Cowboy Country: The Creed Legacy / Blame It on the Cowboy

The shop looked magical in the moonlight. Like some enchanted workshop, where elves ran up ruffly cotton-print aprons on miniature sewing machines and made more goats’ milk soap whenever the supply was low.

Carolyn gave a little snicker at the thought.

She made the aprons, and they bought the soap from a woman who ran a small goat farm a few miles out of town. A few elves would certainly come in handy, though, even if it wasn’t Christmas.

She loved the shop; it grounded her, like sewing and riding horseback usually did, and she loved the twinkling quiet surrounding her.

A shaft of silvery light struck the batik of the Native weaver, high on the wall, illuminating the image as though to convey some message.

There was no message, Carolyn thought. Not in the picture, at least.

The dream, now? That had clearly been a manifesto from her subconscious mind.

As usual, she wanted what she couldn’t have.

Right or wrong, for better or worse, she wanted Brody Creed.

She gave a loud sigh of frustration, set her mug of tea down on the glass top of the handmade-jewelry display and shoved all ten fingers into her hair, pulling just a little.

Why couldn’t she just let go? It had been over seven years, after all, since that awful morning when she’d awakened in a guest-room bed at Kim and Davis’s place to find Brody gone.

At the time, she’d figured he was merely out in the kitchen making coffee, or even whipping up some breakfast. He was a fair cook, and he seemed to enjoy it.

She’d gotten out of bed, pulled on a robe and headed for the kitchen, in search of the man she loved.

Instead, she’d found the note.

Have to go, Brody had written. Something came up.

That was it.

Have to go, something came up.

The tears that had threatened before, after the dream, sprang up again. Carolyn hugged herself, chilled, and gazed at her own woebegone face, reflected in the big mirror behind the counter.

“Nobody likes a crybaby,” she told her image.

And then she cried anyway.

* * *

“WHERE’D YOU GET the dog?” Conner asked the next morning, with affable interest, as Brody carefully lifted the bathed, brushed and still-skinny critter down from the passenger side of his truck, onto the grassy stretch of ground between the main ranch house and the barn.

“His name’s Barney,” Brody replied. He’d hung that handle on the stray after taking him by the vet’s office that morning for a checkup. And he’d been so glad over the dog’s clean bill of health that he’d named him after the doctor. “He showed up at my door last night, in pretty sorry condition, so I took him in.”

Conner grinned and crouched to look the dog in the eyes, much as Brody had done the night before, when Barney turned up on his doorstep.

“Well, hello there, Barney,” Conner said, putting out his hand.

To Brody’s mingled amazement and irritation, the dog laid a paw in Conner’s outstretched palm.

Man and dog shook hands.

“I’ll be damned,” Brody muttered, impressed, then worried. Maybe whoever had taught Barney to shake hands was out combing the countryside for him, right now. Maybe somebody loved him, wanted him back.

Conner, meanwhile, stood up straight again. “I guess Doc must have checked for a microchip and all that,” he said.

“First thing he did,” Brody replied. “No chip, no identification of any kind.”

“You gonna keep him?” Conner ventured, as Valentino trotted out of the back door, joined the group and sniffed Barney from head to tail.

“Yeah,” Brody said. “I’ll keep him. Unless his original owner tracks him down, anyway. Doc’s assistant took his picture, and she’ll upload it onto several lost-pet websites, just in case...”

“But?” Conner prompted.

“But my gut says he’s in need of a home.”

“Mine, too,” Conner agreed. He had been frowning until then, but suddenly, the grin was back. “It’ll be good for you,” he preached. “The responsibility of looking after the poor critter, I mean.”

The words, though he knew they were well-meant, raised Brody’s hackles a little just the same. Was he going to be the Irresponsible One for the rest of his life, while Conner got to play the Good Brother?

Before he could figure out a way to answer, Davis came barreling down the hill in his truck from his and Kim’s place. Kim rode beside him, her smile visible even through the dusty grunge covering the windshield.

“Kim’s pinch-hitting for Tricia today at the shop,” Conner said.

Brody felt a pang of alarm, remembering how tuckered out his sister-in-law had seemed the day before. “Tricia isn’t having trouble, is she?”

“No,” Conner replied, raising a hand to greet the new arrivals. “She just enjoyed yesterday so much that she wanted today to be just like it.”

