Montana Cowboy (Big Sky Mavericks Book 2) (7 page)

"The owner of the Graff is an old friend. His chef owes me a favor."

She didn't press for details, but as far as she could tell, everyone in the dining room knew Austen. Men put down their utensils to stand and shake his hand. Women would dab their linen napkins to their lips to kiss his cheek. Younger women would get too close for Serena's taste.

She'd never spent three hours dining. If asked, she couldn't explain how the evening went by so fast when all they did was taste, talk, and laugh. His mind reminded her of her father's—filled with silly trivia, smart factoids, and funny, oddly endearing family anecdotes.

Her favorite, by far, was when his younger brother proclaimed loudly in church, "Austen isn't nice."

"Pretty much summed me up in one sentence. Before God, the priest, and the whole congregation."

She'd tried not to laugh but his sigh did her in. As if his eleven-year old self actually accepted his brother's edict. "You should have heard some of the names my brother called me. If I took any of them to heart, I'd have cloven feet at the very least."

A faint arc of smile touched the corner of his mouth and her heart did a silly somersault. The man was sexy, with a hint of woebegone—her weakness. "I know. It's stupid, but the thing I remember about that day is nobody in the entire church contradicted him. Even my mother. She put her finger to her lips to shush Paul, but I could tell she was trying not to laugh—a fact she fervently denies."

Serena reached out to pat his hand supportively as she might a student who seemed defeated by his physical challenges. He caught her hand, flipped it over, and kissed the pulse point in her wrist.

The gesture was the most romantic thing any of her dates had ever done. For the first time in her life she understood what romance writers meant when their heroine swooned.

Fortunately, his next question brought both of her feet firmly to the ground.

"So, tell me more about being homeschooled. Didn't you miss out on interaction with other kids?"

She'd heard these words or some variation her whole life. The concept of non-traditional education often provoked a knee-jerk reaction that seemed to imply she'd missed out on the wonderful normalcy that defined most people her age—things like field trips, proms, PE, classroom discussions, sports, competition—in and out of the classrooms.

"Like bullying?"

His eyes widened in surprise.

"Sorry. I didn't mean to jump out of the box on the side of defensiveness, but when people ask me this, they usually want me to reassure them their way is better...or, at the very least, the right way to teach kids."

Austen reached across the table to take her hand. He hadn't meant to get her back up with his question. He was curious about her—every aspect of her life.

His thumb stroked her palm.

"My mother probably would have slit her wrists if she had to teach us at home." He chuckled. "Don't get me wrong. Mom's great, but she'd be the first to admit she's not a teacher. And I was a pushy, demanding young prince. Just ask my sisters."

"What will they tell me?"

He poured the last of the wine into his own glass since she'd already declined more when the waiter tried to refill hers. After swallowing a sip, he told her, "For one, I blackmailed them into becoming members of the Big Sky Mavericks."

"Big Sky Mavericks? What's that?"

"Did you see the movie Top Gun?"

"Of course."

"Tom Cruise's call sign was Maverick, remember? The movie came out right before Mia's and my eighth birthday. We each got to take a friend to the premier at a theater in Billings. Meg, our older sister, came along, too."

Her grin widened. "I've worked with a lot of eight-year-olds. I can picture you getting all gung-ho about the idea of flying fighter jets. I read that movie was like the best recruiting poster in history."

Gung-ho. Good word. Meg and Mia called him bossy and obnoxious. But they still went along.

"We had call signs, of course."

"Yours was Maverick."

He pretended to be wounded. "Never. I started out as Zman, but the girls would call me "sheman" or "z-boy" when they were mad at me... which was often, so I changed it to Striker."

She gave a thoughtful nod. "Austen "Striker" Zabrinski. I can see that. What were the other two?"

"Mia's was Nitro—a small amount packs a big punch, and Meg insisted on Lone Wolf, although we gave her a hard time about it."

"Interesting. I can see why your twin would play along, but what was in it for your older sister?"

"Meg's wicked smart and skipped a grade or two. But that meant she didn't really fit in with her classmates. She's always been a bit of a loner—like a wolf."

