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Before he could put the truck in drive, I stepped beside his door, gave him my best hey y’all smile, and if he wasn’t in the truck, I would have hugged his neck.
    “Thanks again, Beck. For being such a cowboy. You saved me.”
    He lowered his shades and nodded. “Anytime, Rainey Brown.”

 
     
    CHAPTER FOUR
     
    Rainey’s assumption that Beck was a cowboy stung hard. Of course if you looked at his lineage and the ranch where he was raised, she was correct. But when he’d gone away to college, he’d been naïve enough to think he could just take off and forget Montana and the land that had been in his family for a dozen generations. Something his father never forgave him for.
    As much as he tried to deny the Big Sky hold on him, it was always there, pulling him back by invisible threads and the absolute truth that once a cowboy, always a cowboy.
    His father had never had any patience with anybody, especially Beck. After he graduated from college, his father started hounding him about coming back to the ranch. Not because he needed the help. He thought Beck’s wanting to work in a restaurant instead of working the ranch was foolish.
    Beck kept telling his father he wasn’t ready to come back to Marietta, although that was exactly what he had planned on doing when the time was right. He’d wanted to see a little of the world before he came home to build his dream, to have his restaurant and maybe even raise another generation of Hartnett cowboys. That was when Beck began to believe it was possible to have the best of both worlds.
    Then, just before he came home for good, his father sold the place without even telling his mother, without telling Beck, and his parents moved into town. Always the go-between, Beck’s mother tried to smooth things over, said it was a natural progression of the times, their small place gobbled up by a mega ranch. She swore it had nothing to do with spite, but Beck wasn’t buying that. His father carried his grudge all the way to the grave, and thankfully, that was where the similarity between father and son ended.
    He opened a beer and propped his feet up on the porch railing. He did a lot of forgiving on this deck and a fair share of forgetting too. From where he sat, he couldn’t see his home place. But this was where he came to appreciate what he had and still feel connected to his family’s land that was now a part of the McLaughlin spread just on the other side of the lake. Sitting here, he found peace, even with all the bad shit that had happened. It was the closest thing he knew to the best of both worlds.
    Beck was a lucky bastard, he knew that, but today, the sky didn’t seem so blue. The mountains were unimpressive, even the beer seemed flat. At first he blamed it on the history Rainey hadn’t meant to stir up, but the truth was it was Rainey Brown herself.
    Beck didn’t know why he’d gotten so angry with her for lying to him, but he had. He hadn’t meant to eavesdrop when she was on the phone, well, maybe he had a little. But the office wasn’t as far away from the kitchen as she thought it was. And when she turns on that drawl, she does talk louder, and she was definitely turning it on for Dillon. Then he heard her say her name, Rainey Brown.
    At first he thought it was funny that she’d played out that whole Carolina bit to the hilt. Then he’d heard her call her boyfriend. No drawl, it was like she was begging the asshole to call her. Beck probably should have felt sorry for her, should have been a little nicer, but it pissed him off that she accepted that from someone who was supposed to love her. Pissed him off even more than she hadn’t trusted Beck enough to tell him her name, her real name. And he wanted her to trust him.
    Beck’s cell phone buzzed. “Hey, Dillon. You get the little lady all squared away?”
    “Dude, she’s hot. And lucky you came along when you did. I wouldn’t want my woman or my sister out there alone.”
    “You don’t have a