Chapter Six
B oone froze.
Sierra’s mouth was on his.
He could taste her, God help him.
She had told him she was divorced and so he’d just realized that he hadn’t actually believed she’d go through with it, and now he could feel her pressed up against him in one of those torturous hugs that he’d managed to keep platonic all these years.
This one felt less platonic with her mouth on his, as sweet as this kiss was.
It would be easiest thing in the world to angle his head to make this kiss…
something else. To take it deep, get his hands in her hair, and lose himself in her—something he’d been imagining pretty consistently since the day he’d met her.
He could feel her, everywhere.
He could feel himself, too, hard and ready.
But he also knew two things, whether he wanted to know them or not.
One, she didn’t understand what she was doing.
Sierra wasn’t licking her way into his mouth.
She was kissing him, yes, but with a closed mouth.
There was no way she was ready for the response he could feel building inside of him.
He doubted she had any idea those feelings in him existed.
How could she? He’d gone out of his way to make sure she couldn’t, didn’t, and never would.
Responding to this with his feelings wasn’t right.
And more to the point, two—like hell was he going to be some kind of consolation prize for a douchebag like Matty Quealey.
So even though it felt like he was breaking his own bones, he eased her off of him and set her down on her feet.
He didn’t let go of her, because he wasn’t sure she was steady on her feet.
But Boone said nothing.
He just waited.
She was out of breath, and she looked dazed.
Then she laughed. And then her whole face went red.
He felt split in two, as part of him found her as cute right now as he always did.
Because he pretty much thought every single thing she did was cute.
Like making his cows their own social media account that he pretended he didn’t know how to access when he did.
But the other part of him, who’d been in love with her his whole goddamned life and who worked so damn hard to keep that from her so she would never have cause to feel anything but safe around him, was pissed.
He dropped his hand from her arm.
“Who are you kissing?” he asked her.
More bluntly than was maybe necessary.
“Because it didn’t feel like me.”
Sierra blinked.
She shook her head a little bit as if she had to clear it.
“I know who you are, Boone. Why wouldn’t I?”
“I’m glad that you’re finally divorced,” Boone told her, and his usual filters didn’t seem to be working.
“I’ve spent what feels like a thousand years managing not to talk shit about Matty, but he was never worthy of you. I’m not sure he was ever faithful to you, Sierra, and you deserve better. I’m glad you’re done with him.”
“Um.” She was frowning.
“Thanks, I guess?”
“Someday you and I are going to sit down and have a long conversation about why you spent all of these years on that guy. You’re going to have to tell me what you got out of it.” He could hear his voice getting gruffer by the word.
“What the point was.”
Sierra’s frown deepened.
“I don’t have those answers for you, Boone. I don’t think I have any answers, period.”
“In the meantime, I’m going to need you to do me one favor.” He stepped closer to her, and since this was apparently a day for throwing all the rules right out the window, he reached over and wrapped his hands around her upper arms and pulled her closer.
But not too close. He hadn’t lost complete control of himself.
Not yet. “Don’t kiss me again unless you mean it.”
“What are you…?” Again, she looked dazed, and in any other moment he might have taken pity on her.
He might have let this blow over.
But she’d put her lips on his and she might already have forgotten it, but he Boone knew he never would.
“I did mean it. I meant it as a kind of toast to a new life.”
“If you kiss me again, Sierra, it better be with intention,” he told her in a low voice that he hoped sounded more controlled than he felt.
“I’m not a party favor. I’m a grown ass man and I’ve been your best friend for half your life.” Her eyes went impossibly green, but he didn’t stop.
“If you want to shift that relationship, I’m going to need you to think that through. And I’m definitely going to need you to make absolutely certain it’s not some reaction to that piece of shit whose name you never took, I assume because he wasn’t all that nice to you, and who you shrugged off pretty easily after all these years. Do you understand me?”
She looked wide-eyed and stricken, and Boone cursed himself for that.
But he didn’t take anything he said back.
He made himself take his hands off her, and that was another Herculean battle.
He stood up straight and he looked away from her, though he couldn’t see his land or even the trees.
