Montana Creeds: Tyler

Sullenly—Tess was never sullen—the child rummaged through Lily’s handbag, found the crackers, tore open the package and munched.

After that, none of them spoke. They were twenty minutes outside Stillwater Springs when they spotted the man and the dog walking alongside the highway.

Something about the man jarred Lily—the set of his shoulders, the way he walked, something— tripping all sorts of inner alarms.

“Stop,” Hal commanded urgently. “That’s Tyler Creed.”

And I thought this day couldn’t get any worse .

Lily pulled over and put on the brakes, while her father buzzed the passenger-side window down.

“Tyler? Is that you?” he called.

The man turned, flashed that trademark grin, dazzling enough to put a heat mirage to shame. Damn it, it was Tyler.

All grown-up, and better-looking than ever.

And here she was, with her back and thighs glued to the car seat and her hair tugged up into a spiky mess.

He approached the car, the dog plodding patiently at his heels. Bent to look in at Hal. When his gaze caught on Lily, then Tess, the grin faded a little.

“Hey, Doc,” Tyler said. “I heard you went through a rough spell. You feeling better?”

“I’ll be all right, thanks to Dylan and Jim Huntinghorse,” Hal replied. “I went toes-up at Logan’s place, during a barbecue, and they gave me CPR. I’d be six feet under if it hadn’t been for those two.”

Tyler gave a low whistle. “Close call,” he said. In high school, he’d been cute. Now, he was drop-dead gorgeous. His eyes were the same clear blue, though, and his dark hair still glistened, sleek as a raven’s wings. “Lily,” he added, in grave greeting.

“Get in,” Hal said. “We’ll give you a lift to Stillwater Springs.”

“Don’t you have a car?” Tess ventured, fascinated, straining in the hated “baby seat” to get a look at the dog.

Tyler grinned again, and Lily’s stomach dipped like a roller coaster plunging down steep and very rickety tracks. “It broke down on a side road,” he explained. “No tow trucks available, so Kit Carson and I started hoofing it for home.”

“Hoofing it?” Tess echoed, confused.

“Walking,” Lily translated.

Tyler chuckled.

“Well, get in,” Hal said. “That sun’s hot enough to bake a man’s brain.”

Tyler opened the right rear door of the Taurus, and he and Kit Carson took their places alongside Tess, the dog in the middle. Delighted, Tess shared the last of her crackers with Kit.

“Obliged,” Tyler said.

“My daddy died when I was four,” Tess said. “In a plane crash.”

Lily tensed. Oddly, Tess often confided the great tragedy of her short life in strangers. With counselors and well-meaning friends, she tended to clam up.

“I’m sorry to hear that, shortstop,” Tyler told her.

“Is hoofing it the same as hitchhiking?” Tess asked. “Because hitchhiking is very dangerous. That’s what Mom says.”

Lily felt Tyler’s gaze on the back of her neck, practically branding her sweaty flesh.

“Your mom’s right,” Tyler answered. “But Kit and I didn’t have much choice, as it turned out.”

“You could have called Logan or Dylan,” Hal said.

Lily wondered at the note of caution in her father’s voice, but she was too busy merging back onto the highway to pursue the thought very far.

“Cold day in hell,” Tyler said.

Lily cleared her throat.

“Cold day in heck, then,” he amended wryly.

“Who are Logan and Dylan?” Tess asked.

“My half brothers,” Tyler replied, belatedly buckling his seat belt.

“Don’t you like them?” Tess wanted to know.

“We had a falling out,” Tyler said.

“What’s that?” Tess persisted.

Risking a glance in the rearview mirror, Lily saw him ruffle Tess’s dark blond hair. She had Burke’s green eyes, and his outgoing personality, too. Telling her not to talk to strangers was pretty much a waste of time—not that Tyler Creed was a stranger, strictly speaking.

“A fight,” Tyler said.

“Oh,” Tess said, sounding intrigued. “I like your dog.”

“Me, too.”

Lily sat ramrod-straight in the sticky vinyl seat. Concentrated on her driving. She’d thought a lot about Tyler Creed since she’d hurried out to Montana to keep a vigil at her father’s bedside, but she hadn’t expected to actually run into him. He was a famous rodeo cowboy, after all—a sometime stuntman and actor, and he did commercials, too.

People like that were, well, transitory. Weren’t they?

