Big Sky Country
By Linda Lael Miller
Harlequin Enterprises Limited
Copyright © 2012
Linda Lael Miller
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-373-77643-6
Chapter One
Parable, Montana
"You weren't at the funeral," Slade Barlow's half brother, Hutch Carmody, accused, the words
rasping against the underside of a long, slow exhale.
Slade didn't look at Hutch, though he could still see him out of the corner of one eye. The both of
them were sitting side by side in a pair of uncomfortable chairs, facing what seemed like an acre
of desk. Maggie Landers, their father's lawyer, who had summoned them there, had yet to put in an
appearance.
"I went to the graveside service," Slade replied evenly, and after a considerable length. It was
the truth, though he'd stood at some distance from the crowd, not wanting to be numbered among the
admitted mourners but unable to stay away entirely.
"Why bother at all?" Hutch challenged. "Unless you just wanted to make sure the old man was really
in the box?"
Slade was not a quick-tempered man—by nature, he tended to think before he spoke and offer whatever
response he might make with quiet deliberation, traits that had served him well over the several
years since he'd been elected sheriff—but the edge in his half brother's tone brought heat surging
up his neck to pound behind his ears.
"Maybe that was it," he drawled with quiet contempt as the office door whispered open behind them.
Hutch, who had just shoved back his chair as if to leap to his feet, ready to fight, thrust a hand
hard through his shock of brownish-blond hair instead, probably to discharge that rush of
adrenaline, and stayed put. He all but buzzed, like an electric fence line short-circuiting in a
thunderstorm.
Slade, though still confounded by his own invitation to this particular shindig, took a certain
grim satisfaction in Hutch's reaction. There was, as the old saying went, no love lost between the
two of them.
"Good to see you haven't killed each other," Maggie observed brightly, rounding the shining expanse
of the desk to take the leather chair behind it. Still gorgeous at fifty-plus, with short, expertly
dyed brown hair and round green eyes, usually alight with mischievous intelligence, the lawyer
turned slightly to boot up her computer.
"Not just yet, anyhow," Hutch replied finally.
Maggie's profile was all he could see of her, but Slade registered the slight smile that tilted up
one corner of her mouth. Her fingers, perfectly manicured every Saturday morning at his mother's
beauty shop for the last quarter of a century, flicked busily over the keyboard, and the monitor
threw a wash of pale blue light onto her face and the lightweight jacket of her custom-made off-
white pantsuit.
"How's your mother, Slade?" she asked mildly without glancing his way.
Maggie and his mom, Callie, were around the same age, and they'd been friends for as long as Slade
could remember. Given that he'd run into Maggie at his mom's Curly-Burly Hair Salon just the day
before, where she'd been having a trim and a touch-up, he figured the question was a rhetorical
one, a sort of conversational filler.
"She's fine," Slade said. By then, he'd gotten over the urge to commit fratricide and gone back to
mulling the thing that had been bothering him ever since the formidable Ms. Landers had called him
at home that morning and asked him to stop by her office on his way to work.
The meeting had to be about the old man's last will and testament, though Maggie hadn't said so
over the phone. All she'd been willing to give up was, "This won't take long, Slade, and believe
me, it's in your best interests to be there."
Hutch's presence made sense, since he was the legitimate son, the golden boy, groomed since birth
to become the master of all he surveyed even as, motherless from the age of twelve, he ran wild.
Slade himself, on the other hand, was the outsider—born on the proverbial wrong side of the
blanket.
John Carmody had never once acknowledged him, in all Slade's thirty-five years of life, and it
wasn't likely that he'd had a deathbed change of heart and altered his will to include the product
of his long-ago affair with Callie.
No, Slade thought, Carmody hadn't
had a heart, not where he and his mother were concerned, anyway.
He'd never so much as spoken to Slade in all those years; looked right through him, when they did
come into contact, as if he was invisible. If that stiff-necked son of a bitch had instructed
Maggie to make sure Slade was there for the reading of the will, it was probably so he'd know what
he was missing out on, when all that land and money went to Hutch.
You can stick it all where the sun never shines, old man, Slade thought angrily. He'd never
expected—or wanted—to inherit a damn thing from John Carmody—bad enough that he'd gotten the
bastard's looks, his dark hair, lean and muscular build, and blue eyes—and it galled him that
Maggie, his mother's friend, would be a party to wasting his time like this.
