Page 7 of The Cowboy's Best Friend

Chapter Two

That evening, Sierrapulled up in front of her parents’ house just off Bramble Lane, considered by many to be the loveliest part of Marietta proper. And it was as pretty as ever, Sierra could admit.

Yet despite all her tough talk earlier, she felt… shaky. Apprehensive. Maybe even a little scared, if she was prepared to be honest about it.

On the drive here from Cowboy Point, she’d found herself wondering if she’d been putting off any real reckoning with her marriage for as long as she had because of this. Because she’d known that once she faced reality, she would also have to face this dinner.

That did not exactly make Sierra feel great—about either herself or the night stretching before her.

If she could have, she would have brought Boone with her. She’d considered it, and she’d known thathewould have been happy to tag along. But she’d been pretty sure that her parents were likely to frown on her emotional support best friend if she tried to drag him to one of their painful family dinners.

Truth be told, they weren’t a huge fan of Boone at any time, though at least they’d stop complaining about him over the years.

Sierra had decided she needed to toughen up, face the music, take her medicine—all of those things. These were her parents. This was her mess. She could either defend what she was doing or maybe she shouldn’t be doing it.

Sitting in her Jeep, closed up tight again to ward off the chill that had crept back in when the sun started its way down—even though it was literally the first day of June, welcome to Montana—Sierra reminded herself that nothing was set in stone. Matty was out of town and didn’t know she’d left yet. She could go back. She could slide right back into the life she’d been living all these years and nobody would ever be the wiser.

Except Boone, of course. But Boone was the sweetest, kindest, most supportive person she’d ever met in her life. If she called him right now and told him she’d changed her mind, he’d haul all her stuff back down the mountain himself. He wouldn’t even question her about it.

He was, as always, her angel.

She didn’t call him.

Boone had left her in the apartment and once she’d heard his heavy, booted feet go down the stairs, and then his truck as he drove away, she’d succumbed to the tears she’d been holding back that whole time. If she’d cried in front of him, he would have been as sweet as he always was, but Sierra was so tired of crying.

And besides, she didn’t want him to think that she was anything butdelightedto have escaped her life down in Marietta at last.

The truth was, shewasdelighted. Or she thought she was. She thought that was what she felt, kicking around inside her pretty shyly. Somehow, after all these years with Matty, she’d lost touch with how to tell what she felt about anything.

“It’s notsomehow,” she muttered at herself, her hands too tight on the steering wheel. “He did it. Piece by piece, drip by drip, until you learned how to do it yourself.”

Until she was so small, so biddable, so diminished—like a tiny, smooth, inconsequential little pebble. Until there was barely anything of her left at all.

She shook her head and then shook the rest of herself too, like she was shaking all that off. Then she told herself to get it together once again, and this time, she did. She swung out of her car, though it was less of a smooth exit than usual since she always dressed up to have dinner at her parents’ and was wearing the sort of pencil skirt she knew her mother would like. Along withappropriateheels and a little sweater, because her mother was deeply concerned with what wasappropriate.

She smoothed her hair, swept back in a sleek ponytail, and then she walked up the front path to the door of her childhood home.

Like everything else in her parents’ life, it was beautiful. It was a perfectly maintained, historic Victorian. Not a bit of paint was chipped. There wasn’t the faintest smudge on a single window. The path of the front door was paved and well lit, as if this was a storybook instead of a rugged part of Montan. Even the landscaping was exquisite, though this was still considered fairly early into the blooming season.

She made her way up the front steps and across the porch to the front door, then rang the bell. Because everything in the Tate family was formal. It hadn’t been until she had Boone in her life that she’d realized that everything she accepted as normal in her family was not normal everywhere.

Boone did not ring the doorbell at his parents’ house. He walked right in like he belonged there. It was his childhood home, after all.

Sierra had spent a long time trying to come to terms with that. She still wasn’t sure she had.

But there was no time to dive intothatold swamp. Not tonight. She could hear her mother’s quick steps from inside, because Mary Catherine Bonneville Tate set the standard for the evening dress she liked to see at her table. As far back as Sierra could remember, she had always dressed as if she expected a parade of refined, cosmopolitan people to descend upon her at any moment.

Not that any of them ever had, as far as Sierra knew.

Her mother swung the front door open and frowned when she saw Sierra. This was not unusual. After thirty-two years, it hardly even bothered Sierra any longer.

“Have you come alone?” Mary Catherine asked, sounding put-out. “We already set the table for youandMatty, Sierra. If he couldn’t make it, the polite thing would have been to let us know in advance.”

As if Sierra was Matty’s handler. As if her parents hadn’t invited them both, separately—meaning Matty could easily have declined on his own since he’d known he was going out of town when they’d set the date. That he hadn’t—because he never did, because he too seemed to think that her job was to make polite excuses for him in all things—was not new. He almost never came to her parents’ house for dinner. She couldn’t remember the last time he’d showed up to take part in this monthly exercise.

But guess who Mary Catherine blamed for that?

“He can’t make it,” was all Sierra said, and she smiled while she said it, because there was no point getting in fights with her mother about such pointless things.

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