Page 13 of The Cowboy's Best Friend

His mother had that fierce expression on her face that usually meant trouble, but all she did was nod.

Boone choice to interpret that as acceptance.

Later, he and Sierra took a walk across Boone’s acreage so she could better get a sense of his dairy herd, where he wanted to put the goats he was thinking of bringing in, not to mention the little farm he’d been tinkering with. She might have been a town girl, who as far as he knew had never been allowed to touch her mother’s dramatic flowerbeds, but she wasn’t afraid to ask questions or to get our hands dirty.

“This is great,” Sierra said after they’d had a long, circuitous discussion about what cheeses he was experimenting with, his feelings on what made butter an experience rather than a condiment, his thoughts on yogurt, and when these experiments would make this enterprise of his a creamery. Not to mention how Boone saw all of this playing out in this remote corner of paradise that many folks from far off might consider the literal middle of nowhere—though tourism kept rising the more that people kept working remote. “I feel like even though I’ve been in Montana in my whole life, this is my opportunity to really and truly get my Big Sky on.”

“There’s no shortage of sky around here,” Boone agreed.

Since they were already looking around, he walked her through the working parts of the dairy barn, too. And that bedrock conviction he’d had all along that she was the one to do this with only strengthened as she took notes and told him she was going to do her research and then ask him about it once she knew the right questions to ask.

It was much later in the afternoon when they ended up sitting on his front porch, each of them nursing a beer.

“I feel like I’vealmostwalked off your mom’s cooking,” Sierra said with a laugh.

What Boone wanted to say was that good food didn’t require an intervention or a medicinal response, but he didn’t. He said nothing the way he always said nothing when he heard her mother come out of her mouth. He stared out at the view from his porch instead. From here he could see his own barn and the stretch of his land, the little bit of farmland he’d started cultivating, and beyond that, the march of mountains out beyond the horizon.

“Your sister-in-law invited me out tonight,” Sierra said, and she sounded… Not quite surprised. Not exactly baffled. Something like that, though.

“You have to be more specific,” Boone drawled. “I have a lot of those all of a sudden.”

“Rosie,” Sierra said.

That was a surprise. Rosie had gotten pregnant with Ryder’s babies right around the time she graduated from college and had spent the next few years being a single mother here in Cowboy Point. She and Ryder had gotten married back in March, but even before then, Boone wasn’t sure he’d ever seen Rosie out and about.

None of his sisters-in-law, as far as he could tell, were much in the way of party girls. Not that there was anything wrong with a party girl, but that would be a tough transition to ranch life. These mountains were full of stories like that. Like that grumpy asshole Colton Dean who lived way out on the Bar C—halfway through the Gallatin Range. Had his late wife been ill-suited to the ranch after her big city upbringing or had exposure to him made her that way? Jury was still out.

Boone felt lucky that all of his brothers had chosen wisely.

“Rosie said that she, Kendall, and Cat all get together on Sunday evenings at the pizza place to commiserate,” Sierra told him. And her green eyes danced when Boone lifted a brow. “That’s right. They console each other on the terrible burden of being married to a Carey brother. Given that I’m more or less roommates with one now, they figured I can come too. A special dispensation for best friends instead of wives, in case you wondered. They’ve apparently been discussing whether or not that counted.”

Boone bet they had. He shook his head. “I don’t know how long you’re going to be living here once they get their claws into you.”

She laughed. But then she sighed a little. “I don’t know the last time anyone wanted to do something with me…just because. It’s usually volunteer stuff, or the wives of Matty’s clients, you know.”

Boone did know. He knew a lot more than he wanted to about what Sierra’s life was like in that marriage and if he was ever going to discusstorture, it would be that. Keeping a civil tongue in his head while Sierra told him all the things that she clearly thought weren’tthatbad.

Because he knew her. He knew that she kept theactually badstuff to herself.

He stayed quiet now, too.

“I kind of want to go,” she said, softly.

Boone had to grit his teeth to keep from reacting to that, because it infuriated him when she showed him all the ways she wasn’t allowed to express the things she wanted in her marriage. And she showed him these things all the time.

“I think you should go,” he said, careful to sound neutral. “You never get to see your friends. You need to make some new ones.”

“Matty always says that I don’t know how to make friends.” Sierra was looking down at her bottle of beer as if the opening fascinated her.

Boone practiced some of his favorite calming exercises, all of which involved envisioning—in exquisite detail—wringing Matty Quealey’s neck.

But when he spoke, he was calm. Deeply and excessively calm. “All your high school friends moved away. Last I heard, Kelly was down in Denver and Erin was in Illinois. You can’t exactly go out for coffee with them, can you? And you had a lot of friends in college.”

Unlike her husband, he had always listened to her when she talked about the people in her life and the things she was doing, even if he would have preferred that she was doing them closer to him. As far as he could tell, Matty had spent those same four years making Sierra feel bad for not following him out to the West Coast. When anyone who knew anything about Matty also knew that he would have hated it if she had, because it would have gotten in the way of his frat boy antics.

Then again, Boone wasn’t sure Matty had ever cared how obvious he was. His behavior would suggest he did not.

“I have friends in Marietta,” Sierra said, and he could hear the consternation in her voice, like it had occurred to her that saying she didn’t have any friends might reflect badly on her. That she was actually afraid it might when Boone knew perfectly well that there were a lot of great folks in town—but not people that Matty would ever want to give the time of day. That had nothing to do with Sierra, in his view. “Just no close friends. That’s what I meant. I think that’s what Matty was trying to say.”

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