Two wild cowboys’ hearts get lassoed in these fan-favorite tales from two stars of Western romance

The Creed Legacy

Linda Lael Miller

Rough-and-tumble rodeo cowboy Brody Creed likes life on the move—until a chance encounter with his long-estranged twin brother brings him “home” to Lonesome Bend, Colorado, for the first time in years, and forces him to face the secrets that continue to haunt him. But can this restless bad boy finally overcome his past—and find a future with Carolyn Simmons, the opposite of everything he thought he wanted?

Blame It on the Cowboy

Delores Fossen

All of Logan McCord’s carefully laid plans erupt the day he walks in on his would-be fiancée getting...well, not so carefully laid. Tonight, just once, Logan is acting on instinct by agreeing to a cute stranger’s request for a fling with a Texas cowboy. But when chef Reese Stephens tracks him down looking for the heirloom watch she’d left in his keeping, they just might discover that Reese’s crazy past and Logan’s battered heart are no match for the kind of chemistry that could turn one night into the start of a passionate lifetime.

Praise for the authors of Cowboy Country

Praise for #1 New York Times bestselling author Linda Lael Miller

“Miller tugs at the heartstrings as few authors can.”

—Publishers Weekly

“Miller’s name is synonymous with the finest in Western romance.”

—RT Book Reviews

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

—#1 New York Times bestselling author Debbie Macomber

“Miller is one of the finest American writers in the genre.”

—RT Book Reviews

Praise for USA TODAY bestselling author Delores Fossen

“Clear off space on your keeper shelf, Fossen has arrived.”

—New York Times bestselling author Lori Wilde

“Delores Fossen takes you on a wild Texas ride with a hot cowboy.”

—New York Times bestselling author B.J. Daniels

“You will be sold!”

—RT Book Reviews on Blame It on the Cowboy

“In the first McCord Brothers contemporary, bestseller Fossen strikes a patriotic chord that makes this story stand out.”

—Publishers Weekly on Texas on My Mind

Cowboy Country

The Creed Legacy

Linda Lael Miller

Blame It on the Cowboy

Delores Fossen

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Table of Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

Praise

Title Page

The Creed Legacy

Dedication

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

EPILOGUE

Blame It on the Cowboy

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Extract

Copyright

The Creed Legacy

Linda Lael Miller

For Nicole Blint, with love.

CHAPTER ONE

Lonesome Bend, Colorado

RANCHING, BRODY CREED THOUGHT, shifting in the saddle as he surveyed the sprawling range land from a high ridge. It can mend a broken heart, this life, and then shatter it all over again, in a million and one different ways and twice that many pieces.

There were plenty of perils. Cattle starved or froze to death when a hard winter came around, which averaged once a year up there in the high country. Spring calves and colts fell prey to wolves and coyotes and sometimes bears, hungry after hibernating through the coldest months.

It was now May, and all was well, but come summertime, wells might dry up for lack of rain, and turn the grass to tinder, ready to blaze up at the smallest spark. He’d seen wildfires consume hundreds of acres in a matter of hours, herds and houses and barns wiped out.

Year-round, good horses went lame and pickup trucks gave up the ghost, and every so often, somebody drowned in the river or one of the lakes.

On the other hand, Brody reflected, the beauty of that land could heal, take a man by surprise, even though he’d called the place home all his life. That day, for instance, the sky was so blue it made Brody’s heart ache, and the aspens, cottonwoods and pines lining the landscape were shimmering splashes of green, a thousand hues of it, ranging from silvery to near-indigo. The river wound like a ribbon through the valley, clear as azure glass.

After a few moments, Brody adjusted his hat and sighed before giving the gelding a light nudge with the heels of his boots. The buckskin, long-legged with a black mane and tail, picked his way cautiously down the steep slope that led to the water’s edge.

Behind them and a hundred yards farther along the riverbank, in a westerly direction, hammers clacked and power saws screeched, and Brody glanced back, pleased, as always, to see the steel-and-lumber skeletons of his house and barn rising.

Not so long ago, there had been a campground and RV park on the site, owned by Tricia McCall, now his sister-in-law and therefore a Creed. The picnic tables and the concrete fire pits were gone, along with the public showers and electrical hookups for trailers. Only the log building that had once served as the office remained; Brody had been baching in it since last Thanksgiving, when he’d moved out of the main ranch house.

The peace between him and twin brother, Conner, could be a fragile one at times, and they both benefited by a little distance.

Now, ready to get moving, Brody clucked his tongue and gave the gelding, Moonshine, another tap with his heels.

“Come on, now,” he told the buckskin, his tone reasonable. “The water’s shallow here, and it’s real calm. If we’re going to be working livestock on both sides of this river, then you’ve got to learn how to cross it.”

Moonshine, recently acquired at an auction in Denver, was young, and Brody hadn’t had a chance to train him in the ways of a cow pony.

No time like the present, he figured.

Brody was about to get down out of the saddle and lead the horse into the water, which lapped gently at the stony shore that used to be a swimming beach, back when the River’s Bend Campground was a going concern, when Moonshine suddenly decided he was willing to get wet after all.

He plunged into the water, up to his chest, making a mighty splash in the process. Brody, gripping the barrel of that horse hard between his knees, just to stay in the saddle, laughed out loud before giving a whoop of pure delight.

His boots filled, and within moments his jeans were soaked to the tops of his thighs, but he didn’t care. Moonshine swam that river like he had Olympic aspirations, his powerful legs pumping, his head high and his ears pricked up.

“Good boy,” Brody told the horse, with gruff appreciation. “You’re doing just fine.”

Reaching the other side, Moonshine bunched his haunches for the effort and bunny-hopped up the steepest part of the bank, water pouring off him in sheets. Once he’d gained level ground, the animal shook himself like a dog and Brody laughed again, for no other reason than that life was good.

He was home.

And, for the most part, he was happy to be there.

Drenched, he got down from the saddle to pull off his boots, empty them and yank them back on over his sodden socks. When he got to the main house, he’d swap his wet duds for dry ones from Conner’s closet.

Having an identical twin brother had its advantages, and one of them was access to a whole other wardrobe.

There’d been a time when Conner would have groused about Brody’s tendency to borrow his stuff, but last New Year’s Eve, Brody’s “little brother,” born a couple of minutes after he was, had taken a wife. Conner was happy with Tricia, and these days it took more than a missing shirt or pair of jeans to get under his hide.

They were on a perpetual honeymoon, Conner and Tricia, and now, with a baby due in three months, they glowed, the both of them, as if they were lit from within.

Brody mounted up again and reined Moonshine toward the home-place, feeling a mixture of things as he considered his twin’s good fortune.

Sure, he was glad things were working out so well for Conner, but he was a little envious, too.

Not that he’d have admitted it to anybody.

Tricia was beautiful, smart and funny, and she’d taken to ranch life with surprising ease, for a city girl. Essentially a greenhorn, she’d gone horseback riding almost every day since the wedding, when the weather allowed, anyway—until her pregnancy was confirmed. Then Conner had put a stop to the pursuit.

No more trail rides until after the baby’s arrival.

Period, end of discussion.

Brody grinned, recalling how adamant his brother had been. For the most part, the marriage appeared to be an equal partnership, but this time, Conner had laid down the law. And Tricia, normally the independent type, had capitulated.

That was just common sense, to Brody’s mind, though a lot of country women continued to ride when they were expecting a baby, herding cattle, rounding up strays, checking fence lines. Conner’s strong opposition was a no-brainer—Rachel Creed, Conner and Brody’s mother, had continued to enter barrel-racing events long after she learned she was carrying twins. There hadn’t been a specific incident, but soon after giving birth to Brody and Conner, Rachel’s health had begun to go downhill.

She’d died when her infant sons were less than a month old.

Blue Creed, their father, hadn’t lasted much longer. Overwhelmed by the responsibility, he’d brought the babies home to the ranch, right around their first birthday, and handed them over to his brother, Davis, and Davis’s wife, Kim. Soon afterward, Blue himself had been thrown from a horse and broken his neck. He’d been in a coma for six weeks, and then died.

Now, crossing the range between the river and the two-story house Conner and Tricia had been sharing since they got hitched, the grass rippling around him like a green sea, Brody did his best to ignore the clammy chill of wet denim clinging to his legs—and the old, deep-seated sorrow rooted in his soul. He did take some consolation from seeing the cattle grazing all around, most of them Herefords, with a few Black Anguses to break the red-brown monotony. Two dozen broncos, specially bred for the rodeo, and six Brahma bulls completed the menagerie.

Clint and Juan and a couple of the other ranch hands wove in and out among the different critters on horseback, mainly keeping the peace. Brody touched his hat brim to the other men as he passed, and those who were looking his way returned the favor.

By then, Moonshine was restless, trying to work the bit between his teeth, so Brody gave him his head. That cayuse might be skittish when it came to crossing rivers, but he sure did like to run.

Brody bent low over the buckskin’s neck, holding his hat in place with one hand and keeping a loose grip on the reins with the other.

And that horse ate up ground like a jet taxiing along a runway before takeoff.

Brody was enjoying the ride so much that the corral fence sprang up in front of them as suddenly as a line of magic beanstalks.

Moonshine soared over that top rail as if he’d sprouted wings, practically stretched out flat, and came in for a magnificent landing about one foot short of the place where Conner stood, looking like he’d had rusty nails for breakfast instead of bacon and eggs.

Brody gazed down into a face so like his own that the sight of it even took him aback sometimes, and he was used to being pretty much an exact duplicate of his brother.

Conner was scowling up at him, through swirls of settling dust, and he looked as though he’d like to grab hold of Brody, haul him off that horse and beat the holy bejesus out of him. So much for personality improvements resulting from wedded bliss!

“Oops,” Brody said cheerfully, because he knew that would piss off Conner and he still enjoyed doing that now and again, even though they’d been getting along well for a respectable length of time. “Sorry.”

He swung down and faced Conner, who was taut with annoyance, his shoulders squared, his fists clenched and his attitude contentious.

“Damn it, Brody,” he growled, “am I having one of my invisible days, or are you going blind? You darn near ran me down, and it’ll take me the better part of the morning to get this mare calm enough to work with again!”

Prior to the leap, Brody hadn’t noticed his brother or the pinto mare, now nickering and tossing her head over on the far side of the corral, but he didn’t think it would be smart to say as much. Instead, he decided to come from a place of helpfulness.

“You starting horses yourself these days, instead of letting one of the wranglers do it?” he asked, bending to pick up the lightweight saddle the mare must have tossed when he and Moonshine came over the fence.

Conner grabbed the saddle and jerked it out of Brody’s hands. “Yes,” he snapped in response. “You dropped out for a decade, Davis broke both legs the last time he rode a bronc and Clint and Juan are downright creaky at the hinges. Who the hell did you think was starting the horses?”

“Whoa,” Brody said, recoiling slightly and still grinning. “What’s chewing on you? Did you have a fight with the little woman or something?”

“No!” Conner yelled.

Brody chuckled, adjusted his hat and then turned to get Moonshine by the reins. After the river crossing and the hard run over the range, not to mention that spectacular jump, he figured the horse deserved some stall time, free of the saddle and bridle. “Well, what’s the matter, then?” he asked reasonably, starting toward the side door of the barn.

“Nothing,” Conner bit out, setting the dusty saddle on the top rail of the fence and turning to the mare.

“Something is,” Brody insisted calmly, pausing.

Conner looked at Brody then, through the haze of slowly settling corral dirt, and sighed. “Tricia and I might have had words,” he said grudgingly.

“Trouble in the vine-covered cottage?” Brody teased, knowing it couldn’t be anything serious. He’d never seen a man and a woman more deeply in love than his brother and Tricia were.

“She says I’m overprotective,” Conner said, taking off his hat and swatting his thigh with it before putting it back on.

Brody flashed a grin. Rubbed his beard-stubbled chin with one hand. “You?” he joked. “Overprotective? Just because you’d wrap the lady in foam-rubber padding, if she’d let you, so she wouldn’t stub her toe?”

Conner glared, but there was a grin to match Brody’s brewing in his blue eyes. He held it off as long as he could, but then it broke through, like sunlight penetrating a cloud-bank.

“Put your horse away,” Conner said. “I might as well turn the mare out to graze for the rest of the day, now that you and that gelding scared her out of three years’ growth.”

Brody led Moonshine into the barn, put him in a stall and gave him a couple of flakes of hay. When he left by the main door, Conner was waiting for him in the yard, throwing a stick for the Lab-retriever mix, Valentino.

In Brody’s opinion, that was a prissy-assed name for a ranch dog, but the poor critter had already been saddled with it when Conner and Tricia took up with each other. Conner had tried calling him “Bill” for a while, but the former stray wouldn’t answer to that, so Valentino it was.

Brody looked around. There was no sign of Tricia, or the Pathfinder she drove.

“She’s gone to town to help Carolyn at the shop,” Conner said. He usually had a pretty fair idea what Brody was thinking, and the reverse was also true. “The woman is pregnant out to here.” He shaped his hands around an invisible basketball, approximately at belly level. “What would be so wrong with staying home for one day? Taking it easy, putting her feet up for a while?”

Brody chuckled and slapped his brother on the shoulder. “She’s running a small-town art gallery, Conner,” he said, “not bungee-jumping or riding bulls in a rodeo.”

Conner’s face tightened momentarily and, once again, Brody knew what was on his twin’s mind because they so often thought in tandem.

“There’s no connection between our mom’s pregnancy and Tricia’s,” Brody added quietly. “Stop looking for one.”

Conner sighed, managed a raw kind of grin. Nodded.

It struck Brody then, though not for the first time, of course, just how vulnerable loving a woman made a man. And after the baby came? It would be way worse.

Brody shivered, momentarily swamped with recollections.

“What happened to your clothes, anyhow?” Conner asked, looking him over. He tended to get around to things in his own good time.

“Moonshine got a little overenthusiastic crossing the river,” Brody replied.

