Maisey Yates - Cowboy Ever After

With Madison stripping and Daisy supervising the whole enterprise, Kendra managed to prepare the little girl’s bath—a few inches of warm water with bubbles.

Madison climbed in and Daisy rested her muzzle on the edge of the bathtub, watching her small mistress, brown eyes shining with love.

“Can Daisy get into the tub, too?” Madison asked, reaching for her pink sponge and the duck-shaped bar of soap she favored.

“Not this time, sweetie,” Kendra said, since that seemed better than a flat no.

Madison huffed out a sigh and began her ablutions, perfectly capable of bathing herself.

A few minutes later, she announced, “I’m clean now, Mommy!”

Smiling, despite the quiet but persistent ache in the region of her heart Hutch still claimed, Kendra gave her a kiss and reached for a towel.

* * *

HUTCH HAD ALWAYS been good at letting stuff roll off his back—he’d had to be—but that tangle with Kendra back at her place made him want to fight.

With anybody, about anything.

When the lights of Boone’s cop car flashed behind him, just before the turn-in at Whisper Creek, it almost pleased him to pull over.

“What?” he snapped, rolling down the window on the passenger side of the truck so Boone could peer in at him.

“You headed for a fire?” Boone countered. “I clocked you at fifty in a thirty-five back there.”

Hutch swore under his breath, tightened his grip on the steering wheel. “Sorry,” he lied, glaring through the windshield at the dirt road ahead. It did some twisting and turning, that old road, before it joined the highway and rolled right on into Idaho and Washington.

At the moment, he sure felt like following it till it ended at the Pacific Ocean.

“Look at me, Hutch,” the sheriff said, and he sounded dead serious.

Hutch turned his head, met Boone’s gaze. “Write the ticket and be done with it,” he growled.

“Well, who spit in your oatmeal this morning?” Boone asked, folding his arms against the base of the window and studying Hutch intently.

“I’ve got a lot on my mind right now,” Hutch snapped. “All right?”

Boone sighed, shoved a hand through his dark hair. “I know that,” he said, “but I can’t let you go speeding around my county, now can I? Pretty soon, folks will be saying I turn a blind eye when my friends break the law and I can’t have that, Hutch. You know I can’t.”

“So write the ticket, ” Hutch reiterated. He just wanted to be gone, to be moving, to be riding hard across darkening ground on a horse or climbing Big Sky Mountain on foot— anything but sitting still.

“Have it your way,” Boone said. He took his ticket book from his belt, scrawled on a piece of paper, ripped it free, and held it out to Hutch, who snatched it from his hand and barely managed to keep from chucking it out his own window out of sheer cussedness.

“Thanks,” Hutch told him, glaring.

Boone laughed. “I’d say ‘you’re welcome,’ but that would add up to one too many smart-asses per square yard.” He wouldn’t unpin Hutch from that penetrating gaze of his. “I’m off duty and I was headed for home until you went shooting by me like a bat out of hell,” he said companionably. “Why don’t you follow me back over to my place? We’ll have a couple of beers and feel sorry for ourselves for a while.”

Hutch had to chuckle at that, though it was against his will and he resented it. “All right,” he agreed at last, and grudgingly. “Long as you promise not to run me in for drunk driving after plying me with liquor.”

“You have my word,” Boone said with a grin. “See you over there.”

With that, he backed away from the window and strolled back to his cruiser where the lights were still swirling, blue and white, causing the few passersby to slow down to gawk.

Boone’s land, situated on the far side of Parable from where they started, was prime, fronting the river and sloping gently up toward the foothills, but it had the look of a place bogged down in hard times. The double-wide trailer was ugly as sin, and there were a couple of junked-out cars parked in the tall grass that surrounded it.

The double-wide had rust around its skirting, the makeshift porch dipped in the middle, and there was an honest-to-God toilet out front, with a bunch of dead flowers poking out of the bowl. Boone and his wife, Corrie—she’d never have stood for a john in the yard—had planned to live in the trailer only until they’d built their modest dream house, but when Corrie died of breast cancer a few years back, everything else in Boone’s life seemed to stall.

If he’d had a dog, folks said, he’d have given it away. He had sent his two young sons, Griffin and Fletcher, off to live with his sister and her family in Missoula, where he probably figured they were better off.

Running for sheriff, after Slade announced that he wouldn’t be seeking reelection, had been the first real sign of life in Boone since Corrie was laid to rest and for a while optimistic locals had hoped he’d get his act together, bring his kids home to Parable where they belonged, and just generally get on with things.

Parking behind the cruiser, Hutch felt an ache of sorrow on his friend’s behalf—Boone had loved Corrie with all he had, from first grade on through college and in some ways, it was as if he’d just given up and crawled right into that grave with her.

“I swear this place looks worse every time I see it,” Hutch remarked after getting out of the truck. There should have been two little boys running to greet their dad after a day at work, he thought, and a dog barking in celebration of his return, if not a woman smiling on the porch of the new house.

Instead it was dead quiet, like a graveyard with rusted headstones.

“You sound like the chicken rancher,” Boone responded dryly, cocking a thumb in the direction of the neighboring place where Tara Kendall had set up housekeeping the year before. “She says this place is an eyesore.”

Hutch had to grin. “She has a point,” he said. Then, aware that he was pushing it, he added, “How are the boys?”

Boone, starting toward the sagging porch, tossed him a look. “They’re just fine with their aunt and uncle and their brood,” he said. “So don’t start in on me, Hutch.”

Hutch pretended to brace himself for a blow from his oldest and best friend. “You won’t hear any relationship advice from me, old buddy,” he said. “These days, I’m on America’s Ten Most Unwanted list, which hardly makes me an authority.”

“Damn straight,” Boone grumbled. “And that’s where you belong, too. On a master shit-list, I mean. I knew all that womanizing was bound to catch up with you someday.”

Hutch laughed and followed his friend into the trailer. Boone always said what he thought; nobody was required to like it.

The inside of the double-wide was clean enough, but it was dismal, too. Full of shadows and smelling of the bachelor life—musty clothes left in the washing machine too long, garbage in need of taking out, the remains of last night’s lonely pizza.

Boone opened the refrigerator and took out two cans of beer, handing one to Hutch and popping the top on another, taking a long drink before starting back outside again to sit in one of the rickety lawn chairs on that sorry excuse for a porch.

Hutch joined him.

“Old friend,” Hutch ventured, looking out over what passed for a yard, “you need a woman. And that’s just the start.”

Boone grinned ruefully. “So do you,” he said. “But you keep running them off.”

Hutch sipped his beer. It was icy cold and it hit a dry spot, way down deep, unknotting him a little. “Slade’s a dad now,” he remarked, letting the gibe pass. “Can you believe it?”