Chapter Four
“W elcome to the Carey brother support group,” Cat said, and started clanking her beer against everyone else’s drink.
Root beer for Kendall, who was rubbing a hand over her belly like her baby was trying to join in the fun.
Then a Coke for Rosie.
“The last thing I need is to wake up tomorrow morning with a hangover and two toddlers in my face,” she said with a laugh.
Though Sierra thought she saw a look pass between Cat and Kendall.
Sierra accepted a clink to her own beer and then sat back in her chair.
“I think I’m a fraud. Not only because I’m not married to Boone, but because I don’t need support to be his friend. He’s too sweet.”
A strange sort of pause descended over the table.
Mountain Mama Pizza was popping on a Sunday night.
Families were clustered around the big tables inside.
Children and a few older kids were running in circles and banging on the two old-fashioned arcade games in one corner.
There was a line at the bar for takeout orders and the Bennett sisters were charging around, delivering food to tables, taking orders, and somehow making all of the commotion feel like it was under control.
Meanwhile, Sierra found herself on the wrong end of three pairs of eyes.
All of them with the same expression—but she couldn’t quite place it.
It wasn’t pity. It wasn’t scorn.
She knew those pretty well.
This was something more like…
a knowledge she didn’t have, and she didn’t know what to do with that.
“Boone is very dependable,” Kendall said after a moment, her mouth curving.
“I’ll give you that.”
“Sturdy,” Rosie said, though she looked like she wanted to laugh.
“Even trustworthy.”
“I once would have described him as a sweetheart. I think I did,” Cat said, leaning in and propping up her chin on one hand.
“But I’m not as innocent as I was then. I would not use that word now.”
Sierra blinked.
“You wouldn’t?”
“I would say that Boone has…” Cat sighed.
“A quiet intensity, maybe?”
“Definitely,” Rosie said.
“And more intense than quiet.”
“He’s like a dormant volcano, I’d say,” Kendall said, when Sierra’s impression of the other woman had always been that she was practical and down-to-earth.
Not… metaphoric. “But you can tell that sooner or later, he’d going to erupt. You know what they say.”
“About Boone?” Sierra asked, mystified by this conversation.
“‘Beware the fury of a patient man,’” Kendall said.
“That’s Boone.”
Sierra took a sip of her beer, but she already felt something like intoxicated.
She had no idea what they were talking about.
She knew simmering, volcanic men, and they weren’t patient about anything and anyway, this was Boone .
He was kind. Thoughtful.
And yes, sweet .
Cat smiled at her.
“But you’re his best friend, of course. You know him better than anyone else. Maybe we’re getting him all wrong.”
Sierra shrugged.
“I know him pretty well, sure. We’ve been best friends since we were fifteen.”
She thought she heard Rosie say something like, we know , but that was weird.
“Fifteen,” Kendall repeated.
She shook her head. She still had one hand on her belly, as if the baby she was carrying shared her astonishment.
“I don’t have any friends from when I was fifteen. Or really any friends at all, but that’s mostly because I was raised by wolves. Only slightly because I’m awkward and strange.” She smiled.
“Or so I tell myself.”
“You have friends,” Cat told her loyally.
“Whether you want us or not.”
“That’s the best thing about this club,” Rosie said with a grin.
“You belong whether you want to or not. There’s no escaping it. Membership is imposed upon you and you can’t refuse it. All you have to do is have some connection to a Carey brother. It’s the club that has you no matter what.”
“You all really don’t think Boone is sweet?” Sierra asked.
Again, another sort of hush fell over the whole table, and she wished she could claw that question back.
“Harlan likes to say that Boone is the most determined man he’s ever met,” Kendall said after a moment, and what looked like a little too much eye contact with her sisters-in-law.
But Sierra was too busy nodding at that to run that down.
“He is,” she said. “I think most people would be satisfied with taking part in High Mountain Ranch. Who wouldn’t be satisfied? It’s one of the best ranches in Montana. I’m not surprised, though, that Boone still wanted to branch out and try something on his own. I think that’s just who he is.”
“Wilder always says that while Boone plays a man of very few words, he has a whole lot to say if you really listen,” Cat said.
