Chapter Seven
S ierra felt Boone tense beneath her hand.
She thought he would laugh, but instead, it was as if he was suddenly a furnace.
A blasting, hot furnace.
She pulled her hand back, feeling as if she’d gone and put her hand on the cold stove only to find it was actually red hot.
“Sierra,” he said, after some time, as if it was difficult to pronounce her name, suddenly.
He was driving the truck and his hands gripped the wheel as he stared straight ahead, all of which was appropriate as he headed onto that windy road, except she thought his grip was little too tight.
And the way he was staring out the window seemed…
significantly less relaxed than the Boone usually was.
“Sierra, you’re going to have to try to go easy on me.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.
“I know you don’t.” Boone laughed, but it wasn’t that usual joyful sound that he made.
That low, long rumble.
“Believe me, I know that you don’t know what I’m talking about. And it baffles me. But I beg of you, please do not tell me that you fought with your worthless husband about sex with me that you never had.”
“But we did,” Sierra said, confused.
“I would have told you, but it was so… It was just so embarrassing.”
“Embarrassing.”
Sierra felt herself getting flustered, and she didn’t understand it.
She was usually so good at staying calm while people around her lost their composure, but this was Boone.
He never lost his composure.
She didn’t know what to do with the fact that he seemed to be…
pissed at her?
Something in her shook at that.
It seemed related, somehow, to that shimmering thing she still couldn’t identify.
“I don’t know why we’re focusing on things that Matty said,” Sierra got out then, hurriedly, before all that shaking and shimmering took hold.
“It’s amazing to me that I spent as long with him as I did. Although, when you start to break it down, we really didn’t see each other that much. He was always off on a business trip. He spent a little time in Marietta as possible. Even his CrossFit gym is in Livingston. Even when he said mean things to me about why he stayed away so much, he still stayed away. I didn’t have to put up with him too often, really. The only time we really saw each other every day was in high school—”
Boone muttered something under his breath that that sounded a whole lot like a prayer for deliverance.
Then he pulled over, sharply—right before he started up the side of Copper Mountain.
There was a creek that ran down alongside the road in spring and summer, and he drove them down to the water, then got out of the truck.
He slammed the door behind him, and she watched him walk around the front of the truck until he could stare into the water as it tumbled along, here in the tall grass at the base of the mountain.
But he didn’t look like he’d stopped to take in the pretty view.
He looked… agitated.
Sierra sat still in her seat, vibrating—though she still couldn’t have said why.
She didn’t understand what was happening.
Never, in all the time she’d known him, had she ever seen Boone so much as indicate that he had access to a temper.
Not any sort of real one.
He never got upset. He was the soul of patience.
She could hear Matty sneering in her head, yes, Boone Carey is a freaking paragon .
But he was. He always had been.
Sierra got out and followed him down to the creekside.
And she knew exactly when he realized that she’d come to stand beside him, because she could see it.
He stiffened again. He crossed his arms over his chest.
She couldn’t say she liked that reaction much.
Or maybe it was more that she didn’t understand it.
“I’m obviously saying all the wrong things,” Sierra said quietly.
“I know it’s offensive that Matty said all that stuff and I’m sure that’s part of why I didn’t tell you in the first place. I shouldn’t have told you now. It’s put upsetting images in your head and it must be difficult, because of course I’ve never had a single thought about you that was in any way romantic—”
“That’s the fucking problem!” Boone thundered out.
So loud that it seemed like that deep voice of his echoed back from the mountains all around them.
Sierra stared up at him in shock as he turned toward her.
She kept staring as he leaned down so he could put his hands on the high part of her arms again—and it was true that she felt entirely too much when he did that.
She could feel that touch everywhere , just like before.
It was zinging all the way through her, like some kind of electricity.
She didn’t understand what it was.
She didn’t understand how she felt so weak suddenly and yet lit up from within.
“I’m sorry that Matty said those things,” she managed to continue, tripping over her words.
“Especially the part about finally getting what you want. I’m really so sorry. I just have to say that, and then we can go back—”
“He was right, Sierra,” Boone threw at her, sounding a lot like a man at the end of his tether.
But how was that possible?
How could he be at the end of a tether she hadn’t known existed?
“He was absolutely right. I’m delighted that you’re divorced. But that’s not going to change the real problem, is it? You don’t feel a single romantic thing about me. And you never will.”
His gaze was coppery now, and dark, and it seemed to crowd its way inside her, expanding along with those words that didn’t make any sense.
“And that’s okay, but I’m begging you, be careful . Because when you start talking about sex and you start kissing me on my mouth, you start blurring the lines that we’ve kept in place for half our lives. That happens, Sierra, and other shit is going to get blurry too. Do you understand me?”
“No,” Sierra whispered, though she could barely hear her own voice over the pounding of her heart.
“I don’t understand any of this.”
Boone made a low noise, as if he was in pain, and he stepped back.
That meant he dropped his hands, and Sierra suddenly felt cold despite the sun beating down on them from the cloudless, perfect blue sky high above.
“I’m not mad at you,” he told her, making it sound like every word was deliberate.
Careful. “Being your best friend is an honor and a privilege, Matty is an idiot. All I’m asking you to do is remember what friends do and don’t do. Okay?”
Sierra knew he was right.
She was taking advantage of their friendship and he was absolutely right to call her on it.
She would have to do better.
Because God knew, she couldn’t possibly lose him.
