- -
- 100%
- +
She folded her arms, foolishly barring his way into the kitchen. “You could have knocked,” she said.
Conner lifted one shoulder, lowered it again. His grin didn’t falter. “Natty called me last night and asked me to wrap the pipes. I crawled around under the house with a flashlight for a while, making sure there weren’t any obvious leaks, and then I checked the situation in the basement.” He paused, ran his eyes lightly over Tricia’s rumpled hair, coming loose from its braid, before letting his gaze rest on her lips for one tingly moment. “The padlock on the cellar door probably rusted through years ago. I didn’t need the key Natty told me about.”
At last, Tricia found the presence of mind to back up so Conner could step into the kitchen. Now he stood a head taller.
“I’ll be happy to replace it,” he added. His eyes narrowed a little as he watched her, as if he’d suddenly noticed something new and disturbing about her.
“Replace what?” she asked.
The grin returned, faintly insolent and, at the same time, affable. Even friendly.
“The padlock?” he prompted, in the same guessing-game tone he’d used moments before.
It was the most ordinary conversation—about padlocks and plumbing, for Pete’s sake. So why did she feel like a shy debutante about to step onto the dance floor at her coming-out ball?
“Oh,” she finally managed. “Right. The padlock.”
Natty’s kitchen was frigidly cold, and yet, because they were standing within a few feet of each other, the hard heat coming off Conner’s body made Tricia feel as though she were standing in front of a blazing bonfire.
Or was she the source of it?
Conner set the duct tape and the wrench aside on a countertop, rested his hands on his hips. “Will you be joining us for the trail ride on Sunday?” he asked.
Not for the first time, Tricia had a strange sense of needing to translate the things this man said from some other language before she could grasp their meaning. “I—guess,” she said, recalling in the next instant that she’d promised Sasha the outing, and backing out wasn’t an option.
“But—?” he asked, watching her.
She finally rustled up a smile, but it felt flimsy on her mouth and wouldn’t stick. “It’s just that I’ve never been on a horse before,” she admitted.
His eyes lit at that, blue fire framed by a narrow rim of steely gray, and his mouth crooked up in that way Tricia couldn’t seem to get used to. “No problem,” he told her, his tone faintly gruff.
No problem.
Easy enough for him to say, she thought, just as Valentino and Sasha clomped down the stairs from her apartment. Conner Creed had probably been born in the saddle, growing up on a ranch the way he had. She, on the other hand, had never ridden anything more dangerous than a carousel.
“We’ll put you on one of the mares,” Conner went on, when she didn’t speak. “Sunflower would be a good choice—she’s three years older than dirt and you’d be more likely to get hurt riding a stick horse.”
Tricia was relieved and, at the same time, a little indignant. Before she could come up with a fitting response, however, Sasha and Valentino made their appearance.
Seeing Conner, Sasha beamed. “Hello, Mr. Creed,” she said.
He nodded to the child, smiled back. “It’s okay to call me Conner,” he told her.
Pleased, Sasha barely glanced at Tricia, stroking Valentino’s head as the two of them stood just inside the kitchen doorway. “I’m Sasha,” she announced.
“I remember,” Conner said easily. “My nephew, Matt, introduced us at the barbecue last weekend, didn’t he?”
Sasha nodded eagerly. “He’s pretty nice, for a little kid,” she said.
Conner chuckled and looked briefly in Tricia’s direction—just in time to catch her sneaking a step back. She felt magnetized, like a passing asteroid being pulled into the orbit of some enormous planet.
He smiled, dashing all hope that he hadn’t noticed.
Tricia’s cheeks flamed. She’d worked hard, ever since high school, to overcome her natural shyness, but when it came to this man, all that effort seemed to be for nothing. A look from him, a word, and every cell in her body suddenly leaped to electrified attention.
It was ridiculous.
“Do you think Natty’s all right?” he asked, his expression serious now. His face could change in an instant, it seemed, and that made him hard to read.
Tricia didn’t like it when people were hard to read.
“Why do you ask?” she inquired, a little jolt of alarm trembling in the pit of her stomach.
Conner wasn’t wearing a hat, being indoors, though she could tell that he’d had one on earlier. He ran the fingers of his left hand through his hair, watched with a smile in his eyes as Sasha excused herself and left the room, Valentino trotting alongside.
