Praise for the novels of
LINDA LAEL
MILLER

“As hot as the noontime desert.”

—Publishers Weekly on The Rustler

“Loaded with hot lead, steamy sex and surprising plot twists.”

—Publishers Weekly on A Wanted Man

“Miller’s prose is smart, and her tough Eastwoodian cowboy cuts a sharp, unexpectedly funny figure in a classroom full of rambunctious frontier kids.”

—Publishers Weekly on The Man from Stone Creek

“[Miller] paints a brilliant portrait of the good, the bad and the ugly, the lost and the lonely, and the power of love to bring light into the darkest of souls. This is western romance at its finest.”

—RT Book Reviews on The Man from Stone Creek

“Linda Lael Miller creates vibrant characters and stories I defy you to forget.”

—No.1 New York Times bestselling author Debbie Macomber

Dear Reader,

Welcome to the second of three books about the rowdy McKettrick cousins, the Creeds.

Dylan Creed, seasoned hell-raiser and erstwhile rodeo cowboy, suddenly finds himself the full-time father of a two-year-old daughter. Like his brother, he’s come back to Stillwater Springs, Montana, to face down his demons, but his high school sweetheart, librarian Kristy Madison, shakes him up more than any bull he’s ever ridden in the rodeo! Will he stick around long enough to help Logan make the Creed name mean something again?

I also wanted to write today to tell you about a special group of people with whom I’ve recently become involved. It is The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), specifically their Pets for Life programme.

The Pets for Life programme is one of the best ways to help your local shelter: that is to help keep animals out of shelters in the first place. Something as basic as keeping a collar and tag on your pet all the time, so if he gets out and gets lost, he can be returned home. Being a responsible pet owner. Spaying or neutering your pet. And not giving up when things don’t go perfectly. If your dog digs in the yard, or your cat scratches the furniture, know that these are problems that can be addressed. You can find all the information about these problems—and many other common ones—at www.petsforlife.org. This campaign is focused on keeping pets and their people together for a lifetime.

As many of you know, my own household includes two dogs, two cats and four horses, so this is a cause that is near and dear to my heart. I hope you’ll get involved along with me.

With love,

Also available from
LINDA LAEL
MILLER

The Stone Creek series THE MAN FROM STONE CREEK A WANTED MAN THE RUSTLER

The McKettricks series McKETTRICK’S CHOICE McKETTRICK’S LUCK McKETTRICK’S PRIDE McKETTRICK’S HEART A McKETTRICK CHRISTMAS

The Mojo Sheepshanks series DEADLY GAMBLE DEADLY DECEPTIONS

Don’t miss all the adventures of the Montana Creeds LOGAN DYLAN TYLER

And return to Stone Creek in THE BRIDEGROOM

Montana Creeds: Dylan

Linda Iael Miller

www.mirabooks.co.uk

For Sam and Janet Smith, my dear, funny friends.

Thanks for some of the best advice

I’ve ever received:

Go to Harlequin!

CHAPTER ONE

Las Vegas, Nevada

HE’D KNOWN ALL DAY that something was about to go down, something life-changing and entirely new. The knowledge had prickled in his gut and shivered in the fine hairs on the nape of his neck throughout the marathon poker games played in his favorite seedy, backstreet gambling joint. He’d ignored the subtle mind-buzz as a minor distraction—it didn’t have the usual elements of actual danger. But now, with a wad of folded bills—his winnings—shoved into the shaft of his left boot, Dylan Creed knew he’d better watch it, just the same.

Down in Glitter Gulch, there were crowds of people, security goons hired by the megacasinos to make sure their walking ATMs didn’t get roughed up or rolled, or both, cops and cameras everywhere. Here, behind the Black Rose Cowboy Bar and Card Room, home of the hard-core poker players who scorned glitz, there was one failing streetlight, an overflowing Dumpster, a handful of rusty old cars and, at the periphery of his vision, a rat the size of a raccoon.

While he loved a good fight, being a Creed, born and bred, Dylan was nobody’s fool. A tire iron to the back of the head and being relieved of the day’s take—fifty-odd thousand dollars in cash—was not on his to-do list.

He walked toward his gleaming red extended-cab Ford pickup with his customary confidence, and probably looked like a hapless rube to anybody who might be lurking behind that Dumpster, or one of the other cars or just in the shadows.

Someone was definitely watching him; he could feel it now, a for-sure kind of thing—but it was more annoying than alarming. He’d learned early in his life, though, just by being Jake Creed’s middle son, that the presence of another person, or persons, charged the atmosphere with a crackle of energy.

Just in case, he reached inside his ancient denim jacket, closed his fingers loosely around the handle of the snub-nosed .45 he carried on his frequent gambling junkets. Garth Brooks might have friends in low places like the Black Rose, but he didn’t. Only sore losers, crooks and card sharps hung out in this neighborhood, and Dylan Creed fell into the latter category.

He was within six feet of the truck before he realized there was someone sitting in the passenger seat. He debated whether to draw the .45 or his cell phone in the split second it took to recognize Bonnie.

Bonnie. His two-year-old daughter stood on the seat, grinning at him through the glass.

Dylan sprinted to the driver’s side, scrambled in and lost his hat when the little girl flung herself on him, her arms tight around his neck.

With his elbow, Dylan tapped the lock-button on his armrest.

“Daddy,” Bonnie said. At least, in his mind the kid’s name was Bonnie—Sharlene, her mother, had changed it several times, according to the latest whim.

“Hey, babe,” Dylan said, loosening his grip a little because he was afraid of crushing the munchkin. “Where’s your mom?”

Bonnie drew back to look at him with enormous blue eyes, thick-lashed. Her short blond hair curled in wisps around her ears, and she was wearing beat-up bib overalls, a striped T-shirt and flip-flops for shoes.

I’m only two, her expression seemed to say. How should I know where my mom is?

Dylan turned, keeping one arm around Bonnie, and buzzed down the window. “Sharlene!” he yelled into the dark parking lot.

There was no answer, of course, and he knew by the shift in the vibes he’d been picking up since he stepped through the back door of the Rose that his onetime girlfriend had bailed. Again.

Only this time, she’d left Bonnie behind.

He wanted to swear, even pound the steering wheel once with his fist, but you didn’t do things like that with a kid around. Not if you’d grown up in an alcoholic cement mixer of a home, like he and his brothers, Logan and Tyler, had, jumping at every thump and bump. And there was more to it than that: besides the fact that he didn’t want to scare Bonnie, he felt a strange undercurrent of exhilaration.

He seldom saw his daughter, thanks to Sharlene’s gypsy ways—though she always managed to cash his child-support checks—and being separated from Bonnie, never knowing what was happening to her, ached inside him like a bruise to the soul.

Bonnie settled into his lap, laid her head against his chest, gave a shuddery little sigh. Maybe it was relief, maybe it was resignation.

She’d probably had one hell of a day, given how the night was shaping up.

Dylan propped his chin on top of her head for a moment, his eyes burning and his throat as hot as if he’d tried to swallow a red-ended branding iron. He leaned forward, turned the key in the ignition, shifted gears.

Logan. That was his next thought. He had to get to Logan. His brother was a lawyer, after all. And while Dylan had the money to pay any shyster in the country, and he and Logan were sort of on the outs, he knew there was no one else he could trust with something this important.

Bonnie was his child, as well as Sharlene’s, and by God, she deserved a stable home, decent clothes—the getup she was wearing looked as if it had doubled as a dog bed for a year or two—and at least one responsible parent.

Not that he was all that responsible. He’d been a rodeo bum for years, and now he was a poker bum. He had all the money he’d ever need, thanks to a certain shrewd investment and a spooky tendency to draw a royal flush once in practically every game, and he’d done some high-paying stunt work for the movies, too.

Compared to Sharlene, for all his rambling, he was a contender for Parent of the Year.

He didn’t find the note and the shabby duffel bag on the backseat until he got out to South Point, his favorite hotel. Holding a sleepy Bonnie in the curve of one arm while he stood waiting for a valet to take the truck, he read the note.

I’m having some problems, Sharlene had scrawled in her childlike handwriting, slanting so far to the left that it almost lay flat against the lines on the cheap notebook paper, and I can’t take care of Aurora anymore. Aurora, now? Jesus, what next—Oprah? I thought giving her to you would be better than putting her in foster care. I went that route, and it sucked. Don’t try to find me. I’ve got a boyfriend and we’re hitting the road. Sharlene.

Dylan unclamped his back molars, shifted Bonnie’s weight so he could take the ticket from the parking guy and then grab the duffel bag. He’d have his own gear sent over from Madeline’s place, where he usually crashed when he was passing through Vegas. Madeline wouldn’t like it, but he wasn’t about to take his two-year-old daughter there.

South Point was a sprawling, brightly lit hotel. Dylan stayed there whenever he came to the National Finals Rodeo—if Madeline, a flight attendant, was on one of her overseas runs or seeing somebody else at the time—and the establishment was family-friendly.

He and Bonnie were family.

There you had it.

After he’d booked a room with two massive beds, he ordered room-service hamburgers, French fries and milk shakes. While they waited, Bonnie, only half-awake, lay curled on her side on the bed farthest from the door, her right thumb jammed into her mouth, her eyes following every move he made.

“You’re gonna be okay, kiddo,” he told her.

She looked so small, and so vulnerable, lying there in her ragbag clothes. “Daddy,” she said, and yawned broadly before pulling on her thumb again, this time with vigor.

“That’s right,” Dylan answered, turning from the phone to the duffel bag. Inside were more clothes like the ones she was wearing, a kid-size toothbrush with the bristles worn flat and a naked plastic baby doll with Ubangi hair and blue ink marks on its face. “I’m your daddy. And it looks like we’ll be doing some shoppin’ in the morning, you and me.”

There were no pajamas. No socks. No real shoes, for that matter. Just two more pairs of overalls, two more sad-looking T-shirts, the doll and the toothbrush.

Rage simmered midway down Dylan’s gullet. Damn it, what was Sharlene doing with the money he sent to that post office box in Topeka every month? He knew by the way the substantial check always cleared his bank before the ink was dry that her grandmother picked it up for her, the day it came in, and overnighted it to wherever “Sharlie” happened to be.

He had his suspicions, naturally, regarding Sharlene’s spending habits—cocaine, animal-print spandex, tattoos for the fathead boyfriend du jour, if not herself. Bonnie, most likely, had subsisted on fast food and frozen pizza.

Dylan’s jaw tightened to the point of pain; he consciously relaxed it. None of this was Bonnie’s doing. Unlike him, unlike Sharlene, she was innocent, forced to live with the consequences of other people’s mistakes.

Not anymore, he vowed silently.

Much as he would have liked to put all the blame on Sharlene, he knew it wouldn’t be fair. He’d known who—and what—she was when he’d slept with her, nearly three years ago, after a rodeo, in a town he couldn’t even remember the name of now. They’d holed up in a cheap room and had sex for a week, then gone their separate ways. A few clueless months later, Sharlene had tracked him down and told him she was expecting his baby.

And he’d known it was true, long before he’d even laid eyes on Bonnie and seen her resemblance to him, the same way he’d known he wasn’t alone in the parking lot behind the Black Rose.

Listless with fatigue and probably confusion, Bonnie merely nibbled when the room-service food came, and then fell asleep in her overalls. Was she still on formula or something? Should he send a bellman into town for baby bottles and milk?

He sighed, shoved a hand through his tangled hair.

In the morning, he’d take Bonnie to a pediatrician—after buying her some decent clothes so the doc wouldn’t put a call through to Child Protective Services the minute they walked in—for a routine exam and to find out what the hell two-year-olds actually ate.

When he was sure Bonnie was sound asleep, the bedspread tucked around her, he called Madeline. She’d be expecting him, though to her credit, not at an even remotely reasonable hour, since theirs was a sleep-over-when-you’re-passing-through kind of arrangement.

He needed his clothes, and his shaving gear, and his laptop.

“It’s Dylan,” he said, to Madeline’s hello.

“You winnin’, sugar?” She’d cultivated a Southern drawl, but every once in a while, the Minnesota came through, with its faintly Scandinavian lilt.

“I always do,” Dylan murmured, looking at his sleeping child.

“Then we ought to celebrate,” Madeline crooned. “Find us a sexy movie on pay-per-view and—”

“Look, Madeline, I can’t make it over there tonight. Something—er—came up—”

“Where are you?” There was a snap in Madeline’s tone now. She wasn’t possessive—he’d have driven fifty miles out of his way to avoid her if she had been—but she had turned down other offers for the duration of his stay in Vegas, she’d made that abundantly clear, and she clearly wasn’t happy about being stood up.

“I’m at South Point,” he began.

“Damn you,” Madeline said, downright peevish now, “you picked up some—some woman, didn’t you?”

“Not exactly.”

“What do you mean, ‘not exactly’?”

“I’m with my daughter, Madeline,” Dylan said, patient only because he didn’t want to disturb Bonnie. “She’s two years old.”

The croon was back. “Oh, bring her over here! I just love babies.”

Dylan actually considered the offer, for a nanosecond. Then he remembered Madeline’s penchant for impromptu sex, the smell of stale pot smoke that permeated her condo and the bowl of colorfully packaged condoms in the middle of her coffee table.

“Uh—no,” he said. “She’s pretty tired.”

He sensed another huff building up beneath Madeline’s drawl. “Then why did you bother to call at all?” she purred. In a moment, the claws would be out, poised to rip him to bloody shreds.

“I need my stuff,” Dylan admitted, ducking his head a little, the way he had on the playground when he was a kid, in anticipation of a blow. “If you’d just put it all in a cab and send it this way, I’d be obliged.”

