Montana Creeds: Dylan

Dylan longed to displace the cat and pull Kristy onto his lap, to offer her what comfort he could, but he didn’t move. She’d loved Sugarfoot, that old horse of hers, with a near-sacred constancy.

The way she hadn’t loved him.

When he spoke at long last, the words scraped his throat like a swallow of rusty barbed wire. “Suppose they did find a body in that grave besides Sugarfoot’s? Your folks are gone, Kristy, and so is Sugarfoot. This can’t hurt any of them.”

Stupid, stupid, Dylan thought, in the next instant, raking splayed fingers through his hair as the frustration hit him.

The Madisons couldn’t be hurt, or the horse, either—but Kristy could.

She’d lived in or just outside of Stillwater Springs all her life. It was her home, the only place she’d ever wanted to be, which had been a big part of the problem between the two of them back in the day. She’d been Holly Homemaker, he’d been a hell-raiser and a rodeo cowboy with a penchant for the open road.

Welcome to Heartbreak Hotel.

Kristy bit her lower lip, reached out and closed her paint-splotched hand over Dylan’s. Tried gamely to smile. “I know you didn’t mean that the way it sounded,” she said, with a gentleness that bruised him. He was used to rough-and-tumble, growing up with Jake and his brothers and then riding the professional circuit. He could be gentle, especially with Bonnie, or a lost or injured animal, but finding himself on the receiving end was different, and downright unsettling.

Dylan cleared his throat. Gearing up to make another attempt, because he was a Creed, and therefore nothing if not persistent. Even when it meant digging himself in deeper, he had to keep shoveling.

“Why didn’t you ever get another horse after Sugarfoot?” he heard himself ask. Damn, but he hadn’t intended to say that, either. It just rolled right off his tongue before he could rope and hogtie it.

A faraway, wistful look deepened the bluer-than-blue of Kristy’s eyes. “It costs money to keep a horse,” she said, after a very long time. “A lot of money. Librarians don’t exactly pull down the big bucks, Dylan.”

“You bought this house,” Dylan reasoned.

“I received a small inheritance when my great-aunt passed away a year and a half ago,” Kristy said, in a why-m-I-telling-you-this-when-it’s-personal tone of voice. “I made the down payment on the house and moved in.”

The cat had already gotten bored; having shed white hair all over Dylan’s T-shirt, he probably figured his work there was done. Now, he was batting a toy mouse around the kitchen floor.

“You and your great-aunt’s cat,” Dylan mused, recalling how Kristy had always wanted a large family and lots of pets. Being an only child, she’d said, was too lonely.

“Oh, Winston didn’t belong to Aunt Millie,” Kristy replied. “He was Freida Turlow’s, and when she moved out after I’d closed on the house, he started turning up on my doorstep at all hours of the day and night. Freida’s been annoyed with me ever since—it’s as if she thinks I wooed him away from her or something.”

Dylan remembered Freida Turlow clearly. She’d tried to seduce him, the night of his sixteenth birthday, and he might have taken her up on the offer, too, if he hadn’t already been in love with Kristy.

“Freida’s always annoyed with somebody,” he observed, barely stopping himself from saying right out loud that, faced with a choice between living with the imposing Ms. Turlow or with Kristy, he’d have thrown in with the cat.

Kristy’s eyes turned bleak. For a few minutes, she’d forgotten about the possibility of impending scandal, but now Dylan could see that the respite was over. “Freida will be the worst,” she said, with soft despair, “if it turns out that Floyd’s suspicions are right.”

“What will you do,” Dylan ventured to ask, “if he is?” He was surprised by the suspense he felt, awaiting her answer. It would be one hell of an irony if, just when he’d decided he’d be able to settle down on the ranch and make a home for his daughter, Kristy chose to leave town for good.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I think—I think it might sour things—the house, my job at the library—” She paused, took another run at getting her point across. “You know how small towns are, Dylan. It was bad enough when my parents died within a year of each other, and the ranch went for debts and taxes. Everybody felt sorry for me. People would never let a story like this rest, and I’m not sure I could face all that pity and gossip again.”

All that pity and gossip.

