The Cowboy’s Best Friend (The Careys of Cowboy Point #4)

Prologue

I t was a beautiful afternoon in a southwestern Montana late May.

The sky was achingly blue and the sun was bright enough to make it feel like summer might show up again this year after all.

Locals knew better than to think that might be soon.

Sneak peeks like this were enough to trick the unwary before the last of the snow inevitably fell, because around this part of the Montana Rockies, there were only three seasons in a given year: winter, July, and August.

Anything could happen before summer and probably would.

But today it was pretty and warm and Zeke Carey was enjoying a stroll with his wife through their land, some ten miles above Paradise Valley.

Spring was evident in the snow melt that made the creeks run high and the rivers treacherous.

The birds were cheerier.

Wildlife were waking up and wandering where they liked.

The land was green and there were lilacs in vibrant bloom in the lower elevations, though these hills where they lived stayed colder and snowier.

All these signs of a new season making its way into the world made a man feel alive.

And Zeke Carey had been pretending he was dying for over a year now, so he took life a little more seriously than he might have before.

Not just his life. He was involved in the lives of his five hard-headed sons as well.

Too involved , some might say, but Zeke had never been much for external opinions.

Especially if said opinions came from his children, who were all grown but still needed a helping hand to get where they needed to go.

Or a good, swift kick in the butt.

Whatever worked.

Zeke wanted to be the kind of grandfather who got to know his grandkids.

Who watched them grow up a bit.

He wanted to be more to them than a distant memory and a gravestone.

Sometimes a man had to take matters into his own hands, and Zeke had.

But pretending to be dying for over a year now sure made a man contemplate his own mortality in interesting ways.

Mostly, how glad he was that he wasn’t actually dying—or at least, not more than anyone else.

Luckily, three of his five sons were already married thanks to his announcement of impending doom.

And a little push here and there, when needed.

Better yet, his eldest son and the wife he’d married like one of the good, old-fashioned mail-order brides that had made the West great were pregnant.

Almost five months along now.

Things were coming along nicely.

And they were about to get even better.

Beside him, her hands deep in the pockets of her vest—because while it was warmer than usual, but that didn’t mean warm —his wife Belinda was walking with her brow furrowed.

A sight that would make any of their boys’ blood run cold.

This was an expression that indicated that Belinda was working on something .

And the things Belinda worked on always came to fruition.

They did not always get there comfortably .

“Whose life are you planning to ruin this time?” Zeke asked her, mildly enough.

Because if he’d wanted comfortable , he would have stayed on his own after he lost his first wife.

But Belinda had made him one of her projects.

She’d done some of her best work on him and, like most things, she’d been right.

His Alice, God rest her soul, had been a gentle thing.

Alice had made things easy and sweet.

She’d been a soothing presence, even when she got sick.

Zeke had promised to love her forever and he intended to keep that promise, though it looked different now than the forever they’d planned.

Belinda had never begrudged him that.

On the contrary, she accepted Alice as a part of their lives, and in the way she loved all their children, too.

The three Alice had left behind, little as she’d ever wanted to say goodbye, and the two more that Belinda and Zeke had made together.

But the thing about Belinda was that she was fierce.

She was wholeheartedly ferocious in all things, from the way she gardened to the way she cooked, to the way she loved Zeke, deep and wide and right before they’d set out on this walk, on the kitchen floor like they were kids.

Zeke’s forever was complicated in all the best ways.

He was a deeply lucky man.

“I’ll ruin your life if you’re not careful, my love,” she replied and then smiled at him, her hazel eyes gleaming.

“It’s Boone. It’s always Boone.”

Boone was in some ways the hardest headed of all their sons.

He had been born self-contained.

Even when he was very young, he had always had a different kind of presence about him.

When he made up his mind, that was that.

He never retracted. He never circled back or changed his mind.

When Boone set himself upon a course, he never varied from it.

Yet he was, for some unfathomable reason, considered ‘the sweet one.’

“He’s going to be the hardest nut to crack,” Zeke said.

Beside him, Belinda nodded.

Then rolled her eyes.

“I would agree, but I think fate might have to take the wheel.”

Zeke laughed, looking down at her in all the soft spring sunshine.

“Since when have you ever been one to step aside and let fate take charge? I thought you told fate what to do, and how, and better yet, when to get it done.”

Belinda tried her best to look guileless, and failed.

“I can’t help it if fate moves too slow for me, most of the time.”

“Boone made up his mind about that Tate girl back in the seventh grade,” Zeke reminded her, though he knew she hadn’t forgotten.

“Walked right into his first day of junior high down in Marietta and there she was. He took one look, and that was that. You know Boone. Mountains change faster than he does.”