Brody chuckled, partly amused and partly relieved.

An instant later, though, the worry was back. Women were fragile creatures, it seemed to him. Lisa, for instance, couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred and ten pounds sopping wet; she hadn’t stood a chance against two tons of speeding steel, not driving that little car of hers.

He’d always had access to his inheritance and his share of the ranch profits, even when he was staying as far away from Lonesome Bend as he could. Why hadn’t he gotten her a sturdier rig to drive?

“Brody,” Conner said suspiciously. “Where’s your head right now?”

“You know where,” Brody replied, as Davis parked the truck and he and Kim got out of the vehicle and started toward them. Kim was wearing a lightweight sweater with big pockets, where her impossibly small dogs, Smidgeon and Little Bit, were riding.

Barney whimpered and moved behind Brody, leaning against the backs of his legs. He could feel the animal trembling.

Seeing that, Kim smiled, crouched down and set the two Yorkies on the ground. Ignoring Valentino, who was probably considered old news by now, they wagged their stumpy little tails and one of them growled comically.

“Now, come on out here,” Kim cajoled, addressing Barney. “Smidgeon and Little Bit aren’t going to hurt you.”

Kim definitely had a way with animals, and Barney’s reaction was proof of that. Probably drawn by her gentleness, as well as his own curiosity, he came out of hiding to stand at Brody’s side. His plume of a tail wagged once, tentatively.

The Yorkies nosed him over and then lost interest and tried to start a game of tag with Valentino. They were absolutely fearless, those two. Or maybe their brains were just so small that they couldn’t grasp the difference between their size and Valentino’s.

“Come have supper with us tonight,” Kim told Brody, when she was standing upright again. “You look a little ribby to me, like this dog.”

Brody’s mouth watered at the mere suggestion of Kim’s cooking, not to mention a chance to avoid another lonely evening.

“Is this a setup?” he asked good-naturedly. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that everybody was hoping he and Carolyn would get together.

“Of course it is,” Kim replied with a laugh, looking at Brody but slipping an arm around Davis’s waist and giving him a brief squeeze. “Why fight it?”

Brody laughed, too, despite the little thrill that quickened in the pit of his stomach at the thought of being in the same house with Carolyn. He folded his arms and countered, “Why not?”

Kim punched him. “You’re just like your uncle,” she said.

Whatever that meant.

That he was a stubborn cuss, probably.

The quality came free with the Creed name, one to a customer but guaranteed for life.

Conner and Davis, meanwhile, moved off toward the house, where Tricia surely had a pot of coffee brewing.

Smidgeon, Little Bit and Valentino ambled along after them, leaving Brody and Kim in the yard, with Barney.

“Carolyn’s probably wise to your tricks, Kim,” Brody ventured, serious now, his voice a little husky. “She’ll know you’ve invited me to supper, and she’ll think of some excuse to get out of it.”

Kim, still a striking woman in her mid-fifties, shook her head and mimicked his stance by folding her own arms. “Could you be any more negative, Brody Creed?” she asked. “You and Carolyn are perfect for each other. Everybody seems to know that but the two of you.”

Brody recalled kissing Carolyn the day before, and an aftershock went through him. When it was over, she’d looked as if he’d slapped her, and he’d made some smart-ass remark about not being sorry for doing it.

Oh, yeah. He was zero-for-zero in Carolyn’s books, no doubt about it.

Kissing her had only made things worse.

He just hadn’t been able to resist, that was all.

“Brody?” Kim prompted, evidently reading his face.

He smiled, laid a hand on Kim’s shoulder. “I’m all right,” he told her. “Stop worrying about me, okay?”

“Okay,” she said, in a tone of bright irony. “Are you coming to our place for supper tonight or not?” Not waiting for an answer, Kim added, “Six-thirty, on the dot and don’t be late.” She looked around, parodied a frown. “If Davis Creed thinks he gets to keep Smidgeon and Little Bit with him while I’m in town, covering for Tricia at the shop, he’s got another think coming.”

With that, she turned and headed resolutely for the house.

Brody watched her go, one side of his mouth quirked up in a grin. It was anybody’s guess whether Carolyn would accept Kim’s supper invitation or make up some excuse to get out of it, but he sure hoped it would be the former.