“I wouldn’t think of doing that,” Madeline said. “I’ll drop it all off on my way to the club.” Her slight emphasis on the last two words was a clear message—if he was going to be a no-show, far be it from her to sit home alone watching pay-per-view.

“Madeline, you don’t have to—”

“South Point? That’s where you said you are, isn’t it?”

“Yes, but—”

She hung up on him.

Dylan sat down on the edge of his bed, opposite Bonnie’s, and propped his elbows on his thighs. Madeline would want to come straight up to the room, probably to see if he’d lied about the company he was keeping, and he didn’t want her waking Bonnie. But unless he could talk Madeline into sending his things up with a bellman, which didn’t seem likely, he’d have no other choice.

He’d have to leave Bonnie alone to go downstairs, and that wasn’t an option.

Twenty minutes later, the phone rang, causing Bonnie to stir in the depths of some baby-dream, and he pounced on it, whispered, “Hello?”

“I’m downstairs,” Madeline said. “What’s your room number, sweetie?”

Dylan suppressed another sigh. God, he hated being called “sweetie.” “Twelve-forty-two,” he said.

Madeline, a leggy redhead, almost as tall as he was, at six feet, whisked her shapely self to his door with no measurable delay. Looking through the peephole, he saw that she was flanked by a bellman with a loaded cart. Her shiny mouth was tight, and her eyes narrowed slightly.

Reluctantly, Dylan admitted her.

She immediately scanned the room, her gaze landing on Bonnie, while the bellman waited politely to unload some of the stuff from the cart. Dylan handed him a tip and brought in the laptop, his shaving kit and his suitcase himself.

“She is precious!” Madeline enthused, looming over Bonnie’s bed.

“Be quiet,” Dylan said. “She’s had a rough day.” A rough life was more like it. As soon as he got rid of Madeline, he’d bite the bullet and call Logan. They’d made some progress lately, he and his older brother, but the ground could get rocky at any time, and asking big brother for help was going to be hard on his pride.

Madeline put a shh finger to her plump mouth and batted her false eyelashes. Put her in a big Vegas headdress, with feathers and spangles, a skimpy costume, high heels and fishnet stockings, and Bonnie, if she chanced to wake up and see a stranger standing over her, would have nightmares about showgirls until she died of old age.

He took Madeline by the elbow and gave her the bum’s rush toward the door. “Good night, thank you, and what do I owe you for the favor?”

She patted his cheek. “We’ll settle up next time you come through Vegas,” she said. She paused. “The hotel could probably provide a babysitter, then we could—”

“No,” Dylan said flatly.

Blessedly, and none too soon, Madeline left.

Dylan showered, shaved, brushed his teeth and headed for bed in his boxer briefs; he hadn’t owned a pair of pajamas since grade school.

But he had Bonnie to think about now. He couldn’t go parading around in front of a two-year-old in his shorts—even if she was asleep.

Fatherhood, he thought, was getting more complicated by the minute. Especially since he didn’t know jack-shit about it—his experience had been limited to a few brief visits with Bonnie whenever Sharlene deigned to light someplace for a month.

He pulled on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, and then he crashed.

He’d call Logan the next day, he promised himself. Or the next day, or the one after that …

KRISTY MADISON BUSTLED around her big kitchen, opening a can of food for her white Persian cat, Winston, gathering her notes for that night’s book-club meeting at the library, grabbing her cell phone off the counter where she’d been charging it during a quick trip home for supper.

She wished she could stay in tonight, soak in her big claw-foot bathtub and read a book, but the reading group had been her idea, after all. And it had turned out to be a popular one—twenty-six people had signed up.

Privately, Kristy wondered how many of them simply wanted a close-up look at Briana, Logan Creed’s love interest. Before Briana had taken up with Logan, she’d been just another single mother, pulling down a paycheck at the casino on the outskirts of Stillwater Springs, homeschooling her two boys, Josh and Alec, and generally minding her own business.

Kristy bit her lower lip. Thinking of Logan inevitably led to thinking about Dylan, and that was still too painful, even though it had been five years since she’d seen him. He’d been in town recently—the busybodies had made sure she knew—but he hadn’t sought her out, and she’d been half again too proud to chase him down.

Looking at her own reflection in the dark glass of the kitchen window, Kristy saw a slender woman with fashionably mussed, midlength blond hair, blue eyes and good bone structure. But there were shadows under those eyes, her hair needed a trim, and what the hell good did bone structure do a person, anyway? She looked okay in the picture on her driver’s license—that was the extent of the advantage, as far as she’d been able to determine.

Winston, ignoring his food bowl, gave a loud and plaintive meow and slithered across the cuffs of Kristy’s black jeans, leaving a dusting of snow-white hair.

Now, she’d have to lint-roll—again.

Other women carried mints and lipstick in their purses—Kristy had a tape-covered stick.

“I know,” she told Winston gently. “You want to cuddle and watch Animal Planet, but I’ve got to work tonight.”

Winston’s reply was another meow—this time, he’d turned the “pitiful” meter up a few notches.

“You can have an extra mackerel treat when I get home,” Kristy promised. “I won’t be late—nine-thirty at the outside.”

Winston, unappeased, turned and made his way between the various paint cans and wallpaper samples littering the kitchen floor. With a disdainful flip of his bushy white tail, he disappeared into the dining room.

Kristy had been renovating her big Victorian house forever, or so it seemed. She was used to tripping over stuff from Home Depot, and so was Winston, but all of a sudden, it seemed more like a never-ending hassle than the noble restoration effort she’d undertaken as soon as she’d signed the mortgage papers.

“I’m tired of my life,” she told her reflection. “I want a new one.”

“Too bad,” her reflection replied. “You made your bed, and now you have to sleep in it. Alone.”

No husband. No children.

A few more birthdays, a few more cats, and she’d qualify as a crazy old maid. Kids would start saying she was a witch, and avoid her house on Halloween.

Kristy turned away from her window-self, tugged her purse strap onto her shoulder, dropped her cell phone into the bag, along with her notes and a copy of that month’s book-club selection, and headed for the back door.

No matter how blue she might be, the sight of the Stillwater Springs Public Library always lifted her spirits, and this evening was no exception. She loved the squat, redbrick building, with its green shutters and shingled roof. She loved being surrounded by books and readers.

She and a few other people who’d grown up in or around the small western Montana town had fought some hard battles to get the funding to build and stock the library after the old one burned down.

Parking her dark green Blazer in the spot reserved especially for her, Kristy hurried toward the side door, keys jingling. The main part of the library had closed early that night for plumbing repairs in one of the rest-rooms, but the two small meeting rooms would be open—the reading group in one, AA in the other.

She hung her purse on a peg, washed her hands at the sink in the little kitchenette between the meeting rooms and started wrestling with the big coffee urn.

Sheriff Floyd Book was the next to arrive—he carried in a box of books from his personal car and greeted Kristy with a smile and a nod. “I knew if I didn’t get here too quick, you’d make the coffee,” he teased.

Kristy laughed. “Everything in place for your retirement?” she asked, setting out columns of disposable cups, packets of sugar and powdered creamer and the like.

“Everything except me,” Floyd replied, through the open doorway leading to the AA side, already setting out books and pamphlets for that night’s meeting. In Stillwater Springs, nobody was anonymous, but for the sake of what was called The Program, everyone pretended not to notice who came and went from the side entrance to the library on a Tuesday night. “I can’t hardly wait for that special election. Hand my badge over to Jim Huntinghorse or Mike Danvers, and kick the dust of this town off my feet—for a few weeks, anyhow. Dorothy and I are all packed for that cruise to Alaska.”

“Soon,” Kristy soothed good-naturedly. She’d been too busy, until the mention of the woman’s name, to notice that Mrs. Book was nowhere around. “Dorothy isn’t coming to the reading group meeting? She signed up.”

Dorothy Book was confined to a wheelchair, following an automobile accident some years before, and there were people who said she wasn’t right in the head. Kristy had always liked Dorothy—so what if she was a little different?—and she’d been looking forward to having her come to the group’s first meeting.

Floyd shook his head. He’d looked weary lately, worn down to a nubbin, as Kristy’s late mother used to say. Maybe it was the buildup to his retirement, the stresses of his job, and the uncertainty of the special election, but it seemed to Kristy that he was more strained than usual.

“It’s hard for her to get in and out of the car,” the sheriff told Kristy. “And she hates fussing with that wheelchair. I’m hoping the cruise will put some color back in her cheeks and a twinkle in her eyes.”

Kristy stopped fiddling with the coffee things. Floyd Book was the sheriff of a sprawling county—he’d been elected to the office when she was in the second grade and had held it ever since. Until her dad died, just six months after her mother’s passing, Floyd had been a regular visitor out at Madison Ranch. He and Kristy’s father had been best friends, sharing a love of fishing, horseback riding and herding the few cattle Tim Madison had been able to afford to run on that hard-scrabble place.

A pang struck Kristy as she started to ask Floyd, straight out, if something was wrong and if so, what she could do to help. This was a night, it seemed, for painful memories to come up.

“You all right, Kristy?” Floyd asked, crossing the hallway to lay a brawny hand on her shoulder. “You went pale for a second there. I thought you were going to faint.”

“I’m fine,” Kristy lied. She’d been raised as a tough Montana ranch kid, expected to say she was fine whether she was or not.

But the ranch was abandoned now, the barn leaning to one side, the sturdy old house empty. The last time Kristy had forced herself to go out there and stand on the high rise where she used to ride Sugarfoot, her beloved palomino gelding, she’d actually felt her heart break into pieces.

Her parents were both dead, and she had no brothers or sisters, no aunts—now that Great-Aunt Millie had passed away—or uncles, no cousins.

Sugarfoot was gone, too, buried in a horse-size grave in the middle of a copse of trees bordering the Creed ranch. After sixteen years, more than half her life, Kristy still cried when she visited her best friend’s final resting place. People urged her to get another horse—she’d loved riding, and she’d been uncommonly good at it, too—but somehow, she just didn’t have the heart to love something—or someone—that much and risk another loss.

She’d lost so much already.

Her parents, Sugarfoot.

And Dylan Creed.

“Kristy?” the sheriff prompted, peering worriedly into her face now. “Maybe you ought to go home. You might be coming down with something. I could tell the reading-club ladies the meeting’s been postponed.”

Kristy summoned up a smile, straightened her shoulders, looked her father’s old friend straight in the eye. “Nonsense,” she said. “We’ve already postponed it once. I’m just a little tired, that’s all.”

Floyd didn’t seem entirely convinced, but a few of the AA regulars were straggling in, so he finally turned to go and greet them, the way he had every Tuesday night for years—ever since Dorothy’s car accident, and that scandal about him running around with Freida Turlow behind Dorothy’s back. He’d wept, sitting at the kitchen table with Kristy’s dad, out on the ranch, over the pain Dorothy had suffered, not only because of the wreck on an icy road, but because he’d betrayed her with another woman.

It was the first and only time Kristy, watching and listening unnoticed from the hallway, had ever seen a grown man cry.

Her kindly dad had put a hand to Floyd’s shoulder and said, “It’s the drinking, old buddy. That’s what’s messing up your life. You think I don’t know you carry a flask everywhere you go? You’ve got to do something.”

And Floyd had done something. He’d joined AA, gotten sober and, as far as Kristy knew, been a faithful husband to Dorothy from then on.

Kristy left the kitchenette for the reading group’s meeting room, and by some cosmic irony, Freida Turlow was the first to arrive.

An athletic type, attractive in a hardened sort of way, Freida, like Kristy, was a lifelong resident of Stillwater Springs. Except for college, neither one of them had been away from home for any significant length of time.

Kristy was a hometown girl—she’d never wanted to live anywhere else, even after her parents both died during her junior year at the University of Montana. By contrast, Freida, who was at least a decade older, had indeed been Kristy’s babysitter on the rare nights when her mom and dad went out dancing, or to play cards with friends, seemed out of place in Stillwater Springs. She was ambitious and well-educated, and virtually ran the local real estate office. Her brother, Brett, was a classic jerk, sleeping on her couch and famous for stealing money from her every chance he got.

Tonight, her dark chin-length hair pinned up at the back of her head, Freida wore a running suit and sneakers and carried that month’s reading selection under one arm. Like Kristy, Freida had lost her family home—the gingerbread-laced minimansion Kristy now owned—and she was touchy about it. She’d offered to buy back the old house several times, at higher and higher prices, and had gotten progressively more annoyed at every polite refusal.

Kristy understood Freida’s desire to reclaim the venerable Victorian, even sympathized. But that house, except for Winston and her job at the library, which she’d held ever since she got her degree, was all she had.

Where would she go, if she sold it back to Freida?

“News on the real estate front,” Freida told her, with no little satisfaction. “I’ve got an offer on Madison Ranch—or at least, the promise of one.”

Kristy froze. The old place was run-down, but it was big—totaling some thirty thousand acres. Prime pickings for the movie stars and Learjet executive crowd who’d been snatching up properties in Montana over the past couple of decades.

Only the probate tangle had kept it off the market this long.

Technically, the local bank owned Madison Ranch now, though the name had stuck, because there had been Madisons living on that land since that part of the state was settled. They’d foreclosed two months after Kristy’s dad died.

Freida allowed herself a smug little smile.

Then Briana Grant came in. There were rumors that she and Logan Creed were secretly married or would be soon, and sleeping together either way. Briana, a pretty woman who always wore her strawberry-blond hair in a tidy French braid, certainly hadn’t confided the nature of the relationship to Kristy, though the two of them were friendly.