“Don’t I know it.” Belinda sniffed, though her eyes were dancing.

“Stubborn as a thousand mules, that one. He must have gotten it from your side of the family.”

Zeke hadn’t been born a wise man, but two marriages and five headstrong boys had helped him along.

He kept his thoughts on that to himself.

Because he might have been descended from generations of hardy Montana stock, themselves the product of single-minded, determined folks who had set off into the great unknown from back east and had made the best of what they’d found.

But his Belinda was pure fire.

And she not only supported what Zeke was doing, she’d been holding back as he handled the first three.

But now it was time for the younger two.

She’d talked of nothing else since their third son, Ryder, had gotten married in March—to hometown girl Rosie Stark, who’d come back pregnant after a night in Austin when she’d met up with Ryder as part of his rodeo career.

They’d made two beautiful twin boys that first night, and if it had taken the two of them three years and some intensity to find their way to each other, well.

Zeke and Belinda knew a thing or two about complicated paths.

As long as they led to the right place, it was worth it.

Besides, Ryder and Rosie’s complicated path meant Zeke had two ready-made grandsons already, so he was all for it.

They walked to the ridge that let them look down the gentle sweep of their land, and over four parcels of land tucked away in the trees where three of the four youngest had built themselves homes over the years.

Ryder had broken ground on his last month.

Harlan, as eldest, lived on the other side of the ranch house, but it was Boone that Zeke was focused on today.

Down a ways from the houses the boys had built, and accessible by a more direct path directly from Boone’s house that didn’t use the main drive, there was the creek that ran through this part of the property.

On the other side was Boone’s dairy barn and the little farm he’d started over the last couple of years.

That was another thing about Boone.

He was satisfied with what he had, but always interested in what came next, too.

“I can’t believe that child decided to start a dairy,” Belinda said, clearly looking in the same direction.

“He’s always been quietly innovative,” Zeke pointed out.

“I’ve never known him to sit still for too long.”

Belinda was frowning down at their son’s life, laid out before her with the snowcapped Copper Mountain rising in the distance and, closer in, the old Cowboy Point Lodge that was in the process of a long, drawn-out renovation.

Boone’s house he’d built years ago and had refined over the years.

The barn he’d put up two summers ago now.

The field he was cultivating, though Zeke hadn’t asked what crops he thought he might produce.

What he did know was that Boone was sure to have a plan.

Then again, so did Belinda.

“I like Sierra well enough,” she said now, though the way she said it made Zeke laugh.

Especially while she was looking down on all the things Boone had built.

“Sierra is a good girl,” he told his wife, maybe a little chidingly.

“My firstborn child has been pining for that so-called good girl for more than half his life,” Belinda retorted.

“I question her choices. But then again, as I said, I think that fate has finally decided to step in.”

“I thought that I was pretending that fate already had.” Zeke eyed her.

“Do I have to tell you that out of all of them, it’s going to be Boone who takes it the hardest when he finds out I lied to him?”

“Boone could do a little more gray in his life,” Belinda declared, a bit airily to Zeke’s ear.

“He’s been black or white, light or dark, with nothing in between for as long as he’s been alive. It might be the best thing in the world for him to spend some time reckoning with a white lie told for all the right reasons.”

Privately, Zeke thought that was easy for Belinda to say.

Every single one of his boys loved her to distraction, as well they should.

It was Zeke who was their father.

And he knew exactly how much Boone had always looked up to him.

Boone’s regard for Zeke was going to take a hit.

There was no way around it.

He’d known that going in.

On the other hand, Zeke agreed with Belinda not only that it was for the best reasons—hell, he’d do anything at all to see to it that his sons were happy—but it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world for Boone to take off those rose-colored glasses of his for a minute.

Integrity mattered to Zeke.

He’d made it a cornerstone of his life and had done his best to instill it in his sons too, so that they could call themselves good men.

But he was also old enough to know that when it was used as a weapon, it was no different from any other in the amount of damage it could do.

“What I’ve been trying to tell you,” Belinda said impatiently, bumping her hip against Zeke’s to make sure she had his full attention, “is that fate might actually have stepped up to the plate. At last.”

“You’re going to have to tell me what that means,” Zeke told her.

“I know the land. I know cattle and weather and can occasionally predict my wife’s moods. Fate I leave up to you.”

“My love, you will never predict my moods,” Belinda replied with a laugh.

Then she took his hand in hers, threading their fingers together, and leaned in to tell him the rumors she’d heard and the conclusions she’d reached and how she thought it was all going to play out with Boone and the girl he’d loved most of his life, and Zeke knew fate didn’t stand a chance.

Not with Belinda in the game this time, and more than ready to win.