They headed into the house, the dog trotting behind them, and Brody ducked into the laundry room to swipe a pair of jeans, a T-shirt and some socks from the folded stacks on top of the dryer. After a quick shower to thaw out his bone marrow, he dressed in the room he and Conner had shared as kids, with their cousin Steven joining them in the summertime, and emerged to find his brother still in the kitchen, brewing a cup of coffee with one of those fancy single-shot machines designed for the chronically caffeine-deprived.

“How’s the new place coming along?” Conner asked, holding out a steaming mug, which Brody took gratefully.

“It’s a slow process,” he replied, after a sip of java. “The builder swears up and down that it’ll be move-in ready by the middle of August, though.”

Conner gave a snort at that, retrieved a second cup from under the spout of the shining gizmo and raised it slightly, in a little salute. “Nice clothes,” he observed wryly. “I once owned some just like them.”

* * *

CAROLYN SIMMONS HELD her breath as she watched her very pregnant friend and business partner, Tricia Creed, making her wobbly way down from the top of a ladder. Tricia had just hung a new batik depicting a Native American woman weaving at a loom. The work of a local artist, the piece wouldn’t be in the shop long, which was possibly why Tricia had placed it so high on the wall. No doubt she reasoned that if the picture wasn’t within easy reach, she and Carolyn could enjoy it for a while before some eager buyer snatched it up.

With her long, dark braid, loose-fitting cotton maternity clothes and attitude of serene faith in the all-around goodness of life, Carolyn thought Tricia resembled the weaver a little.

Taller than Tricia, with artfully streaked blond hair, Carolyn wore her usual garb of jeans, boots and a fitted T-shirt. Tricia liked to joke that if an opportunity to ride a horse came up, Carolyn was determined to be ready.

“What were you doing on that ladder?” she asked now, propping her hands on her hips as she regarded Tricia. “I promised Conner I’d keep an eye on you, and the minute I turn my back, you’re teetering on the top rung.”

Tricia dusted her hands together and smiled, stepping back a little way to look up at the batik. “I was nowhere near the top rung,” she argued cheerfully, her face glowing in the sunlight pouring in through the big front window. She sighed. “Isn’t she beautiful?”

Carolyn, following Tricia’s gaze, nodded. Primrose Sullivan, the artist, had outdone herself this time. The weaver was indeed beautiful. “I think some of our online customers would be interested,” she mused. “I’m not sure it would photograph all that well from this angle, though—”

The hydraulic squeal of brakes interrupted.

Tricia moved to the window and peered through the antique lace curtains. “It’s another tour bus,” she said. “Brace yourself.”

The business, a combination boutique and art gallery, filled the first floor of Natty McCall’s venerable Victorian house—Carolyn lived upstairs in Tricia’s former apartment, along with her foster cat, Winston. The items the two women sold ranged from goats’ milk soap and handmade pincushions to one-of-a-kind dresses and near museum-quality oil paintings.

“I’m braced,” Carolyn confirmed, smiling and taking her customary place behind the counter, next to the cash register.

Tricia straightened an already straight display of handmade stationery.

The shop wasn’t going to make anyone rich, but for Carolyn, it was a dream come true. In Lonesome Bend, she had a comfortable place to live—not a small thing to a person raised in no fewer than fourteen foster homes—and an outlet for the various garments, decorative pillows and retro-style aprons she was constantly running up on her sewing machine. Formerly a professional house sitter, Carolyn had been selling her designs online for years. Her online business brought in enough extra money to build a small savings account and buy thread and fabric for the next project she had in mind, but that was the extent of it.

The little bell over the front door jingled merrily, and the busload of customers crowded in, white-haired women with good manicures and colorful summer clothes, chatting good-naturedly among themselves as they thronged around every table and in front of every shelf.

The store, loftily titled Creed and Simmons—Tricia’s great-grandmother, Natty, said the name sounded more like a law firm or an English jewelry shop than what it was—barely broke even most of the time. Tour buses heading to and from Denver and Aspen and Telluride stopped at least twice a week, though, and that kept the doors open and the lights on.

For Tricia, having sold property inherited from her father for a tidy sum and then having married a wealthy rancher to boot, the place was a hobby, albeit one she was passionate about.

For Carolyn, it was much more—an extension of her personality, an identity. A way of belonging, of fitting into a community made up mostly of people who had known each other from birth.

It had to work.

Without the business, Carolyn would be adrift again, following the old pattern of living in someone else’s house for a few days or a few weeks, then moving on to yet another place that wasn’t hers. House-sitting was a grown-up version of that old game musical chairs, only the stakes were a lot higher. Once or twice, when the figurative music stopped unexpectedly, Carolyn had been caught between houses, like a player left with no chair to sit in, forced to hole up in some cheap motel or sleep in her car until another job turned up.

Thankfully, there were plenty of opportunities around Lonesome Bend—movie stars and CEOs and high-powered political types kept multimillion-dollar “vacation homes” hidden away in private canyons, on top of hills and at the ends of long, winding roads edged with whispering aspen trees.

Carolyn still did some house-sitting now and then, for longtime clients, but she much preferred the cozy apartment above the shop to those enormous and profoundly empty houses, with their indoor swimming pools and their media rooms and their well-stocked wine cellars.

In the apartment, she was surrounded by her own things—the ceramic souvenir mugs she’d collected from cities all over the country, a few grainy photographs in cheap frames, her trusty laptop and the no-frills workhorse of an electric sewing machine that had been a parting gift from her favorite foster mom.

In the apartment, Carolyn felt substantial, real, rooted in one particular place, instead of some ethereal, ghostlike being, haunting lonely castles.

For the next forty-five minutes, Carolyn and Tricia were both so busy that they barely had a chance to look at each other, let alone speak, and when the tour bus pulled away at last, it was almost time to close up for lunch.

The cash drawer was bulging with fives, tens and twenties, and there was a nice pile of credit card receipts, too.

The shelves, racks and tables looked as though they’d been pillaged by barbarians, and the air still smelled of expensive perfume.

“Wow,” Tricia said, sagging into the rocking chair near the fireplace. “That bunch just about cleaned us out.”

Carolyn laughed. “That they did,” she agreed. “Bless their hearts.”

Tricia tilted her head back, sighed slightly and closed her eyes. Her hands rested protectively over her bulging stomach.

Carolyn was immediately alarmed. “Tricia? You’re all right, aren’t you?”

Tricia opened her eyes, turned her head and smiled. “Of course I am,” she said. “I’m just a little tired from all that hurrying around.”

“You’re sure about that?”

Tricia made a face, mocking but friendly. “You sound just like Conner. I’m fine, Carolyn.”

Frowning slightly, Carolyn went to the door, turned the Open sign around, so it read Closed, and turned the lock. She and Tricia usually had lunch in the downstairs kitchen at the back of the house, and sometimes Tricia’s husband joined them.

Tricia was still in the rocking chair when Carolyn got back.

And she’d fallen asleep.

Carolyn smiled, covered her friend lightly with a crocheted afghan and slipped away to the kitchen.

Winston, the cat, wound himself around her ankles when she entered, purring like an outboard motor. Like the house, Winston technically belonged to Natty McCall, Tricia’s great-grandmother, now a resident of Denver, but because he stayed with Carolyn whenever his mistress was off on one of her frequent and quite lengthy cruises, she loved him like her own.

Apparently, the feeling was mutual.

Or he just wanted his daily ration of sardines.

“Hungry?” Carolyn asked, bending to stroke the cat’s gleaming black ears.

Winston replied with a sturdy meow that presumably meant yes and leaped up onto a sideboard, where he liked to keep watch.

Smiling, mentally tallying up the take from the power-shopper invasion, Carolyn went to the fridge, got out the small bowl of sardines left over from the day before and stripped away the covering of plastic wrap.

She set the bowl on the floor for Winston, then went to the sink to wash her hands.

Winston came in for a landing squarely in front of his food dish and, at the same time, a knock sounded lightly at the back door.

Conner Creed pushed it open, stuck his head inside and grinned at Carolyn, flashing those way-white teeth of his.

Her heart skipped over a beat or two and then stopped entirely—or at least, that’s the way it felt—as he stepped into the house.

Because this wasn’t Conner, as she’d first thought.

No, siree. This was Brody.

Carolyn’s cheeks burned, and she barely held back the panicked “What are you doing here?” that sprang to the tip of her tongue.

The grin, as boyish and wicked as ever, didn’t falter. Clearly, their history didn’t bother Brody at all. It shouldn’t have bothered Carolyn, either, she supposed, since almost eight years had passed since they were together-together. And what they’d shared amounted to a tryst, not an affair of the heart.

Be that as it may, every time she encountered this man—a recurring problem now that his brother was married to one of her closest friends—she wanted to flee.

“Is my sister-in-law around?” Brody asked, well aware, Carolyn would have bet, that he’d rattled her.

Carolyn swallowed hard. Once, when she’d been on a trail ride with Conner and Tricia and a number of their friends and neighbors, Brody and his now-and-then girlfriend, Joleen Williams, had raced past on horseback, their laughter carried by the wind. Carolyn, taken by surprise, had played the fool by bolting for the barn, without so much as a goodbye to the other members of the party, and she’d been kicking herself for it ever since.

“Tricia is in the front,” she replied, in a remarkably normal tone of voice. “We had a busy morning, and she fell asleep.”

Brody closed the door behind him, crossed to the cat and crouched, extending a hand.

Winston hissed and batted at him with one paw.

“Whoa,” Brody said, drawing back.

Carolyn chuckled, relaxing a little. Clearly, Winston was a good judge of character, as well as an expert mouser and a connoisseur of fine sardines.

Having made his position clear, the cat went back to snarfing up his lunch.

Meanwhile, Brody rose off his haunches, still holding his hat in one hand, and looked disgruntled. Being drop-dead gorgeous, he probably wasn’t used to rejection—even when it came from an ordinary house cat.

“Animals usually like me,” he said, sounding baffled and even a little hurt.

Carolyn, realizing she’d been gawking, turned away, suddenly very busy getting a can of soup, a box of crackers and a loaf of bread from the pantry.

Glancing back, she saw Brody approach the inside door, push it open carefully and peer into the next room.

He turned, with a kind of brotherly softening in his eyes, and put his index finger to his lips.

“Shh,” he said.

“I didn’t make a sound,” Carolyn protested, in a whisper.

Why didn’t the man just leave now, if he didn’t want to disturb Tricia?

Instead, he lingered, one-hundred-percent cowboy, with his hat in his hands and his mouth tilted sideways in a grin.

“We don’t have to be enemies, you know,” he said quietly.

Carolyn, in the middle of slapping a slice of bologna onto a piece of bread, opened her mouth and then closed it again.

“Do we?” Brody persisted.

Carolyn recovered enough to reply, though the words came out in a terse little rush of breath. “Tricia is my friend and business partner. You’re her brother-in-law. Therefore, we have to be civil to each other.”

“Is it that hard?” Brody asked. “Being ‘civil,’ I mean?”

Suddenly, all the old feelings rose up inside Carolyn, nearly overwhelming her. Tears stung her eyes and she turned her head quickly, bit down hard on her lower lip.

“Carolyn?” he said.

He was standing right behind her by then; she felt the heat and hard masculinity of him in every nerve in her body.

Just go, she thought desperately, unable to risk turning around to face him.

Brody Creed had never been one to leave well enough alone. He took a light hold on her shoulders, and Carolyn found herself looking up into the treacherous blue of those trademark eyes.

“I’m sorry for what I did, way back when,” he told her, his voice a gruff rumble. “I was wrong. But don’t you think it’s time we put all that behind us and stopped walking on eggshells every time we happen to be in the same room?”

He was sorry.

As far as Carolyn was concerned, sorry was the emptiest, most threadbare word in the English language. People hurt other people, said they were so sorry and then, in her experience at least, turned right around and did the same thing all over again.

Or something worse.

Carolyn glanced nervously in the direction of the inside door, afraid of upsetting Tricia. When she spoke, her voice was a ragged whisper. “What do you want me to say, Brody? That I forgive you? Okay, for what it’s worth, I forgive you.”

Brody’s expression was bleak, but his eyes flashed with frustration. He was famous for his temper, among other things.

“You’ll forgive, but you won’t forget, is that it?”

“I might conceivably forgive a rattlesnake for biting me,” Carolyn responded. “After all, it’s a snake’s nature to strike. But I’d be worse than stupid if I forgot and cozied up to the same sidewinder a second time, wouldn’t I?”

A muscle bunched in Brody’s cheek. He was already sporting a five o’clock shadow, a part of Carolyn observed with a strange detachment. Or maybe he hadn’t shaved at all that morning.

Oh, hell, what did it matter?

“You think I’m asking you to ‘cozy up’ to me?” Brody almost growled. His nose was an inch from Carolyn’s, at most. “Damn it, woman, I can’t avoid being around you, and you can’t avoid being around me, and all I’m suggesting here is that you let go of that grudge you’ve been carrying for seven-plus years so we can all move on!”

Carolyn would have loved to slap Brody Creed just then, or even throttle him, but suddenly the door to the next room opened and Tricia peeked through the opening, stifling a yawn with a patting motion of one hand.

“Have you two been arguing?” Tricia asked, her gaze shifting from one of them to the other.

They stepped back simultaneously.

“No,” Carolyn lied.

“Everything’s just great,” Brody added, through his teeth.

CHAPTER TWO

MISCHIEF LIT TRICIA’S blue eyes as she studied Brody and Carolyn, the pair of them standing still in the middle of Natty McCall’s kitchen.

Just looking at her took the edge off Brody’s irritation. He’d always wanted a sister, after all, and now he had one. He felt a similar affection for Melissa, his cousin Steven’s wife, but he didn’t see her practically every day, the way he did Tricia, since Steven, Melissa and their three children lived in Stone Creek, Arizona.

“Did Conner send you to check up on me, Brody Creed?” Tricia asked in a tone of good-natured suspicion, tilting her head to one side and folding her arms before resting them atop her impressive belly.

