BEFORE SHE DARED to open her eyes, Briana let her mind race through the events that had brought her to that moment, pressed against Logan Creed on a narrow couch. The frustrating discussion with Heather, the then-disturbing encounter with Brett Turlow in the casino parking lot. Finding the door open at home, and Wanda gone. Wandering into the orchard. The bear. The oddly calm terror she’d felt. Logan’s truck bumping and bucking over rough ground, wending between trees, horn blaring. And then…blessed safety, sanctuary in the ranch house that had stood empty for so long.
Her fingers were still knotted in the front of his shirt.
And he had a serious erection.
Was he awake?
She forced herself to look.
He was, dark eyes solemn. And smoldering.
She should get up off that couch, she told herself silently. Find her clothes, put them on and hightail it out of there, on foot if necessary.
On foot? She’d risk running into the bear again if she walked home, and, anyway, she couldn’t expect Wanda to make that hike, bear or no bear.
Dylan’s truck was still where she’d parked it the day before—next to the clothesline at the other place.
Briana gave a languid stretch, heard Logan groan under his breath. His erection, already hard and hot against her, searing through the only thing she was wearing—a T-shirt—grew harder still, and hotter.
The night before, he’d refused to make love to her. Said she wasn’t in her “right mind,” whatever that meant. Well, this morning she was, and she wanted him, if only this once, hurriedly, the two of them fumbling on his couch, like a pair of teenage lovers left unsupervised.
Her body was already expanding, warm and achy, to receive him.
She wasn’t using birth control—there’d been no reason to—and even if Logan happened to have condoms on hand, she knew by his breathing, by the hard tension and the heat, that he might not take the time to find one and put it on.
But she was tired of the constant self-denial, and the need ran deep, a canyon in the center of her being, yawning and dangerous.
So she found his mouth with hers, and kissed him.
He held back at first, but then gave in.
Their tongues tangled, Logan shifted, and she was beneath him, squirming, arching her back. It wasn’t yet dawn; they were blanketed in shadows, alone. Somewhere nearby, a clock ticked, marking off seconds like heartbeats.
Logan pulled back breathlessly. She saw his face clearly—there must have been a lamp burning, or maybe it was moonlight—and saw the reluctance and a need to match her own.
He didn’t ask the question; she glimpsed it in his eyes.
Are you sure?
She nodded. Even then, with no foreplay save that horizon-bending kiss, she was on the brink of shattering. She wanted him inside her, filling her.
He moaned her name.
She wriggled beneath him.
He shifted, tugged the T-shirt up and off, over her head. Tossed it away.
She slid her hands up under his T-shirt, splayed her fingers across his solid, warm chest. Smooth. It was smooth, his chest. His nipples pressed like hard buttons against the palms of her hands.
He braced himself on either side of her, thrust his head far back with a ragged gasp. “Briana, I don’t have—”
“Shh,” she murmured.
She found the snap on his jeans, set him free, stroked him with a kind of shameless abandon she’d never felt before.
Logan made a raw, scratchy sound, deep in his throat, and allowed her to plunder him for several long, stretched-to-the-snapping-point moments. Then he fell to her, tongued her bare breasts, suckled on them, one and then the other.
Briana gave a low cry of sheer exultation, arching her back, grinding her hips where their bodies met. She parted her legs slightly, felt him settle between them.
And then, like the thrust of some fiery sword, he was inside her, deep, deep inside her.
“Yes!” she cried. “Yes—”
Her climax was immediate, as she had known it would be, and all-consuming, sucking the breath from her lungs, electrifying even the tiniest nerves, rippling like a current through every muscle. Even as she surrendered to the storm, as powerless as a bird caught up in a whirlwind, tears welled in her eyes.
It would be over so soon.
But it wasn’t. She’d barely stopped shuddering, Logan holding himself still inside and above her, when the friction began to build again, more slowly this time.
“Easy,” he groaned.
“Oh…my… God—” she pleaded, grasping at his shoulders, tossing beneath him. “Logan—”
He began to move again, but with excruciating slowness, consummate control. The second climax came several minutes later, more devastating than the first, wringing a long, crooning whine from Briana, but this time, there was no slow descent afterward. The orgasm spiked, and then began to climb.
As Logan increased his pace, Briana was utterly lost. Dazed, blinded, groping and begging senselessly, she practically disintegrated. Logan’s own cry of satisfaction was a distant thing, an echo heard under deep water, more vibration than sound.