Kristy looked as though she’d like to take those words back, choke on each one whole before giving voice to them. Dylan supposed there had been plenty of gossip, when he came back to Stillwater Springs to ask her to wait for him, a few months after the breakup following Jake’s funeral, and she’d waved Mike Danvers’s huge engagement ring under his nose and basically told him to get lost. He’d always supposed, though, that any pity making the rounds had been reserved for him.

That was one of the reasons he’d stayed away so long—as a ragged kid, with the notorious Jake Creed for a father, he’d had all the sympathy he could take. Charity baskets left on the front porch, at Christmas, Thanksgiving and Easter. Well-meaning church ladies offering him their sons’ cast-off clothes. And all the rest of it.

The biggest reason, though, had been Kristy herself.

He’d ridden the meanest bulls in rodeo. Scraped his knuckles and bloodied his nose in a score of bar brawls—and those were the ones he’d won—but he’d known that seeing Kristy going about her wifely business around town, picking up mail down at the post office, pushing a shopping cart through the supermarket aisles, intermittently blossoming with another man’s child, would bring him to his knees.

So, except for brief forays, when he’d brought his bull, Cimarron, back to the ranch, not knowing what else to do with him, and hired Briana Grant—now Creed— to look after his empty house, he’d stayed as far away as possible.

Bonnie—and Logan’s telling him, during his last visit, that Kristy was still single—had changed everything.

Coming to terms with all that was going to take a while.

And now there might be a body moldering on the old Madison place.

His coffee had gone cold, but since the conversation had come to a halt and he didn’t know how to start it up again, he sipped some java.

That was another thing that hadn’t changed.

Kristy’s coffee was still bad.

He smiled at the thought.

“Tell me about your little girl,” Kristy said, and he knew by the way she framed the request that she’d been working up her nerve during the silence.

“You probably already know as much about her as I do,” Dylan admitted. “She’s two. Her name is Bonnie. She likes listening to you read aloud.”

Kristy seemed to relax a little, though there was still a tense undercurrent. “I take it her mother is out of the picture?”

“God knows where Sharlene is,” Dylan said, sighing. Then he met Kristy’s gaze, and held steady. “Sharlene was a mistake, no denying that. But Bonnie—well—she’s the proof that something good comes out of everything.”

Everything but a horse’s grave, in a peaceful copse of trees, added the voice in his mind. Now that the possibility had had a chance to sink in, he knew instinctively that the sheriff and his crew would find something besides Sugarfoot’s bones when they dug that hole.

Kristy’s smile was misty. “I envy you,” she said.

Again, Dylan was taken aback. He’d forgotten Kristy’s capacity to surprise him—one of the things he’d loved best about her. “Why?” he asked, honestly puzzled.

“Because you have a child,” she said slowly, and with amused patience.

“I just hope I can keep her,” he answered. The worry that Sharlene would change her mind and take Bonnie back circled in the darkest depths of his mind, liable to drag him under when he least expected it.

Kristy raised one eyebrow. Waited.

“I plan to file for permanent custody when Logan gets home from Vegas,” he explained. “Until then, I’m pretty much hanging out there in the wind.” He studied Kristy, remembering—no, remembering wasn’t the right word, because he hadn’t actually forgotten in the first place—how good it had felt to hold her tightly again.

“You didn’t—steal her, did you?”

“You’re the second person who’s asked me that,” Dylan said. “No, I didn’t kidnap my daughter. Sharlene left her in my truck while I was inside some dive in Las Vegas, playing poker, along with a note saying she couldn’t take care of her anymore.”

Kristy’s mouth dropped open. “She left a child alone in a truck?”

“She was around someplace, keeping an eye out.”

Like that made a difference. He’d probably never know what Sharlene would have done if he hadn’t found Bonnie. Even if they happened to have a reasonable conversation at some point, Sharlene wasn’t likely to be honest and straightforward.

“Oh, well,” Kristy said skeptically, “that changes everything.”

“Sharlene isn’t the brightest bulb in the marquee,” Dylan allowed. “But in her own crazy way, I think she was doing what she thought was best.”

Kristy pulled in her horns a little. Sighed again. “Why not simply call you, if she felt overwhelmed by the responsibility of caring for Bonnie, and ask for help?”

Dylan didn’t like the answer that came to him, liked saying it out loud even less. “She probably thought I’d say no, so she didn’t give me the chance.”