Out of the corner of his eye, Brody saw Carolyn turn away. Her streaky blond hair swung with the motion, brushing against her shoulders, and just that fast, she was busy thumping things around on the counter again.

“Brody?” Tricia persisted, while Brody was untangling his tongue.

“It was my own idea to look in on you while I was in town,” Brody finally answered, grubbing up a crooked grin and turning the brim of his hat in both hands, like some shy hero in an old-time Western movie. “I don’t figure Conner would object much, though.”

Tricia smiled broadly, flicked a glance in Carolyn’s direction.

The can opener whirred and a pan clattered against a burner.

Brody sighed.

“Join us for lunch?” Tricia asked him.

Carolyn’s backbone went ramrod-straight as soon as Tricia uttered those words, and Brody watched, at once amused and confounded, while she jammed slices of bread down onto the beginnings of two bologna sandwiches. She used so much force to do it that the things looked like they’d been made with a drill press.

Deciding he’d stirred up enough ill will for one day, Brody shook his head. “I’d better get back to the ranch,” he said. “We’re replacing some of the wire along one of the fence lines.”

“Oh,” Tricia said, as if disappointed.

She moved slowly to the table, pulled back a chair just as Brody went to pull it back for her and sank onto the seat.

“Hey,” Brody said, concerned. “Are you feeling all right?”

Tricia sighed. “Maybe I’m a little tired,” she confessed. “It’s no big deal.”

At that, Carolyn stopped flinging food hither and yon and turned to look at Tricia. “I think you should go home and rest,” she said. “This morning was crazy, and we’ve been taking inventory for a couple of days now.”

“And leave you to straighten up the shop and restock the shelves all by yourself?” Tricia asked. “That wouldn’t be fair.”

“I can handle it,” Carolyn said. She spoke in a normal tone, but Brody could feel her bristling, all over, like a porcupine fixing to shoot quills in every direction. She didn’t deign to glance his way, of course. “And, anyhow, I’d like to close the shop early today. That way, I could catch up on the bookkeeping, then put the finishing touches on that gypsy skirt I’ve been working on and get it posted on the website.”

Brody neither knew nor cared what a gypsy skirt was. He was feeling indignant now, standing there on the fringes of the conversation as if he’d either turned transparent or just disappeared entirely.

He cleared his throat.

Tricia didn’t look at him, and Carolyn didn’t, either.

The cat fixed an amber gaze on him, though, and Brody was affronted all over again. He’d never met a critter that didn’t take to him right away—until this one.

“Tell you what,” Tricia finally said to Carolyn, after a few moments spent looking happily pensive. “I’ll take the afternoon off. If you promise not to stay up half the night stitching beads and ribbons onto that skirt.”

“I promise,” Carolyn said quickly.

Most likely, by her reckoning, persuading Tricia to go home was the best and fastest way to get rid of him, too.

Brody felt his back teeth mesh together.

“All right, then,” Tricia conceded. “I guess I could use a nap.” With that, she headed off into the other room, probably on the hunt for her purse, and thus Brody and Carolyn were left alone again, however briefly.

On the stove, soup began to boil over the sides of the saucepan, sizzling on the burner and raising a stink.

Brody automatically moved to push the pan off the heat, and Carolyn did the same thing.

They collided, sideways, and hard enough that Carolyn stumbled slightly. And Brody grabbed her arm, an instinctive response, to steady her.

He actually felt the charge go through her, arc like a bolt of electricity from someplace inside Carolyn to someplace inside him.

Instantly, both of them went still.

Brody willed his fingers to release their hold on Carolyn’s arm.

She jerked free.

And Tricia was back in the kitchen by then, taking it all in.

Although he and Carolyn were no longer physically touching each other, it seemed to Brody that he’d been fused to her in some inexplicable way.

The very air of the room seemed to quiver.

“I’ll drive you home,” Brody managed to tell Tricia, his voice a throaty rasp.

“I’ll drive myself home,” Tricia countered, friendly but firm. There’d be no more use in arguing with her than with any other Creed. “I don’t want to leave the Pathfinder behind, and, anyway, I told you—I feel just fine.”

Carolyn favored her friend with a wobbly smile. “Take it easy, okay?” she said.

Tricia nodded on her way to the back door. She noted the spilled-over soup on the stove and, with the smallest grin, shook her head.

Brody happened to see her expression because he’d just leaned past her, to take hold of the knob. Where he came from—right there in Lonesome Bend, as it happened—a man still opened a door for a lady.

And this particular lady was trying hard not to laugh.

Brody’s neck heated as he stood there, holding the door open for his brother’s wife, all too aware that she’d drawn some kind of crazy female conclusion about him and Carolyn.

He clamped his jaw down tight again and waited.

* * *

ONCE BRODY AND TRICIA were gone, and far enough along the flagstone walk to be out of earshot, Carolyn let out a loud, growl-like groan of sheer frustration.

The sandwiches were smashed.

Most of the soup—tomato with little star-shaped noodles, her favorite—coated the stove top. The rest was bonded to the bottom of the pan.

All of which was neither here nor there, because she wasn’t the least bit hungry now anyway, thanks to Brody Creed.

Winston, having finished his sardine repast, sat looking up at her, twitching his tail from side to side. His delicate nose gleamed with fish oil, and out came his tiny, pink tongue to dispense with it.

Comically dignified, his coat sleek and black, the cat reminded Carolyn suddenly of a very proper English butler, overseeing the doings in some grand ancestral pile. The fanciful thought made her laugh, and that released most of the lingering, after-Brody tension.

Carolyn frowned at the catch phrase: After Brody. In many ways, that simple term defined her life, as she’d lived it for the past seven years. If only she could go back to Before Brody, and make a different choice.

A silly idea if she’d ever heard one, Carolyn decided.

Resolutely, she cleaned up the soup mess, filled the saucepan with water and left it to soak in the sink. She wrapped the flattened sandwiches carefully and tucked them away in the refrigerator. When and if her appetite returned, she’d be ready.

Winston continued to watch her with that air of sedate curiosity as she finished KP duty and returned to the main part of the shop.

Winston followed; whenever Carolyn was in the house, the cat was somewhere nearby.

She tidied the display tables and put out more goats’ milk soap and handmade paper and the last of the frilly, retro-style aprons that were so popular she could barely keep up with the demand.

That task finished, she stuffed the day’s receipts into a zippered bag generously provided by the Cattleman’s First Bank, double-checked that the front door was locked and there were no approaching customers in sight and went upstairs to her apartment.

Every time she entered that cheery little kitchen, whether from the interior stairway, like now, or from the one outside, Carolyn felt a stirring of quiet joy, a sort of lifting sensation in the area of her heart.

She rented the apartment from Natty McCall for a ridiculously nominal amount of money—nominal was what she could afford—so it wasn’t really hers. Still, everything about the place, modest though it was, said home to Carolyn.

Sure, she was lonely sometimes, especially when the shop was closed.

But it wasn’t the same kind of loneliness she’d felt when she was constantly moving from one house to another and her address was simply General Delivery, Lonesome Bend, Colorado.

The irony of the town’s name wasn’t lost on Carolyn.

She’d ended up there quite by accident, a little over eight years ago, when her car broke down along a dark country road, leaving her stranded.

Her unlikely rescuers, Gifford Welsh and Ardith Sperry, both of them A-list movie stars, had been passing by and stopped to offer their help. In the end, they’d offered her the use of the guest house behind their mansion-hideaway three miles outside of town. After a series of very careful background checks, the couple had hired Carolyn as nanny to their spirited three-year-old daughter, Storm.

Carolyn had loved the job and the child. Most of the time, she and Storm had stayed behind in the Lonesome Bend house, while Gifford and Ardith crisscrossed the globe, sometimes together and sometimes separately, appearing in movies that invariably garnered Oscar nominations and Golden Globes.

Although Carolyn had never given in to the temptation to pretend that Storm was her own child, strong as it was some of the time, she and the little girl had bonded, and on a deep level.

For Carolyn, life had been better than ever before, at least for that single, golden year—right up to the night Gifford Welsh had too much to drink at dinner and decided he and the nanny ought to have themselves a little fling.

Carolyn had refused out of hand. Oh, there was no denying that Welsh was attractive. He’d graced the cover of People as the World’s Sexiest Man, not just once, but twice. He was intelligent, charming and witty, not to mention rich and famous. She’d seen all his movies, loved every one of them.

But he was married.

He was a father.

Those things mattered to Carolyn, even if he’d temporarily lost sight of them himself.

After fending off his advances—Ardith had been away on a movie set somewhere in Canada at the time—Carolyn had resigned, packed her belongings and, once a friend had arrived to pinch-hit as Storm’s nanny, left that house for good.

Within a few months, the property was quietly sold to the founder of a software company, and Gifford, Ardith and Storm, reportedly having purchased a sprawling ranch in Montana, never set foot in Lonesome Bend again.

Even now, years later, standing in the kitchen of her apartment, Carolyn remembered how hard, and how painful, it was to leave Storm behind. The ache returned, like a blow to her solar plexus, every time she recalled how the little girl had run behind her car, sobbing and calling out, “Come back, Carolyn! Carolyn, come back!”

Before that—long, long before that—another little girl had frantically chased after another car, stumbling, falling and skinning her knees, getting up to run again.

And that child’s cries hadn’t been so very different from Storm’s.

Mommy, come back! Please, come back!

“Breathe,” Carolyn told herself sternly. “You’re a grown woman now, so act like one.”

Indeed, she was a grown woman. But the child she’d once been still lived inside her, still wondered, even after twenty-five years, where her mother had gone after dropping her daughter off at that first foster home.

“Reow,” Winston remarked, now perched on the kitchen table, where he was most definitely not supposed to be. “Reow?”

Carolyn gave a moist chuckle, sniffled and patted the animal’s head before gently shooing him off the table. He immediately took up residence on the wide windowsill, his favorite lookout spot.

Being something of a neat freak, Carolyn moved her portable sewing machine aside, replaced the tablecloth beneath it with an untrammeled one and washed her hands at the sink.

The gypsy skirt, the creative project of the moment, hung on the hook inside her bedroom door, neatly covered with a plastic bag saved from the dry cleaner’s.

Carolyn retrieved the garment, draped it carefully over the side of the table opposite her sewing machine and silently reveled in the beauty of the thing.

The floor-length underskirt was black crepe, but it barely showed, for all the multicolored, bead-enhanced ribbons she’d stitched to the cloth in soft layers. She’d spent days designing the piece, weeks stitching it together, ripping out and stitching again.

It was exquisite, all motion and shimmer, a wearable fantasy, the kind of original women like Ardith Sperry wore to award ceremonies and premieres.

Carolyn hadn’t sized the piece for a movie star’s figure, though. It was somewhere between a ten and a twelve, with plenty of give in the seams, allowing for a custom fit.

Carolyn, a curvy eight since the age of seventeen, had deliberately cut the skirt to fit a larger figure than her own, for the simple reason that, if she could have worn it, parting with it would have been out of the question.

She’d been making purposeful sacrifices like that since she’d first learned to sew, in her sophomore year of high school. Once she understood the basics, she hadn’t even needed patterns. She’d sketched designs almost from day one, measured and remeasured the fabric, cut and stitched.

And she’d quickly made a name for herself. While other kids babysat or flipped burgers for extra money, Carolyn whipped up one-of-a-kind outfits and sold them as fast as she could turn them out.

That made two things she did well, she’d realized way back when, with a thrill she could still feel. Carolyn had an affinity for horses; it seemed as though she’d always known how to ride.

Over the years, most of her foster homes being in rural or semirural areas, where there always seemed to be someone willing to trade riding time for mucking out stalls, she’d ridden all kinds of horses, though she’d never actually had one to call her own.

Now, determined not to waste another second daydreaming, she shook off the reflective mood and picked up the skirt again, carefully removing the plastic wrap and holding it up high so she could admire the shift and shiver of all those ribbons, the wink of crystal beads.

It was silly, she supposed, but she coveted that skirt.

Aside from the money the sale would bring in, which, as always, she needed, where would she even wear a garment like that? She lived in blue jeans, cotton tops and Western boots, and for good reason—she was a cowgirl at heart, not a famous actress or the wife of a CEO or a cover model for Glamour.

With a sigh, Carolyn put the skirt back on its hook on the bedroom door—out of sight, out of mind.

She crossed to the small desk Tricia had left behind when she moved to the ranch, and booted up her laptop. While the magic machine was going through its various electronic thumps, bumps and whistles, Carolyn heated a cup of water in the microwave to brew tea.

Winston, still keeping his vigil over the side yard from the windowsill, made a soft yowling sound, his tail swaying like a pendulum in overdrive. His hackles were up, but his ears were pitched forward instead of laid back in anger. While Carolyn was still trying to read his body language, she heard someone coming up the outside stairs.

A Brodylike shape appeared in the frosted oval window at the door, one hand raised to knock.

Before he could do that much, however, Carolyn had yanked the door open.

“I don’t believe this,” she said.

Over on the windowsill, Winston expressed his displeasure with another odd little yowl.

“What is that cat’s problem, anyway?” Brody asked, frowning as he slipped past Carolyn, graceful as a billow of smoke.

Carolyn shut the door. Hard.

“Winston,” she said stiffly, “is a very discerning cat.”

Brody sighed, and when Carolyn forced herself to turn around and look at him, he was gazing at Winston with an expression of wounded disbelief on his handsome face.

“Does he like Conner?” Brody inquired.

Carolyn hesitated. Brody threw an emotional wrench in the works every time she encountered him, but she didn’t hate him. Not all the time, that is. And she didn’t enjoy making him feel bad.

“Yes,” she replied, eventually. “But you shouldn’t take it personally.”

“Easy for you to say,” Brody answered.

“Tricia’s okay, isn’t she?” That was it, she decided. He was there because he had bad news. Why else would he have come all the way back in from the ranch, where he was supposed to be stringing new fence lines with Conner and the crew?

