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

Hello? Joleen cyber-nudged.

Hi, he responded.

Joleen was faster on the draw, when it came to keyboards. I was hoping I could stay at your place. Mom and Dad have room, but they’re not too pleased with me these days.

Brody let out a ragged breath. Sorry, he wrote back, using only the tip of his right index finger. Quarters are too tight for a visitor.

Still mad over that little spat we had? Joleen inquired, adding a row of face icons with tears gushing from their eyes.

It isn’t that, Brody replied laboriously.

Joleen’s reply came like greased lightning. Are you dumping me, Brody Creed?

Brody sighed again, dug out his cell phone and speed-dialed Joleen’s number.

“Hello?” Joleen purred, like she couldn’t imagine who’d be calling little old her.

“I just think it’s time we called it quits,” Brody said, seeing no reason to bother with a preamble. “The sleeping-together thing, I mean.”

“So you are dumping me!” Joleen chimed. To her credit, she sounded cheerful, rather than hurt. One thing about Joleen—she was a good sport.

“Okay,” Brody said. “Have it your way.”

“If I had things my way,” Joleen immediately retorted, “we’d be married by now. With a bunch of kids.”

Brody closed his eyes. He could envision the kids all too clearly, but they were all dead ringers for Carolyn, not Joleen.

“We had a deal,” he reminded Joleen gruffly. “We agreed from the first that we wouldn’t get serious.”

Joleen laughed, but the sound had a bitter edge to it. “So it’s finally happened,” she said, after a lengthy silence. “Some filly has you roped in, thrown down and hog-tied.”

“Nice image,” Brody said, without inflection. “And for your information—not that I owe you an explanation, because I sure as hell don’t—nothing has happened.”

“Right,” Joleen scoffed. “Well, I’m coming back anyway. If you get lonely, I’ll be at my folks’ house, trying to convince them that I’m a good girl after all.”

“Good luck with that one,” Brody said, sensing a letup in the tension, however slight. He’d never loved Joleen, and they’d had some wild fights in their time, but he liked her. Wanted her to be happy.

“You and me,” Joleen mused, surprising him with the depth of the insight that came next, “we pretty much just use each other to keep everybody else at a safe distance, don’t we?”

“Yeah,” Brody agreed presently. “I think that’s what we’ve been doing, all right.”

“Huh,” Joleen said decisively, as though she’d come to some conclusion.

“And it’s time we both moved on,” Brody added. You go your way, and I’ll go mine.

“Just tell me who she is,” Joleen urged.

“There isn’t a specific she, Joleen.”

“The hell there isn’t, Brody Creed. I know you, remember? You’ve been on this path for a while now, coming back to Lonesome Bend, making up with Conner and Kim and Davis, building a house—” She made a moist sound then and, for one terrible moment, Brody feared Joleen was either already crying or about to. “Silly me,” she finally went on. “I thought all that talk about not getting too serious was just that—talk. We go way back, Brody.”

Brody shut his eyes for a moment, remembering things he’d been doing his best to forget right along. Joleen had been Conner’s girlfriend, back in the day, and with plenty of help from him—Brody—she’d driven a wedge between the brothers that might have kept them estranged for a lifetime, instead of a decade.

And a decade, to Brody’s mind, was plenty too long to be on the outs with Conner.

“I’m sorry if you misunderstood,” Brody said quietly, when the air stopped sizzling with Joleen’s ire. “But I never gave you any reason to think whatever it was we had together was going anywhere, Joleen, and I’m not responsible for what goes on in your imagination.”

She sighed, calming down a little. “Is this the part where you say we’ll always be friends?” she asked, at long last.

“That’s up to you, Joleen,” Brody said, wishing he could ask her not to come back, at least not right away, because things were complicated enough already. Trouble was, Lonesome Bend was as much her home as his, and she had every right to spend time there. “We can be friends, or we can steer clear of each other for a while and let the dust settle a little.”

“I could make trouble for you, you know,” Joleen reminded him mildly.

Was she serious or not? He couldn’t tell.

“You could,” he allowed.

“You might as well tell me who she is, Brody,” Joleen went on reasonably, ignoring what he’d said. “I can find out with a phone call or two, anyway.”

“Up to you,” Brody reiterated. “Goodbye, Joleen.”