He could still taste her—
Boone ran an abrupt hand over his face.
He took a breath and tamped it all down the way he always did.
He shoved it all back in that lockbox and when he faced her again, he was confident that she could only see the same Boone she’d always seen.
Though if he wasn’t mistaken, she was a little warier now.
He probably should have regretted that.
But he didn’t.
“I’m glad you’re done with all of that,” he said.
Calmly. He hoped. “I hope it was as simple as it seemed.”
“He told me I have three days to get the rest of my stuff,” Sierra said, though she made a soft kind of noise that was a little too derisive to be called a laugh.
But what he really noticed was that she was also hugging herself, studying him as if she wasn’t entirely sure what had just happened between them.
Truth was, he didn’t feel too bad about that either.
“Or what?” he asked.
“He mentioned the curb,” Sierra said, and rolled her eyes.
“Knowing him, he’s probably not going to wait that long. And it will probably be the dump.”
And Boone decided in that moment that there was absolutely nothing on this earth more critical than making sure that Sierra had no further connection to Matty Quealey.
He nodded toward the truck.
“Let’s go.”
She looked startled again.
“Go where?”
“Sierra. Let’s go get your stuff. Let’s not give him an opportunity to turn this into another one of his little circus sideshows.”
“Oh, I don’t think—”
“Besides,” Boone said, and he let himself smile, “I don’t think Matty and I have had a heart to heart in a good long while.”
Sierra laughed at that and he immediately felt better about snapping at her, not that he would have taken that back if he could.
Because either way he had the taste of her in his mouth and he imagined he’d be living off that for a while.
Maybe for the rest of his life.
“Are you going to get in a fight with him?” she asked.
But she only sounded mildly curious.
“You know he’s afraid to get a fight with me,” Boone told her.
“Or he would have. About a thousand times already.”
“I feel like I should be the liberated, independent woman I am now and tell you that I can handle this on my own,” Sierra said then, very seriously.
“But I don’t actually want him to throw all my stuff into the street. And I don’t think that it would be all that easy to gather it up by myself. And most of all? Matty has always been afraid of you, whatever he might like to call it to make himself feel better.” She smiled.
“So yes, Boone, I would love your company. The company of my best friend on what’s supposed to be a difficult day. Even though, if I’m being honest, it doesn’t really feel all that difficult.”
He could see a kind of storm in her gaze when said that, clouding up all that green, and he expected it wasn’t the divorce that was bothering her.
It wasn’t the divorce was making this day complicated.
Or it wasn’t just the divorce.
But he wasn’t about to make that easier for her.
“Let’s go,” he said again.
He swung in his truck and texted his brothers to tell them that he was making a run into Marietta.
He didn’t tell them why.
Not that it was a secret, but he could already hear the commentary.
Given that he didn’t entirely believe that Sierra was finally leaving Matty for good, divorce or no divorce, he wasn’t about to tell his nosy brothers that he was going and moving her out of her house and fully into his.
Or his barn—same difference.
That was little different than her taking a summer off, and he didn’t need his brothers to point that out.
Sierra climbed in the passenger seat, closed the heavy door, and clicked her seatbelt into place.
And for the first time in as long as he could remember, the silence between them felt…
awkward. Or not easy, anyway.
Not normal .
He didn’t do anything to fix that, either.
They drove down from the ranch, following the dirt roads that led to the hill where the Lodge sat.
As they came over the crest of that hill, Cowboy Point was there before them, looking pretty as a picture in the bright July sunshine.
“Seems like you’re fitting in well up here,” he said.
Beside him, Sierra seem to jolt to attention, which was interesting.
When he glanced over, she had that furrow in her forehead and it looked like she was biting her nails, though he knew she didn’t actually bite them anymore.
Her marriage had broken that unsightly habit.
Now she just worried her nails with her teeth.
“I like it here,” she said quietly.
Like it was a sacred vow that probably shouldn’t have been spoken out loud.
His problem was, it felt like it to him, too.
