Chapter Ten
“S o,” Knox said one fine August day while Boone and all his brothers were gathered in one of the corrals, inspecting the horses.
“Are we not going to talk about how Boone and his very best friend who he swore he would never ever date, are… dating?”
Because of course he did.
“I’m not,” Boone retorted, glaring at his younger brother.
“Funnily enough,” drawled Wilder, from where he was leaning against the fence, “that happens to be a favorite topic of conversation in my house these days too.”
“Rosie and I have two active toddlers and are building a house,” Ryder said with a laugh.
Then he swung his gaze to Boone, and any half-formed idea that Ryder was putting a stop to this line of discussion died a quick death.
“And still we manage to talk about your private life pretty much nonstop regular.”
“Let me clear that up for you,” Boone replied.
“It’s still none of your business.”
There was a silence, then.
Nothing but the breeze and the usual commentary from the animals.
Boone was tempted to think that was the worst of it.
He always had managed to get away with things simply by stonewalling.
It was a tactic he’d perfected as a child.
“I’m partial to all the courtly, gentlemanly dinner dates,” Harlan chimed in, just when Boone had begun to think that the oldest of the Carey brothers was going to sit this one out.
Never could tell with Harlan.
“It’s downright old-fashioned.”
Boone sighed.
“I didn’t put an ad in the paper like it’s the 1800s, if that’s what you mean,” he pointed out.
“Kendall suggested you were personally bringing the Old West back to life,” Harlan said, and even smiled.
Wide enough to make it clear he was happy to get into this.
Great.
Boone didn’t bother to roll his eyes.
He crossed his arms over his chest, settled in, and waited.
“I’ve heard rumors of dates all over this county, and even up into Bozeman and back,” Knox continued like he was telling his brothers a fairy tale.
“There are tales of handholding. There are reports of the opening of doors and better yet, kissing on the streets.”
Four pairs of eyes, all a little too merry for Boone’s taste, focused on him then.
Like lasers.
“Is there something you want to share with group?” Ryder asked, grinning.
“Or should we keep on sharing rumors?”
Boone only stared back at them, like he was made of granite.
Wilder laughed. “Cat already knows everything there is to know,” he assured everyone.
“Between working in the clinic and at the General Store, there’s not a single person who hasn’t shared their thoughts with her about recent developments. Apparently, down in Marietta, it’s causing quite a stir.”
Boone did not choose to share with them that he’d made sure that they weren’t avoiding Marietta.
That he’d tested the waters one night and Sierra hadn’t balked at all, the way he’d wondered if she might.
He also didn’t share that he’d forgotten about tests after that, because all he focused on was taking her out and showing her what it was supposed to feel like to spend time with a man, by his reckoning.
It wasn’t supposed to be a long list of external rules.
It was supposed to be fun .
“Oh, I bet there’s more than just a stir down the mountain,” Ryder was agreeing, too heartily, because he and Wilder were two sides of the same irritating coin.
“Because last I heard, Boone’s very best friend who he had no romantic designs on—despite all the evidence I saw with my very own eyes for the past three hundred years when I didn’t even live here—is only very recently divorced.”
“So recently that I doubt the ink is dry,” Harlan agreed.
“Obviously, certain parties want everyone to think that this is an affair that’s been going on for a long time.” Wilder wasn’t smiling then, when he looked at Boone.
“But I think we all know that’s not you.”
“Anybody who knows me or Sierra knows that there’s no possibility she was having an affair,” Boone agreed, flatly.
“And anyone who doesn’t know us can think what they want. They will anyway.”
“I think that means that he pretty much just confirmed it,” Knox pointed out with a grin.
“Right?”
“Not that I needed confirmation,” Wilder said, shaking his head.
But his smile was huge.
“But it’s about damn time, brother.”
And Boone couldn’t decide if he was irritated or touched by the fact that all of his brothers came and clapped him on the back, one after the next, like he’d finally won the grand prize.
Which was pretty much how he felt about Sierra these days, so that tracked.
Later, when they’d exhausted all the ribbing they could come up with—and they were masters in that arena—he found himself back in the ranch’s big barn.
He finished the chores he was doing and then wandered back into his dad’s workshop.
Zeke was sitting there by an open window that let the summer afternoon in.
He was polishing up some of his finished pieces, making them all shine.
But he looked at Boone and nodded.
“I hear congratulations are in order,” the old man said.
Boone blew out a breath, and didn’t bother to ask how he’d heard so fast. “Sierra and I are together,” he said gruffly.
“If that’s what you mean. But we haven’t put any labels on it.”
Zeke stopped what he was doing and stared at him for a moment.
“Why not?”
This, Boone decided, was significantly worse than anything his brothers had thrown at him.
He could handle ribbing.
He could handle all four of his brothers.
But his father was a different thing altogether.
Boone liked and appreciated his brothers.
But Zeke was the man he’d modeled his adult life after.
That meant something different.
He moved further into the workshop and took his Stetson off, then sat down on one of the other benches near his father’s workbench.
He felt like a little kid, called into this workshop to explain a teacher’s call home or to give his side in a brotherly war.