She paused, absorbing the finality of his words. Gave another sniffle...and hung up on him.

Brody closed his phone and stood there looking at it for a few moments, frowning.

Barney, snugged down over by the stove, raised his head off his muzzle and regarded his master with something resembling pity.

He was probably imagining that part, Brody decided.

“Women,” he told the dog, before turning back to the computer and the message he’d been trying to write to Carolyn. “There’s no making sense of them, no matter how you try. They say one thing when they mean another. They cry when they’re sad, and when they’re happy, too, so you never know where you stand.”

Barney gave a little whimper and settled back into his snooze.

Grimly, Brody glared at the message box on the screen in front of him. Hope you’re feeling better was as far as he’d gotten, as far as he was likely to get, if inspiration didn’t strike soon.

There didn’t seem to be much danger of that.

He rubbed his chin again, aware that his beard was growing in. He’d shaved just that morning—hadn’t he?

Brody tried to round up his thoughts, get them going in the same direction, but it was hard going. He was mystified to find himself so confused and at a loss for words. He’d been a smooth talker all his life, he reflected, but when it came to Carolyn Simmons, it seemed, he was about as verbal as a pump handle. Presently, Brody gave up and hit the delete key, logged off of the computer and turned around in his chair.

The bed was still unmade, and there was still no woman in it.

The microwave and the minifridge, inanimate objects posing as some kind of kitchen, presented a sad image of the bachelor life.

The only bright spot in the whole place, Brody decided glumly, after mulling it all over, was the dog.

CHAPTER SIX

DENIAL, CAROLYN DECIDED, as she went through the motions of opening the shop for business promptly at nine the next morning, would be the watchword of the day.

All she had to do was pretend. That she hadn’t gotten tipsy on wine at Kim and Davis’s tamale supper, in front of Brody Creed.

That she hadn’t leaned out the door of a hot guy’s truck and thrown up on the side of the road.

That she hadn’t made an utter and complete idiot of herself.

Like hell she hadn’t. She’d done all those things and more, and the worst part was, she didn’t know why. It wasn’t like her to drink at all, let alone overindulge. She simply didn’t have the capacity to assimilate alcohol, never had.

Now, confounded as well as queasy, Carolyn looked up at the Weaver, the art piece gracing the high place on the wall, seeking wisdom in all that quietness and color, but all she got was a crick in her neck and the conclusion that her longtime coping mechanism had failed her.

Without denial to fall back on, she’d be stuck with reality.

Yikes.

There were positive sides to the situation, though. She had slept through the night, at least, and two more aspirin, with a water chaser, had made her head stop pounding.

She hadn’t been able to manage coffee, though, or even herbal tea.

Breakfast? Forget about it.

Her stomach was still pretty iffy.

So she’d fed Winston, taken a shower and gotten dressed for the day, choosing faux-alligator flats, black pants and a rather prim-looking white shirt over her usual: jeans, T-shirt and Western boots. She applied makeup—without blusher, she’d have had no color at all—and even put her hair up in a sort of twisty do she hoped looked casually elegant, then donned her one and only pair of gold posts.

She wanted to look...well, businesslike. A woman of substance and good sense.

But she’d settle for looking sober.

Tricia breezed in at nine-fifteen, wearing sandals and a soft green maternity sundress and carrying two mega-size cups of coffee from the take-out place down the street. She glowed like a woman who’d spent the night enjoying great sex with her adoring husband.

Carolyn felt a stab of envy. Great work, if you could get it.

Casting a glance at Carolyn before she set the cups on the display counter, Tricia smiled warmly, taking in the slacks and the shoes and the fussy shirt.

“Well, look at you,” she observed finally. “All dressed up like somebody about to head over to the bank and ask for a big loan. Or apply for membership in a country club.”

Carolyn sighed, and the truth escaped her in a rush. “I think I was trying to change my identity,” she said. The scent of the coffee, usually so appealing, made her stomach do a slow tumble backward. “Become somebody else. Lapse into permanent obscurity, disappear forever. Create my own one-woman witness protection program.”

Tricia laughed. “You’ve got it bad,” she said forthrightly. “And I’m not talking about the flu, here.”

Carolyn’s cheeks burned, and she felt her chin ratchet up a notch. “If you mean the hangover, thanks for reminding me. I already feel like four kinds of a fool, after everything that happened last night.”

