THE HEADLIGHTS of an oncoming car splashed through the windshield of the Blazer, a cruel dazzle to the eyes, as Tyler drove Lily back to her dad’s place in Stillwater Springs. She sat huddled in the passenger seat, wearing her crumpled dress, arms clamped around her middle, being very careful not to glance in his direction.
She’d looked fantastic in that dress.
Even better out of it.
Now, at a little after one in the morning, remorse was evidently setting in. Lily, helping him pound the headboard against the wall of his sleeping loft only a little while ago, howling like a she-wolf as she came, seemed profoundly miserable now.
It grieved Tyler to know that, because regret was the last thing he felt. He was still weak in the knees from the pleasure he’d shared with Lily—it had been the best sex of his life, bar none. And he’d had a lot of sex in his life.
“Hey,” he said gruffly, hoping she’d pick up the conversational ball and run with it.
“We didn’t even use condoms,” Lily lamented, thrusting the fingers of one hand into her love-tangled hair.
Tyler always wore a condom, but the precaution hadn’t even occurred to him with Lily.
“I’m healthy, Lily,” he said. “Nothing to worry about there.” He paused, swerved slightly to avoid a doe and a young fawn dashing suddenly across the dark road. “Could you be pregnant?” he asked, after a few moments of recovery from the near-miss with the deer.
She made a strangled sound, part laugh, part sob, but distinctly neither. “No,” she said.
“You’re on the pill—or something?”
“Or something,” she said, with a touch of bitterness. “I can’t have any more children, Tyler. Believe me, I tried.”
Lily couldn’t have kids? The thought opened a hollow place deep inside Tyler, an echoing void.
“You have Tess,” he pointed out lamely. Like she might have forgotten.
“There were some problems,” she explained, still without looking at him. “After Tess was born, I mean.”
Tyler marveled at the scope of his disappointment. It wasn’t as if he’d planned to marry Lily and start a family or anything, but the idea that it wasn’t possible to have a child with her had struck him hard, like an unexpected punch to the gut. He might have doubled over, if he hadn’t been at the wheel of Kristy’s Blazer.
“You’re sure?” he asked.
“I’m sure. Burke and I wanted more children—or, at least, I did. But after Tess was born, I couldn’t get pregnant again.”
They’d reached the outskirts of Stillwater Springs, and the place looked less scruffy in the dark. “Were you tested?”
Lily shook her head. “There was no point,” she said. “If something hadn’t been wrong, I’d have conceived.”
“Did it ever cross your mind,” Tyler pressed, “that you might not have been the one with the problem?”
She made that sob-sound again. Hugged herself more tightly than before, as though she feared she might fly apart in pieces if she didn’t. “Burke Kenyon, the hotshot pilot, the ladies’ man, sterile? I don’t think so. Besides, he used to brag about how many abortions his mother had to pay for while he was in college.”
“Nice guy,” Tyler commented.
They pulled up in front of Hal Ryder’s dark house. Hopefully, the doc and the two little girls were sound asleep by now. The kids were too young to speculate about Lily’s dress and the state of her hair and the way her mouth was swollen from too much kissing, but Doc would know the whole story at a glance.
Tyler got out of the Blazer, came around to open Lily’s door, only to find her already scrambling off the running board. She stood there in the street, trying to straighten that hopelessly messed-up dress.
He knew she’d probably slap him silly if he tried to kiss her good-night, but he couldn’t just dump her in front of her dad’s front gate after all that had happened between them out at his place.
He took her by the arm and walked her through the gate, up the walk, onto the porch. Waited while she fumbled with the handle on the screen door. Beyond it, the front door stood open.
“Lily,” he said, very quietly, lest he wake the neighbors or Lily’s dad.
“What?” she snapped, but she kept her voice down.
“I wouldn’t change what we did tonight for anything,” he answered.
She opened the screen door, and it creaked a little on its hinges.
Lily winced, looking as anxious as a teenager out after curfew. “You got what you wanted,” she whispered. “I got what I wanted. Now, we’ll just act as if it never happened.”
“Are you kidding?” Tyler demanded, insulted.
“Shh!” Lily said, putting a finger to her lips. “Do you want to wake everyone up?”
