Good Together Read online

  © Copyright 2014 Carla Daum

  The Tule Publishing Group, LLC

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN 978-1-940296-16-6

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Carrigans of the Circle C

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The Carrigans of Circle C

  Excerpt: Close to Her Heart

  About the author

  Dedication

  For Myrna—we’ve been friends through teenaged angst, myriad boyfriends, marriage, motherhood, losses, successes and now... the empty nest! My life has been so much richer with you in it—and a lot more fun!

  Dear Reader,

  What should you expect when you pick up Good Together? A love story, of course, one that makes you believe in the amazing goodness of the human heart. But there is also an end-of-love-story, one that reminds us that not all beautiful things last forever.

  You should expect to revisit the Circle C ranch in Marietta, Montana. You’ll visit all four Carrigan sisters, as well as their austere father Hawksley. You’ll find out more about the troubles between Hawksley and his deceased wife Beverly. And you’ll get to spend some time with Sage Carrigan (from Promise Me, Cowboy) as well as her smoking hot boyfriend, Dawson O’Dell, and his precocious daughter, Savannah.

  You’ll also be introduced to the Tennessee Walking Horses at Bishop Stables, and I want to thank Rick at Rick Wies Stables for giving me and my guy a tour of his operations in Big Arm, Polson. These are indeed beautiful horses, and I hope I’ve managed to convey why Mattie Bishop loves them so.

  Two more stories will be coming this autumn for Dani and Callan Carrigan. You won’t believe the surprises in store. Make sure you sign up for both my newsletter, and Montana Born’s so you don’t miss them!

  Thanks for being someone who loves books and reading!

  CJ Carmichael

  Carrigans of the Circle C

  Promise Me, Cowboy (novella)

  Good Together (novel)

  Close To Her Heart (novel)

  Snowbound in Montana (novella)

  A Cowgirl’s Christmas (novel)

  CHAPTER ONE

  Mid-October

  Mattie Carrigan’s subconscious figured out the problem first. She was dreaming that she and her husband Wes were in the airport. “You screwed up the reservation,” he was yelling. “We’re booked on two separate flights.”

  She opened her eyes, heart racing, relieved to be in bed at their ranch in the Flathead Valley of Montana and not—as had been the case in her dream—trying desperately to get to Denver where one of their twin daughters had started college two months ago. They’d picked different schools, Portia and Wren, one moving south to Denver, the other west to Seattle, which drove Mattie crazy. It was difficult enough having her children leave the nest. Couldn’t they at least have chosen the same college?

  The night was still, dark, and silent. Curtains fluttered in the breeze from the open window to her left. Wes was in the bed to her right, his naked back a wall blocking the digital time display on their alarm clock.

  What time had he rolled in from his latest rodeo? This one, the livestock exposition and rodeo in Billings, was about a seven-hour drive from home. So if he’d left at five, like he’d said he would, he should have been back before she’d gone to bed around one a.m.

  Maybe he’d delayed his departure to have dinner with friends. Or had trouble with the rig. In either case, he must have been dead-tired when he got here. Yet, judging from the Head and Shoulders scent of him, he’d taken the time to shower before crawling under their covers.

  She wanted to move closer and snuggle up against his warm, tanned skin. But something—a nasty stew of resentment, fear and hurt—stopped her. He might have called to let her know he’d been delayed.

  Again.

  Pushing aside her covers, Mattie slipped to the bathroom down the hall. A weak nightlight—installed eighteen years ago when the twins were babies—kept her from stubbing her toes on Wes’s boots. Damn, why hadn’t he taken them off in the mudroom?

  She’d seen his bull-riding scores posted on the Internet and they’d been low, so he wouldn’t have brought home any prize money. He hadn’t for the past six months. A sign that at thirty-nine, he was getting too old to be a rodeo cowboy.

  The rosemary and bergamot infusion sticks on the back of the toilet tank couldn’t mask the odor of horse manure and cowboy sweat that permeated the pile of Wes’s clothes on the tiled floor. As she peed, she stared at his faded Wrangler jeans and old blue and white checked shirt.

  Not that long ago—definitely less than a year—Wes would have woken her up when he got home, no matter how late. They’d make love and then he’d tell her how things had gone. The bulls he’d drawn and the scores he’d made. He’d fill her in on the latest gossip—who’d been injured and who was riding high. And the romances. Someone sleeping with someone else’s wife... it happened all the time.

  Mattie stared at her reflection as she washed her hands. The low light was flattering, masking the new age-freckles that had popped out this summer. Now that she was almost forty, she had to be more careful with her sunscreen, she supposed, though she’d never been one for fussing about her appearance.

  Her sisters would say she relied too much on the looks she’d inherited from their mother. And she knew it was true, and that she’d been lucky. Good bones and teeth, thick hair and pretty eyes. She’d taken these assets for granted, never guessing that one day they wouldn’t be enough for her husband.

  Because that had to be the reason they were drifting apart, right?