This time she made eye contact with Sierra.
And held it. “And also that he’s never done a single thing he hasn’t wanted to do. Not once in all his life.”
Sierra felt something seem to shimmy down her spine at that, almost like foreboding, though she couldn’t have said why.
It was almost as if there was an answer to a question she hadn’t known she was asking right there , just within reach, if she would only—
But Rosie changed the subject, asking Kendall all kinds of questions about her pregnancy and her baby plans, and Sierra forgot all about it.
The next morning was Monday and Sierra was looking forward to really getting into the details of what she in good would be doing with the dairy business this summer.
Maybe even using that minor in business that she’d gotten at MSU.
But before she could do that, she had to drive back down into Marietta to tell her father she was quitting her job as his paralegal.
The morning was cold and a little bit foggy, and she drove carefully down the winding switchbacks that took her into Marietta.
Her hometown gleamed as the mountain fog receded, giving way to the sunlight.
It looked like the sort of place where nothing bad could never happen.
As if all the Old West brick and elegant Victorians could make it a real life fairy tale, suitable for the Hallmark movies she loved to watch.
On mornings like this, driving in from up high and getting a bird’s eye view of the whole town, Sierra believed it.
Once on the valley floor, she could have gone to see if her father was getting ready at home.
She knew his schedule better than she knew her own, so she knew full well he would be having his second cup of coffee in the kitchen with the front pages of at least three papers, wearing an apron over his good shirt so the newsprint wouldn’t transfer to his clothes.
But she didn’t turn down her old street.
Individually, her parents were…
More manageable. Together it was always the same thing.
And last week’s unpleasant dinner was still ringing in her head.
She went to the office instead in the center of town and waited to feel a pang of nostalgia when she parked on the street in front of the law office that had been a part of her life since she was a child.
Surely she ought to feel something now that she was walking away from the only job she’d had since graduating college.
But no matter how long she sat there and waited for the sadness to hit her, it didn’t.
She liked waking up in her new apartment every morning.
She kept expecting to feel some sense of shock, or sadness, that she wasn’t in the house she and Matty had lived in together for a decade.
Instead, she woke up and stared directly into the sky that seemed to be right there in the bedroom with her, thanks to that skylight.
It had been a full week and Sierra didn’t miss that excruciatingly clean and showy house over in the flashy new build neighborhood on the road out of town that most locals were still furious about.
She decided that it probably just hadn’t hit her yet.
Maybe changing a whole life took longer to really land.
Emotionally, that was—because so far, she thought Cowboy Point in general and life in Boone’s barn, where she could do precisely as she liked at all times, was pretty fantastic.
She was early to the law office, arriving even before Mrs. Lloyd.
So she let herself in and took the opportunity to empty out her desk, so that she wouldn’t feel any pressure to do should there be a temper tantrum going on at the same time.
Then she went sat in the waiting room, knowing that her father would walk in at 9 o’clock on the dot.
Mrs. Lloyd came in first—precisely fifteen minutes earlier—and if she was surprised to see Sierra sitting there in what was most certainly not an appropriate work outfit by her father’s standards, she said nothing.
Because she had always been the soul of discretion.
She said hello and then went to her desk to begin preparing for the day ahead.
Exactly fifteen minutes later, at precisely 9AM, Kenneth Tate marched in through the door.
Unlike Mrs. Lloyd, he stopped dead at the sight of Sierra, sitting in his waiting room in jeans, a long-sleeved t-shirt, and a sleek wool vest to ward off the morning chill.
He stared at her as if she was wearing something scandalous, or possibly risqué, when she could have been an advertisement for standard Montana wear.
“Is a casual day?” he asked.
As if offended .
“I came talk to you, Dad,” Sierra said, staying bright and focused, because it was always the little sidebars that ruined everything.
“Things got a little heated a dinner the other night, so I thought I’d—”
“We can speak in my office, Sierra,” Kenneth said in a darkly reproving voice, as if poor Mrs. Lloyd didn’t already know every last detail about their whole family and where every single one of their secrets was hidden after all these years.