They strained against each other for what seemed a very long time, slowly coming back to themselves, and then collapsed in a tangle of arms and legs, speechless with exhaustion.
Even when they’d recovered, they didn’t talk right away.
What was there to say?
Logan sprawled across Briana, though he’d been careful not to crush her under his full weight.
“Next time,” he said, after a long time, “let’s use the bed.”
She laughed, savoring their closeness, her satiation and his. It would be gone soon enough, that magical, golden feeling of freedom, when reality reasserted itself. “Who says there’s going to be a next time?”
He lifted his head, grinned at her. “After that? You’ve got to be kidding.” He kissed her lightly. “Of course there’s going to be a next time, and a time after that.”
Briana felt the truth of her life prodding at the perimeters of her pleasure, looking for a way in. She would hold it at bay as long as she could, stay inside the bubble of contentment until it popped.
Before her befuddled brain came up with an answer for Logan’s remark, though, his face contorted and he leaped over her, like a man on fire, hopping on one foot and howling.
Wanda, Sidekick and Snooks all came running, their barking fit to raise the roof.
“Charley horse!” Logan yelled.
And Briana laughed, full out, from the place far inside her, where her true self lived, the woman, the goddess, the unflappable One Who Knew. She laughed until she doubled over, until Logan stopped jumping around and Wanda came to the side of the couch and licked the tears off her face.
* * *
LOGAN LIMPED INTO the kitchen, the dogs following, to start the coffee brewing and give Briana a chance to collect herself. Once the java apparatus was in full chortle, he went outside, fed the horses, checked to make sure the water trough in the corral was full.
By the time he got back to the house, the sun was up, and Briana was dressed in her own clothes, frying bacon and eggs at the stove.
Logan had slept with a lot of women in his life, and he’d never been at a loss for words the morning after. This day, he was.
She’d tamed that wild, blazing blond hair of hers into the usual French braid—that part was a pity—but she seemed surrounded by a haze of soft light, as though she didn’t quite belong in the ordinary, rough-and-tumble world, but had gone astray from some finer one.
“How’s your leg?” she asked.
Logan was momentarily stymied. “My—?” Then he remembered the charley horse. The result of sleeping on the couch, probably, twisted like a snarl of rusty barbed wire, trying to avoid touching Briana and at the same time keep her from falling off onto the floor. “It’s fine,” he said.
“Are you just going to stand there all day, Logan Creed?” she asked, sounding for all the world like one of the long, long line of women who’d stood in that kitchen, turning the breakfast bacon in a skillet, urging some Creed husband to get moving. “Wash up and set the table. The food is almost ready.”
The sweetness of that moment tightened the back of Logan’s throat. It would have been so easy to imagine that this was a regular morning, that they were man and wife and her boys would be tromping in at any minute, fresh from their little-kid beds. Even that there might be a baby nearby, in a playpen or one of those cradle-like things that folded up for easy transport.
So easy, and so dangerous.
Logan put kibble out for all three dogs and refilled their common water dish before washing his hands with soap and water at the sink, drying them on a wad of paper towels and setting plates and silverware on the table.
What now? He wanted to ask her that, and Where do we go from here?
But he didn’t dare. Things seemed too delicately balanced for that, too fragile. Whatever was insulating the both of them from the real world was as flimsy, and as transparently beautiful, as a butterfly’s wing.
Since there were no serving dishes to speak of, Briana shoveled the food onto their plates, straight from the big skillet and the smaller one she’d fried the eggs in.
Sitting down, she stole a glance at the Regulator clock on the wall separating the kitchen from the living room. Six-thirty.
Logan read her mind by reading her face. Her mouth puckered a little, as did her forehead, and then that slight shake of her head.
Too early to call Josh and Alec and find out if they’d survived the overnighter at Vance and Heather’s.
“Sooner or later,” Logan said, his voice sounding like five miles of dry gravel, “we’re going to have to talk about what we just did.”
She set her fork down. Frowned. But the pinkish tinge to her cheeks betrayed her. “We had sex.”
“We made love.”
Even though she didn’t actually move, he saw her pull back inside herself, become the regular Briana—the hardworking single mother, barely making it from paycheck to paycheck. “What’s the difference?” she asked.
Heat surged up Logan’s neck. Was she trying to piss him off?
Sure she was.
She needed to throw up a barrier between them.
“What’s the difference?” he echoed, determined not to let her pretend nothing had happened between them. Maybe she had resurrection sex all the time, but he’d never been hurled outside himself like that before. He still felt the jolt.
