Montana Darling (Big Sky Mavericks Book 3) Read online

  “Pitta?”

  A pretty touch of rose colored her cheeks. “Pain in the…um…arse.”

  “Got it. I’ve been away from society too long.”

  She reached across the desk to touch his arm. “Don’t say that. You’ve been following your passion. I see it in every photo. This is beauty, Ryker. Doing something you love to do is much better than Facebook, TV and all the other distractions we call normal life. Don’t apologize for taking a road less traveled.”

  Her words sounded like something his father would have said. Ryker swallowed hard as emotion swelled in his chest. While he’d been actively mourning Colette, his father had slipped to the back of his mind. Ryker hadn’t thought of Dad in a long time…until Mia Zabrinski brought up the issue of land ownership.

  “I need to use the library’s Internet,” he said. “Seems hiding my head in the sandy, less-traveled roadbed might have created a problem only my brother can help me sort out.”

  “Your brother the firefighter?”

  Ryker nodded.

  “Since you mentioned him the other day, I started paying attention to the news about the fires in California. Bailey didn’t live too far from a couple of the worst spots. The whole state is suffering from a drought, so everything is super dry.”

  “That means I probably won’t be able to reach him, but I’ll try leaving a message.”

  She held up the camera. “May I finish looking at these before I give it back?”

  He trusted her more than he would his own mother. “Sure. You know where to find me.”

  He settled into the sturdy, metal and plastic chair at one of the computer stations. He quickly logged into the account he’d signed up for right after arriving in Marietta. Since he was from out-of-state, he’d had to pay an extra fee to get a library card, but Louise had assured him the money would be refunded when he left.

  “Holy crap,” he muttered, his heart thudding unpleasantly in against his chest the moment he spotted his bank balance.

  His bank account was nearly empty. A cursory review pointed to the fact his monthly stipends from his trust account hadn’t been deposited in three months. Since he’d been spending so little, he hadn’t bothered to check his balance, but all the normal, automatic withdrawals for health insurance, rent on the storage unit in Pittsburgh, and his retirement fund had continued—even without new money coming in.

  “What the hell?”

  He emailed his stepfather. “What’s up with my trust? No $ for 3 mos.?! What’s going on?”

  He dug around the bottom of his backpack for the cheap, low-tech phone he’d bought for emergencies. The battery was dead, of course, so he plugged it in.

  He didn’t waste his time calling his mother. Mom had abdicated any free will she might once have possessed while married to his father when she married Howard Margolis. In truth, Ryker had blocked the majority of his memories of his mother from his conscious mind. Occasionally, she’d wander through his dreams, especially when Ryker was thinking about Dad. But his mother’s defection—desertion—after Martin Bensen’s death, and her sudden, jolting defection to Camp Margolis, had caused a Grand Canyon-size rift between them. A void neither seemed inclined to acknowledge, much less heal.

  He scrolled backwards through his email and found two old messages from his brother.

  Headed to California. Sounds ugly. Will keep you posted.

  The second was even shorter. Sucks 2 b me.

  Flynn didn’t take shortcuts.

  He’d just opened his phone to try Flynn’s number when an email came in from his stepfather. “Yes. Sorry about that. Ran into some problems. Better not use that acct for awhile.”

  “What account would you have me use, asshat?” Ryker muttered under his breath. He looked around, hoping no kids were nearby.

  He jotted off a furious reply, demanding a full accounting today. Like that’ll happen. His fingers shook as he closed his account and signed off the computer. The image of his overdrawn bank balance flashed neon red in his mind. How could I be broke? Broke. The word made no sense. The last time he looked, he’d been rich.

  He grabbed his stuff, jumped to his feet and started toward the main entrance. Maybe fresh air would help him think. His Trust had been the one constant in his life—even when Mom failed him and Flynn took off to do his own thing, Ryker had been able to count on his safety net. Now, apparently, for some reason, it was gone.

  “Ryker,” a voice called.

  He swung around, searching until his eyes spotted Louise walking toward him, his camera in hand.

  “Oh, wow. I forgot you had it.”