She and Sierra exchanged a look, in fact, as Sierra dutifully followed her father into his office.
Inside, he made huge production of shutting the door behind them and then fluttering around behind his desk as if the entire state and federal judiciary was clamoring for his attention.
All to make certain Sierra got the message that she was disrupting his cherished morning routine.
Sierra took one of the chairs in front of his desk and waited.
As she did, she studied the pictures he kept on his wall, all of them of himself with various people he’d consider luminaries, without a family photo to be seen.
That made her feel a pang of something—not quite sadness.
And somehow that seemed to connect emotionally to the fact that, as far she was aware, this was the first time she had ever worn jeans in this office.
Not every revolution started big and bold, she reminded herself.
The point was starting at all.
“I can’t imagine what could cause you to come to the office like this,” Kenneth said fretfully as he finally sat down.
“It’s incredibly irregular—”
“Dad.” Sierra cut him off, and that felt good too.
And it was so unusual that he stopped and gaped at her.
“This is my notice. Effective immediately, I’m leaving.”
He only stared at her, until she started to wonder if she’d only imagined that she’d said anything.
“What on earth are you talking about?”
At least she wasn’t hallucinating conversations.
That felt like a win.
“I told you at dinner,” she said, as calmly as possible.
“I’ve moved to Cowboy Point. I’m going to be working with Boone this summer. I want to give that venture my all and I won’t be able to work here while doing it. I assumed that you wouldn’t be interested in giving me a leave of absence, so I’m quitting.”
Her father kept staring at her as if she wasn’t making sense.
As if the actual words she was speaking weren’t making at sense.
“You can’t just quit .”
“I can,” she contradicted him, but gently.
Very gently. “If you mean contractually, you might recall that I never signed a contract. You said I was your daughter and the contract was implied.”
“I mean because of all the open cases that you’re handling,” he began, in that ponderous tone that he liked to use when he thought he was proving that she wasn’t as bright as she ought to have been.
A common point of contention at home.
It occurred to her to wonder why she’d always told stories about that as if it was funny.
When it didn’t really feel all that funny today.
“I left extensive notes on all of my cases,” she told him, careful to keep her voice as even as possible.
“It should be no trouble at all for someone else to step in and take over. And of course, you can always call me if there are any questions. I haven’t died. I’m simply shaking up my life a little bit.”
Kenneth stared at her as if she was sprouting new heads with every word.
“Is this the influence of that Boone character?” he asked, in repressive tones.
“How many times must I point out that he’s a glorified farmer, Sierra. If that. What on earth do you think he has to offer you?”
If Sierra was a different person, she thought she would be deeply offended that he could only imagine her leaving if there was some man making her.
Or offering something.
Even though there was.
“For one thing, Dad, he’s nice to me,” Sierra retorted, before she could think it through.
She regretted it instantly.
Her father recoiled as if she had shouted obscenities at him, and possibly tossed one of his ostentatious paperweights at his head.
“I think what you need to do is have a conversation with your poor husband,” Kenneth said, sounding weary and disappointed, while also managing to convey his sympathy for Matty.
It reminded her that for all his faults, he’d always been a good lawyer.
He knew how to work a courtroom.
“He can’t possibly be in support of all of this… nonsense.”
“I’ll be sure to ask him the next time I see him,” Sierra replied, maybe not as calmly as she might have hoped.
When her father only stared back at her, as if he expected her to call Matty on the spot, she sighed.
“In any case, you should probably start looking for a new paralegal, Dad. If I decide to start paralegalling again, it won’t be until the end of the summer. You’ll need someone to support you until then.”
Kenneth let out a puff of sound, maybe some kind of laugh.
“You can’t possibly think that you can flit out of this job that I was kind enough to give you when you were a wet-behind-the-ears college graduate and imagine that it will be held open for you. That you can just walk back in whenever you feel like it, can you?”
Sierra shrugged.
“If it’s not available to me when I want to come back, then I won’t come back. Problem solved.”
She got up then, though that was risk.
It was possible that her father would be able to see how shaky she was and she really didn’t want that.