Tyler sighed. If it had been up to him, he’d have woken up the whole damn town, whooping and hollering for joy, in true cowboy style. “Good night,” he said instead, as well-mannered as somebody’s English butler, holding the screen door for her, so it wouldn’t slam when she went inside, the way screen doors tended to do. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”
Lily didn’t answer; she just scowled at him and disappeared into the house, shutting the door decisively between them.
“Hot damn,” Tyler said, grinning, as he sprinted back down the walk and through the open gate. He hopped into the Blazer and switched on the engine, sat there at the curb for a long moment, wishing he and Logan and Dylan were still close.
If they had been, he’d have had someone to celebrate with.
He’d have told them he was getting married.
Wait—he was what?
He knew that as surely as he knew the sun would climb up over the eastern hills in a few hours, spilling fiery pink and orange light over the trees and the pastures, the creeks and rivers.
He thrust a hand through his hair. Maybe it was better this way, since he needed some time to adjust to the decision himself, and the prospective bride wasn’t in on his plans quite yet.
Still, he couldn’t go straight home, knowing what he did, even though he knew poor old Kit Carson would be waiting for him there. The dog definitely suffered from separation anxiety.
He drove back to the ranch, slowly, trying to make sense of everything he was thinking and feeling, and having no luck with it at all. One minute, he’d been his old self. The next, he was suddenly husband material.
He wasn’t even sure when the shift had occurred, but the whole universe seemed to be converging on the concept now—him and Lily, married. It was mind-boggling and, at the same time, entirely natural, as though it had been inevitable from the beginning of time.
Passing by the main ranch house—it was dark, with everybody bedded down for the night—Tyler found himself yearning for the old days, when he and his brothers were still kids.
They hadn’t been all bad, those times.
When Jake was sober, he’d played driveway basketball with the three of them. There had been a hoop over the garage door, back then. He’d spun yarns, too, most of them about the glory days of the Creeds, when the ranch was one of the biggest and best in the whole state of Montana. Yes, sir, Jake had known all about the “thrilling days of yesteryear,” as he’d put it, and when Tyler, puzzled, had asked him to explain the phrase, Jake had shaken his head and said it had to do with the Lone Ranger and you had to be there to understand.
Remembering, Tyler’s eyes smarted a little.
He stopped, got out of the Blazer and opened a gate in Logan’s fancy new wooden fence, drove the Blazer through and went back to shut the gate again. There were cattle on the place now and, having grown up in the country, Tyler respected ranch etiquette. No matter what, if a gate was closed when you got to it, you made sure it was closed again when you’d passed through it.
He headed for the old cemetery, with the Blazer’s headlights switched off. If Logan or Dylan had seen their glow in the pasture, they might come out to investigate.
At the edge of the pioneer graveyard, Tyler parked the rig, shut off the engine and, ignoring Jake’s grave, found the one marked with his mother’s name.
Someone had been there recently, left a bouquet of pink, purple and yellow wildflowers in a Mason jar by her headstone. A sliver short of being full, the moon spilled a silvery glimmer over the whole place, lending it a strange and potent beauty.
Tyler crouched, touched the flowers in the canning jar and wondered who had left them. He finally concluded that it must have been Logan’s wife, Briana. Kristy and Dylan were still staying in town, at her place, while their new house was being built, but Logan and Briana lived within walking distance. And someone had mentioned in passing—Tyler couldn’t recall who—that Briana and her boys had taken care of the cemetery long before she and Logan met.
Having no idea what to say to a dead person—he wasn’t all that good at talking to live ones—Tyler simply sat there on his haunches, remembering, wishing things had been different.
Angela Creed had been a beautiful woman, delicate and spirited and full of music. Until Jake’s drinking and womanizing and chronic poverty had gotten to be too much for her, anyhow.
Lots of women lived with worse situations, Tyler reflected. Doreen was a good example. But they didn’t just drive off one day, hole up in some fleabag motel on a lonely stretch of highway and down a handful of pills.
Had she even thought about what her death would do to him or, for that matter, to Dylan and Logan? They’d both lost their mothers, and they’d loved Angela. Loved her singing and her guitar-playing on the back porch at night—serenading the fireflies, she’d called it.
