Big Sky Country. Linda Miller Lael

snapped up his copy of the document and got to his feet. Slade rose, too, but he left the papers where they were. None of this seemed real to him—he was probably dreaming. Any moment now, he’d wake up in a cold sweat and a tangle of sheets, in his lonely, rumpled bed over at the duplex where he’d been living since he came back to Parable ten years ago, after college, a stint in the military and a brief marriage followed by a mostly amicable divorce.

      “I’ll be damned,” Hutch muttered, his voice like sandpaper. He was dressed for ranch work, in old jeans, a blue cotton shirt and a pair of well-worn boots, which probably meant he’d had no more notice about this meeting than Slade had.

      “Thanks, Maggie,” Slade heard himself say as he turned to leave.

      He wasn’t grateful; he’d spoken out of habit.

      She got up from her chair, rounded the desk and pursued him, forcing the printout of his father’s will into his hands. “At least read it,” she said. “I’ll set up another meeting in a few days, when you’ve both had time to absorb everything.”

      Slade didn’t answer, but he accepted the paperwork, felt it crumple in his grasp as his fingers tightened reflexively around it.

      Moments later, as Slade opened the door of his truck, Hutch was beside him again.

      “I’ll buy your half of the ranch,” he said, grinding out the offer. “I don’t give a rat’s ass about the money—I’ve got plenty of that anyway—but Whisper Creek has been in my family for almost a hundred years, and my great-great-grandfather built the original house and barn with his own hands. The place ought to belong to me outright.”

      The emphasis on the phrase my family was subtle, but it was an unmistakable line in the sand.

      Slade met his half brother’s fierce gaze. Reached in to take his hat off the passenger seat where he’d left it earlier, resting on its crown, before heading into Maggie’s office. “I’ll need to give that some thought,” he said.

      With a visible effort, Hutch unclamped the hinges of his jaws. “What’s there to think about?” he asked, after another crackling pause. “I’ll pay cash, Barlow. Name your price.”

      Name your price. Slade knew he ought to accept the deal, and just be glad John Carmody had seen fit to claim him, albeit posthumously. All he had to do was say yes, and he could buy that little spread he’d had his eye on for the past couple of years, pay cash for it, instead of depleting his savings for the down payment. But something prevented him from agreeing, something that ran deeper than his utter inability to act on impulse.

      Indirectly, John Carmody had, at long last, acknowledged his existence. He needed to be with that knowledge for a while, work out what it meant, if anything.

      “I’ll get back to you,” Slade finally reiterated, climbing up behind the wheel of his truck and putting on his hat. “In the meantime, I’ve got a county to look after.”

      With that, he shut the truck door.

      Hutch thumped the metal hard with the heel of one palm, then turned and stormed away, rounded the hood of the Whisper Creek pickup, yanked open the door and jumped into the driver’s seat.

      Slade watched as the other man ground the engine to life, shoved it into Reverse and threw some gravel in the process. He was all sound and fury, though. Half again too smart to actually break the speed limit with the sheriff looking on.

      With a wry twist to his mouth, Slade waited a few moments, started his own rig and pulled onto the narrow side street. He was supposed to be in his office over at the courthouse, assigning his day shift deputies to patrol various parts of the county, but he headed for the highway instead. Five minutes later, he pulled up in front of his mother’s place, an old trailer with rust-speckled aluminum skirting and a plywood addition that served as living quarters.

      As a kid, Slade had been about half-ashamed of that jumble of metal and wood, jerry-rigged together the way it was, lacking only waist-high weeds, a few rattletrap cars up on blocks and household appliances on the porch to qualify as out-and-out redneck. Callie nagged him into power-washing the two-toned walls of the trailer—the part that housed the shop—at least twice a year, and he painted the rest of it regularly, too.

      This week, all the words on the dusty reader-board at the edge of the gravel parking lot were even spelled correctly. Acrylic nails, half price. Highlights/perms, ten percent off.

      Slade smiled as he shut off the truck and got out.

      The shop didn’t open for business until ten o’clock, but Callie already had the lights on, and, most likely, the big coffeepot was chugging away, too. As Slade approached, the door opened, and Callie, broom in hand, beamed a greeting.

      “Hey,” she called.

      “Hey,” Slade replied gruffly.

      Callie Barlow was a small woman, big-busted, with an abundance of auburn hair held to the top of her head by a plastic clasp roughly the size of the jaws-of-life, and she wore turquoise jeans, pink Western boots and a bright yellow T-shirt studded with little sparkly things.

      “Well, this is a surprise,” she said, setting aside the broom and dusting her hands together. Her expression was warm, as always, but her gray eyes showed puzzlement bordering on concern. She knew Slade took his job seriously, and it wasn’t like him to drop in during working hours. “Is the county running itself these days?”

      “My deputies are holding down the fort,” Slade answered. “Is the coffee on?”

      He knew it was; he could smell the rich aroma wafting through the open doorway, along with tinges of industrial-strength shampoo and a variety of mysterious hair-bending chemicals.

      “Sure,” Callie responded, stepping back so he could come inside the shop. “That’s about the first thing I do every morning—plug in the coffeepot.” The faintest ghost of a frown lingered in her eyes, and then her natural bluntness broke through. “What’s wrong?” she asked.

      Slade sighed, took off his hat and set it aside on the counter next to Callie’s cash register. “I don’t know if wrong is the word for it,” he said. “I just came from Maggie Landers’s office. It seems John Carmody remembered me in his will.”

      Callie’s eyes widened at that, then narrowed in swift suspicion. “What?” she asked and had to clear her throat afterward.

      He hooked his thumbs through the belt loops of his jeans and tilted his head to one side, watching her. If Callie had known about the bequest ahead of time, she was doing a damn good job of hiding the fact.

      “Half,” he said. “He left me half of everything he had.”

      Callie sank into one of the dryer chairs, nearly bumping her head on the plastic dome. She blinked a couple of times, and one of her false lashes popped loose at the outside corner of her eye. She pressed it back down with a fingertip.

      “I don’t believe it,” she murmured.

      Slade raised the dome above the chair next to his mother’s and sat down beside her. Took her hand just long enough to give it a slight squeeze.

      “Believe it,” he said, not knowing where to go from there. He loved Callie and they were close, but she hadn’t raised him to come running home to her with this or any other kind of news.

      “What happens now?” she asked in a small voice. Her lower lip wobbled a little, and her eyes, usually bright and mischievous, looked dull, almost haunted.

      “I have no idea,” Slade answered quietly. “Not surprisingly, Hutch didn’t take it real well. He’s already offered to buy out my share of the ranch.”

      Callie closed her eyes for a moment, and when she opened them again, the shine was back. She was tough—she’d had to be, orphaned young and later giving birth to a child out of wedlock in a town where such things mattered, and mattered a lot—but her problems hadn’t hardened