Page 3 of The Cowboy's Best Friend

Then she took his hand in hers, threading their fingers together, and leaned in to tell him the rumors she’d heard and the conclusions she’d reached and how she thought it was all going to play out with Boone and the girl he’d loved most of his life, and Zeke knew fate didn’t stand a chance.

Not with Belinda in the game this time, and more than ready to win.

Chapter One

Boone Carey livedhis life according to three simple principles.

Some men preferred whiskey, others had Jesus. It wasn’t Boone’s job to criticize or condemn, so he kept his thoughts on those choices to himself. The way he kept most of his thoughts to himself, the world being a little too full of loud opinions voiced by the confidently misinformed, as far as he was concerned.

None of that was his business and besides, he had better things to think about.

Boone had been born and bred in the enduring, demanding Montana Rockies, ten miles up from pretty Marietta and around the back of Copper Mountain, a peak so wily it had lured in all kinds of miners and produced nothing—except the wildly independent and hard-to-kill former miners and other such folks who’d stayed behind when the mining companies left, and had made themselves some settlements out here where the sky and the land were as majestic as the wildlife was bold, and tomorrow was never a guarantee.

Winters on the family ranch outside of the tiny community of Cowboy Point kept a man humble. And summers here were so beautiful and so brief that they hurt a little, but they made sure he had a little hope going into the next long cold spell.

Montana’s stark seasons taught a man everything he needed to know, if he was prepared to pay attention. And Boone always paid attention. That was how he’d come up with the three principles he lived by in the first place.

He’d been arranging his life around them for as long as he could recall.

One, that a man’s word was his worth and needed to be protected as such. Boone wasn’t one to play games with his integrity, no matter what it cost him. That didn’t always make the people around him happy, but he liked the fact that he could sleep at night and look directly at himself in the mirror come morning. That mattered. Some days, it was all he had.

Two, that honesty wasn’t only the best policy, it was the baseline requirement for pretty much everything. He’d learned that by watching his father’s example. Zeke Carey hadn’t simply told his five sons how to grow up and become decent men, he’d showed them what one looked like. Day in and day out, Zeke had used his hands to build, his mind to solve problems, and his core decency to inspire. He was Boone’s hero. If Boone thought too much about his father’s looming diagnosis, it took his breath away—so he did his best to enjoy the old man while he still could.

The third principle was more of an immovable fact, a lot like the mountains that surrounded him and inspired him, humbled him and exalted him in turn. It was simple too, though that did not mean uncomplicated. It was this: He had been irreversibly and unrequitedly in love with his best friend Sierra Tate since the moment he’d laid eyes on her in the seventh grade and would be until the day he died. The end.

None of these principles were comfortable, necessarily. But all told, they were who he was. They made up the core of Boone Carey even if no one ever knew these things but him.

Besides, he wasn’t sure what made folks think that life was supposed to be comfortable, anyway.

And it was a good thing he had no expectations in that regard, he told himself as he heard a familiar vehicle in the trees. It was bumping along the lane that branched off from the main drive through the ranch that had been in his family since the 1800s and wound its way through the tall, stout pines into the heart of his parcel of that same land.

Sierra was coming to live with him.

Notwithhim, Boone corrected himself, sounding gruff and stern even inside his own head.

Don’t get ahead of yourself, dumbass, he growled at all the excitement he could feel inside him.

When he’d turned eighteen, he’d gotten to choose this land. He’d built a house, and was proud of the work he’d put into it and the fact that he slept in a dwelling he’d made with his hands.

But Boone had always wanted something that was purely his. He loved this land. He was as much a part of High Mountain Ranch as the earth beneath his feet, and nothing could ever change that. He loved working with his brothers, idiots though they often were. He knew that there were few men on earth as lucky as he was, to get to spend his life out beneath the Montana sky, working with his hands and his family and living life the way he chose.

Yet he’d gone ahead and started his artisan dairy all the same. He’d found some Jersey cows that had already pleased him. He had his eye on some goats. This winter he’d been experimenting with cheese and yogurt.

And when Sierra had said she needed a place to crash, he had understood at last why it was that he’d built the whole apartment down here in his barn, a lot like he’d been waiting for this to happen.

Well. If he was completely honest, he had been waiting for this to happen—pretty much since the day Sierra had gone ahead and gotten married to the guy he’d hoped was just a high school mistake on her part.

Joke was on him. It had been more than a decade since the wedding.

Good thing Boone had made waiting into an art form.

But her car came careening into view, shooting out from the trees entirely too fast, as always. And he smiled the way he always did, because another simple truth in his life was that there was nothing about Sierra Tate that didn’t make him happy.

Except, that was, the fact she wasn’t his. And would never be his.

But that was an old wound. More of an ache now, like a touch of arthritis, and he knew what to do about that kind of thing. There were salves and painkillers of one sort or another out there and he indulged when needed. He knew how to handle the slight discomfort. Some years, he barely noticed it.

Sierra was driving her rugged Jeep with the top off, though it really wasn’t warm enough for that—especially not up here on the other side of Copper Mountain where there was still snow on the ground. Down in Marietta on the floor of Paradise Valley where Sierra had lived most of her life, it tended to be a little warmer and a whole lot greener this time of year.

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