  She passed the camera to him but didn’t let go right away. “That’s not like you. It’s not like you to leave without saying goodbye, either. Something’s wrong.”

  “Maybe everything.”

  She glanced at her watch. “It’s time for my break. Let me buy you a cup of coffee.”

  He didn’t argue. His life was in the toilet—and he was being evicted from his own land. He’d take any help he could find. “Thanks. I’d like that.”

  “I’ll meet you outside in a minute.”

  “Good. I need to make a call.”

  He trotted down the steps and jogged to a nearby park bench. He opened his phone, grateful to see a small charge. Enough to call his stepfather. His fingers drummed impatiently on the curved metal armrest as he waited.

  “Ryker. I was expecting this call weeks ago. Still playing the dilettante arteest, I see. Where are you?”

  “Montana. Where I’ve been camping on land that apparently no longer belongs to me, if a woman named Mia Zabrinski is to be believed.”

  “I don’t recognize the name, but…she could be right.”

  “How is that possible, Howard? I didn’t sell my land. I’m pretty damn sure Flynn didn’t sell my land.”

  “Actually, he did.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Watch your language, young man. Settle down or we won’t be discussing anything further.” Same autocratic, hardline Howard. A man Ryker had hated on sight the moment Mom introduced him to her two grieving sons.

  “Flynn would not sell our father’s property. We planned to subdivide the ten acres into two lots and both build cabins here for our retirement.”

  “Yes, well, plans change. The economy changes. As administrator of your trust, it’s incumbent upon me to make sure your investments are diverse and a mix of safe and aggressive. A couple…three years ago, a hiccup in the market made some of the riskier investments bottom out. In an attempt to recoup those losses, I needed capital. You were in Africa, I think. Your brother authorized the sale. It’s only dirt, Ryker. Once your portfolio is healthy again, you can buy another patch of dirt in any state you wish. There are fifty, you know. Montana is not Nirvana.”

  A blur of red clouded Ryker’s eyes. The color he associated with seeing Colette die. The pressure on his chest made his voice low and harsh. “You sold my land without my permission. Is that even legal?”

  “I told your mother you’d climb on your high horse and start spouting legalities when you found out. She promised me you’d understand. We have three kids in college, Ryker. Do you have any idea how much that costs?”

  “Yes. I do. Since you refused to pay for my college, I know exactly how much we’re talking about.”

  The last came out as a full-blown shout.

  Howard hung up. He had warned Ryker to watch his tone, and Howard Margolis never went back on a threat. He’d threatened to cut off Flynn and Ryker if they didn’t live at home and follow the career path he thought best. Since Flynn already had two years in Penn State and wasn’t about to change majors to become an accountant, he dropped out of college and got a job in the US Forest Service as a firefighter. Ryker spent his final months of high school feeling like an unwelcome stranger in his own home—a home Howard and his four children, Peter, Penny, Charlotte and Ben, more or less took over. And Mom let them.

  “But your room is so big,” Mom had
reasoned. “The girls will share it, and you and Peter can have Flynn’s room. Ben needs a room of his own because of his condition.” Some mysterious breathing problem that sucked up everybody’s time, attention and money. The fat, ugly kid reminded Ryker of the Garbage Pail Kids cards his friends used to collect. He’d hated the little brat and even wished he’d die.

  He wondered how old Benny was now? Was he attending college on Ryker’s dime, too?

  His fingers tightened on his phone. He was so damn furious he didn’t even hear Louise approach.

  “Ryker?”

  Her voice held a note of caution.

  He shoved the phone in his pocket. “Sorry.”

  “Bad news?”

  “You could say that. It appears my stepfather has been draining my trust fund dry over the past year…or longer.” Before Colette’s death, Ryker had been so in love he hadn’t paid any attention to his U.S. accounts. Since Ryker went off the deep end trying to make sense of life, love, loss, he’d lived mostly off the grid, using a pay as you go phone and spending cash for his purchases. “And there’s a good chance he sold the land I’ve been living on. A woman claiming to be the rightful owner dropped by this morning to tell me to get off her land or she’d call the sheriff.”