He wanted to see Carolyn again, even though the idea pretty well scared the crap out of him.

“Women,” he told Barney ruefully.

Barney gave a little yip of agreement.

Brody chuckled, bent to ruffle the dog’s ears and the two of them started for the house, where the others were gathered and the coffee was on.

* * *

“YOU HAVE DARK CIRCLES under your eyes,” Kim announced, the moment she stepped over the threshold at the shop. “Aren’t you sleeping well?”

Carolyn smiled as her friend took the pair of tiny dogs from her sweater pockets and set them down carefully on the floor, where they proceeded to romp like a couple of kittens.

Winston, long since resigned to the occasional presence of the canine contingent, ignored them.

“I slept just fine, thank you very much,” Carolyn lied, in belated reply to Kim’s question. She’d eventually managed to get to sleep again the night before, but she’d promptly tumbled right back into a variation of her dream. This time, with the added fillip of Brody riding through a conglomeration of suitors and shopping carts on horseback, reaching her side and then leaning down to hook an arm around her and haul her up into the saddle in front of him.

The dream hadn’t stopped there, either. With no noticeable transition, Brody and Carolyn were alone in a forest, both lying naked in a stand of deep, summer-fragrant grass, making love.

She’d awakened in the throes of a very real orgasm, which was downright embarrassing, even if she was alone at the time.

“I don’t believe you,” Kim said, moving behind the sales counter to put away her purse.

Smidgeon and Little Bit were rolling across the center of the floor now, in a merry little blur of shiny fur and pink topknot ribbon.

Carolyn, thinking of the spontaneous climax, was blushing. “Would I lie to you?” she retorted, with an attempt at a light tone.

There weren’t any customers in the shop yet, and she’d been keeping her mind off the nightmare/dream by catching up on the bookkeeping on the store’s computer.

“Depends,” Kim replied mischievously. “How about joining Davis and me for supper tonight? I’m thawing out a batch of my world-famous chicken-and-pork tamales.”

A bar of that old song “Suspicion” played in Carolyn’s head. “Hard to resist,” she admitted. Kim’s tamales were fantastic. “Are Conner and Tricia coming, too?”

Kim nodded, but she averted her eyes and was busying her hands rearranging costume jewelry in the glass case.

“And Brody?” Carolyn asked, rather enjoying herself, despite all her nerves being on red alert.

“Maybe,” Kim said, her manner still evasive. “Did you know he adopted a dog? Brody, I mean? It’s a very good sign. He really is serious about settling down in Lonesome Bend—”

“Dogs travel pretty well,” Carolyn said, amused and, at the same time, wickedly excited over the perfectly ordinary prospect of sitting across a supper table from Brody Creed.

The bastard.

Kim straightened, looked at her directly. Her smile was a little weak. “You think he’s planning to leave again? Even though he’s building that big house and a fancy barn to go with it?”

Carolyn’s casual shrug was, in reality, anything but casual. “He could always sell the house and barn, if he wanted to move on,” she reasoned. In truth, though, she didn’t like the idea of Brody going back to his other life any more than Kim did, and that surprised her. The prospect should have been a relief, shouldn’t it?

Kim’s gentle blue eyes filled with tears. “Brody’s had a tough time of it,” she said.

Carolyn needed a few moments to recover from that tidbit—she’d always imagined Brody whooping it up, as the cowboys liked to say, riding bulls and winning gleaming buckles and bedding a different woman every night.

“How so?” she asked, finally, in an oddly strangled voice.

Kim sniffled, squared her shoulders and straightened her spine. “I can’t say,” she told Carolyn, in a forthright tone. “I’m not supposed to know what Brody went through, and neither is Davis. He’d be furious if he knew Conner had told us.”

“Oh, boy,” Carolyn said.

“He’ll tell you himself, one of these days,” Kim said, with new certainty. “And that’s the way it should be.”

Just then, the bell over the front door jingled and Smidgeon and Little Bit ran, yapping, to greet whomever was there.

Kim rolled her eyes and chased after them. “Little devils,” she muttered, with abiding affection.

Carolyn smiled, but on the inside, she was shaken.

She knew better than to go to supper at her friends’ place, since it was a given that Brody would be there. Just being around him was playing with fire, especially in light of that stolen kiss—and last night’s dream.