Briana bit her lower lip, wouldn’t look at him.
“And where the hell did you get a name like Briana, anyway?” he sputtered, because, damn it, he had to say something.
Her green eyes twinkled a little. “Wild Man was quite a reader,” she said, and it took Logan a second to make the connection that Wild Man was her dad’s rodeo nickname. “He read a story with a character named Briana, and the name took his fancy.”
The tension was ebbing, but it was a goodnews/bad-news kind of thing. Now, the pretending would start.
Sure, they’d had sex, but they were two consenting adults, weren’t they?
No big deal.
A pulsing sorrow welled up in Logan—he might have been onboard the Titanic, watching the last of the lifeboats skim away into the frigid Atlantic darkness. “Did your mother agree?”
“I don’t know,” Briana said. “She died when I was eight.”
Logan glanced at the Our Family album, still lying on the other side of the table, where he’d left it the night before. Looked back at Briana. “I don’t know much about my mother, either,” he said. “I had stepmothers, though. They both tried to take up the slack.”
Briana studied him. “Stepmothers, plural?”
He nodded, smiled wistfully at the memory of Dylan’s mother, Maggie, puttering in this same kitchen, and then Tyler’s mother, Angela. “Two of them,” he confirmed. “Jake—my dad—seemed to think he could outrun his demons by marrying some good woman and getting her pregnant five minutes after the ceremony.” He sighed. “It never worked.”
Remember that.
Briana pushed her food around with the prongs of her fork. “Is that why you got married more than once, Logan? To outrun some demon?”
The question stung, striking bare nerves. He wondered briefly who’d told her about his marriages, decided it could have been anybody in Stillwater Springs. For all he knew, he’d told her himself.
“Maybe,” he admitted. “Looking back, though, I’d have to say it just seemed like a good idea—twice.”
She chuckled ruefully at that. “So many things seem like good ideas, at the time. When I met Vance, I didn’t bother to find out who he was. I created an identity for him—the cowboy prince I’d read about in so many library books—and when that turned out to be false, I tried to change him into what I wanted.”
“Good luck with that,” Logan said.
“Didn’t you want to change your wives? Ever?”
“No. But about six months in, I wouldn’t have minded volunteering them both for long-term space flights. Say to Jupiter, or the asteroid belt on the other side of Pluto.”
Briana laughed, swatted at his arm. Her touch made his nerves jangle under his flesh.
And then the phone rang.
Somebody had really lousy timing.
Logan sighed, got up and crossed the room. Barked a “Hello” into the receiver.
“Is my mom there?” Alec asked meekly.
Logan bit back the automatic “Yeah” that rolled to the tip of his tongue. It wasn’t even seven in the morning, and young as Alec was, he might put two and two together, which would not, Logan knew by the look on Briana’s face, be a good thing.
“She just stopped by for coffee,” he said.
Briana was at his side in an instant; he surrendered the phone.
“Josh? Alec?”
Logan watched her face as she listened. Saw the anxiety drain from her eyes.
“You’re fine?” she asked. “Really?” A long pause. “Yes. Yes, I’m going to work.” More listening. Briana’s gaze touched Logan, ricocheted off immediately. “Yes, I’ll remember to charge my cell phone…. Sure, I’ll see you tonight—bye.”
She moved to hang up the phone, keeping her back to Logan.
“Can we act like this morning didn’t happen?” she asked.
“No,” he answered, without hesitation.
She turned, her eyes wide and troubled. “It was wrong,” she said. “You’ve already had to lie once because of it—”
He crossed to her, took her shoulders in a gentle grip. “It wasn’t wrong, Briana,” he said.
“Not for you, maybe,” she retorted miserably. “You’re a man. It’s another notch in your bedpost. A score. For me—”
“What was it for you?” he demanded, loosening his hold on her shoulders but not willing, or able, to let her go. “And don’t tell me it was ‘just sex,’ Briana, because I was there.”
Color suffused her face. “Okay, so I enjoyed it,” she said. “So did you.”
For a long moment, they simply stared at each other, neither one knowing what else to say. Then they broke apart.
Briana started to clear the table.
Logan stopped her.
She found her purse and called her dog, he got his keys, and, by tacit agreement, he took her and Wanda home.
* * *
THE DOOR WAS open again.
Briana stared. She’d closed it when she went looking for Wanda the day before—she remembered that clearly.
Logan swore under his breath, shut off the truck and got out before she’d unbuckled her seat belt. After lifting Wanda off the backseat, he strode toward the back porch.