Wandering through her kitchen with a basket of laundry one day a few years before, she’d glimpsed him on the countertop TV, hawking boxer-briefs, and had to sit down because of heart palpitations. Burke, an airline pilot by profession, had been between flights, and asked her what was the matter.

She’d said she was getting her period, and felt woozy.

She’d felt woozy, all right, but it had nothing to do with her cycle.

“Grampa and I wanted hamburgers for lunch,” Tess informed her fellow passenger, “but she said it would clog our arterials, so now we have to wait and eat salad with tofu .”

“Ouch,” Tyler commented. “That bites.”

Lily pushed down harder on the accelerator.

“Where shall we drop you off?” she asked sunnily, when they finally, finally hit the outskirts of Stillwater Springs. The place looked pretty much the same—a little shabbier, a little smaller.

“The car-repair place,” Tyler replied.

Lily had forgotten how sparely he used words, never saying two when one would do. She’d also forgotten that he smelled like laundry dried in fresh air and sunlight, even after he’d been loading or unloading hay bales all day. Or walking along a highway under a blazing summer sun. That his mouth tilted up at one corner when he was amused, and his hair was always a shade too long. The way his clothes fit him, and how he seemed so comfortable in his own skin…

Do not think about skin, Lily told herself, aware that her father was watching her intently out of the corner of his eye, and that that eye was twinkling.

“Thanks for the ride,” Tyler said, when they pulled up to the only mechanic’s garage in town. Kit Carson jumped out after him.

“Bye!” Tess called, as though she and Tyler Creed were old friends.

“Anytime,” Lily lied.

He walked away, without looking back.

Just as he had that last summer, when Lily, high on teenage passion and exactly half a bottle of light beer, had proposed marriage to him. He’d said they were both too young, and ought to cool it for a while, before they got in too deep.

Lily had been crushed, then mortified.

Tyler had simply walked away. Later, she’d learned that while he was dating her, ending every evening with a chaste peck on the cheek and a “sleep tight,” he’d passed what remained of the night in bed with a divorced waitress twice his age.

The memory of that discovery still stung Lily to the quick.

He’d written songs for her, sung them to her in a low vibrato, aching with heart, played them on his guitar.

He’d taken her to movies, and for long walks along moonlit country roads.

He’d won three teddy bears and a four-foot stuffed giraffe at the county fair, and given them to her.

And all the time, he’d been boinking a waitress with a hot body and a Harley-Davidson tattoo on her right forearm.

Lily was a grown woman, a widow, with a young daughter, a sick father and a successful career in merchandising under her belt. And damn, it still hurt to remember that the songs and the movies and the romantic walks had meant nothing to him.

Nothing to him, everything to her.

“Water under the bridge,” her father commented quietly. “Let’s go home, Lily.”

Let’s go home, Lily.

Hal had said that the night she’d come to the clinic, where he was working late, after the breakup with Tyler, carrying her bleeding, broken heart in her hands. She’d cried, and said she never wanted to see Tyler Creed again as long as she lived. Hal’s jaw had tightened, and he’d put an arm around her shoulders, held her close for a few moments.

He’s Jake Creed’s boy, honey, Hal had said. They’re poison, those Creeds. Every one of them. You’re better off without him.

She’d sobbed, destroyed as only a betrayed seventeen-year-old can be. But I love him, Dad, she’d protested.

Let’s go home, Lily, he’d repeated. You’ll get over Tyler. You’ll see.

And she had gotten over Tyler Creed.

Or at least, she’d thought so, until today.

Now, she sucked it up, for Tess’s sake, and her own. Drove toward the house where she’d grown up, a happy kid—until her parents’ sudden and acrimonious divorce when she was eleven. Until Tyler shattered her heart, and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men, plus a certain dashing and very handsome airline pilot, had failed to put it back together again.

The big Victorian hadn’t changed, either, except for a few drooping rain gutters and peeling paint on the wooden shutters.

A blond woman in jeans stood on the wraparound porch, waving and smiling as they pulled up.

“Kristy Madison,” Lily said aloud, cheered.

“Creed, now,” Hal said. “She married Dylan a while back.”

Kristy came down the porch steps, through the open gate in the picket fence, which sagged a little on its hinges. When Hal hauled himself slowly out of the car, Kristy greeted him with a hug.

“We’ve all missed you,” she told him. “Welcome back.”

