Big Sky Mountain. Linda Miller Lael

And those were just the stills—there were videos, too. In one thirty-second wonder, he could be seen climbing into his rusted-out pickup truck, right there in the Presbyterians’ gravel parking lot, and in the next, he was heading for the horizon, a dust plume spiraling behind his rig.

      Yep, that was him all right, beating a hasty retreat, like a yellow-bellied coward on the run.

      That impression rested sour on the back of his tongue.

      Someday, he suspected, when Brylee met up with her own personal Mr. Right, got hitched for real, and had herself a houseful of kids, she’d thank him for stopping the wedding and thereby preventing certain catastrophe.

      At present, though, that particular “someday” seemed a long way off.

      Weary to the aching marrow of his bones, Hutch logged off the internet, pushed back from the rolltop desk that had been in his family since the Lincoln administration, and stood up, stretching luxuriously before retrieving his coffee mug and ambling out of the little office behind the ranch house kitchen.

      Taking Slade’s advice, he’d kept a low profile since the day that, like the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the 9/11 attacks, would forever live in infamy. Against his own better judgment, he hadn’t gone to see Brylee in person, called her on the phone, or even sent her an email.

      He hadn’t done much guilt-wallowing, either, which might be proof that he really was a “selfish, heartless, narcissistic bastard,” as members of Team Brylee universally agreed, at least online. By now, the group probably had its own secret handshake.

      Hutch regretted hurting Brylee, of course, and he certainly wished he could have spared her the humiliation of that very public breakup, but his overriding emotion was a sense of relief so profound that it still made his head reel even after a week.

      Train wreck, averted.

      Apocalypse, canceled.

      Check and check.

      Running into Kendra Shepherd at Slade and Joslyn’s place after the debacle had definitely thrown him, however—slammed the wind out of him as surely as if he’d been hurled off the back of a bad bull or a sun-fishing bronco and landed on hard ground.

      He’d loved Kendra once and he’d believed she loved him.

      He’d expected to spend the rest of his life with the woman, happy to make babies, run Whisper Creek Ranch with Kendra at his side, a full partner in every way.

      Instead, enter Jeffrey Chamberlain, he of the nominal titles and English estates, practically a prince to a woman like Kendra, brought up in a small Montana town by a grandmother who resented the responsibility of raising her errant daughter’s child. Chamberlain had been visiting friends at the time—Hollywood types with delusions of living the ranching life in grand style—and damned if Sir Jeffrey hadn’t struck up a conversation with Kendra at the post office one fine day and parlayed that, over the coming weeks, into a romance so epic that it could only have ended badly.

      Not that Kendra had fallen for Chamberlain right away—at the get-go, she’d insisted he was just a friend, interesting and funny. Hutch, though nettled, had reluctantly—okay, grudgingly—accepted the explanation.

      Down deep, he’d been out-of-his-gourd jealous, though, and soon enough the bickering commenced.

      Chamberlain, knowing full well what he’d set in motion, had found excuses to stay on in Parable and he just bided his time while things got worse and worse between Hutch and Kendra.

      Inevitably, the bickering escalated to fiery yelling matches and, worse, single words, terse and biting, punctuated by long, achy silences.

      Eventually, Kendra had given Hutch an ultimatum—trust her or leave her.

      He’d chosen the latter option, being a stubborn, hard-headed cowboy from a long line of stubborn, hard-headed cowboys, never really thinking she’d go at all, let alone stay gone; everybody knew they belonged together, he and Kendra. After a semidecent interval, though, she’d hauled off and eloped with Jeffrey.

      There were still days—moments, really—when Hutch couldn’t believe it had come to that, and this was one of them.

      Now, standing in his kitchen, he closed his eyes, remembering.

      Kendra had called him three days after tying the knot down in Vegas.

      Even then he’d wanted to say, “This isn’t right. Come home.”

      But he’d been too cussed proud to take the high road.

      He’d wished “Lady Chamberlain” well and hung up in her ear. Hard. They’d seen each other numerous times afterward, the way things shook out, especially after Chamberlain bought his way out of the marriage and crossed the pond to resume his Lord-of-the-manor lifestyle while Kendra remained in Parable, rattling around in that hotel-sized mansion on Rodeo Road.

      Small as Parable was, he and Kendra had come close to patching things up a few times, making another start, but something always went wrong, probably because neither one of them trusted the other any further than they could have thrown them.

      They’d been civil last Saturday night at Slade and Joslyn’s noisy supper table, but Kendra had looked ready to jump out of her skin at any moment, and as soon as the meal was over and the dishes were in the machine, she’d grabbed up her little girl and boogied for town in her boxy mom-car.

      What had happened to that little BMW convertible she used to drive?

      “She wasn’t expecting to see you tonight,” Joslyn had explained, touching his hand once Kendra and the child were out of the house.

      Hutch had slanted an evil look at his half brother. “I know the feeling,” he’d said.

      Slade had merely looked smug.

      Now with another long, dirty workday behind him and lunch a distant memory, Hutch stood there in his stupidly big kitchen and tried to shift his focus to rustling up some kind of a supper, but the few budding science experiments hunkered down in the fridge held no appeal. Neither did the resoundingly empty house—by rights, the place should have been bursting with noisy ranch kids and rescued dogs by now. Instead it was neat, cold and stone silent.

      Hutch sighed, shoved a hand through his hair. Stepped back from the refrigerator and shut the door.

      Upstairs he took a quick shower and donned fresh jeans, a white shirt and go-to-town boots.

      He’d hidden out long enough, damn it.

      By God, he was through keeping a low profile—he meant to fire up one of the ranch trucks, drive into Parable to the Butter Biscuit Café, claim one of the stools at the counter and order up his usual cheeseburger, shake and fries. As for the joshing and the questions and the speculative glances he was bound to run into?

      Bring it, he thought.

      * * *

      KENDRA HAD HAD a week to put that off-the-wall encounter with Hutch the previous Saturday night behind her and she was mostly over it.

      Mostly.

      She’d been busy, after all, overseeing the move of her real estate company from the mansion on Rodeo Road to the little storefront, catty-corner from the Butter Biscuit Café, enrolling Madison at the year-round preschool/day-care center and scanning the multiple-listings for cozy two-bedroom houses within a reasonable radius of Parable.

      In a town like that one, smaller properties were always hard to find—people didn’t necessarily sell their houses when they retired to Florida or Arizona or entered a nursing home. They often passed them down to the next generation.

      At present, Kendra’s choices were a double-wide trailer in the very court where she’d grown up so unhappily with her grandmother—no possible way—what resembled a converted chicken coop on the far side of Three Trees, which was thirty miles away, or the cramped apartment over old Mrs. Lund’s garage on Cinch Buckle Street, which rented for a tidy sum and didn’t even have its own entrance.