Maggie clicked the mouse, and her printer began spewing sheets of paper as she turned to face Hutch
and Slade head-on.
"I'll spare you all the legal jargon," she said, gathering the papers from the printer tray,
separating them into two piles and shoving these across the top of her desk, one set for each of
them. "All the facts are there—you can read the wills over at your leisure."
Slade barely glanced at the documents and made no move to pick them up.
"And what facts are those?" Hutch snapped, peevish.
Pecker-head, Slade thought.
Maggie interlaced her fingers and smiled benignly. It took more than a smart-ass cowboy to get
under her hide. "The estate is to be divided equally between the two of you," she announced.
Stunned, Slade simply sat there, as breathless as if he'd just taken a sucker punch to the gut. A
single thought hummed in his head, like a trapped moth trying to find a way out.
What the hell?
Hutch, no doubt just as shocked as Slade was, if not more so, leaned forward and growled, "
What did
you say?"
"You heard me the first time, Hutch," Maggie said, unruffled. She might have looked like a
gracefully aging pixie, but she regularly chewed up the best prosecutors in the state and spit them
out like husks of sunflower seeds.
Slade said nothing. He was still trying to process the news.
"Bullshit," Hutch muttered. "This is
bullshit."
Maggie sighed. "Nevertheless," she said, "it's what Mr. Carmody wanted. He was my client, and it's
my job to see that his final wishes are honored to the letter. After all, Whisper Creek belonged to
him, and he had every right to dispose of his estate however he saw fit."
Slade finally recovered enough equanimity to speak, though his voice came out sounding hoarse.
"What if I told you I didn't want anything?" he demanded.
"If you told me that," Maggie responded smoothly, "I'd say you were out of your mind, Slade Barlow.
We're talking about a great deal of money here, in addition to a very profitable ranching operation
and all that goes with it, including buildings and livestock and mineral rights."
Another silence descended, short and dangerous, pulsing with heat.
Hutch was the one to break it. "When did Dad change his will?" he asked.
"He
didn't change it," Maggie said without hesitation. "Mr. Carmody had the papers drawn up years
ago, when my father and grandfather were still with the firm, and he personally reviewed them six
months ago, after he got the diagnosis.
This is what he wanted, Hutch."
Hutch snapped up his copy of the document and got to his feet. Slade rose, too, but he left the
papers where they were. None of this seemed real to him—he was probably dreaming. Any moment now,
he'd wake up in a cold sweat and a tangle of sheets, in his lonely, rumpled bed over at the duplex
where he'd been living since he came back to Parable ten years ago, after college, a stint in the
military and a brief marriage followed by a mostly amicable divorce.
"I'll be
damned" Hutch muttered, his voice like sandpaper. He was dressed for ranch work, in old
jeans, a blue cotton shirt and a pair of well-worn boots, which probably meant he'd had no more
notice about this meeting than Slade had.
"Thanks, Maggie," Slade heard himself say as he turned to leave.
He wasn't grateful; he'd spoken out of habit.
She got up from her chair, rounded the desk and pursued him, forcing the printout of his father's
will into his hands. "At least read it," she said. "I'll set up another meeting in a few days, when
you've both had time to absorb everything."
Slade didn't answer, but he accepted the paperwork, felt it crumple in his grasp as his fingers
tightened reflexively around it.
Moments later, as Slade opened the door of his truck, Hutch was beside him again.
"I'll buy your half of the ranch," he said, grinding out the offer. "I don't give a rat's ass about
the money— I've got plenty of that anyway—but Whisper Creek has been in my family for almost a
hundred years, and my great-great-grandfather built the original house and barn with his own hands.
The place ought to belong to me outright."
The emphasis on the phrase
my family was subtle, but it was an unmistakable line in the sand.
Slade met his half brother's fierce gaze. Reached in to take his hat off the passenger seat where
he'd left it earlier, resting on its crown, before heading into Maggie's office. "I'll need to give
that some thought," he said.
With a visible effort, Hutch unclamped the hinges of his jaws. "What's there to think about?" he
asked, after another crackling pause. "I'll pay cash, Barlow. Name your price."
