Even the Nights are Better

Vernon jumped a little, sending bubbles over the rim of the tub.

“I’m looking for the soap,” Carolyn said innocently.

Vernon chuckled. His spirits began to rise. Maybe everything would be all right after all. He’d make sure to get hold of Scott early in the morning and caution him not to reveal anything. Then later, when he felt Carolyn was ready to hear it, he’d…

He smiled, closed his eyes, leaned back and allowed the warm water to soothe him.

“You keep that up much longer, girl,” he muttered huskily, “and you’re going to find much more than the soap down there.”

Special thanks and acknowledgment to Margot Dalton for her contribution to the Crystal Creek series.

Special thanks and acknowledgment to Sutton Press Inc. for its contribution to the concept for the Crystal Creek series.

Even the Nights are Better

Margot Dalton

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Dear Reader,

Welcome back to Crystal Creek! In the heart of Texas Hill Country, the McKinneys have been ranching, living and loving for generations, but the future promises changes none of these good folks could ever imagine!

Crystal Creek itself is the product of many imaginations, but the stories began to take shape when some of your favorite authors— Barbara Kaye, Margot Dalton, Bethany Campbell, Cara West, Kathy Clark and Sharon Brondos—all got together with me just outside of Austin to explore the Hill Country, and to dream up the kinds of romances such a setting would provide. For several days, we roamed the countryside, where generous Texans opened their historic homes to us, and gave us insights into their lives. We ate barbecue, we visited an ostrich farm and we mapped out our plans to give you the linked stories you love, with a true Texas flavor and all the elements you’ve come to expect in your romance reading: compelling, contemporary characters caught in conflicts that reflect today’s dilemmas.

Margot Dalton takes us next door to the Double C in Even the Nights are Better, where Carolyn Townsend, J. T. McKinney’s sister-in-law and neighbor, certainly has her hands full. What with an unwelcome business venture opening right under her nose, a health crisis throwing all the McKinneys into a tizzy and a wounded puppy fighting for survival in her barn, romantic advances are the last thing on her mind. Being confronted with a lifelong ardor she hadn’t ever known existed is more than she can cope with right now!

And next month, you’ll want to attend the opening of the Hole in the Wall Dude Ranch with all of us. Everyone who’s anyone in Crystal Creek will be there. And owner Scott Harris’s wandering brother Jeff—who can give Cal McKinney a run for his money in the charm department—is bound to show up sooner or later!

C’mon down to Crystal Creek—home of sultry Texas drawls, smooth Texas charm and tall, sexy Texans!

Marsha Zinberg

Executive Editor

Crystal Creek

A Note from the Author

Even the Nights Are Better begins in the spring, and I soon realized that no matter how hard I tried, I just wasn’t going to be able to describe the true miracle of April in Texas Hill Country. It’s not only the green hills rolling off into the misty distance, the incredible blue of the sky and the miles and miles of wildflowers. There’s something even more magical in the air, something that goes far beyond words. I just hope that someday, everyone will have a chance to visit Texas in the spring and see it for themselves.

Margot Dalton

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER ONE

RAIN FELL over the hills of Central Texas during the night, carried by gray brooding clouds that had rolled in with the twilight and massed along the darkening skyline as soft and dense as piles of wood ash.

But it wasn’t one of the torrential downpours that often lash the Hill Country in the spring, dropping two or three inches onto green wooded hillsides and gravelly creek beds in the space of a few hours.

This was a gentle sweet spring rain, pattering and rustling in the new green leaves, dancing on the silvered surface of the river, whispering through gullies and shallow draws in the midnight blackness. The moisture flowed like a blessing across the hills and valleys, and by dawn the world was made new, washed clean and bright as a freshly minted coin.

Just as the rain ended, a silver-gray Camaro came skimming along a country road in the early-morning freshness, its sleek sculptured sides catching and reflecting the rising sun’s dazzling rays that broke into rainbows among the silent dripping trees.

This vehicle belonged to Vernon Trent and was his one wry, half-joking concession to longing for vanished youth. On this glorious spring morning, Vernon Trent had just passed his forty-fifth birthday and was, on the whole, comfortable with himself and his life. He liked the maturity and confidence that came with middle age, enjoyed his friends and daily routines and didn’t really miss the real or imagined crises of youth.

But he did have a stubborn boyish love for his shining, sporty Camaro, and never more than on a morning like this when he was alone at the wheel, the only living being in a world so fresh and lovely that it brought a lump to his throat.

His excuse for this drive was a scouting trip before office hours, a search for likely properties for a wealthy businessman from Dallas who fancied a retirement home here in the Hill Country. But this pretext was pure nonsense, of course, and Vernon was well aware of the fact.

