Chapter Three
“H ave you completely lost your mind this time?”
Boone didn’t have to look up from the stretch of fencing he was working on to recognize his younger brother’s voice.
He hadn’t heard Knox drive up, way out here where Carey land flirted with National Forest, but then again, he’d had other things to focus on.
Like the work he was doing, out here in a heartbreakingly beautiful Montana June afternoon.
Days like this reminded him how truly lucky he was to live the life he did, not that he was likely to forget.
Not when he got to spend his time getting his sweat on out here in a part of the world so beautiful that he wasn’t sure there were any words for it.
The Rockies were a blue smudge in the distance all around.
Closer in there were specific hills and forests, the easy roll of Carey land, and civilization nowhere to be seen in any direction.
Not to mention, Sierra was living in a home he’d built with the same two hands that he was using to do his work today.
Sleeping in a bed that was technically his.
Life was pretty good.
So it made sense that Knox would show up and poke at it.
The youngest of the five Carey brothers walked around so he could lean against a mended part of the fence.
He and Boone were the closest in age and Boone had always thought they looked alike, even if he was brawnier.
They were both darkly blond, with the height and ranginess that they’d all inherited from Zeke.
Knox was leaner, but they both had the same dark hazel eyes they’d gotten from their mother.
It was Boone’s opinion that Knox had also gotten more than his fair share of Belinda’s excitability.
An opinion Knox did not share, but then, he wouldn’t.
“I know you heard me,” his younger brother said, grinning in that devil-may-care way of his that had always been a major key in getting himself out of trouble.
That and being the baby of the family.
“And I also know that you know exactly what I’m talking about. Sierra Tate?”
“Yes,” Boone said, making his voice gruffer the necessary, not that Knox was ever dissuaded by such things.
“I’m familiar Sierra Tate, Knox.”
His brother shook his head.
He pulled off his Stetson and ran his hand through his hair.
“In my whole life, I’ve never met a man more committed to torturing himself than you. It’s like you’re in a competition to see how many crosses you can climb up on to in the course of a single day. And every day, you win.”
“Don’t you have anything to do?” Boone asked, eyeing the last bit of the fencing he’d finally secured.
“Because I know you didn’t drive out all this way to help me.”
“I’m nothing if not helpful,” Knox said with a laugh.
Knox was many things, Boone thought.
Arguably the smartest of them all, he was the only one of the brothers who’d gone on to college after high school.
He’d done it on a football scholarship and had still managed to graduate with an agricultural degree over in Missoula, even though he made it sound as if he’d never stopped partying.
These days he was the efficiency expert on the ranch.
He was the one who studied the systems they used and made recommendations about how to shift gears, though he managed to do it in a way that honored the history of this place and the way the Careys had always done things.
Boone figured that kind of thing had to take a lot of smarts.
Pity Knox didn’t apply any of that to the rest of his life.
“If you came all the way out here for the sole purpose trying to get under my skin, you’re doomed to failure,” Boone drawled.
“You also clearly need to talk to Harlan about giving you a better workload.”
“My workload is fine, thank you,” Knox said with a laugh.
“Can’t I be worried about my brother?”
Boone stopped messing around with his fence and stepped back to eye his handiwork.
Mending fences was an ongoing task without end when a person worked on a ranch.
Or a farm. Or any sort of outdoor environment that required a person enclose some areas to keep the animals from roaming freely and getting themselves into trouble.
Some members of his family viewed the job as an inconvenience, which was fair enough, because it was like playing whack-a-mole.
Fix a fence here and another section went down there.
The livestock were forever finding new ways to wriggle their way free of the fences set to contain them.
Still, Boone enjoyed it.
It was downright meditative.
But then, he took pride in the things he did.
Even a section of fencing way out here in a corner of their land that no one but him was likely to ever see.
If the fence didn’t matter here, then nothing did.
If the fence mattered, everything mattered.
Boone liked to believe that it really did matter what he did with his hours each day.
Either a man took pride in his life or he was wasting it, to his way of thinking, and he wasn’t one to waste much of anything.
Even a little bit of mending fences.
Besides, a little existential meditation never went awry when forced to deal with his meddling brothers.
“Sierra needed to get out of Marietta for a while and I happen to have the extra space,” Boone told Knox, wiping at his own brow and keeping his eyes on the mountains.
The quiet, enduring mountains who did not have to claim their power and authority.
They simply exuded it.
He tried to do the same.
“Not that it’s any of your business.”
“You just happen to have that space,” Knox said, rolling his eyes.