The nostalgia was both comforting and ill-fitting at once.
Why not? Zeke had asked.
Why wasn’t Boone putting labels on things?
“This is all new to her,” he told his father.
“She just got divorced. She has a whole life to figure out. And anyway, there’s no rush.”
“Of course there’s a rush,” Zeke retorted.
And Boone realized—with a sickening sort of lurch in his belly—that he’d actually forgotten.
He blew out a breath and couldn’t believe he’d actually let himself get so distracted that he’d forgotten.
“You always look so healthy,” he said quietly.
“I forget.”
Zeke eyed him.
Almost balefully, Boone thought, though that couldn’t be right.
“That’s not what I meant.”
Boone shifted uncomfortably on the low bench, because there wasn’t a thing on this planet that could make him fidget except his father.
His father talking about Sierra?
When Boone had just forgotten how little time he likely had left with Zeke?
This was a recipe for disaster as far as Boone was concerned.
He cautioned himself to remain calm.
“I would love to say that I took what you said at Easter last year to heart,” he said after a moment.
“That it made all of this happen, but it didn’t. The simple truth that she got divorced and she leaned on her best friend. And for the first time since high school, she wasn’t taken. That’s the beginning and the end of it.”
Zeke continued to study him, and Boone ordered himself to sit still, like a man.
Not some awkward, prepubescent kid whose body was going to do what it liked no matter how he tried to keep his limbs in order.
He didn’t miss those days at all.
Except maybe the ability he’d had at sixteen to eat…
everything, and then go back for thirds and fourths with no aftereffects.
He figured he’d probably miss that the rest of his life.
“Your mother thought I was a bad bet,” Zeke said into the silence.
Boone blinked, banishing his teenage memories at once.
“What?”
Zeke nodded sagely.
“Widower. Single father. So many red flags, according to her, that I might as well be a crimson tide.”
Boone laughed despite himself.
“That does sound like mom.”
“She didn’t want to take a chance on me.” Zeke shrugged, and looked almost philosophical—an expression that Boone knew made his mother start in with her dark mutterings.
“It took some convincing on my part. A lot of convincing to even get her in the game. What I’m trying to say is that there’s nothing wrong with a crooked path to get where you’re going. You get there all the same.”
Boone sat with that.
He picked up one of the spurs that his father had made into art and looked at it from every angle.
Unlike some of his family, it didn’t surprise him at all that this gruff, down to earth man had an artist inside of him.
Somehow, it fit.
He had always seemed magical to Boone.
“I told her that we wouldn’t be able to go back, but that doesn’t mean that there’s a way forward,” he told Zeke, not looking up.
Confessions were always better when they were delivered from a distance.
“I get it,” Zeke agreed, warmly.
“Got a little buyer’s remorse, do you?”
Boone’s head snapped up.
“What?”
“It makes sense,” Zeke said placidly.
“A man spends half his life building something up in his head, only stands to reason that when he gets it, might be a little bit of a letdown.”
“Yeah,” Boone drawled that out, shaking his head.
“That’s not the case. At all.”
His father’s gaze sharpened.
“So again I have to ask, why not put a label on it? Why not call it what it is?”
“Why hurry?” Boone shot right back.
“There’s no rush. It’s been a lifetime already. What’s a whole summer, at the very least?”
“You think you have so much time,” Zeke told him, quietly.
“We all think we have years and years and years. We think that forever really means forever, but if you’re lucky, it’s maybe a few decades. That might seem like a lot when you’re young, but it’s not. I promise you, it’s not.”
Boone ran a hand over his face.
He thought about his father’s first wife, the lovely Alice, who was his older brothers’ mother and who had never been hidden away or whispered about in their house.
It wasn’t until Boone was older that he’d realized how extraordinary his own mother was, to have included Alice in everything, even with the boys that weren’t hers.
Boone and Knox pretty much thought of Alice as a favorite aunt.
And that was only one of the losses Zeke could be referencing now.
“I’m sorry, Dad,” he managed to say “Running out of time has got to feel—”
“I’m not dying,” Zeke said impatiently, and his gaze stayed hard on Boone’s.
“No more than anyone else, anyway. While it’s true that I could drop dead at any time, so could you.” When Boone stared at him without comprehension, his father grunted.
“I wanted my sons settled and some grandchildren to play with, so I did what I had to do.”
It still took Boone an excessive amount of time to process what he was hearing.
Boone couldn’t make sense of this.
“You lied?”
“I did and I would again,” Zeke replied easily.
“I sleep like a baby, before you ask. And I’ll also thank you to keep this information to yourself, because I have a feeling your younger brother is going to be a harder nut to crack.”
Boone was fairly sure his mouth was hanging open, though when he checked, it seemed that he’d managed to keep it shut.
But it felt like he was never going to feel less winded than this.
It felt like his father had socked him a good one, straight to the eye.
“I can’t believe I’m hearing this.” Boone couldn’t figure out how to say what needed to be said.
His ears were ringing.
“You lied to all of us. You told us you had a year to live.”
“And look at me, defying expectations,” Zeke said.
And even laughed.
He laughed .
