Linda Miller - Big Sky Wedding

“Beds,” Nash ruminated. He seemed wistful now, but that might be an act. “With sheets and blankets and pillows and everything?”

Where in hell had this kid been sleeping? Zane wondered that and many other things. “With sheets and blankets and everything,” he confirmed, hoping the boy didn’t notice the slight catch in his voice.

Nash’s grin flashed, Landry-like. Zane-like.

There was certainly no question of his paternity. He was Jess Sutton’s kid, all right, full of bravado and brains and smart-ass attitudes. Were there other siblings out there? Zane wondered, as he often did. Did he and Landry and Nash have sisters and brothers they knew nothing about?

It seemed more than possible.

“Let’s go, then,” Nash said. He actually seemed eager now.

Zane, not at all sure he wasn’t being shined on, was unaccustomed to power-shopping—or any shopping at all, really, since Cleo or some assistant had done most of that for him.

Until now.

The furniture store in Three Trees agreed to deliver the beds, mattresses and box springs, dressers and bureaus later that same day, which was a good thing, because by the time he and Nash were done filling several carts at the big discount store out on the highway, there wasn’t an inch of space left in the back of Zane’s truck.

Even with the two of them working, it took twenty minutes just to carry all the bags and boxes inside and pile them in the far corner of the kitchen to be dispersed to other parts of the house later on.

Nash, evidently benefiting from the heavy dose of retail therapy, rustled through the loot until he found a towel, a bottle of liquid soap, new jeans, a long-sleeved gray sweatshirt, socks and underwear that actually fit him and, finally, boots.

He disappeared into a nearby bathroom—there were several in the house, but the others were in various states of rust and wreckage—and, soon after, Zane heard the shower running.

Nash was in there so long that Zane had time to log back on to his laptop and wade through his emails. He skipped over the ones from Tiffany, replied with regrets to half a dozen party invitations and deleted the obvious sales pitches. There were three missives from his agent, Sam Blake, each one more exasperated than the last. “Damn it,” Sam had written, with a lot of caps and punctuation marks, he had “the role of a lifetime” lined up for Zane. All he had to do was get off this stupid hick-kick he was on, whatever it was, hustle back to L.A. and sign on the bottom line.

Zane sighed, decided to reply later and opened the last of the lineup, a virtual ear-boxing from Cleopatra Livingston, his former housekeeper. Where the dickens did he think she was going to find another job, she demanded, at her age, and in a tanked economy, no less. And what in blazes gave him the idea that he could get by without her? Who was going to cook his meals and wash and iron his shirts? When she wasn’t around, she further declared, he tended to be careless about things like that.

Grinning slightly, Zane picked up his phone again. Keyed in Cleo’s number. She didn’t carry a cell, so he’d have to reach her at home. If she didn’t answer—a possibility that had its merits, given the mood she’d been in when she wrote that email—he’d leave a message.

And say what? That he was sorry? That he’d send more money? That she could go on living in his condo until he got around to selling it? Only if he wanted to piss her off all over again by making her feel like a charity project.

“It’s about damn time you called me!” Cleo boomed into her receiver, probably one of those bulky, old-fashioned ones, broad-jumping right over “howdy” and straight into giving him seven kinds of hell.

“I left a note,” Zane said. Now there was a half-assed explanation.

“Big fat deal,” Cleo scoffed furiously. “I work my fingers to the bone for you for almost four years, Zane Sutton, years I could have spent looking after somebody who appreciated me, mind you, and one fine day, you just go off on your merry way without a word of farewell?”

Reminding her about the note would be a mistake, so he didn’t. While the gears clicked away in his head, he focused on Slim, visible through the arched doorway opening onto the hall, waiting for Nash to come out of the bathroom. The dog’s patience was rewarded when the kid suddenly emerged, preceded by billows of steam.

Zane smiled. “Cleo,” he said, “I have missed your sweet and gentle ways.”

“I’ll sweet-and-gentle you,” Cleo shot back. “With a horsewhip!”

He laughed. “You know,” he teased, “you sound a little like a woman scorned.”

She made a disgruntled sound. “As if I’d ever throw in with the likes of you, cowboy, even if I wasn’t a good thirty years older than you are.” A pause. “Darn it, I’m not ready to retire. I’m unlucky at bingo and I don’t knit or crochet. And, anyways, I can’t sleep nights, for worrying that you’re living on fast food and wearing wrinkled shirts in public.”

Nash came through the archway and headed for the fridge, looking like a different kid in his jeans, boots and sweatshirt. Except for the hair, of course—it looked as though he’d been cutting it himself lately, with nail scissors. Or maybe hedge clippers.

“Are you listening to me, Zane Sutton?” Cleo demanded, when he failed to reply to her previous diatribe.

“I’m listening,” Zane said.

“Where are you?” Cleo wanted to know. Would know, by God, if she had to crawl through the telephone system and drag the answer out of him.

“I’m on my ranch,” he said. “Outside Three Trees, Montana.”

“Well, you get me a plane ticket for day after tomorrow,” Cleo commanded. “I need some time to pack and say goodbye to folks. Make it one way, this ticket, and I had better be sitting in first class, too, after all you put me through. And don’t you stick me in row one, neither. I need to be able to get to my purse when I want it, and in a bulkhead seat, they make you put it in the overhead.” She made another huffy sound. “My blood pressure is through the roof,” she added.

Importing Cleo wasn’t a bad idea, Zane thought. The lady might be prickly sometimes, but she could cook and clean, and she’d be the ideal person to oversee the forthcoming renovations, too.

Plus, he’d been telling the truth when he said he missed her.

“You’d do that?” he asked, moved. “Leave L.A. for Montana? It’s real rural out here, Cleo. And we’re roughing it—not much furniture to speak of and plenty of things in need of repair.” Or replacement.

“Sure I would,” Cleo answered briskly. “You might be used to living luxuriously, Mr. Movie Star, but I’m no stranger to doing without, let me tell you. Didn’t I raise four kids by the sweat of my brow, with no man to help out? And didn’t I do that in a part of the city a lot of folks would be afraid to set foot in, even in broad daylight?”

She was laying it on thick, Zane knew. The four kids she’d raised were all well-educated and prosperous professionals now, scattered all over the country and contributing generously to their mother’s bank account. And Cleo had been living in staff quarters in his condo since she came to work for him, so it wasn’t as though she took buses to and from the ghetto every day, dodging bullets as a matter of course.

“All right,” Zane heard himself say. “I’ll book your flight for the day after tomorrow and email you the itinerary.”

“Good.” Cleo huffed out the word. “Get me out of LAX bright and early. And there’s one other thing, too.”

“What’s that?” Zane asked, a grin quirking at one corner of his mouth. Nash, meanwhile, peeled a banana and stuck half of it into his mouth, so both cheeks bulged.