town, looking pale and bleakly determined not to get married no matter what he had to do to avoid it. And those were just the stills—there were videos, too. In one thirty-second wonder, he could be seen climbing into his rusted-out pickup truck, right there in the Presbyterians’ gravel parking lot, and in the next, he was heading for the horizon, a dust plume spiraling behind his rig.
Yep, that was him all right, beating a hasty retreat, like a yellow-bellied coward on the run.
That impression rested sour on the back of his tongue.
Someday, he suspected, when Brylee met up with her own personal Mr. Right, got hitched for real, and had herself a houseful of kids, she’d thank him for stopping the wedding and thereby preventing certain catastrophe.
At present, though, that particular “someday” seemed a long way off.
Weary to the aching marrow of his bones, Hutch logged off the internet, pushed back from the rolltop desk that had been in his family since the Lincoln administration, and stood up, stretching luxuriously before retrieving his coffee mug and ambling out of the little office behind the ranch house kitchen.
Taking Slade’s advice, he’d kept a low profile since the day that, like the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the 9/11 attacks, would forever live in infamy. Against his own better judgment, he hadn’t gone to see Brylee in person, called her on the phone, or even sent her an email.
He hadn’t done much guilt-wallowing, either, which might be proof that he really was a “selfish, heartless, narcissistic bastard,” as members of Team Brylee universally agreed, at least online. By now, the group probably had its own secret handshake.
Hutch regretted hurting Brylee, of course, and he certainly wished he could have spared her the humiliation of that very public breakup, but his overriding emotion was a sense of relief so profound that it still made his head reel even after a week.
Train wreck, averted.
Apocalypse, canceled.
Check and check.
Running into Kendra Shepherd at Slade and Joslyn’s place after the debacle had definitely thrown him, however—slammed the wind out of him as surely as if he’d been hurled off the back of a bad bull or a sun-fishing bronco and landed on hard ground.
He’d loved Kendra once and he’d believed she loved him.
He’d expected to spend the rest of his life with the woman, happy to make babies, run Whisper Creek Ranch with Kendra at his side, a full partner in every way.
Instead, enter Jeffrey Chamberlain, he of the nominal titles and English estates, practically a prince to a woman like Kendra, brought up in a small Montana town by a grandmother who resented the responsibility of raising her errant daughter’s child. Chamberlain had been visiting friends at the time—Hollywood types with delusions of living the ranching life in grand style—and damned if Sir Jeffrey hadn’t struck up a conversation with Kendra at the post office one fine day and parlayed that, over the coming weeks, into a romance so epic that it could only have ended badly.
Not that Kendra had fallen for Chamberlain right away—at the get-go, she’d insisted he was just a friend, interesting and funny. Hutch, though nettled, had reluctantly—okay, grudgingly—accepted the explanation.
Down deep, he’d been out-of-his-gourd jealous, though, and soon enough the bickering commenced.
Chamberlain, knowing full well what he’d set in motion, had found excuses to stay on in Parable and he just bided his time while things got worse and worse between Hutch and Kendra.
Inevitably, the bickering escalated to fiery yelling matches and, worse, single words, terse and biting, punctuated by long, achy silences.
Eventually, Kendra had given Hutch an ultimatum—trust her or leave her.
He’d chosen the latter option, being a stubborn, hard-headed cowboy from a long line of stubborn, hard-headed cowboys, never really thinking she’d go at all, let alone stay gone; everybody knew they belonged together, he and Kendra. After a semidecent interval, though, she’d hauled off and eloped with Jeffrey.
There were still days—moments, really—when Hutch couldn’t believe it had come to that, and this was one of them.
Now, standing in his kitchen, he closed his eyes, remembering.
Kendra had called him three days after tying the knot down in Vegas.
Even then he’d wanted to say, “This isn’t right. Come home.”
But he’d been too cussed proud to take the high road.
He’d wished “Lady Chamberlain” well and hung up in her ear. Hard. They’d seen each other numerous times afterward, the way things shook out, especially after Chamberlain bought his way out of the marriage and crossed the pond to resume his