After all, it wasn’t as if he’d be likely to stumble across some new piece of land for sale out here. Vernon Trent knew every inch of these hills as intimately as he knew his own tidy kitchen back in the old stone house in Crystal Creek. There was nothing for sale along this road that he wasn’t aware of already, and few that he hadn’t listed personally.

It couldn’t hurt, though, he reflected as he glanced appreciatively out the window. It couldn’t hurt to drive for a spell out here anyhow. Maybe he’d get some ideas. And, he mused, smiling briefly into the smoky mirror, the morning was just so damned beautiful….

The rain-drenched scrub trees in the pastures, mostly cedar and mesquite, glittered damply in the sunlight as if they were fashioned from crystal and emeralds. Beneath the trees wildflowers were already blooming in shy profusion, bluebonnets and buttercups and Indian paintbrush, fluffy wild poppies and bright Indian blanket that carpeted the fields in vivid color.

Small animals, rabbits and coons and squirrels, frisked and played through the swaying grasses, rejoicing in life and springtime while a thousand trills of birdsong rose straight up to the clear blue heavens. Baby animals were everywhere, wobbly little calves and bony long-legged colts attesting to the enduring cycle of mating and renewal.

Vernon passed the high curved gates of the Double C Ranch, smiling as he thought about mating and renewal. There was a lot of that going on at the Double C these days, so much that the neighboring ranchers and townspeople were having all kinds of fun making jokes about the love affairs in the McKinney family.

They were affectionate jokes, though, because everybody liked and respected the McKinneys. In fact, there wasn’t a soul Vernon knew of who wasn’t tickled about what was going on out here, with J.T. finding himself a pretty young wife from Boston, and then all three of the McKinney youngsters unexpectedly following in their father’s footsteps within a few months. Even that lovable wild man, young Cal McKinney, looked to be on the verge of settling down with a good woman. And that, Vernon thought fervently, was a real blessing for the whole family.

Just yesterday morning, during coffee time down at the Longhorn, Vernon had overheard Bubba Gibson joking loudly that the way everybody was behaving out at the Double C, somebody must have dumped a couple of barrels of love potion into the Claro River and let it drift downstream past the ranch.

At the time Vernon had laughed along with everybody else, but now it didn’t seem so funny. Out here, surrounded by sunrise freshness and the beauty of springtime, it just seemed right and proper somehow that the people at the ranch should be fitting in with the cycle of nature, finding themselves some love and tenderness in a big lonely world.

A lot more fitting, Vernon thought with a sudden tightening of his jaw, than the way Bubba Gibson was acting these days.

No matter how many tons of love potion might be drifting down the Claro, there was no excuse for Bubba’s flagrant affair with Billie Jo Dumont, a girl younger than his own daughter. Bubba didn’t even trouble to hide his infatuation, almost seemed to flaunt it, in fact. People felt sorry for Mary Gibson, who bore this public humiliation with quiet dignity and never said a word against her philandering husband…at least, nothing that anybody heard.

Vernon’s wide pleasant mouth set in a hard line and he frowned again, gripping the wheel and surging around a bend in the road a little faster than was really necessary.

Like many confirmed bachelors, Vernon idealized women, liked them and enjoyed their company and had strong feelings about how they should be treated. Especially good women, wives like Mary Gibson who helped their husbands and stood by them through all the lean years, all the building and struggling and hard work. To Vernon’s way of thinking, a woman like that deserved the very best her man could give.

If I had a wife who’d stood by me like that, Vernon thought, there’d never be a minute that she couldn’t trust me. I’d give her so much….

But just then his thoughts halted abruptly. Even his breathing was suspended for a moment as his car purred toward the gates of the Circle T, the ranch adjoining the McKinney place. Pain stabbed at him, as fresh and powerful as it had been all those years ago.

Briefly, Vernon Trent’s shining cheerful world turned gray and cloudy while he swept past the big stone gates.

He gripped the wheel again, wondering with a touch of desperation if he was ever going to get over those old feelings. Maybe it was all this thinking about love, about J.T.’s marriage and the young people finding partners for themselves, even the animals all happily paired out there in the thickets, playing and mating and nesting in secret places….

Vernon shook his head restlessly, staring down at the ditch beside the road. Something caught his eye and he hesitated, then braked, backed the low-slung powerful car around and drove slowly back toward the gates of the Circle T. He pulled over onto the shoulder and stopped, got out and walked around his car to peer down into the wet grassy ditch.