“Like you didn’t build that barn with hope in your heart and Sierra’s name in your mouth.”
Boone chose to ignore the commentary on his heart and anything involving Sierra and his mouth .
“It’s a win all around, because she and I want to kick the dairy into high gear this summer.” He eyed his brother.
“Does that satisfy the little gossip in your soul?”
“You can call me a gossip all you want,” Knox said with an unbothered laugh.
“What do you think it’s going to be like at Sunday dinner, though?”
“I think it’s going to be perfectly polite.” Boone frowned at his brother.
“Because Sierra will be there, Know. In person. So unless you plan on getting in her face, which I really wouldn’t recommend, I think you’ll keep your commentary to yourself.”
“I might.” Knox grinned, clearly enjoying himself.
“But Mom? Keep her opinions to herself? Unlikely. Not just unlikely—unheard of. Are you really ready for that?”
Boone thought about that a lot over the next couple of days.
He’d told Sierra to take her time settling in and getting acclimated.
She was used to living in town, so it would take some getting used to the rhythms of living this far away from amenities like a supermarket.
She was going to have to learn what to buy in bulk and how to handle the perishables.
She was going to have to pay a lot more attention to the gas level in her Jeep.
That wasn’t even getting into what he assumed would be the significant emotional turmoil from leaving her whole life behind her.
Because he never met anyone taking a break from or exiting a marriage who didn’t have a pretty intense reaction to it.
No matter what the situation.
He’d told her that Monday was soon enough to start talking about the dairy business.
In the meantime, he’d showed her around the office that was on the lower level of the barn and had invited her to get comfortable there.
What he wanted was for Sierra to find herself comfortable.
Everywhere. All over his life in whatever way she liked.
And what Knox didn’t understand was that it wasn’t torture.
It felt right , the way Sierra always did and always would.
But no one needed to understand anything except the fact that Boone was going to do what he wanted to do.
Every time. Up to and including giving his best friend a safe space to land.
By the time he and Sierra walked in to the ranch house that first Sunday in June, he’d come to the conclusion that Knox had been trying to get a rise out of him—a lifelong pursuit on Know’s part.
Because he knew his family.
His brothers might like to talk shit and roast each other whenever possible, but there wasn’t a single one of them who would hurt Sierra’s feelings.
Not deliberately. And not a one of them who would ever do a single thing to make her feel uncomfortable.
This was because they were all decent men, of course—even Knox—and not because they were worried about Boone’s reaction if they insulted or hurt Sierra.
Though he imagined that potential reaction didn’t hurt, either.
Besides, there were more important things to talk about.
His oldest brother Harlan’s wife, Kendall, was solidly pregnant—something that had been suspected a while, but only confirmed about a month back.
She was due in September.
Zeke and Belinda were delighted.
Beyond delighted, in fact.
Sunday dinners were already different than they been a year ago.
A lot louder and more disorderly than ever before—and with five boys turning into grown men, it had never been all that orderly around here.
These days, Ryder and Rosie came with their four-year-old twins, Eli and Levi, who were terrors in all the best ways.
The little boys tore through the house, wild with glee, and were doted upon by everyone they raced past. Belinda worked her usual magic in the kitchen, these days with more help than she’d ever accepted before—mostly because Wilder’s wife, Cat, insisted and would not be dissuaded.
And somehow made Belinda laugh when usually she preferred to wave the rest of them away and mutter about interference beneath her breath, but always loud enough to be heard.
Zeke sat there in the middle of it all like the chaos was giving him life.
Literally, Boone hoped.
But he didn’t like to think too much about how unlikely it was that his father was going to watch any of these kids grow up.
“I myself have been known to play with fire,” came his brother Ryder drawled from beside him.
Boone didn’t respond.
He was standing in the kitchen, watching the mayhem unfold and minding his own business while it did.
Ryder laughed. “But even in my wildest days, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen an act of self-immolation like this.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Boone replied mildly.
This was a lie, of course.
Sierra, like Cat, was incapable of sitting around and being waited upon.
She and Cat were talking a mile a minute over there by the stove, where Belinda was directing traffic and batting Wilder’s hands away from her roast potatoes.
“What I have to wonder,” Ryder said in a low voice so that only Boone could hear, “is what happens when the only person in the state of Montana who doesn’t know how you feel about this girl—meaning, Sierra herself—finds out? How do you think she’s going to handle the news that her dependable best friend had actually been nursing a thing for her all along?”
Boone laughed.
“Never going to happen,” he assured his older brother with a grin.
He clapped Ryder on the shoulder.