Tricia picked up one of the cups and held it out, and Carolyn shook her head, swallowed hard.

“You had a little too much wine,” Tricia said gently, with a shrug in her tone. “It’s no big deal, Carolyn—we’ve all done that at one time or another. And if you do have a hangover—your word, not mine—it doesn’t show.” She paused while she went behind the counter and stuck her purse into its usual cubbyhole. Then, straightening, she went on. “I was referring, my prickly friend, to the bare-socket electricity arcing between you and Brody all evening. I’m surprised all our hair didn’t stand on end, and our skeletons didn’t show through our skin.”

Carolyn had to laugh, though the sound was hoarse and it hurt her throat coming out. “That was visual,” she said. “And what an imagination you have, Tricia Creed. If there was anything ‘arcing’ between Brody and me, it was hostility.”

“Sure,” Tricia agreed smoothly, and a little too readily, fussing with a display of sachet packets beside the cash register. Unless a tour bus came through unexpectedly, they probably wouldn’t be very busy that day, and Carolyn’s heart sank at the prospect of long hours spent making work where none existed.

“I’ll check for internet orders,” Carolyn said, desperate to change the course of their conversation before it meandered any deeper into Brody Territory. They kept the shop computer in their small office, a converted bedroom, off the living room. “Maybe we’ve sold a few more aprons online.”

“Maybe,” Tricia said, shooting another glance at Carolyn as she was about to turn and walk away. Then she came right out with it. “How come you didn’t mention signing up for cyberdates to me, but Kim knew?”

Carolyn wanted to lie, but she simply couldn’t. Not to Tricia, one of the first real friends she’d ever had. “I wasn’t planning on telling anybody,” she admitted ruefully, folding her arms. “Kim and I were upstairs, having lunch, and this message just popped up on my laptop screen.” She drew in a breath, huffed it out again. “That website—Friendly Faces, I mean—is a little scary. The thing talks. If the computer is on, and a message comes in, it just pipes right up with the news. ‘Somebody likes you!’” She threw her arms out wide, let her hands slap against her sides. “When that happened, Kim was onto my secret and I had no choice but to explain.”

Tricia smiled. “Relax,” she said. “It’s a new world. Lots of people connect online before they meet in person.”

“Easy for you to say,” Carolyn pointed out. “You don’t have to resort to desperate measures—you’re already married.”

Tricia gave a dreamy sigh. “Yes,” she said. “I am most definitely married.”

Carolyn barely kept from rolling her eyes.

Tricia came back from the land of hearts and flowers and cartoon birds swooping around with ribbons in their beaks and studied Carolyn with slightly narrowed eyes. “I just have one question,” she said.

“Of course you do,” Carolyn said, resigned. This was the troublesome thing about friendships—they opened up all these private places a person liked to keep hidden.

“Why go online and meet strangers when the perfect man is right in front of you?”

Carolyn pretended to look around the surrounding area in search of this “perfect man” of Tricia’s. Arched her eyebrows in feigned confusion and set her hands on her hips. “He is? I don’t see him.”

“You know I’m talking about Brody,” Tricia replied, going all twinkly and flushed again. She might have been talking about Brody, but it was a good bet she was thinking about Conner.

Carolyn reminded herself that Tricia meant well, just as Kim did. She was being prickly with her friend, and she regretted it.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“For what?” Tricia wanted to know.

“I might have been a little snappish.”

“And I might have been meddling,” Tricia said. Another long pause followed, then she added, “Was it really so bad, whatever happened between you and Brody?”

Carolyn opened her mouth, closed it again, stumped for an answer.

Tricia touched Carolyn’s arm. “There I go, meddling again.”

“Could we not talk about Brody, please?” Carolyn asked, after a long time. She realized she was hugging herself with both arms, as though a cold wind had blown through the shop and chilled her to the bone.

“Of course,” Tricia said, her eyes filling. “Of course.”

Carolyn turned on her heel and marched off to the bedroom-office, keeping her spine straight.

Was it really so bad, whatever happened between you and Brody?