Vernon Trent was a good-looking man, even in the bright impartial light of the sunrise. He was a little above medium height, with broad shoulders and a stocky muscular frame, though he was probably carrying twenty pounds or so of excess weight these days. Vernon knew well enough that he’d been letting himself go and should be doing something about getting back into shape, but somehow he just never seemed to find the time or the incentive. In the meantime he disguised the extra pounds well enough with casual pleated corduroys and roomy worn tweed sport jackets like the one he wore this morning.

His face was blunt, square and full of good humor, and his brown eyes were shrewd, though they sometimes softened to a thoughtful faraway look that made people suspect that Vernon Trent might still be a bit of a dreamer.

His thick sandy hair was half-gray, but that was nothing recent. The same dusting of silver had been there for more than twenty years, ever since Vernon came home from Vietnam. He’d wandered into the lonely bus depot at Crystal Creek on a hot August morning with his duffel bag on his shoulder and a slight limp that only bothered him occasionally, in damp cold weather. But there’d also been a look in his eyes that even his best friends had never found the courage to inquire about, and that hair gone gray before its time….

Right now, though, none of this ancient history was on Vernon Trent’s mind. His concerns were more immediate, focused on the small crumpled dark mass he’d sighted at the side of the road just where the shoulder straggled into a lush growth of weeds and grass.

He edged forward intently, heedless of the damp foliage brushing against his pant legs and the puddles of water that squelched up around his suede shoes. He knelt beside the little furry object.

“Hi, fella,” he muttered huskily. “How are you? Pretty bad, aren’t you? Poor little guy. Poor little guy.”

His square tanned face was tender with sympathy, his brown eyes full of compassion as he touched the little dog’s matted fur. The suffering animal lay shivering in the weeds, gazing piteously up at Vernon’s face, blue-black liquid eyes glassy with pain. The dog was slick with dampness, one of those comical terrier types that look like brisk self-propelled mops when they’re on their feet and in motion.

But this little dog wasn’t likely to be in motion in the near future, Vernon suspected. There was no doubt that the animal had been hit by a passing car during the rain last night. It lay crumpled and twisted on the grass, its tongue lolling, one hind leg obviously broken, and a long gash in its side crusted with blood.

Vernon gazed down at the animal, then reached out again to touch one of the silky ears. The little dog lifted its jaw, pink tongue wavering painfully in a feeble attempt to lick the big man’s fingers.

Vernon swallowed hard at this and dashed a hand impatiently across his eyes. After a moment’s hesitation he got briskly to his feet and hurried back to his car, opening the trunk and taking out a battered old plaid blanket that had served many strange purposes over the years. Without pausing to think further, he rolled the little broken body into the soft fabric, set it gently on the seat beside him and pulled through the gates of the Circle T and up the long curving entry road.

Usually when Vernon Trent drove up this particular road, his heart was in his mouth and he had a hard time breathing normally, beset by all the crazy adolescent reactions that he never seemed to outgrow no matter how old he got. Today, though, wrung with concern for the pitiful little object on the seat beside him, Vernon wasn’t bothered quite as much by his own emotions.

Still, when a slim woman came out of the barn at his approach and looked curiously over at his car, Vernon’s throat tightened and his heart leaped with excitement, then settled into the old dull ache that had been part of his life for decades now.

“Hi, Carolyn,” he said casually, getting out of the car and approaching the woman. “Nice morning, isn’t it?”

“It surely is,” the woman agreed, coming toward him with a smile. “’Specially after that rain last night, Vern. What’re you doing up and about so early?”

“Just out for a drive, Caro. Scouting property for a client. You know me, I never stop working.”

Vernon’s voice and manner were casual, but his heart was singing, on fire with love for the woman who stood smiling in front of him.

Carolyn Randolph Townsend was almost exactly his own age, just a week younger, in fact, and Vernon Trent couldn’t remember a time when he hadn’t loved her. Maybe in the years before grade school when he’d only seen her at birthday parties and community picnics… maybe he hadn’t loved her then. He couldn’t remember. But certainly by the time they were both in first grade he had selected Carolyn Randolph as the woman of his dreams, and in the forty years since he’d never really wavered from that choice.

Carolyn Randolph Townsend, at forty-five, had a figure to put most younger women to shame. Her tall curving body was firm and beautiful and full of promise, even in the old jeans and denim shirt that she wore this morning with her riding boots. Her wide blue-green eyes were vivid, sparkling warmly in her tanned oval face, and her hair, pulled back casually and tied at the nape of her neck with a blue bandanna, was almost the same rich dark gold it had always been. Still, Vernon’s keen loving eyes noticed a few scattered streaks of gray that he’d never seen there before, glistening softly in the early-morning light.