"Hence the name. Makes sense."

"And all of us kids—even Paul—knew we'd learn to fly someday because our grandpa was a sort of one-man Pony Express in the sky. He got a special exemption from the government to deliver mail and groceries all over the northwest."

"Do you have your own plane?"

"Zabrinski, Inc. has a small prop. We're the only shareholders, along with Mom and Dad, and we all fly. Although Mom has never soloed and Mia's grounded for the moment."

She took back her hand.

"What about Paul? Wasn't he a Big Sky Maverick?"

He shook his head. "We considered him a pesky kid and ditched him any time we could. Mom says we're the reason he spent so much time at the store. Paul flies because it gets him from point A to point B fast, but he is absolutely the most grounded person I know. Which probably explains why he was content to stick around and run the family business while the rest of us took off."

But when things got crazy, you came home
. Happily, Serena managed not to say the words out loud. She could picture his wonderful, imaginative childhood with three siblings who adored him and let him play the role of big brother. It sounded like her dream childhood. The kind she would have had if the parents who gave her up for adoption had loved her, loved each other and done what society expected of them—the way Austen's parents did. She hated the bitter taste of envy she couldn't quite squash.

When the busboy stopped to fill her water glass, she watched him interact with Austen. Deferential, she realized. The younger man admired Austen.

"Groupie?" she asked when the teen was out of earshot.

"Football player. I played in high school. My name is on a couple of plaques in the school trophy cases."

An understatement if she ever heard it.

Before she could ask for details, he said, "You deflected my question about homeschooling. I wasn't being judgmental, Serena. Just curious what it was like for you."

Perfect. Sheltered. Both too simple and too complex to really describe. "I love to learn—anything and everything. Dad calls me a born student, and I take that as a compliment. But, if I'm being honest, studying in a highly charged classroom with a volatile, unpredictable brother who could go from happy to hostile in ten seconds or less was not fun. I'd have loved to have had a sister, but our parents were in their forties when they adopted us and they decided they simply didn't have the time—or energy—to add another baby to the family."

"You were adopted. Interesting. Do you know anything about your birth parents?"

Why did every new acquaintance ask the same predictable query? Why did she feel a twinge of disappointment that Austen wasn't more original? Or was she expecting too much because she found him so interesting and unique?

She ignored the question and asked one of him instead. One he'd probably heard a thousand times, too. "I've never met an Ivy Leaguer. What was that like?"

He eyed her over his coffee cup a moment before answering. "More pressure than I expected. More academic challenges than I'd been led to believe. More parties than I'd like to admit. But I survived those eight years with most of my brain cells and a bankable degree that opened a lot of doors when I came home to Montana."

She talked work. He talked work... briefly. She pieced together a few of the headlines she'd seen in her Internet search. Enough for her to understand that something pivotal happened in Helena—something he preferred not to talk about—that had him second-guessing his life's ambition.

She didn't press, because sooner or later he'd figure out something life-changing happened to her, too. And she'd learned a valuable lesson from her stalker experience—it didn't pay to be too open and frank.

"So, are we ready to call it a night?" he asked, pushing back from the table.

She got up, too. "Thank you, so much. What a fabulous treat! But, you know that coffee I ordered to offset the champagne and wine?"

He nodded.

"I think it's going to take a beer to offset the effect of the caffeine. My treat."

"I know just the place. Have you been in Grey's Saloon, yet?"

She'd popped her head in the door her first afternoon in town but hadn't found the courage to step inside. Ridiculous as it sounded, her mind equated stalkers with bars. Of course, the likelihood of her stalker hanging out in a local pub in Marietta, Montana, was on par with winning the lottery while being handed the Nobel Peace Prize. Still, fear rarely manifested itself in the form of logic.

They opted to leave Austen's fancy SUV in the Graff Hotel Parking Lot and walk to Grey's. Austen's bare hand in hers more than made up for any chill. The town of Marietta took on a magical air at night. Some businesses chose to hang mini-twinkle lights in their windows. The pizza place seemed packed with young people—obviously it was a happening spot—the smell of pepperoni and spices both inviting and nauseating, after their huge meal.