A short silence fell, during which Kristy regarded Dylan long and hard. “Would you have said no?” she finally asked.

“Of course not,” he said, mildly affronted. “Bonnie is my daughter.”

“Excuse me,” Kristy countered, “but some guys would have married the mother of their child.”

Just like that, she’d gotten his hackles up. That was another thing he’d forgotten about Kristy—her gift for pissing him off royally. “I didn’t love Sharlene,” he said tautly, “and she sure as hell didn’t love me.”

“Did either one of you love Bonnie?” Kristy asked.

Dylan had to unclamp his back molars before he could reply. “I never missed a child-support check,” he said.

“Aren’t you noble?” Kristy challenged, bending one knee and sitting on her leg, which was still another thing he recalled about her. Her forehead was furrowed, her eyes slightly narrowed. “Did you ever see Bonnie, before you found her in your truck? Did you ever take care of her when she was teething, or had the flu? Did you even carry her picture in your wallet?”

“Yes,” Dylan growled, leaning in a little. “I saw Bonnie whenever I could catch up with Sharlene. No, I wasn’t there when she was teething, or if she had the flu.” He raised his haunches, pried his wallet out of his back pocket and flipped it open to the discount-store photo of the one person in the entire world he was absolutely, positively sure he loved. “Sharlene’s grandmother sent me this,” he finished, confounded by his own fury. After all, none of this was Kristy’s fault—not directly, anyway. “Along with a bill for Sharlene’s boob job. It seemed they both thought she’d have a better chance of landing a husband with a big set of knockers.”

Kristy blushed.

Dylan didn’t care. If she wanted to play hardball, so be it.

“Did you pay it?”

For a moment, Dylan wasn’t sure he’d heard the question correctly. “What?”

A smile teased at the corner of Kristy’s lush and highly kissable mouth. “Did you pay the bill for the boob job?”

“No,” he said.

She laughed.

And then, remarkably, he laughed, too. “Your coffee is still awful,” he said.

“And you still get your back up too easily.”

“Do I?”

“Yes.”

He needed to leave, pick Bonnie up at Cassie’s and get her settled out at the ranch. But first he had to know for sure that Kristy was going to be all right.

Spotting a small blackboard on the wall next to the back door—Kristy’s grocery list was on it, in her precise librarian’s handwriting, all loopy and firm—he crossed to it, picked up a stubby piece of blue chalk and scrawled his cell number below broccoli.

“Call me,” he told Kristy, turning to see her clearing their cups from the table with brisk, efficient motions, “if you need anything.”

“I won’t,” she said. “Need anything, I mean.”

Her stubbornness. Her pride. It was all coming back to him now.

“Why didn’t you marry Mike?” he asked. He felt entitled to ask that question; turnabout was fair play, after all.

She sighed, turned to face him. He could tell that holding his gaze was an effort, but she managed it. “I came to my senses,” she said.

Now, what the hell did that mean?

“Mike is a nice man,” she went on, when Dylan didn’t speak. Although he’d come in through the front door, he was at the back now, with one hand on the knob. “He deserved to be happy.”

“He looked pretty happy to me, that night I ran into the two of you in Skivvie’s Tavern.” The vision filled his mind’s eye; he might as well have been in that darkened bar again, watching Mike and Kristy dancing to a slow song playing on the jukebox, Kristy making sure Dylan got a good look at the diamond glittering on her left hand. He could feel the sawdust and peanut shells under the soles of his boots, smell cigarette smoke and draft beer.

“I was using him,” Kristy said forthrightly. “When I realized that, I broke our engagement. A few months later, he married Julie. End of story.”

End of story? After that night at Skivvie’s, Dylan had left Stillwater Springs, his tires flinging up gravel, swearing he’d never set foot in his hometown again. He’d spent the better part of a year drowning his sorrows in cheap whiskey, dodging bill collectors and backing down from the one thing he was really good at—bull-riding.

He’d probably have drunk himself to death, in fact, if an old friend, a retired rodeo clown named Wiley Spence, hadn’t gotten him by the shirt collar one night in Cheyenne, after bailing him out of jail, and threatened to call Logan if he didn’t get his act together pronto.