Poor girl, he thought, gazing at those silvery strands, thinking about all this woman had suffered in the past few years. My poor girl….

He fought the familiar desire to take her in his arms, to hold her and protect her and shield her from pain.

Get a grip, fella, he ordered himself sternly. It’s not you she wants to comfort her, and it never has been….

Maybe things would have been different if he’d had more courage when they were young, if he’d ever told her all the things he was feeling. But she and her older sister, Pauline, had been like princesses, growing up out here on this big sprawling ranch that was one the finest places in the area, second only to the McKinneys’ Double C. He, on the other hand, was just young Vernon Trent, the druggist’s son, living with his parents through most of his boyhood in a little apartment above the drugstore in Crystal Creek.

And in later years, just when all that ceased to matter quite as much and he was ready to open his heart to her, Vernon was drafted. He left Crystal Creek before he was twenty, and came back when he was twenty-three. By that time, everything had changed in the Randolph family. Pauline, Carolyn’s sister, and J. T. McKinney had a little girl to go along with their two boys. The Randolph girls’ charming dissolute father, Steven, had run off somewhere and dropped out of sight, leaving his wife, Deborah, to run the ranch with the help of Frank Townsend, her young foreman. Pauline Randolph McKinney had a little girl to go with her two young sons. And Carolyn had been married for more than three years to Frank Townsend and was a mother herself.

“Vern? Is something the matter?”

Vernon pulled himself back to reality with a visible effort, banishing all those painful twenty-year-old memories and turning with an easy smile to the woman in front of him, who was now frowning anxiously.

“Not with me, Caro,” he said. “I’m on top of the world. But I’ve got somebody in my car who isn’t, I’m afraid.”

He opened the passenger door of his car and pointed to the small motionless bundle on the seat.

“I found him out on the road a few minutes ago,” he said. “Just past your gates. Looks like he…”

But Carolyn was already leaning into the car, turning back the blanket with gentle hands and gazing in horror at the pitiful little dog curled within the folds.

Vernon watched as her expressive features registered a whole series of impressions—shock, compassion, tenderness, pain and finally outrage. “God, Vern, this makes me so mad!” Carolyn said, straightening and turning to her old friend, her eyes glittering in the early light.

“What does, Caro?” he asked gently.

“This,” she said, waving her hand at the dog and then reaching down to caress one of its ears. “It’s happening more and more these days. Those damn town people, Vern, they just never give a thought to what they do. This little dog is certainly no ranch dog. He belongs to somebody from the city, somebody who’s moving away or doesn’t want to be bothered with him anymore, so they drive forty miles out into the country and dump him off, figuring he’ll just find a happy home at some ranch.”

She paused for breath, her chest heaving, her delicate features pink with anger. Vernon was silent, watching her.

“And,” Carolyn went on in a lower tone, touching the little dog’s head again, “it’s just so brutal, Vern. What chance does a little fella like this have out in open country that he doesn’t know a thing about? People who treat animals this way should be shot. They really should.”

Vernon grinned. “Well, Caro, I can’t say I disagree. But it might take a few months to get legislation like that passed, even in Texas.”

“Even in Texas,” Carolyn agreed, swallowing her outrage and trying to smile back. “Lift him out, Vern, would you? Be real careful,” she added. “Just carry him into the barn here, and we’ll make him a little nest of straw in one of the mangers.”

“Look, Carolyn,” Vernon began awkwardly, “I didn’t mean for you to have to do all this. I mean, I don’t want to make a lot of work and trouble for you. It’s just that I thought the little guy needed some help and you were closest….”

“Be quiet, Vern,” Carolyn said, laying a gentle hand on his cheek and giving him a smile that made his heart stop, then begin thudding like mad. “Just do as you’re told, okay? Bring the little guy in here.”

Vernon obeyed silently, carrying the dog into the barn and settling it in the upper portion of one of the mangers, a shallow wooden box designed for oats and other grains into which Carolyn was busily arranging a bedding of soft dried alfalfa.

“This should be nice and cozy for him,” she said, leaning in to study the small dog, examining his injuries with competent tanned hands while the animal shivered beneath her touch.

“Do you still have that toy car phone of yours?” she asked over her shoulder without turning around.

“It’s not a toy,” Vernon said with dignity. “It’s a completely viable working tool, Caro. An absolute necessity in the modern business world.”

“Like hell,” his old friend said cheerfully. “It’s just a toy, Vern, and you know it. I can never get over the way you men love your toys. But I’ll allow that it could be handy at times. Call Manny’s office for me, would you, and see if he could drop by and take a look at this little fella?”