A shiver went down Briana’s spine. Maybe, she thought, Vance and Heather had stopped by last night, so the boys could get their pajamas or something. In the rush, they’d forgotten to shut the door….
Only Josh wouldn’t have done that. He was too security conscious. And Vance and Heather, while not exactly paragons of responsibility, would surely have noticed.
Wanda curled back her lips and growled, crouching a little in the grass.
“Stay here,” Logan told Briana, as she got out of the truck.
He disappeared inside.
Briana fumbled for her new cell phone, remembered it needed charging. Tossed it back into her purse and inched toward the door, expecting shouts to erupt at any moment, or sounds of a scuffle—maybe even a gunshot.
“Logan?” she called uncertainly.
Wanda was still growling, still crouched, but apparently not inclined to spring at whomever, or whatever, was inside the house.
Briana was about to wade in, unable to bear the suspense any longer, when Logan reappeared on the porch, shoved a hand through his hair.
“Somebody was here,” he said grimly. “But they’re gone now.”
Briana made her way up the steps, Wanda reluctantly following, almost at a crawl.
Nothing different in the kitchen, the living room, the boys’ room, the bath.
But her bedroom…
Standing in the doorway, Briana gasped. And not because Logan, just behind her, laid a hand on her shoulder.
Her flimsiest nightgown—a little pink number Vance had given her one Valentine’s Day—was the only thing out of place. It lay neatly in the middle of the bed, almost as if she were inside it.
She put a hand to her mouth.
Briana shook her head. Vance wasn’t capable of this kind of subtlety. No, someone else had rummaged through her bureau drawers, come across that long-forgotten nightgown, then arranged it with creepy, almost reverent care.
Someone who wanted to scare her.
But who—and why?
She flashed on Brett Turlow—she’d been pretty blunt with him, the day before—but it didn’t feel right.
One of the men working on the pasture fence? A random passerby?
Briana turned, rested her forehead against Logan’s chest, struggling to catch her breath.
He stroked her back with circular motions of one hand, opened his cell phone with the other.
“This is Logan Creed,” he said. “I need to talk to Sheriff Book. Now.”
* * *
“HELL OF A WAY for us to finally get to sit down and talk,” Floyd Book told Logan, an hour later, at Briana’s kitchen table. She’d talked to Jim on the telephone for a few minutes, then gone to town to get the boys, face still flaming with embarrassment over the nightgown incident as she got into Dylan’s truck.
“Hell of a way,” Logan agreed, distracted. It gave him the creeps, the way it did Briana, to think of somebody sneaking around in this house, handling her things. Setting up an intimate little tableau for her to find when she came home.
“You still suspect the ex-husband,” the sheriff said. He consulted his notes. “Vance Grant.”
“Briana ruled him out right away,” Logan reminded the other man.
“I didn’t ask who she suspects.”
“The truth is, I don’t have any idea.”
“Wasn’t Brett Turlow,” Book said. “I took him home from Skivvie’s Tavern myself, and that old Corolla he drives was still in the lot next to the bar every time I checked.”
Briana had told both the sheriff and Logan how Turlow had asked her out the day before and she’d turned him down, politely at first, though when he’d made some remark about Jim, she’d cut him off at the knees.
And the sheriff had already recounted giving Turlow a ride from Skivvie’s, and cruising past to make sure the Corolla hadn’t gone anywhere.
They were running in circles.
“Chances are,” Book said, “it was kids. Briana is a fine-looking woman, and she’d sure fuel a teenager’s fantasies. Probably, some goof-off dared another one, and things just got out of hand.”
“That’s a nice theory, Sheriff,” Logan said. “But suppose it’s more serious than that?”
Book let out a long sigh. “You mean like a stalker? You’ve been living in the big city too long, Logan. This is Stillwater Springs, not Vegas.”
“How did you know I was in Vegas?”
“Pull in your horns, boy. Everybody knows you got hooked on the bright lights in your rodeo days, and went back there after you got out of the service.”
Book grinned at the look of surprise on Logan’s face. “My question is, how come you’re driving that old truck out there, living and dressing like a ranch hand, when you founded a company that just sold for close to twenty million dollars?”
Logan didn’t answer.
“Thought I didn’t know that part?” Book asked. “I’ve been in law enforcement for a long time.”
“What are you getting at, Floyd?”