  She sat beside him. “You need a lawyer.”

  “I can’t afford one.” The reality of his situation struck hard. He didn’t have enough money for a train ticket home. “Maybe if I sell my bike…” No. He needed deeper pockets and more resources. He needed help. “Once my brother gets off the fire line in California, he’ll lend me whatever I need to get to the bottom of this.”

  Louise shook her head. “That might be too late. The fires sound like they’re getting worse, not better. If this lady is threatening to evict you, you need help now.” She pulled out her phone and punched in a number.

  Ryker started to protest but Louise held up one finger, in a bossy librarian manner. When the person on the other end answered, she said, “Good morning, dear. I need a favor. Text me Mia Zabrinski’s number. You mentioned she and Austen are opening a law office. I’m sending her her first client.”

  Mia Zabrinski?

  Ryker sat back and looked to the sky. A rumble of laughter started low in his belly and crowed upward, releasing in a loud guffaw. The connections in small towns never ceased to amaze him.

  “What on earth is so funny?” Louise asked.

  He wiped the tears from the corner of his eyes using the back of his hand. “Sorry about that. The irony is so rich. Mia Zabrinski is the woman who said she and her husband bought my land.”

  “Oh, my. Well, that’s not good.” Louise took a deep breath and let it out. “Plan B.” She held up her phone and pushed a name on the screen. “We’ll call Ren Fletcher, then. He helped Oscar and me straighten out a problem we had with my husband’s ex-partner. I’m not sure he’s taking new clients—he’s a newlywed, but he’ll point you in the right direction.”

  Ryker looked toward Copper Mountain. Where, he wondered, would that be?

  Chapter 3

  ‡

  “Mom. Stop. Seriously. This is useless. My head was full of wicked ugly drugs when I packed. I don’t know where anything is.”

  Mia, her mother, Sarah, and the kids’ dog, Roxy, had been digging through packing boxes stacked with pyramid-builder efficiency in one stall of the Zabrinskis’s two-car garage. Mom clamped her hands on her slightly widened hips impatiently. “That doesn’t sound like you. It must be here somewhere.”

  Mia closed her eyes. The person who packed these boxes was a stranger—a woman possessed by poisonous chemicals, and by an even-more-poisonous anger. She’d wanted to hide all evidence of the perfect life she’d once bragged about to any and all that would listen.

  “I have the best husband and most wonderful kids any woman could ever hope to have,” she’d claimed at the birthday party Edward had thrown for her…a few weeks before he broke the news that he was leaving her for another woman. Someone who “…isn’t married to her job,” he’d told her.

  After a year or so of trying to hold the fragments of her perfect life together—while battling cancer, her devastated children’s sadness and anger and her ex-husband’s joy, she’d finally admitted the truth: she hated her life. She hated the monstrous house she’d once claimed to love. She hated its five toilets that nobody could flush, let alone keep clean. She hated the pool that absorbed money as fast as it grew algae. She hated Edward and was ambivalent toward their children, who had turned, almost overnight, into snarly, contemptuous, demanding brats. She tolerated Roxy, the mocha-colored labradoodle, who, at least, had the good sense not to bite the hand that fed her. She kept Roxy—for companionship—and sent Hunter and Emilee to Marietta to stay with her parents while Mia set out to deconstruct her perfect life.

  In truth, although she blamed chemo for her brain fog, the drugs that may or may not have been necessary to rid her body of any trace of cancer were probably out of her system by the time she started packing. She’d done such a terrible job simply because she didn’t care about any of the crap she’d once valued so highly.

  Unfortunately, a few important items—such as the children’s birth certificates and the deed to the lot she and Edward bought to retire on—were nowhere to be found. She’d gotten duplicates of the birth certificates and immunization records in time to register the kids for school. And she probably could obtain a duplicate deed from the Crawford County Clerk as well. She just couldn’t tolerate the idea of having lost yet another piece of herself.

  She pawed through a bizarre mix of plastic superhero figures, hand-thrown bowls that Edward bought for her at the Big Marietta Fair a couple of years ago, kitchen knives—in their burly wooden block and a dozen or so cookbooks. “Hey, I could use these,” she said, yanking out the knife stand. “You don’t have a sharp knife in the house.”