As they headed out of Cowboy Point the road got steep again, leading them up toward the peak of Copper Mountain before it took a turn to the east and started a series of switchbacks that had led generations of locals to call this road Desolation Drive.
So it seemed like the perfect time to hard launch a few questions he’d been sitting on for the past sixteen years.
“How the hell did you stay married this long to that guy?” he asked.
Not furiously. Not loudly.
But she flinched all the same.
“I made vows, Boone.”
“So did he,” Boone shot back.
“But that didn’t seem to get in his way.”
That was maybe too hard, he acknowledged.
He should have kept that inside.
Sierra blew out a breath.
“I know that he was never faithful to me,” she said in a low, hurt sort of voice that he’d never heard before.
Not directed to him, anyway.
“What kind of idiot do you think I am?”
“What do you mean, you know?” Something in the vicinity of his chest seemed to run head on into a wall.
Or maybe the wall just collapsed on top of him.
“You do? You…always have?”
He knew she wasn’t an idiot.
He knew that better that anyone But he had wondered if she was blind.
“Of course I knew,” Sierra said in a rush.
She turned in her seat so that she was facing him, but Boone had to keep his eyes on this road or they would fly right off the side of this mountain to their deaths.
And he really couldn’t tell if that seemed like a good solution to this moment or if he needed to slow down even more and be even more careful, because he was finally having one of the many conversations he’d been wanting to have with her forever.
Painful though it might be.
“I knew in high school,” she told him, and she sounded like she was finding this as painful as he was.
“There were all those rumors and people were talking about me and him and her. ” Her voice sounded shaky, but only a little shaky.
“When I asked him directly he responded the way he always did. No conversation, no explanation, nothing. He immediately told me to break up with him if I didn’t trust him and if I did, he said we’d never speak again.”
“You should have.”
“Thank you, that’s very helpful. I didn’t, as you know.”
“I do know that,” Boone said, and there was a new kind of simmering thing in him.
Not as simple as fury.
It was sharper. Edgier.
He wasn’t entirely sure he was going to be able to keep it inside.
“He could have had anyone and he chose me,” Sierra said, she sounded…
Not sad, exactly. More like she couldn’t access the version of herself who had truly believed that.
But Boone had been there.
He knew that girl. He knew that as enraging as he found that sentiment, back then and now, she’d believed it.
She had more than believed it.
“He was a punk when he was sixteen, Sierra. Even more of a punk than he is now, and that’s saying something. You should have laughed in his face.”
“He was so popular,” Sierra said softly.
Not wistfully, he was happy to hear, but it was something close to that.
Like a sad sort of nostalgia.
“His father was so rich, and everyone knew it, and they were always going off to Sun Valley to ski or to Cabo in the winter and it was like another life from the one everyone else was living out here in rural Montana. He seemed like some kind of celebrity.”
Boone shook his head.
“He really didn’t.”
“Half the girls in our class were in love with him for absolutely no reason but that.” Sierra shifted in her seat.
“I like to think that I was a little deeper, but you know. My parents loved him. Adored him. They still do. They would have married me off to him at sixteen if it had been up to them. So no, I didn’t break up with him when I heard those rumors as a sophomore in high school who couldn’t believe that the boy everyone liked actually liked me .”
She took another breath, and this one sounded deeper.
Harder. “Instead, I told him that it was impossible to trust him when there were so many rumors swirling around about him. That it would be a lot easier if I never heard any.”
It took Boone a minute.
It was the way she said that.
It was the brittleness in her voice.
And something else that sounded a lot like shame.
Then he got it. “Oh Sierra,” he breathed.
“You didn’t.”
“Did I know that day, standing at our lockers in Marietta High School, that he would take that as me giving him permission to do whatever he wanted as long as I didn’t hear about it? No. I didn’t know that.” She sounded…
not beaten down. But like this was a thought she’d returned to again and again, and had lived with for far too long.
“Still, as the years went by, he made me doubt that. Sometimes I actually thought I’d fully understood what I was agreeing to back then. That it had been my idea from the beginning. Because I was smart enough at sixteen to understand that boys will be boys. What did it matter what he did if he always came home to me? That’s what everybody thinks, isn’t it? This is how the world works.”
