LOGAN CREED STOOD with one booted foot braced on the lowest rail of his corral fence, arms resting across the top as he watched the latest stray—a dark-haired kid with piercings, tattoos and plenty of attitude—riding the tamest horse on the place, bareback.
Dylan, right beside him, watched, too, while Kristy, Dylan’s bride, supervised the boy’s ride from within rein-grabbing distance. Kristy was good with horses, even gifted. After a long hiatus spent grieving for her old partner, a gelding named Sugarfoot, she was training them again.
“Think the kid is Tyler’s?” Logan asked quietly. Briana, the love of his life, was in the house, whipping up supper for a crowd, while Bonnie, Dylan’s little girl, played on the kitchen floor, and his stepsons, Josh and Alec, worked on the summer lessons their mother had assigned them.
Briana was a stickler for education, and preferred to home-school her sons, but she’d agreed to let them attend normal classes in the fall. In the meantime, she made sure they kept their math and reading skills up to snuff.
Logan’s heart bucked like a bronc fresh from the chute, just thinking of her in the house, a ranch wife in blue jeans and a sexy cotton blouse, and the sweet secret they shared.
In roughly eight months, there would be a new Creed on Stillwater Springs Ranch, of the small, messy, noisy variety.
He could barely wait. Thought sometimes he’d burst if he had to keep the secret to himself much longer. But he and Briana had agreed not to spread the word until she was three months along, so he stayed mum.
“According to Ty, Doreen denies it,” Dylan answered. A grin cocked up one corner of his mouth, and he adjusted his hat. “I’m not sure Ty’s convinced, though. It would be a good thing for him, and for Davie, too, if the kid’s one of us.”
“One of us,” Logan repeated, unable to hide the touch of sorrow that phrase made him feel. “Ty doesn’t want to be a Creed, remember? So even if the DNA’s right—”
Dylan laid a hand on his brother’s shoulder. “Our little brother’s back on the ranch,” he reminded Logan. “That means something. That he’s come home, that he wasted no time asking Lily out. Give him a little time to come around, Logan.”
Logan gave a rueful chuckle, part snort. Except for marrying Briana and helping to raise Josh and Alec, he’d never wanted anything as much as he wanted the Creed family restored, and the ranch back in working order.
He and Dylan, once on the outs, were brothers again. They were full partners in the newly formed Tri-Star Cattle Company; they’d bought the start of a herd and doubled the size of the ranch by purchasing Kristy’s folks’ old place, but there was still a line on the official documents, awaiting Tyler’s signature.
The outfit wouldn’t be “Tri”-anything until Ty joined up.
And since the last time Logan had seen his youngest brother, at their dad’s grave, Ty had sucker punched him, reconciliation didn’t seem all that likely.
“If I hadn’t busted that damn guitar—” Logan mused, remembering. Regretting. It had happened the day they buried their dad—they’d all been drunk, down at Skivvie’s, and Tyler had been singing and strumming some stupid song he’d written, making Jake sound like John Wayne or Roy Rodgers, not the hard-drinking, ornery son of a bitch he’d really been.
Logan, full of grief and rage and cheap beer, had suddenly lost it. He’d jerked that guitar out of Tyler’s hands and smashed it to splinters against the bar. A second later, he’d have given anything to take back what he’d done, but there was no changing it.
The guitar had belonged to Tyler’s dead mother, and it had been her most precious possession.
The damage had been done.
The fight was on.
And all three of them had been thrown into the clink for public drunkenness and brawling and a whole list of other misdemeanors. They’d gone their separate ways the next morning, as soon as Floyd Book turned them loose from the hoosegow, and written each other off.
“That goddamned song,” Logan muttered, watching as Davie relaxed a little on the horse, under Kristy’s patient tutelage, and started showing some potential as a cow-puncher.
Dylan nodded. “Everything Tyler wanted in a father was in that song,” he recalled. “Everything we all wanted Jake to be.”
“Why didn’t I see that?” Logan asked.
“Maybe because you were hurting, too. We all were, Logan. It was a tough day for everybody.”
