Big Sky Secrets Page 3

  The lumbering creatures were nowhere in sight—not surprising considering the density of the gloom—but Ria had no illusions that the animals had wandered conveniently homeward, never to trouble her again. That would have been too easy, and while her life hadn’t been any more difficult than anyone else’s, she was accustomed to dealing with obstacles.

  She checked her watch, frowned. The great Landry Sutton was certainly taking his sweet time getting over here and tending to business, that was for sure. At least an hour had passed since she’d called his place to demand action.

  Following a surge of renewed frustration, Ria stretched out her arms, grabbed hold of the drapes and yanked them shut. She might have been in a more forgiving state of mind if this same disaster hadn’t befallen her, and her struggling crops of zinnias and gerbera daisies, half a dozen times in the past few months.

  Then she heard the noise. It was an alarmingly loud and wholly horrific combination of furious thumping and repeated scraping, and it was coming from the front, right-hand corner of the cottage, just a few feet from where she stood, in the questionable safety of her own living room. Holding her breath, Ria crooked an index finger to pull one of the drapes aside by a couple of inches and then looked out again, but she still couldn’t see what was going on.

  Which was not to say she hadn’t guessed.

  Incredibly, the nerve-shattering racket intensified. Once or twice, she would have sworn that the whole house trembled on its ancient and probably cracked foundation.

  Her sense of caution exceeded only by a need to confirm her suspicions, Ria tiptoed over to the door, flipped on the porch light, turned the dead bolt from its locked position with a decisive twist of one wrist and stepped outside, poised to run back over the threshold in a heartbeat if the situation warranted.

  Inside its bug-speckled cover, the single bulb glowed a sickly yellow, throwing a small spill of light onto the welcome mat, no threat to the thick darkness of a near-moonless night in the Montana countryside.

  All around her, crickets croaked in the balmy gloom, and although the sky was spangled with stars, they certainly didn’t illuminate the landscape.

  A sudden, roaring bellow froze her blood in an instant.

  But this was her house, her property. And, damn it, enough was enough.

  Steeling herself, Ria ventured a few steps closer to the corner of the porch, where shadows loomed, knowing, on some level, what she’d find there, but, at the same time, not quite believing it.

  Sure enough, there was Bessie, scratching her mangy hide against the corner of the house.

  “Shoo!” Ria whispered hoarsely, making a flapping motion with both hands but otherwise standing still. “Go away!”

  The response was another earsplitting, window-rattling bellow. Was the animal warning her? Issuing some kind of primitive protest?

  Ria neither knew nor cared. She wasn’t fool enough to move any closer, but she wasn’t about to retreat, either. Damn it, she had rights.

  Being a buffalo, Bessie couldn’t be expected to know that, but her owner sure as hell should have. Especially since this certainly wasn’t the first time her farm had been invaded by his livestock.

  And what was keeping him anyhow? He lived on the next place over, and he’d had plenty of time to saddle up a horse or whatever.

  After pushing up her mental sleeves in preparation to do battle, Ria drew a deep breath and tried once more to scare the creature away, this time raising her voice to a near shout. “Shoo!”

  Again, nothing happened, except that the floor of the ancient porch seemed to ripple slightly under her feet as Bessie heaved her gritty brown bulk against the corner of the house.

  As if in answer to her exasperated wonderment of moments before, headlights swung in at the top of Ria’s long dirt driveway, and she heard wheels bumping over hard, rocky ruts as a large vehicle barreled toward the house.

  Mercifully distracted, Bessie stopped the awful bawling and the assault on the cottage, and Ria put her fingers to both temples and gave a sigh of angry relief as the tension-tight muscles between her shoulder blades relaxed slightly.

  As the rig drew nearer, she could make out the outlines of the trailer being hauled behind it.

  Bessie’s calf, invisible before, trotted out of the darkness and stood still in the cone-shaped gleam of the truck’s headlights. The animal didn’t seem frightened, as a deer or other wild creature would have been; instead, the calf remained where it was, giving a single, low grunt. A moment later, Bessie ambled over to stand beside her baby boy.