Loved her peach cobbler, too, and the way she’d mussed their hair and straightened their collars, treated them like her own boys.
The news the sheriff brought might not have been such a shock if Angela had seemed unhappy. Oh, she and Jake had fought often, and loudly, behind the closed door of their bedroom, and there were other signs that the marriage was on its way down the tubes, but she’d always had a smile for “my boys,” no matter how bad things were otherwise.
But she hadn’t even said goodbye.
She’d made supper that night, like always, Tyler recalled, and told him and Logan and Dylan to do their chores. She’d seemed distracted and upset, that was true, but she sure hadn’t let on that she wouldn’t be coming back.
Why? Tyler asked himself silently, for about the millionth time. Why hadn’t she turned to Cassie that night, or to some other friend or relation, gone anywhere but to that damn dead-end motel? Why hadn’t she just divorced Jake Creed?
That, Tyler could have comprehended, young as he’d been at the time.
He would even have understood if she’d said she couldn’t take him with her, if she’d left him behind with Logan and Dylan, until she’d found a teaching job someplace, and managed to rent an apartment or a house.
Instead, she’d consigned herself to oblivion.
Permanent solution to a temporary problem, Jake had said, the day of her funeral. He’d worn a suit that didn’t fit him, Jake had, and smelled of stale whiskey.
Shut up, Logan had told their father furiously. Why can’t you just shut up?
Tyler blinked, yanked himself back to the here and now, rose to his full height.
Thought about Lily.
What if whatever it was that had been wrong with Jake was wrong with him, too? What if it was hardwired into his DNA, and he took up with Lily and then one fine day woke up with a yen for whiskey?
What if.
Both Logan and Dylan must have had similar doubts, similar fears.
And yet Logan had married Briana and taken on a couple of stepchildren in the bargain, and Dylan had made Kristy Madison his wife, set out to raise two-year-old Bonnie, too.
What did his brothers know that he didn’t?
Or were Logan and Dylan just whistling in the dark? Taking a chance, throwing the dice, hoping against hope that things would work out—but well aware that, being Creeds, they were a pair of emotional time bombs, programmed to morph into the old man when some mysterious switch was flipped in their brains?
Did they wake up in a cold sweat at night, wondering when it would all come crashing down around them?
Both his brothers had been wild men when they were younger—Logan had been married at least twice before Briana, and Dylan hadn’t been a real father to Bonnie until he’d been forced into it, after finding the toddler in his truck one night in Vegas, abandoned by her mother.
Tyler left the graveyard, got back into the Blazer, started the engine and headed for his cabin.
He’d put off going back because he knew Lily’s absence would echo in the place, that the sheets would be imprinted with her singular scent. Now, because of the dog, and because Kristy or Dylan or both would be dropping Davie off first thing in the morning, he couldn’t wait any longer.
Kit Carson was ridiculously glad to see him. After some ear-ruffling and reassurances, Tyler took the dog outside. Without Lily to distract him, Tyler heard all the night sounds this time—the frogs croaking at the mossy-green edges of the lake, the crickets, an owl or two. Even fish breaking the surface of the water and splashing as they made re-entry.
For all the burdens he carried, Tyler loved that ramshackle old shack, ugly and small though it was. Jake had rented it out for a fishing cabin while he was growing up, but the old man had promised that when the time came, and the ranch was split between him and Logan and Dylan, Hidden Lake and some three thousand acres surrounding it would be his.
Promise-keeping had been a rare thing for Jake Creed, but he’d kept this one. Six months after his death, and the debacle at Skivvie’s that had put an end to so much, an official-looking letter had caught up with Tyler, somewhere on the rodeo circuit, along with a document granting him full title to one-third of Stillwater Springs Ranch.
Tyler and Kit Carson walked to the end of the ancient dock, watched the moonlight dance on the surface of the water. He’d just married Shawna when that letter arrived, and for weeks they’d talked of coming back, spending a “just-the-two-of-us summer,” and maybe conceiving a baby.
But before the winter was over, Shawna, returning from a visit with her folks, had hit a patch of ice on the long, twisting road between Carson City, Nevada, and Reno, and rolled her truck. According to the EMTs called to the scene by a passing motorist, Shawna had died on impact.