“I guess it bothers me a little that she’s staying on in Denver,” Conner sighed, when he and Tricia were alone in the big kitchen again. “It’s not like your great-grandmother to miss out on the big weekend, even if she has stepped down as head chili commando.”
Though quiet, his tone was so genuine that it touched something deep and private inside Tricia, stirred a soft but still-bruising sweetness where he shouldn’t have been able to reach. They were basically strangers, she and Conner—they certainly hadn’t been more than summer acquaintances growing up—and yet it was as if they’d known each other well, once upon a time and somewhere far, far away.
When she thought she could trust herself to speak, Tricia found another smile, and managed to hold on to it a little longer this time. In truth, she was worried, too. Should she mention that Natty was staying in Denver at the suggestion of her doctor?
No, she decided, in the next second. If Natty had wanted Conner to know why she’d postponed her return to Lonesome Bend, she would have told him herself.
“I’m sure she’s fine,” she said at last, though of course she wasn’t sure at all. Natty had said her heart had been racing.
Conner studied her for a few moments, looking like he wanted to say something but wouldn’t, and then he flashed that dazzling grin at her again. It was like stepping into the glare of a searchlight on a moonless night, and Tricia blinked once.
“You might want to keep it a little warmer in here,” he said, in another of those hairpin conversational turns of his. “Even wrapped, some of the pipes might freeze if you don’t turn on the heat.”
Tricia nodded, feeling stupid because no response came to mind.
Conner grinned, gave his head an almost imperceptible shake. “Sorry if I scared you a little while ago, banging on the plumbing with my wrench. I got here a little earlier than I expected and, though it seems ironic now, I was pretty sure you’d already gone out.”
Again she felt that sugary sting, inexplicably pleasant, but highly discomforting, too. “Natty asked you to come over,” she said, with a verbal shrug, “and I’m sure she appreciates your help.”
His grin was rueful now, but it tugged at her, nonetheless. “I’d do just about anything for Natty,” he said, moving to retrieve the duct tape and the wrench from the nearby counter and then stopping to look back over one shoulder. “Turn up the heat,” he added.
Tricia almost said, “I beg your pardon?” but she stopped herself in time. Nodded again.
“Sixty-eight degrees ought to do it,” Conner said. He took another long, slow look at her. “See you around,” he told her, heading for the back door.
See you around.
That was all he’d said. And it was a perfectly normal remark, too.
Just the same, Tricia stood as still as if her feet were glued to the floor until several seconds after he’d closed the door behind him.
The first thing she did, once she could move again, was turn the lock. The second was to find and adjust the downstairs thermostat.
Now, she thought, making the climb back up to her own space, if she could just turn down the heat inside herself.
Upstairs, she found Sasha eating cold cereal at the table, while Winston and Valentino enjoyed their separate bowls of dry food.
After pouring a cup of much-needed coffee, Tricia booted up her computer. The screen saver loomed up automatically, filling the monitor and taking Tricia a little aback, even though she’d seen that picture of herself and Hunter, in front of the ski lodge, at least a jillion times.
“Mom says you can do a lot better than Hunter,” Sasha remarked casually, no doubt prompted by the photograph.
A little of Tricia’s coffee splashed over the rim of her cup and burned her fingers, but beyond that, she showed no outward reaction. “Does she, now?” she asked, amused but mildly resentful toward Diana, too. Surely her very best friend in the world hadn’t meant to make such an observation within her daughter’s earshot.
“That’s what she told my dad,” Sasha said, and resumed her cereal crunching.
Tricia kept her back to the little girl, focusing on the computer’s keyboard instead, going online and clicking on the mailbox icon at the top of the screen.
Normally, she would have felt a little thrill to find no less than three messages from Hunter in among the usual sales pitches for miracle vitamins, quick riches and sexual-enhancement products. This morning, in the wake of another encounter with Conner Creed, all Tricia could work up was a dull sense of futility. Seattle seemed very far away, and so did Hunter.
Sasha, apparently, was determined to keep the verbal ball rolling. “I think Conner is really handsome,” she observed.
“Hmm,” Tricia responded noncommittally, without turning around. She’d opened the first of Hunter’s emails.