  Ria was astounded by this behavior, and annoyed, too. She’d been sure both animals would charge her if she dared step off the porch, but now they were acting like well-trained pets.

  Were they tame? Hard to believe, after the way they’d carried on like banshees with bellyaches, trampling her flower beds, trying to knock down her house.

  As casually as if the incident were no big deal, though admittedly an inconvenience on his part, Landry opened the truck door, activating the interior lights and thus becoming deliciously visible. He raised one hand to Ria in a desultory wave, got out of the vehicle and started toward the back of the trailer. He whistled once, low and through his teeth, and, miraculously, both buffalo obeyed the summons as readily as a pair of faithful farm dogs.

  Despite her earlier intention to avoid direct contact with her neighbor at all costs, Ria didn’t disappear into the house, shut the door and wait for Landry to retrieve his stray critters and leave, as she probably should have. Instead, she remained where she was, stubborn and indignant and, though this was completely unlike her, spoiling for a fight.

  She listened through the thrumming of her blood in her ears as Landry opened the rear door of the trailer, soon heard the metallic rasp of a ramp being lowered, the steely, resounding thump as one end struck the ground.

  Landry muttered some gruff command, and hooves clattered like thunder as two beasts the size of mastodons clattered up the ramp and into the trailer, which seemed too flimsy to contain them.

  An instant later, the ramp clanked back into place, and then the doors were closed with a bang and bolted shut.

  Go inside, Ria told herself. Let Landry Sutton take his stupid bison and get out of here.

  It was prudent advice, since no good could come of a confrontation, but Ria still couldn’t bring herself to back down. Anyway, it was too late to pretend she wasn’t at home, as she’d planned to do, since Landry had obviously seen her.

  Finally, the rancher rounded the truck and trailer, idly dusting his hands together as he moved, probably congratulating himself on a job well done. With just the wimpy porch bulb and the truck’s headlights to see by, Ria couldn’t make out his expression, but she didn’t need to, because she caught the brief flash of his grin.

  Cocky bastard.

  “It took you long enough to get here,” she blurted, folding her arms tightly across her chest, as if she were cold. She had a legitimate gripe, and she was still furious, but she regretted giving voice to the complaint, because instead of getting back into his truck, turning it around and heading out of there, he approached her.

  His walk was slow and easy, loose-hipped and damnably sexy.

  He came to a stop at the base of the porch steps, features awash in the light from the bulb beside the front door, and his grin was affable, generously tolerant and amused.

  “If they did any damage,” he said mildly, “just send me a bill.”

  No remorse at all. He thought the incident was funny.

  People like Landry—rich people—always seemed to think money was the solution to every problem. Ria’s belly twisted.

  She glared at Sutton—they were almost at eye level, since he was standing on the ground and she on the porch—and held her folded arms even more tightly against her chest. “Maybe you’ve heard the old saying?” she bit out. “‘Good fences make for good neighbors’?”

  Landry sobered a little, but a glint of mischief lingered in hi
s eyes. “Do they?” he countered, charitably amenable.

  Condescending SOB. He was nettling her on purpose and, worse, he was enjoying it.

  Ria glowered back at him. She was a sensible person, so what was stopping her from just turning around, without another word, and marching straight into her house and slamming the door in his handsome face for good measure?

  No answer came to her.

  Landry sighed heavily, as though sorely put-upon, his broad shoulders rising and falling slightly as he inhaled and then thrust out a breath. “Look,” he said, sounding resigned now. “I’m sorry about what happened, but all I can do is apologize and make restitution—”

  “You could also build better fences,” Ria suggested tersely. Who was this snippy woman inhabiting her body? Her normal self was pleasant and friendly, at least most of the time, but there were things about Landry Sutton—some of them impossible to put into words—that just plain got on her last nerve and stayed there.

  Now he folded his arms. Was he doing that rapport thing, reflecting her stance? Trying to win her over with body language?

  Fat chance.