Logan shook his head, not in denial of what Dylan had just said, but out of resignation and remorse. “Pretty crazy,” he said. “We hated Jake’s drinking and hell-raising, and what did we do? When push came to shove, Dylan, we acted just like he would have. Came straight to Skivvie’s from the funeral home and started swilling beer. Got ourselves arrested.”
“Jake would have been real proud,” Dylan joked. Since Kristy, he’d mellowed out a lot, and developed a halfway decent sense of humor. Must have been all that regular, down-home sex.
Logan knew that because of what he had with Briana. Whenever the kids weren’t around, they were doing it—in the barn, in the laundry room, anywhere they happened to be. They’d tear off each other’s clothes and collide. Briana liked it fast and wet and hard, liked being bent over things and taken in a single thrust, like a stallion with a mare in heat—hardly any foreplay at all.
Ironically, the foreplay came later, when they’d eased that first ferocious, almost violent need to join their bodies, when Logan would lay his flushed and still-gasping wife down on the nearest soft surface and take his time pleasing her. And in pleasing Briana, he more than pleased himself.
He shifted against the coral fence, lest Dylan spot the instant hard-on thinking about Briana always produced, and shoved a hand through his hair.
“I guess you like being married,” Dylan observed dryly.
Damn him, he didn’t miss much.
“I like it all right,” Logan allowed. “What about you?”
“If I’d known what it was going to be like with Kristy,” Dylan answered, “I’d have been the original virgin bridegroom.”
Logan gave a hoot of laughter, and some of the gloom over his broken relationship with Tyler let up. “You, a virgin? Hell, were you ever a virgin, little brother? This is me you’re talking to—I happen to know you did the babysitter when you were barely fifteen.”
“‘Babysitter’?” Dylan balked, but there was a laugh behind the word. “Are you completely clueless? That woman wasn’t a babysitter. She was one of Dad’s barfly girlfriends—he brought her home from one of his binges and she stayed on when he left for work the next morning.”
“And you decided to do her?”
Dylan grinned, the cocky little bastard. “It was mutual. These days, they’d arrest her, but I’ve got to admit, I enjoyed being taken advantage of.”
“Yeah,” Logan drawled. “I reached that same conclusion when I came running into Jake’s room to rescue you—the way you were howling, I thought somebody was killing you—and there you were, buck-ass naked, with her riding you like a bronc at the rodeo.”
“If she’d have had a hat handy,” Dylan agreed, “she’d have been waving it in the air.”
Logan laughed. Shook his head again. “It’s no wonder we’re so screwed-up,” he said.
Dylan glanced at Kristy, and his expression softened. “Not anymore, brother,” he said. “I’m not screwed-up anymore, and neither are you.”
“Nothing like the love of a good woman,” Logan conceded, just as Briana appeared on the porch and called out that supper was ready.
“Nothing like it,” Dylan said.
Davie swung a leg over and got down, and he and Kristy went into the barn to put the animal up for the night. That was part of learning to ride, as far as Kristy was concerned. You looked after the horse, first, last and always, even if it made you late for supper.
“You think Tyler’s serious about Lily, or just looking for a piece of tail?” Logan asked, as he and Dylan headed toward the house. All he really knew was that Kristy and Dylan had agreed to keep an eye on young Davie while Tyler took Doc Ryder’s daughter, Lily, out to dinner.
Dylan had explained, in his offhand way, that Davie had an asshole for a stepfather, and needed to live away from home for a while, so he was bunking in at Tyler’s place. At the mention of Doreen’s name, and Davie’s age, Logan had started counting backward, summer by summer, to the most likely scenario.
“I think our little brother is definitely looking for a piece of tail,” Dylan replied, after some thought. “I also think he never got over Lily, any more than I got over Kristy, but he may not have figured that part out yet. Could be that Lily hasn’t, either.”
Logan hoped Tyler would fall for his high school sweetheart, hoped he’d marry her and get her pregnant and stay right on Stillwater Springs Ranch, where he belonged.
Where all of them belonged.
The Creed brothers ride again, Logan thought, picturing the three of them riding abreast on well-fed horses, driving their own cattle over their own land, justifiably proud of their name because they’d turned things around, made being a Creed mean something good.