Hi, babe, he’d written.
Much to her own surprise, Tricia bristled a little. Babe? Mexican cruise or not, where did Hunter get off calling her babe? After all, the man virtually ignored her for weeks—if not months—at a time. Wasn’t that term a touch on the intimate side, considering how they’d drifted apart?
Tricia felt a twinge then; when her conscience spoke, it was usually in Diana’s voice. You did accept the invitation, Miss Hot-to-trot, came the brisk and typically no-nonsense reminder. Did you think Hunter was suggesting a platonic getaway?
Tricia’s spine straightened. Why—oh, why—had she blithely sidestepped what should have been obvious to anyone?—that she and Hunter would be sharing a cabin on the ship. And that meant sex.
“Oh, Lord,” she said aloud.
“Huh?” Sasha asked, from the table.
“Never mind,” Tricia said, focusing in on the rest of Hunter’s email.
It amounted to online foreplay, essentially, and she closed it with a self-conscious click of the mouse. Then she deleted it entirely. And felt even more foolish than before.
In that moment, she would have given just about anything to exchange some girl talk with Diana, despite the sure and certain knowledge that her best friend would tell her to kick Hunter to the curb and get on with her life.
With her friend in another time zone, though, and Sasha right there in the same room, a chat simply wasn’t feasible.
“Don’t you have to work today?” Sasha asked. Tricia hadn’t heard her push back her chair to rise, but the little girl was standing at her elbow now, studying her thoughtfully.
Tricia couldn’t find a smile. Maybe, she thought, with rueful whimsy, she could pick one up at the rummage sale.
“There isn’t much to do, with the camping season coming to an end,” she said. “We’re all ready for the weekend, so I thought we’d go over to the community center and help set up for the rummage sale.”
Sasha, who had probably never rummaged for anything in her admittedly short life, lit up at the prospect. “Awesome!” she enthused. “Can Valentino come, too?”
“I don’t think he’d enjoy that,” Tricia answered diplomatically. “What do you say we get ourselves dressed and take a certain dog out for a quick walk?”
CHAPTER EIGHT
BRODY WAS DEFINITELY up to something, though damned if Conner could figure out what it was. He’d helped himself to a pair of Conner’s own jeans, Brody had, and one of his best shirts, too, and he’d shaved for the first time since his return to Lonesome Bend. If his hair hadn’t been longer than Conner’s, and way shaggier, they’d have been mirror images of each other.
And if all that wasn’t bothersome enough, Brody not only had the coffee on by the time Conner wandered into the kitchen, after making the run into town to check on Natty McCall’s pipes, he was cooking up some bacon and eggs at the old wood-burning stove.
Conner meandered over to the counter, took the carafe from its burner and poured himself a dose of java. He’d been thinking about Tricia ever since he’d scared the hell out of her at the top of Natty’s basement steps that morning, and irritation with his brother provided some relief.
“Mornin’,” Brody sang out, as if he were just noticing Conner’s presence.
Conner squinted, studying his brother suspiciously. He’d gotten used to living his life as a separate individual since Brody left home, and it was a jolt to look up and see himself standing on the other side of the room. Gave him a familiar but still weird sense of being in two places at once.
“Since when do you cook?” he asked, after shaking off the sensation and taking a sip from his mug. Only then did he take off his coat and hang it from its peg by the back door.
Brody laughed at that. “I picked up the habit after I left home,” he replied easily. “Believe it or not, I find myself between women now and then.”
Conner rolled his eyes. “So then you just knock some hapless female over the head with a club and drag her back to your cave by the hair? Tell her to put a pot of beans on the fire?”
Brody slanted a look at him, and there was a certain sadness in his expression, Conner thought, unsettled. “I didn’t mean it like that,” Brody said, his voice quiet.
“Right,” Conner said, his voice gone gruff, all of a sudden, with an emotion he couldn’t name. He looked his brother up and down. “So what’s up with the clothes?”
Again, the grin flashed, quick and cocky. Brody speared a slice of bacon with a fork and turned it over in the skillet before looking down at Conner’s duds. “All my stuff is in the laundry,” he said. “Hope you don’t mind.”