Lily peeled herself off the car seat and got out to stand in the road, while Tess scrambled out of the back.

“Hi, Lily,” Kristy said. “It’s good to see you again.” Her dark blue eyes drifted to Tess, who was just rounding the front of the car. “And you must be Tess.”

Tess nodded eagerly, probably pleased that someone in this strange new place knew her. “My daddy died in a plane crash,” she said. “When I was four.”

“I’m so sorry,” Kristy said gently.

“Are there any kids my age in this town?” Tess asked. “I’d sure like to play with some of them, if there are.”

Kristy smiled, and her gaze met Lily’s for a moment, then went immediately back to Tess’s upturned face. “I can think of several,” she said. “In the meantime, though, let’s get your grandfather inside. Lunch is on the table.”

Weary gratitude swept through Lily. Just as she’d forgotten so much about Tyler, she’d also forgotten the nature of small towns like Stillwater Springs. When someone got sick or fell on hard times, people rallied. They aired out rooms and made beds up with clean sheets and set lunch out on the kitchen table.

“I’m plum tuckered,” Hal said. “Believe I’ll take a nap on my own bed.”

He went on inside, while Lily, Kristy and Tess followed at a slower pace.

“I hope you don’t mind,” Kristy said to Lily. “Briana—that’s my sister-in-law, Logan’s wife—and I got the keys from your dad’s next-door neighbor and spiffed the house up a little.”

Again, Lily’s eyes burned. In Chicago, she’d had millions of acquaintances and clients, but no close friends. Back in the day, she and Kristy had spent a lot of time together.

“You must be worn-out,” Kristy said, reading her face. “After lunch, why don’t you lie down and rest for a while, and I’ll take Tess over to the library for story hour.”

Lily had kept her guard up for so long, living in the big city, coping with all things hectic, that letting it down left her a little dizzy. “Would you like that?” she asked Tess. “To go to the library, I mean?”

“Yes,” Tess answered. Not a major surprise; the child had taught herself to read at three.

Lunch turned out to be fresh iced tea, tuna sandwiches and potato salad. Lily fixed a plate for her dad and took it to his room off the kitchen, and when she returned, she sat down with Tess and Kristy in that dearly familiar room and ate, actually tasting her food for the first time since she’d gotten the call about her father’s heart attack.

Kristy, she remembered, had gotten in touch soon afterward. And Dylan, an old friend, had come on the line moments later, to reassure her and offer her the use of a private plane.

“You look happy,” she told Kristy, when Tess had finished eating and rushed off to explore a little before washing up for the trip to the library.

“I am,” Kristy said, glowing. Then she reached across and squeezed Lily’s hand briefly. “Things will get better,” she promised. “You’re home, among friends, and your dad’s going to be fine.”

Lily laughed, but it was a halfhearted sound, weary and a little—no, a lot—skeptical. “If you say so,” she said. “Thanks for everything you did, Kristy. And thank Briana, too. Wherever she is.”

Kristy smiled, pushed back her chair and stood to begin clearing the table. “You’ll meet her soon enough,” she assured Lily. “She and Logan are building on to their house, and she had to go home to talk to the contractor.”

Logan was married, and building on to his house.

Kristy was obviously happy with Dylan.

And Tyler was probably still sleeping with waitresses—if he hadn’t graduated to sexy movie stars and supermodels.

As if she cared.

CHAPTER TWO

I F HIS BRAIN HADN’T SNAGGED on Lily Ryder and then gotten snarled like so much fishing line, Dylan wouldn’t have taken Tyler by surprise the way he did, there in the auto-repair shop. A hard slug to his right shoulder jerked him back to the here and now, pronto.

Tyler turned, ready to fight, but drew up when he saw Dylan’s side-slanted grin and the bring-it-on glint in his blue eyes.

“That city-slicker rig of yours break down someplace?” Dylan asked.

Tyler unclenched his right fist, let out a breath. Much as he would have liked to punch his middle brother, he figured it might scare Kit Carson, so he didn’t. The dog had been through enough. “I swapped it for a truck,” he heard himself say. “And that broke down.”

Dylan raised one eyebrow. “Need a ride?”

Tyler looked down at the mutt, resting watchfully at his feet, brown eyes rolling from one brother to the other. The poor critter looked as though he expected to be smashed between two giant cymbals at any moment.

