Nathan's Big Sky Read online

  Nathan’s Big Sky (sweet)

  a Henderson’s Ranch romance

  M. L. Buchman

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  A Sweet Note

  This “Sweet Version” is exactly the same story as the original, with no foul language and the bedroom door—even when there isn’t one—tastefully closed.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Return to Eagle Cove (excerpt)

  Return to Eagle Cove (excerpt)

  About the Author

  Also by M. L. Buchman

  Chapter 1

  The silence was deafening.

  Nathan gripped the crowbar-handle of his car’s jack so tightly that it hurt his hand but he couldn’t ease up. It was his sole hope of survival.

  The only sound for miles on the emptiness of the Montana prairie was the hot-metal pinging of his cooling Miata sports car, lurched awkwardly to the roadside by a flat tire. The chill of the cold April evening almost hurt his lungs. The sun hadn’t quite set; instead it illuminated the clouds of his own breath like some horror movie with a fog machine turned on too high.

  How was it that he’d come to this place to die?

  Chefs were not supposed to die alone in the forsaken wilderness, they were supposed to have a butter-induced heart attack in the middle of a meal service. But the safety of his New York kitchen lay an impossible distance behind him. He’d bolted forty-eight hours ago, sleeping only a few fitful hours in Chicago before punching west as if all the hounds of Hades were after him.

  And they’d caught up with him in the form of a monster.

  Two days to cross most of the country and now, like a gunslinger fated to his doom, he was going to be murdered in the emptiness of the Montana wilderness by the largest cow ever born.

  It put Paul Bunyan’s mythically massive blue ox Babe to shame.

  Purest black, it was an inkblot on the continuance of Nathan’s life.

  Horns the length of a New York cabbie’s woes sprang from either side of its head, ending in points that looked sharper than his finest boning knife.

  He’d hit Choteau, Montana, in the late afternoon for directions, as his little brother’s instructions had turned out to be utterly useless: “Henderson Ranch, just west of Choteau.” There wasn’t a single app on his phone that told him where the ranch might be. There’d also been no answer on his brother’s phone, but he was used to that. Apparently most of the ranch was beyond the pale of civilization and didn’t have reception. His brother had always been useless about answering the phone anyway, unless you were a pretty girl—them he’d always had a sixth sense for, even on a blocked number.

  Maybe Patrick’s directions sucked because he was messing with his big brother. Or maybe it was because he assumed Nathan would never cross west of the Hudson River—which historically was a reasonable assumption—so it wasn’t worth the effort to be more descriptive.

  A Choteau (Cho-toe that was almost Sho-toe) local had known the name, however. In a town only three blocks long, it made sense that he did. “Just go down the highway apiece until you hit Anderson’s farm. Can’t miss it. He has the last big white cow barn this side of Augusta. Take a right on the main road and go on until you’ve just about hit the mountains. Out onto the dirt a ways. That’ll set you in the right place.”

  The “highway” was a narrow two-lane called Montana 287.

  By the time Choteau was two miles behind him, he’d passed two Andersons, an Andersen, and an Andreassen. This driveway had no mailbox that he could see, but it had a big white barn and a road along one side of the property. The map on his cell phone said that Augusta was fifty miles ahead. Telling him “the last big barn before Augusta” counted as a local having fun setting up the stranger.. He must have taken one look at Nathan’s two-seater Miata and painted a little mental target on Nathan’s forehead—just as the monster cow now had one painted on Nathan’s life.

  The turnoff road was a lane and a half wide. Nathan guessed that in its favor, it was paved and had an actual stop sign where it met the “highway.” Sunlight was streaming out the backside of the sign through several bullet holes. He wondered if someone was going to shoot him for being in a sports car instead of a pickup with a gun rack.

  Did upstate New York even have roads like this one—not even two lanes wide and with no painted stripes? Or was that only legal west of the Mississippi? Manhattan and Long Island certainly didn’t. During his five years in Paris, he’d rarely been farther out than the Metro could carry him.

  For thirty miles past the white cow barn, he drove unknowingly toward his doom as the mountains drew closer and closer. He kept assuming he’d reach them in another few miles and they insisted on teasing him just like his brother. After the unremitting flatness of the Great Plains, they had loomed tall and rough to the west as seen from Choteau. Now he was discovering that Australia wasn’t the only place that had an Outback.

  The peaks kept growing bigger and climbing higher but the land remained flatter than the ocean off Coney Island on a hot summer’s day. The peaks’ jagged flanks were shrouded in snow despite it being April. He turned on the Miata’s heater as the sun settled toward the west, but he left the convertible top down because the view was so amazing. The blue sky arced forever over him until the mountains sliced it off like a kid’s construction project: sharp, jagged, unreal.

  Each time he’d passed a ranch, he checked the name, but none said Henderson. He even pulled out his phone to check that he’d remembered it right—and almost drove his car into the gaping ditch. Not a good idea. For all he knew, there might not be another person down this road for a week. He’d seen a few tractors—which were far bigger than he thought they would be—far out in the fields, but no one else on the road.