Conner scowled and swung a leg over the long bench lining one side of the kitchen table, taking more coffee on board and trying to figure out what the hell was going on.
“Would you give a damn if I did mind?”
Brody didn’t say anything; he just went right on rustling up grub at the stove, though he did pause once to refill his own coffee cup, whistling low through his teeth as he concentrated on the task at hand. That tuneless drone had always bugged Conner, but now it really got on his last nerve.
“If you insist on staying,” he told Brody’s back, “why don’t you bunk in over at Kim and Davis’s place?”
Brody took his sweet time answering, scraping eggs onto a waiting platter and piling about a dozen strips of limp bacon into a crooked heap on top.
“I might have done just that,” Brody finally replied, crossing to set the platter down on the table with a thump before going back to the cupboard for plates and flatware, “except that they’ve already got a housesitter, and she happens not to be one of my biggest fans.”
Conner stifled an unexpected chuckle, made his face steely when Brody headed back toward the table and took one of the chairs opposite. They ate in silence for a while.
Kim had mentioned hiring somebody to stay in their house while she and Davis were on the road, Conner recalled. Most likely, it was Carolyn Simmons; she was always housesitting for one person or another.
“Carolyn,” Conner said, out loud.
Across the table, Brody looked up from his food and grinned. “What about her?”
Conner felt his neck heat up a little, realizing that there had been a considerable gap between Brody’s remark and his response. “I was just wondering how you managed to make her hate you already,” he said, somewhat defensively, stabbing at the last bite of his fried eggs with his fork.
“I didn’t say Carolyn hated me,” Brody explained, the grin lingering in his eyes, though there was no vestige of it on his mouth. “I said she isn’t one of my biggest fans.”
He paused, finished off a slice of bacon, and finally went on. “We have a—history, Carolyn and I.”
To Conner’s knowledge, Brody hadn’t been anywhere near Lonesome Bend in better than a decade, and Carolyn hadn’t moved to town until a few years ago. Which begged the question, “What kind of history?”
Brody sighed deeply, crossed his fork and knife in the middle of his plate and propped his elbows on the table’s edge, his expression thoughtful. Maybe even a little grim. His gaze was fixed on something in the next county.
“The usual kind,” he said, at some length.
“How do you know her?”
Why, Conner wondered, did he want to know? He liked Carolyn, but things had never gone beyond that, attraction-wise.
Brody met his eyes with a directness that took Conner by surprise. “It’s a small world,” he said. After a beat, he added, “You interested in her? Carolyn, I mean?”
Conner made a snortlike sound, pushed his own plate away. “No,” he said.
“Then why all the questions?”
“What questions?”
“‘What kind of history?’” Brody repeated, with exaggerated patience. “‘How do you know her?’ Those questions.”
“Maybe I was just trying to make conversation,” Conner hedged. “Did you ever think of that?”
“Like hell you were,” Brody scoffed, with a false chuckle. “You can’t wait to see the back of me and we both know it. But here’s the problem, little brother—I’m not going anywhere.”
Something tightened in Conner’s throat. He might have said he was sorry to hear that Brody was staying, but he couldn’t get the words out.
Brody shoved back his chair and stood, picking up his empty plate to put it in the sink, the way Kim had trained all three of “her boys” to do after a meal, from the time they could reach that high. “I could tell you a few things, Conner,” he said hoarsely, “if I thought there was a snowball’s chance in hell that you’d listen.”
With that, Brody turned and walked away.
He set his plate in the sink and banked the fire in the cookstove and slammed out the back door—after shrugging into Conner’s flannel-lined denim jacket.
* * *
FOLKS WERE LINED up all the way to the corner that next Saturday morning when Tricia and Sasha drove past the community center and circled around back to park in one of a half-dozen spots reserved for volunteers. They’d already stopped by River’s Bend, where every camping spot and RV hookup was in profitable use by the annual influx of visitors, just to make sure everything was in order.
Although they’d spent much of the previous day helping to set up for the big sale, and were therefore in the much-envied position of having seen the plethora of merchandise ahead of time, Sasha was impressed by the size of the crowd.
“There must be a lot of hoarders in this town,” she said. “Why do they want to buy the stuff other people gave away?”