“Yeah,” Tyler said, reluctantly agreeing to Dylan’s offer. “The tow truck’s out on another call, and I’m fifth in line, so it might be tomorrow before they can haul the Chevy in and fix it.”

After he’d told Vance Grant, the only mechanic on duty, that he’d check back in the morning, Tyler and Kit followed Dylan out into the afternoon heat. They made a stop at the supermarket, for dog kibble, coffee and a few other staples, and headed, by tacit agreement, for the ranch. In all that time, barely two words passed between them.

They were a good three miles out of town, in fact, Kit panting happily in the backseat of Dylan’s extended-cab pickup, before it occurred to Tyler to wonder how his brother had happened along at just the right—or wrong—time.

Reflecting on the question, Tyler idly rubbed his sore shoulder, where Dylan had slugged him. “Did you come into the shop looking for me?” he asked.

“Yup,” Dylan answered easily, without so much as glancing in his direction. The slight tilt of amusement at the corner of his mouth told Tyler he’d seen him nursing that arm, though. “Word gets around. Big news, when a Creed hits the old hometown.”

Tyler sighed. “Not much happens around here, if we’re news.”

“You’d be surprised,” Dylan said. “If you ever stuck around long enough to find out what’s going on around Stillwater Springs, that is.”

They’d run into each other a little over a week before, at the home of a mutual friend, Cassie Greencreek, but it hadn’t exactly been a family reunion. Tyler had met Dylan’s little girl, Bonnie, and taken a fierce liking to her, even fetched her some medicine when she was sick, but that was the extent of the brotherly bonding.

“Catch me up,” Tyler said, because Dylan was bent on talking, evidently. And when Dylan was bent on anything, it was easier to just ride it out.

“Well, I got married,” Dylan said. “To Kristy Madison.”

Tyler absorbed that. “Okay,” he said. “Congratulations.”

“Gee, thanks. Your enthusiasm is overwhelming.”

“She’s half again too good for you,” Tyler commented, at something of a loss. There was so much bad blood between him and his brothers that he didn’t know how to carry on a civil conversation with either of them. “Kristy, I mean.”

Dylan laughed. “True,” he answered. Then he proceeded to bring Tyler up to speed on all the latest doings in Stillwater Springs, Montana. “They dug up a couple of bodies on the old Madison place,” he went on. “And Sheriff Book retired early, a week before the special election. Mike Danvers was running against Jim Huntinghorse, but he dropped out of the race, so Jim’s The Man now.”

“Bodies?” Tyler echoed. He’d barely untangled himself from the shock of seeing Lily Ryder again, and that little girl of hers, and now Dylan was laying all this stuff on him.

“Murder victims,” Dylan confirmed.

“Holy shit,” Tyler said. “Anybody we knew?”

“Probably not,” Dylan answered, as they bumped off the main road onto one of the old cattle trails snaking through the ranch like a network of ancient tree roots. A muscle tightened in Dylan’s jaw. “A drifter who worked for Kristy’s dad for a while, and a young girl who went missing during a family camping trip a few years back.”

Tyler remembered the media frenzy surrounding the missing girl. Searchers had turned over every rock in that part of Montana, without success, and eventually the hoo-ha had died down and the parents had gone home, defeated and hollow-eyed with despair. “Did Floyd nab the killers?”

“Do you ever read a newspaper?” Dylan countered, sounding semi-irritated now. Now there was a tone Tyler understood.

“No,” he snapped back. “My lips move when I read, and that makes me testy.”

“ Everything makes you testy, little brother.” Dylan paused, sighed. Went on. “Freida Turlow killed the girl—some kind of jealousy thing. And the drifter—well, that’s another story.”

“Those Turlows,” Tyler said, “are just plain loco.”

Dylan laughed again, but it was a raw, gruff sound, without a trace of humor. “Coming from a Creed, that’s saying something.”

In spite of himself, Tyler laughed, too.

“What brings you back to the home place, little brother?” Dylan asked. He was downright loquacious, old Dylan.

“Stop calling me ‘little brother,’” Tyler told him. “I’m a head taller than you are.”

“You’ll always be the baby of the family. Deal with it.” Dylan downshifted, with a grinding of gears, and they jostled up the lake road, toward Tyler’s cabin. “Answer my question. What are you doing here?”

Tyler let out a long sigh. “Damned if I know,” he admitted. “I guess I’m tired of the open road. I need some time to think a few things through.”

“What things?”