Name your price. Slade knew he ought to accept the deal, and just be glad John Carmody had seen fit
to claim him, albeit posthumously. All he had to do was say yes, and he could buy that little
spread he'd had his eye on for the past couple of years, pay cash for it, instead of depleting his
savings for the down payment. But something prevented him from agreeing, something that ran deeper
than his utter inability to act on impulse.
Indirectly, John Carmody had, at long last, acknowledged his existence. He needed to be with that
knowledge for a while, work out what it meant, if anything.
"I'll get back to you," Slade finally reiterated, climbing up behind the wheel of his truck and
putting on his hat. "In the meantime, I've got a county to look after."
With that, he shut the truck door.
Hutch thumped the metal hard with the heel of one palm, then turned and stormed away, rounded the
hood of the Whisper Creek pickup, yanked open the door and jumped into the driver's seat.
Slade watched as the other man ground the engine to life, shoved it into Reverse and threw some
gravel in the process. He was all sound and fury, though. Half again too smart to actually break
the speed limit with the sheriff looking on.
With a wry twist to his mouth, Slade waited a few moments, started his own rig and pulled onto the
narrow side street. He was supposed to be in his office over at the courthouse, assigning his day
shift deputies to patrol various parts of the county, but he headed for the highway instead. Five
minutes later, he pulled up in front of his mother's place, an old trailer with rust-speckled
aluminum skirting and a plywood addition that served as living quarters.
As a kid, Slade had been about half-ashamed of that jumble of metal and wood, jerry-rigged together
the way it was, lacking only waist-high weeds, a few rattletrap cars up on blocks and household
appliances on the porch to qualify as out-and-out redneck. Callie nagged him into power-washing the
two-toned walls of the trailer—the part that housed the shop—at least twice a year, and he painted
the rest of it regularly, too.
This week, all the words on the dusty reader-board at the edge of the gravel parking lot were even
spelled correctly.
Acrylic nails, half price. Highlights/perms, ten percent off.
Slade smiled as he shut off the truck and got out.
The shop didn't open for business until ten o'clock, but Callie already had the lights on, and,
most likely, the big coffeepot was chugging away, too. As Slade approached, the door opened, and
Callie, broom in hand, beamed a greeting.
"Hey," she called.
"Hey," Slade replied gruffly.
Callie Barlow was a small woman, big-busted, with an abundance of auburn hair held to the top of
her head by a plastic clasp roughly the size of the jaws-of-life, and she wore turquoise jeans,
pink Western boots and a bright yellow T-shirt studded with little sparkly things.
"Well, this is a surprise," she said, setting aside the broom and dusting her hands together. Her
expression was warm, as always, but her gray eyes showed puzzlement bordering on concern. She knew
Slade took his job seriously, and it wasn't like him to drop in during working hours. "Is the
county running itself these days?"
"My deputies are holding down the fort," Slade answered. "Is the coffee on?"
He knew it was; he could smell the rich aroma wafting through the open doorway, along with tinges
of industrial-strength shampoo and a variety of mysterious hair-bending chemicals.
"Sure," Callie responded, stepping back so he could come inside the shop. "That's about the first
thing I do every morning—plug in the coffeepot." The faintest ghost of a frown lingered in her
eyes, and then her natural bluntness broke through. "What's wrong?" she asked.
Slade sighed, took off his hat and set it aside on the counter next to Callie's cash register. "I
don't know if
wrong is the word for it," he said. "I just came from Maggie Landers's office. It
seems John Carmody remembered me in his will."
Callie's eyes widened at that, then narrowed in swift suspicion. "What?" she asked and had to clear
her throat afterward.
He hooked his thumbs through the belt loops of his jeans and tilted his head to one side, watching
her. If Callie had known about the bequest ahead of time, she was doing a damn good job of hiding
the fact.
"Half," he said. "He left me half of everything he had."
Callie sank into one of the dryer chairs, nearly bumping her head on the plastic dome. She blinked
a couple of times, and one of her false lashes popped loose at the outside corner of her eye. She
pressed it back down with a fingertip.
"I don't believe it," she murmured.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Big Sky Country
by Linda Lael Miller
Copyright © 2012 by Linda Lael Miller.
Excerpted by permission of Harlequin Enterprises Limited. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.