The one thing that had kept Tyler sane was knowing she hadn’t suffered.
But there would be no summer at Hidden Lake.
No baby.
No anything.
Tyler had grieved, not just for Shawna, but for all they’d planned, all the things that would never happen.
The guilt had been even worse than the grief—because while Tyler had liked Shawna, he’d soon realized that he’d never really loved her, and the fear that she might have known that all along ate at him whenever he allowed his thoughts to wander down that particular trail.
Which wasn’t often.
Although he hadn’t consciously recognized it when he’d first met Shawna, behind the chutes at a rodeo in Cheyenne, she’d borne a certain casual similarity to Lily. Same compact but lushly feminine build, same blue eyes and blond hair.
He sat down on the end of the creaky old dock—like everything else on the property, it needed replacing—and Kit Carson huddled up close and leaned in.
Tyler put an arm around the dog, trying to reassure the poor critter. They were together for the duration, him and ole Kit Carson, two veterans of a hard-knock world, home at last.
He tried to pinpoint the moment he’d decided to marry Lily; figured it must have been right around the time she’d hung her damp panties on the passenger-side mirror of Kristy’s Blazer. The memory made him smile.
Did he love Lily?
He wasn’t sure. Growing up Creed the way he had, he wasn’t sure he’d know love—the real thing—if it bit him in the ass.
He sure as hell felt something, though. Something deep and undeniable and completely unlike anything he’d ever felt before.
It wasn’t just the sex, though God knew that was good.
He watched, pondering, as moonlight played on the still, dark water, putting on the kind of show he’d missed in the big city, for all the bright lights. New York, Las Vegas, L.A.—he’d tried to put down roots in all three of those places, but he’d never been able to find a soft spot in all that concrete.
No, he needed rich Montana dirt under his feet, and that fabled Big Sky over his head.
He needed Lily.
Maybe he even needed his brothers, though he wasn’t quite prepared to admit that, just yet.
The question was, did Lily need him? She’d responded, body and soul, to every touch of his hands, every brush of his lips, every caress and whispered word and hard, deep thrust of his hips. But there was a lot more to the far side of a wedding than sex; even a marriage-challenged Creed like himself knew that much.
It was possible she’d been telling the truth when she’d informed him, in so many words, that she’d only gone along with the whole thing because she wanted to get him out of her system. And she’d seemed pretty adamant, as they drove back to her dad’s place: the whole night had been about getting off, to hear her tell it.
In the beginning, Tyler had believed that, too. That taking Lily to bed was a way of scratching an old itch. In retrospect, he knew that during their first simultaneous climax, it hadn’t been just their bodies that had connected and then fused in a flash of fire. It had been some other, more elemental dimension of their beings.
Or, at least, that was how it had been for him.
He turned his head, disturbing the leaning tower of dog a little, and looked back at the cabin. From the looks of that house, it might just fall over on one side at any minute, its beams finally giving out under the pressure of too many deep-snow winters weighing down on its roof. Too many hard winds battering its walls, rattling its windows. Too many glaring summer suns warping its timbers.
It was time to tear down and rebuild, the way Dylan was doing on his section of the ranch. Like Dylan, Tyler felt no sentimental attachment to the structure itself; it was the land that mattered to him—the land generations of Creeds had walked on. Good Creeds and bad ones, strong ones and weak ones—a long and winding line of them reaching all the way back to old Josiah himself.
Suddenly, it was as if the ghosts of all Tyler’s ancestors rose up out of that good Montana soil, a horde of them, demanding their due.
We fought for this land, they seemed to say. We lived and died and sweated and bled here. We raised our children and buried our dead, and laughed and wept and shook our fists at heaven itself when the crops failed and the cattle died. And like it or not, you’re one of us. We’re in your blood. No matter where you go or what you do or who you try to turn yourself into, you’re still a Creed.
“Damn it,” Tyler muttered, shoving a hand through his hair.
But the words echoed in his mind. You’re still a Creed.
Kit Carson whimpered, concerned.
“You’re going to have to tough up, dog,” Tyler told him, ruffling the animal’s floppy ears. “You’re a Creed now.”