Again, Tyler’s temper, never far beneath the surface, stirred inside him. “What the fuck do you care?” he asked.

Kit Carson gave a fitful whimper from the backseat.

“I care,” Dylan said evenly. “And so does Logan.”

“Bullshit,” Tyler said flatly.

“Why is that so hard for you to believe?”

The cabin came in sight, nestled up close to the lake. It was more shack than house, his hind-tit inheritance from the old man, but Tyler loved the solitude and the way the light of the sun and moon played over that still water.

Logan, being the eldest, had scored the main ranch house when Jake Creed got himself killed up in the woods, logging, and Dylan, coming in second, got their uncle’s old dump on the other side of the orchard. That left Tyler in third place, as always.

Hind-tit.

Tyler unclamped his back molars, reached back to reassure the dog with a ruffling of the ears. Ignoring Dylan’s question, he asked about Bonnie instead.

“She’s fine,” Dylan answered.

He brought the truck to a stop in front of the log A-frame, and Tyler had the passenger-side door open before Dylan had shut off the engine. Kit Carson waited, shivering a little, with either anticipation or dread, until Tyler hoisted him down from the backseat.

“Thanks for the lift,” Tyler told his brother, reaching over the side of the truck bed for the kibble and the grub they’d picked up in town. Here’s your hat, what’s your hurry?

Dylan got out of the truck, slammed his door.

“Don’t you have things to do?” Tyler asked tersely. Kit Carson was sniffing around in the rich, high grass, making himself at home—and he was all the company Tyler wanted at the moment. Once inside, he’d prime the pump, build a fire in the antiquated wood cookstove and brew some coffee. Try to get a little perspective.

“I have all kinds of ‘things to do,’” Dylan answered, his mild tone in direct conflict with his go-to-hell manner. “I’m building a house, for one thing. Logan and I are back in the cattle business. But you’re at the top of my to-do list today, little brother. Like it or lump it.”

Tyler consulted an imaginary list, envisioning a little notebook, like the one his dad had always carried in the pocket of his work shirt, full of timber footage and married women’s phone numbers. “You’re at the top of mine, too,” he replied. “Trouble is, it’s a shit list.”

Dylan leaned against the hood of his truck, watching as Tyler started for the cabin, lugging the kibble under one arm and juggling two grocery bags with the other. Kit Carson hurried after him, though it was most likely the dog food he was after.

“Ty,” Dylan said, easy-like but with that steel undercurrent that was pure Creed orneriness, born and bred, “we’re brothers, remember? We’re blood. Logan and I, we’d like to mend some fences, and I’m not talking about the barbed-wire kind.”

“You’ve obviously mistaken me for somebody who gives a rat’s ass what you and Logan would like.”

Dylan stepped back from the truck, folded his arms. “Look,” he said, as Tyler passed him, headed for the front door of the cabin, “we were all messed up after Jake’s funeral—”

Messed up? They’d gotten into the mother of all brawls, he and Logan and Dylan, down at Skivvie’s Tavern. Wound up in jail, in fact, and gone their separate ways—after saying a lot of things that couldn’t be taken back.

Tyler shook his head, shifted to fumble with the doorknob. The thing was so rusted out, he’d never bothered with a lock, but that day, it whisked open and Kit Carson shot over the threshold, growling low, his hackles up.

Dylan was right at Tyler’s back, carrying his guitar case and duffel bag. “What the hell?” he muttered.

Somebody was inside the cabin, that was obvious, and Kit Carson had them cornered in the john.

“Whoa,” Tyler told the dog, setting aside the stuff he was carrying.

“Call him off!” a youthful voice squeaked from inside what passed as a bathroom. “Call him off!”

Tyler and Dylan exchanged curious glances, and Tyler eased the dog aside with one knee to stand in the doorway.

A kid huddled on the floor between the pull-chain toilet and the dry sink, staring up at Tyler with wild, rebellious, terrified eyes. Male, as near as Tyler could guess, wearing a long black coat, as if to defy the heat. Three silver rings pierced the boy’s right eyebrow, and both his ears and his lower lip sported hardware, too. The tattooed spider clinging to his neck added to the drama.

Tyler winced, just imagining all that needlework. Gripped the door frame with both hands, a human barrier filling the only route of escape, other than the tiny window three feet above the tank on the john. The kid glanced up, wisely ruled out that particular bolt-hole.