Montana Cowboy (Big Sky Mavericks Book 2)
Read Montana Cowboy (Big Sky Mavericks Book 2) Online
Authors: Debra Salonen
Tags: #cowgirl, #montana, #Romance, #contemporary romance, #western, #cowboy
A Big Sky Mavericks Romance
Debra Salonen
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Montana Cowboy
Copyright © 2014 Debra Salonen
The Tule Publishing Group, LLC
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental
ISBN: 978-1-940296-80-7
An Excerpt from Montana Darling
For Paul—my one and only
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D
ear Reader,
Welcome to Big Sky Mavericks Country!
Meg, Austen & Mia Zabrinski are true children of the vast northern plains. They grew up believing each would soar to success. After watching the movie, Top Gun, they gave each other “Call Signs” and adopted the motto:
Dream big and reach for the sky.
Unfortunately, life hasn’t turned out exactly the way they planned.
Meg “Lone Wolf” Zabrinski sacrificed a personal life to the important work of re-populating the wolves of Yellowstone. Only now, on the eve of her fortieth birthday does she question her choices. But her soul-searching retreat at her mountain cabin turns into a real life search for a missing child and brings her face-to-face with her most outspoken critic. Together, the yin and yang of animal rights prove adversity makes great bedfellows.
Mia “Nitro” Zabrinski’s perfect life just went down in flames. Sharing a life raft with two angry teens who blame her for not holding her marriage together while piecing together the body that betrayed her, Mia wonders what happened to the fearless girl who once flew higher, faster and with more style than her twin brother. To her family’s surprise, she finds the answer in the arms of a younger man with ghosts of his own.
Austen “Striker” Zabrinski never lost at anything...until he lost almost everything. Second-guessing his choices goes against his grain, so instead, he re-invents himself...with the help of his beautiful, independent neighbor. A beautiful, independent neighbor who raises alpacas.
Since the only thing I knew about alpacas before I started this book was they are fuzzy and adorable, I am forever grateful to Casey and Steve Aitchison of Epic Alpacas for sharing a day in their action-packed lives to introduce me to their herd. Any mistakes are mine, but I could blame the alpacas because they are so darn cute, and I’m so easily distracted by cuteness.
As always, my heartfelt thanks extend to my editor, Sinclair Sawhney, and to Tule’s one and only Meghan Farrell. And, of course, to my family for giving me the time and support to write. Every book, I dream big and reach for the stars. Thank you, dear readers, for flying with me.
Happy reading,
Deb...or as my Top Gun call sign would have it: Lt. Debra “Bookshelf” Salonen
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A
usten Zabrinski's horse spotted the snake before he did.
Probably because Austen was texting his ex-not-quite girlfriend, Sheri Fast. Not quite girlfriend, but definitely ex, if the hostile tone of her text was any indicator.
"Whoa. Shit. No. God dammit."
The last came in one of those slow motion howls that got big laughs on TV, but sent the fear of broken bones through the person crying out.
His impact with the parched late August earth of southwestern Montana blasted the breath from his lungs like a kid popping a blown-up paper sack. The ringing in his ears and bright shards of light dancing across his vision made him wonder if someone had set off a bomb nearby. Was that what made his horse shy?
"No," his half-functioning subconscious shouted. "Snake!"
He shot to his wobbly legs like a drunken pledge and looked around. No coiled rattler ready to strike. Thank God.
No horse, either.
"Mother f—"
He mumbled the rest of the epithet. His mother had been on his case for cursing in front of Emilee and Hunter, his twin sister's kids who were staying at the Zabrinski family homestead until Mia got her life back on track—or moved home—whichever came first.
Austen had flown to Cheyenne twice in the past couple of weeks to 'help,' but other than ferrying the kids to Marietta in time for the Big Marietta Fair and delivering one box of crap to his ex-brother-in-law, Austen couldn't say he'd done much.
When they were kids, he and his twin were inseparable. Then competition happened. There could be only one winner and each wanted that title, whether it was Valedictorian or first to pass the Montana bar.
Austen won his share and then some, but Mia was first to marry, first to have kids—their parents' first grandchildren—and, unfortunately, first to divorce.
And I thought my life was f-ed up
. He almost muttered the thought. But talking to oneself in the middle of nowhere beneath a clear blue Montana sky was a sure sign of impending craziness. A point Sheri had made in her last text:
U R crazy. Nobody gives up a promising career in politics to be a cowboy. NoBody.
The capital B proof she was texting heatedly. With passion.
Sheri Fast did everything to the hundred and tenth degree. Her focus and drive drew him to her, but she loved the fast, highly connected life they'd each embraced in Helena ...before everything turned to shit. She attributed his decision to give up politics to hurt feelings.
"Pull up another layer of big boy pants," she'd advised, never one to mince words. "You're a politician. Things get ugly. What did you think would happen when you work for a snake? Sometimes, the snake handler gets bit."
Austen had been bit hard. For a time, it had appeared as though he'd be censured by the Montana Bar Association and lose his license. Fortunately, he'd invested well and he owned his ranch, the Flying Z, free and clear.