Kristy wasn’t the only one with pride. Although he and Logan had been estranged back then, he’d known his big brother would track him down and probably throw him into the nearest treatment center. He hadn’t wanted Logan to see him down and out. So he’d laid off the booze, except for an occasional beer, cleaned up and gotten back into the rodeo as soon as he’d scraped together an entry fee.

None of which was Kristy’s concern.

“Thanks for the coffee,” he said. And then he left.

DYLAN WAS GOOD AT LEAVING. Very good at leaving.

Kristy banged the mugs around in the sink for a few moments, then decided to wash them later, when she wasn’t apt to break off the handles.

What had she expected?

Well, she certainly hadn’t expected him to show up at her front door that evening, that was for sure. And if anyone had told her she’d—well, throw herself at him the way she had, she’d have called them crazy.

The hardest thing to face was the knowledge that if he’d kissed her, she’d have let him make love to her right there in the front hallway.

The thought made her cringe.

And yearn.

It was a wonder she hadn’t gotten pregnant, back when they were still together, as often as they’d made love.

Things would have been so different if she’d been the one to conceive Dylan Creed’s child, not this Sharlene person with the breast implants.

Her gaze swung to the blackboard, and Dylan’s number, written hard and fast and slanting to the right. Like she would call him, even if there were ten muggers in the house and the place was on fire to boot.

She marched over and resolutely wiped away the blue chalk with the palm of her hand, leaving a streaky smudge.

But erasing the number hadn’t helped.

It was already burned into her memory, like the letters on the old sign over the gate out at Stillwater Springs Ranch.

She let her forehead rest against the blackboard.

And tears came. Again.

She’d lost so much—her parents, Sugarfoot, Madison Ranch, the home and family she and Dylan might have shared, if they hadn’t been such hotheads.

Winston curled around her ankles, meowing uncertainly, and a tear plopped onto the top of his head. He looked up, in a curious way, as though wondering if it was raining.

His expression made Kristy laugh.

And laughing made her square her shoulders, dry her cheeks with the back of one hand and pull herself together.

Maybe all hell would break loose when Sheriff Book and his crew opened Sugarfoot’s grave.

Maybe Dylan Creed was back in town for good, with his child and his wicked smile and his death-to-women body.

She was no gutless wonder, and no stranger to trouble.

Whatever came her way, she’d handle it.

Somehow.

THE FIRST NIGHT IN THE ranch house was a sleepless one for Dylan, and not just because he spent half of it trying to comfort Bonnie, who’d taken to calling for her mother during their fast-food supper and hadn’t quit until she’d fallen asleep against his chest, after one last, hiccoughy sigh.

Sitting on the beat-up old couch that, like the bed and the kitchen table, had been in the place since the last Creed had lived and died there—his great-uncle, Mick—his chin propped on top of Bonnie’s sweat-dampened head, Dylan felt real despair.

He hadn’t expected raising a child to be easy; it wasn’t that. Now that the novelty of being with him was wearing off, Bonnie was missing Sharlene, and it was likely to get worse.

You’re a real tough guy, Creed, he told himself silently. When Bonnie had cried, and then wailed, he’d felt like crying right along with her. Almost called Cassie in a panic, ready to beg her for help.

Cassie? Who was he kidding?

It was Kristy he’d wanted to call.

When the hell were Logan and Briana coming back from their damned honeymoon, anyhow? Briana was a mother—a good one, from what he’d seen—and she’d surely know what you were supposed to do when a kid started crying and wouldn’t stop.

The knock at the back door startled him.

Careful not to wake Bonnie, he stood, carried her with him through the kitchen, crossing the dark place worn into the linoleum by decades of passing feet.

Tyler peered in at him through the glass.

Dylan scowled a little, then nodded.

Tyler came in. “Is that old bull in the pasture yours?” he asked, as though nary a harsh word, let alone a fist, had ever flown back and forth between them.

“Yes,” Dylan answered, whispering. “Do you know anything about kids?”

Tyler grinned. “Only that that’s about the cutest one I’ve ever seen.”

Bonnie stirred against Dylan’s chest, whimpered a little. Her face felt hot against his shoulder, even through the cloth of his shirt. He carried her into the bedroom, laid her down carefully on the bed, made sure the inked-up rubber doll with the wild hair was within reach, and sneaked back out into the kitchen.

By that time, Tyler was going through the cupboards.

“No whiskey?” he asked.