  With a crash and thud that made him check his rearview to see if he’d left an axle on the road behind him, the pavement ended.

  “Out onto the dirt a ways.” Maybe the old-timer in Choteau hadn’t been completely setting him up..

  He slowed down to preserve his suspension. A cloud of brown dust obliterated his past. If he wanted to turn around, he’d have to eat his own dust. That sounded like a properly cowboy-like metaphor for the last decade of his life. Two days ago he’d cut every tie to that past. If only he could figure out how that had led him to the Montanan Outback, he wouldn’t feel quite so overwhelmed at the moment. Twenty-eight years old and his life fit in a two-seater sports car—with room to spare. That might not be right, but it didn’t make it any less true.

  For the last ten miles he’d been hoping to meet someone on the road to ask directions again. Or maybe how to escape, little knowing it would soon be too late.

  The dirt road narrowed and then he actually hoped he didn’t meet anyone because he’d have to crawl to the side to get by them. Out here he wasn’t threatened by ditches anymore, they’d disappeared along with the pavement, but instead by barbed wire running close down either side of the dirt track. Not a chance that his Soul Red Metallic paint job would survive the encounter.

  After a few miles of dodging potholes and gr
itting his teeth over washboard ripples, he started looking for a place to turn around. The road wasn’t wide enough to be sure he could turn even his small car without dinging it up.

  He’d been climbing slowly since Choteau, and spring had turned back into winter. There was a bitter snap to the evening air that promised what looked like snow and ice up ahead…really was snow and ice up ahead. By this point the mountains were so high they looked as if they were going to roll over and land on him.

  Manhattan didn’t have places like this. Neither did Paris, where he’d done his time at Le Cordon Bleu and three years servitude for Chef Guevarre—may his brutal training and magnificent palate both be cursed. There was something wrong about the flatness behind and the impossible mountains ahead.

  Then, topping a low rise, facing straight into the setting sun, he was confronted by the beast from the underworld that was going to kill him.

  He’d slammed on the brakes, skidding sideways on the washboard gravel, and barely managed to avoid hitting the cow. A tire caught in a pothole where it had blown with a loud bang that scared him almost as much as the creature of his doom had.

  Now he stood in the middle of the road between his crippled car, pinging the last dying notes of its hot-metal song, and the monstrous black cow that was about to charge him. The thing didn’t so much as blink its malevolent eyes, as if it was trying to hypnotize him.

  His only weapon choices were his chef’s knives, which would be very useful if the cow was already dead and butchered but not until then, and his car’s jack handle. Retreating into his car and pulling up the convertible’s roof would be pointless—this monster was so big it could practically step over the Miata. And the tips of its horns were actually wider than the car itself.

  His ears rang with the silence, now broken only by a scuffing of one New York metro bus-sized hoof as the cow prepared to charge. Nathan had served a thousand roasts, ten thousand steaks, and this meal-still-on-the-hoof knew it. It had come to exact revenge for all of its spiritual forebears…fore-steaks?

  The last thing Nathan was going to smell was the crackling dry grass of the prairie, the biting chill of the fast-approaching night, and the hot breath of the demon cow so big it seemed to block out even the vast expanse of the Montana sky. There had been fourteen hundred miles of flat since Chicago, but here, with his back up against the mountains, the vast horizon seemed far bigger than should be possible. His last-ever vision would be to actually see the curvature of the earth.

  Then, impossibly, as if it wasn’t bad enough that his epitaph was going to read: Here a once-decent chef was trampled to death by a cow—trampled sounded like a marginally more pleasant way to go than gored—he heard a clip-clop sound coming from behind him.

  He didn’t dare turn, because he knew the beast-cow would charge the moment he looked aside.

  Still, the sound behind him grew.

  Unable to stand it any longer—the sound was so close—he spun and raised his foot-long jack handle in one last desperate bid for life.

  Backed by the sun, a silhouetted cowboy sat up on a horse even taller than the cow and looked down at Nathan from under the brim of his cowboy hat.

  “What are you doing out in the road?”

  Not cowboy, cowgirl. A soft voice, but no less disgusted for all that. Against the dazzling sun he could see that she wore cowboy boots, a heavy leather jacket, and had a rifle tucked close to hand.

  Hope?

  Maybe she could shoot the demon cow before it trampled, trompled, gored, or whatever demon cows did.

  He tried to speak, but his throat was clogged dry with fear and road dust. The air was so dry it seemed to suck the moisture right out of him.

  She rode around him and his car as if he wasn’t even there. “Go on now, Lucy. Scoot!”

  A demon beast named Lucy?

  He’d had a great Aunt Lucy, but she hadn’t been very fierce—more the quiet and retiring type, which was perhaps inevitable beside her husband’s garrulous stockbroker charisma.