“Maybe you don’t know this but I’m a sweet, kind angel. As far she’s concerned, I have wings and a halo.”
Ryder laughed, as his sons came barreling by, but when Boone didn’t laugh with him, he shook his head.
“I don’t see it ending well, Boone.”
“That’s because you have less self-control than I do,” Boone retorted, and lifted a brow at the now-brawling toddlers on the kitchen floor.
Ryder took that with a grin.
“You may have a point.”
Boone’s mother was harder to shake off.
When he volunteered to help with the dishes after a long, lazy sort of meal that was repeatedly punctuated by laughter and toddler outbursts and the usual brotherly nonsense, Belinda took that as an opportunity to send him out to the compost pile.
Mostly so she could follow him and corner him away from the rest the family.
“You can’t really believe you’re going to trick that girl into falling in love with you simply because you put a roof over her head,” Belinda said, glowering at him.
Boone would have taken a swing at one of his brothers if they’d dared say something like that to him, but this was his mother.
So he only rolled his eyes.
“You’re right. I can’t think that. I don’t.”
“I know your father demanded that all five of you marry and start on grandchildren,” Belinda continued.
“But I never thought that you’d be this competitive.”
Boone felt his jaw go tight, but he couldn’t let himself think about what his father had called his last, best wish .
“I’ve never been competitive a day in my life.”
That wasn’t strictly true.
He’d played football in high school.
And a man didn’t grow up with four hard-headed brothers without a sense of healthy competition—he just preferred to compete by appearing to be above competition.
It usually worked like a charm.
Belinda sniffed, but her gaze was assessing.
“I don’t think he meant that you should take him so seriously that you’d move in with Sierra. That seems extreme. Isn’t she still married?”
“Sierra’s marital status isn’t my business,” Boone growled out.
“I’m not clear on how it could be yours.”
His mother was a tiny thing, especially in this family.
But what she didn’t have in stature, she more than made up for in intensity.
She poked her finger into his chest and scowled up at him.
“You deserve a woman who can love you back, Boone,” she snapped out with a serious look on her face.
“You should demand it.”
They were away from the ranch house, on the backside of the outbuildings.
None of his brothers were in earshot.
Sierra was safely inside the house.
Boone let out a heavy breath.
“She loves me, Mom,” he said, and shrugged.
“Is it the kind of love you and Dad have? No. But that doesn’t mean it’s any less worthy. If that’s what I get in this life, I’ll can’t complain.”
Belinda looked as close to chastened as he’d ever seen her.
“I want more for you.”
“And I want Sierra,” he told her, simply.
“In whatever capacity I get her.”
Belinda started to argue and he shook his head.
“I’m not going to fight about this with you, Mom. And I don’t intend to discuss it further. But I need you to respect it—and her. If you can’t manage that, then respect me.”
His mother had that fierce expression on her face that usually meant trouble, but all she did was nod.
Boone choice to interpret that as acceptance.
Later, he and Sierra took a walk across Boone’s acreage so she could better get a sense of his dairy herd, where he wanted to put the goats he was thinking of bringing in, not to mention the little farm he’d been tinkering with.
She might have been a town girl, who as far as he knew had never been allowed to touch her mother’s dramatic flowerbeds, but she wasn’t afraid to ask questions or to get our hands dirty.
“This is great,” Sierra said after they’d had a long, circuitous discussion about what cheeses he was experimenting with, his feelings on what made butter an experience rather than a condiment, his thoughts on yogurt, and when these experiments would make this enterprise of his a creamery.
Not to mention how Boone saw all of this playing out in this remote corner of paradise that many folks from far off might consider the literal middle of nowhere—though tourism kept rising the more that people kept working remote.
“I feel like even though I’ve been in Montana in my whole life, this is my opportunity to really and truly get my Big Sky on.”
“There’s no shortage of sky around here,” Boone agreed.
Since they were already looking around, he walked her through the working parts of the dairy barn, too.
And that bedrock conviction he’d had all along that she was the one to do this with only strengthened as she took notes and told him she was going to do her research and then ask him about it once she knew the right questions to ask.
It was much later in the afternoon when they ended up sitting on his front porch, each of them nursing a beer.
“I feel like I’ve almost walked off your mom’s cooking,” Sierra said with a laugh.
What Boone wanted to say was that good food didn’t require an intervention or a medicinal response, but he didn’t.
He said nothing the way he always said nothing when he heard her mother come out of her mouth.
He stared out at the view from his porch instead.
From here he could see his own barn and the stretch of his land, the little bit of farmland he’d started cultivating, and beyond that, the march of mountains out beyond the horizon.