Some dreams never died.
No matter how bad the odds against them might be.
* * *
“WE ARE NOT SKIPPING DINNER,� Lily whispered, as soon as the front door had closed behind her and Tyler. “And we’re not ‘getting right down to business,’ either!”
Tyler laughed, damnably confident. Standing there in the first pink and lavender shadows of a Montana sunset, he looked like a character in a Western movie. “You’re hungry?” he teased.
Heat surged through her.
There was no way she was going to be able to get so much as a bite of food down, with the air so charged between her and Tyler, and he probably knew that as well as she did.
“I’ll fix you some scrambled eggs out at my place,” Tyler went on, when she didn’t speak. He took her hand and instead of pulling free, turning on one heel, dashing back into the house, slamming and locking the door behind her, like any halfway sensible woman would have done, Lily let him lead her down the steps. “How’s that?”
“Nothing is going to happen between us,” Lily insisted, leaving the scrambled-egg question to dangle and casting an anxious glance over one shoulder. Her dad, Tess and Eleanor were all standing with their noses practically pressed to the glass in the living room window, taking it all in.
“Then what’s the harm in scrambled eggs at the cabin?” Tyler asked reasonably, nodding cordially to the spectators. “You’re putting on quite a show, you know,” he added. “Try to make this look like an ordinary dinner date—as it is, anybody would think you’re expecting me to hoist you off your feet and throw you over one shoulder at any second. Carry you off to some cave and lick every part of you until you lose your mind.”
More heat, so heavy that it nearly brought Lily to her knees.
“I could still go inside and forget this whole crazy idea, you know!” Lily whispered furiously.
“You won’t,” Tyler said easily. “Do you think I don’t know you got off in Wal-Mart this morning? You are a woman in need of some intense sex, and I’m just the man to give it to you.”
“And you are impossible! And I did not ‘get off,’ as you so crudely put it, in Wal-Mart!”
“Smile and wave,” Tyler coached, grinning. “We’re still being watched.”
She worked up a smile, waved to the delighted onlookers and against all better judgment, against all reason and good sense, let Tyler guide her down the walk to the gate, through it and up to the passenger door of a Blazer. It didn’t look like the kind of rig he’d drive, she thought, distracted, but then his truck had broken down on some lonely highway, leaving him and his dog afoot, which was part of the reason she was in this mess. Maybe the Blazer was a rental.
“I did not have a climax in Wal-Mart!” she blurted, once she was seated in the spotlessly clean SUV, with her seat belt buckled. Her head wanted to do one thing—go back into her dad’s house, where she’d be safe—but her body had staged a mutiny, taken over.
Tyler, still standing on her side of the Blazer, braced one foot on the running board and smiled at her through the open door. “Save it, Lily. Your eyes practically rolled back in your head. You were breathing from the back of your throat, not your lungs, and you broke out in a very fetching orgasmic sweat. You came. And if it’s the last thing I ever do, I want to see it happen again.”
She scowled at him, turned stiffly to face straight forward, glaring through the windshield. “I did not sweat!” she fussed.
Tyler laughed, closed the door and started around to the driver’s side.
Run for it! her brain warned fitfully.
Take off your underpants, her wanton body countered. It will save time.
“You promised me dinner,” Lily said, as they pulled away from the last bastion of sanity on earth.
“You don’t want dinner. You want my head between your legs.”
She squirmed, wet enough that taking off her panties began to seem almost practical. “Of all the arrogant—”
“Face it, Lily. You’re horny as hell. I’m horny as hell. And neither of us is going to be able to think straight until we’ve tended to business.”
She noticed he hadn’t said “until we’ve made love.” No, he’d said, “tended to business.” There would be no tender kisses, no avowals of lasting affection. What was about to happen between them could only be classified as good old-fashioned fucking.
And Lily was stunned at how much she wanted just exactly that.
From Tyler Creed.
In his cabin at Hidden Lake.
If they even got that far.
As it turned out, they made it to the copse of heavy-leafed trees shading his gravel driveway.
