Montana Cowboy (Big Sky Mavericks Book 2) (20 page)

Serena's heart expanded in a way only Austen could make it feel. He put one arm around her shoulders and pulled her tight to his side. He kissed the top of her head. "Oh, honey, Bailey was right—I'm such an egoist. Maybe I was in Helena longer than I thought. Of course, you need time to process everything that's happened. And I plan to be here every step of the way if you'll let me."

She wiped away a tear and looked at him. "Really?"

"Absolutely. I have things to figure out, too—like what I'm going to do for a living. Fortunately, my sister has a few ideas." He used his thumb to brush a bit residual wetness from her cheek. "And I heard there might be an opening in the alpaca business. I'm well acquainted with poop."

She snickered softly, searching his eyes for any lingering hurt. "Are you sure you're not upset about me turning down your proposal?"

"What proposal? I don't remember hearing a proposal." He rolled his eyes before kissing her lightly. "That's not to say there won't be one...or two...or ten. As many as it takes to get the right answer, but only an insensitive politician with his head buried deeply in his own agenda would propose right here, right now." He pointed at the weathered table. "Plus, you know I'm more romantic than that, right?"

Austen felt such a rush of relief seeing a happy light return to Serena's eyes he nearly missed her sassy reply.

"Well, in that case, I think I'd like to accept the position I originally applied for—if it's still open."

Original position?
The only one he could think of involved her bent over the arm of the sofa. She poked his arm and clucked, clearly reading his dirty mind. "Not that one. Remember what we discussed in my truck? Our first kiss..." She waited for him to get her meaning. He shook his head until the answer finally hit. His bark of laughter made Beau leap to his feet, growling.

Austen petted the dog, grinning at Serena. "Friends-with-benefits, no-strings-attached?"

"Exactly."

Austen thought a moment. The benefits were excellent, but he had his heart set on a more permanent arrangement. "I'm afraid that position has closed. But there's a new opening that might appeal to you."

"Namely...?"

"Girlfriend. Entry level with the possibility of advancement."

"Girlfriend," she repeated, her lips curling under to keep from grinning. She looked at Beau. "What do you think, boy?"

The Great Pyrenees let out a deep, reverberating woof.

She leaned over and gave the big dog a hug. "I think you're right. He'll make an excellent boyfriend...in training," she whispered loud enough for Austen to hear. When she straightened, she held out her hand to shake on it. "Yes. I'll be your girlfriend, as long as you understand I'm a package deal: love me, love my dog, llamas, alpacas and barn cat."

"Done."

He shook her hand and pulled her to him to seal the deal with a kiss. A kiss filled with all the passion he'd been storing up since he left the ranch. He was home, she was his, and Austen knew it was only a matter of time before they fine-tuned their agreement to include a ring, a ceremony and a future together.

THE END

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Please see the next page for an excerpt from Book 3 in the Big Sky Mavericks series:

Montana Darling

T
he boy lifted his face to the sun and inhaled deeply.

Heaven, he thought, is Montana in the summer.

He put his new camera to one eye, squeezing the other so he could focus on the scene in his viewfinder. His father stood thirty feet away, casting back and forth like one of those old mechanical toys they saw at the museum in Bozeman. No waders for Dad, who insisted he needed contact with the river to “feel the fish.”

He snapped a shot, then looked for his brother in the distance.

No luck.

Only the flickering tip of his brother’s rod was visible a hundred yards away. Mr. Independent, Dad called him. Two years older meant he didn’t have to wear the hideous, bright orange Coast-Guard-approved safety vest that smelled like fish and chafed the boy’s bare arms when cast. But no amount of complaining helped. Dad said even good swimmers could panic and drown in the fast moving Marietta River and he wasn’t taking any chances because Mom would kill him if he returned to Pennsylvania one kid short.

A sound reached his ears. Not the usual bird cries or the muffled roar of Harleys on the road that led to Yellowstone. Laughter punctuated with high-pitched squeals. He squinted against the bright light as a girl in a red swimsuit rounded the bend in the river, her legs draped over a big black inner tube. She kicked hard, water splashing.

She had something clenched in one fist as she paddled fiercely with her free hand, obviously trying to stay ahead of the others that followed. He could hear their shouts but the only thing he could make out was one word: Nitro.

Her dark, wet hair was pulled back in a ponytail that trailed in the water when her head dipped backward. Water drops on her tanned skin sparkled like tiny jewels. Even from a distance he could tell her eyes were blue. Electric blue. The color of the vodka bottle Dad brought for his evening cocktail.

The boy’s hand shook as he hurried to take her picture. This was something special. A moment in time that might never come again.

The expression on her face was part laughter and part win-at-all-cost. Clamped in her mouth like a knife was a smoking punk—the kind he and his brother used to light fireworks on the Fourth of July. Taking a break from paddling, she pinched off something, held it to the punk then tossed it high in the air, nearly upsetting her tube.

A loud crack filled the air, followed by three or four more explosions.

Firecrackers.

She had another ready to light when she spotted him.

Her eyes went wide. Her top teeth bit down on her bottom lip, a look of being caught doing something wrong on her face.

“Sorry,” she called, as the other kids caught up to her.

She pointed to the boy, their camp.

The bigger kids—there were six total—formed a circle around her—probably to make sure she didn’t throw any more firecrackers and disturb the fishermen. One thing the boy knew about western Montana, people took their sports seriously.

The older kids in the group exchanged words with Dad, but the boy didn’t pay them any mind. He couldn’t stop looking at the girl in the red suit. She kept looking over her shoulder at him, too.

He snapped another shot. A keeper. He’d bet anything on it.

He watched until they were nearly out of sight.