Yes, answered some voice within Carolyn, too deep to be uttered aloud. He was the first man I ever dared to love. I gave Brody Creed everything I had, everything I was and ever planned to be. I thought he was different from all the others—Mom, the social workers, the foster families—so I trusted him. In the end, though, he threw me away, just like they did. He left and I watched the road for him for months, hoping and praying he’d come back, and he stayed gone.

So much for hope and prayer. When had either one of them ever done her any good at all?

Reaching the office, Carolyn booted up the computer, only to be rewarded with an all-too-familiar greeting as soon as she went online.

“Somebody likes you!”

“Imagine that,” she muttered.

Why was this happening? She hadn’t signed on to Friendly Faces through this computer; she’d used the laptop upstairs.

It was creepy.

On an annoyed impulse, Carolyn clicked on the Show Me! icon.

And there was a picture of a buckskin horse.

Give me a chance, read the message beneath the photo.

It had been posted in the middle of the night, and it was signed, Brody.

Carolyn put a hand to her mouth. Then, in a shaky voice, she called out, “Tricia?”

Her friend appeared almost immediately. Tricia was light on her feet, for someone so profoundly pregnant.

“Is something wrong?” she asked, from the doorway.

“Am I seeing things?” Carolyn countered, gesturing toward the screen.

Tricia crept forward and peered at the monitor. “That’s Brody’s horse,” she said, very quietly. “Moonshine.”

“Apparently,” Carolyn quipped, “Moonshine is looking for action.”

Tricia giggled, but it was a nervous sound. “Brody sent you a message through Friendly Faces?” she marveled. “Wow. He must really like you.”

Carolyn felt a crazy thrill. “Yeah,” she retorted. “That would be why he’s hiding behind his horse.”

“He knows you like horses,” Tricia reasoned. It was a weak argument.

“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” Carolyn scoffed.

“You registered as ‘Carol’?” Tricia asked, frowning a little.

“Never mind that,” Carolyn said briskly. “What do I do now?”

“Go out with Brody?”

“Oh, right.”

“What can it hurt? The two of you go out for a bite to eat, maybe take in a movie? Harmless fun.”

“Nothing about Brody Creed is harmless,” Carolyn said, with conviction.

“True,” Tricia agreed, wide-eyed. “But is that the kind of man you really want? Somebody harmless, who makes zero impact?”

“He scares me,” Carolyn admitted. The words were out before she’d had a chance to vet them as something she actually wanted to say out loud. And Brody did scare her, because no one, not even her feckless mother, had ever had as much power to hurt her, to crush her, as he did.

“One date,” Tricia negotiated. “You set the terms. How bad can that be?”

“Trust me,” Carolyn said, “it can be really bad.”

“He must have done you a number,” Tricia ventured, meddling again and showing no signs of apologizing for it. “You can tell me, Carolyn.”

“Like I told Kim?”

Tricia made the cross-my-heart motion with her right hand and then held it up in the oath position. “I will tell no one. Not even Conner.”

Carolyn sighed. She turned to Tricia and, against years of conditioning, took a chance. “Brody was passing through Lonesome Bend,” she said wearily, like an old-fashioned record player on slow speed. “It was years ago. I was house-sitting for Kim and Davis, and he—well, he just showed up on their doorstep. Something happened. Then something else happened. The next thing I knew, we’d been sharing a bed for a week and I was crazy in love with Brody Creed. We were making plans for a future together—babies, pets, a house somewhere on the ranch, the whole thing. Brody was going to reconcile with Conner, and with his aunt and uncle, and we were going to get married. Then, one morning, I woke up and found a note. ‘Something came up,’ he said, and he had to leave. That was it. He was gone.”

“Oh,” Tricia said, absorbing the story like an impact. “You didn’t hear from him again?”

“He called me a month later, drunk out of his mind. It was worse than not hearing from him at all.”

“I’m so sorry,” Tricia whispered, looking so broken that Carolyn immediately forgot her own pain.

“Don’t,” Carolyn said. “Don’t agonize over this, Tricia. It’s ancient history. But you know what they say about history—those who fail to learn from it are condemned to repeat it.”

“I love my brother-in-law,” Tricia said, “but right now, I could wring his neck.”

“The last thing I want is to turn you against Brody,” Carolyn told her friend. “He’s your husband’s brother, Tricia. Your baby’s uncle. It would be so, so wrong if what I’ve told you caused problems within the family. I couldn’t bear that—families are precious.”