Serena had been in a few of the stores on Main Street. The chocolate shop gave new meaning to decadence. She hadn't walked this particular side street, but she'd never felt safer. Only a fool would mess with someone as substantial as Austen Zabrinski.

Which probably explained why the suddenness of the assault caught her so off-guard. One minute they were laughing and talking. A second later, someone jumped out of the shadows between two buildings and started taking pictures.

"Who's your new lady friend, Z-man? Does she know you're a crook? What's your name, lady? You must be new in town if you'd go out with someone who stole taxpayer dollars so his boss could pay high-priced call girls. Are you a hooker? You don't look like one, but who can tell anymore?"

Austen hustled them away from the camera, the voice, the barely contained fury. They practically ran into Grey's. Austen motioned for someone—a bouncer, maybe—to come close. He pointed, whispered, and handed him something. A gun? No. Keys, she decided.

The guy—who had a don't-mess-with-me-or-mine look about him—shot out the door.

"I'm so sorry, Serena. I had no idea he was in town."

"W-who?"

"Will Paulson. His daughter, Jenny, and I worked for Senator Crandwell. She was young and idealistic. When it was discovered funds from the senator's re-election campaign had been used to pay for hookers, elaborate parties, and bribes, shit, as they say, rolls downhill. Last hired, first fired—and blamed. I fought back. I refused to cop a deal when I had nothing to do with it. Jenny sank into a deep depression and wound up taking her own life."

"That's terrible. But why does her father blame you when you were named as a defendant, too?"

"Jenny came to me for help before everything went public. She told me about some of the expenses she'd been forced to fabricate. I told her she must have misunderstood or somebody else in the campaign made a mistake. I could have saved us both if I'd acted then instead of rubberstamping the party line."

Serena shoved her hands in her pockets to keep them from shaking. "W-what will he do with the pictures he took?"

Austen shrugged. "Post on his blog, probably. It's called The Ruination of Austen Zabrinski."

Her three-figure meal nearly came up. Blogs. Photos. The World Wide Web. So much for her anonymity. Her safe new life.

"I need to go, now."

He nodded. "Yeah. I'm really sorry, Serena. I'll drive you home. Dillon went to get my ride." He gave a rueful chuckle. "One good thing about being born and raised in the same town is your high school buddy's younger brother doesn't think twice about helping out. Nobody messes with the Sheenans."

She wouldn't know. She'd never belonged to a larger community. Her parents had raised her and her brother to be self-sufficient—something that came in handy most of the time, but actually had proven to be a detriment when someone violated her privacy. Where were her concerned, nosy neighbors when a stalker had gone through her garbage? At least, Serena assumed that was how he got her mailing address.

How long would it be this time before her stalker found her? A week? A month, maybe? Depended on how persistent Austen's blogger was about getting her name. Where she might go from here, she had no idea. But she couldn't stay in Marietta.

The biggest irony? She'd fallen—hard—for a man whose past might have blown her chance at a normal life.

Austen's Land Rover—the vehicle she'd barely noticed when she got in at her house—double-parked in front of them. She noticed the car's license plate for the first time—ZLAWMN.

She couldn't prevent a smirk from forming on her lips. Her parents had no respect for gratuitous displays of wealth.
Mcmansions
were objects of scorn. On family trips, fancy cars with vanity plates became the objective of a game called Find The Biggest Ego.

No. Here was an even bigger irony, she thought, shaking off his hand when he opened the door and tried to assist her in. She'd fallen for a guy whose lifestyle was about as far from "normal" as possible. "I'm good, thank you."

His hand dropped to his side.

She watched through the windshield as Austen paused to talk to the young man who'd raced after the car. How could she have tripped herself up so badly? Her parents' oft-repeated mantra rang in her head. "Never forget, Serena, we create our own reality. Visualize your world as you want it to be and your vision—or something even better—will be manifest."

She'd counted on anonymity in a new place with no connection to her old life to keep her safe. Thanks to Austen Zabrinski, her newly envisioned world was already screwed.