“I’m a beer man these days,” Dylan answered quietly, wondering what the unexpected visit was all about. Five would get you ten it wasn’t a social call. “In the fridge.”

Tyler opened the refrigerator door, recoiled as if he’d found a live rattler coiled inside. “The cheap brand?”

“Beer is beer. Keep it down, will you? The kid’s been screaming for three hours straight and she’ll probably start up again if you wake her.”

Tyler extracted a can from the six-pack and popped the top. His expression was unreadable. “Is she sick or something?”

“I don’t know. Her forehead felt kind of warm when I was holding her a minute ago.”

So much for the inscrutable singing cowboy. Tyler looked alarmed. He set aside his beer—hell, it was the cheap brand, anyway—headed for the bedroom and bent over Bonnie, touching the backs of his fingers to her cheek.

He frowned, gazing at Dylan, who stood in the doorway.

Back in the kitchen, Tyler said, “I think she has a fever. You got any baby aspirin?”

“No,” Dylan said, more scared than he was about to let Tyler see. “She was upset earlier—like I said, she cried a lot—it’s probably just that.”

“Why was she crying?” Tyler demanded, as though he thought Dylan had been pinching the kid or something.

“She wanted her mother,” Dylan answered. Tyler wasn’t much comfort, but he was better than nothing.

“oh,” Tyler said, picking up his beer again, taking a swallow.

“Yeah, oh,” Dylan said, annoyed.

“I still think we should take her to a doctor.”

“Gee, all this concern. It’s almost like having a brother.”

Tyler frowned angrily. “I’m going to town to get some baby aspirin,” he said. “While I’m there, I’ll ask the pharmacist if he thinks Bonnie needs medical attention.”

In spite of himself, in spite of all that had gone down between him and Tyler over the years, Dylan felt a sudden rush of relief, and something a lot like affection. He was swallowing the lump that had risen in his throat when Tyler went on, already headed for the door.

“I’ll be back,” he said.

A few moments later, Dylan heard his brother’s rig start up outside.

He checked on Bonnie again—he’d have sworn she did have a fever—but decided to do his pacing in the kitchen so he wouldn’t disturb her sleep.

When Tyler blew in again, forty-five minutes later, he had baby aspirin, cough medicine, a stuffed animal of indeterminate species and a digital thermometer.

“If this thing reads above a one-oh-one, according to the pharmacist, Bonnie should be taken to the emergency room.”

Dylan frowned, examining the unfamiliar plastic stick in its bright green box. “Where does this thing—go?”

Tyler chuckled. He made quite a picture, standing there in Dylan’s kitchen, full of avuncular concern. The bad-ass cowboy, spilling a toy dog, if that was what it was, along with a bottle of aspirin and a carton of children’s cough syrup onto the table.

“In her ear, shit-for-brains,” he said.

“Oh,” Dylan said, squinting at the instructions on the back of the box.

Tyler grabbed the whole works right out of his hand. “Give me that,” he said, after the fact. “Bill—that’s the pharmacist—told me how to use it.”

“Great,” Dylan said.

“I ran into a friend of yours while I was at the drugstore,” Tyler added, as an aside. “You might get company any minute now.”

“What?” Dylan asked, irritated all over again.

Tyler grinned, rummaging in the drugstore bag again and pulling out a packet with a sterile wipe inside. Damned if he hadn’t thought of everything, old Uncle Ty. “The thing’s got to be sanitized,” he said.

“Who—?”

Tyler wiped down the thermometer, dispensing with all those offensive Dylan germs, and headed for Bonnie.

“Ninety-eight point seven,” he announced, in a low but triumphant voice, after gently easing the end of the thermometer into Bonnie’s right ear. “She’s probably fine.”

Suddenly, Dylan felt unaccountably territorial.

Bonnie was his daughter. He should have been the one taking her temperature.

As if in direct response to his thought, she woke up at precisely that moment, looked around, and let out one long, piercing shriek, followed by a plaintive, “Mommmmmmeeeee!”

“I see what you mean,” Tyler said.

vaguely, Dylan heard a knock at the back door. He tried to pick Bonnie up, but she flailed both arms and kicked like she’d been raised by wolves.

And then Kristy swept in, like an avenging goddess, and scooped Bonnie up into her arms.