Seeing Freida seated at one of the chairs surrounding the conference table, her book open before her, Briana stopped on the threshold, looked as though she might turn on one heel and bolt.

“Come in,” Kristy urged her, smiling. Inside, though, she was still shaken by Freida’s smug announcement that she had a promising prospect to buy Madison Ranch, and no amount of telling herself it didn’t matter anyway seemed to help.

Briana hesitated, then met Freida’s gaze, lifted her chin a little, and took a place at the table.

“You’ve got your nerve, showing up here, after all the trouble you’ve caused my poor brother,” Freida told her flatly.

Briana flushed, but didn’t give any ground. Sheriff Book had picked Brett Turlow up for questioning a couple of times, after a break-in at Briana’s, but that was all Kristy knew. She wasn’t much for gossip.

“Everybody’s welcome here, Freida,” Kristy said staunchly. While the Stillwater Springs Public Library wasn’t exactly a hotbed of violent controversy, she’d had some experience keeping order. A lot of townspeople used the place as if it were a free day-care center, and once in a while, there was a little dust-up when two voracious readers wanted to check out the only copy of some recent bestseller.

Freida stood, her movements stiff and precise. She grabbed her purse and her book and sniffed, “I don’t know why I stay in this town, with all the riffraff coming in these days.” With that, she swept grandly out.

Tears stood in Briana’s eyes.

Kristy sat down beside her friend, took her hand. “She’s the one with nerve, calling anybody riffraff, with that brother of hers,” she said gently.

Briana sniffled, managed a smile and then a nod. She hugged her library book to her chest like some sort of treasure.

After that, the other members of the book club began trailing in, by chatty twos and threes. Those who wanted to helped themselves to the coffee in the kitchenette, and though they watched Briana with interest, surely speculating about her and Logan Creed, they included her in the discussion.

All in all, Kristy thought, as she locked up an hour later, when both meetings were over, it had been a worthwhile evening, though Winston probably wouldn’t agree.

Back in the Blazer, and alone in the library parking lot, Kristy gripped the wheel with both hands and laid her forehead against her knuckles for a long moment.

She felt strangely on edge, hyperalert, as though something big were about to happen, but big things simply didn’t happen in Stillwater Springs, Montana. Not often, anyway.

She rallied, made herself sit up straight, start the motor, head for home. Winston was waiting, and so was her claw-foot bathtub, along with the page-turner she’d been trying to finish for a week.

Maybe Sheriff Book had been right.

She might be coming down with something.

And maybe that monster-memory she’d been fighting to keep submerged was about to break the surface, finally, and ruin her carefully constructed life.

CHAPTER TWO

FIRST THING IN THE MORNING, after half an hour trying to spoon room-service oatmeal into Bonnie’s tightly closed mouth and finally giving up, Dylan checked out of the hotel and went looking for a Wal-Mart.

Bonnie needed a car seat, and a whole slew of other things.

So he put her into a shopping cart, and the two of them wheeled around. He guessed at her clothes sizes, and she kicked up a fuss when he went to try some shoes on her, but after a brief struggle, he won. In the toy department, he snagged a doll almost as big as Bonnie herself, mounted on a plastic horse no less, but she didn’t show much interest in that, either.

“Toys,” an older woman told him sagely, leaning in to whisper the wisdom, “have to be age-appropriate.”

“Age-appropriate?” Dylan pushed his hat to the back of his head.

The woman tapped the box containing the new doll, sitting tall and straight on her horse. “This is for children five and up. Your little girl can’t be any older than two.”

“She’s small for her age,” Dylan replied automatically, because he didn’t like other people telling him what to do, even when they were right. But once the meddlesome shopper had rounded the bend, he put the doll back on the shelf and rustled up a soft pink unicorn with a gleaming horn and a fluffy mane. According to the tag, it would do.

And Bonnie took to it right away.

After making a few more selections, and paying at the checkout counter, they were good to go. Dylan made a couple of calls from the truck and located a pediatrician on the outskirts of the city.

Jessica Welch, M.D., operated out of an upscale strip mall. She was good-looking, too, with long, gleaming brown hair neatly confined by a silver barrette at her nape. Not that it mattered, but when Dylan met a woman—any woman—he noticed things about her.

“Who do we have here?” Jessica Welch, M.D., asked, chucking Bonnie, who had both arms clamped around Dylan’s neck, under the chin.

Bonnie threw back her head and screamed out one of those ear-piercers that go through a man’s brain like a spike. Ever since Dylan had hauled her into the waiting room, a full forty-five minutes before, she’d been clinging to him. He’d been the only father present, and the looks he’d gotten from the various mothers waiting with quieter, better-behaved kids weren’t the kind he was used to getting from people of the female persuasion.

Dr. Welch was unmoved. Screaming children were not uncommon in her day-to-day life, of course. “This way,” she said.

Dylan and Bonnie followed her down a short corridor and into a small examining room. Bonnie didn’t let up on the shrieking, and she’d added kicking and squirming to the fit; hostilities were escalating.

“I guess she thinks she might get a shot or something,” Dylan said, completely at a loss. By then, Bonnie had knocked his hat off, and she was pulling his hair with both hands.

Dr. Welch simply smiled. “Let’s have a look at you, Miss—?”

“Bonnie,” Dylan said. “Bonnie Creed.”

Bonnie Creed. He liked the sound of that.

The doctor examined the papers on her clipboard. “And you’re her father,” she said. It was rhetorical, a conclusion not a question, but Dylan felt compelled to answer all the same.

“Yes.”

“I would have known by the resemblance,” Dr. Welch said. As it turned out, she had a few tricks up her sleeve. By letting Bonnie listen to Dylan’s heart through a stethoscope, she got the kid to quiet down.

“Any significant health problems?” the doctor asked, finishing up with the routine stuff, like looking into Bonnie’s ears with that little flashlight-type thing and peering down her throat.

“Not that I know of,” Dylan said. “She’s been—er—living with her mother.”

“I see,” Dr. Welch replied solemnly.

“I was hoping you could tell me what to feed her and stuff like that,” Dylan went on. He felt his ears burning. By now, the doctor was probably wondering if she should notify the authorities or something.

“I take it you haven’t been around Bonnie much,” she said thoughtfully.

“It was kind of sudden. Sharlene decided she couldn’t take care of her anymore, and left her with me.” He probably looked and sounded calm, but if Dr. Welch drew her cell phone, he and Bonnie would be out of there in a flash and speeding for the open road. Damn. He should have called Logan. Then he’d have some kind of legal backup at least—

“I’ll need a number where I can contact you, Mr. Creed.”

Dylan gave her his cell number and hoisted a reaching Bonnie off the end of the examining table and back into his arms.

“Two-year-olds,” Dr. Welch went on, with a sudden smile, “usually prefer a semisoft diet—some baby food, not the infant variety. Anything that’s easy to chew.”

“No bottles or anything?” Dylan asked.

“One of those sippy cups, with the lid,” the doctor said. “Bonnie needs a lot of milk, and juice is okay, too, provided you watch the sugar content.”

Dylan figured he ought to have been taking notes. What the devil was a sippy cup, anyhow? And didn’t just about everything have sugar in it?

He kept his questions under his hat, having already made a fool of himself. If the doc didn’t take him for a child abductor, it would be a miracle.

Dr. Welch gave Bonnie a couple of shots—the kid barely noticed—ferreted out a list of healthy foods for children and sent them on their way. Dylan paid the bill, and he and Bonnie left. Until they were fifty miles north of Vegas, he checked the rearview mirror for a squad car every few minutes.

AS IT HAPPENED, Dylan didn’t have to call Logan, because Logan called him—at an inconvenient time, as usual.

Logan was getting married to Briana Grant, that was the gist of it, and there was no talking him out of it, Dylan learned, when he took his brother’s call on his cell phone, seated in a truck-stop restaurant somewhere along the winding road homeward. Bonnie, in the provided high chair, kept flinging strands of spaghetti at him—she was covered in the stuff, and so was he.

And he was losing patience. “Look, Logan, I—” He paused when Bonnie stuck her whole head into her plate and came up looking like some pasta-Medusa. “Stop that, damn it—”

Bonnie merely giggled and preened a little, like all that goopy spaghetti was a wig she was modeling.

“Are you with a woman?” Logan asked.

“I wish,” Dylan said. “I’ve got to hang up now—I said stop it—but I’ll get there when I can. If I don’t show up in time, go ahead without me.”

After that, Dylan barely registered what his brother said.

Logan asked him to get word to Tyler, he remembered that much, and relay the message that he wanted to talk to their younger brother, in person.

As if. Tyler was in pissed-off mode. There would be no getting through to him, and Dylan said so, in so many words.

Then Bonnie started throwing spaghetti again.

This time, she hit the woman in the next booth square in the back of the head.

Dylan ended the phone call, no closer to asking Logan for help than he had been in the first place, scooped up the demon child, tossed the bills to pay for the meal onto the cashier’s counter and fled.

Now, he’d have to find a place to hose the kid down.

He cleaned her up with baby wipes, purchased along with the unicorn, a plastic kid-toilet, the little tennis shoes and the new outfit she’d pretty much ruined.

“Potty,” she said, as they pulled out of the truck stop and onto the highway. “Daddy, potty.”

“There’s no way we’re going back in there,” Dylan said. “We’re probably banned from the place, thanks to you. Eighty-sixed, for all time and eternity.”

“Potty,” Bonnie insisted. Besides Daddy, that seemed to be the only word she knew. He’d sneaked her into at least four different men’s rooms since they’d left South Point that morning. Held her on the seat so she wouldn’t fall in and looked the other way as best he could.

Her lower lip started to wobble. “Potty,” she said pitifully.

“Oh, hell,” Dylan muttered. He pulled the truck over, located the miniature pink toilet, and set it down behind some bushes. Then he unfastened Bonnie from her car seat and carried her, spaghetti stains and all, to the john.

He turned his back.

She must have gotten her pants down on her own, because he heard a cheery little tinkle. When he finally turned around, she was grinning up at him, her hair crusted in spaghetti sauce, and grunting ominously.

Dylan had ridden the meanest bulls on the rodeo circuit, and until he and Cimarron, the bull to end all bulls, met up, he’d never been thrown. He’d held his own in bar brawls and backstreet fights where losing meant getting your head slammed against the curb. Bluffed his way past the toughest poker players at the toughest tables in the toughest towns in America.

But a little girl pooping—now, that was a new one.

“Wipe!” she crowed, upping her known vocabulary to three words.

“Not a chance,” Dylan said. But he got some more baby wipes out of the truck and handed them to her.

She must have used them, because when she came past him, her pants were up and she was pulling the potty-chair behind her. Gnarly as the whole experience had been, Dylan felt a rush of pride. The kid was independent, for a two-year-old. She’d even thought to dump the evidence.

“We need a woman,” he told her, once they were back in the truck and he’d used yet another baby wipe to wash her hands and fastened her into the car seat, which was so complicated it might have been invented by NASA. “Any woman.”

But it wasn’t any woman who came to mind.

It was Kristy Madison.

No way, he told the image.

After that, they drove for hours, and a little past three in the morning, they hit the outskirts of Stillwater Springs, Montana.

Dylan owned a house on the family ranch—Briana and her kids had been living there up until recently, when they’d moved in with Logan, but there had been a break-in and some vandalism, and he didn’t know if Logan had arranged for repairs yet.

So he headed for Cassie’s place.

When they pulled into her driveway, light glowed through the buckskin walls of her famous teepee. Dylan had spent a lot of happy hours in that teepee, with Logan and/or Tyler, pretending to be Indians plotting a raid on a white settlement.

Now, with Bonnie asleep in her car seat and clinging to that naked, inked-up doll like it was her last friend, the pink unicorn spurned, he got out of the truck and headed toward the teepee.

Cassie, a bulky and singularly beautiful woman and the closest thing to a grandmother he’d ever had, sat watching low, flickering flames in the fire pit inside the teepee. It might have been a picturesque scene, if she’d been wearing tribal gear, but double-knit pants, bulging at the seams, neon-green high-top sneakers and a sweatshirt with a picture of Custer on the front, with an arrow through his head, lacked the punch of a fringed leather dress and moccasins.

Custer was a nice touch, though. From his benignly confident expression, the arrow didn’t bother him much.

“Dylan,” Cassie said, looking up. And she didn’t sound surprised.

“I need help,” he told her. No sense beating around the bush with Cassie; she could see right through a person.

She smiled. Nodded. Moved to rise.

He extended a hand to help her up.

Led her to the truck.

She drew in a breath at the sight of Bonnie, still sleeping the sleep of the just. “Yours?” she whispered.

“Mine,” he confirmed and, once again, he felt that same swell of pride.

“Where is her mother?”

“God knows.” Dylan got Bonnie out of the car seat, her head bobbing against his shoulder. “I’m going to petition for full custody, but I need Logan’s help to do that.”

“There are a lot of lawyers in this world,” Cassie pointed out quietly. “Why Logan?”

“Because this could be—well—tricky.”

“Dylan Creed, did you steal that child from her mother?” They’d reached the gate by then, and Cassie led the way up the walk, onto the porch. Jiggled the knob on the door.

Evidently, she couldn’t see through him. Not always, anyway.

“No,” Dylan said. It was late—or early—and he was too wrung out from the long drive and the stress of looking after a two-year-old to go into the story. “Give me a little credit, will you? I’m not a criminal.”