  The woman rode her black-and-white patterned horse up to the “monster cow from the underworld” before he could warn her off.

  Yet, in a startlingly sudden surrender, the gigantic animal turned and ambled back through a broken gap in the barbed wire fence that Nathan hadn’t noticed. As it walked, he recognized the scuffing sound that he’d thought proceeded a deadly charge—it was just the sound the cow made by walking.

  After riding her horse through the gap as well, she then swung a long leg over the back of the saddle and came down out of the sky. Paying no more attention to him than if he was a bump in the road, she pulled out some tools and walked up to the fence.

  He could only watch—numb with his unexpected last-second stay of execution and the biting cold—as she repaired the fence. It was only the work of minutes before she had three fine strands of barbed wire strung back up between the posts; her and the cow on one side and he and his broken car on the other. The flimsy wires had no chance of stopping a baby cow, never mind the demon cow Lucy, currently tearing at the low dead grass.

  The woman had been towering in the saddle; on the ground she was still tall. Perhaps slender beneath the heavy leather jacket. Straight, light blond hair fell past her shoulders. Her cheeks were rosy with the cold, which he’d always thought was just a saying.

  When she finished, he finally found his voice before she could disappear back into the landscape as eerily as she’d arrived.

  “Excuse me, can you tell me how to get to Henderson Ranch?”

  “I can,” he could just see her eyes beneath the wide brim of her cowboy hat. They were as brilliant blue as the sky and seemed to be laughing at him, though her mouth wasn’t. What was it with locals today?

  “Would you mind telling me?”

  “Not a bit,” and she let it hang long enough to make him sigh.

  The failing sun caught the cloud of his breath in the chill air.

  “You’re standing on Henderson land.”

  “I am?” he looked down at the road, but it was keeping its secrets to itself. “This doesn’t look like a ranch, it looks like a whole bunch of nothing.”

  “It’s two ranches,” she sounded miffed by his description, which, he decided on review, hadn’t been the most tactful thing he’d ever said. “You’re standing on Henderson’s, but your passenger seat is on mine—property line runs up the middle of the lane. You’ve been on Mac and Ama’s land for the last five miles or so. If you’d like, I can chop your car in two and then you’ll be off my family’s land.”

  “That’s okay. I like my car the way it is.”

  “Even with the flat?”

  “Okay, except for the flat.” Was this what passed for a sense of humor out here, or was she about to pull the rifle hanging on her horse’s saddle and make good on her offer—maybe shooting his poor car for trespassing before skinning it? Perhaps it would be safer if he kept her talking. “What are you doing way out here?”

  “Riding the fence.”

  He assumed that meant something to someone other than him, but he couldn’t figure out how to ask what. Her horse stepped up to her and rested its chin over her shoulder. She reached up a gloved hand and patted it on the cheek a couple of times.

  “I was looking for different,” and it didn’t get more different than the woman in front of him.

  “Thought you were looking for Henderson’s.”

  “I was. I am,” and he was on the verge of being turned into a babbling idiot. He’d left New York looking for a change. For something he’d never done, someone he’d never been. Couldn’t get more different than a burned-out New York chef and a tall, blond cowgirl out “riding a fence” who had a horse for a pet.

  “Their drive is another mile yet, on the left. Can’t miss it,” she tipped her head toward farther down the road. Then, in a move so smooth she might have been doing it since birth, she stepped one foot up into a high stirrup and swung atop the tall horse. He’d briefly dated an American Ballet Th
eater dancer—sleeping through her performance had not earned him many bonus points—who didn’t have the grace or posture of this cowgirl. Cow-woman. Was that a real phrase? She stepped once more into line with the low sun and he lost her in the glare.

  “Thanks,” he called out. One of his more charming lines.

  “Need help with the tire?”

  “I can change a flat.”

  Her blinding silhouette nodded as if that might be a miracle worth witnessing, then tipped her hat and turned to ride away. He couldn’t argue with that conclusion, but it would be too embarrassing to admit his gross incompetence.

  “Will I see you again?”

  “It depends,” she spoke over her shoulder without fully turning.

  “On what?” Nathan had to call more loudly as she headed away perpendicular to the road.

  “On how long I can avoid you.”

  Unwilling to turn, Julie Larson kept an ear out. It took a bit, but then she heard a soft laugh.

  A minute later, the rattling sound of someone jacking a car—a sound far enough away to be no louder than the ticking of a lone cricket. Anything else was lost beneath the sound of the last of the dry winter grass swishing against Clarence’s hocks, but that laugh intrigued her. She didn’t know why the man made her more prickly than a stinging nettle.

  This had been the last stretch of the fence line. There were a half dozen places where the winter had snapped a post and occasional runs where wood rot had finally taken down a whole stretch of wire, but nothing bad in the entire run. In the morning she’d grab one of the hands and a truck; they’d have the spring pasture put together before the cattle were ready for it. Old Lucy had somehow slipped in early, but she’d been a certified escape artist since her third day afoot.