  “My fences,” he replied tautly, “are just fine. Most likely, somebody left a gate open somewhere, that’s all.”

  “That’s all?” Ria sputtered, still wondering why she was prolonging this conversation when all she wanted was to go back inside, take a hot bath, read for an hour and then fall into the warm oblivion of a good night’s sleep. Once she drifted off, she wouldn’t have to think about her too-sexy neighbor, her demanding half sister, Meredith, or the fact that she’d bought a flower farm in the heart of Podunk County, Montana, and was barely making a go of the enterprise, even without the perils of free-range buffalo. “These flowers aren’t just for decorating my yard, Mr. Sutton,” she added primly. “I earn a good part of my living selling them. I won’t know for certain until morning, when I can see clearly enough to assess the damage, but there’s a reasonable chance that some or all of my crop has been wiped out.” She sucked in a breath, huffed it out. “Surely, you can see why I’d be concerned?”

  Her tone implied that he couldn’t, being oblivious and all.

  At this, Landry looked both exasperated and apologetic. He sighed again, shoved a hand through his hair. “Yes,” he answered, in a measured tone. “If I didn’t say it before, I’m sorry.”

  “You didn’t,” Ria said briskly. She hadn’t intended to say what came out of her mouth next; it just happened, and she didn’t have the luxury of unsaying the words. “Why can’t you raise cattle or chickens or hogs or sheep, like everyone else around here? Why does it have to be buffalo?”

  A muscle tightened in Landry’s fine jaw, relaxed again, as if by force of will. “Well, for one thing, I’m not like ‘everyone else around here,’” he retorted. Then he narrowed his eyes, studied her for a long, scrumptiously uncomfortable moment and added, “And unless I miss my guess, Ms. Manning, you’re not, either.”

  Heat suffused Ria’s entire body, and a rush of—well, something—quivered in her belly and hardened her nipples and set her heart to pounding. All her life, she’d wanted to fit in, to belong, though something inside her always rebelled, in the end, causing her to go her own way instead of following the herd.

  She’d thought, until this night, until this instant, that no one else knew her secret, that she was different. Even her late husband, Frank, had never seen through the act, as intimate as they’d been, and now here was Landry Sutton, of all people, calling her out, subtly questioning the facade she’d worked so hard to maintain.

  Damn him.

  “Since this conversation is getting us nowhere,” she said, quietly reasonable, “it would probably be best if we said good-night.”

  The evening, balmy before, had grown chilly, and goose bumps rippled across Ria’s flesh. Conversely, her insides felt molten, like lava about to blow out the side of an otherwise tranquil mountainside.

  Landry chuckled, but it was a rueful sound, a little raw, a little broken. He looked away, looked back, and, inside the trailer, Bessie and her huge “calf” fidgeted impatiently, and it seemed possible, at least to Ria, that they might actually turn the whole thing over, right there in her driveway.

  “You’re probably right,” he conceded, without a trace of generosity. “But I’ll be back tomorrow. We can look the—crops—over together, and come to some kind of agreement.” A brief pause. “Not that I can really picture you agreeing with me about much of anything.”

  By then, Ria was fresh out of bluster and ready comebacks—civil ones anyhow.

  So she let the gibe pass, nodded stiffly and, at last, went back inside the cottage. Once over the threshold, she shut the door hard behind her and turned the dead bolt with a reverberating click.

  Through the door, she heard Landry Sutton laugh.

  * * *

  “THAT IS ONE hardheaded woman,” Landry remarked aloud as, back behind the wheel of his truck, he negotiated a wide U-turn and drove slowly back up Ria Manning’s driveway to the county road beyond.

  Minutes later, at his own place, he backed the trailer he’d borrowed from Zane up to a corral gate, got out of the truck and proceeded to release Bessie and her calf into the pasture at Hangman’s Bend.

  That done, he parked the truck, still hitched to the trailer, alongside the house.

  Thanks to Highbridge, light glowed in the kitchen windows, and Landry felt a shade less lonely—and less bleak—because, for the next little while anyway, he wouldn’t be alone.