“But you’re looking over your shoulder for some reason,” Cassie whispered, switching on a lamp in the familiar living room of her small, shabby house. She took Bonnie from him, murmured soothingly when the little girl fussed in her sleep.

“I don’t have legal custody,” Dylan answered. “Until I do, I’m keeping a low profile, in case Sharlene changes her mind. I’ll tell you the rest in the morning.”

Cassie stared into his eyes for a long moment, then nodded again. “All right,” she said, making for the spare bedroom. “I’m putting this child to bed. There’s cold chicken in the refrigerator if you’re hungry.”

Grateful, Dylan let himself drop onto the couch, and before he knew it, the sun was up and Bonnie was standing beside him, tugging playfully at his hair.

He grinned, glad to see her. She was wearing one of Cassie’s massive T-shirts, tucked up here and there with safety pins, to make it fit, and she was clean.

God bless Cassie. Despite her obvious misgivings, she’d given Bonnie a much-needed bath, and probably fed her, too.

“Daddy,” Bonnie said angelically, stroking his beard-stubbled cheek with one very small hand.

And if Dylan hadn’t known before that he’d do anything to keep and raise this child—his child—he knew it then.

“DDYLAN’S OUT AT CASSIE’S place,” Kristy’s hairdresser, Mavis Bradley, told her, when she came in for a lunch-hour trim. “I saw his truck parked in her driveway when I came in to work.”

A thrill went through Kristy, part dread, part anticipation. She waited it out. If Dylan was in town, he’d soon be gone. That was his pattern. Come in, stomp somebody’s heart to bits under his boot heel and leave again.

“And Cassie was at the store, not an hour later, buying training diapers and toddler’s food in those plastic cartons that cost the earth,” Mavis rattled on, before Kristy could come up with a response. “That’s what Julie Danvers told me, when she came in to have her nails done.”

Kristy took a moment to be glad she’d missed Julie. There was some bad blood between them, at least on Julie’s side, because Kristy had been briefly engaged to her husband, Mike, and he hadn’t taken the breakup well. Now they had two children, a big house and a thriving business, and Mike was a candidate for sheriff. It was a mystery to Kristy why that particular water hadn’t gone under the proverbial bridge.

“Interesting,” Kristy said, because she’d known Mavis since first grade, and she’d just keep prattling on until she got some kind of reaction. Everybody for miles around knew Kristy and Dylan had been passionately in love, once upon a time, and Mavis certainly wouldn’t be the last person eager to tell her Dylan was back.

“Now what would Cassie need with stuff for a little kid unless—”

“Mavis,” Kristy broke in. “I have no idea.”

“Think you’ll see him?”

Kristy actually shrugged. No use pretending she didn’t know who Mavis was asking about. “Maybe around town,” she said, with a nonchalance she certainly didn’t feel. “We’re old news, Dylan and I.”

“So are you and Mike Danvers,” Mavis parried coyly, “but Julie gets her panties in a wad every time he mentions your name. Which, apparently, is quite often.”

Kristy had to be careful how she answered that one. Everything she said would go out over Mavis’s extensive network within five minutes after she’d paid for the haircut and left. “That’s silly. Mike and Julie have been married for a long time. They have two beautiful children and a great life. So Mike mentions my name once in a while? Stillwater Springs is a small town. He probably mentions a lot of people’s names.”

“Well,” Mavis said doggedly, “I’d think you’d at least wonder about why Cassie might buy diapers, and there’s Dylan Creed’s truck parked in front of her house so early in the day that he must have rolled in during the night—”

“I don’t wonder,” Kristy lied, and very pointedly. If Dylan had a child, it would be the height of unfairness on the part of the universe. She was the one who longed for a houseful of kids. Dylan had never wanted to settle down—he’d just pretended he did, for obvious reasons. “What Dylan Creed does—or doesn’t do—is simply none of my concern.”

“Hogwash,” Mavis said. “Your ears are red around the edges.”

“That’s because you’ve been poking me with the scissors at regular intervals. Are we nearly done here? I need to get back to the library.”

Mavis blew out a breath. “The library,” she scoffed. “You were a cheerleader in high school. You were a prom queen. And Miss Rodeo Montana, first runner-up for Miss Rodeo America. Who’d have thought Kristy Madison, of all people, would end up with a spinster-job? It reminds me of that scene in It’s a Wonderful Life, when Donna Reed is this miserable old biddy because George Bailey was never born—”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Mavis!” Kristy was ready to leap out of the chair by that point. Tear off the plastic cape and march right out into the street with her hair sectioned off in those stupid little metal clips. “Some of us have moved beyond high school, you know. And what’s so terrible about being a librarian?”

Mavis softened. In the mirror facing the chair, her pointy little face looked sad. “Nothing,” she said quietly.

“I’m sorry,” Kristy said, immediately regretting her outburst. “I didn’t mean to snap at you. It’s just that—”

“It’s just that,” Mavis continued kindly, “when anybody mentions Dylan Creed, you get peevish.”

“Then why mention him?” Kristy asked wearily.

Mavis squeezed her shoulder with one manicured hand. “I didn’t mean any harm. I was just thinking you might be glad Dylan was back. I know you’ve had a hard time, Kristy—losing your folks the way you did, and the ranch and Sugarfoot, practically all at once. I’d like to see you happy again—and you were happy with Dylan, until that blowup the day of his dad’s funeral. So would everybody else in Stillwater Springs—like to see you happy, I mean.”

Kristy fought back tears, not because of the sad memories, but because she was touched. Mavis, in her own clumsy way, did care about her, and so did a lot of other people. “I am happy, Mavis,” she said. “I have my job, my house, my cat—”

“Well, I’ve got a job and a house and four cats,” Mavis argued cheerfully, “but it’s my Bill that makes my heart go pitter-pat.”

“You’re lucky,” Kristy said. And she meant it. Mavis had been married to the same man since the day after her high school graduation and though she and Bill had never had children, it was common knowledge that they were still as deeply in love as ever.

Mavis finished the haircut without mentioning Dylan again, which was a mercy, and Kristy rushed back to the library to grab a sandwich in her tiny office behind the information desk. It was Wednesday, and business was slow enough that her two volunteer helpers, Susan and Peggy, could handle the traffic.

Story hour was coming up at three, though, and it was Kristy’s baby. She still hadn’t chosen a book, and that stressed her a little. She was a detail person, and few details were more important to her than doing her job well.

So she finished her sandwich and went out into the main part of the library, headed for the children’s section. It was always tricky, deciding what story to read, because the kids who gathered in a circle under the mock totem pole in the tiny play area ranged in age from as young as three to as old as twelve. The rowdy ones came, after swimming lessons over at the community pool, still smelling of chlorine and sunshine and always a little soggy around the edges, and the ones with working mothers invariably arrived early.

Harried, Kristy went from book to book, shelf to shelf.

Finally, she fell back on an old standby, one of the Nancy Drew mysteries she’d loved in her own youth. The boys would snicker, and the little ones wouldn’t understand a word, but she knew just listening was part of the magic.

Yes, today, it would be The Secret in the Old Clock.

It would do the girls good to hear about smart, proactive Nancy and her lively sidekicks, George and Bess. And it wouldn’t hurt the boys, either. Call it consciousness raising.

The time passed quickly, since Kristy stayed busy logging in a pile of returned books, and when she looked up from her work, she saw at least a dozen kids gathered in the play area, waiting.

“Showtime,” Susan whispered, smiling. “I’ll finish the returns. And I can stay right up till closing time tonight, too. Jim’s off to Choteau with his bowling league.”

Susan, in her midfifties, was supercompetent. Her staying meant Kristy could leave at five o’clock, instead of nine, like a normal person, and paint at least part of her kitchen before she nuked something for supper and tumbled into bed with Winston to read awhile and then sleep.

“Thanks,” Kristy said, giving her friend a shoulder squeeze.

Carrying The Secret in the Old Clock, she made her way to the play area, took exaggerated bows when the kids clapped and cheered. They always did that, mainly because they liked to make noise in the library, where it was normally forbidden, but Kristy got a kick out of the whole routine anyway.

She settled down on the floor, cross-legged. “Today,” she announced, “Nancy Drew.”

True to form, the boys groaned.

The girls giggled.

The latch-key kids were just happy to see an adult.

Kristy made a production of opening the book. That, too, was part of the show. Always a flourish—kids liked that. Her own mother had made reading—and being read to—so much fun, using a different voice for each character and sometimes even acting out parts of the story.

And when she looked up, ready to begin, her heart jammed itself into the back of her throat and she couldn’t say a single word.

Dylan Creed had appeared out of nowhere. He was sitting, cross-legged like Kristy, at the edge of the crowd, holding positively the cutest little girl Kristy had ever seen within the easy circle of his arms.

Kristy swallowed.

There was no doubt the child was his—the resemblance made Kristy’s breath catch.

Dylan’s blue eyes danced with mischief as he watched her.

She cleared her throat. “Chapter One,” she began.

And then she froze up again.

One of the bigger boys started a chant. “Nan-cy! Nan-cy!”

All the other kids picked it up. Even the angelic being in Dylan’s lap clapped her plump little hands together and tried to join in.

Dylan let out a sudden, piercing whistle.

Silence fell.

The little girl turned and looked up at him curiously.

“The lady,” Dylan said, “is trying to read a story. So you yahoos better settle down and listen.”

Somehow, Kristy managed to get through three chapters of the book, but it was a lackluster performance, for sure. Her gaze kept straying to Dylan and the little girl, and every time that happened, she felt her neck heat up.

At last, mothers started wandering in and collecting their charges. Kristy tried to look busy, but that was hard, given that she was still sitting on the floor with nothing but a book to fiddle with. Worse, her legs had gone to sleep, and she knew if she stood up too suddenly, she’d probably fall on her face.

In front of Dylan Creed.

Why didn’t he just leave, like everybody else?

“Nice job,” he said, and Kristy was startled to realize he was sitting right beside her. The little girl was playing with the large plastic blocks the Friends of the Library had provided for the play area.

Was he making fun of her?

Kristy swallowed again. Gulped, was more like it.

“She’s beautiful,” she croaked, inclining her head toward the child.

Dylan nodded. “Her name is Bonnie,” he said.

What do you want? That was what Kristy would have asked if she hadn’t been too chicken, but what tumbled out of her mouth was, “I heard you were passing through.”

Great.

Now he’d think she’d been panting for any Dylan Creed news that might come her way.

“I’m not passing through,” Dylan replied, watching Bonnie with a soft light in his wicked china-blue eyes. “I’m planning to stay on—tear down that old house of mine, now that Briana and her boys don’t need it anymore, and build a new one. I’m going to have a barn, too, and some horses. Maybe even run some cattle with Logan’s herd.”

Why was he telling her all this? Did he think she cared?

Did she care?

No, no, a thousand times no.

Get a grip, she told herself.

Okay, so Bonnie could have been her little girl, as well as Dylan’s, if things had turned out differently. But they hadn’t, and that was that.

She had a house and a job and a perfectly good cat.

An excellent life, damn it.

“That’s nice,” she said, easing her legs out straight and giving them subtle shakes to get the circulation going again so she could stand up and walk away with some degree of dignity. Go about her business. Tell Susan she had a headache and wasn’t staying until five.

But that would be a lie.

It was her heart that ached, not her head.

“How have you been, Kristy?” Dylan asked.

What was this, Be Kind to Former Lovers Week? “Fine,” she said.

One corner of his mouth tilted upward in a sad little grin. “Up until the last time I talked to Logan, I thought you were married to Mike Danvers.”

The name fell between them like a lead weight.

Kristy recovered quickly, but not quickly enough. Something moved in Dylan’s eyes while she was coming up with her response, even though it only took a split second. “It wouldn’t have worked out for Mike and me,” she said.

“Like it didn’t work out for us,” Dylan said, and try though she might, Kristy couldn’t get a bead on his tone.

“We were young,” she heard herself say. “The world was falling apart. Your dad had just been killed in that logging accident, and both my folks—”

“Daddy!” Bonnie whooped suddenly, shrill with joy. “Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!”

She ran at Dylan and he scooped her up in his arms.

“Potty!” Bonnie yelled triumphantly.

Dylan sighed. “Would you mind taking her to the women’s room?” he asked Kristy.

Glad of an excuse to break out of his orbit, if only for a few minutes, and hoping to God her legs had woken up, Kristy got to her feet, took Bonnie by the hand and escorted her to the bathroom.

Because so many of the children who came to the library were small, Kristy was used to that particular duty. But this was Dylan’s little girl. He’d conceived this beautiful moppet with some nameless, faceless woman—not with her.

Damn it. When they’d made love all those times, before the rodeo and death and a lot of other things came between them, they’d always ended up choosing names afterward. They’d call a boy Timothy Jacob, for their fathers. A girl, Maggie Louise, for their mothers …

When she and Bonnie stepped out of the restroom, Dylan was waiting in the corridor, leaning against the wall with that indolent grace that seemed to emanate from his very DNA.

“Thanks,” he said.

“You’re welcome,” she replied.

He hoisted Bonnie up into his arms. “Good to see you again, Kristy,” he said, his voice a little hoarse.

“You, too,” Kristy said. Fortunately, he left before the tears sprang to her eyes.

Thanks.

You’re welcome.

Good to see you again …

You, too.

Kristy ducked back into the women’s restroom, turned on the cold-water faucet and stood splashing her face until the burning stopped. But she still heard the voices, hers and Dylan’s, though this time, they came from the long ago.

When the moon strays off into space, Dylan Creed, and the last star winks out forever, I will still love you.