The ranch had originally been named the Crooked K, supposedly a nod toward the curious bend in the creek that meandered through his property. The silly name seemed down right ridiculous when the new owner was a lawyer, so Austen changed it.
He'd bought the place a few years back as a tax write-off. Ever since the proverbial buffalo dung hit the fan earlier this year, his log home had become a haven of a different kind. A place he could use to figure out what he wanted to do with the rest of his life. A fact nobody seemed to accept—especially the people who knew him best. His family.
Mia seemed the most affronted by his plan to sell his condo in Helena and move to the log home he'd had built to impress his city cronies twice a year, once when hunting season opened and then throughout the spring when he courted favors for Jim "Crandy" Crandwell, Austen's boss, mentor, and, Austen had believed wrongly, friend.
Logically, Mia's refusal to accept his decision to bow out of politics was less about Austen giving up and more about the fact her relocation from Cheyenne to their hometown of Marietta, Montana, was not one of her choosing. She'd been at the top of her game when a double whammy blindsided her. First, her husband of nearly fifteen years knocked up his summer clerk—not necessarily his first affair, Mia came to find out, but the first he cared enough about to leave his wife for, then her monthly self-exam showed an anomaly that turned out to be Stage 1—thank God she caught it early—breast cancer. But Mia, who never did anything halfway, chose the most extreme treatment possible. Every step in the process depleted her strength, and the soul-crushing circumstances surrounding her divorce sapped her spirit.
Austen hated feeling so damn powerless to help when the person closest to him was in pain. But what could a single, presently unemployed, lawyer dealing with his own monumental failures do to help two kids who were angry, confused, and disillusioned?
Disillusioned.
The word came up a lot lately.
"Where's my fu-frigging phone," he muttered, scanning the clumps of sagebrush and dry grass.
He spotted his hundred and eighty-five dollar Larry Mahan hat playing chicken with a dust devil and took off on a run... or, rather, a hobble. His hip hurt and his shoulder started singing the blues the moment he reached for the filthy, tan felt brim.
"Crap." He liked the hat. A lot. It was the first one that didn't make him feel like an 'all-hat, no cattle' imposter.
Technically, he could call himself a cowboy. He owned a ranch. He owned cattle—a hundred-plus head, according to his foreman, Stuart Briggs. And despite his graceless nosedive a few minutes ago, he wasn't a rank amateur when it came to horses. He'd ridden with the Sheenan boys every summer growing up.
But the bottom line—Sheri's favorite expression—was undeniable.
"I'm no cowboy."
He put the hat on his head and did a slow, achy-breaky three-sixty. He needed a massage from Lani, his favorite therapist in Helena.
Thinking about the life he'd left behind in Montana's capitol city aggravated the precursor to an ulcer his doctor had warned him about. "The stress of this lousy job of yours is eating you alive," the specialist he'd seen for chronic indigestion told him. "Austen, you've got the gut of a seventy-five-year old man. Get out of politics while you can still enjoy real food."
He unconsciously rubbed a tender spot right above his belt line.
His doctor got his wish. Austen was out of politics. He'd been the sacrificial scapegoat—and again not by choice—who took the fall for the man he'd loved like a father and once admired for his honesty and convictions. Austen's fall from grace didn't hurt nearly as much as the blistering process of having his rose-colored blinders sandblasted from his eyes.
"Where am I?"
About as far from his three-bedroom cedar log home as possible on his two-hundred-and-fifty-acre ranch. He didn't ride this area often. Actually, he rarely saddled up when he was at the ranch. He'd acted on a whim that morning... or, maybe, he was still processing the long talk he'd had with his brother's future father-in-law, OC Jenkins.
"You know what your problem is, Austen?" Marietta's so-called Fish Whisperer had asked. "You don't know how good you have it. You're smart, healthy, and young. You live in God's country... hell, you own a big piece of it, but you're too busy trying to be a
somebody
to enjoy what most every
nobody
like me would give their eye teeth to have."
Since that conversation at the Big Marietta Fair, Austen had taken a cold hard look at his life. He'd even sat down with a yellow legal pad and made two columns labeled: pros and cons.
As much as it galled him to admit it, OC was right. The Flying Z was a huge asset that he'd basically ignored or was content to use as a tax haven. He might not have any natural aptitude or experience when it came to ranching, but he'd graduated from frigging Harvard, for God's sake. He ought to be able to figure out a plan.
So, he'd saddled up Jake... Johnny Boy... the brown horse that Stuart claimed was kid-proof and set off to take stock of his assets.
Unfortunately, the Flying Z was bigger than it looked on paper and his sense of direction wasn't that acute when he was on the ground.
He turned toward the nearby hillock. His nostrils crinkled and his stomach lurched. If the whiff of animal stink was a valid indicator, he was within hailing distance of his brother's place. According to Stu, Paul Zabrinski had rented the former Jenkins's ranch to a California woman some were calling a 'hot llama mama'.