Big Sky Secrets. Linda Lael Miller

brief but hectic process of throwing him that third and—for today—final time.

      Landry reckoned he should be glad his skull hadn’t met the same fate as his headgear, but he couldn’t quite make the philosophical shift from adrenaline-fused annoyance to gratitude. He was frustrated, embarrassed and pissed off—and those were just the emotions he had names for.

      Arrogance on four legs, the sweat-lathered horse took a few prancing turns around the corral, moving outward in ever-widening circles. He snorted once or twice, nostrils flared, neck bowed into a curve, head held high and proud, ears laid so far back they were almost flat against his hide.

      Finally, the gelding came to a purposeful halt about a dozen yards away from Landry, hind legs planted firmly in the dirt, flanks quivering with a barely contained strength that seemed about to bust loose in a whole new way, like a primeval thunderstorm.

      Go on, cowboy—try it again. That was the message.

      Slowly, Landry became aware of their immediate surroundings, his and the horse’s—that son of Satan—though most of what lay beyond their battleground was still a dust-roiled haze, a void with its own heartbeat. Landry did register the presence of his brother Zane perched on the top rail of the corral fence. He knew his sibling was looking on with charitable, even benign, interest, waiting to see what would happen next.

      Was Landry fool enough to get back on that crazy cayuse, he might have been wondering, or would he finally see reason and call it a day?

      “Anything broken?” Zane called, in a jocular drawl. He was only thirteen and a half months older than Landry, but the gap might have been wider by a decade, considering the dynamics between the two of them. Zane tended to come from the place of older-and-wiser, like a father, or a venerable uncle—or a justice of the Supreme Court.

      Stung anew, Landry merely glared in Zane’s general direction for a few moments, then slapped his ruined hat against one thigh to vent some of the steam still building inside him. A handful of ranch workers—all employed by Walker Parrish, local rodeo-stock contractor and older brother to Zane’s wife, Brylee—ducked their heads briefly, in half-assed attempts to hide their grins of enjoyment.

      It was no big stretch to figure out what the other men were thinking, of course. After nearly a year in Montana, Landry was still an outsider, still that dandified greenhorn from Chicago, still the perennial dude. Still and always the great Zane Sutton’s kid brother.

      And not much more.

      Six feet tall, smart as hell and a self-made man, an independently wealthy one no less, and a ranch owner in his own right, Landry normally didn’t sweat the small stuff. The fact was, he’d never failed at anything he set out to do, in all his thirty-plus years of life, unless you counted his efforts to stay married to Susan Ingersoll without committing murder, that was. To him, the ill-fated marriage had been a disaster, yes, but he wouldn’t have described it as an actual defeat. He and Susan never should have tied the knot in the first place, if only because they hadn’t wanted the same things, even in the beginning.

      Now, aching in every muscle, bones seeming as brittle as if he’d aged by twenty years since breakfast, his pride chafed raw as a sore with the scab ripped off too soon, Landry watched glumly as one of the ranch hands roped the bronc, led him out of the corral and turned him loose in the adjoining pasture.

      Zane stood next to Landry now, there in the slowly settling dust. “Buy you a beer?” he said quietly. He started to raise one hand, as if to slap Landry on the back, perhaps in brotherly reassurance, but he must have thought better of the gesture in the end, because he refrained.

      It was just a beer, and Landry wanted one badly, but his first impulse was to refuse the offer, all the same. He and Zane had been close as kids, and right up through their late twenties, but then, around the time their mom died...

      Well, things had just gone to hell. Some kind of chasm had opened between the brothers, and there didn’t seem to be a way across. For the most part, they’d gone their separate ways, Zane taking to the rodeo circuit and eventually winding up in the movies, of all things, while Landry headed for Chicago, a place that had always intrigued him. By going to night school and working days and weekends as a barista at one of the coffee franchises, he’d gotten his degree, taken a job with Ingersoll Investments, originally landing in the mail room. He’d climbed the corporate ladder and eventually met and married the boss’s daughter, Susan.

      Certain he’d found his niche at long last, Landry had pushed up his figurative sleeves and proceeded to make money—a shitload of it—for the company and, through bonuses and finally a partnership, for himself, as well.

      “I wouldn’t mind a beer right about now,” Landry heard himself say, instead of the “No, thanks” instinct dictated. The more sensible thing would have been to take his sorry self straight home, of course, back to his half of Hangman’s Bend. There, he could have tossed back a Scotch or two, gulped down some aspirin and maybe stood in a hot shower until his muscles stopped screaming.

      So it was that they walked out of the corral together, Zane and Landry, passing through the gate, shutting it behind them. Zane waved a farewell to the others as he and Landry headed for his rig, a silver extended-cab truck so covered in dried mud that it might have been any color in the spectrum. Zane’s adopted mutt, Slim, waited patiently in the bed of the pickup, panting in the bright June sunshine, perfectly content to be just what and where he was.

      A person could learn a lot from a dog, Landry reflected silently. Stepping up onto the passenger-side running board, he paused long enough to pat the critter on the head and ruffle his floppy ears. “Hey, dog,” he said, with gruff affection. “How ya doin’?”

      Talk about your rhetorical question.

      Slim wagged his tail, appreciative but, at the same time, taking the greeting as his just due, and then settled down for the short ride over to neighboring Hangman’s Bend.

      Without pausing, Zane climbed behind the wheel, pushed the ignition button and looked back over one shoulder, acknowledging the dog with a grin. He loved that goofball canine, no question about it, would have let him ride in the cab if the critter had shown any inclination to do so. Slim had recently developed a preference for the back, though, seemed to like riding with a pile of feed sacks and whatever else Zane happened to be hauling at the time, and he showed no signs of changing his mind anytime soon.

      “You ought to get yourself a dog,” Zane remarked, maneuvering the truck into a slow, wide turn. “They’re real good company, you know.”

      His brother, the authority on loneliness, Landry thought, with an ironic inward sigh. As if Zane had ever suffered any lack of “company,” even before he’d settled on the run-down, abandoned ranch outside Three Trees, Montana, the one he and Landry had bought together, sight unseen, a few years before. These days, Zane had his beautiful bride, Brylee, first and foremost. And then there was the formidable but ever-faithful Cleo, their housekeeper—and Nash, Zane and Landry’s half brother, a rowdy thirteen-year-old with a childhood behind him that made their hardscrabble upbringing look downright pampered.

      “I’ll get around to it,” Landry allowed, still distracted by other thoughts. “Getting a dog, I mean.” A pause, followed by an irritated “There’s no hurry, is there?”

      Zane didn’t answer, and that was all right, because sometimes—and this was one of them—they didn’t feel a need to talk. The rig bounced down the long, rutted driveway, dog and gear rattling in the back.

      Walker’s place, called Timber Creek, was a prosperous spread, to put it mildly, but the dirt trail leading to the main gate was in little better shape than a cow path after a month of pounding rain followed by a ten-year drought. Out here in the wilds of Montana, Landry had observed, folks weren’t overly concerned with either convenience or appearances, whether they had two nickels to rub together or not. It probably wouldn’t have occurred to most of them to smooth the way with a layer of asphalt. Sure, one or two showy types might have sprung for a load of gravel, if the bills were current and the price of beef was decent, he supposed, but nobody paved a driveway.

      Nope,