was looking to hire someone to do the yard work this year. “I told him we could do it,” Montana said. Cooking and yard work were how she could sleep at night, knowing she couldn’t pay her aunt and uncle much in rent.
“Apparently, this boy has some magic system Bob wants to try.” Aunt Jackie sounded like she’d believe it when she saw it.
“Okay,” Montana said. “But I feel bad.”
“You can still feed the chickens and milk the goats,” Aunt Jackie said. “Don’t worry, Ana. There’s plenty to do.” Something scratched on her end of the line, and she said, “Oops, I have to go. See you in a few minutes.”
“Yeah,” Montana said, letting her aunt’s nickname for her flow through her. She hadn’t been called Ana in a long time, and the name took her back to sweltering Texas days like the ones she’d experienced last summer.
Aunt Jackie and Uncle Bob had lived in Three Rivers for a very long time. Montana used to come visit her in the summer when her mother would take all the children for an extended vacation.
Later, Montana had realized that her mother got the kids out of the house for as much of the summer as possible so Daddy didn’t kill one of them.
She had three siblings, and they’d all somehow landed in Texas.
None as far north as her, though, and they didn’t live with long-lost relatives while trying to raise a teenager by themselves.
Montana loved her siblings. What they’d done carried enough blame to keep her from texting them very often, and she didn’t like dwelling on the cracks in her family relationships.
She finished putting together dinner just as Uncle Bob walked in the back door. “Somethin’ smells amazing,” he said, his Texas drawl as thick as honey. He grinned at her, and she hugged him.
He was a big, tall, wide wall of a man, and he ran an outdoor outfitters store in town. Aunt Jackie did some work with him on the weekends, but otherwise, she worked as a nurse at the hospital in town.
“It’s all ready,” she said. “Aunt Jackie said she’ll be here any minute with the bread.” She started for the hallway, where a narrow doorway led to a set of even narrower steps. Her room sat at the top of those, and Montana could admit she didn’t hate it. Only two bedrooms and a single bathroom existed on the second level of the farmhouse, the rest of it a sprawling one-story rambler.
Her bedroom had a slanted ceiling on one side, and Aurora’s had a mirrored slant on the other side of her bedroom. The bathroom sat between them, and Montana felt like she and Aurora could get out of her aunt and uncle’s hair with their second-floor bedrooms. She’d loved the slanted ceiling as a child, and she did now as an adult too.
“Don’t wait for me,” she said. “I’m eating at a business meeting tonight.”
“Okay,” Uncle Bob called after her. “I’ll be outside with Steven for a bit.”
“All right.” Montana went upstairs and started searching through her closet for something to wear that said professional business meeting and that wasn’t made of denim.
Montana pulled up to the massive mansion-like homestead at Shiloh Ridge and found Bishop sitting on the top step as if men like him did such things. “Play it cool,” she told herself.
She hadn’t been able to go downstairs wearing a denim skirt like she’d planned. She’d be peppered with questions from everyone in the house, including the lawn man Uncle Bob had hired and then invited to stay for dinner. Didn’t they all understand that she’d rather not admit that this business meeting was really dinner with a good-looking cowboy?
That good-looking cowboy rose to his feet and came down the steps, making Montana’s breath lodge somewhere behind her tongue. He’d said some pretty cheesy lines that day, but Montana hadn’t been flirted with in a while, and she hadn’t minded them so much.
She finally opened her door when she realized she was still sitting in her truck.
“You look nice,” Bishop said as he approached.
Montana looked down at her clothes. They were clean, at least, but she’d ended up wearing a practically white-washed pair of jeans with a blouse as green as an emerald. It had pure white stitching on the sleeves, collar, and hem, and Montana wore it when she wanted to draw out the color in her eyes and provide strong contrast for her sometimes embarrassingly blonde hair.
“That’s hardly a compliment,” she