“You pretended to be sick!” Boone said, maybe a little loudly.
“I did,” Zeke agreed, and then he leaned closer.
“And I also knew that when you found out, you’d be the one to take it the hardest, because you take honesty so seriously.”
Like that was a bad thing?
“I thought I learned that from you,” Boone threw out there.
His head was reeling.
He couldn’t take this in.
It had to be some kind of joke, didn’t it?
Yet Zeke didn’t look the least bit concerned.
Or like he thought he was telling jokes.
He also didn’t look even remotely frail.
In retrospect, maybe that should have been a clue.
“Here’s the thing, Boone.” Zeke sounded kind , and that was…
not better. “You’ve been lying to yourself for a long time.”
“I’m not a liar,” Boone shot back at him.
“That’s you, apparently.”
But his father didn’t relent.
“Aren’t you?”
“I don’t know what the hell that’s supposed to mean, Dad.” Boone could feel the temper he usually kept locked away tag in.
“I’ve gone out of my way, all my life, to stay honest. Even when it didn’t exactly make me the most popular guy around.”
Ask any of the women he’d been with all these years.
He’d been starkly honest and many of them liked to act as if that had been bruising.
Afterward, that was.
He knew what they said about him.
It had never bothered him—because it was true.
He was that honest, always, no matter that other men would lie to make everyone feel better.
That wasn’t him.
Boone prided himself on never, ever being a liar.
Zeke leaned forward, a lot like he’d been waiting to speak on this for a good, long while.
“I have a lot of friends, Boone. Good friends. Some might even describe them as best friends . Not one of them acts in a way that could be confused for my wife.”
Boone started to argue with that, but Zeke shook his head.
“I’ve never liked a money man in my life. I have no use for wannabe copper kings in this day and age. I’m not going to sit here and defend Matty Quealey. But you know as well as I do that you made yourself the foundation she rested her life on. You made it possible for her to envision a way out, simply by giving her, day after day and year after year, what her husband didn’t.”
“I never laid a hand on her while she was married,” Boone managed to get out, feeling as if he been slapped.
So hard it made his head spin.
“I don’t doubt that,” Zeke said, but his voice was still uncompromising.
“But you gave her everything else, didn’t you? You were a shoulder to cry on. A helping hand. Everything a husband ought to be, and I’m not saying she doesn’t deserve those things. You know how fond I am of Sierra. But now that she’s left her actual husband, you don’t want to put a label on it?” And when Zeke laughed this time, Boone felt no urge to join him.
“What are you afraid of? In almost every way that matters, she’s been with you since high school. If you doubt that, what have you been doing?”
“I don’t think,” Boone said, though his heart was a sledgehammer in his chest and he hardly recognized his own voice, “that I’m going to take a lecture from a man who’s been manipulating his children for the past year.”
“Son,” Zeke said, and he was still laughing, “I’ve been manipulating you your whole life. I just prefer to think of it as fatherly influence.”
When Boone muttered something a man shouldn’t say in the presence of his parent—and certainly not one who claimed to be dying and then claimed he’d made it up so was probably delusional anyway—said parent laughed even harder.
Then sobered.
“There are no consequences if you don’t marry this girl,” Zeke said in that quiet, sure way of his.
“Not for me. But I have to wonder if you’ve thought at all about the consequences for you.”
“For all I know she has no desire to ever marry again,” Boone bit out.
“But you don’t actually know.” Zeke studied him.
“Because you’re afraid to ask. Or maybe you’re afraid that if you do marry her, it really will be a letdown. Maybe what you like is what’s forbidden.”
“You can go—” Boone found that he was standing up, his hands in fists at his side, and he was about to curse his own father out.
And he might have kept going, buoyed by a rush of that temper he almost never indulged.
But he saw that Zeke had the faintest curve in his mouth.
Boone blew out a breath.
“You’re trying to wind me up.”
“As you pointed out, I’m very manipulative,” Zeke said, happily.
“Why?” Boone asked.
“Because I know what you want.” Zeke shook his head as if he despaired of Boone.
“And so do you. If you love Sierra as much as you’ve always indicated that you do, she should know that already. She should also have an idea of what this all must mean to you and in what direction you’re clearly thinking this is leading. You can’t have an honest relationship if you’re not willing to be honest about the things that really matter, can you?”
“Again, what is this? ‘Do as I say, not as I do?’”
Zeke laughed so uproariously then that Boone almost felt like he was watching this from off in the distance somewhere.
Him falling apart while Zeke was having the time of his life.
Him feeling like his chest was going to explode and his father laughing .
“Believe you me,” Zeke said when the laughter receded a little bit, “my marriage is so honest it hurts. Don’t you worry about me on that score.”
“You’re just happy to lie to your kids, is that it?”
Zeke walked over, as if he couldn’t see that Boone was vibrating with tension and clapped him on the shoulder.
“I told you Santa Claus was real too,” the old man said, his eyes gleaming.
“I think you’ll survive.”
And then he ambled on out of his shop, actually whistling under his breath.
While Boone stood there for far too long, trying to piece together what had just happened.
And why he felt like he’d just been laid out flat.