  “Alone,” of course, was a relative term.

  He tended to a few chores in the barn, checking on the horses, making sure there was hay in every feeder and no debris in the waterers in the stalls and finally headed for his half-finished house.

  He’d borrowed the stock trailer from Walker Parrish, but there was no need to return it tonight. Anyhow, his muscles were starting to ache again, from the bronc ride that morning, and his pride wasn’t in great shape, either. Bad enough that he’d been thrown three times in front of half of Parable County; the confrontation with Ria Manning had left him feeling scraped raw on the inside.

  Okay, yeah, the lady had a right to be pissed off about the damage Bessie and her strapping calf might or might not have done to her property, but, hell, he’d offered to make good for that, hadn’t he? What else could he do, at this point?

  Damned if he had a single clue.

  One thing was abundantly clear, though—nothing he said or did was going to please Ria. She just flat-out didn’t like him, buffalo-on-the-loose notwithstanding, and while Landry didn’t usually give a rat’s ass about other people’s opinions, this was different. This time, with this particular woman, he cared.

  And that might have been the most troublesome part of all.

  Reaching the house, Landry crossed the flagstone patio and stepped into the kitchen, which was spacious and ultramodern, with travertine tiles on the floors, gleaming granite on the counters and the latest in top-of-the-line appliances. He nodded a greeting to his butler, Highbridge, before heading for one of several steel sinks to wash up a little.

  Highbridge, tall, skinny as a zipper turned sideways and exuding English dignity from every pore, stood with his hands clasped behind his back and his spine straight. For him, this was relaxed.

  “I trust the most recent—buffalo incident—is behind us?” he murmured, obviously stifling a smile.

  Landry dried his hands. “For the time being,” he conceded, a mite on the grumpy side now.

  Highbridge consulted his heirloom pocket watch, drawn from a special pocket in his long-tailed butler’s coat. Cleared his throat. “Will there be anything else, sir?” he asked.

  Landry moved to the oven—make that ovens—where his dinner awaited, carefully covered in foil and still warm. “No,” he responded tersely. “You can change out of that monkey suit and do whatever it is you do, once the workday’s over.”

  Using a potholder, he removed the plate from the oven, lifted a
corner of the foil and peered beneath it. Cornish game hen, roasted to crispy perfection, wild rice, exquisitely seasoned, and green beans cooked up just the way Landry liked them best—boiled, with bacon and chopped onion.

  His mood might have been on the sour side, but his stomach rumbled with involuntary anticipation.

  Highbridge, usually anxious to vanish into his well-appointed quarters to watch some reality show on TV or, conversely, read from one of his vast collection of multivolume tomes, like Churchill’s A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, lingered. Cleared his throat again, a clear indication that there was more he wanted to say.

  With a silent curse, Landry carried his plate to the trestle table in the center of the vast room, where cutlery, a starched linen napkin and a glass of red wine awaited him, and sat down.

  “What?” he nearly barked.

  “Ms. Manning,” Highbridge began carefully. He faltered and made another attempt, but that failed, too, and he just stood there, hands still clasped behind his rigid back, looking reluctant and stubborn, both at once.

  “What about her?” Landry demanded, plunging a fork into the succulent game hen on his plate.

  “Well,” Highbridge ventured, “she did have something of a scare this evening, you must admit.” Even you. “Is she all right?”

  Landry reached for the saltshaker and proceeded to oversalt his food, mainly because he knew the act would bug his butler, who made every effort to serve healthy meals. Right or wrong, Landry felt like bugging somebody.

  “She’s as prickly as a porcupine with PMS,” Landry answered flatly. “I don’t know if she’s ‘all right,’ but she’s definitely her usual ornery self.”

  A corner of Highbridge’s normally unexpressive mouth quivered just slightly, though whether this indicated annoyance or amusement was anybody’s guess.

  Taking his etiquette cues from Henry VIII, Landry ripped off a drumstick and raised it to his mouth, bit into it, chewed and swallowed with lengthy deliberation, hoping Highbridge would take the hint and retire for the evening.