He’d smiled, and stroked her hair, and kissed her, sending fire skittering along her veins all over again. You read too much, he’d teased. I love that about you. Our kids will have a chance at being smart, with you for a mother.

You’re smart, too, Dylan, she’d protested, meaning it.

Not book-smart, he’d replied. I can’t talk in poetry the way you do.

Does it matter? she’d asked, her heart brimming with tenderness.

Nothing matters but you and me, Kristy.

Nothing matters but you and me.

CHAPTER THREE

DROPPING BY THE LIBRARY had probably been a tactical error, Dylan admitted to himself; it had been a spur-of-the-moment thing, a sudden compulsion to see Kristy again, if only from a distance.

As it happened, though, she’d just rounded up a herd of kids for story-time when he and Bonnie came through the front door, and he’d been drawn into her circle immediately. There might as well have been beating drums and a fire pit, like the one in Cassie’s teepee—the gathering had that same kind of elemental, visceral attraction.

Kristy was still beautiful—five years of living without him to complicate her life had only made her more so. She seemed more centered and serene than before, though it had pleased him to notice that his unexpected presence had thrown her a little.

The only bad part was the hurt he’d glimpsed in her eyes when she’d registered Bonnie’s identity.

He glanced over at his daughter, buckled into her car seat and hugging her inky doll. By rights, the toy should probably be burned, since it had to be germ-central, but he couldn’t bring himself to take it away. Maybe later, when Bonnie was asleep, he’d douse the thing in Lysol or something.

In the meantime, cruising through the shady streets of Stillwater Springs, he was careful to keep to the speed limit. All he needed was Floyd Book or one of his deputies pulling him over and asking for some kind of proof that he hadn’t committed parental kidnapping. He had the note from Sharlene, found in his truck with Bonnie and the duffel bag, but who knew how much weight that would carry?

Logan would, of course. Logan could draw up papers, get everything on the up-and-up.

He headed for the ranch, partly in the vain hope that Logan would be there, and partly because it was home.

“This is where I grew up,” he told Bonnie, as they drove under the newly repaired Stillwater Springs Ranch sign hanging over the main gate.

“No,” Bonnie said cheerfully, chewing on the doll’s punk-rocker hair.

Four words, now. The kid was developing an impressive vocabulary, all right.

The work on the barn was almost finished—new timbers supported it, and the roof had been replaced.

Dylan parked the truck, rolled down his window as one of the workmen came toward him, grinning.

He recognized Dan Phillips, a guy who’d graduated a few years ahead of him, at Stillwater Springs High.

“Logan around?” Dylan asked, though he knew the answer.

Dan shook his head. “Off to Las Vegas to get married.”

“The barn’s looking good,” Dylan said.

Dan stooped for a glimpse at Bonnie. “Didn’t know you were a family man, Dylan,” he commented, with a twinkle.

“I’m full of surprises,” Dylan replied. “You happen to know if Logan arranged to have my house fixed up after that last break-in?”

“Took a crew over there and did it myself. Logan asked me to have Briana’s and the boys’ stuff picked up and moved here, and I did that, too.”

That was something, anyhow, Dylan thought, still unaccountably disappointed that Logan wasn’t home. He and Bonnie could get some groceries and move right in. Cassie had made them welcome, but her place was small and he didn’t want to impose any longer than necessary.

“This must be old home week,” Dan went on, just as Dylan was about to shift gears and drive overland to his place to figure out what he and Bonnie would need besides groceries. “I just saw Tyler. He’s holed up in that old cabin of his, out there by the lake, and he asked me not to tell anybody he’s around. Don’t figure he’d mind your knowing, though.”

Dan figured wrong, but Dylan saw no reason to say so. “I’ll stop by and say howdy,” he answered easily. If I’m lucky, little brother won’t run me off with a shotgun.

“Starting on the house next,” Dan said, with a nod toward the venerable old place. “Putting in some pretty fancy rigging—new master bathroom and a state-of-the-art kitchen to start.”

Dylan grinned. Logan still expected to stay on, settle down, raise a pack of kids with Briana.

He’d believe it when the last of the bunch grew up and got married.

But, then, considering how he felt about his own child, it was possible Logan really had set his mind to “making the Creed name mean something,” as he put it.

“Be seeing you,” Dylan told Dan, because that was what you said, in the boonies, when you wanted to make a polite but speedy exit.

Dan nodded, executed a half salute and went back to work.

Dylan headed for his own place.

“Potty,” Bonnie said solemnly, as they bumped and jostled across the field, going around the orchard and the cemetery.

Sooner or later, he’d have to visit Jake’s grave, but that was way down on the list.

“Hold your horses,” Dylan answered, his tone affable. “We’re almost home.”

“IT’S JUST PLAIN SILLY to get all bent out of shape just because Dylan Creed showed up at story hour with absolutely the most gorgeous child in the universe,” Kristy told Winston, long about sundown as, standing on the top rung of a folding ladder, she swabbed sunshine-yellow paint around the framework of the archway between the kitchen and dining room.

Winston, having just devoured his usual feast, groomed one of his forepaws meticulously and offered no comment.

“I mean, it isn’t as if he’s ever had any trouble attracting women,” Kristy went on, wiping a splotch of paint from her nose with the sleeve of the oversize men’s shirt she’d bought at Goodwill for messy jobs.

“Meow,” Winston said, halfheartedly.

“It’s just that it was sort of a shock, that’s all.”

Bored, Winston turned, fluffed out his bushy tail and hied himself to the living room. He liked to curl up on the antique bureau in front of the bay windows and watch the world go by. Slow going, in Stillwater Springs. Hours could pass before a car putted past.

“Typical,” Kristy said to the empty kitchen. “Nobody listens to me.”

In the next instant, somebody rapped at her back door, and Kristy nearly fell off the ladder, she was so startled. What was the matter with her, anyway?

“Come in!” she called, because that was what you did in Stillwater Springs.

When Sheriff Book opened the door and stepped across the threshold, she was surprised, though not enough to take a header to the linoleum.

“You shouldn’t just call out ‘come in’ like that,” Floyd said, taking off his sheriff hat and setting it aside on the counter. “I could have been some drifter, bent on murder and mayhem.” A little grin twitched at the corner of his mouth, softening his otherwise stern expression. “This isn’t the old days, Kristy.”

Kristy set her wet paintbrush in the aluminum tray of sunshine-yellow and climbed down the ladder, smiling. “Coffee?” she asked.

Floyd shook his head, sighed. “Trying to cut down,” he said. “Keeps me awake at night.”

Kristy stood there, waiting for him to get to the reason for his visit.

“You mind sitting down?” the sheriff asked, sounding tired.

Uh-oh, Kristy thought. Here comes the whammy.

Once she was seated at the table, Floyd took a chair across from her. “I guess you know the bank finally untangled that probate mess over the ranch,” he said quietly. “And Freida’s got that movie-star fella all set to buy it.”

Kristy’s throat thickened. She nodded. “She told me it was going up for sale now that all the legal processes are complete.” She was curious as to why Floyd had dropped in to tell her something like that.

“It’s an old ranch,” Floyd went on, his expression downright grim. “A lot happened out there, over the years.”

Kristy felt an uneasy prickle in the pit of her stomach. “Floyd, what are you getting at?”

“I think there might be a body buried on the place,” Floyd said.

Kristy’s mouth dropped open, and her heart stopped, then raced. The monster-memory stirred in the depths of her brain. “A body?”

Floyd sighed. “I could be wrong,” he said, but the expression on his face said he didn’t think so.

“Good God,” Kristy said, too stunned to say anything else and, at the same time, strangely not surprised.

The sheriff looked pained. “There was a man—worked for your daddy one summer when you were just a little thing. Some drifter—I never knew his name for certain. Men like him came and went all the time, stopping to earn a few dollars on some ranch. But one night, late, Tim woke me up with a phone call and said there was bad trouble, and I ought to get out there quick. He didn’t sound like himself—for a moment or two, I thought I was talking to a prowler. Turned out he’d caught this drifter fella sneaking out of the house with some of your mother’s jewelry and what cash they had on hand, which was plenty, because they’d sold some cattle at auction that day. There was a fight, that was all Tim would tell me. That there’d been a fight. I dressed and headed for the ranch, soon as I could. And when I got there, your dad changed his story. Said the drifter had moved on and good riddance to him.”

Dread welled up inside Kristy, but she said, “That must have been the truth, then.” She’d never known her father to lie about anything, however expedient it might be.

But Sheriff Book shook his head again. His eyes seemed to sink deeper into his head, and there were shadows under them. “I took his word for it, because he was my best friend, but there was more to the story, and I knew it. Tim looked worse than he’d sounded on the phone. It was a cold night, but he was sweating, and he had dirt under his nails, and on his clothes, too. You know he always cleaned up before supper, Kristy, and this was well after midnight.”

Kristy couldn’t speak, couldn’t bring herself to ask the obvious question: Did Sheriff Book think her father had killed a man?

“Few days later,” the sheriff went on, clearly forcing out the words, “on a Sunday morning, I came by the ranch for a look around, when I knew you and your folks were at church. And I found what I figured was a freshly dug grave in that copse of trees over near where Tim’s property and the Creed place butt up.”

Kristy felt a surge of relief—he’d seen Sugarfoot’s grave that morning, not that of a human being—but it was gone in a moment. Back then, Sugarfoot had been alive and well.

Floyd reached across the table, squeezed her ice-cold hand. “I asked Tim what was there. He said an old dog had strayed into his barn and died there, and he’d buried the poor critter in the midst of those trees.” He thrust out another sigh. “I was the sheriff. I should have done some digging, both literal and figurative, but I didn’t. I wanted to believe your dad, so I did, but I’ve always wondered, and now that I’m about to retire, I’ve got to know for sure. It isn’t just the coffee that keeps me up at night, it’s certain loose ends.”

Kristy thought she was going to be sick. “You’re going to—to exhume—”

Floyd nodded. “I know Sugarfoot’s buried there, Kristy,” he said gruffly, hardly able to meet her gaze, “and I’ll do my best not to disturb his remains too much. But I’ve got to see, once and for all, if there’s a dog in that grave with him—or a man.”

“You seriously think my father—your best friend—would murder someone and then go to such lengths to hide the body?” Now, Kristy was light-headed. Her heart pounded, and the smell of paint, unnoticed before, brought bile scalding up into the back of her throat.

Don’t remember, whispered a voice in the shadowy recesses of her mind, where migraines and nightmares lurked. Don’t remember.

“I think,” Sheriff Book said quietly, “that there was a fight, and things got out of hand. If Tim did kill that drifter, it was an accident, and nobody will ever convince me otherwise. He’d have been real upset, Tim, I mean, with you and your mother in the house—that would have made the fight one he couldn’t afford to lose. In Tim’s place, I’d have been scared as hell of what that fella might do if I wasn’t up to stopping him.”

Kristy got up, meaning to bolt for the bathroom, then sat down again with a plunk. “But Dad called you,” she muttered. “Would he have done that if he’d killed somebody?”

“He was in a panic, Kristy. He probably called first and thought later.”

“Dad’s gone, and so is Mom. You’re about to retire. Can’t we just let this whole thing … lie?”

“If we can live with knowing what we do. I don’t think I can, not anymore—I’ve got an ulcer to show for it as it is. Can you just go on from here like nothing was ever said, Kristy?”

She bit down on her lower lip. “No,” she said miserably.

If there were human remains buried with Sugarfoot—more likely beneath him—the scandal would rock the whole state of Montana. Tim Madison’s memory, that of a decent, hardworking, honorable man, would be fodder for all sorts of speculation.

How would she handle that?

“Why now?” she asked, closing her eyes briefly in the hope that the room would stop tilting from side to side. “After all this time, Floyd, why now?”

“I told you,” he replied gently. “My retirement. And with that land going up for sale, and some jerk from Hollywood bound on bringing in bulldozers to make room for tennis courts and whatnot—”

Kristy froze. She’d known, of course, that someone would buy Madison Ranch eventually. It was prime real estate. But not once had she considered the possibility that that someone might destroy poor Sugarfoot’s grave.

Tears filled her eyes, and all the old wounds opened at once.

“I’m sorry,” Sheriff Book said.

“When he died,” Kristy murmured, “Sugarfoot, I mean—I wanted to die, too. Crawl right into that grave with him and let them cover me with dirt.”

“You’d just lost your mother then,” Floyd reminded her. “And your dad was already sick. It was a lot for one young girl to bear up under. But you did bear up, Kristy. You kept going, kept living, like you were supposed to.”

A long, difficult silence fell. Kristy broke it with, “You do realize what an uproar this is going to cause, if you find—find something.”

Grimly, Floyd nodded. “Might be I’m wrong. There’s no need to get the community all riled up if there’s really a dog sharing that grave with Sugarfoot. I can keep the whole thing quiet, Kristy, at least for a while. But this is Stillwater Springs, and folks are always flapping their jaws. Word could get out, and that’s why I came over here to talk to you first. So you’d know ahead of time, in case—well, you know.”

Kristy nodded.

The sheriff stood to go. “You going to be all right?” he asked. “I could call somebody, if you want.”

“Call somebody?” Kristy echoed stupidly. Who? Who in the whole wide, upside-down, messed-up world would drop everything and rush over to hold the librarian’s hand?

Dylan, she thought.

“Maybe you oughtn’t to be alone.”

“I’m fine,” Kristy said. Stock answer.

Major lie.

“Lock up behind me,” Floyd said.

Kristy nodded.

But he’d been gone a long time before she even got out of her chair.

