife was bold, and tomorrow was never a guarantee.
Winters on the family ranch outside of the tiny community of Cowboy Point kept a man humble.
And summers here were so beautiful and so brief that they hurt a little, but they made sure he had a little hope going into the next long cold spell.
Montana’s stark seasons taught a man everything he needed to know, if he was prepared to pay attention.
And Boone always paid attention.
That was how he’d come up with the three principles he lived by in the first place.
He’d been arranging his life around them for as long as he could recall.
One, that a man’s word was his worth and needed to be protected as such.
Boone wasn’t one to play games with his integrity, no matter what it cost him.
That didn’t always make the people around him happy, but he liked the fact that he could sleep at night and look directly at himself in the mirror come morning.
That mattered. Some days, it was all he had.
Two, that honesty wasn’t only the best policy, it was the baseline requirement for pretty much everything.
He’d learned that by watching his father’s example.
Zeke Carey hadn’t simply told his five sons how to grow up and become decent men, he’d showed them what one looked like.
Day in and day out, Zeke had used his hands to build, his mind to solve problems, and his core decency to inspire.
He was Boone’s hero.
If Boone thought too much about his father’s looming diagnosis, it took his breath away—so he did his best to enjoy the old man while he still could.
The third principle was more of an immovable fact, a lot like the mountains that surrounded him and inspired him, humbled him and exalted him in turn.
It was simple too, though that did not mean uncomplicated.
It was this: He had been irreversibly and unrequitedly in love with his best friend Sierra Tate since the moment he’d laid eyes on her in the seventh grade and would be until the day he died.
The end.
None of these principles were comfortable, necessarily.
But all told, they were who he was.
They made up the core of Boone Carey even if no one ever knew these things but him.
Besides, he wasn’t sure what made folks think that life was supposed to be comfortable, anyway.
And it was a good thing he had no expectations in that regard, he told himself as he heard a familiar vehicle in the trees.
It was bumping along the lane that branched off from the main drive through the ranch that had been in his family since the 1800s and wound its way through the tall, stout pines into the heart of his parcel of that same land.
Sierra was coming to live with him.
Not with him, Boone corrected himself, sounding gruff and stern even inside his own head.
Don’t get ahead of yourself, dumbass , he growled at all the excitement he could feel inside him.
When he’d turned eighteen, he’d gotten to choose this land.
He’d built a house, and was proud of the work he’d put into it and the fact that he slept in a dwelling he’d made with his hands.
But Boone had always wanted something that was purely his.
He loved this land. He was as much a part of High Mountain Ranch as the earth beneath his feet, and nothing could ever change that.
He loved working with his brothers, idiots though they often were.
He knew that there were few men on earth as lucky as he was, to get to spend his life out beneath the Montana sky, working with his hands and his family and living life the way he chose.
Yet he’d gone ahead and started his artisan dairy all the same.
He’d found some Jersey cows that had already pleased him.
He had his eye on some goats.
This winter he’d been experimenting with cheese and yogurt.
And when Sierra had said she needed a place to crash, he had understood at last why it was that he’d built the whole apartment down here in his barn, a lot like he’d been waiting for this to happen.
Well. If he was completely honest, he had been waiting for this to happen—pretty much since the day Sierra had gone ahead and gotten married to the guy he’d hoped was just a high school mistake on her part.
Joke was on him. It had been more than a decade since the wedding.
Good thing Boone had made waiting into an art form.
But her car came careening into view, shooting out from the trees entirely too fast, as always.
And he smiled the way he always did, because another simple truth in his life was that there was nothing about Sierra Tate that didn’t make him happy.
Except, that was, the fact she wasn’t his.
And would never be his.
But that was an old wound.
More of an ache now, like a touch of arthritis, and he knew what to do about that kind of thing.
There were salves and painkillers of one sort or another out there and he indulged when needed.
He knew how to handle the slight discomfort.
Some years, he barely noticed it.
Sierra was driving her rugged Jeep with the top off, though it really wasn’t warm enough for that—especially not up here on the other side of Copper Mountain where there was still snow on the ground.
Down in Marietta on the floor of Paradise Valley where Sierra had lived most of her life, it tended to be a little warmer and a whole lot greener this time of year.
Though if she was cold she didn’t show it.
She came to a rocking sort of stop and then slid out of the front seat to land hard on the ground.
Then she smiled at him.
“Can you believe it? I did it.”
“You did it,” he agreed in a low voice, waiting to read where her mood was going.
He didn’t have long to wait.
She barreled toward him and threw herself against his chest, knowing full well that he would catch her.