Brody must have seen the alarm in Carolyn’s eyes, because he shook his head. Holding his range-battered hat in one hand, he ran the other through his shaggy, tarnished-gold hair.

Sighed again.

In a searing flash, it came back to her, the feel of that mouth on her skin.

“As far as I know, she’s taking a nap.” Another grin flickered in Brody’s eyes and twitched at one corner of his amazing mouth. “As soon as Tricia turned in, Conner decided he was a little tired, too. That was my cue to make myself scarce.”

Carolyn’s cheeks were stinging a little, but she had to smile. “Probably a good call,” she agreed. And then she waited. It was up to Brody to explain why he’d come back.

His remarkable blue eyes seemed to darken a few shades as he looked at her, and the gray rim around the irises widened. “I know the word doesn’t mean much,” he said, at long last, “but I meant it before, when I told you I was sorry about the way things ended with us.”

Suddenly, Carolyn wanted very much to cry. And this was a sign of weakness, an indulgence she rarely allowed herself. All her life, she’d had to be strong—as a matter of survival.

She swallowed painfully and raised her chin a notch. “Okay,” she said. “You’re right. We’ll just...let it go. Act as though it never happened.” She put out her hand, the way she might have done to seal a business agreement. “Deal?”

Brody looked down at her hand, back up at her face. “Deal,” he said hoarsely. And in the next moment, he was kissing her.

Carolyn felt things giving way inside her and, as good as that kiss was, she wasn’t about to surrender so much as an inch of the emotional ground she’d gained after the cataclysm that was Brody Creed.

She wrenched herself back out of his arms, put a few steps between them and then a few more.

Brody merely looked at her, with his mouth upturned at one corner, a bemused I thought so gleaming in his eyes.

Stunned, not only by his audacity, but also by what he made her feel, Carolyn touched her lips, as if relearning their contours after a long absence from her own body.

“Don’t you dare say you’re sorry,” she muttered.

Brody chuckled as he opened the door to leave. “Oh, believe me,” he intoned. “I’m not the least bit sorry—not for that kiss, anyhow.” His gaze shifted to Winston, who watched him from the windowsill, ears laid back, fur ruffled. “So long, cat,” he added. “For now.”

In the next moment, Brody was gone—so thoroughly gone that Carolyn felt as if she might have imagined the visit, at the same time certain that she hadn’t.

After that, her concentration was shot.

She waited until Brody had had plenty of time to drive away. Then she logged off her computer, pulled on a lightweight blue corduroy jacket and retrieved her purse and car keys.

Sewing was out of the question, and so was doing the bookwork. She was too jumpy to sit still, or even stay inside.

So she drove to the Creed ranch, taking the long way around, following the back roads and bumpy logging trails to avoid running into Brody.

After some forty minutes, she reached Kim and Davis’s place, parked beside the barn and then stood next to her car for a few moments, debating with herself. She and Kim were good friends; she really ought to knock on the door and say hello, at least.

The sprawling, rustic house had an empty look about it, though, and besides, Carolyn didn’t feel like chatting. Kim was perceptive, and she’d know something was bothering her friend just by looking at her.

Because she had permission to ride any of the Creeds’ horses anytime she wanted—with the exception of the rescued Thoroughbred, Firefly—she could go ahead and saddle up one of the cow ponies without asking first.

Firefly, a magnificent chestnut, was “too much horse” for anybody but an experienced jockey, according to Davis. When they’d learned that the animal was about to be euthanized because his racing days were over and, being a gelding, he couldn’t be put to stud, Kim and Davis had hitched a trailer behind their truck and driven all the way to Kentucky to bring him home.

Passing the corral, an enclosure as large as many pastures, Carolyn stopped to admire Firefly, who had the area to himself that cool but sunny afternoon. He towered against the blue of the sky, and his beauty all but took her breath away.

She stood still as he tossed his great head and then slowly approached her.

Carolyn reached up to pat his velvety nose. Normally, if she planned to ride, she stuffed a few carrots into her jacket pockets before leaving home. Today, though, she’d made the decision impulsively as, let’s face it, a knee-jerk reaction to Brody’s kiss.

“Sorry, buddy,” she told the former racehorse. “No carrots today, but I’ll be sure to remember them next time.”

Firefly nodded, as if to convey understanding, and Carolyn’s spirits rose a little. For her, there was something therapeutic about horses—even as a kid, cleaning stalls and stacking bales of hay to earn riding privileges, she’d felt better just for being around them.

“Wish I could ride you,” she told the former champion, “but you’re off-limits.”

He stretched his long neck over the top rail of the fence, and Carolyn patted him affectionately before moving on.

Besides coming there to ride when the mood struck and time allowed, she’d spent a lot of time in that place, house-sitting and looking after the horses while Davis and Kim were off on one of their frequent road trips, and everything about the barn was blessedly familiar. In fact, Carolyn figured if she ever went blind, she’d still be able to go straight to the tack room, collect the saddle and bridle Kim had given her and get the pinto mare, Blossom, ready to ride.

The horse knew every trail on that ranch by heart. Blossom would cross the creeks without balking, too, and she was as surefooted as a Grand Canyon mule in the bargain. Snakes and rabbits didn’t spook her, and Carolyn had never known her to buck or run away with a rider.

Blossom, standing in her stall, greeted Carolyn with a companionable whinny.

Five minutes later, the two of them were out there under that achingly blue sky. Carolyn tugged at one stirrup, to make sure the cinch was tight enough, and then mounted up.

Once she was in the saddle, her jangled nerves began to settle down. Her heart rate slowed and so did her breathing, and her mouth curved into a smile.

She reined Blossom toward the green-festooned foothills, headed in the opposite direction from the main ranch house and away from the range as well, still wanting to avoid Brody if at all possible, but beyond that, she allowed the mare to chart her own course.

Blossom strolled along at a leisurely pace, stopping to drink from the icy, winding creek before splashing across it to the high meadow, one of Carolyn’s favorite places to be.

Here, wildflowers rioted, yellow and pink, blue and white, and the grass was tall and lush. From the ridge, Carolyn could not only see the river, but also Lonesome Bend beyond it.

Brody’s new house and barn, both sizable buildings, looked like toys from that distance. The workmen were no bigger than ants, moving over the framework, and the sounds of construction didn’t reach her ears, though the horse might have heard them.

Blossom grazed contentedly, her reward for making the climb to high ground, and Carolyn stood in the stirrups, in order to see even farther.

There was the highway that led to Denver and points beyond.

Immediately after Brody’s return to Lonesome Bend the year before, Carolyn had considered loading up her things and following that road wherever it might lead—like in the old days, she’d had no particular destination in mind.

Just somewhere away.

But her stubborn pride had saved her.

She’d loved Lonesome Bend and its people.

She’d had friends, a library card, a charge account at the local hardware store. Not a lot by most folks’ standards, Carolyn supposed, but to her, they were important. Leaving would have meant starting over somewhere else, from scratch, and the idea of that had galled her.

She’d decided to stand her ground. After all, Brody was bound to take off again, sooner or later, because that was what Brody did.

He took off.

Looking out over the landscape, Carolyn sighed. Trust that man to break his own pattern by staying on this time, buying the land that had belonged to Tricia’s father, Joe McCall, making it part of the family ranch.

Still, staying out of Brody’s way hadn’t been very difficult at first, as small as the town was. No doubt, he’d been doing his best to steer clear of her, too.

Then Tricia and Conner fell in love, and everything changed.

As Tricia’s friend and eventually her business partner, Carolyn was included in every gathering at the Creed ranch and, since they were a sociable bunch, tending to go all out for holidays or anything that could possibly be construed as a special occasion, it happened often. Even in the rare month without a red-letter day on its calendar page, it seemed there was always a picnic, a barbecue, a trail ride, a potluck or some kind of party.

Most of the time, Carolyn attended the shindigs and did her best to have fun, but Brody was inevitably somewhere around, seldom speaking to her, or even making eye contact, but there, nonetheless, a quiet but dynamic presence she had to work hard to ignore.

And just doing that much required a level of concentration tantamount to walking barefoot over hot coals, like a participant in some high-powered seminar.

Frankly, Carolyn resented having to make the effort but, besides pulling up stakes and leaving town herself, she didn’t seem to have any options.

She kept waiting to get over Brody.

Get over the hurt.

Get over caring about him.

So far, it hadn’t happened.

Carolyn drew the scenery into her mind and spirit the way she drew breath into her lungs.

A hawk soared overhead, riding an invisible current of air.

Small animals rustled through the grass.

And beneath it all, Carolyn heard the steady tick-tick-tick of her biological clock.

At thirty-two and counting, she wasn’t getting any younger.

How long could she afford to wait around for fate to make her dreams of a home and a family come true?

She leaned forward to pat Blossom’s long, sweaty neck. Shook her head in silent answer to her own question.

She’d wasted enough time waiting around for the proverbial prince to ride up on a snow-white steed and whisk her away to Happily-Ever-After Land.

Okay, sure, she’d hoped a grand passion would be part of the package. But she’d had that with Brody Creed, hadn’t she—for a whole week and a half?

And where had it gotten her? Heartbreak Hotel, that was where.

Obviously, love wasn’t going to just happen to her, like in all those fairy tales she’d lost herself in as a child. It happened to some people—Tricia and Conner and a few others—but those were probably flukes.

Bottom line, she could wish all she wanted, but the fulfillment of said wishes was her own responsibility. Nobody was going to wave a magic wand and make things happen for her.

It was time to do something, time to take action.

Gently, she drew back on the reins so Blossom would stop grazing and continued the solitary trail ride, thinking as she went.

She’d been resistant to the idea of signing up for one of those online dating services, afraid of attracting, oh, say, a serial killer, or a bigamist, or some sort of con man set to make an appearance on America’s Most Wanted. In light of a statistic she’d recently come across—that twenty percent of all romantic relationships begin via a matchmaking website of some sort—she was willing to reconsider.

Or, more properly, she was willing to be willing to reconsider.

Denver was probably full of nice men looking for a partner. Maybe there were even a few eligible guys right there in Lonesome Bend.

It wasn’t as if she needed a doctor or a lawyer. She’d settle for a mature man, a grown-up with a sense of humor and a steady job.

The word settle immediately snagged like a hook in the center of her chest.

She drew a few deep breaths as she and Blossom started back toward Kim and Davis’s barn, traveling slowly. She wasn’t signing up to be a mail-order bride, she reminded herself. Posting her picture and a brief bio online wasn’t a lifelong commitment, but just a way of testing the water.

“You can do this,” she told herself firmly.

Now, all she had to do was start believing her own slogan.

CHAPTER THREE

BRODY GAZED WISTFULLY toward his half-finished house—the barn had stalls and a roof roughed in, so Moonshine had shelter, at least—and swung down out of the saddle.

It was twilight—the loneliest time of all.

In town and out there in the countryside, where there were a dozen or more farms and ranches, folks were stopping by the mailbox, down at the road, or riding in from the range after a day’s work, to be greeted by smiling wives and noisy kids and barking dogs. Dishes and pots and pans clattered cheerfully in kitchens, and the scents of home cooking filled the air.

At least, that was the way Brody remembered it, from when he was a boy.

Back then, Kim baked bread and fried chicken in honest-to-goodness grease. She boiled up green beans with bacon and bits of onion, and the mashed potatoes had real butter and whole milk in them. Usually, there would be an end-of-the-day load of laundry chugging away in the washer, in the little room just off the kitchen, since “her men”—Davis, Conner and Brody and, in the summer, Steven—went through clean clothes like there was no tomorrow.

With a sigh, Brody led Moonshine into the partially completed shelter, placed him in one of the twelve stalls and removed the saddle and bridle and blanket. He filled the feeder, and made sure the waterer was working right, and took his time brushing the animal down, checking his hooves for stones or twigs. The overhead lights weren’t hooked up yet, but he didn’t need them to do this chore. Brody had been tending to horses and other critters all his life—he probably could have performed the task in a catatonic state.

He patted Moonshine on one flank before leaving the stall, making his way back to the doorway, which was nothing more than a big square of dusk framed in lumber that still smelled of rawness and pitch, and took off his hat so he could tip his head back and look up at the sky.

It was deep purple, that sky, shot through with shades of gray and black and navy blue, the last fading line of apricot light edging the treetops. A three-quarter moon, the ghost of which had been visible all afternoon, glowed tentatively among the first sparks of stars.

Something bittersweet moved in Brody’s chest, both gentle and rough, a contrary emotion made up of sorrow and joy, and a whole tangle of other feelings he couldn’t name.

He wondered how he’d ever managed to stay away from Lonesome Bend, from this land and its people, for so many years. His soul was rooted in this land, like some invisible tree, tethered to the bedrock and pulling at him, pulling at him, no matter where he wandered.

This was the only place he wanted to be.

But that didn’t mean being here didn’t hurt sometimes.

Figuring he was getting a little flaky in his old age, he grinned and put his hat back on, raised the collar of his denim jacket against the chill of a spring night in the high country and surveyed the house he’d been building in his head for as long as he could remember—he’d drawn the shape of this room or that one a thousand times, on a paper napkin in some roadside café, on the back of a flyer advertising some small-town rodeo or a stock-car race, sometimes even on paper bought for the purpose.

And now, here it was, a sketch coming to life, becoming a real house.

The question was, would it ever be a home, too?

Brody looked around, taking a mental tally of what was finished and what was yet to be done. The under-floor had been laid throughout, the walls were framed in and the roof was in place. The kitchen—the heart of any country house—was big, with cathedral ceilings and skylights. There was space for one of those huge, multiburner chef’s stoves. The massive double-sided fireplace, composed of stones from the fields and pastures around Lonesome Bend, and from the bans of the river, was ready for crackling fires, except for the hardware.

He moved on, into what would become the combination dining-and-living room. He paused briefly to examine that side of the fireplace. In this part of the house, the skylights were still covered in plastic, turning the shimmer of the moon murky, but the bowed windows overlooking the river would brighten things up plenty during the daylight hours.