By then, Lily had given up all pretense that it wasn’t going to happen.
She was furious with herself, and she was furious with Tyler, and even that didn’t change a damn thing.
When he pulled that Blazer under those trees, a place made private by the density of the foliage, she unhooked her seat belt and shimmied out of her panties. Angrily rolled down the window and hung them to dry on the passenger-side mirror.
Tyler chuckled at that, a hoarse sound, wholly masculine. He’d won, before he’d even touched her, and she’d made it so ridiculously easy for him that she’d never be able to think about this night again, if she lived to be a hundred, without being embarrassed to tears.
He got out of the Blazer, came around to her side and opened the door.
Lily glared defiantly into his eyes. “Right here?” she asked, with a coolness she certainly didn’t feel. “In the grass?”
“And spoil that sexy little dress?” Tyler drawled. “No way.”
Oh, Lily thought, strangely detached from the whole thing. He was going to have her standing up, the way it happened in books and those pay-per-view movies offered in hotel rooms.
She’d never done that with Burke, but if memory served, all she had to do was wrap her legs around Tyler’s lean hips and he’d be inside her and this needing, this endless, stupid, primitive needing would finally stop.
Then they could both right their clothes, go their separate ways and get on with their lives.
Only it didn’t happen that way.
Tyler went to the back of the small SUV and raised the hatch.
Lily turned her head slightly, to watch over one shoulder while he assessed the space, shook out a neatly folded blanket and arranged it carefully over the bare metal of the tailgate. When he came back, he lifted Lily off the seat as easily as if she weighed nothing at all, carried her around behind the rig and laid her down on the blanket like a picnic-spread at a halftime party.
When he slid her dress up around her waist, she realized she had the analogy right, and her eyes widened with anticipation and no little shock.
Back there in Stillwater Springs, when he’d told her she wanted his head between her legs, she’d thought he was just trying to shake her up. Burke had never been willing to do this—had shamed her the few times she’d asked him to—but now that oral sex was definitely in her very near future, Lily didn’t know what to do.
Tyler showed her. He coaxed her into bending her knees, set her feet wide apart, slipped her new strappy sandals off and let them fall to the ground, forgotten.
With them went all thought of Burke and what he had and hadn’t done, in bed or out.
In those moments, she and Tyler were the only reality.
He made a throaty, anticipatory sound and began tracing the inside of her right thigh with his lips. With his free hand, he found the nest of moist curls where all her life-force seemed to have gathered, like a new universe about to be born, her own personal Big Bang.
The pun made her give a soft, sobbing laugh.
“It’s all right, Lily,” Tyler told her, with a gentleness that brought tears swelling into her throat. “It’s all right.”
She nodded, sniffled, groped with both hands for his hair, his shoulders, any part of him she could touch, and draw near. “What if I—What if I c-come too soon?” she rasped, remembering the spontaneous orgasm she’d had that morning.
Tyler chuckled again, kissing his way down her thigh, nearer and nearer to the apex, to the wet place where she pulsed and ached with the need of him. “There’s no time clock, Lily,” he told her. “And you’re going to come a lot more than once.”
In the next instant, he’d parted her, taken her full into his mouth.
The warmth and the wetness, the first flick of his tongue, instantly sent her shooting skyward on a geyser of stars. She groaned, her cries loud and hoarse, completely surrendered to a kind of lust she’d never let herself feel before.
The climax went on and on, buckling Lily like a live wire fallen into deep water, wringing shout after shout of pleasure from her. Tyler stayed with her, relentless, granting no quarter, demanding everything she had to give, and more.
And she gave.
Oh, how she gave.
When she finally collapsed, spent, exhausted and totally satisfied, tears filled her eyes. It was over. She’d had her climax, and she’d had it too soon.
Now, Tyler would take her. Satisfy himself. But for her, it was over.
He leaned over her, kissed away her tears.
“What?” he whispered, nibbling at the length of her neck, slipping one shoulder strap down to uncover her bra and then her bare breast.
“It’s over,” she murmured. “It happened too fast—I—”
“Shh,” he said. “It’s not over, Lily. It hasn’t even begun.”