Slowly, Tyler got to his feet, made his way back down the dock to the shore, made himself go inside the cabin. He knew he wouldn’t sleep in the bed he’d just shared with Lily—those few square yards would feel like an acre of frozen river—so he crashed downstairs on the cot he’d set up for Davie.
He woke to sunlight reddening his eyelids and somebody banging around in the general vicinity of the cookstove.
Raising himself on one elbow, Tyler blinked.
Logan was there, building a pot of coffee, and Kit Carson, who would obviously never go down in the annals of history as one of the great guard dogs, was practically glued to the intruder’s heels, tail wagging, tongue lolling, ears perked.
“Mornin’, little brother,” Logan drawled, as though he had every right to invade another man’s house while he was sleeping. “Nice to know you’re not dead. You must have had yourself one hell of a night.”
“What are you doing here?” Tyler snapped, sitting up, swinging his legs over the side of the cot. He’d hauled off his shirt at some point, and slept in his jeans.
“Well, dumb-ass,” Logan answered easily, “what does it look like I’m doing?”
“It looks,” Tyler snarled, “like you’re trespassing.”
Logan grinned. “That, too,” he agreed. “But mainly I’m making coffee. Maybe a cup will restore your friendly attitude.” He paused, shook his head. “That’s right,” he corrected himself. “You never had a friendly attitude in the first place.”
“What the hell time is it, anyhow?” Tyler growled. He’d left his watch upstairs, and there wasn’t a clock in the whole damn place.
“Around six,” Logan said, rustling up a couple of mugs and setting them on the table. “Half the day’s gone. If you were any kind of rancher, you’d know that.”
Tyler shook his head. Stumbled into the john, used it, washed his hands at the sink and came out again.
Logan had drawn back a chair and sat down to wait for the java to brew, just as if he was welcome in that house.
“Time we talked,” he said.
“We’ve got nothing to talk about,” Tyler grumbled. Kit Carson was at the door, so he let him out.
“I’m sorry I busted your guitar,” Logan said.
The words were simple ones, but something about the proud, quiet way his brother said them got to Tyler in a way that made him reinforce his anti-Logan force-field.
“Too little, too late,” Tyler grumbled, glaring at the coffeepot, willing it to perk so he could get some caffeine flowing through his veins.
Logan rolled his eyes, but the set of his mouth was grim. Determined. “Goddamn you’re stubborn,” he said. “I’m your brother, Ty.”
“Spare me the ‘I’m your brother’ crap,” Tyler said. “Five years ago, we decided to go our own ways—with good reason. Let’s keep it like that, okay?”
“You plan on staying here on the ranch?” Logan asked, and Tyler would have thought his brother hadn’t heard a word he’d said, if it hadn’t been for that familiar muscle bunching in Logan’s jaw. That always happened when he was annoyed.
“Maybe,” Tyler ground out.
“Then how do you expect to avoid Dylan and me?”
“There must be a way,” Tyler said.
Logan chuckled. “Haven’t you ever done anything you wished you could take back?” he asked.
There were plenty of things Tyler regretted, but he wasn’t inclined to share them, especially with Logan. “What do you want?” he demanded, clearly enunciating each word, dragging back a chair and sitting down opposite his brother. After all, it was his house. Why should he stand, while Logan lounged at his table?
“Another chance,” Logan answered. This time, he sounded hoarse.
“Why?” Tyler asked, honestly puzzled.
Logan didn’t reply to that. He just folded his arms and sat there looking at Tyler like he was two feet over the border between smart and stupid.
“You’re not going to leave this alone, are you?” Tyler rasped.
“Nope,” Logan said.
“Okay, I forgive you for smashing the guitar. Are you happy now?”
“I’m real happy,” Logan shot back. “Don’t I look happy?”
“You look butt-ugly,” Tyler said. “Now, will you please leave? I’m not a morning person.”
Logan laughed again, reached out, tapped a stack of papers with the tip of one finger. Tyler hadn’t noticed the documents until then. He frowned.
“What—”
“I assume you can read,” Logan said.
Smart-ass son of a bitch.
Tyler picked up the documents, scanned the face page. Something about a corporation called Tri-Star Cattle Company.
“We’re trying to run a ranch here, Dylan and me,” Logan told him. “A third of it’s yours. Are you going to sign on or not?”
