Big Sky Country. Linda Miller Lael

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

       CHAPTER NINETEEN

       An Interview with Linda Lael Miller

       Extract

       Copyright

       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. Still 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