There were five bedrooms in that house, besides the master suite, and almost as many bathrooms. Brody planned on filling those bedrooms with rambunctious little Creeds, ASAP, but there was the small matter of finding a wife first. He was old-fashioned enough to want things done in their proper order, though, of course, when it came to babies, that first one could come along anytime, as Davis liked to say, whenever there was a wedding. Invariably, he’d add that the others would take the customary nine months, and Kim would punch him playfully in the arm.

Kim and Davis had a solid marriage, the kind that lasted. The kind Brody wanted for himself, only with kids.

He smiled to himself, there in the gathering darkness of his new house. If she could have heard that thought, Kim probably would have said they’d had kids—him and Conner and Steven.

They’d been a handful, Brody reflected. Most likely, keeping up with two boys year-round, and a third when the school term ended, had been plenty of mothering for Kim. Either way, she’d never complained, never withheld love or approval from any of them, no matter how badly they behaved, but she’d been strict, too.

Chores and homework and church on Sunday were all nonnegotiable, and so was bedtime, until they all reached their teens. Scuffles were permissible, even considered a part of growing up country, but they had to be conducted outside.

Of course, Davis usually refereed, though he was always subtle about it.

Bullying, either among themselves or out there in the bigger scheme of things, was the biggest taboo. It was the one infraction that would guarantee a trip to the woodshed, Davis told them.

None of them had ever wound up there, but they’d sure gotten their share of skinned knuckles and bloody noses interceding when kids at school picked on somebody.

Brody roped in his thoughts. Quieted his mind. Carolyn Simmons popped into his brain. She had a way of doing that.

Which was a waste of thinking power, since that woman had about as much use for him as a stud bull had for tits.

And who could blame her, after the way he’d done her?

He leaned against what would be a wall, someday, and took off his hat. Lowered his head a little.

He’d never set out to hurt Carolyn, and he’d meant it when he apologized. He’d been young back then, and foolish, and when the call from his most recent girlfriend, Lisa, came late one night, her voice full of tears and urgency, he’d panicked.

It was as simple as that.

“I’m pregnant,” Lisa had told him. “The baby’s yours, Brody.”

After she’d calmed down a little, she’d gone on to say that she wasn’t cut out to raise a baby by herself, and she wasn’t about to hand an innocent child over to a rodeo bum like him, either. No, sir, she wanted her child to have a mom and a dad and grow up in one house, not a series of them. If he didn’t marry her, pronto, she knew an attorney who handled private adoptions.

Brody hadn’t discussed the matter with Conner, or with Davis and Kim, because he’d been estranged from all of them during those years. In fact, he’d made damn sure they weren’t around before he showed up on the ranch, badly in need of a hideout, a place to lick his wounds.

And he sure as hell hadn’t brought the subject up with Carolyn. He hadn’t known what to say to her. So he’d simply packed up his gear, within an hour after hanging up with Lisa, and loaded it into his truck.

Carolyn, still flushed from their lovemaking earlier in the evening, had been smiling in her sleep when he leaned over and placed a kiss as light as a whisper on her forehead. Except for a note, hastily scrawled and left next to the coffeemaker on the counter beside the back door, that kiss was all the goodbye he could manage.

There was no way to sugar-coat it, then or now. He’d skipped out on her.

End of story.

All during the long drive to San Antonio, where Lisa was living at the time, though, it had been Carolyn haunting Brody’s heart and mind, not the woman he was heading for in that beat-up old truck, not the life they would make together, him and Lisa and the baby.

Before Lisa’s call, he’d been this close to telling Carolyn he loved her, that he wanted to marry her. Start a family as soon as they were settled.

He’d planned to make up with his kin, too, and, if they’d have him, make a home right there on the ranch.

Fortunately, Brody reflected, remembering his long-ago honorable intentions, he’d had enough sense to override that particular impulse, on the grounds that he and Carolyn had only known each other for about ten days, and that flat-out wasn’t long enough for anything real to get started.

Reaching San Antonio, he’d driven to Lisa’s tiny rental house, hoisted her few belongings into the back of his truck and the two of them had headed straight for Las Vegas. Within a couple of days, they were man and wife, setting out to follow the rodeo.

They’d been happy enough together, Brody supposed. Especially after the baby came.

Marriage hadn’t cured Brody’s penchant for Carolyn, though. He’d been with Lisa for about a month, when, one night in a seedy bar, after guzzling too much beer with some of his bull-riding buddies, he’d tracked down the pay phone and punched in Davis and Kim’s number, without a hope in hell that Carolyn would answer.

By then, she’d surely have finished her house-sitting stint and moved on, but he had to try. If Kim answered, he’d ask her how to reach Carolyn. Beyond that, he had no clue how to get in touch with the woman he still loved.

Miraculously, though, Carolyn did answer the phone. His aunt and uncle were on the road again, she’d said, and then she’d fallen silent, waited for him to explain himself.

He’d meant to, but it didn’t happen. Brody was thrown and then hog-tied by his own tongue and, in the end, all he said was that ever-inadequate phrase, I’m sorry.

Carolyn had hung up on him then, and justifiably so. Brody had stood in the corridor of that dive of a bar, with his hand still on the receiver and his forehead against the graffiti-covered wall, feeling as though he’d been gut-punched.

After that night, Brody had kept his alcohol consumption to a minimum. He knew Lisa loved him, and he’d made up his mind, then and there, to love her back. Even if it killed him.

It had taken some doing, but he had come to care for his pretty young wife, especially after their son, Justin, was born. One look at that kid, and Brody would have done anything—given up anything—for him.

And he had given up things he’d once believed he couldn’t do without.

Carolyn.

The old and tired dream of going home, setting things right with his family, settling down to a rancher’s life. He wanted to show Justin off to the folks, but he was scared shitless of running into Carolyn, so he stayed away.

He’d regret that particular choice forever, probably, because three weeks before he would have turned two, Justin was killed in a car wreck, along with Lisa.

The pain of remembering that time was as fresh as ever, and it nearly doubled Brody over, even now. He’d quit the rodeo after the accident, and stayed drunk for a solid year.

Eventually, he sobered up, but he stayed mad at the world, and he stayed ashamed. More in need of his home and family than ever, he’d denied himself both—as a sort of self-punishment, he supposed.

If he hadn’t been off riding bulls, after all, he’d have been driving that snowy night, not Lisa. He might have been able to avoid the drunk driver doing ninety on the wrong side of the freeway.

And if he’d brought his wife and son home, where they belonged, the greatest tragedy of his life might never have happened.

It was all about choices, Brody reflected, forcibly hauling himself back into the present moment again. The past was over. A man made choices, and then he had to live with the consequences, whether they were good, bad or indifferent.

Brody squared his shoulders, walked on toward the small log structure where he’d been bunking for too damn long.

He switched on the lights as he stepped over the threshold, but two of the three long fluorescent bulbs in the ceiling fixture were burned out, the third flickering ominously, and the ambience was just plain gloomy.

The original furnishings were gone, except for the long counter that had served as a sign-in place for campers, when Joe McCall was still running River’s Bend, and the ancient woodstove. Brody slept on a roll-away bed he’d borrowed from Kim and Davis, never made up now that he and Joleen were in an “off” stage of the on-again-off-again thing they had going. He’d had a shower installed in the small rest room, and he did his laundry either at the Wash-and-Go on Main Street or out at the ranch. He owned a double-burner hot plate and a minifridge with a microwave the size of a matchbox sitting on top, and his desktop computer served as TV, DVD player and general, all-around communication device. He used a cell phone when he had something to say to somebody, or he went to see them in person, face-to-face.

What a concept.

Tricia’s dad had always referred to the shack as a lodge.

Brody called it a log cabin—or a shit-hole, depending on his frame of mind.

That night, despite his best efforts to alter his attitude, it was a shit-hole.

* * *

HE’D KISSED HER.

Try though she might, even after the ride on Blossom and the meandering drive back to town, Carolyn could not get past the fact that Brody Creed had had the nerve, the unmitigated gall, after all he’d done to her, to haul right off and kiss her.

“Unbelievable,” she told Winston in the apartment kitchen as she set his nightly kibble ration down in front of him. “The man is unbelievable.”

“Reow,” Winston agreed, though he went straight to his food dish.

Carolyn shoved up one T-shirt sleeve, then the other, still agitated. She was hungry, but not hungry enough to cook. Remembering the flat bologna sandwiches from lunch, she went downstairs, retrieved them from the refrigerator in Natty’s former kitchen and pounded back up the inside steps.

She tossed one wrapped sandwich into her own fridge—maybe she’d have it for breakfast—and slowly removed the plastic from the other one.

Winston was still noshing away on his kibble.

Carolyn washed her hands and then plunked down in a chair at the table, along with her sewing machine, the day’s mail and a rapidly cooling cup of herbal tea.

“I’m talking to a cat,” she told the cat.

Winston didn’t look up from his bowl. “It’s pathetic,” Carolyn went on. She took a bite out of her sandwich, and it was soggy, tasteless. The crusts of the bread were curling a little, too, and none of that even slowed her down. The meal wasn’t about fine dining, after all. It was about making her stomach stop grumbling. “I’m pathetic. And do you know what, Winston? I’m no closer to achieving my goals than I was last year, or the year before that, or the year before that—”

Winston paused at last, gave her a disapproving glance for talking with her mouth full and finished off the last of his supper.

Carolyn offered him part of her sandwich, but he wasn’t into people-food, except for sardines, and he’d already had his daily ration of those.

“You tried to warn me, didn’t you?” she prattled on, dropping the remains of her supper into the trash and then washing her hands again. She squirted a dab of lotion into one palm and then rubbed the stuff in with vigor. “You made your opinion of Brody Creed absolutely clear, but did I pay attention? Did I keep my defenses up?”

“Reoooooow,” Winston said wearily.

“This is ridiculous,” Carolyn said, addressing herself now, instead of the cat. Was talking to herself better than talking to a pet? Seemed like six of one thing and half a dozen of another. “I’ve got to get a grip. Do something constructive.”

Winston, curled up in his cushy bed now, yawned, wrapped his tail around himself with typical feline grace and dozed.

“Am I boring you?” Carolyn asked sweetly. Then, getting no answer, naturally, she laughed, flung her hands out from her sides and let them slap against her blue-jeaned thighs. “I’m certainly boring myself.” She approached the laptop, drew back the chair and sat down. Pressed the on button and waited.

Maybe she could find a helpful website. Say, getalife.com, or something along those lines.

She checked her email first—nothing much there.

Then she went to the online banking site and posted the day’s sales receipts.

“Look at that,” she said, squinting at the screen, though she knew Winston wasn’t listening. “If we have many more days like today, Tricia and I are in serious danger of making a profit.”

There was more bookkeeping to do—there was always more bookkeeping to do—but, being in a low-grade funk, even after a horseback ride, Carolyn decided not to do today what she could put off until tomorrow. Things were usually slow in the shop on weekday mornings and, besides, she’d be fresh then. Capable of left-brain pursuits like balancing debits and credits in a virtual ledger.

She’d brew another cup of herbal tea and sew, she decided. Let her ever-energetic right brain run the show for the rest of the evening.

It couldn’t hurt to just look at the online dating services, though, she mused, still sitting at the desk and sinking her teeth into her lower lip as she entered a request into her favorite search engine.

The number of choices, as it turned out, was mind-boggling.

There were sites for people who wanted a same-religion partner.

There were sites for dog-lovers, cat-lovers, horse-lovers and just about every other kind of lover. A person could sign up to meet people who enjoyed the same hobbies, political beliefs, movies, foods and wines, books, etc.

Hooking up by preferred profession was an option, too. Just about every legal vocation—and a few that were distinctly iffy—was represented by not just one website, but dozens of them. If she wanted to meet men with a certain first name, or a particular sign of the zodiac, no problem.

It was overwhelming.

It was also intriguing, especially for a woman who’d eaten a squashed bologna sandwich for supper and carried on an impassioned and fairly lengthy discourse with a cat for her only audience.

Reminding herself that fortune favors the bold, not the lily-livered, Carolyn settled on one of several sites based in Denver, and serving the surrounding area. The main page was tastefully designed, and the questionnaire for trial members was short and relatively nonintrusive—some of the sites required enough personal data to trace a person’s ancestors back to the Ice Age.

Well, practically that far.

The first two weeks of the proposed trial period were free, giving her plenty of time to pull out, and all she had to do was post one photo of herself and give her first name, age and a few minor details.

Carolyn decided to call herself Carol for now. She uploaded a recent picture, taken at the town’s Independence Day picnic, admitted that she’d hit the big 3-O, and then—well—lied. Just a little.

She loved to bowl, she wrote, in the little panel labeled Little Tidbits About Me, and she worked in a bank. She had two rescued dogs, Marvin and Harry, and she’d been married once, when she was very young.

Reading over what she’d entered, Carolyn sighed, propped an elbow on the desk and sunk her chin into her palm. None of this was true, of course, but she couldn’t help being creative—it was in her nature. Besides, she was starting to like the fictional Carol.

She sounded like a good person.

Reassured by the certainty that prospective dates could contact her only through an assigned email address connected with the site, Carolyn moved the cursor to the little box in the lower right-hand corner of the screen, marked Go For It!, and clicked.

Dater’s remorse struck her in the next second, but it was too late now. She was out there in cyberspace, albeit under an assumed identity, and it was kind of exciting, as well as scary.

She’d taken a step, after all. Made a move, however tentative, toward her heart’s desire: a home and family of her own.

Carolyn slumped back in her chair, glumly scanning the Friendly Faces web page for a button that would allow her to back out of her trial membership—what had she been thinking?—but the best she could come up with was the Contact Us link.

That would have to do. She’d send a brief message, say she’d changed her mind about online dating and that would be that.

But then a message popped up.

Someone likes your friendly face! it crowed, in letters that appeared to be dancing across the screen. Click on the heart to get acquainted!