“Like hell it does,” Boone gritted out.
He took another glance at her, then.
She was staring down at her lap, where she was clenching her fingers a little too tightly.
And he was pretty sure he could see moisture in the corner of her eye.
Boone hoped that Matty was there when they got to the house.
He more than hoped it.
He began to actively pray for that outcome.
“It was such a slippery thing,” Sierra was saying softly.
“I couldn’t even tell you why how it happened the way it did. It was like it just got more confusing as time went on. Things began to seem inevitable. Like there weren’t any choices. There was only that. Him.”
That made Boone want to break things.
“One time,” Sierra continued, “I decided I should hire a private investigator to tail him around so I could see the reality of it, for once. So there could be no more hiding. This was a few years ago. I sat outside Honor’s Edge Investigations for a whole morning, but I couldn’t bring myself to actually go in. I decided that probably meant that I really had wanted things to be the way they were all along. That Matty was right. That it had all been my idea from the start.”
“What changed?” That was all he could seem to get out.
It was that or that his temper was going to take control, and he really didn’t think she was ready for that.
“Nothing,” she said.
He thought maybe she laughed.
“I turned thirty-two. And just like that, I was done.”
They made it down the mountain and Boone sat with that—with all of that—as they drove into Marietta.
He remembered her birthday vividly.
He’d brought her cupcake, she’d looked like she might cry, and he’d known without having to ask that whatever it was Matty had done or hadn’t done, certainly hadn’t been about her .
Not for the first time, he wondered if she’d put together what he finally had—to his own consternation—not so long ago.
That maybe if Sierra hadn’t had him in her life, she would have been done Matty sooner.
That she hadn’t had to truly reckon with the fact that Matty gave her nothing, since Boone gave her everything.
That the emptiness in her marriage that he thought was visible from space was something she could overlook, because she always had her best friend to fill in the gaps.
He wasn’t sure he was ever going to forgive himself for that.
She was breathing heavily beside him, so he reached over and put his hand on one of her shoulder blades.
Not a kiss. Not a hug.
Not anything that could be misconstrued.
Still, when it came to touching Sierra, Boone was pretty sure that there wasn’t a single bit of it that had ever been entirely innocent from his end.
He’d worked very, very hard over the years to make sure that never came through, because that only seemed right.
“I’m okay,” she assured him, reaching up to squeeze his arm.
“I just… I’ve never said that to anyone.”
Then they were pulling up in front of that ugly house that Matty, of course, thought was so modern and sophisticated.
It was everything that Boone personally hated about what outsiders were doing to Montana.
And he counted Matty as an outsider, no matter if he’d been born here or not.
His famously snooty father sure hadn’t raised his only son to act like a local.
Matty’s pompous vehicle wasn’t in the driveway.
Boone thought that was a pretty serious letdown, but he kept that to himself as he followed Sierra inside.
“Still looks like a morgue in here,” he muttered.
Sierra made a low sound, like she was trying to stifle a laugh.
“It is a little stark, I grant you.”
But then there was no time for remarks, because they got to work.
All told, took him about an hour to take everything Sierra wanted from the house, which wasn’t much.
Only about half of her clothes, which made him think that the other half were things Matty liked that she didn’t.
He made a note of what they looked like, but he figured he was right about that.
Matty had always liked her not to look like her.
He packed up her books.
The framed photos she kept in a drawer.
And all the rest were boxes of things she had to get from the attic, which told him even more about what this house was really like—in case he’d had any doubts about that over the years.
Truth was, he couldn’t wait to get her out of here.
Boone was outside, making sure everything was secured in the truck, when a slick Range Rover pulled into the driveway with music blaring.
“Terrific,” Sierra said beneath her breath.
“I guess this is happening after all.”
“Bring it on,” Boone said, though he only realized that he’d said it out loud when Sierra slid a look his way.
“I knew I should have changed those locks,” Matty said with that smarmy smile of his that Boone very much wanted to rip off of his face and shove directly up his—
“I’m actually surprised that you didn’t.” Sierra sounded remarkably calm, Boone thought.