THE HOUSE WAS HABITABLE, as it turned out, if sparsely furnished. Dylan figured he and Bonnie could live there, in comfort if not style, but he’d need to rig up some kind of bed for her, get her a dresser.

More shopping, he thought unhappily.

And with a two-year-old.

“Whoopee,” he muttered.

“Potty,” Bonnie said.

“Learn another word,” Dylan replied. The little pink toilet was still at Cassie’s place, so he had to lift Bonnie onto the john again, bare-assed, and wait it out.

In the end, Cassie offered to babysit at her place while he laid in grub and the other necessities.

He bought Bonnie a miniature bed, one step up from a crib, with side rails that could be raised and lowered. It was white, with gold trim—French provincial, the saleswoman at the only furniture store in Stillwater Springs called it. The piece, she said, was designed to grow with the child.

Dylan paid cash and the woman promised an early-morning delivery. He still needed some other stuff, but since he meant to tear down the house anyway, he couldn’t see torturing himself by buying a decent couch and a new dinette set right then. He could get all that later—or maybe the trailer he meant to lease and set up on the property as temporary digs would have some rigging in it.

But the kid would need milk in the morning, to put in her sippy-thing, and cereal, too.

So he braved the grocery store in town.

Once he’d carted everything back out to the ranch and put it away, he headed back to Cassie’s to pick up Bonnie. She could sleep on the bed that night—it had been there when Briana moved in—and he’d take the lumpy old couch.

At least they’d be in their own place, he and Bonnie. It was a start.

As he drove past the casino, his truck wanted to pull in, but for the time being, he was out of the poker business. He was, after all, a father.

He had responsibilities now.

And strange as it seemed, he liked the feeling.

It was all good—except for the potty thing and the flying spaghetti.

He definitely needed a wife, if he was going to pull this thing off.

He immediately thought of Kristy.

“Oh, sure,” he told himself out loud. “Just walk right into the library, one fine day, and suggest letting bygones be bygones because, lo and behold, you’ve got a two-year-old daughter and you could sure use a hand raising her.”

Put like that, it sounded pretty damn lame.

And Kristy would probably bash him over the head with the nearest heavy book.

Still, Bonnie needed a mother, and he couldn’t think of a better candidate than Kristy Madison, with her soft storyteller’s voice and her calm practicality. If he’d had to get somebody pregnant, why couldn’t it have been her, instead of Sharlene?

Now there was a useless question.

After what had gone down the day of Jake’s funeral, Kristy had crossed him off her list, gotten herself engaged to Mike Danvers. Good old solid Mike, student body president, Boy Scout and future owner of his dad’s Chevrolet dealership.

He wouldn’t get arrested for fighting with his own brothers after a family funeral, not Mike. No sir, he was the original solid citizen, not a hell-raising Creed. One word from Kristy and he’d probably beat feet down to the jewelry store to make a down payment on that honking diamond he’d given her.

Since Dylan was thinking these thoughts, and some that were even worse, when he pulled into Cassie’s yard, it took him an extra second or two to realize that the big white Cadillac SUV parked next to the teepee probably belonged to Tyler.

The rodeo insignia in the back window clenched it. Only champions had those silver-buckle decals, and Tyler had been a world-class bronc-buster, among other things.

He did TV commercials, too, and posed for cowboy calendars, half-naked. Taking a page from Dylan’s book, he’d done some stunt work, too, though mercifully they’d never wound up on the same movie set.

Dylan was flat-out not ready to deal with his younger brother just then, but leaving wasn’t an option, either. For one thing, he didn’t run from confrontations, unless they were with women. He’d come for Bonnie, and he wasn’t leaving without her.

So he got out of the truck and walked toward Cassie’s front door.

Best get it over with. He’d pass the word to Tyler, if Cassie hadn’t done it already, that Logan had been trying to get in touch with him, get Bonnie and all her assorted gear, and leave.

Tyler was on the floor when Dylan walked in, on his hands and knees, with Bonnie on his back, one hand gripping the back of his shirt collar, the other raised in the air, bronc-buster style.

And she was laughing as he bucked, careful not to throw her.

She was a Creed, all right. Thank God she was a girl, or she’d probably end up on the circuit, risking life and limb for a rush of adrenaline and some elusive prize money.

Of the three Creed brothers, Tyler was the youngest, and the tallest, and the one with the hottest temper. His hair was as dark as Cassie’s, and he wore it long enough to brush his collar.

He turned his head, saw Dylan and stopped bucking. Eased Bonnie off his back and got to his feet.

His deep blue eyes were arctic as he straightened to his full height.

As a kid, he’d had music in him, so much that it flowed out through the strings of his cheap guitar and just about everything he did. Between Jake’s drunken escapades and his mother’s suicide when he was still young, though, something had shut down inside him and never started up again.

“Logan wants to talk to you,” Dylan said, because with Tyler, even “hello” was shaky ground.

“So I hear,” Tyler answered. “Of course, I don’t give a rat’s ass.”

Cassie wooed Bonnie into the kitchen, promising her a cookie, after casting worried glances from one Creed brother to the other.

“If you’re trying to get my back up, Ty, you’re going to have to do better than that. What brings you back to Stillwater Springs?”

“I was about to ask you the same thing,” Tyler answered, turning to look when Bonnie’s giggle chimed from the kitchen. “Cute kid,” he added, and for a fraction of a second, his eyes warmed. “Bonnie, isn’t it?”

“That’s right,” Dylan said, still waiting for the explosion. He and Tyler had had several run-ins over the years; the brawl after Jake’s funeral was only one of them. A couple of seasons back, they’d collided at the same rodeo, and Ty’s girlfriend, probably wanting to make him jealous, had been all over Dylan.

He hadn’t taken the bait, but the girlfriend—he couldn’t recall her name—had ditched Tyler, stayed out all night and claimed she’d been with Dylan, in his hotel room. It wasn’t true—for one thing, there’d been another woman sharing his bed, and he wasn’t into threesomes—but Tyler, with that perennial chip on his shoulder, hadn’t believed him.

There would have been a fight, right there behind the chutes that day at the rodeo, if ten other cowboys hadn’t jumped in to pull them apart.

“I’ll be leaving now,” Tyler said. “I just came by to say hello to Cassie.”

Dylan nodded. There had to be more to it, of course—Tyler hadn’t set foot in Stillwater Springs, as far as he knew, since Sheriff Book turned them all loose the morning after Jake was laid to rest—but he knew better than to try to get an answer out of his brother.

“See you,” he said.

“Not if I see you first,” Tyler replied. As kids, that had been a running joke. Now, Tyler meant it.

A bleak feeling settled over Dylan. He and Logan were speaking, anyway, though they still had things to work through. But that wasn’t going to happen with Tyler, he could tell.

Tyler was a loner, and he clearly intended to stay that way.

“What’s he doing here?” Dylan asked Cassie, in the kitchen, after Tyler left. The SUV started up with a roar outside.

She sat at the table, Bonnie on her knee, deftly spooning toddler grub into the kid’s mouth. “Why didn’t you ask him?” she asked. She’d been trying for years to get the three of them to reconcile and act like brothers, and despite an almost complete lack of success, she still seemed to think it could happen.

“Might as well ask the totem pole down at the library,” Dylan said, opening the fridge and helping himself to a can of soda. Pre-Bonnie, he’d have had a beer, but since you never knew when you might have to rush a kid to the emergency room with some sudden malady, he figured he’d better lay off the brew.

Cassie smiled to herself. “You’ve been to the library?”

Dylan popped the top on the soda can and took a swig. “I can read, you know. I was dyslexic as a kid, but I’ve learned to compensate.”

“That isn’t what I meant,” Cassie said sweetly. How many nights had she sat with him, at that same table, going over the “special lessons” he’d been assigned after a battery of reading tests?

“Ah,” Dylan said. “Yes. Did I see Kristy—that’s what you’re asking.”

“And?”

“I saw her.”

“Well, don’t overwhelm me with information, here.”

Dylan sighed. “I saw her. She’s still a looker. She’s still got a way with kids. End of story.”

“Or the beginning,” Cassie said, smiling at Bonnie.

“Don’t get any ideas,” Dylan warned, though when it came to Kristy, he’d been getting ideas himself. Cassie couldn’t possibly know that, unless she used her X-ray vision.

“Poor Kristy,” she said, looking solemn now, even sad. Frowning as she gazed over Bonnie’s head, past Dylan, to some unseen world only she could navigate.

“What do you mean, ‘poor Kristy’?” Dylan asked, knowing he shouldn’t, but too worried to resist. When Cassie worried about people, they tended to meet with severe and immediate problems.

“She could use a friend, that’s all,” Cassie mused.

It wasn’t all, of course.

Dylan set the soda can aside with a thump. He’d have tossed it, but Cassie recycled. “What’s going on?” he demanded quietly. “You didn’t have one of your dreams.?”

“No,” Cassie said. “I just know these things.” She brightened. “Call it an old Indian trick.”

“Cassie,” Dylan pressed. “Tell me.”

“Go see her,” Cassie replied, looking up into his face. “She’s alone, at her place. I’ll look after Bonnie, give her a bath and supper and put her to bed.”

“I can’t just show up on her doorstep, Cassie. What am I supposed to say? ‘Hi, my foster grandmother sent me’?”

“You’ll think of something.”

“I was planning on taking Bonnie out to the ranch.”

“That can wait, Dylan. I’m not sure Kristy can.”

“She’ll probably slam the door in my face.”

“You’re a big boy. Deal.”

Dylan sighed. He’d never taken Cassie’s so-called psychic abilities very seriously—she’d as much as admitted that she told her Tarot clients whatever she thought they wanted to hear—but there were times when her instincts struck too close to the bone for comfort.

He bent, kissed the top of Bonnie’s head and left.

Ten minutes later, he was knocking at Kristy’s door, still wondering what the hell he was going to say to explain being there in the first place.

She was wearing old pants, a man’s shirt and a lot of yellow paint when she opened the door.

And she’d been crying. Her eyes were puffy and her nostrils were red around the edges. Seeing Kristy in tears was devastating, but at least he wasn’t the cause of them this time—as far as he knew.

“Everything okay?” Dylan asked, stricken. Just call him the Wordmeister, he thought glumly. He’d always been able to talk his way into—or out of—any situation—unless that situation involved Kristy Madison.

“No,” she said. Her voice shook a little. Then she launched herself at him, wrapped both arms around his neck. “No!”

CHAPTER FOUR

DEAR GOD.

It should have been against the law to smell the way Kristy did—a tantalizing combination of rich grass after a heavy spring rain, leaves burning in autumn, talcum powder of some kind and paint thinner. For a precious moment, Dylan simply held her against him, breathed her in, closing his eyes tightly against the rush of emotion he felt.

Like most precious moments, that one was brief.

Kristy quickly bristled in his arms, pulled back, raised her chin and sniffled. The vulnerability in her cornflower-blue eyes turned to defiance.

“I apologize,” she said stiffly, as though he were a stranger she’d collided with in a crowded airport, not the first man who had ever made love to her. “I’ve just been under a little stress lately and—”

Dylan drew a long breath, let it out in a sigh as he closed Kristy’s front door behind him and hooked his thumbs through his belt loops. “Kristy,” he said. “This is me. Dylan. Something’s up with you, or you wouldn’t have practically tackled me on the threshold.”

Kristy gave an answering sigh, and her usually straight shoulders sagged in a way that tugged at a tender place in Dylan’s heart. “Come in,” she said, with about the same level of enthusiasm she might have shown a visiting terrorist wearing a suit of dynamite.

Dylan saw no reason to point out that he was already in—he simply followed Kristy through the house, expecting to wind up in the kitchen. When folks around the Springs had something to discuss, or just wanted to jaw awhile, they tended to congregate at the table, with the coffeepot and the refrigerator close at hand.

He’d visited the huge Victorian once or twice, with his dad, when Jake stopped by to collect an overdue paycheck from old man Turlow. The place had seemed dark and oppressive to him then, but Kristy had brightened it up considerably, with lace curtains and lots of pale yellow walls. The floors were gleaming oak, probably sanded to bare wood and then refinished.

That, too, would be Kristy’s doing.

She liked a lot of light and space—used to dream of living in the Turlow house one day.

It only went to show that some dreams came true, anyway.

A giant folding ladder stood just inside the kitchen doorway—Kristy ducked around it, Dylan walked between its runged legs.

“Coffee?” she asked. He saw the struggle in her face, but eventually, she couldn’t keep herself from adding, “You shouldn’t walk under ladders.”

“That’s a stupid superstition,” Dylan countered, with a twinkle. “And, yes, please, ma’am, I would like some coffee.”

“I wasn’t referring to the superstition,” Kristy insisted loftily, standing on her toes to fetch two mismatched mugs down from a cupboard. “Things could fall on your head, like a bucket of paint.”

“Still waiting for the sky to come crashing down, I see.” Dylan grinned, but tension twisted inside him like a screw turned too tight. He regretted those flippant words as soon as he saw them register in Kristy’s face. Behind that flimsy facade of bravery, she was crumbling.

Perhaps the sky was falling.

“Are you going to tell me what’s wrong,” he persisted, “or do I have to look it up on the Internet?”

A flush rose in her face. She poured coffee, carried the two cups to the table, and pulled back a chair with a practiced motion of one foot. “For Pete’s sake,” she said irritably, “sit down.”

“Not until you do,” Dylan replied. “I’m a gentleman.”

Kristy snorted at that, dropped into her chair. Added insult to injury by rolling her eyes once, for good measure.

Dylan took the chair next to hers, idly stroked the big white cat that immediately jumped into his lap.

