Big Sky Country

  The “First Lady of the West,” #1 New York Times bestselling author Linda Lael Miller is back with a new series about Parable, Montana—where love awaits.

  The illegitimate son of a wealthy rancher, Sheriff Slade Barlow grew up in a trailer hitched to the Curly-Burly hair salon his mother runs. He was never acknowledged by his father—until now. Suddenly, Slade has inherited half of Whisper Creek Ranch, one of the most prosperous in Parable, Montana. That doesn’t sit well with his half brother, Hutch, who grew up with all the rights of a Carmody. Including the affections of Joslyn Kirk, homecoming queen, rodeo queen, beauty queen—whom Slade has never forgotten.

  But Joslyn is barely holding her head up these days as she works to pay back everyone her crooked stepfather cheated. With a town to protect—plus a rebellious teenage stepdaughter—Slade has his hands full. But someone has to convince Joslyn that she’s responsible only for her own actions. Such as her effect on this lawman’s guarded heart.

  Praise for the novels of #1 New York Times bestselling author Linda Lael Miller

  “Linda Lael Miller creates vibrant characters

  and stories I defy you to forget.”

  —#1 New York Times bestselling author Debbie Macomber

  “[Miller] is one of the finest American writers in the genre.”

  —RT Book Reviews

  “A fine conclusion to Miller’s latest trilogy.

  It is peopled with likeable…quite human characters. Animal lovers will enjoy the creatures that make up

  a delightfully integral part of the story.”

  —RT Book Reviews on The Creed Legacy

  “Only Linda Lael Miller can write the kind of romance

  that melts your heart and makes you want to shout

  Yippee ki-yay!”

  —SingleTitles.com on Creed’s Honor

  “Miller excels at creating extended-family dynamics in an authentic Western small-town setting and richly populating her stories with animal, as well as human characters.”

  —Booklist on A Creed in Stone Creek

  “No one does a better cowboy/Western romance

  than [Miller], and when she adds to the pot

  one of her prolific families like the Creeds,

  watch out because you are in for one wild bronco ride.”

  —Debbie Haupt, The Reading Frenzy blog, on Creed’s Honor

  “The tale of Austin McKettrick…is completely wonderful. Austin’s interactions with Paige are fun and lively and the mystery…adds quite a suspenseful punch.”

  —RT Book Reviews on McKettricks of Texas: Austin

  “Strong characterization and a vivid Western setting

  make for a fine historical romance.”

  —Publishers Weekly on McKettrick’s Choice

  Also available from Linda Lael Miller and HQN Books

  The McKettricks of Texas

  McKettricks of Texas: Tate

  McKettricks of Texas: Garrett

  McKettricks of Texas: Austin

  A Lawman’s Christmas

  The McKettricks series

  McKettrick’s Choice

  McKettrick’s Luck

  McKettrick’s Pride

  McKettrick’s Heart

  A McKettrick Christmas

  The Montana Creeds series

  Montana Creeds: Logan

  Montana Creeds: Dylan

  Montana Creeds: Tyler

  A Creed Country Christmas

  The Mojo Sheepshanks series

  Deadly Gamble

  Deadly Deceptions

  The Stone Creek series

  The Man from Stone Creek

  A Wanted Man

  The Rustler

  The Bridegroom

  The Creed Cowboys

  A Creed in Stone Creek

  Creed’s Honor

  The Creed Legacy

  Coming soon

  Big Sky Mountain

  Linda Lael Miller

  Big Sky Country

  Dear Reader,

  Welcome to a new community, Parable, Montana—a small town of the type I know and love so well. The people of Parable are good, decent, hardworking folks who pull together in times of trouble and never miss a chance to celebrate the good things in life.

  In this first story, Big Sky Country, you’ll meet Sheriff Slade Barlow, the dark-haired hunk who happens to be pretty disillusioned with love, and Joslyn Kirk, his equally love-skittish lady. Joslyn, after all, has returned to Parable only to right an old wrong, one she didn’t actually commit, and she’s planning to move on as soon as possible.

  But here’s the thing about small towns—and about love: there are threads that pull a person into the picture, whether they choose to be part of it or not. What are these threads? Friends, old and new, human and animal. Memories. The glorious process of making new memories. The laughter and the tears and, of course, there’s always the biggest blessing of all: Love. In all its fascinating forms.

  So welcome to Parable. You’ll fit right in.

  My very best,

  Linda Lael Miller

  In loving memory of my beloved beagle, Sadie.

  I’m grateful for every moment of the eleven years we shared.

  Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  BPA

  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. Stil
l 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 nee
ded 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.