“I’m just wondering,” the older man said slowly, his eyes keen, “if maybe you came back here because you still think Brett Turlow dropped all those logs on your daddy on purpose. Man might keep a low financial profile, so as not to draw attention to himself, if he was looking to right an old wrong. The trouble with that idea is, soon as you crossed the county line, everybody knew.”
“You think I came back to Stillwater Springs to get back at Turlow?”
“Did you?”
“Hell, no.”
“Then why, Logan? Do you see Dylan hanging around? Tyler? No. Because they’ve got better things to do, in better places. And so do you.” He paused. “Unless—”
“Unless what?”
“You were just passing through, and Briana Grant happened to catch your eye.”
Logan narrowed his eyes. “Are you working your way around to accusing me of prowling around in this house, fingering Briana’s lingerie?”
“If you’re fingering her lingerie,” the sheriff said, “it’s your own business. And unless you’ve lost that famous Creed touch, you don’t have to ‘prowl around’ to do it.” Floyd took a noisy sip of his coffee. “I will be leaving office soon,” he went on, when he was damned good and ready, “and I’ve got a perfect record, at least on paper. You know as well as I do that I always thought Brett Turlow cut that logging chain deliberately, but I could never prove it. I hate to let that go, but I can do it. Take my pension check, turn in my badge and call it good. What I cannot—and will not—ignore, is you taking the law into your own hands.”
“Here’s what I think, Sheriff,” Logan said. “Brett Turlow didn’t have the guts to cut that chain, even after he found out his girlfriend had been getting it on with Jake. He might have wanted to dance on the old man’s grave after the fact, but to actually kill somebody? No way.”
“Maybe it was an accident,” the sheriff mused. “It would be a relief to know that.”
Logan relented a little; he knew it was the sheriff’s job to question his reasons for coming back to Stillwater Springs. And while he probably wouldn’t have spit on Brett Turlow if he was on fire—well, maybe then—he had no intention of “taking the law into his own hands,” as Floyd had put it. Even though he didn’t practice, he was still a member of the bar, sworn to uphold the law, not break it.
“You ever consider running for my job?” Book asked cagily, a few moments later.
“I don’t need a job, remember?” Logan replied. “And even if I did, I sure as hell wouldn’t want yours.”
Floyd laughed. “And you’re Jim Huntinghorse’s best friend, at that. It would be awkward, running against him.”
Logan thought fleetingly of Cassie’s warning, that he was in danger and, through him, Briana and the boys might be, too. She’d asked him specifically not to get involved in the election, one way or the other.
“Jim’s a good man.”
“He is,” Floyd agreed. “Always liked him. But there’s already talk about how he’d look after the tribe first and the white folks in this county second, if not third.”
“That’s bullshit,” Logan said.
“The bigots, like the poor, are always with us,” Floyd reminded him. “And bigots vote—more often than other folks, probably.” With that, Floyd picked up his hat, rose wearily out of his chair. Bent to pat Wanda on the head before going to the door. “If you say you didn’t come back here to even the score with Brett Turlow,” he said in parting, “then I believe you. Just don’t prove me wrong, Logan. That’s all I’m saying.”
Logan nodded, not in agreement but to show he’d gotten the message. He hadn’t come back to Stillwater Springs to avenge Jake’s death—had he?
He rose, followed the sheriff outside, watched as his old friend and the nemesis of his younger years got into the squad car, ground the ignition and drove off.
It seemed strange, being at Briana’s without her or the boys there, but he wasn’t inclined to leave, either. He wished whoever had been creeping around the house later would come back so he could confront them, but since his truck was parked outside, in plain sight, he didn’t think it was very likely.
“Just you and me,” he said to the dog.
The wall phone rang, and he answered it automatically. “Logan Creed,” he said.
No answer, except for some raspy breathing and then a quick hang-up.
Frowning, Logan punched star-sixty-nine, then realized it wouldn’t work. Briana’s phone system was as antiquated as the one at his place.
“Hello?” he barked, even though he knew there wouldn’t be a response, beyond the frustrating dial tone droning in his ear. As the caller had, he hung up hard.
Wanda gave a concerned little whimper, head upturned, searching his face with those luminous brown eyes of hers. There was a problem, that much was obvious, and she needed reassurance.
“I know, girl,” he told her. “I know.”
The dog lumbered over to her bed and dropped onto it with a sigh.
“We need a plan.”
Wanda sighed again.
Logan turned one of the kitchen chairs around backward, and sat astraddle of it. Rested his chin on his folded arms and narrowed his eyes.
Yep, they needed a plan.
And one was already taking shape in his head.