He proceeded to prove his words then, caressing her, sucking at her breasts, tonguing the nipples until she thought she’d go mad if he didn’t suck them again.
And when he’d worked her into an even greater frenzy than before, he went down on her again. Held her apart, teased her clitoris with the tip of his tongue, plied her on the inside with his fingers.
She came again.
And then again.
And still Tyler didn’t crawl on top of her.
In fact, when she’d recovered from the third orgasm—or was it the fourth?—he bundled her in the blanket and the discarded dress and lifted her into his arms. Snatched her panties off the passenger-side mirror as they passed.
“Aren’t you going to—well—you know?” Lily inquired sleepily.
“Do you?” Tyler asked. “Yeah, Lily. I’m going to do you, like you’ve never been done before. And then I’m going to do you again. And again after that.”
Even in her melted state, a state in which Lily could barely imagine being able to have even one more orgasm, as long as she lived, she felt the aching need of him begin. Felt herself expanding to receive him. “Oh,” she said, as though he’d just explained every mystery in the universe.
He chuckled, carried her up a set of rickety steps, pushed open a door.
Greeted his dog.
Lily didn’t really see the dog, or the cabin itself. She was all sensation, all warm honey and, conversely, achy wanting.
Tyler carried her up a set of stairs, to a loft of some kind.
She couldn’t have walked, she reasoned. Her legs were like noodles.
He laid her down on a bed, the covers pleasantly rumpled and smelling distinctly of Tyler and no one else. Downstairs, the dog gave a halfhearted whimper.
Tyler disappeared, and she heard his footsteps on the stairs, heard him speaking quietly to the dog, shaking kibble into a bowl. Still, he returned in what seemed like a flicker of a second, and he was magnificently naked now, his erection almost frighteningly big.
Her eyes widened.
He stretched out on the bed next to her, his body half covering hers, careful not to put his full weight on her. She felt delicate, precious, and at the same time, fiercely feminine.
“Lily—I—If you want to change your mind—”
Lily was lost. She finally pressed her fingers to his mouth and urged him onto her.
The need was back, more ferocious than before, beyond refusal. It was basic biology—man, woman, instinct.
She wanted him inside her now, deep, deep inside her.
And she would die if she didn’t have him.
He eased her legs apart. Hesitated for a long, almost unbearable interval, gazing into her eyes. She knew there was some kind of battle going on inside him, one that might have little or nothing to do with her, but she didn’t care.
“Do me, Tyler Creed,” she told him. “Do me.”
She’d seen how huge he was, but when he took her, she gasped at the sheer power of his thrust, at the steely hardness and the instant friction. She would have loved a spontaneous orgasm then, reveled in the quick relief it would have brought her.
But that wasn’t to be.
The build from one level to the next, each one more impossible than the last, was exquisitely slow. At each new place, Tyler stopped, read the play of emotions in Lily’s face as though they were holy writ, made her need him and then need him still more.
The friction increased with every long, slow stroke.
Lily began to fret and toss beneath Tyler, sure she couldn’t bear another breathless pinnacle, on the verge of orgasm but not quite there.
Every twist of her hips made him groan like a man in agony, but he didn’t give in. Several times he stopped, closed his eyes, the muscles in his neck straining as he struggled for control, but he kept her pinned to the mattress, so completely did he fill her.
“Tyler,” she finally begged, tossing her head from side to side on the pillow now, nearly delirious with the promise of satisfaction and the withholding of it. “Make me come—Oh God, Tyler, make me come—”
Something broke inside him then. He slid his hands under her buttocks and slammed into her with everything he had, driving fast and hard and deep enough to touch her very soul.
Lily splintered, even as Tyler stiffened on her, spilled himself into her. She felt his warmth inside her and sobbed his name as another orgasm tore through her, then another. Through it all, Tyler pleasured her with exquisite skill, even after he’d emptied himself, his hands cupping her face now, buried in her sweat-dampened hair. He kissed her as she convulsed under him, around him, as she called his name again and again, in a throaty wail of pleading and of triumph.