“Sheriff Book was here a while ago,” Kristy said, elbow propped on the tabletop, her chin resting forlornly in her hand.

“Go on,” Dylan said.

Her eyes filled with fresh tears. “He thinks my father may have—may have killed someone.”

Stunned, Dylan set down the mug he’d just picked up and stared at Kristy, waiting for the punch line. Tim Madison, a murderer? Impossible. Kristy’s dad had been a soft-spoken, kindly man, hardworking and generous with what little he had.

Jake Creed, on the other hand, had been possessed of a legendary temper, and if Sheriff Book thought he’d offed some poor bastard, Dylan could have believed it. Although he didn’t tolerate criticism of Jake well, particularly when it came from his brothers, deep down he’d never had many illusions about the sort of man his father was.

“That’s crazy,” he said, finally.

Kristy sniffled again, tried a sip of her coffee, made a face and put it down again. “I know. But the county is going to dig up Sugarfoot’s grave. He tried to soften the blow, but Floyd clearly believes my father killed a man, probably by accident, and buried him with—with—”

Dylan longed to displace the cat and pull Kristy onto his lap, to offer her what comfort he could, but he didn’t move. She’d loved Sugarfoot, that old horse of hers, with a near-sacred constancy.

The way she hadn’t loved him.

When he spoke at long last, the words scraped his throat like a swallow of rusty barbed wire. “Suppose they did find a body in that grave besides Sugarfoot’s? Your folks are gone, Kristy, and so is Sugarfoot. This can’t hurt any of them.”

Stupid, stupid, Dylan thought, in the next instant, raking splayed fingers through his hair as the frustration hit him.

The Madisons couldn’t be hurt, or the horse, either—but Kristy could.

She’d lived in or just outside of Stillwater Springs all her life. It was her home, the only place she’d ever wanted to be, which had been a big part of the problem between the two of them back in the day. She’d been Holly Homemaker, he’d been a hell-raiser and a rodeo cowboy with a penchant for the open road.

Welcome to Heartbreak Hotel.

Kristy bit her lower lip, reached out and closed her paint-splotched hand over Dylan’s. Tried gamely to smile. “I know you didn’t mean that the way it sounded,” she said, with a gentleness that bruised him. He was used to rough-and-tumble, growing up with Jake and his brothers and then riding the professional circuit. He could be gentle, especially with Bonnie, or a lost or injured animal, but finding himself on the receiving end was different, and downright unsettling.

Dylan cleared his throat. Gearing up to make another attempt, because he was a Creed, and therefore nothing if not persistent. Even when it meant digging himself in deeper, he had to keep shoveling.

“Why didn’t you ever get another horse after Sugarfoot?” he heard himself ask. Damn, but he hadn’t intended to say that, either. It just rolled right off his tongue before he could rope and hogtie it.

A faraway, wistful look deepened the bluer-than-blue of Kristy’s eyes. “It costs money to keep a horse,” she said, after a very long time. “A lot of money. Librarians don’t exactly pull down the big bucks, Dylan.”

“You bought this house,” Dylan reasoned.

“I received a small inheritance when my great-aunt passed away a year and a half ago,” Kristy said, in a why-m-I-telling-you-this-when-it’s-personal tone of voice. “I made the down payment on the house and moved in.”

The cat had already gotten bored; having shed white hair all over Dylan’s T-shirt, he probably figured his work there was done. Now, he was batting a toy mouse around the kitchen floor.

“You and your great-aunt’s cat,” Dylan mused, recalling how Kristy had always wanted a large family and lots of pets. Being an only child, she’d said, was too lonely.

“Oh, Winston didn’t belong to Aunt Millie,” Kristy replied. “He was Freida Turlow’s, and when she moved out after I’d closed on the house, he started turning up on my doorstep at all hours of the day and night. Freida’s been annoyed with me ever since—it’s as if she thinks I wooed him away from her or something.”

Dylan remembered Freida Turlow clearly. She’d tried to seduce him, the night of his sixteenth birthday, and he might have taken her up on the offer, too, if he hadn’t already been in love with Kristy.

“Freida’s always annoyed with somebody,” he observed, barely stopping himself from saying right out loud that, faced with a choice between living with the imposing Ms. Turlow or with Kristy, he’d have thrown in with the cat.

Kristy’s eyes turned bleak. For a few minutes, she’d forgotten about the possibility of impending scandal, but now Dylan could see that the respite was over. “Freida will be the worst,” she said, with soft despair, “if it turns out that Floyd’s suspicions are right.”

“What will you do,” Dylan ventured to ask, “if he is?” He was surprised by the suspense he felt, awaiting her answer. It would be one hell of an irony if, just when he’d decided he’d be able to settle down on the ranch and make a home for his daughter, Kristy chose to leave town for good.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I think—I think it might sour things—the house, my job at the library—” She paused, took another run at getting her point across. “You know how small towns are, Dylan. It was bad enough when my parents died within a year of each other, and the ranch went for debts and taxes. Everybody felt sorry for me. People would never let a story like this rest, and I’m not sure I could face all that pity and gossip again.”

All that pity and gossip.

Kristy looked as though she’d like to take those words back, choke on each one whole before giving voice to them. Dylan supposed there had been plenty of gossip, when he came back to Stillwater Springs to ask her to wait for him, a few months after the breakup following Jake’s funeral, and she’d waved Mike Danvers’s huge engagement ring under his nose and basically told him to get lost. He’d always supposed, though, that any pity making the rounds had been reserved for him.

That was one of the reasons he’d stayed away so long—as a ragged kid, with the notorious Jake Creed for a father, he’d had all the sympathy he could take. Charity baskets left on the front porch, at Christmas, Thanksgiving and Easter. Well-meaning church ladies offering him their sons’ cast-off clothes. And all the rest of it.

The biggest reason, though, had been Kristy herself.

He’d ridden the meanest bulls in rodeo. Scraped his knuckles and bloodied his nose in a score of bar brawls—and those were the ones he’d won—but he’d known that seeing Kristy going about her wifely business around town, picking up mail down at the post office, pushing a shopping cart through the supermarket aisles, intermittently blossoming with another man’s child, would bring him to his knees.

So, except for brief forays, when he’d brought his bull, Cimarron, back to the ranch, not knowing what else to do with him, and hired Briana Grant—now Creed— to look after his empty house, he’d stayed as far away as possible.

Bonnie—and Logan’s telling him, during his last visit, that Kristy was still single—had changed everything.

Coming to terms with all that was going to take a while.

And now there might be a body moldering on the old Madison place.

His coffee had gone cold, but since the conversation had come to a halt and he didn’t know how to start it up again, he sipped some java.

That was another thing that hadn’t changed.

Kristy’s coffee was still bad.

He smiled at the thought.

“Tell me about your little girl,” Kristy said, and he knew by the way she framed the request that she’d been working up her nerve during the silence.

“You probably already know as much about her as I do,” Dylan admitted. “She’s two. Her name is Bonnie. She likes listening to you read aloud.”

Kristy seemed to relax a little, though there was still a tense undercurrent. “I take it her mother is out of the picture?”

“God knows where Sharlene is,” Dylan said, sighing. Then he met Kristy’s gaze, and held steady. “Sharlene was a mistake, no denying that. But Bonnie—well—she’s the proof that something good comes out of everything.”

Everything but a horse’s grave, in a peaceful copse of trees, added the voice in his mind. Now that the possibility had had a chance to sink in, he knew instinctively that the sheriff and his crew would find something besides Sugarfoot’s bones when they dug that hole.

Kristy’s smile was misty. “I envy you,” she said.

Again, Dylan was taken aback. He’d forgotten Kristy’s capacity to surprise him—one of the things he’d loved best about her. “Why?” he asked, honestly puzzled.

“Because you have a child,” she said slowly, and with amused patience.

“I just hope I can keep her,” he answered. The worry that Sharlene would change her mind and take Bonnie back circled in the darkest depths of his mind, liable to drag him under when he least expected it.

Kristy raised one eyebrow. Waited.

“I plan to file for permanent custody when Logan gets home from Vegas,” he explained. “Until then, I’m pretty much hanging out there in the wind.” He studied Kristy, remembering—no, remembering wasn’t the right word, because he hadn’t actually forgotten in the first place—how good it had felt to hold her tightly again.

“You didn’t—steal her, did you?”

“You’re the second person who’s asked me that,” Dylan said. “No, I didn’t kidnap my daughter. Sharlene left her in my truck while I was inside some dive in Las Vegas, playing poker, along with a note saying she couldn’t take care of her anymore.”

Kristy’s mouth dropped open. “She left a child alone in a truck?”

“She was around someplace, keeping an eye out.”

Like that made a difference. He’d probably never know what Sharlene would have done if he hadn’t found Bonnie. Even if they happened to have a reasonable conversation at some point, Sharlene wasn’t likely to be honest and straightforward.

“Oh, well,” Kristy said skeptically, “that changes everything.”

“Sharlene isn’t the brightest bulb in the marquee,” Dylan allowed. “But in her own crazy way, I think she was doing what she thought was best.”

Kristy pulled in her horns a little. Sighed again. “Why not simply call you, if she felt overwhelmed by the responsibility of caring for Bonnie, and ask for help?”

Dylan didn’t like the answer that came to him, liked saying it out loud even less. “She probably thought I’d say no, so she didn’t give me the chance.”

A short silence fell, during which Kristy regarded Dylan long and hard. “Would you have said no?” she finally asked.

“Of course not,” he said, mildly affronted. “Bonnie is my daughter.”

“Excuse me,” Kristy countered, “but some guys would have married the mother of their child.”

Just like that, she’d gotten his hackles up. That was another thing he’d forgotten about Kristy—her gift for pissing him off royally. “I didn’t love Sharlene,” he said tautly, “and she sure as hell didn’t love me.”

“Did either one of you love Bonnie?” Kristy asked.

Dylan had to unclamp his back molars before he could reply. “I never missed a child-support check,” he said.

“Aren’t you noble?” Kristy challenged, bending one knee and sitting on her leg, which was still another thing he recalled about her. Her forehead was furrowed, her eyes slightly narrowed. “Did you ever see Bonnie, before you found her in your truck? Did you ever take care of her when she was teething, or had the flu? Did you even carry her picture in your wallet?”

“Yes,” Dylan growled, leaning in a little. “I saw Bonnie whenever I could catch up with Sharlene. No, I wasn’t there when she was teething, or if she had the flu.” He raised his haunches, pried his wallet out of his back pocket and flipped it open to the discount-store photo of the one person in the entire world he was absolutely, positively sure he loved. “Sharlene’s grandmother sent me this,” he finished, confounded by his own fury. After all, none of this was Kristy’s fault—not directly, anyway. “Along with a bill for Sharlene’s boob job. It seemed they both thought she’d have a better chance of landing a husband with a big set of knockers.”

Kristy blushed.

Dylan didn’t care. If she wanted to play hardball, so be it.

“Did you pay it?”

For a moment, Dylan wasn’t sure he’d heard the question correctly. “What?”

A smile teased at the corner of Kristy’s lush and highly kissable mouth. “Did you pay the bill for the boob job?”

“No,” he said.

She laughed.

And then, remarkably, he laughed, too. “Your coffee is still awful,” he said.

“And you still get your back up too easily.”

“Do I?”

“Yes.”

He needed to leave, pick Bonnie up at Cassie’s and get her settled out at the ranch. But first he had to know for sure that Kristy was going to be all right.

Spotting a small blackboard on the wall next to the back door—Kristy’s grocery list was on it, in her precise librarian’s handwriting, all loopy and firm—he crossed to it, picked up a stubby piece of blue chalk and scrawled his cell number below broccoli.

“Call me,” he told Kristy, turning to see her clearing their cups from the table with brisk, efficient motions, “if you need anything.”

“I won’t,” she said. “Need anything, I mean.”

Her stubbornness. Her pride. It was all coming back to him now.

“Why didn’t you marry Mike?” he asked. He felt entitled to ask that question; turnabout was fair play, after all.

She sighed, turned to face him. He could tell that holding his gaze was an effort, but she managed it. “I came to my senses,” she said.

Now, what the hell did that mean?

“Mike is a nice man,” she went on, when Dylan didn’t speak. Although he’d come in through the front door, he was at the back now, with one hand on the knob. “He deserved to be happy.”

“He looked pretty happy to me, that night I ran into the two of you in Skivvie’s Tavern.” The vision filled his mind’s eye; he might as well have been in that darkened bar again, watching Mike and Kristy dancing to a slow song playing on the jukebox, Kristy making sure Dylan got a good look at the diamond glittering on her left hand. He could feel the sawdust and peanut shells under the soles of his boots, smell cigarette smoke and draft beer.

“I was using him,” Kristy said forthrightly. “When I realized that, I broke our engagement. A few months later, he married Julie. End of story.”

End of story? After that night at Skivvie’s, Dylan had left Stillwater Springs, his tires flinging up gravel, swearing he’d never set foot in his hometown again. He’d spent the better part of a year drowning his sorrows in cheap whiskey, dodging bill collectors and backing down from the one thing he was really good at—bull-riding.

He’d probably have drunk himself to death, in fact, if an old friend, a retired rodeo clown named Wiley Spence, hadn’t gotten him by the shirt collar one night in Cheyenne, after bailing him out of jail, and threatened to call Logan if he didn’t get his act together pronto.

Kristy wasn’t the only one with pride. Although he and Logan had been estranged back then, he’d known his big brother would track him down and probably throw him into the nearest treatment center. He hadn’t wanted Logan to see him down and out. So he’d laid off the booze, except for an occasional beer, cleaned up and gotten back into the rodeo as soon as he’d scraped together an entry fee.