  He no longer found her attractive. Maybe he’d found someone new...?

  Mattie put a hand to her chest, feeling the pain as she entertained this new suspicion... that her husband had fallen for somebody new.

  But then common sense prevailed. This was Wes, her husband of nineteen years. They were a team. Had been a team forever. Raising their girls. Running the ranch. They did everything together. And he valued that as much as she did.

  She’d never doubted Wes in all the nineteen years of their marriage, even though they’d spent a lot of that time apart. And she wouldn’t doubt him now.

  They were just moving into a new stage of life, that was the problem. Every couple went through this when their children moved away from home. For sure she and Wes were handling the change differently. She was clinging in every way possible—text messaging the girls many times a day, sending care packages from home—whereas Wes rarely mentioned them. Wren said he hadn’t called her once since she’d left.

  Mattie hung back in the doorway, watching Wes sleep, feeling oddly distant, like she was observing a stranger. They’d met at a rodeo, when she was only eighteen. Ended up married and pregnant before either one of them was twenty. Not a recipe for mari
tal success.

  And yet, they’d defied the odds.

  Just a year ago she would have called them happy. Wes was her partner, the father of her children, her best friend. They told each other everything.

  But not anymore.

  “Mat? What’s going on?” Wes lifted his head from his pillow. His dark hair all but covered his eyes.

  “I had a bad dream.”

  “Worried about the kids?” His head flopped back. “Don’t. They’re fine.”

  He always said that. She was the one who worried. But this time, it wasn’t about Wren and Portia. “We need to talk.”

  Wes groaned. “In the morning. Get back to bed. It’s damned freezing in here. Did you leave the window open again?”

  She loved fresh air when she slept, but Wes preferred to be toasty warm. That meant open windows in the summer, but come October when the cold winds blew off the Mission Mountains, they had to be closed.

  She pushed aside the curtains, then cranked the lever until the window was flush with the wall. Quietly she crept back under the covers, loving the coolness of the sheets on her side of the bed. On her back, she stared at the ceiling, waiting to see if Wes would turn and pull her into his arms.

  He didn’t.

  * * *

  Before dawn, Mattie was up, dressed for work in old jeans and a flannel shirt. She stood by the bedroom window as she fastened her buttons. In the faint light she could see mist hanging low to the ground and clinging to the Mission mountains. It would be cold outside. She slipped an extra pair of socks on her feet.

  Wes was still sleeping and she closed the door after herself so he wouldn’t be disturbed.

  He generally slept late after a rodeo. She never did. Nothing happened in her day until the horses had been fed. Wes insisted this was ridiculous because they had hired men to do the morning chores. Well, these days it was only Jake. But Mattie had been raised on a ranch and the rules on the Circle C had been inviolate. No one eats before the animals.

  Mattie brought up the twins the same way. From a young age, no matter the weather, she’d bundled them up and taken them to the stables with her. They’d adored trailing the feed cart as she doled out rations, petting the barn cats, and jumping in the wood chips that were used for bedding. But when they hit their teen years, suddenly Wren became a night-hawk and couldn’t drag herself out of bed any earlier than fifteen minutes before the school bus arrived, while Portia’s new hair and makeup routine required at least an hour of prep time , rendering her unavailable for anything as prosaic as ranch chores.

  Mattie missed all of this—the early childhood years and the stormy teenaged years—with an intensity that made her chest ache. Something vital had been scooped out of her body the day she and Wes drove the twins to the Missoula airport. Was she always going to feel this hollow?

  After filling a to-go mug with coffee that had been programed the night before to brew fresh at six a.m., Mattie almost tripped on the sleeve of a jacket that had been tossed toward a stool—and only partially hit its target. The light navy windbreaker was Wes’s. She bent over to pick it up, wrinkling her nose at the scent of tobacco smoke—he must have worn it into a bar. Intending to hang it on one of the pegs in the mudroom, she paused when she noticed a key had fallen from one of the pockets.

  She picked it up, frowning because their house keys were silver-colored, not brass. Besides, Wes kept all his keys on a ring. So what was this for?

  She placed it on the butcher block island and went to put her boots on.

  * * *

  Mattie’s spirits lifted the moment she stepped outside. The crisp air was like a health tonic, and everywhere she looked there was beauty. From the long-needled, elegant ponderosa pine trees that had been planted by Wes’s mother to buffer the house from the road, to the reflective, aquamarine waters of Flathead Lake to the north. A film of ice coated the brick path that led from the back of the house through a break in the lilac hedge to the graveled farm yard, and her boots skidded a few times as she walked. Another sign that the first snow would be coming soon—probably before Halloween.

  Wes’s truck was parked in his usual spot, the trailer door left open after he’d unloaded Whiskey Chaser. With the rising sun behind her, she saw the fields glistening brightly and it took a few moments for Mattie to locate the golden quarter horse gelding grazing with the rest of the herd at the far end of the north pasture.