The way he always did.
She hugged him, fierce and hard.
And he hugged her back, getting the scent of her shampoo in his nose, mixed with that cream she used and the laundry detergent she washed her clothes in.
All of it together was her.
To Boone, she always smelled like sunshine.
But these were the things that he filed away, down deep in that part of himself that he kept locked up tight.
Because Sierra needed him as a friend, so that’s what he was.
That was all he was, and he counted it as a privilege.
Even on a day like this.
Maybe especially on a day like this.
She pulled back, and those green eyes of hers that reminded him of the proud pines that stood tall all over these mountains looked damp.
But she slashed her hands at them, looking impatient.
“This is going to be fantastic,” she said, like she was daring it not to be.
“First of all, I’ve always wanted to live in a barn. Did I imagine that it would be a tastefully reimagined modern farmhouse in the old Western style? Appropriate for fancy magazine spreads that would attract the sort of people who vacation in Bozeman? I might have. But this is better.”
“I’m never going to show up in a glossy magazine,” Boone reminded her.
“But I think you’ll be comfortable.”
“I know I will be.” Though she sounded more like she was convincing herself when she said that.
“I will be.”
Boone moved over to the Jeep then and started pulling out her bags.
She came over too, and then they didn’t say much as they loaded themselves up.
When they were both at full capacity—and had managed to hoist up everything she’d brought with her—he led her inside, up the internal stairs of the separate entrance that led to the apartment up top, skirting the functioning part of the barn entirely.
He’d aired the place out for her this morning.
Once she’d told him that she really was doing this, today , he’d come down to make sure that the place was ready for her.
She dropped her bags in the center of the living room floor as she walked in, looked around, and let out a long breath.
Maybe it was a little ragged, but he didn’t focus on that.
Because clearly, she wasn’t focusing on it either.
She was looking around.
“This is really beautiful,” she said after a moment.
“I knew you were building this when you built the barn, but I don’t think that I’ve ever seen it all pulled together. Did you really do this all by yourself?”
“All by my lonesome self,” he agreed, and he liked it when she laughed at that.
At that tone he’d used that she liked to call his stern and sardonic voice.
Truth was, Boone was proud of this place.
And yes, he’d arranged it with her in mind.
Given that doing things that she liked had pretty much guided him since the day they’d met, he didn’t think it was that much of a leap.
He knew that she’d like the modern but cozy furnishings, the polished wood floors, the big windows.
He waited in the living room as she looked around, and he liked it when he heard her exclaim over the freestanding bathtub, then sigh happily when she found the sloped skylight in the bedroom that would let the stars in while she slept.
He’d thought a lot about that when he’d put it in.
About the stars all over her pretty face while she slept.
That was the sort of thing he found comforting.
Comfort with a sucker punch was his stock in trade.
His brother Knox liked to call him Montana’s greatest martyr.
Knox, obviously, was an asshole.
Sierra came back out and moved around the kitchen that sat in its own alcove off the living room.
She turned in a circle and he knew she took in every detail.
The painting on the wall that his mother had done in one of her crafty phases, of the view from a ridge farther into the property.
The usual prints of mountains.
“It’s delightful here,” she told him when she faced him again.
“And I insist on paying rent.”
“Denied.”
“Boone. You have to—”
“You’re going to help me find out if this is dairy thing is a business or a hobby,” he reminded her.
“You’re the one with a degree. We’ll figure out the money on that side of things, but I’m not going to charge you for a place to live, Sierra. That’s never going to happen.”
He didn’t say why.
He didn’t have to say why.
She knew why. They’d been best friends since they were fifteen.
Best friends didn’t charge each other rent while they were leaving their shitty marriages.
If there was a rule book out there, Boone was pretty sure that would be high on the list.
They looked at each other, and he could see a hint of emotion in her eyes again.
There was probably a lot more where that came from, but she clearly didn’t want to break down.
Or maybe she did. He watched her straighten her shoulders.
“You haven’t said anything about all of this. I keep waiting.”
“What do you want me to say?”
She laughed, but it had an edge to it.
“I don’t know. I told you so comes to mind?”
“But I didn’t tell you.” He said that quietly, because it wasn’t an accusation.
It was a simple truth.
One he’d always assumed was deliberate on her part.
“That wasn’t something you wanted to hear.”
“The thing about you, Boone, is that your nonverbal communication is what other people might call a whole cacophony.”
“I’m just a dairy farmer, darlin’,” he drawled.
“I don’t know all those fancy words you learned up in Bozeman.”