Tricia hugged her, briefly but hard. “Don’t worry about me,” she said. “You need to do what’s right for you, Carolyn. When was the last time you put yourself first?”

Carolyn searched her mind, then her soul, for an honest reply. “Always,” she said. “And never.”

Tricia was quiet for a long, long time. Then she said, “In the beginning, when I was first attracted to Conner, I mean, I resisted my feelings with every ounce of strength I could muster. I was so afraid. Nothing in my life had ever prepared me to believe in happy endings—not my parents’ brief marriage or, after I was grown up, my own relationships. Nothing worked. Ever. Somewhere along the line, I decided that true love was something that happened in books and movies, and to other, luckier people, and that I was better off alone, because that way, I couldn’t be hurt.” She stopped, her eyes searching Carolyn’s. “Pretty stupid, huh? Only one thing hurt worse than I thought loving and losing Conner Creed would, and that was not allowing myself to take the risk. And you know what? No matter what the future holds—even if, God forbid, Conner dies in his prime, or he leaves me, or whatever else the fates might throw at us—it would be worth it, because once you’ve loved someone the way I love Conner, once someone has loved you the way he loves me...” Tricia’s blue eyes brimmed with tears again, and she swallowed before going on. “Once you’ve loved, and been loved, that way, nothing and no one can ever take it away. Whether it lasts five minutes or fifty years, that love becomes a permanent part of you.”

Carolyn studied her friend. “It’s that way for some people,” she said, at some length.

“It can be that way for you,” Tricia insisted quietly.

“Not with Brody Creed, it can’t,” Carolyn replied. And she turned back to the monitor, clicked on the appropriate icon and replied to his message, fully intending to turn him down flat.

Instead, she found herself typing Nice horse and then clicked Send.

* * *

AFTER NUKING A frozen breakfast in the microwave, going out to the barn to feed Moonshine and walking the dog, Brody finally logged on to his computer at around nine-thirty. All the while, he was telling himself it didn’t matter a hill of beans if he’d heard from Carolyn, aka Carol.

Barney, having chowed down on his kibble, sat at Brody’s feet, waiting patiently for whatever was next on the agenda and probably hoping he’d get to participate.

Brody grinned down at the mutt and flopped his ears around gently, by way of reassurance. “We ought to be on the range already,” he confided to the animal. “Davis and Conner will be biting the heads off nails by now, and complaining to each other that some things just never change.”

Barney opened his mouth wide and yawned.

Brody laughed and turned back to his computer just as an electronic voice chirped, “Someone likes you!”

“I sure as hell hope so,” Brody told the dog, who, by that time, had stretched himself out for a spur-of-the-moment nap.

And there it was.

Nice horse, Carolyn had written.

Brody sighed. It wasn’t a yes, but it wasn’t a no, either.

He rubbed his hands together and thought hard.

Once again, inspiration eluded him.

Thanks, he finally wrote back. Want to go riding with me?

Brody sighed again, heavily this time, and shoved the fingers of one hand through his hair in frustration. He was a regular wiz with the ladies, he chided himself.

The truth was that he had lot to say to Carolyn Simmons, starting with “I’m sorry,” but he’d sooner have his thoughts posted on a billboard in the middle of town than send them over the internet.

His cell phone rang.

Distracted, Brody hit Send, and immediately wished he hadn’t.

“Hello,” he said into the phone.

“What kind of outfit do you think we’re running over here?” Conner demanded. “This is a working ranch, Brody—operative word, working—and it would be nice if you could drop by and do your part sometime before noon.”

Brody laughed. “Now, Conner,” he drawled, because he knew slow talking made his brother crazy, “you need to simmer down a little. Take life as it comes. The cattle have a thousand acres of grass to feed on, and the fences will get fixed—”

“Brody,” Conner broke in tersely, “this is as much your ranch as it is mine. We split the profits down the middle, and by God we’re going to do the same with the work!”

“What got up your backside?” Brody asked. “For a man getting regular sex, you’re pretty testy.”

He could literally feel Conner going from a simmer to a boil on the far end of that phone call.

“Enough of your bullshit,” Conner almost growled. “Get over here, unless you want me coming after you.”

“Maybe you’re not getting regular sex,” Brody speculated.

“Brody, I swear to God—”