  Chaser was a relatively young horse, and this was only the second year Wes had ridden him for bulldogging. Mattie wondered if he was the reason Wes had performed so poorly lately. But last season, Chaser’s first, he’d done pretty well.

  Mattie slid open the main door to the barn and unzipped her insulated vest at the welcoming warmth. It was designed and built over thirty years ago, and she was impressed anew every time she stepped inside. Her father, Hawksley Carrigan, a practical cattle rancher who owned more than ten times the land of the Bishops, would never have approved of the expensive wood interior, the brick floors, the airy open-topped stalls with their wrought iron gates.

  Wasteful. Extravagant. She could hear the adjectives in her father’s voice, but that didn’t prevent her from appreciating the attractive setting.

  Jake Webster was already in the feed room, to the right of the main door, doling rations into the cart which everyone in the family referred to as the “gravy train.” It was built on wheels, so it was a simple matter to push it down the broad main corridor and measure out the feed and supplement according to the charts outside each stall door.

  “Morning Jake.” Mattie picked up a scoop and started filling the back side of the cart.

  Jake had been hired by Wes’s father and was in his late fifties. His hair was thick and straight—and pure gray. He shaved every day, but in the evening, so he had a perpetual grazing of stubble over his long, lean face. When he’d been younger and his hair was dark, this look had been rather attractive. Now, however, the stubble merely accented his age.

  He was still lean, though, and healthy, getting as much done in a working day as he ever had.

  “I see Wes made it home last night. Where was he this time?” The note of disapproval in Jake’s voice was customary any time he referred to Wes’s “other” life, as a rodeo cowboy. Jake considered Wes’s bulldogging and bull-riding to be a ridiculous and dangerous hobby, whereas running a horse breeding and training operation was a real man’s career.

  Mattie sometimes felt the same way. Over the years there’d certainly been many times when she’d wished Wes spent more time at home.

  But whenever she went to watch him at one of the rodeos, she could understand why he was hooked. He was so talented, and he knew how to play to the crowd. His rides always earned him roars of approval, no matter the score. Over the years, he’d made a lot of friends, too. His rodeo family meant almost as much to him as his real-life one did.

  “Billings,” she kept her answer brief, knowing where the conversation was heading and not looking forward to it.

  “Don’t suppose he bought us any yearlings while he was out there?”

  The Northern International Livestock Exposition, where Wes had gone for the rodeo, also held auctions for some of the best horses and yearlings that money could buy. Here was another sore point with Jake. In the old days—when Garth Bishop was in charge—they’d kept more than a hundred horses. Now they were down to twenty-two.

  She shrugged. “Not sure. We haven’t had a chance to talk yet.” But she’d be surprised if he had. “Look at it this way—no new horses means less work for both of us.”

  Jake snorted. “Hardly worth you guys paying me a fulltime salary if this place doesn’t require fulltime work.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Yeah, you’ve got to stop spending so much time on your iPhone, Jake.”

  He gave her an affronted look. Then they both laughed. She and Wes had had to practically threaten to fire him before he’d finally agreed to accept the thing and keep it charged and in his pocket while he was wor
king.

  “This way, you run into trouble, and you can call for help, quick,” Wes had told him.

  “More like, you can reach me anytime to give me more work to do,” Jake had grumbled. But the man wasn’t lazy. It was the infringement on his privacy and his innate dislike of change—especially any change involving technology—that had made him reluctant to accept the phone.

  A lot of the older ranchers in Montana were suspicious of change, Mattie’s father included. Rich newcomers from places like California and Washington were buying up the relatively cheap Montana land for hobby ranches. Money to spare, and a lack of appreciation for the way things were done around here, led to a lot of animosity toward the interlopers... and the fancy contraptions they brought with them.

  But over time, Jake had started to appreciate certain features that came with the phone. Like the weather app. And sports updates. Portia had even taught him how to download apps for video games.

  “Ah well,” Jake sighed. “Maybe this winter I should sell my horse and buy me a nice little trailer. Head south to the desert and soak up some rays.”

  About this time of year, Jake always made the same threat. Mattie didn’t take him seriously. She couldn’t imagine Jake being happy if he wasn’t busy working with horses. And if he hadn’t left Montana ten years ago, after his wife Chris died, she didn’t figure he ever would.

  About an hour later, all the horses had been fed, their water checked, and most of the stalls were mucked out. Mattie checked her watch. “Think I’ll head inside. Wes should be up by now.”

  Jake made no reply to that. But he stopped working and straightened, meeting her gaze with an expression that was partly a frown. And partly concern. To Mattie it felt as if a sheet of ice had been slipped down her back.

  Jake’s look told her that he’d noticed the new distance between her and her husband.

  Which meant it wasn’t in her head.

  Their problems were real.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The smell of burned toast and eggs greeted Mattie as she replaced her boots with a pair of gray canvas slip-ons. After washing up at the stainless steel sink in the mudroom, she headed for the kitchen. Wes was at the island, his head bent over his iPad as he finished up his breakfast with a cup of coffee.