Carolyn hesitated, amazed and curious and wishing she’d worked on the gypsy skirt as planned, instead of surfing the Net.

She thought about Tricia, happily married and expecting a baby.

She thought about Brody Creed, who apparently believed he could just go around kissing women he’d dumped.

Dumped? He hadn’t even had the decency to do that. He’d just boogied, abandoned her in the middle of the night, while she was sleeping.

She clicked on the pulsing heart icon.

A photo of a nice-looking—as in, he looked as though he was probably nice—man popped up immediately. Hi, the message bar read. My name is Darren.

Darren wore a mild expression on his roundish face, and his hairline was receding, just a little. He was a dentist, divorced with no kids and he loved dogs and bowling and computer games.

At least appearance-wise, he was nothing like Brody.

A point in his favor, for sure.

Carolyn drew a deep, shaky breath, let it out slowly, and clicked on the chat button. Hello, she told him. I’m Carol.

Darren, in addition to his other talents, was a speedy typist. He flashed back with an immediate, Wow. That was fast. Hi, there, Carol.

Carolyn felt a pang of guilt. She’d been acquainted with the man for two seconds, and she was already lying to him. Lying to a divorced dentist, with no kids, who loved dogs.

What kind of person was she, anyway?

A careful one, she thought.

Hi, there, Darrell, she wrote back.

Darren, he corrected.

Carolyn stifled a groan. Sorry. Darren. I haven’t had much experience at this, as you’ve probably guessed. And my name isn’t Carol, it’s Carolyn. I don’t work in a bank and I’m looking for a husband to father my children. Anybody who isn’t a Creed and doesn’t have a criminal record will do.

Darren replied with an LOL and an animated smiley face that was winking. Everybody was new here once, he added, in his rapid-fire, e.e. cummings style. On the Friendly Faces site, I mean. It’s a great way to meet new people. Very low-key.

It’s a virtual singles bar, Carolyn thought but did not type. And the secret password is probably loser.

Really? Carolyn wrote in response. Have you met a lot of people through the site? And if so, why are you still trolling the web for prospective dates?

Sure, Darren answered. I’m making friends right and left. So far, it’s just been dinner and a movie, but, hey, at least I’m doing something besides filling cavities and begging patients to floss. Ha ha.

Darren had a sense of humor, then.

Sort of.

Carolyn sat with her fingers poised over the keyboard, and no earthly idea what to say next.

Carol? Darren asked. Are you still there?

I’m here, Carolyn replied.

You’re shy, Darren said.

Carolyn blew out a long breath, making her bangs tickle her forehead. Not really, she answered. There, she’d said something honest. She wasn’t shy. She was merely cautious. Sensible.

It finally occurred to her that if she was stretching the truth, Darren might be, too. Maybe his name was Dave, and he was married and not a dentist at all. Maybe he owned the Friendly Faces website, and this was his way of making people think they were in for some action.

Nice “talking” to you, Darren, she wrote. But I should be going. Lots to do.

Wait! Maybe we could meet for coffee? he replied.

Maybe, Carolyn said.

Your picture is great, Darren hastened to add. Promise we can chat again, at least?

Carolyn sighed. We’ll see, she wrote.

She logged off the computer, pushed back her chair and stood. Stretched, enjoying the pull in her muscles, and turned around. There was the sewing machine, the plastic box full of ribbon scraps saved from various projects, her quilted-top basket, where she kept scissors, thimbles, needles and other notions.

Sewing, like horseback riding, had long been a refuge for her. She could lose herself in either pursuit...usually.

But tonight was different.

All because Brody Creed had kissed her.

The bastard.

The good-looking, sexy bastard.

Carolyn squared her shoulders, spun around on one heel and marched herself back to the desk, and her computer.

She switched on the laptop and waited impatiently for the system to reboot.

Then she went online and clicked her way straight to the Friendly Faces website.

Who knew? Maybe Darren—Darrell?—the dentist was still hanging around.

Carolyn’s eyes widened when she spotted the message-box counter. “Carol” had over a dozen emails waiting.

After pushing her sleeves up again, Carolyn plunged in.

* * *

BRODY TIPPED WHAT was left of his microwave-box dinner into the trash and looked up at the last of the functioning lightbulbs. Might as well change them out, he figured. It wasn’t as if he had anything better to do.

He rustled up the extras he’d bought days before, but never gotten around to installing, and vaulted up onto the counter to take out the dead bulbs first. The job was tricky—he’d seen these thingamajiggies shatter into a jillion tiny, razor-sharp shards for no sensible reason—so Brody took his time.

He’d just finished, his eyes still a little dazzled by the glare of three fluorescent tubes, when he heard what sounded like a thump, or maybe a scratch, at the door.

He got down off the counter. Listened.

That was when he heard the whimper. It was faint, and almost human.

A chill trickled down his spine. He sprang to the door and wrenched it open, half expecting to find a person on the other side, injured and bleeding, looking for help.

Instead, his gaze fell onto the skinniest, dirtiest, most pitiful dog he’d ever seen. It was just sitting there, looking up at him with a sort of bleak tenderness in its eyes.

Brody, a sucker for anything with four legs and fur, crouched down, so he wouldn’t be looming over the poor critter like a grizzly or something.

“Hey, buddy,” he said huskily. “You selling something? Spreading the Good News?”

The dog whimpered again.

Brody examined the animal. No collar, no tags.

Fleas were a sure thing, though, and maybe something worse, like ringworm.

Brody stood up, slow and easy, and stepped back. “Come on in,” he said to the dog. “Nothing to be afraid of—you’re among friends.”

The stray just sat there for a few moments, as though he might have heard wrong. He was obviously used to fending for himself.

“Come on,” Brody repeated, speaking gently and giving the dog room.

Slowly, painfully, the wayfarer limped over the threshold and right into Brody Creed’s heart.

CHAPTER FOUR

THE DREAM WAS disturbingly vivid.

Carolyn was in a supermarket, surrounded by dozens, if not hundreds, of eager suitors. There were men of every size and shape, color and type, a regular convention for fans of the Village People.

They nudged at her cart with theirs.

Some of them carried signs with her modified name printed on them in ransom-note letters, and one wore a sandwich board that read Marry Me, Carol! and Have Free Dentistry for Life!

“Carol,” all the others chanted, in creepy unison, “Carol, Carol, Carol!”

Carolyn’s feet seemed to be glued to the floor, but she looked wildly around for an escape route anyway. The freezer aisle was completely blocked, in both directions. She was trapped. Cornered.

Heart-pounding panic set in, washing over her in sweeping, electrified waves. A man with an elaborate wedding cake teetering in his shopping cart pushed his way past the others, to the forefront.

Carolyn recognized Gifford Welsh. He smiled his big movie-star smile, and his piano-key teeth sparkled cartoonishly, like something out of an animated mouthwash commercial.

“You’re already married!” she said, turning her head when Gifford tried to stuff a handful of cake into her mouth. Then, pressing back against the cold door of the ice-cream freezer, she shouted, “I don’t want to marry any of you! You’re not—you’re not—

“Brody.” She started awake at the name. Could still feel its singular weight on her lips.

Winston, curled up at her feet, made a halfhearted hissing sound. There was no telling whether the noise was a comment about Brody or annoyance because she’d awakened him from a sound sleep.

Carolyn’s heart thumped against the back of her rib cage, and her breathing was fast and shallow. She lay there, in her dark bedroom, looking up at the ceiling and fighting tears.

Don’t be a crybaby, she heard one of her long string of foster mothers say. Nobody likes a crybaby.

Carolyn had subscribed to that belief ever since, and she blinked until the sting in her eyes abated a little.

Going back to sleep was out of the question, lest the dream go into rewind, so she got out of bed and padded into the kitchen, barefoot. She was wearing flannel pajamas she’d sewn herself, covered in a puppy-dog pattern, and the fabric was damp against her chest and between her shoulder blades. Perspiration.

The nightmare had been a doozy, then. Normally, dreams didn’t cause her to sweat.

But, then, this hadn’t been a normal dream, now, had it?

You’re not Brody. The words still reverberated through her mind.

She took a mug from the cupboard, this one a souvenir of Cheyenne, Wyoming, filled it with water, added an herbal tea bag and stuck the works into the microwave to heat.

A dog, she thought peevishly, would have gotten up when she did, to keep her company, lend silent reassurance. Winston, by contrast, did not put in an appearance, sympathetic or otherwise.

That was a cat for you.

Not that Winston was her cat—he was a frequent boarder and no more. Just passing through.

Somebody else’s cat.

Somebody else’s house.

Everything in her life, it seemed, belonged to somebody else.

Including Brody Creed. Whenever Joleen Williams blew into town, she and Brody were joined at the hip. It was probably only a matter of time before Joleen roped him in for good.

He was building a house, wasn’t he? A big house, obviously not meant for man to live in alone.

The bell on the microwave dinged, and Carolyn carefully removed the cup. Took a sip.

The tea had the usual placebo effect, and she calmed down a little.

In need of something to occupy her mind, but scared to log on to the computer again, lest more men should pop up, in search of her alter ego, Carol, she flipped on the light at the top of the inside stairway and made her way down the steps.

The shop looked magical in the moonlight. Like some enchanted workshop, where elves ran up ruffly cotton-print aprons on miniature sewing machines and made more goats’ milk soap whenever the supply was low.

Carolyn gave a little snicker at the thought.

She made the aprons, and they bought the soap from a woman who ran a small goat farm a few miles out of town. A few elves would certainly come in handy, though, even if it wasn’t Christmas.

She loved the shop; it grounded her, like sewing and riding horseback usually did, and she loved the twinkling quiet surrounding her.

A shaft of silvery light struck the batik of the Native weaver, high on the wall, illuminating the image as though to convey some message.

There was no message, Carolyn thought. Not in the picture, at least.

The dream, now? That had clearly been a manifesto from her subconscious mind.

As usual, she wanted what she couldn’t have.

Right or wrong, for better or worse, she wanted Brody Creed.

She gave a loud sigh of frustration, set her mug of tea down on the glass top of the handmade-jewelry display and shoved all ten fingers into her hair, pulling just a little.

Why couldn’t she just let go? It had been over seven years, after all, since that awful morning when she’d awakened in a guest-room bed at Kim and Davis’s place to find Brody gone.

At the time, she’d figured he was merely out in the kitchen making coffee, or even whipping up some breakfast. He was a fair cook, and he seemed to enjoy it.

She’d gotten out of bed, pulled on a robe and headed for the kitchen, in search of the man she loved.

Instead, she’d found the note.

Have to go, Brody had written. Something came up.

That was it.

Have to go, something came up.

The tears that had threatened before, after the dream, sprang up again. Carolyn hugged herself, chilled, and gazed at her own woebegone face, reflected in the big mirror behind the counter.

“Nobody likes a crybaby,” she told her image.

And then she cried anyway.

* * *

“WHERE’D YOU GET the dog?” Conner asked the next morning, with affable interest, as Brody carefully lifted the bathed, brushed and still-skinny critter down from the passenger side of his truck, onto the grassy stretch of ground between the main ranch house and the barn.

“His name’s Barney,” Brody replied. He’d hung that handle on the stray after taking him by the vet’s office that morning for a checkup. And he’d been so glad over the dog’s clean bill of health that he’d named him after the doctor. “He showed up at my door last night, in pretty sorry condition, so I took him in.”

Conner grinned and crouched to look the dog in the eyes, much as Brody had done the night before, when Barney turned up on his doorstep.

“Well, hello there, Barney,” Conner said, putting out his hand.

To Brody’s mingled amazement and irritation, the dog laid a paw in Conner’s outstretched palm.

Man and dog shook hands.

“I’ll be damned,” Brody muttered, impressed, then worried. Maybe whoever had taught Barney to shake hands was out combing the countryside for him, right now. Maybe somebody loved him, wanted him back.

Conner, meanwhile, stood up straight again. “I guess Doc must have checked for a microchip and all that,” he said.

“First thing he did,” Brody replied. “No chip, no identification of any kind.”

“You gonna keep him?” Conner ventured, as Valentino trotted out of the back door, joined the group and sniffed Barney from head to tail.

“Yeah,” Brody said. “I’ll keep him. Unless his original owner tracks him down, anyway. Doc’s assistant took his picture, and she’ll upload it onto several lost-pet websites, just in case...”

“But?” Conner prompted.

“But my gut says he’s in need of a home.”

“Mine, too,” Conner agreed. He had been frowning until then, but suddenly, the grin was back. “It’ll be good for you,” he preached. “The responsibility of looking after the poor critter, I mean.”

The words, though he knew they were well-meant, raised Brody’s hackles a little just the same. Was he going to be the Irresponsible One for the rest of his life, while Conner got to play the Good Brother?

Before he could figure out a way to answer, Davis came barreling down the hill in his truck from his and Kim’s place. Kim rode beside him, her smile visible even through the dusty grunge covering the windshield.

“Kim’s pinch-hitting for Tricia today at the shop,” Conner said.

Brody felt a pang of alarm, remembering how tuckered out his sister-in-law had seemed the day before. “Tricia isn’t having trouble, is she?”

“No,” Conner replied, raising a hand to greet the new arrivals. “She just enjoyed yesterday so much that she wanted today to be just like it.”

Brody chuckled, partly amused and partly relieved.

An instant later, though, the worry was back. Women were fragile creatures, it seemed to him. Lisa, for instance, couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred and ten pounds sopping wet; she hadn’t stood a chance against two tons of speeding steel, not driving that little car of hers.

He’d always had access to his inheritance and his share of the ranch profits, even when he was staying as far away from Lonesome Bend as he could. Why hadn’t he gotten her a sturdier rig to drive?

“Brody,” Conner said suspiciously. “Where’s your head right now?”

“You know where,” Brody replied, as Davis parked the truck and he and Kim got out of the vehicle and started toward them. Kim was wearing a lightweight sweater with big pockets, where her impossibly small dogs, Smidgeon and Little Bit, were riding.