Later, when she was back inside herself, Lily would reflect that never in her life, not with Burke, not even when she’d given birth to Tess, had she felt so completely, gloriously, uncompromisingly female.
She’d surrendered to Tyler.
She’d also conquered him.
But it wasn’t lovemaking, she reminded herself, even while she was still clawing at his shoulders and his back, even while she was still shuddering under him, still begging him to have her. It wasn’t lovemaking. It was getting off, being done.
Nothing less, nothing more.
Finally, he rolled onto his side next to her, breathing hard, and pulled her into his arms. Held her. Murmured the occasional senseless word into her hair.
And in some ways, that part of the encounter was even more satisfying than the shattering climaxes he’d given her only minutes before. The tender, time-out-of-time feeling of it brought fresh tears to Lily’s eyes.
Tyler held her more tightly still, and told her to shush, and the two of them drifted off into sleep.
* * *
WHEN LILY AWAKENED, the room was dark, except for a silvery stream of moonlight pouring in through a window that hadn’t been washed in a while. Tyler’s side of the bed was empty, but as reality coalesced around her, sound by sound, feeling by feeling, sight by sight, she heard his voice.
He was downstairs, talking to the dog.
Lily sat up, felt around for her sundress, started to pull it on and gave up. It was a wrinkled mess—how was she going to go home and face her father and daughter and little Eleanor from next door in a garment that had so obviously spent most of the evening in a crumpled heap?
She began to panic.
What had she done?
Tyler started up the stairs; she saw his head first, grinning. Then his T-shirt and misbuttoned jeans. Then his bare feet.
He offered her a jelly glass with wine in it.
“How am I going to explain the state of this dress?” Lily demanded, but she took the glass, and a gulp of the wine, and was a little surprised to realize it was good stuff, not the kind that came out of a spigoted box.
And there was music playing somewhere.
Was that Andrea Bocelli?
“I wouldn’t try to explain the dress, if I were you,” Tyler said, sitting down on the edge of the bed with a satisfied sigh. “A couple of slaps with an iron and it will look okay.”
“You own an iron?”
Tyler laughed. “Yeah,” he said. “A few other luxuries, too.”
Lily felt another rush of panic, looked at her wrist, which was bare since she’d forgotten her watch at home, and then all around the room, in hopeless search of a clock. “What time is it?”
“Early enough,” he drawled.
“Early enough for what?” Lily demanded, but she knew, of course, and her resolve was already weakening.
She hadn’t come to her senses, then.
In fact, she was nowhere near them.
“Early enough,” Tyler repeated. Then he took the wine out of her hand and set it aside. He stood and peeled the T-shirt off over his head, unbuttoned his jeans and took them off.
Once again, Lily’s eyes nearly popped at the size of his erection. He seemed even bigger than before.
How was that possible?
Deftly, he turned her onto her hands and knees, knelt behind her, stroked her belly and her thighs and her breasts until she whimpered.
“You might want to hold on,” he murmured, kissing her right shoulder even as he guided her fingers to the rails in the headboard. “This position is hell on the old G-spot.”
Lily’s palms felt moist and slick where she gripped the rails. She gave another little whimper when she felt him pressing at her vagina, about to ease inside her.
“Have you ever done it this way, Lily?” he asked, gliding his mouth across her back to her left shoulder, weighing her breast with one hand and toying with her clitoris with the other.
She shook her head, nearly hypnotized by the sound of his voice, the hard heat building inside her. She’d thought she needed to get laid, specifically by Tyler Creed, and that was it.
Slam, bam, thank you, sir.
He had satisfied her, every time. Oh, satisfaction wasn’t even the word for the things he’d made her feel.
But she’d expected to get him out of her system.
Scratch the itch, and be done with it.
Now, here she was, on her knees, bending over for him, holding on to the headboard of his bed like some—some porn queen. Even in a whole new fog of lust, she blushed to remember things she’d cried out before—do me, Tyler—make me come—
He eased inside her, smooth and slow.
Began a gentle rhythm, rocking her on the bed, murmuring softly to her.
In and out, in and out.
In five minutes, she was begging him again, groaning those same fitful phrases—and some new ones, too.