She’d be there, just the same.

Maybe she’d take in the gypsy skirt—just baste it to fit temporarily—and wear that.

* * *

BRODY WATCHED WITH a combination of affection and envy, that evening, in Kim and Davis’s kitchen, while Conner and Tricia flirted like a pair of teenagers.

It was enough to make Brody roll his eyes.

Get a room, he wanted to say.

Davis, sitting beside him at the unset table, nudged him with one elbow. “You remember how it was with those two?” Brody’s uncle asked, keeping his voice low. “When they first noticed each other, I mean?”

“I remember,” Brody said, grinning a little. A stranger would have given odds that Conner and Tricia would never get together, but everybody who knew them wondered when the wedding would be.

Was Carolyn going to show up for supper or not?

He hoped so.

He hoped not.

“You and Carolyn remind me of them,” Davis said, with a twinkle in his eyes.

That got Brody’s attention, all right. He swiveled in his chair to look at his uncle with narrowed eyes. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Just what I said,” Davis replied, undaunted. “You know me, son. If I say it, I mean it.”

Tricia snapped a dish towel at Conner, who laughed, and the dogs all started barking, while an apron-wearing Kim tried to shush the lot.

It was happy chaos.

It was a family.

Again, Brody felt that bittersweet sense of mingled gratitude and loneliness.

“Give things a chance, boy,” Davis told him, pushing back his chair and heading for the back door. His uncle had always been able to read him and, clearly, that hadn’t changed.

Brody hadn’t heard the car drive up, what with all the barking and shushing, dish-towel snapping and laughing, but Davis must have.

He opened the door just as Carolyn was raising one hand to knock.

She looked shy and sweet standing there, wearing black jeans and a gossamer white shirt. Her sun-streaked hair was pulled back in a French braid and, unless Brody missed his guess, she had on just a touch of makeup, too.

“Hi,” she said to Davis, with a little wobble in her voice, shoving a large plastic food container into his hands and not sparing so much as a glance for Brody. “I brought pasta salad. It’s from the deli at the supermarket, but I’m sure it’s good.”

“That’s fine,” Davis said, in that Sam Elliott voice of his, sounding amused. “Come on in and make yourself at home.”

Conner and Tricia knocked off the prelude to foreplay to greet Carolyn—Conner with a smile, Tricia with a hug. When Kim joined in, it was like something out of a reality-show reunion.

All Brody could do was wait, though he did remember enough of his manners to stand in the presence of a lady.

Carolyn finally forced herself, visibly, to look at him. Pink color pulsed in her cheeks and hot damn, she looked good.

“Hello, Brody,” she said.

“Carolyn,” he replied, with a nod of acknowledgment.

Brody immediately grew two left feet and felt his tongue wind itself into a knot.

It was junior high school all over again.

Only worse.

In junior high, it had been all about speculation. As a man, he knew, only too well, what it was like to kiss this woman, to make love to her.

Stand in a puddle and grab hold of a live wire, he thought.

That’s what it’s like.

“Kim says everything’s fine at the shop,” Tricia told Carolyn, with a sparkling little laugh. “I was hoping I’d be missed a little bit, though.”

Carolyn smiled, no longer looking quite so much like a doe poised to run after catching the scent of a predator on the wind. “Oh, you were definitely missed,” she said.

“Absolutely,” Kim agreed cheerfully, opening one of the big double ovens to check on the tamales.

They smelled so good that Brody’s stomach rumbled.

Things settled down to a dull roar over the next few minutes—Carolyn and Tricia washed up at the sink and began setting the table, while Davis pulled the corks on a couple of bottles of vintage wine.

It came as no surprise to Brody—and probably not to Carolyn, either—that they wound up sitting side by side at the huge table in the next room. The others made sure of it, the way they always did.

Brody and Carolyn were so close that they bumped elbows a couple of times. The scent of her—some combination of baby powder and flowers and a faint, citrusy spice—made him feel buzzed, if not drunk, which was weird because he let the wine bottle go by without pouring any for himself.

Tricia passed on it, too, of course, being pregnant.

Carolyn, by contrast, seemed uncommonly thirsty. She nibbled at the salad, and then the tamales and Kim’s incomparable Mexican rice and refried beans, but she seemed to be hitting the wine pretty hard.

