Mary Anne Wilson - Montana Miracle

“Exactly. So why don’t I just ask, then you can decide if you want to answer it?”

That seemed safe enough. “Okay.”

“Good. But there’s a question I need to ask before I ask the real question.”

It was a game of some sort. “What are you talking about?”

“First, who am I talking to and driving with and being rescued by? That man, Carl, he called you Kenny. So, is it Kenny? I really need to know before I ask the question.”

It wasn’t discomfort he was feeling, it was more like confusion. “First of all, that’s hardly one question,” he muttered, not sure if his name would mean anything anymore to anyone, especially this woman, but he wasn’t going to offer it up to see. “For what it’s worth, Kenny’s fine.”

She hesitated, then, “So, your name’s Kenny or is that a nickname?”

“Where are the rubber hoses and bright lights?” he asked.

“Oh, come on,” she said, her words tinged with soft humor. “I just asked your name. It’s polite if someone introduces himself, which I did a long time back, for that other person to respond with, ‘And my name is—’”

“Miss Manners?”

“What?”

“That’s what your name really is, isn’t it?”

She laughed again, and the sound only added to his confusion. “Sorry, no, I’m just polite, and my last name is Ames, Katherine Ames. And your name is…”

He found himself smiling a bit, an easing of the tension that had been a huge part of his life for the past year or so. “Okay. You shamed me. My name’s Mackenzie, a name my mother used when I was in trouble as a kid. Kenny is what I got saddled with because my father was named Mackenzie, too. That meant I was young Mac, small Mac. My Dad got big Mac most of the time, but he hated old Mac. It was easier to call me Kenny, then he was just Mac. I’ve also been called jerk. That’s pretty self-explanatory. So the choice is yours.”

“Mackenzie,” she said softly. “Kenny, Mac, Jerk.”

“Those are the choices.”

“What’s your middle name?

She never stopped. “Ashton, and before you ask, that was my mother’s maiden name and her name was Ruth.”

“Hmm,” she said. “I guess you wouldn’t go by your initials, then, would you?”

“What?”

“You know how people get called B.J. or J.R.?”

The easing grew in him as he manuvered on the snow-choked road. “No initials.”

“Is your father still alive?”

“No, and what does that have to do with anything?”

“I was just asking, because if he was still around, calling you Mac would be confusing. You said so yourself.”

“He’s dead, but even if he wasn’t, he wouldn’t be at Joanine’s, so there wouldn’t be any confusion.”

“Good point,” she said. “Okay, Mackenzie Ashton…”

Her voice trailed off and he could feel her gaze on him. No last name. There was no reason for there to be a last name. She’d be out of the truck in ten minutes, and that would be that. “Oh, just call me Mac.”

“Okay, that’s settled,” she murmured.

Why in hell did he feel relieved to have that settled? “Okay, and with you it’s Katherine.”

“Fine by me. Although, Katherine sounds pretty formal and I’ve been called a lot of different things, less formal and maybe you should—”

“Enough,” he said, cutting her off. “It’s Mac and Katherine for the next ten minutes. Then it’s goodbye.”

“Now, can I ask you that question, Mac?”

There had been no women around in the past year or so, besides Natty, and maybe he was out of practice. Or maybe he’d never really talked to any woman just to talk. Katherine was for talk. That was all. “Okay, Katherine, what is it?”

“Were you really going to leave me there at Carl’s?”

Yes, he was way out of practice. “I was leaving, period. If you hadn’t left your phone in the truck, I would be long gone.”

“You would have made your escape?”

“Call it what you will, I’d be someplace else.”

“I’m sorry for inconveniencing you so much.”

Now she was making him feel like a jerk. There was no way she’d know, and no way he’d tell her, that just about anything that kept him away from the ranch since he’d come back to salvage his life felt like an intrusion and an inconvenience. “Forget it. I’m going that way…sort of, so it worked out.”

“And it’s only going to be for the next ten minutes, anyway,” she said, echoing his words from earlier.

He glanced at her and found her staring intently ahead of them now. “Yeah, ten more minutes,” he said.

She sighed softly. “I never expected to get stuck in this place.”

“Next time you’ll bring chains.”

“There won’t be a next time. No snow, no storms, not again.” He sensed her shift, stirring the air and bringing him that scent again. “I’ve got another question.”

“You never stop, do you,” he murmured.

“Sorry, I tend to be the curious sort, too.”

“I’d say you are,” he said, slowing to find the entrance to Joanine’s property. It was around here somewhere, but the snow was drifting so heavily that it was almost obliterating the old landmarks. Add to that the total darkness beyond the headlights, and he wasn’t certain if he’d passed it or even if he was on the right road.

“Sorry,” she said again, but didn’t sound all that sorry. “I just wondering why you’d live around here.”

That brought some of the tension back. “Why not?”

“Oh, I’m not knocking it. I hate it when someone comes to visit or someone’s passing through, and all they do is knock where you live. I didn’t mean that. But, well, just look outside. It’s like another world.”

It was another world from what he was used to. “You get used to it.”

“How long does it take?”

He actually felt that smile surfacing again. “A life-time.”

The smile died when she said, “Carl told me you left for a while. I can understand why.”

Carl talked too much. “Most of the residents leave now and then. It’s called freedom. Some actually come back.”

“So you came back. Why?”

Just as the tension returned, Mac spotted the entrance to Joanine’s. The heavy stone pillars that marked the end of the drive that led up to the old farmhouse had been refashioned by the drifting snow to look like misshapen snowmen. “Now, that’s one of the ninety-nine percent. It’s none of your business.”

“Well, you’re blunt, aren’t you.”

He slowed more and turned right onto Joanine’s property. “Why I’m here is no one’s business except mine. I live here. Period. And you talk too much.”

He’d meant to stop her in her tracks with a rebuke that he was certain would offend her enough to get to Joanine’s and get her out of the truck in silence. But he was wrong again. She was actually agreeing with him. “I do talk too much. I’ve always been curious and, I’m sorry to say, I always will be. It’s sort of a curse, I think. That need to know everything about everything around me. You know, the mysteries of life? And one of those is why anyone who’d escaped to California would come back to a place that gets this cold and this snowy and is this isolated. You don’t even have a hotel, for Pete’s sake.”

Carl had told her far too much. Even that he’d been in California. He was getting her out of the truck just in time. “I won’t dispute Bliss’s lack of amenities. We don’t have time. This is Joanine’s, at least it is in about half a mile up her drive.”

Before she could respond, there was a sound unlike any other sound he’d heard and it seemed to shatter the night. A falling, cracking, thudding, earth-shaking sound that made him hit the brakes and pray they wouldn’t skid into whatever was happening. Snow was everywhere, but not just falling snow. It was exploding upward, too, only to be driven up and off by the fierce wind.