Big Sky Secrets. Linda Lael Miller

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.

      Landry had, after all, used up his quota of words for the day, and felt no inclination to chat—especially if the subject of the exchange was Ria Manning.

      Yet again, Highbridge cleared his throat. “I see,” he said.

      Landry might have rolled his eyes, if he hadn’t been so busy chowing down on all that good food. After the day he’d put in, he was ravenous. “And?” he prompted pointedly. “Obviously, you have more to say. Spill it, okay?”

      Highbridge arched both bushy white eyebrows and stood his ground. “‘Spill it’?” he echoed, letting it be known that he considered the freewheeling use of slang one of America’s many lesser charms.

      “Explain,” Landry explained, and none too politely.

      “It’s just that Ms. Manning is a very nice, hardworking person,” Highbridge supplied.

      “Hardworking,” Landry conceded, somewhat testily now, “yes. ‘Nice’? I don’t think so.”

      “She has very good manners,” Highbridge insisted, sounding miffed.

      Landry paused in the act of devouring his supper and studied the butler solemnly. Highbridge, a man with a mysterious past, had been working for him since before he’d married Susan—a lifetime ago. “Really?” he replied. “I hadn’t noticed.”

      To Highbridge, hard work and good manners were everything. Reasons enough, as far as he was concerned, to overlook proclivities ranging from littering to international terrorism.

      “You do understand that Ms. Manning is a widow?” Highbridge went on.

      “Yes,” Landry admitted, thinking of the wide gold wedding band on Ria’s left-hand ring finger. If she was wearing it after all this time, it followed that she was still hung up on her dead husband. An oddly discouraging insight. And where was this conversation headed, exactly? He had no idea. “So I’ve been told,” he finished.

      Highbridge sighed, as though balancing the unwieldy weight of the world on his narrow shoulders. “If there’s nothing else—”

      Landry leveled a look at his only full-time employee, a look that said Highbridge should have gone off duty hours ago.

      Some of Zane’s ranch hands moonlighted for Landry now and then, and a cleaning lady came in three times a week, but other than that, Highbridge was the whole staff. When a picture of the butler dressed to ride the range popped into Landry’s mind, complete with a Stetson, a sun squint and woolly chaps, he had to smile.

      “Have a good night,” he said.

      Highbridge nodded, with his usual formality, and left the kitchen.

      Once he was gone, a rush of fresh loneliness passed through Landry, which was crazy, because Highbridge wasn’t the type to shoot the breeze, whatever the time of day, but there it was.

      He finished his dinner, imagining how things were on his brother’s half of the ranch, over beyond the creek. By now, Cleo would have come back from town and made supper, and after the meal, Brylee would have chased the housekeeper off, good-naturedly, of course, so she and Zane could clear the table and load the dishwasher. They’d talk about their day—Zane, no doubt, would offer a comical account of Landry’s bronc-riding episode, and Brylee would elbow him and tell him to be nice, and then she’d blush as they both remembered summer-afternoon lovemaking.

      Whoa, Landry thought, derailing his previous train of thought by shoving his chair back from the table and getting to his feet. He carried the remains of his supper—gourmet fare by anybody’s standards, so he had no business complaining on that score—over to the sink. There, he tossed the bones in the trash bin and scraped and then rinsed his plate and stowed it in the machine, along with his utensils and the wineglass.

      Maddie Rose Sutton had raised her boys to clean up after themselves, swearing she wasn’t about to unleash a couple of slobs on a world full of women who had enough to do as it was, without kid-gloving some man. By now, it was a habit.

      Landry stood still, there at the sink, remembering his mom. She’d had it tough, Maddie Rose had, but she’d never complained, as far as he could recall. Just when he was getting established and Zane was about to sign the contract to make his first movie, and they could have been assets to their mother for once, instead of liabilities, she’d come down with a case of flu that turned out to be some virulent strain of leukemia instead. After a week in a small hospital in the backwater Dakota town where she’d been waiting tables for the past few months, Maddie Rose had breathed her last.

      Worse, she’d been alone when the time came, except for a friend or two from the café where she’d worked. He and Zane had both been far away, doing their own thing, blissfully unaware that Maddie Rose’s flu wasn’t flu at all.

      Once they were informed, it was too late to say goodbye, or thank you, or I love you, Mom.

      Landry sighed. Maybe one of these days, he’d be able to think of his mother without guilt and regret, but, just now, that day seemed far off.

      He should have been there for her—Zane, too. The way she’d always been there for them.

      He was just about to shut off the lights and retreat to his bedroom, to read or watch TV or maybe just lie down and stare at the ceiling with his hands cupped behind his head, waiting in vain for sleep, when the wall phone rang.

      Landry scowled at the thing for a moment or two, tempted to ignore it. Unlike the phones in his bedroom and home office, this one hadn’t come equipped with caller ID, wasn’t even cordless. Highbridge’s doing, he recalled grimly—the butler didn’t entirely approve of too much modern technology, was suspicious of what he considered unwarranted convenience.

      So Landry picked up the receiver, in case something was wrong over at Zane and Brylee’s, or those damn buffalo had broken through a fence line somewhere and made for Ria’s flowers again. He answered with a rather brisk “Hello?”

      If the caller turned out to be a telemarketer or a survey taker, he might just take the person’s head off, long-distance.

      The reply was a low, rumbling laugh, gratingly familiar. “Landry? Is that you, boy?”

      Jess Sutton—his father.

      “What do you want?” Landry asked. He didn’t hear from the old man for years at a time, and when he did, it was because a favor was about to be asked, so there was no point in beating around the proverbial bush.

      Jess gave another chuckle. “Is that any way to talk to your old dad?” he chided, with just the slightest edge in his voice.

      Landry said nothing. He knew what was coming, and saw no reason to make it easy.

      His father sighed, long-suffering, patient as the day was long. As if. “I was wondering how Nash is doing,” Jess went on quietly, letting it be known that he was hurt but magnanimous enough to generously overlook the injury.

      “In that case,” Landry replied, frowning, “why didn’t you call Zane and Brylee’s place? Nash lives with them—but I guess you were aware of that, since you signed him over like a quit-claim deed.”

      A long silence followed; then Jess cleared his throat. “Hell, Landry,” he finally muttered, “I know I was a lousy father to all three of you. No need to rub it in.”

      Landry relented, but only a little. “Lousy” didn’t begin to describe the kind of parent Jess Sutton had been—back when he and Zane were growing up, the man had mostly steered clear, and they’d liked it that way. After a while anyhow.

      At first, they’d missed him to the point of genuine pain. They’d waited