Nonetheless, she managed to smile at him as serenely as possible—made a lot easier because he appeared to be turning red—and then turned and walked out before he could start blustering .
“I’m taking a little break from the office,” she told Mrs. Lloyd.
“Boone needs some help with his dairy.”
The older woman laughed.
“If that man needs your help, Sierra, I can’t think of a single reason you wouldn’t provide it.”
“That’s what friends are for,” Sierra agreed, and even though she could hear the ominous sound of her father’s chair creaking—a lot like he was getting up and heading this way—she also saw the quizzical expression on Mrs. Lloyd’s face.
Not regarding her father.
Mrs. Lloyd could handle Kenneth.
It had something to do with what Sierra had said about friends , and it started another shimmying sensation, a lot like last night.
Like she was this close to understanding something that everyone else already knew—
God, I hate this feeling , she thought grumpily, but there was no time to ask the other woman about it.
She didn’t want to go another round with her father, so all she did was smile, then leave the office.
She went back outside before her father let his temper take control, which would probably involve a lot of shouting.
She climbed into her car and sat there, not sure what she wanted to do next.
Once again, she waited for a big tidal wave of fear and uncertainty and second guessing to wash over her, but it never came.
So she put the Jeep into gear, and drove herself over to get herself the coffee drink she felt she deserved, and who cared that it had more fat and calories than a human being was supposed to consume in a week.
That, she decided, could be future Sierra’s problem.
Though she parked a good two blocks away so at least she’d get a walk in.
With her frozen, outrageously sweet caution hand, she strolled back down whatever street, smiling at the shopkeepers who were just then starting to open their businesses.
If Sage’s Chocolates had been open, Sierra was fairly certain she would have bought out the truffle section, but she was saved from her own gluttony because the best sweetshop in all the world was closed.
She realized as she walked back up the other side of the street that she felt…
giddy, almost. Like a kid on spring break.
If it made her wonder what she’d been doing all this time that she—
“Sierra. There you are.”
The giddy feeling crashed down and disappeared as if it had never been.
She turned toward the street, slowly, and it felt almost as if she was in some kind of strange dream.
Like maybe if she just pinched herself she would wake up and she would be in her cozy bed in Boone’s barn, tucked up beneath that marvelous skylight.
That she wouldn’t actually be turning around to look in the window of an extremely flashy Range Rover to see her husband’s face.
But there it was. Matty was right there.
She surreptitiously pinched herself, but nothing changed.
Matty was leaning out the window, looking at her with his patented brand of quizzical concern .
As if he couldn’t for the life of him understand what she was doing or why, but he was determined to be supportive all the same.
She couldn’t remember the last time it had been effective on her, but it wasn’t for her.
It was for anyone watching them interact.
Later, if they discussed this interaction, they would talk about how caring he was.
How worried about Sierra he was, how possibly distraught , but so kind nonetheless.
Sierra realized that she couldn’t remember when it had stopped working on her either, only that it had.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
Mildly enough.
Sierra froze.
She couldn’t think of anything to say, which was ridiculous, because she knew there were a thousand things she should say now.
They were all right there, right on the tip of her tongue—
But her tongue always got so tangled around him.
“What are you drinking?” he asked, but it wasn’t a real question.
He made a low, tutting sort of noise.
“After all your hard work? Sierra. Make this make sense. I go away for the weekend and come back to you backsliding and… what? What is this?”
The sweet, frozen coffee drink in her hand felt like an anvil.
She looked down at it, then at Matty again.
“I left you a note,” was all she could think to say.
She knew he’d seen it.
She’d left it in the very center of the black, gleaming marble counter in the kitchen that he didn’t like to ever see with even the faintest hint of clutter.
It would have been the first thing he saw.
“Sierra, get in the car,” Matty ordered her.
He still had a smile on his face, and he still would have sounded indulgent from fifty paces, but she knew that tone.
He was impatient. She was irritating him.
It was almost ten in the morning on a Monday and she knew that he had better things to be doing this time.
After all, he had taken over his father’s financial services firm here in Marietta.
He had clients who depended on him to spend his life connected to the stock market back east.
That Sierra was an imposition upon him was something he’d never been shy of making clear.
