Page 19 of The Cowboy's Best Friend

Better yet, since her mother had left a letter for her out on the front porch, she didn’t have to interact with her parents, either. She could simply call a lawyer friend she knew for advice—not her father, God help her—while she turned right back around, headed back up the mountain, and got to go do something she loved instead.

“The first thing to discuss is the distribution of assets,” her friend said as Sierra was driving back out of Marietta.

“I want whatever gets me divorced the quickest,” Sierra replied, with that same bedrock certainty that had come over her again and again lately. Seemingly out of nowhere. But it was true. She had stayed with Matty all those years and she’d had no inkling that she would ever evenwantto leave him—and now she was done. “I don’t care what it looks like.”

Her friend had made a noise. “Are you sure?”

Copper Mountain was rising up in front of her and she wanted this. She wanted her hometown behind her and Cowboy Point in front of her. She didn’t want to look back or mire herself in the past—she just wanted to be done.

Sierra hadn’t hesitated. “I’m sure.”

The first thing she did was take over the distribution of Copper Mountain Dairy & Creamery’s daily milk. Instead of having people traipse out to the ranch, which had meant in the past that Boone had to sit around and wait for them to come—thereby irritating his brothers, and worse, giving them ammunition to poke at him about abandoning the ranch—Sierra started a delivery service. That led to her creating a website, a logo, and a social media presence so that customers could keep up with them in real time if they liked and also get a sense of the operation.

Boone had no interest in doing any of those things, so was happy to give Sierra free reign.

She took it. She told the story of Boone’s dream and his small farm, with minimal input from him because she’d been his sounding board all along. She wandered all around Boone’s property and uploaded all the pretty pictures that she took herself—when she hadn’t played around with photography since high school. She pinned a post to the top of their page featuring an adorable picture of one of the cows, Gwendolyn, and named heremployee of the month.

Sierra wasn’t at all surprised that post took off. Gwendolyn was freaking cute.

So she shared the names of all the cows and made them their own social media account too, because cows were always fun.

In the mornings, she would wake up before dawn and always found that Boone had beat her to the barn. While he milked the cows, Sierra loaded up the milk that they’d put through the small-batch pasteurization process the day before—then chilled and bottled in old-fashioned glass—and set off on her deliveries. Copper Mountain Dairy & Creamery promised fresh milk within a day and they delivered on that promise.

Sierra made certain of that. Personally.

Deliveries usually took her a couple of hours, and she plotted out her route so she could swing through Cowboy Point at least twice. That meant she could get some of that good coffee from the coffee cart that had now pretty much taken over what had once been a parking area next to the General Store. No one really parked there anymore, she found, because as June moved along, more and more of the area was populated with little tables and fold up chairs set out beneath umbrellas. The cart was really more of a whole coffeehouse experience this summer.

Sierra considered it something of a personal coup when she managed to talk the owner of the coffee cart, the mysterious Helena Patrick—who Sierra thought looked a whole lot like Cat Lisle Carey, though no one else seemed to have noticed that—into putting in a standing order for heavy cream.

Boone’s little dream was killing it.

Every Sunday, Sierra went to that big, sprawling family dinner at the Carey ranch house. She’d gone a bunch of times over the years, but going weekly hit different. The Careys were nothing like her family. No one stood on ceremony. There was nothingformal. They were always laughing, jostling each other, and calling each other out in a way that it had taken her years, since she was a teenager, to realize was pretty much good-natured. Now there were three generations gathered around the kitchen table and still nobody cared about posture, nobody commented on how much anyone weighed or was eating, and the goal never seemed to be dressing each other down—unless it was funny.

She started to look forward to the loud, raucous, happy gathering every week.

Once it was officially summer, the Saturday market started. Sierra had loved driving up the mountain over the past couple of summers to experience it. It was even more fun this summer, because Boone had a few of his cheeses ready. Saturday mornings they would set up a little booth in the market. It was an offshoot of her Jeep with the big Copper Mountain Dairy & Creamery logo she’d had put on the side, the freezer in the cargo hold, and a little table piled high with “market-only experiments.”

Boone, by virtue of being his gruff, no-nonsense self, sold out every time.

“It’s amazing,” she told him the last Saturday morning in June. “All you have to do is look as if youmightsmile and your fans clear out our entire inventory.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Boone replied in that low rumble of voice, though his mouth was curved.

“You do. The ladies love… dairy,” Sierra replied with a laugh.

“I think that many ladies in the greater Marietta area do indeed enjoy dairy products,” he told her piously. “And who am I to blame them?”

After they sold out, Sierra wandered around and soaked in the rest of the vibrant market, packed with local artisans including Boone’s father—who had Kendall there to run things for him and sell his bespoke spurs and bits. All the people she’d met in town over the years and had spent more time with recently seemed to have a presence here, though the artists and farmers came from all over. All the major ranches were represented. The Art Collective folks, who lived on some land out in the hills and were known for the occasional festival and their fair-weather pop-up, had a booth. The alpaca ranchers who ran the fiber and textile barn on the main road showed up with all kinds of hand-dyed creations. There were jewelry makers, ceramicists of the mug and bowl to high art varieties, handmade clothing boutiques, wood carvings, and crafts of every possible description.

It made Sierra proud to be a part of this community.

And the last Saturday in June, Rosie was there—in an Airstream with a canopy and crates upon crates of artfully-arranged books.

“I had no idea you were opening a bookshop!” Sierra said delightedly when she found herself standing in the cozy-looking space Rosie had made the Airstream into, inside and out. “This is amazing.”

“I’m going to open a permanent shop up by the Lodge,” Rosie said, and nodded her head in the general direction of Cowboy Point Lodge, the old Victorian manor that had been built in railway baron style. Even though the railway had never come this high into the mountains.

The Stark family had owned it forever and had run it for several generations, though it had been empty for years now. Rosie’s older brother Jack was heading the renovation and restoration project and a major step forward had occurred in March, when Jack had thrown Rosie and Ryder a wedding reception in the grand old lobby. Even though it wasn’t entirely done, it had been so splendid that everyone in town, and even down in Marietta, were still talking about it.

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