  Mom shook her pretty bob, artfully streaked with pale gold highlights to mask the silver. “Don’t cast aspersions on my cutlery. It served me just fine when I was raising you four.”

  Mia wrestled the stupid cardboard flaps into submission. Edward had never, in all their moves, figured out how to layer three sides and slip the locking side into place. For some reason, that deficit seemed very telling given what happened in their marriage.

  “They served their purpose. Now, it’s time for something new and cutting edge, so to speak.”

  Her attempt at humor made her mother roll her eyes. Edward would have laughed. He always laughed at Mia’s stupid jokes…until he stopped.

  She kicked the unmarked box into the stack. “Forget it, Mom. I’ll get what I need from the County. Don’t you have to get ready for Bailey’s cake tasting?”

  Mia’s younger brother, Paul, was marrying his high school sweetheart, Bailey Jenkins, in a few weeks. Although they’d been apart for nearly fifteen years—and broke up under pretty horrible conditions, they’d reunited a few months ago and decided they couldn’t live without each other. Mia knew with certainty the sort of love they gushed about was an illusion. Bailey and Paul might be able to make a go of it—the way Mom and Dad had, but the chances were greater that they’d wind up like she and Ed. Divorced. Bitter. Disillusioned.

  Mom checked her watch. “Yes. And so do you,” she said pointedly. Mom had been diligent about getting Mia out of the house and involved in life. “Rachel at Copper Mountain Gingerbread Factory is setting up a special little tasting at her place on Main. Bailey’s expecting you, too. It’ll be charming and delightful.”

  “Sugar is not part of my diet anymore.”

  Mom stepped closer and gave Mia a one-arm hug. “A piece of cake isn’t going to bring the cancer back, honey. You’ve done everything in your power—and then some—to beat this. Everybody deserves a little sweetness in their life.”

  Mia ignored the “and then some” dig and tried to open herself to her mother’s energy and life-affirming attitude. Mom had argued long and hard for Mia to try the less invasive treatment that
had worked for her, but every woman’s body was different, and Mia had chosen the course of treatment she hoped meant she would live to be her mother’s age.

  Mom had had her own brush with cancer when Mia was in high school. Neither of her parents had been terribly forthcoming with Mia or her siblings at the time. “We didn’t want to worry you kids,” Mom had explained.

  “Didn’t work. We worried anyway,” Mia told her years later.

  Attempting to learn from her mother’s mistake, Mia had tried the opposite approach with Hunter and Emilee. She shared every report, scan result, biopsy pathology…too much, it turned out. Hunter had escaped the real life horror show by burying his head in his computer games, building imaginary worlds or slaughtering zombies. Emilee hid her fear by acting out, turning rebellious—as if pretending she was someone else would keep a worse reality from touching her.

  “You’ve beaten this, honey. You have to believe that and get back to living your life,” Mom stressed, squeezing so hard Mia thought she heard a vertebra or two realign. “We Sharpe women are fighters.”

  We’ve had to be, Mia thought. The Sharpe family…formerly Shapiro, originally from Germany, became more American on Ellis Island, but the genes of their Ashkenazi bloodline didn’t get the memo. Mom’s mother died of breast cancer when Mom was still in high school. Before she was thirty, Mom lost two aunts to the disease, and could name at least three cousins undergoing treatment. This made Sarah Joan Sharpe Zabrinski extraordinarily aware of her own body. She found the tiny lump before a mammogram picked it up. There wasn’t a thing called genetic testing back then. She followed the protocols suggested at the time. And, to everyone’s relief, Mom remained a cancer survivor.

  But Mia knew the odds were high Mom’s cancer would return. They’d had this discussion. Mia understood why her mother chose the wait-and-see option, but passive acceptance wasn’t part of Mia’s personality.

  “I got the message, Mom. I’m fighting with everything I’ve got. Kick-boxing, even.”

  “Fighting doesn’t serve any purpose if you’re not living, too, darling. Come to the cake tasting with me.”