“So, anyway,” Kim said, her voice rising above the others. “Carolyn signed up for Friendly Faces—that dating website—and she’s practically under siege, there are so many men wanting to meet her.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Brody saw Carolyn go pink and then mauve. Obviously, she hadn’t expected Kim to spill the frijoles in front of God and everybody.

Brody wanted to chuckle. He also wanted to stand on Carolyn’s front porch with a shotgun and make sure no other man got past him.

“Oops,” Kim said, widening her eyes. She’d let the news slip on purpose, and everybody knew it, but since the horse was already out of the barn, so to speak, that was that. “Sorry.”

Davis gave his wife a look.

Carolyn looked down at her lap, still red and making no pretense of eating.

Casually, Brody leaned over, took hold of the nearest wine bottle and refilled her glass. She glanced at him with an expression of mingled desperation and gratitude and practically drained the thing in a few gulps.

Brody bit back a grin. Well, there was one bright spot to the situation, he reflected. Now he had the perfect excuse to drive Carolyn home, because she was obviously in no condition to get behind the wheel.

An awkward silence fell, broken only by the clinking of silverware against colorful pottery plates.

“I think it’s wonderful,” Tricia piped up, breaking the verbal stalemate. “The dating service thing, I mean. More and more people are meeting their soul mates online these days. Why, the statistics—”

Carolyn looked so utterly miserable by then that Brody felt downright sorry for her. She swallowed hard, raised her chin and bravely interrupted, “It’s only a trial membership. I was curious, that’s all.”

“She’s swamped with guys wanting to get to know her,” Kim said, warming to the topic all over again.

Another wine bottle was opened and passed around.

Carolyn sloshed some into her glass, avoiding Brody’s eyes when she shoved the bottle at him to keep it moving.

“Are you sure you ought to...?”

At last, Carolyn looked at him. She flashed like a highway flare on a dark night, because she was so angry.

Because she was so beautiful.

“I’m of legal age, Brody Creed,” she said, slurring her words only slightly.

The others were talking among themselves, a sort of distant hum, a thing apart, like a radio playing in the next house or the next street, the words indistinct.

“Besides,” Carolyn went on briskly, before he could reply, “I’ve only had two glasses.”

“Four,” Brody said quietly, “but who’s counting?”

“It’s not as if I normally drink a lot,” she informed him, apropos of he wasn’t sure what.

“Have another tamale,” Brody counseled, keeping his voice down even though they still seemed to be alone in a private conversational bubble, him and Carolyn, with the rest of the outfit someplace on the dim periphery of things.

“I don’t want another tamale,” Carolyn told him.

“You’re going to be sick if you don’t eat something,” Brody reasoned. He didn’t think he’d used that particular cajoling tone since Steven and Melissa’s last visit, when he’d been appointed to feed his cousin’s twin sons. He’d had to do some smooth talking to get them to open up for the pureed green beans.

“That’s my problem, not yours,” Carolyn said stiffly.

“Around here,” Brody said, “we look out for each other.”

She made a snorting sound and tried to snag another passing wine bottle, but Brody got hold of it first and sent it along its way.

That made her furious. She colored up again and her eyes flashed, looking as if they might short out from the overload.

Brody merely held her gaze. “Eat,” he said.

She huffed out a sigh. Stabbed at a tiny bite of tamale with her fork. “There,” she said, after chewing. “Are you satisfied?”

He let the grin come, the charming one that sometimes got him what he wanted and sometimes got him slapped across the face. “No,” he drawled. “Are you?”

It looked like it was going to be the slap, for a second there.

In the end, though, Carolyn was at once too flustered and too tipsy to respond right away. She blinked once, twice, looking surprised to find herself where she was, and swayed ever so slightly in her chair.

“I want to go home,” she said.

Brody pushed his own chair back and stood, holding out a hand to her. “I think that’s a good idea,” he replied easily. “Let’s go.”

Kim and Davis, Conner and Tricia—he was aware of them as a group, rimming the table with amused faces but making no comment.

“I guess I have to let you drive me, don’t I?” Carolyn said.

“I reckon you do,” Brody said. “We’ll take my truck. Somebody can bring your car to town later.”

Carolyn, feisty before, seemed bemused now, at a loss. “But what about washing the dishes and...?”