Given everything she’d just told him.
Plus everything he already knew.
“Anyway, I won’t be back. Do what you like.”
Matty turned his attention to Boone.
“Good job, buddy,” he said in that snide way of his, like every word hid seven knives.
“Finally getting what you wanted all along. You must be proud of yourself.”
Beside him, Sierra stiffened.
But Boone laughed. “I’m always pretty proud of myself, Matty, now that you mention it.” He studied the other man, and laughed again.
Maybe a little louder this time.
“Mostly for not committing the acts of violence that I think would be appropriate to the moment.”
Matty smirked.
“I think we know what kind of man always resorts to threats of violence, don’t we?”
“I don’t make threats,” Boone assured him.
He stretched an arm out along the side of his truck and leaned back against it.
“Funny you should mention that. Because it seems to me that there’s a very specific kind of man who likes to go around stirring things up, as if violence doesn’t exist. And anytime someone objects, he claims it’s a threat. There’s a word for a man like that, Matty. I bet you know it. It rhymes with Howard .”
Matty let that cold glare of his move between the two of them, and shook his head.
“I hope you enjoy my leftovers, Boone,” he said in his awful, suggestive, snide voice.
“But then, you always have, haven’t you?”
It took everything Boone had not to close the distance between them and rearrange Matty’s face.
It would take one swing.
For all of Matty’s strutting around recently and his claims that CrossFit had changed his life, what it hadn’t done was teach a snotty little rich boy how to fight.
Having grown up with four brothers, three of them older than him, Boone did not suffer from the same limitations.
But he kept his hands to himself.
And all he did was laugh at Matty, then inclined his head toward the truck—inviting Sierra to climb in.
“Enjoy your downgrade, Sierra,” Matty said.
“But let’s be clear about something. There won’t be any crawling back.”
“Don’t you worry about that,” Boone assured him, with a friendly grin that he reckoned Matty knew wasn’t friendly at all.
“If you start crawling anywhere near her, I’ll treat you like any of the other predators that try to come onto our land. In fact, Matty, I sure hope you give me that opportunity.”
Matty sneered at him.
And Sierra didn’t get into anything with this man who was now her ex, which Boone was pleased about—though he wasn’t sure it was healthy.
Surely people should have more to say to each other at the end of a marriage.
Or why had they been married all this time?
Then again, she’d told him why, hadn’t she?
If he let it, he thought it might crush him.
In the truck, they both sat in silence as Boone pulled away from the curb and left Matty still standing there in the driveway with that flat look on his face.
“I’m sorry,” Sierra said when they got back on the road that led toward Copper Mountain and Cowboy Point.
“Really. I just… I’m really sorry, Boone.”
He slid a glance her way.
“I don’t know what you have to apologize for.”
“What Matty said.” Her breath sounded ragged.
“He’s been obsessed with this fantasy of his since high school and no matter how many times I told him that we’ve never been anything but friends, he’s never believed it.”
Boone wisely kept quiet on that one.
Sierra let out a sound that he wouldn’t quite call a laugh.
“I don’t remember when he started to claim that all the cheating he did was fine, and didn’t matter anyway, as it wasn’t like he had an ongoing relationship with another man. He wasn’t the one who was intimate elsewhere.”
“He has a point there,” Boone said.
“I don’t think Matty Quealey has had single friend in the whole of his life. Mostly that’s because he sucks. Only thing he had going for him was the fact that he convinced you to marry him. Now?” Boone shook his head.
“He’s not going to be able to hide the fact that he’s an empty shell of a human being.”
“He didn’t think we were actually friends,” Sierra said.
“If I had a dollar for every time he accused me of sleeping with you.” She laughed again then, and reached over, putting her hand on his arm, like this was all silly.
So very silly. “Honestly, I probably should have. I got in trouble for it either way.”
At that, something inside Boone finally…
snapped.
With a crack so loud it sounded like an avalanche inside of him.
And as it roared through him, he wasn’t sure that there was any coming back from it.