“Your sister-in-law invited me out tonight,” Sierra said, and she sounded…
Not quite surprised.
Not exactly baffled.
Something like that, though.
“You have to be more specific,” Boone drawled.
“I have a lot of those all of a sudden.”
“Rosie,” Sierra said.
That was a surprise.
Rosie had gotten pregnant with Ryder’s babies right around the time she graduated from college and had spent the next few years being a single mother here in Cowboy Point.
She and Ryder had gotten married back in March, but even before then, Boone wasn’t sure he’d ever seen Rosie out and about.
None of his sisters-in-law, as far as he could tell, were much in the way of party girls.
Not that there was anything wrong with a party girl, but that would be a tough transition to ranch life.
These mountains were full of stories like that.
Like that grumpy asshole Colton Dean who lived way out on the Bar C—halfway through the Gallatin Range.
Had his late wife been ill-suited to the ranch after her big city upbringing or had exposure to him made her that way?
Jury was still out.
Boone felt lucky that all of his brothers had chosen wisely.
“Rosie said that she, Kendall, and Cat all get together on Sunday evenings at the pizza place to commiserate,” Sierra told him.
And her green eyes danced when Boone lifted a brow.
“That’s right. They console each other on the terrible burden of being married to a Carey brother. Given that I’m more or less roommates with one now, they figured I can come too. A special dispensation for best friends instead of wives, in case you wondered. They’ve apparently been discussing whether or not that counted.”
Boone bet they had.
He shook his head. “I don’t know how long you’re going to be living here once they get their claws into you.”
She laughed.
But then she sighed a little.
“I don’t know the last time anyone wanted to do something with me… just because . It’s usually volunteer stuff, or the wives of Matty’s clients, you know.”
Boone did know.
He knew a lot more than he wanted to about what Sierra’s life was like in that marriage and if he was ever going to discuss torture , it would be that.
Keeping a civil tongue in his head while Sierra told him all the things that she clearly thought weren’t that bad.
Because he knew her.
He knew that she kept the actually bad stuff to herself.
He stayed quiet now, too.
“I kind of want to go,” she said, softly.
Boone had to grit his teeth to keep from reacting to that, because it infuriated him when she showed him all the ways she wasn’t allowed to express the things she wanted in her marriage.
And she showed him these things all the time.
“I think you should go,” he said, careful to sound neutral.
“You never get to see your friends. You need to make some new ones.”
“Matty always says that I don’t know how to make friends.” Sierra was looking down at her bottle of beer as if the opening fascinated her.
Boone practiced some of his favorite calming exercises, all of which involved envisioning—in exquisite detail—wringing Matty Quealey’s neck.
But when he spoke, he was calm.
Deeply and excessively calm.
“All your high school friends moved away. Last I heard, Kelly was down in Denver and Erin was in Illinois. You can’t exactly go out for coffee with them, can you? And you had a lot of friends in college.”
Unlike her husband, he had always listened to her when she talked about the people in her life and the things she was doing, even if he would have preferred that she was doing them closer to him.
As far as he could tell, Matty had spent those same four years making Sierra feel bad for not following him out to the West Coast. When anyone who knew anything about Matty also knew that he would have hated it if she had, because it would have gotten in the way of his frat boy antics.
Then again, Boone wasn’t sure Matty had ever cared how obvious he was.
His behavior would suggest he did not.
“I have friends in Marietta,” Sierra said, and he could hear the consternation in her voice, like it had occurred to her that saying she didn’t have any friends might reflect badly on her.
That she was actually afraid it might when Boone knew perfectly well that there were a lot of great folks in town—but not people that Matty would ever want to give the time of day.
That had nothing to do with Sierra, in his view.
“Just no close friends. That’s what I meant. I think that’s what Matty was trying to say.”
Boone wondered, not for the first time, if Sierra understood how much work she put into making Matty seem like less of a dick than he was.
Sometimes he was sure that she knew.
Other times, like today, he thought maybe it was so ingrained in her that she had no idea.
He took another breath to think about the various ways he could rearrange Matty’s pointy face and then smiled at Sierra with none of his thoughts in evidence, another trick he’d learned a long time ago.
When he’d first met Sierra it was her parents that she’d protected.
Then it had been Matty.
These days it was often both.
Boone thought she was well overdue to worry about protecting absolutely no one but herself.
“I think you should go have some pizza with my sisters-in-law,” he told her.
“Aside from their taste in men, which we can agree is questionable at best, they’re pretty great. If you’re looking for friends up here in Cowboy Point, I think they’re a terrific place to start.”