Just before the flotilla cleared the bend where his brother was fishing, he saw the girl kick free and spin around to face him. She took the punk from her lips and waved. Her smile was the sweetest thing he’d ever, in his whole life, seen. And it made him happy.

He didn’t know why.

It just did.

He carried his camera to dry land and stashed it in his sleeping bag. He couldn’t wait to finish the roll so he could get it developed. He wanted to see the picture of the girl—the girl he’d never forget.

“J
ab. Jab. Uppercut. That’s the way. Now, give me two knee lifts...and a kick. Quickly, now. Repeat.”

Mia Zabrinski blinked the salty sting of sweat from her eyes with the back of her glove so she could see the video she’d uploaded on her tablet that morning. Her sides heaved. Lungs burned. Her pathetic little biceps quivered from the use/abuse. Not for the first time since she moved back to her old home town of Marietta, Montana, she asked herself what the hell am I doing and how did I get here?

She’d loved her old gym in Cheyenne. Fresh, hip, and stylish. She’d felt smart, alive and cool every time she walked through the door. Now, she was stuck in her parents’ basement in the space once dedicated to her super-jock twin brother, Austen. Back then, she’d secretly resented all the attention he got on the playing field, but she’d used that to fuel her own successes. Academically and in life. She’d one-upped him a few times—first to marry, first to have kids.

First to crash and burn.

“Give me ten squat kicks starting now. Kick. Higher. Faster. Build on your power,” the lithe woman instructor ordered.

“What power?” Mia would have cried if she weren’t struggling to get enough oxygen.

She’d handed over her power as payment to board the Eradicate Fucking Cancer Express fifteen months earlier. She’d opted for the most aggressive treatment available. No hoping for the best where her life was concerned. A single mom with two kids in her care didn’t gamble on pesky leftover cancer cells.

“Okay. Good. Take it back a notch as we start winding down. Stretch right. Reach. Breathe.”

She inhaled deeply, ignoring the residual twinges from stretched skin and perky new replacement boobs. “Let me give you new breasts, Mia,” her doctor in Cheyenne had begged. “You’ll feel whole again. More you.”

“No more surgery. I don’t have time to go through this again. I need to move my kids and get them settled. I have to find a new job. From the outside, I look as normal as I need to be,” she’d argued.

But her mother, Austen—even her sister, Meg—weighed in on the subject until Mia finally caved. Now, she was whole—whatever that meant. Outwardly, at least. Inside, she was a hot, screaming mess.

She was a fighter and, as anybody in her family would volunteer, as tenacious as a Montana winter.

She stayed married to a man she didn’t love until he walked out on her. She’d stayed in—and excelled at—a job she hated—prosecuting the scum of the earth in Cheyenne, Wyoming—because it gave her the illusion of power. Her take home pay had matched Edward’s, which brought a certain level of satisfaction, too. Their combined incomes placed them in an economic bracket that provided a gorgeous home she could hire someone else to clean. Their children went to private schools—fat lot of good it did them. Her life was freakin’ perfect—until it wasn’t. Until the day Edward told her, “I’m done playing this charade. Get a good divorce lawyer. I suggest Don Cho.”

Her settlement provided enough to start over in style—until cancer kicked her ass and she’d needed her family’s help simply to make it through the day.

“Mom,” a perturbed voice called from the top of the stairs. “We need to leave, now. I texted you twice.”

Mia flopped over in a forward bend, her fingers brushing the ugly commercial carpet. She hated basements. As soon as she had her mobility and endurance back, she planned to check out the new Martial Arts studio that had opened up in the strip mall just outside of town, but no stranger was going to see her in this shape.

“Coming.”

She grabbed the towel she’d set on the old rocking chair that her mother had tried to palm off on her fourteen years ago when Emilee was born. Mia trotted up the stairs, still breathing hard, to find her daughter standing, arms crossed and toe tapping impatiently.

“You do this on purpose, don’t you? You get a kick out of making me late so I have to walk into First Period when everyone else is in their seats.”

Mia wiped the sweat out of her eyes. “Annoy Emilee is the first thing on my to-do list every morning. How am I doing?”

Em made a face of pure disgust and stomped out the door of the attached garage. Mia’s Escalade no longer had a pristine heated garage to call home. The beautiful white gas hog sat outside because her parents were home for another month. Normally, they headed to their winter habitat once school started. But, lucky for everyone, Mia’s younger brother, Paul, was getting married the first weekend in October.

Mia stifled a sigh as she grabbed her purse. “Hunter, we’re leaving.”

Her eleven-year-old son blew through the mudroom with a grunt that probably meant “Good morning” in pre-teen boy vernacular.

“Good morning to you, too, my only son.”

He tugged his Rockies ball cap to the top of his thick black brows and shouldered the backpack that probably weighed half as much as he did—ninety pounds at his recent school physical.

Both kids were in the back when she climbed behind the wheel. She tossed her purse on the passenger seat and started the engine.

“No elevator music,” Emilee ordered.

Mia looked in the rearview mirror and shot her a my-car-my-music look. Then she touched a title on the console’s mini computer for a song she’d downloaded from her future sister-in-law’s playlist. As much as she hated to admit it, Mia liked Bailey Jenkins. They’d had practically no contact when Bailey and Paul dated in high school. By then, Mia was in college, living with Edward, making babies together.

The beat pulsed with a hint of African rhythms. She tapped the steering wheel as she drove, ignoring the death rays shooting from her daughter’s pretty green eyes. Mia deserved her children’s anger. She’d given up on her marriage long before Ed started sleeping with his fave barista. She’d been too focused on her work for years, spending extra hours when her babies were sleeping and working on cases that would help build her reputation as a hard-ass prosecutor. She paid a nanny to do the car-pool thing, to take them to play dates and dance lessons, although Mia almost never missed a recital or performance. Not any more than Edward did, at least.