And yet, to her astonishment, her body was obeying him even her mind didn’t want to.
It was the most amazing thing.
Before she knew what she was doing, or could manage to stop it, she wandered over to the passage side, opened it up, and got inside.
“Please do not let that horrible concoction melt all over my leather interiors, Sierra,” Matty told her with no hint of a smile or that indulgence now that she was inside the vehicle.
“In fact, why don’t you throw it out? You don’t need to be drinking it anyway.”
Sierra felt something like dazed as Matty turned to look at her.
She thought the would start driving off and she had a whole—possibly hysterical—flash of him just…
dropping her off at their house and her meekly shuffling back inside, as if nothing had happened.
As if she’d simply gone away for the weekend the way he had.
Supposedly to a conference in Atlanta.
The strangest part was that she could feel how easy it would be.
She could see it. Neither one of them would ever mention this again.
It would be like it had never happened.
Matty would talk to her father and she would simply go back to work tomorrow, and everything would simply roll along the way it always had.
But then she took a deep breath, thought of the way Boone had looked at her on his porch last night, and remembered who she was.
“I don’t care if my drink melts all over your car,” she told him, and she liked how calm she sounded.
How unbothered. “I put everything I needed to say in my note. I don’t know why you’re acting as if you didn’t read it.”
“I read it.” His lip curled.
“It’s a joke. You’re not leaving me, Sierra. Where would you go?”
“I’ve already gone.” She held his gaze.
“I’m taking the summer off, I guess you could say. I quit my job at my dad’s already. I’ll be reassessing in September.”
Though now she added a maybe to that.
The reassessment had seemed critical when she was getting the nerve to leave.
Now she couldn’t imagine why she’d bother.
“No,” her husband said.
Sierra felt frozen again because the way he said that was so stark.
But he was looking at her in that same friendly manner of his and the disconnect seemed to blare inside of her, like reverb from a speaker.
Her coffee drink was making her hand ache, it was so cold.
Sierra took that as a sign.
She held his gaze, lifted the straw to her mouth, and took a loud, slurping gulp of it.
And that was better, because his gaze flickered.
A vast improvement on that fake friendly face he liked to wear.
“I think you’re misunderstanding me,” Sierra said, after another outrageously long pull on her straw, even noisier this time.
“I’m not asking for your permission.”
“That’s fine,” Matty said nonchalantly.
“You can either get your ass back home, stop acting like the moron you are, Sierra, or we can file for divorce. Immediately.”
This wasn’t the first time that she’d been in a position like this with him.
In high school, when she heard one too many rumors and had confronted him, he’d said something a little too much like this.
Break up with me, then.
She hadn’t.
During their long distance college years, when she’d tried to move on because she was sure that he had but once again, he’d pulled her back.
If you’re ready to turn your back on all our history, Sierra, just say the word and you’ll never hear from me again.
She hadn’t called his bluff.
When they were engaged and he had still been up to his same old tricks, and she’d called him on it, he’d leaned in close.
He’d played with the ring on her hand as he’d said, pitilessly, go right ahead and call of the wedding, then .
It had been three weeks away.
She hadn’t.
Over and over again, he had done exactly this.
No conversation. No discussion.
She could either leave and he would never speak to her again, or she could suck it up.
But the only thing Sierra was sucking today was the straw of a coffee drink.
A deliciously sugary coffee drink that tasted like heaven.
She took another gulp, even though it made her temples throb with an ice cream headache.
The pain reminded her that she’d walked away from their life this time.
She wasn’t asking him for anything.
She was done.
Finally, after all this time, she was done.
And she felt something then, all right, but she was pretty sure it was a celebration.
“Great,” she said, staring right back at him.
“Just let me know what I need to sign.”
And then, buoyed up by caffeine, sugar, and the fact she had Boone’s perfect barn to go home to, she threw open the door to his ostentatious Range Rover and walked away.
This time, it would be for good.
She understood that in her bones.
Because for the first time in their entire history, she’d called his bluff.
Better yet, she’d meant it.
And all Sierra could think was that she couldn’t wait to tell Boone.