He saw something flash over her face, but then she shook her head.
“Idiot.”
“Have you told your parents?” he asked.
The living room was furnished with a sofa that fit Boone’s large frame—not a coincidence, since he regularly found himself overly large for standard furniture, never a problem here on the ranch—and he took advantage of that now.
When he sat down, Sierra looked relieved.
So much so that he wondered if she thought that he was going to stand there and lecture her when she knew perfectly well that he’d never been a big fan of the life she’d been living all this time.
Much less who she’d been living it with.
It would have been different if she was happy.
He’d told himself that for years.
He’d have found a way to get right with it all if she’d been happy .
And he believed that was true, because God knew, Sierra happy made him happy, too.
“I’m having dinner with them tonight.” Sierra made a face.
“Wish me luck?”
Boone waited.
Sierra looked away and pulled her lower lip between her teeth.
That particular absent-minded thing she did featured hugely in that lockbox of things about Sierra that he kept under lock and key as much as possible.
Because the problem with Sierra—maybe the biggest problem, though there were so many more he’d had to wrestle with over the years—was that she’d been the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen when he was fifteen.
And she’d only gotten prettier in the years since.
So damned pretty.
She had shiny brown hair that she liked to wear in French braids.
It was all back in one thick braid today, with pieces falling down because of the wind in her Jeep.
When her hair was down, it was wavy and thick and gleamed all the way down past her shoulders.
When she wore her hair up, it called attention to the gold chain she wore around her neck almost every day.
A gift from her grandma, he knew, for her sixteenth birthday.
Shiny little links of gold nestled in the little hollow at the base of her neck.
Her eyes were green, like the forests Boone loved almost as much as he loved the mountains.
He’d found that nothing short of magical in high school.
He still did.
She’d always been curvy and she technically still was, even though she’d spent a large part of the last decade starving herself and committing to every possible exercise fad in order to get small and stick figured.
He had to give it to her.
She’d made herself miserable but she’d managed it.
Boone thought she looked a little puny, in truth.
That had never been what he wanted in a woman, and if he was honest, he had a lot of follow-up questions for a lot of the men who did.
He thought that the woman in a man’s life should be happy , and who the hell cared what her jean size was?
If Sierra was happy this tiny, hell, he would have loved that too, but she wasn’t.
She looked haunted. Her cheeks were hollow.
He remembered when she’d been ripe and filled with joy.
There had never been a part of her he didn’t like to watch bloom.
Her curves were a work of art and the fact that she’d worked so hard to erase them—
But he couldn’t let his temper take hold.
That wasn’t going to help anything.
Boone was more than used to simmering about this and other offenses Sierra’s marriage had wrought in private.
And in any event, bony or otherwise, she was Sierra.
That was what mattered.
He’d spent more time than he would like to admit analyzing each and every one of her attributes, trying to boil down the particular alchemy of her features because he thought that maybe if he could do that, he could find that magic somewhere else.
But Sierra was the magic.
She lit up every room she was in.
Even if she was miserable.
Even if she was mad.
Even if she was gray straight through, when she walked in, she was the only thing he saw.
On her worst day, she gave the big Montana sky a run for its money—and usually won.
He allowed himself to feel that familiar tightening in his chest. He was used to it.
He breathed it out and then put it away.
Because Sierra was his friend.
And Boone was—always had been and always would be—the best one she had.
She blew out a breath.
“Part of me is afraid I’m going to chicken out,” she admitted.
“And it will just drag on forever until they finally discover my marriage is over because he’s marrying someone else, because you know he will. He’s that type. He’ll do it fast.”
Boone had long ago decided that nothing good could come from any discussions about what type her husband was.
No good at all.
“You’re not going to chicken out,” he assured her, like he knew.
Like it had already happened.
When he knew entirely too well that it was possible she would.
“What do you think your parents are going to do?”
Not what his parents would do, he knew.
His parents had always made it clear they loved him and supported him, even if they thought he was wrong.
Sierra had never had that foundation.
“Come on.” Sierra laughed.
Only a little hollowly.
“You know exactly what they’re going to do.” She came over and sat down on the couch, curling her feet up beneath her on the far end of the sofa from him.
“Mary Catherine will have the vapors as usual. All the fluttering and complaints of vague disorders triggered by my insensitivity. Kenneth will start blustering about his position in the community and what this will mean for his golf game. It’s all very boring. It will be tense and uncomfortable and I wouldn’t be surprised if they race from the table to go see if they can intercede themselves and make it all go away.”
“I never have understood why they are so attached to all this,” Boone said, quietly.