Tricia chuckled, then squeezed the Pathfinder into the last parking space and checked her watch. “It must be the thrill of the hunt,” she answered. “Or it could be the chili. Natty’s been offered a small fortune for the recipe.”
Sasha considered the reply, still fastened into her booster seat, then observed, “It was funny, how you made all those other ladies turn their backs while you put in the secret ingredients.”
After consulting Natty by telephone the day before, Tricia had run the family chili recipe to ground and memorized the unique combination of spices some ancestor had dreamed up. She had indeed insisted that all present look away while she extracted various metal boxes and sprinkle jars from a plain paper bag and added them to the massive kettles of beans already simmering on the burners of the community center’s commercial-size stove.
Her great-grandmother’s cronies, tight-lipped at all the “folderol” involved in keeping the formula a secret, had agreed only because the event just wouldn’t be the same without Natty’s chili. Indeed, Minerva Snyder had allowed, there might even be a riot if they failed to deliver.
Chuckling at the memory, Tricia got out of the rig and went to help Sasha release the snaps and buckles holding her in the booster seat.
Sasha’s eyes twinkled with excitement. She’d sneaked a peek at the mysterious items while Tricia was doctoring the chili the day before and, given the child’s IQ, Tricia had no doubt that she could have recited the recipe from memory. “Remember,” Tricia said, putting a finger to her lips, “Natty doesn’t want anybody to know what’s in that chili.”
After jumping to the ground, Sasha nodded importantly. “Well, there are beans and some hamburger. Everybody knows that part.”
“Yes,” Tricia agreed, going around behind the Pathfinder to raise the hatch. “Everybody knows that part.” They’d left Valentino at home, contentedly sharing his dog bed with Winston while they both snoozed, but Tricia, feeling inspired, had scrounged up a few more donations the night before, including the pink furry slippers Diana had given her, tossing them into a cardboard box with some other stuff. She’d put the slippers at the bottom, hoping Sasha wouldn’t spot them and report the incident to her mother the next time they talked or texted.
Just as Tricia turned around, having hoisted the somewhat unwieldy box into both arms, juggling it awkwardly while she shut the hatch again, Conner Creed walked up to her. Her breath caught, and the box wobbled in her arms.
Conner took it from her just before she would have spilled its contents into the dusty gravel of the parking lot.
How did he manage to startle her the way he did? Tricia wondered, bedazzled, as always, by his ready grin. It was an unfair advantage, that grin.
“Hello,” she said stupidly.
“Howdy,” he replied, holding the cumbersome box easily in his two muscular arms. He looked down at Sasha and winked. “Hey,” he greeted the enthralled little girl. “Are we still on for the trail ride tomorrow afternoon?”
Sasha nodded eagerly and then blurted out a happy “Yes!” for good measure.
“Good,” Conner said, heading toward the back door of the community center, which was propped open with a big chunk of wood that had probably served as somebody’s chopping block, sometime way back. People in Lonesome Bend liked to put things to use, no matter how ordinary.
Tricia locked the Pathfinder with the button on her key fob and followed Conner and Sasha, who was practically skipping alongside the man, toward the rear entrance.
“More stuff?” one of the women in the kitchen chimed. Several volunteers had stayed through the night, keeping an eye on the simmering pots of chili. “That Kim. She always donates twice as much rummage as anybody else in town!”
Conner, his back still turned to Tricia, chuckled at that. “True,” he said. “But Tricia brought these things.”
Tricia peeked around him, waggled her fingers in greeting. Some of Natty’s friends, like a flock of old hens, still had ruffled feathers from yesterday’s intrigue involving the spices for the chili.
One or two straightened their apron strings, and another harrumphed, but these were small-town women, basically sociable, and they wouldn’t hold a grudge—not against Natty McCall’s great-granddaughter, anyway.
Conner seemed to know where to set the box down—there were plenty of last-minute donations, it appeared, even though the door was about to open to the anxious public.
“Thanks,” Tricia said, as Conner passed her, doubling back toward the kitchen.
“You’re welcome,” he told her, with a nod of farewell.
She hadn’t really expected Conner to hang around the rummage sale all day—it was a rare man who did—but Tricia felt oddly bereft when he’d left, and when Sasha tugged at her hand to get her attention, she realized she’d been staring after the man like some moonstruck teenager.