The very thought of it made her feel like crying.
“I understand,” she said, as solemnly as she could.
“Again, I’m sorry.”
He muttered something she didn’t quite hear and then motioned toward the truck, so she went back and climbed into her side.
When he got back behind the wheel, he seemed like her Boone again.
Calm. Placid.
Except now she’d seen that other part of him, and as he drove them up over Copper Mountain, she found she couldn’t relax entirely the way she would have before.
She was too aware that there were other things simmering there inside of him.
Even later that night as she lay in her bed, Boone with a temper kept coming back to her.
Boone with that wild look in his eyes and his voice echoing back from the Rockies themselves.
She kept shivering when she thought about Boone with his hands on her arms and his face bent down close to hers.
A few days later, when Cat texted to ask if she wanted to come down into Cowboy Point to grab a drink with Cat and Cat’s boss, the doctor who’d opened the new clinic in town, Ramona Taylor—and also give Cat a ride back up to the ranch later—Sierra agreed.
It wasn’t that she needed to escape the dairy or anything, because she didn’t.
If anything, she loved the business more all the time.
But she’d expected everything to feel normal with Boone again, and it hadn’t.
It was like they really had crossed some line and she didn’t know how to cross back.
Maybe a night out with Cat would help.
Maybe a change of venue would allow her to figure out how to get her and Boone back onto solid ground, or, failing that, maybe it would just be fun if she forgot about it for a while.
It was worth trying either way.
“I love summer,” Cat said, as they set out on the patio at Mountain Mama, listening to the band while sharing a large pizza and one of Kitty Bennett’s signature salads that were always complicated and fascinating and delicious.
This one involved pickled onions and blue cheese, and only the fact that the pizza was also to-die-for got Sierra to stop eating it.
As she pulled another slice onto her plate, it occurred to her that she hadn’t really been tracking her food the way she normally did.
That was strange. Usually summertime made her even more ferocious in her attempts to keep herself under control.
But the pizza was too good for her to let that revelation change her behavior.
Tonight, anyway.
“What I always wonder,” Cat was saying, “was if I didn’t live in Montana, would I be able to appreciate summer this much? Or do you have to suffer through the endless Montana winter to truly get the glory of a good, long summer?”
“A lot of places have terrible winters,” Cat’s friend and boss said.
Ramona was not only a doctor, she came from back east and had only visited Cowboy Point when she was a girl and her grandfather was still alive.
Now she’d made his old house into a clinic, and for some reason had settled down here.
Sierra would have thought that her kind of willowy blondness was better suited to luxury ranch resorts, Bozeman, or even flashier cities further out.
“Do they all have perfect summers like we do?” Cat fired back.
“A lot of them do pretty well.” Ramona smiled.
“But I would agree with you. There’s not much like Montana in the summertime. It’s what brought me back. The winters are a small price to pay for something this spectacular.”
Sierra had to agree.
It stayed bright so late.
The daylight had serious work to do to make up for all those months where it barely made an appearance.
And it lingered well into the night.
Sierra didn’t know a single local didn’t try their best to soak it all in, foregoing sleep if necessary.
To hoard up all that vitamin D—and besides, they could all sleep in the dark months.
“We have to celebrate Sierra,” Cat announced.
“She just got divorced.”
Ramona looked startled, but only slightly.
“And that’s cause for celebration?” Her tone was careful.
“It definitely is,” Sierra assured her.
It was easier to say that now.
Every time she said it, it was easier.
Something had shifted in her so hard her on her birthday that it was like this moment had always been inevitable.
She would never go back.
The truth was, she barely even thought about Matty, no matter how many times her mother left her passive aggressive voicemail messages.
She was ignoring those, too.
The three of them lifted their glasses and Ramona made a wry sort of face as she put hers back down.
“I’m sorry to inform you that the single scene leaves something to be desired around here.”
“That’s right,” Sierra said, shaking her head at the thought.
“I’m going to have to date .”
But when she said that, the only thing she thought about was Boone.
“I was actually kidding,” Ramona said, looking back and forth between Cat and Sierra.
“Not about the single scene, such as it is, but I was under the impression that you were already dating someone.”
Sierra laughed.
“Oh, I’m not dating anyone. I’m not sure that I want to be dating anyone, honestly. On the other hand, I don’t know that I’ve ever really dated, because Matty and I got together so young that it just kind of—”
“She means Boone,” Cat interjected.
She shrugged when Sierra looked at her.
“I’m serious. You already know he likes you. Why not see how much he likes you?”
Sierra thought about that awkward, tense conversation in his truck the other day.
About how careful everything had been between them since.
She’d thought about nothing else since, if she was honest, and it was high time she came to a conclusion.
She leaned in. She looked at Ramona.
“You know Boone, right?”
“I do. Yes.” Ramona looked slightly uncomfortable, but Sierra brushed past that.
“He’s never dated anybody,” she told the doctor and Cat, who was leaning in herself.
“I think he’s basically celibate. Like a monk. He’s so kind and gentle and sweet that I think maybe he just wants to keep it all inside—”
But she stopped, because her two companions were laughing.
And not a little bit—a lot.
They weren’t even pretending to hide it.
Cat and Ramona looked at each other and they looked at Sierra, and they laughed and laughed and laughed.
Sierra was baffled. “What’s so funny?”
Cat was wiping at her eyes.
It was Ramona’s turn to lean in closer, so she could be heard over the band yet not overheard by the next table.