Barney whimpered and moved behind Brody, leaning against the backs of his legs. He could feel the animal trembling.

Seeing that, Kim smiled, crouched down and set the two Yorkies on the ground. Ignoring Valentino, who was probably considered old news by now, they wagged their stumpy little tails and one of them growled comically.

“Now, come on out here,” Kim cajoled, addressing Barney. “Smidgeon and Little Bit aren’t going to hurt you.”

Kim definitely had a way with animals, and Barney’s reaction was proof of that. Probably drawn by her gentleness, as well as his own curiosity, he came out of hiding to stand at Brody’s side. His plume of a tail wagged once, tentatively.

The Yorkies nosed him over and then lost interest and tried to start a game of tag with Valentino. They were absolutely fearless, those two. Or maybe their brains were just so small that they couldn’t grasp the difference between their size and Valentino’s.

“Come have supper with us tonight,” Kim told Brody, when she was standing upright again. “You look a little ribby to me, like this dog.”

Brody’s mouth watered at the mere suggestion of Kim’s cooking, not to mention a chance to avoid another lonely evening.

“Is this a setup?” he asked good-naturedly. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that everybody was hoping he and Carolyn would get together.

“Of course it is,” Kim replied with a laugh, looking at Brody but slipping an arm around Davis’s waist and giving him a brief squeeze. “Why fight it?”

Brody laughed, too, despite the little thrill that quickened in the pit of his stomach at the thought of being in the same house with Carolyn. He folded his arms and countered, “Why not?”

Kim punched him. “You’re just like your uncle,” she said.

Whatever that meant.

That he was a stubborn cuss, probably.

The quality came free with the Creed name, one to a customer but guaranteed for life.

Conner and Davis, meanwhile, moved off toward the house, where Tricia surely had a pot of coffee brewing.

Smidgeon, Little Bit and Valentino ambled along after them, leaving Brody and Kim in the yard, with Barney.

“Carolyn’s probably wise to your tricks, Kim,” Brody ventured, serious now, his voice a little husky. “She’ll know you’ve invited me to supper, and she’ll think of some excuse to get out of it.”

Kim, still a striking woman in her mid-fifties, shook her head and mimicked his stance by folding her own arms. “Could you be any more negative, Brody Creed?” she asked. “You and Carolyn are perfect for each other. Everybody seems to know that but the two of you.”

Brody recalled kissing Carolyn the day before, and an aftershock went through him. When it was over, she’d looked as if he’d slapped her, and he’d made some smart-ass remark about not being sorry for doing it.

Oh, yeah. He was zero-for-zero in Carolyn’s books, no doubt about it.

Kissing her had only made things worse.

He just hadn’t been able to resist, that was all.

“Brody?” Kim prompted, evidently reading his face.

He smiled, laid a hand on Kim’s shoulder. “I’m all right,” he told her. “Stop worrying about me, okay?”

“Okay,” she said, in a tone of bright irony. “Are you coming to our place for supper tonight or not?” Not waiting for an answer, Kim added, “Six-thirty, on the dot and don’t be late.” She looked around, parodied a frown. “If Davis Creed thinks he gets to keep Smidgeon and Little Bit with him while I’m in town, covering for Tricia at the shop, he’s got another think coming.”

With that, she turned and headed resolutely for the house.

Brody watched her go, one side of his mouth quirked up in a grin. It was anybody’s guess whether Carolyn would accept Kim’s supper invitation or make up some excuse to get out of it, but he sure hoped it would be the former.

He wanted to see Carolyn again, even though the idea pretty well scared the crap out of him.

“Women,” he told Barney ruefully.

Barney gave a little yip of agreement.

Brody chuckled, bent to ruffle the dog’s ears and the two of them started for the house, where the others were gathered and the coffee was on.

* * *

“YOU HAVE DARK CIRCLES under your eyes,” Kim announced, the moment she stepped over the threshold at the shop. “Aren’t you sleeping well?”

Carolyn smiled as her friend took the pair of tiny dogs from her sweater pockets and set them down carefully on the floor, where they proceeded to romp like a couple of kittens.

Winston, long since resigned to the occasional presence of the canine contingent, ignored them.

“I slept just fine, thank you very much,” Carolyn lied, in belated reply to Kim’s question. She’d eventually managed to get to sleep again the night before, but she’d promptly tumbled right back into a variation of her dream. This time, with the added fillip of Brody riding through a conglomeration of suitors and shopping carts on horseback, reaching her side and then leaning down to hook an arm around her and haul her up into the saddle in front of him.

The dream hadn’t stopped there, either. With no noticeable transition, Brody and Carolyn were alone in a forest, both lying naked in a stand of deep, summer-fragrant grass, making love.

She’d awakened in the throes of a very real orgasm, which was downright embarrassing, even if she was alone at the time.

“I don’t believe you,” Kim said, moving behind the sales counter to put away her purse.

Smidgeon and Little Bit were rolling across the center of the floor now, in a merry little blur of shiny fur and pink topknot ribbon.

Carolyn, thinking of the spontaneous climax, was blushing. “Would I lie to you?” she retorted, with an attempt at a light tone.

There weren’t any customers in the shop yet, and she’d been keeping her mind off the nightmare/dream by catching up on the bookkeeping on the store’s computer.

“Depends,” Kim replied mischievously. “How about joining Davis and me for supper tonight? I’m thawing out a batch of my world-famous chicken-and-pork tamales.”

A bar of that old song “Suspicion” played in Carolyn’s head. “Hard to resist,” she admitted. Kim’s tamales were fantastic. “Are Conner and Tricia coming, too?”

Kim nodded, but she averted her eyes and was busying her hands rearranging costume jewelry in the glass case.

“And Brody?” Carolyn asked, rather enjoying herself, despite all her nerves being on red alert.

“Maybe,” Kim said, her manner still evasive. “Did you know he adopted a dog? Brody, I mean? It’s a very good sign. He really is serious about settling down in Lonesome Bend—”

“Dogs travel pretty well,” Carolyn said, amused and, at the same time, wickedly excited over the perfectly ordinary prospect of sitting across a supper table from Brody Creed.

The bastard.

Kim straightened, looked at her directly. Her smile was a little weak. “You think he’s planning to leave again? Even though he’s building that big house and a fancy barn to go with it?”

Carolyn’s casual shrug was, in reality, anything but casual. “He could always sell the house and barn, if he wanted to move on,” she reasoned. In truth, though, she didn’t like the idea of Brody going back to his other life any more than Kim did, and that surprised her. The prospect should have been a relief, shouldn’t it?

Kim’s gentle blue eyes filled with tears. “Brody’s had a tough time of it,” she said.

Carolyn needed a few moments to recover from that tidbit—she’d always imagined Brody whooping it up, as the cowboys liked to say, riding bulls and winning gleaming buckles and bedding a different woman every night.

“How so?” she asked, finally, in an oddly strangled voice.

Kim sniffled, squared her shoulders and straightened her spine. “I can’t say,” she told Carolyn, in a forthright tone. “I’m not supposed to know what Brody went through, and neither is Davis. He’d be furious if he knew Conner had told us.”

“Oh, boy,” Carolyn said.

“He’ll tell you himself, one of these days,” Kim said, with new certainty. “And that’s the way it should be.”

Just then, the bell over the front door jingled and Smidgeon and Little Bit ran, yapping, to greet whomever was there.

Kim rolled her eyes and chased after them. “Little devils,” she muttered, with abiding affection.

Carolyn smiled, but on the inside, she was shaken.

She knew better than to go to supper at her friends’ place, since it was a given that Brody would be there. Just being around him was playing with fire, especially in light of that stolen kiss—and last night’s dream.

She’d be there, just the same.

Maybe she’d take in the gypsy skirt—just baste it to fit temporarily—and wear that.

* * *

BRODY WATCHED WITH a combination of affection and envy, that evening, in Kim and Davis’s kitchen, while Conner and Tricia flirted like a pair of teenagers.

It was enough to make Brody roll his eyes.

Get a room, he wanted to say.

Davis, sitting beside him at the unset table, nudged him with one elbow. “You remember how it was with those two?” Brody’s uncle asked, keeping his voice low. “When they first noticed each other, I mean?”

“I remember,” Brody said, grinning a little. A stranger would have given odds that Conner and Tricia would never get together, but everybody who knew them wondered when the wedding would be.

Was Carolyn going to show up for supper or not?

He hoped so.

He hoped not.

“You and Carolyn remind me of them,” Davis said, with a twinkle in his eyes.

That got Brody’s attention, all right. He swiveled in his chair to look at his uncle with narrowed eyes. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Just what I said,” Davis replied, undaunted. “You know me, son. If I say it, I mean it.”

Tricia snapped a dish towel at Conner, who laughed, and the dogs all started barking, while an apron-wearing Kim tried to shush the lot.

It was happy chaos.

It was a family.

Again, Brody felt that bittersweet sense of mingled gratitude and loneliness.

“Give things a chance, boy,” Davis told him, pushing back his chair and heading for the back door. His uncle had always been able to read him and, clearly, that hadn’t changed.

Brody hadn’t heard the car drive up, what with all the barking and shushing, dish-towel snapping and laughing, but Davis must have.

He opened the door just as Carolyn was raising one hand to knock.

She looked shy and sweet standing there, wearing black jeans and a gossamer white shirt. Her sun-streaked hair was pulled back in a French braid and, unless Brody missed his guess, she had on just a touch of makeup, too.

“Hi,” she said to Davis, with a little wobble in her voice, shoving a large plastic food container into his hands and not sparing so much as a glance for Brody. “I brought pasta salad. It’s from the deli at the supermarket, but I’m sure it’s good.”

“That’s fine,” Davis said, in that Sam Elliott voice of his, sounding amused. “Come on in and make yourself at home.”

Conner and Tricia knocked off the prelude to foreplay to greet Carolyn—Conner with a smile, Tricia with a hug. When Kim joined in, it was like something out of a reality-show reunion.

All Brody could do was wait, though he did remember enough of his manners to stand in the presence of a lady.

Carolyn finally forced herself, visibly, to look at him. Pink color pulsed in her cheeks and hot damn, she looked good.

“Hello, Brody,” she said.

“Carolyn,” he replied, with a nod of acknowledgment.

Brody immediately grew two left feet and felt his tongue wind itself into a knot.

It was junior high school all over again.

Only worse.

In junior high, it had been all about speculation. As a man, he knew, only too well, what it was like to kiss this woman, to make love to her.

Stand in a puddle and grab hold of a live wire, he thought.

That’s what it’s like.

“Kim says everything’s fine at the shop,” Tricia told Carolyn, with a sparkling little laugh. “I was hoping I’d be missed a little bit, though.”

Carolyn smiled, no longer looking quite so much like a doe poised to run after catching the scent of a predator on the wind. “Oh, you were definitely missed,” she said.

“Absolutely,” Kim agreed cheerfully, opening one of the big double ovens to check on the tamales.

They smelled so good that Brody’s stomach rumbled.

Things settled down to a dull roar over the next few minutes—Carolyn and Tricia washed up at the sink and began setting the table, while Davis pulled the corks on a couple of bottles of vintage wine.

It came as no surprise to Brody—and probably not to Carolyn, either—that they wound up sitting side by side at the huge table in the next room. The others made sure of it, the way they always did.

Brody and Carolyn were so close that they bumped elbows a couple of times. The scent of her—some combination of baby powder and flowers and a faint, citrusy spice—made him feel buzzed, if not drunk, which was weird because he let the wine bottle go by without pouring any for himself.

Tricia passed on it, too, of course, being pregnant.

Carolyn, by contrast, seemed uncommonly thirsty. She nibbled at the salad, and then the tamales and Kim’s incomparable Mexican rice and refried beans, but she seemed to be hitting the wine pretty hard.

“So, anyway,” Kim said, her voice rising above the others. “Carolyn signed up for Friendly Faces—that dating website—and she’s practically under siege, there are so many men wanting to meet her.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Brody saw Carolyn go pink and then mauve. Obviously, she hadn’t expected Kim to spill the frijoles in front of God and everybody.

Brody wanted to chuckle. He also wanted to stand on Carolyn’s front porch with a shotgun and make sure no other man got past him.

“Oops,” Kim said, widening her eyes. She’d let the news slip on purpose, and everybody knew it, but since the horse was already out of the barn, so to speak, that was that. “Sorry.”

Davis gave his wife a look.

Carolyn looked down at her lap, still red and making no pretense of eating.

Casually, Brody leaned over, took hold of the nearest wine bottle and refilled her glass. She glanced at him with an expression of mingled desperation and gratitude and practically drained the thing in a few gulps.

Brody bit back a grin. Well, there was one bright spot to the situation, he reflected. Now he had the perfect excuse to drive Carolyn home, because she was obviously in no condition to get behind the wheel.

An awkward silence fell, broken only by the clinking of silverware against colorful pottery plates.

“I think it’s wonderful,” Tricia piped up, breaking the verbal stalemate. “The dating service thing, I mean. More and more people are meeting their soul mates online these days. Why, the statistics—”

Carolyn looked so utterly miserable by then that Brody felt downright sorry for her. She swallowed hard, raised her chin and bravely interrupted, “It’s only a trial membership. I was curious, that’s all.”

“She’s swamped with guys wanting to get to know her,” Kim said, warming to the topic all over again.

Another wine bottle was opened and passed around.

Carolyn sloshed some into her glass, avoiding Brody’s eyes when she shoved the bottle at him to keep it moving.

“Are you sure you ought to...?”

At last, Carolyn looked at him. She flashed like a highway flare on a dark night, because she was so angry.

Because she was so beautiful.

“I’m of legal age, Brody Creed,” she said, slurring her words only slightly.

The others were talking among themselves, a sort of distant hum, a thing apart, like a radio playing in the next house or the next street, the words indistinct.

“Besides,” Carolyn went on briskly, before he could reply, “I’ve only had two glasses.”

