Page 5 of The Cowboy's Best Friend

They looked at each other, and he could see a hint of emotion in her eyes again. There was probably a lot more where that came from, but she clearly didn’t want to break down.

Or maybe she did. He watched her straighten her shoulders. “You haven’t said anything about all of this. I keep waiting.”

“What do you want me to say?”

She laughed, but it had an edge to it. “I don’t know.I told you socomes to mind?”

“But I didn’t tell you.” He said that quietly, because it wasn’t an accusation. It was a simple truth. One he’d always assumed was deliberate on her part. “That wasn’t something you wanted to hear.”

“The thing about you, Boone, is that your nonverbal communication is what other people might call a whole cacophony.”

“I’m just a dairy farmer, darlin’,” he drawled. “I don’t know all those fancy words you learned up in Bozeman.”

He saw something flash over her face, but then she shook her head. “Idiot.”

“Have you told your parents?” he asked.

The living room was furnished with a sofa that fit Boone’s large frame—not a coincidence, since he regularly found himself overly large for standard furniture, never a problem here on the ranch—and he took advantage of that now. When he sat down, Sierra looked relieved. So much so that he wondered if she thought that he was going to stand there and lecture her when she knew perfectly well that he’d never been a big fan of the life she’d been living all this time. Much less who she’d been living it with.

It would have been different if she was happy.

He’d told himself that for years. He’d have found a way to get right with it all if she’d beenhappy. And he believed that was true, because God knew, Sierra happy made him happy, too.

“I’m having dinner with them tonight.” Sierra made a face. “Wish me luck?”

Boone waited.

Sierra looked away and pulled her lower lip between her teeth.

That particular absent-minded thing she did featured hugely in that lockbox of things about Sierra that he kept under lock and key as much as possible.

Because the problem with Sierra—maybe the biggest problem, though there were so many more he’d had to wrestle with over the years—was that she’d been the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen when he was fifteen. And she’d only gotten prettier in the years since.

So damned pretty.

She had shiny brown hair that she liked to wear in French braids. It was all back in one thick braid today, with pieces falling down because of the wind in her Jeep. When her hair was down, it was wavy and thick and gleamed all the way down past her shoulders. When she wore her hair up, it called attention to the gold chain she wore around her neck almost every day. A gift from her grandma, he knew, for her sixteenth birthday. Shiny little links of gold nestled in the little hollow at the base of her neck. Her eyes were green, like the forests Boone loved almost as much as he loved the mountains.

He’d found that nothing short of magical in high school.

He still did.

She’d always been curvy and she technically still was, even though she’d spent a large part of the last decade starving herself and committing to every possible exercise fad in order to get small and stick figured. He had to give it to her. She’d made herself miserable but she’d managed it.

Boone thought she looked a little puny, in truth. That had never been what he wanted in a woman, and if he was honest, he had a lot of follow-up questions for a lot of the men who did.Hethought that the woman in a man’s life should behappy, and who the hell cared what her jean size was?

If Sierra was happy this tiny, hell, he would have loved that too, but she wasn’t. She looked haunted. Her cheeks were hollow.

He remembered when she’d been ripe and filled with joy. There had never been a part of her he didn’t like to watch bloom. Her curves were a work of art and the fact that she’d worked so hard to erase them—

But he couldn’t let his temper take hold. That wasn’t going to help anything. Boone was more than used to simmering about this and other offenses Sierra’s marriage had wrought in private.

And in any event, bony or otherwise, she was Sierra. That was what mattered.

He’d spent more time than he would like to admit analyzing each and every one of her attributes, trying to boil down the particular alchemy of her features because he thought that maybe if he could do that, he could find that magic somewhere else.

But Sierrawasthe magic.

She lit up every room she was in. Even if she was miserable. Even if she was mad. Even if she was gray straight through, when she walked in, she was the only thing he saw. On her worst day, she gave the big Montana sky a run for its money—and usually won.

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