None of which was Kristy’s concern.

“Thanks for the coffee,” he said. And then he left.

DYLAN WAS GOOD AT LEAVING. Very good at leaving.

Kristy banged the mugs around in the sink for a few moments, then decided to wash them later, when she wasn’t apt to break off the handles.

What had she expected?

Well, she certainly hadn’t expected him to show up at her front door that evening, that was for sure. And if anyone had told her she’d—well, throw herself at him the way she had, she’d have called them crazy.

The hardest thing to face was the knowledge that if he’d kissed her, she’d have let him make love to her right there in the front hallway.

The thought made her cringe.

And yearn.

It was a wonder she hadn’t gotten pregnant, back when they were still together, as often as they’d made love.

Things would have been so different if she’d been the one to conceive Dylan Creed’s child, not this Sharlene person with the breast implants.

Her gaze swung to the blackboard, and Dylan’s number, written hard and fast and slanting to the right. Like she would call him, even if there were ten muggers in the house and the place was on fire to boot.

She marched over and resolutely wiped away the blue chalk with the palm of her hand, leaving a streaky smudge.

But erasing the number hadn’t helped.

It was already burned into her memory, like the letters on the old sign over the gate out at Stillwater Springs Ranch.

She let her forehead rest against the blackboard.

And tears came. Again.

She’d lost so much—her parents, Sugarfoot, Madison Ranch, the home and family she and Dylan might have shared, if they hadn’t been such hotheads.

Winston curled around her ankles, meowing uncertainly, and a tear plopped onto the top of his head. He looked up, in a curious way, as though wondering if it was raining.

His expression made Kristy laugh.

And laughing made her square her shoulders, dry her cheeks with the back of one hand and pull herself together.

Maybe all hell would break loose when Sheriff Book and his crew opened Sugarfoot’s grave.

Maybe Dylan Creed was back in town for good, with his child and his wicked smile and his death-to-women body.

She was no gutless wonder, and no stranger to trouble.

Whatever came her way, she’d handle it.

Somehow.

THE FIRST NIGHT IN THE ranch house was a sleepless one for Dylan, and not just because he spent half of it trying to comfort Bonnie, who’d taken to calling for her mother during their fast-food supper and hadn’t quit until she’d fallen asleep against his chest, after one last, hiccoughy sigh.

Sitting on the beat-up old couch that, like the bed and the kitchen table, had been in the place since the last Creed had lived and died there—his great-uncle, Mick—his chin propped on top of Bonnie’s sweat-dampened head, Dylan felt real despair.

He hadn’t expected raising a child to be easy; it wasn’t that. Now that the novelty of being with him was wearing off, Bonnie was missing Sharlene, and it was likely to get worse.

You’re a real tough guy, Creed, he told himself silently. When Bonnie had cried, and then wailed, he’d felt like crying right along with her. Almost called Cassie in a panic, ready to beg her for help.

Cassie? Who was he kidding?

It was Kristy he’d wanted to call.

When the hell were Logan and Briana coming back from their damned honeymoon, anyhow? Briana was a mother—a good one, from what he’d seen—and she’d surely know what you were supposed to do when a kid started crying and wouldn’t stop.

The knock at the back door startled him.

Careful not to wake Bonnie, he stood, carried her with him through the kitchen, crossing the dark place worn into the linoleum by decades of passing feet.

Tyler peered in at him through the glass.

Dylan scowled a little, then nodded.

Tyler came in. “Is that old bull in the pasture yours?” he asked, as though nary a harsh word, let alone a fist, had ever flown back and forth between them.

“Yes,” Dylan answered, whispering. “Do you know anything about kids?”

Tyler grinned. “Only that that’s about the cutest one I’ve ever seen.”

Bonnie stirred against Dylan’s chest, whimpered a little. Her face felt hot against his shoulder, even through the cloth of his shirt. He carried her into the bedroom, laid her down carefully on the bed, made sure the inked-up rubber doll with the wild hair was within reach, and sneaked back out into the kitchen.

By that time, Tyler was going through the cupboards.

“No whiskey?” he asked.

“I’m a beer man these days,” Dylan answered quietly, wondering what the unexpected visit was all about. Five would get you ten it wasn’t a social call. “In the fridge.”

Tyler opened the refrigerator door, recoiled as if he’d found a live rattler coiled inside. “The cheap brand?”

“Beer is beer. Keep it down, will you? The kid’s been screaming for three hours straight and she’ll probably start up again if you wake her.”

Tyler extracted a can from the six-pack and popped the top. His expression was unreadable. “Is she sick or something?”

“I don’t know. Her forehead felt kind of warm when I was holding her a minute ago.”

So much for the inscrutable singing cowboy. Tyler looked alarmed. He set aside his beer—hell, it was the cheap brand, anyway—headed for the bedroom and bent over Bonnie, touching the backs of his fingers to her cheek.

He frowned, gazing at Dylan, who stood in the doorway.

Back in the kitchen, Tyler said, “I think she has a fever. You got any baby aspirin?”

“No,” Dylan said, more scared than he was about to let Tyler see. “She was upset earlier—like I said, she cried a lot—it’s probably just that.”

“Why was she crying?” Tyler demanded, as though he thought Dylan had been pinching the kid or something.

“She wanted her mother,” Dylan answered. Tyler wasn’t much comfort, but he was better than nothing.

“oh,” Tyler said, picking up his beer again, taking a swallow.

“Yeah, oh,” Dylan said, annoyed.

“I still think we should take her to a doctor.”

“Gee, all this concern. It’s almost like having a brother.”

Tyler frowned angrily. “I’m going to town to get some baby aspirin,” he said. “While I’m there, I’ll ask the pharmacist if he thinks Bonnie needs medical attention.”

In spite of himself, in spite of all that had gone down between him and Tyler over the years, Dylan felt a sudden rush of relief, and something a lot like affection. He was swallowing the lump that had risen in his throat when Tyler went on, already headed for the door.

“I’ll be back,” he said.

A few moments later, Dylan heard his brother’s rig start up outside.

He checked on Bonnie again—he’d have sworn she did have a fever—but decided to do his pacing in the kitchen so he wouldn’t disturb her sleep.

When Tyler blew in again, forty-five minutes later, he had baby aspirin, cough medicine, a stuffed animal of indeterminate species and a digital thermometer.

“If this thing reads above a one-oh-one, according to the pharmacist, Bonnie should be taken to the emergency room.”

Dylan frowned, examining the unfamiliar plastic stick in its bright green box. “Where does this thing—go?”

Tyler chuckled. He made quite a picture, standing there in Dylan’s kitchen, full of avuncular concern. The bad-ass cowboy, spilling a toy dog, if that was what it was, along with a bottle of aspirin and a carton of children’s cough syrup onto the table.

“In her ear, shit-for-brains,” he said.

“Oh,” Dylan said, squinting at the instructions on the back of the box.

Tyler grabbed the whole works right out of his hand. “Give me that,” he said, after the fact. “Bill—that’s the pharmacist—told me how to use it.”

“Great,” Dylan said.

“I ran into a friend of yours while I was at the drugstore,” Tyler added, as an aside. “You might get company any minute now.”

“What?” Dylan asked, irritated all over again.

Tyler grinned, rummaging in the drugstore bag again and pulling out a packet with a sterile wipe inside. Damned if he hadn’t thought of everything, old Uncle Ty. “The thing’s got to be sanitized,” he said.

“Who—?”

Tyler wiped down the thermometer, dispensing with all those offensive Dylan germs, and headed for Bonnie.

“Ninety-eight point seven,” he announced, in a low but triumphant voice, after gently easing the end of the thermometer into Bonnie’s right ear. “She’s probably fine.”

Suddenly, Dylan felt unaccountably territorial.

Bonnie was his daughter. He should have been the one taking her temperature.

As if in direct response to his thought, she woke up at precisely that moment, looked around, and let out one long, piercing shriek, followed by a plaintive, “Mommmmmmeeeee!”

“I see what you mean,” Tyler said.

vaguely, Dylan heard a knock at the back door. He tried to pick Bonnie up, but she flailed both arms and kicked like she’d been raised by wolves.

And then Kristy swept in, like an avenging goddess, and scooped Bonnie up into her arms.

“There, now,” she murmured, stroking Bonnie’s back. Gradually—very gradually—blessed silence filled the room. “I’m here, sweetie. I’m here. Everything will be all right.”

Over Bonnie’s head, Kristy gave Dylan a what-were-you-doing-to-her kind of glare.

“She was out of cat litter,” Tyler explained.

“Huh?” Dylan asked, stung by Kristy’s look and, at the same time, glad as hell that she was there.

“That’s why I happened to run into Kristy at the store. She stopped by for a bag of cat litter.”

“You could have warned me,” Dylan growled, after Kristy had carried Bonnie out of the bedroom.

“Ah, hell,” Tyler answered smugly. “That wouldn’t have been any fun at all.”

CHAPTER FIVE

SOMETHING HAPPENED to Kristy, as she held Dylan’s child, there in that old, run-down ranch house that warm summer night. Something sacred and inexplicable and eternal, the kind of shift that comes along once or twice in a lifetime, if that often. It was like the meeting and melding of two colliding universes, at a quantum level.

Bonnie seemed to feel it, too. She looked up at Kristy with wide, startled eyes, then flung both her small arms around Kristy’s neck and held on for dear life.

“Mommy,” she said.

Kristy didn’t have the heart to correct the child. Over Bonnie’s head, her gaze connected with Dylan’s. She saw his jaw tighten, and a blue storm flared in his eyes.

“You have chalk on your forehead,” he said.

Still dealing with her own internal cataclysm, Kristy merely stared at him, uncomprehending.

“Guess I’ll be getting back to the cabin,” Tyler said.

Kristy barely heard him, had only the vaguest sense of his leaving the ranch house kitchen for the dark, yawning world beyond the door, while she and Dylan and Bonnie remained where they were, like the stunned survivors of a meteoric impact. About as mobile as Stonehenge, Kristy couldn’t even swallow, let alone speak.

Dylan broke the spell, stepped forward, put his arms out for Bonnie.

visceral, mother-wolf resistance flared through Kristy, almost painful in its intensity, but Bonnie was Dylan’s daughter, not hers. She was still rational enough to know that, anyway.

So she surrendered the little girl. It felt as though some vital part of her was being torn away.

Dylan murmured to the child, now nodding against his shoulder, and carried her back to the bedroom. As if pulled along behind by an invisible tether, Kristy followed.

Miraculously, Bonnie fell into an immediate sleep, most likely exhausted from all that shrieking.

Kristy, slowly returning to a state that resembled normalcy, found the bathroom, stared at her reflection in the mirror over the sink. A great splotch of blue chalk stained her forehead, from when she’d rested it against the blackboard in her own kitchen, earlier that evening, like the mark of some primitive initiation rite.

She cranked on the water tap, lathered her hands and then her face with soap, and washed the chalk away.

When she returned to the kitchen, Dylan was there, pouring coffee.

He looked exhausted—and grim.

“I was only trying to help,” Kristy said, without apology, remembering the strain she’d seen in his face when he reached for Bonnie a few minutes before.

He smiled wanly, raised a coffee mug in a halfhearted toast. “I know,” he said, husky-voiced. “And I appreciate it.”

Kristy longed to ask if he’d felt what she had, when she was holding Bonnie in her arms, but she didn’t quite dare. Why would he have felt it, standing several feet away?

“You seemed pretty angry,” she ventured, after working up her courage for several moments. “When Bonnie called me ‘Mommy.’”

“Not angry,” Dylan said, extending a cup to Kristy. “Frustrated. Scared as hell. I’m not very good at this parental thing, it seems.”

Kristy saw his vulnerability in his eyes, and in his countenance, and she was touched by it. She’d never known Dylan Creed to be afraid of anything, or to doubt himself in any way. But one very little girl had changed all that.

“Give yourself a chance,” she said, accepting the offered coffee. “You’re new at this.”

“When she screams for Sharlene like that—” Dylan began, turning away from her then, to gaze out the night-darkened window above the sink. “It tears me apart.”

Kristy wanted to cross that room and lay a hand on Dylan’s taut, muscular back, but she refrained. Things were too crazy; she felt too dazed and wrung out. She was standing on the brink of something huge and dangerous, and one wrong move would send her tumbling over the precipice.

He turned then, and faced her, and she felt another shift, almost as staggering as the first. What was happening here?

If she stepped outside, would she find the world changed, the stars in different places, the moon filling most of the horizon instead of riding like a small round balloon above the starkly etched rim of mountains?

It seemed alarmingly possible.

“What do I do, Kristy, the next time Bonnie calls for her mother? And the time after that? What’s worse, what do I do if Sharlene wants her back?”

She set the coffee aside on the table then, and went to Dylan, regardless of that incendiary something pulsing in the atmosphere, ready to explode at the slightest spark. Laid her hands to his upper arms, tilted her head back to look into his troubled face.

“You can do this, Dylan,” she said quietly. “You’re just tired and a little overwhelmed, that’s all.”

He kissed her forehead, lightly, briefly.

Spark #1.

Despite the danger, Kristy laid her head against his shoulder, slipped her arms around his lean cowboy waist, but loosely. Sighed, because it felt so good, being close to Dylan again. He was solid and warm, hard and strong, and when he embraced her, it was a homecoming for Kristy. The healing of broken things inside her, the righting of ancient, forgotten wrongs, a sweet, soft benediction.

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