Carefully.
He had to go easy.
Because he’d always understood that if he let himself vent his full feelings about Sierra’s long-term relationship and then marriage to the so-called scion of the uppity Quealey family down in Marietta, he wouldn’t stop.
Not only would he not stop, he would probably get into subjects that Sierra would not like.
And Boone had made an art—not to mention a whole life—out of being a comfortable place for Sierra to land.
A safe space for her to be herself.
He wasn’t going to go jeopardizing that now.
“Of course you don’t understand,” Sierra said, and there was an edge in her voice.
She picked at the knee of her jeans that he thought were far too baggy for her body.
“The Quealeys are money with a capital M. Snooty Bozeman money. They’re exactly the kind of people that my parents have always loved the most. After all, according to them, everyone in Paradise Valley is a redneck hick, not a fancy lawyer like my father or a hedge fund czar like Fletcher Quealey.” She rolled her eyes and took on a certain cadence that he knew was mimicking her father.
“He used to work on Wall Street, you know.”
Boone did know.
No one could live around here and not know more than they wanted to about the steady influx of rich city people who came from places like New York City or Los Angeles and decided that what they really needed was a Montana ranch house.
Not an actual ranch, because that was hard work, but the idea of one.
A lot of them settled in trendy, flashy Bozeman to start, but then, soon enough, some of them began to resent that everyone else had settled in Bozeman too.
That was why Sierra’s father had taken his law practice out of Bozeman and down into Marietta when Sierra was a baby.
And that was how the Quealeys, who would have made great copper kings if only there was still the option to exploit the land and its people, had built themselves one of those showy, pointless ranchettes out on the edge of town.
In true Bozevegas style, it was all fake antlers and decorative horseshoes, Pendleton blankets tossed just so on pristine leather couches, and rooms dominated by stone fireplaces and interior barn doors.
Every now and again, Boone and his brothers would run into folks like the Quealeys in the feed store, pretending to be real ranchers.
Those interactions generally provided significant merriment at all the bars in Crawford County.
But when it came to Matty Quealey, the spoiled little rich kid who’d been in his and Sierra’s class in school, Boone had never found much to laugh about.
Matty was a douche.
That had been true when they had been in high school.
It had been true when he gone off to college somewhere on the West Coast but had never let Sierra go.
It had proved even more true when he’d finally come back, no doubt because he’d realized that he was little more than a guppy in the big bad world out there.
Only here in Marietta could he saunter around like he meant something, but he’d obviously taken to it, because he’d been doing it ever since.
Always keeping Sierra close.
First as his girlfriend, then as his wife.
Boone had managed not to kill him for so long now that it was no longer a danger.
Just another ache. Another arthritis that had no cure, but that he could live with, right along with all the other aches and pains that defined this.
And him.
Because he already had lived with it.
For years.
“They are not going to like the fact that I finally left him,” Sierra was saying dryly.
“But if I’m completely honest, once the smoke clears? I think my dad’s really not going to like that I’m quitting work, too.”
“You don’t have to quit,” Boone felt compelled to say, even though if it was up to him, he would more than happily steal Sierra away and secrete her up here on Carey land, where she would finally be safe from all the things that had hurt her over the years.
Her family. Matty Quealey.
That particular slice of Marietta society that spent far too much time in The Graff Hotel here and the fine resorts all over this part of Montana, amusing themselves with charity events and thought they were better than the place they lived.
When it was obvious to anyone who knew the land the way Boone did that they had no idea what the real Montana was about.
They just came in, stole water resources and sometimes land too, and liked to look at the mountains through their floor-to-ceiling windows.
They never understood the mountains.
“I absolutely do have to quit thanklessly paralegalling for my father,” Sierra said, meeting his gaze and holding it.
“I’m starting a new life, even if it kills me.” She lifted up her chin.
“I’m throwing out everything that’s felt like an anchor all this time and I’m stepping into what’s new. And at the end of the summer, I’ll see where I am. I’ll see who I am.”
“Still,” Boone said, because this was his job.
Being the voice of reason even when he would have been perfectly happy if Sierra never saw her parents or her husband again in this lifetime.
Because what mattered was that she was happy.
“I want you to know, if at any time this summer you think you’ve made a huge mistake—”
“Boone.” She scowled at him.
“Shut up. I’m moving in. You and I are going to make this dairy of yours a sensation. Thanks to you, I’m going to be happy if it kills me.” Sierra blew out a breath then and laughed, but only a little.
“And it might.”
Not before it killed him, Boone thought.
But he was used to that, too.