Free Last Year's Bride (Montana Born Brides) by Anne McAllister Page A

came up toward the house from the highway. He needn’t have bothered. He heard them before he saw them, anyway.
    A huge generator truck grinding its way up the hill caught his attention first. He didn’t know what the hell the sound was—like an invasion of tanks—until the truck crested the hill. Cole had to rein in his horse who didn’t seem to like the new arrival any better than he did.
    Behind it had come a truck and a cou ple of sport utility four-wheel-drive vehicles. Nell was in one of them. Cole had felt a prickling along his shoulders and the back of his neck as the procession crawled past down below. Only when the road curved away, heading toward the ranch house so that he could see them no longer did he turn away. But the sound lingered.
    So did the knowledge that Nell was less than a mile away.
    “We’ve got potato salad your gran made, and some green beans. I didn’t burn the beans,” Sam said now. “They’re probably eatin’ better down at the house,” he offered after a moment as he ladled the burned chili into two bowls and set them on the table.
    Cole yanked off his boots, washed up, then snagged a beer from the refrigerator. “This’ll do.” He kicked out one of the chairs at the table and sat down.
    Sam shifted from one foot to the other, regarding the meal with less enthusiasm, but eventually he shrugged and sat down too. “Guess so.”
    The only sound was the clink of silverware on dishes, the pop and snap of the blaze in the fireplace across the room, and the click of Sam ’s old dog, Ted’s, toenails on the floor when he moved closer to the fire. Neither Cole nor his dad said a word.
    Sadie had once looked around the dinner table and asked, “If the two of you didn’t have me and Gran, would you ever talk?”
    The answer was, probably not.
    Not to each other anyway.
    When he was a boy, Cole had talked to his father. He could remember tagging after Sam, asking a million questions, eager to learn, to do whatever his dad did. And Sam had, back in those days, been more patient, easier to relate to than he’d become after Sadie’s mother, Lucy, had left. Maybe, Cole reflected, because Sam hadn’t wanted to answer the questions Cole and his brother had asked, like “When’s Lucy coming back?” and “Why did Lucy leave?” and “Did we do somethin’ to make her go? Did you?”
    Now he could appreciate his father ’s reticence. But he still couldn’t talk to Sam. Questions always sounded like accusations. And since Sam had had heart issues, no one wanted to rile him.
    Silence had become the best policy. Besides, over the years Cole had built his own share of walls. There wasn’t any good way around them or over them. So he helped himself to more potato salad and polished off his beer.
    “ You see that big generator truck?” Sam asked after he’d cleaned his plate. He leaned back in his chair and crossed his feet under the table.
    “ I saw it.” He started to ask why the hell Sam had agreed to it, but it would sound like an accusation, so he took another bite and chewed.
    “ Amazing the size of that thing,” Sam marveled. “They’re already makin’ a mess down there.”
    Cole ’s brows lifted slightly. Sam had gone down to the house? He had figured his father would be giving it as wide a berth as he was—for different reasons.
    “ Reckon they make a mess everywhere they go.” Cole cut a piece of his grandmother’s sourdough bread and mopped up the rest of his chili. He ate it, then lifted his gaze to meet Sam’s. “They better be payin’ well.”
    Sam ’s jaw tightened, as if Cole’s comment was an accusation which Cole supposed it was. “Well enough. Sadie did her homework. And Jane had plenty of statistics showing how the money spent in the area would help the whole community, not just us.”
    Cole ’s brows went up another notch. He’d never heard Sam use the word statistics in his entire life. Sam knew pretty much all there was to know about cattle on