“Four,” Brody said quietly, “but who’s counting?”

“It’s not as if I normally drink a lot,” she informed him, apropos of he wasn’t sure what.

“Have another tamale,” Brody counseled, keeping his voice down even though they still seemed to be alone in a private conversational bubble, him and Carolyn, with the rest of the outfit someplace on the dim periphery of things.

“I don’t want another tamale,” Carolyn told him.

“You’re going to be sick if you don’t eat something,” Brody reasoned. He didn’t think he’d used that particular cajoling tone since Steven and Melissa’s last visit, when he’d been appointed to feed his cousin’s twin sons. He’d had to do some smooth talking to get them to open up for the pureed green beans.

“That’s my problem, not yours,” Carolyn said stiffly.

“Around here,” Brody said, “we look out for each other.”

She made a snorting sound and tried to snag another passing wine bottle, but Brody got hold of it first and sent it along its way.

That made her furious. She colored up again and her eyes flashed, looking as if they might short out from the overload.

Brody merely held her gaze. “Eat,” he said.

She huffed out a sigh. Stabbed at a tiny bite of tamale with her fork. “There,” she said, after chewing. “Are you satisfied?”

He let the grin come, the charming one that sometimes got him what he wanted and sometimes got him slapped across the face. “No,” he drawled. “Are you?”

It looked like it was going to be the slap, for a second there.

In the end, though, Carolyn was at once too flustered and too tipsy to respond right away. She blinked once, twice, looking surprised to find herself where she was, and swayed ever so slightly in her chair.

“I want to go home,” she said.

Brody pushed his own chair back and stood, holding out a hand to her. “I think that’s a good idea,” he replied easily. “Let’s go.”

Kim and Davis, Conner and Tricia—he was aware of them as a group, rimming the table with amused faces but making no comment.

“I guess I have to let you drive me, don’t I?” Carolyn said.

“I reckon you do,” Brody said. “We’ll take my truck. Somebody can bring your car to town later.”

Carolyn, feisty before, seemed bemused now, at a loss. “But what about washing the dishes and...?”

“Davis and Conner can do the cleaning up.” Brody slid a hand under her elbow and raised her to her feet, steered her away from the table and into the kitchen, Barney sticking to their heels like chewing gum off a hot sidewalk.

He squired her to the truck and helped her into the passenger seat, careful to let her think she was doing it all herself.

Barney took his place in the backseat of the extended cab.

Once he was behind the wheel, Brody buzzed his window and Carolyn’s about halfway down. She was going to need all the fresh air she could handle.

“You’re going to hate yourself in the morning,” he said easily, as they drove toward the gate and the road to town.

He’d only been teasing, but Carolyn’s sigh was so deep that it gave him a pang, made him wish he’d kept his mouth shut.

“It might not even take that long,” she said sadly. “I’m—I’m not used to drinking and I—well, I’m just not used to it, that’s all.”

Brody reached over, gave her hand a brief, light squeeze. “That’s pretty obvious,” he said gently.

“I feel like such a fool,” Carolyn lamented, refusing to look at him.

“Don’t,” Brody said.

She looked down at her hand, where his had been rested for a second, and frowned, seemingly surprised to discover that he’d let go.

“You probably think I’m pathetic,” she went on, staring straight through the windshield again.

“Nothing of the sort,” Brody assured her gruffly.

“Getting drunk. Signing up for a dating service—”

Before he needed to come up with a response, she turned to look at him, straight on. And she was pea-green.

“Stop!” she gasped. “I’m going to be—”

Brody stopped, and she shoved open the door and stuck her head out.

“Sick,” she finished.

And then she was.

CHAPTER FIVE

IF SHE’D DELIBERATELY set out to make a lasting impression on Brody Creed, Carolyn thought wretchedly, as she stared at her wan image in the mirror above her bathroom sink later that evening, she couldn’t have done a better job.

First, being the proverbial bundle of nerves, she’d had too much wine at supper. Then, with ultimate glamour and grace, she’d thrown up, right in front of the man. Just stuck her head out of his truck door and hurled on the side of the road, like somebody being carted off to rehab after an intervention.

“Very impressive,” she whispered to her sorry-looking one-dimensional self.

With the spectacle playing out in her mind’s eye, Carolyn squeezed her eyes shut, mortified all over again. Brody had reacted with calm kindness, presenting her with a partial package of wet wipes and following up with two time-hardened sticks of cinnamon-flavored chewing gum.

She’d been too embarrassed to look at him afterward, had hoped he would simply drop her off at home and be on his way again, with his dog, leaving her to wallow privately in her regrets.

She couldn’t be that lucky.

Instead of leaving her to her misery, he’d told Barney to stay put, insisted on helping Carolyn down from the truck and escorting her not only through the front gate and across the yard, but also up the outside staircase to her door.

“I’ll be all right now,” she’d said, when they reached the landing, still unable to meet his eyes. “Really, I—”

Brody had taken her chin in his hand; sick as she was, the combination of gentleness and strength in his touch had sent a charge through her. “I believe I’ll stay a while and make sure you’re all right,” Brody had replied matter-of-factly.

Though she was painfully sober by then, Carolyn didn’t have the energy to fight any losing battles, so she merely unlocked the door and allowed him to follow her inside.

Winston, perched on the windowsill, greeted him with raised hackles and a hiss.

“Whatever, cat,” Brody had said, with desultory resignation. “I’m here, like it or not, so deal with it.”

Carolyn had hurried into the bathroom to wash her face and brush her teeth, following up with a mouthwash swish and two aspirin from the bottle in the medicine cabinet. Then she’d slipped into her room and changed her T-shirt.

And here she was back in the bathroom again, trying to work up the courage to go out there into the kitchen, thank Brody for bringing her home and politely send him packing.

He was moving around out there, running water in the sink, carrying on a one-sided chat with Winston, his voice set too low for her to make out the words. The tone was chiding, but good-natured.

Most likely, Brody was bent on winning over the cat.

The idea made Carolyn smile, but very briefly, because even smiling hurt.

How would she feel when the actual hangover kicked in?

Sobering thought. That’s what you get for drinking, she told herself grimly. You know you’re not good at it.

All this self-recrimination, she realized, was getting her nowhere, fast. So Carolyn drew a deep breath, squared her shoulders, let the air whoosh out of her lungs and forced herself to step out of the bathroom and walk the short distance to the kitchen.

Brody was leaning against one of the counters, sipping what was probably coffee from one of her three million souvenir mugs.

This one bore the image of a famous mouse and was painted with large red letters trumpeting Welcome to Orlando!

“You have quite a collection,” Brody observed, raising the mug slightly for emphasis.

“I’ve been everywhere,” Carolyn said, in a lame attempt at normality. Some of the mugs were from thrift stores and garage sales, actually, but she saw no point in explaining that sometimes she liked to pretend she’d purchased them on family vacations over the years.

Which was pathetic, because to take a family vacation, one needed a family.

Brody gave her that tilted grin, the one with enough juice to power a cattle prod, his eyes as soft as blue velvet but with a twinkle of amusement, too. Moving to the microwave, he took out a second cup, this one commemorating some stranger’s long-ago visit to the Alamo, in San Antonio.

Carolyn had always wanted to visit the Alamo.

She caught the soothing scent of mint tea with just the faintest touch of ginger. Her throat, still a little sore from being sick, tightened with some achy emotion.

“Good for what ails you,” Brody said, setting down the tea on the kitchen table. “Have a seat, Carolyn. I’m not fixing to bite you or anything.”

She dropped into a chair, wishing she’d put the sewing machine away before she’d left for Davis and Kim’s house to have supper and campaign for fool of the year. Now Brody would probably think she was a slob as well as a shameless lush.

Brody waited a beat, then sat down across from her. Watched in easy silence as she took a sip of the tea, sighed at the herbal goodness of the stuff.

“You’ve been very...kind,” Carolyn managed to say, after more tea. She was recovering in small but steady increments. “Thank you.”

Brody’s eyes smiled before his mouth did. “You’re welcome,” he said. He’d finished his coffee, but he appeared to be in no particular hurry to leave.

“I’ll be fine on my own, now that I’ve had some aspirin and this tea,” Carolyn told him, hoping he’d take the hint and hit the road.

Hoping he wouldn’t.

He lingered, watching her. “I’m sure you will be,” he agreed.

“And your dog is all alone, down there in your truck.”

Brody chuckled. “Barney’s fine,” he replied.

Carolyn let her shoulders slump, and her chin wouldn’t stay at the obstinate angle she’d been maintaining since her kitchen reentry. “I’m so embarrassed,” she said, in a near whisper, without planning to speak again at all.

“Don’t be,” Brody said. “It’s obvious that you can’t hold your liquor, but that’s not such a bad thing.”

Carolyn bit down hard on her lower lip and forced herself to look Brody Creed directly in the eye. Before, she’d spoken without meaning to—now, she couldn’t seem to get a word out.

“You probably should have some soup or something,” Brody said mildly. What was it like to be so at ease, so at home, in his own skin? Was this what came of belonging somewhere, being part of a tribe? Even with all those years away, Carolyn reflected enviously, the man’s roots went deep into the Colorado soil, curling around bedrock, no doubt. “Might settle your stomach down a little.”

Carolyn shook her head quickly. The thought of putting food in her mouth—even soup—threatened to bring on a new spate of helpless retching.

“I couldn’t,” she managed to croak.

“Okay,” Brody said.

Oddly, his unflappable solicitude made her feel even more vulnerable to him than that infamous kiss had.

Carolyn steeled herself against what was surely a perfectly normal human need to be reassured, cared for, looked after—normal for other people, that is. Foster kids, no matter how good the homes they were placed in, had to be strong and self-reliant, tough to the core.

Always.

“You could leave now,” she suggested carefully.

Brody chuckled again. Sat back in his chair and folded his arms. “I could,” he agreed, showing absolutely no signs of doing so anytime soon.

“And as for what Kim said at supper, about my signing up for a dating service...”

“Who said anything about that?” Brody asked, when her voice trailed off.

“If I’d known she was going to tell everyone,” Carolyn said, “I wouldn’t have mentioned it to her in the first place.”

“Kim didn’t mean any harm, Carolyn,” Brody offered quietly. “Anyway, you’re a grown woman, sound of mind and...body—” He paused, and once more that special something sparked in his eyes. “And if you want to date potential con artists, that’s your business.”

On one level, Carolyn knew full well that Brody was baiting her. On another, she couldn’t resist taking the hook. “Potential con artists? Well, that’s cynical,” she accused, and never mind the fact that she’d had similar thoughts herself, right along.

“If you’re in the market for a man, Carolyn, it’s your call how you go about roping one in. All I’m saying is that you ought to be careful. There are some real head-cases out there.”

“In the market for a man?” She leaned forward in her chair, incensed. “Roping one in?” Being incensed felt like an improvement over being embarrassed, at least.

“Will you stop repeating everything I say?” Brody intoned. A tiny muscle bunched in his cheek, then smoothed out again.

“Who else would want to date me, right?” Carolyn ranted, stifling her voice so she wouldn’t yell and scare Winston. Or the neighbors. “Only a head-case loser who couldn’t get a woman the normal way?”

Brody laughed. Laughed. He didn’t lack for nerve, that was for sure.

Or sex appeal, damn him.

“There you go again, putting words in my mouth,” he said, all relaxed and affable. His gaze dropped ever so briefly to her breasts and then returned to her flushed face. “Take a breath, Carolyn. If you want to sign on with Funky Faces, or whatever that outfit calls itself, go for it.”

“Friendly Faces,” Carolyn corrected, hating that she sounded so defensive. Why couldn’t she, just once, get the upper hand in one of these sparring matches?

“Whatever,” Brody said dismissively, pushing back his chair—at long last—and rising. “You sure you’re all right?”

“I’m sure,” Carolyn insisted, hugging herself and not looking at him.

Funny, though. Even with her eyes averted, the man was an onslaught to her jangled senses. She was aware of Brody Creed in every part of her; he made everything pulse.

She felt angry triumph at the prospect of his leaving and, underlying that, a certain quiet dejection.

Go, she thought desperately. For God’s sake, Brody, just go.

Instead of heading straight to the door, however, Brody stepped around the table, paused behind Carolyn’s chair and then leaned down to place the lightest of kisses on the top of her head.

“See you around,” he said gruffly.

Carolyn clamped her molars together, so she couldn’t ask him to stay.

To cajole her about soup and hold her.

She’d said and done enough stupid things for one day, met and exceeded the quota.

A few seconds later, Brody was gone.

The apartment, once her refuge, felt hollow without him.

She sat still in her chair, listening to the sound of his boot heels on the outside stairs, waiting for the roar of his truck engine, the sounds of driving away.

Only then, when she was sure he wasn’t coming back, did Carolyn push her teacup aside and bend forward to thump her forehead lightly against the table in frustration.

Once, twice, a third time.

Winston jumped down from the windowsill and padded over to wrap himself around her ankles, purring and offering general cat-comfort.

She bent, scooped him onto her lap and petted his silky back.

Since there was no one but the cat around to see, Carolyn finally gave in and allowed herself to cry.

* * *

“OKAY, SO I WAS a buttinski,” Kim allowed, with a sheepish glance at Brody.

The two of them were standing in the ranch-house kitchen.

“Ya think?” Brody retorted.

In the time he’d been out, Tricia and Conner had gone back to their place—they were probably having slow, sleepy sex at that very moment—and Davis had retreated to his saddle shop, where he was working on a custom order.

Little Bit and Smidgeon must have gone with him, because there was no sign of them.

Except for the lingering scent of homemade tamales, all signs of supper were gone. Dishes washed, leftovers wrapped and put away, counters clear.

Kim Creed ran a tight ship.

Too bad she didn’t exercise the same control over her mouth.

“I’m sorry,” Kim said, reaching into the laundry basket on the table and pulling out a towel to fold. “I just thought you should know that Carolyn is...well...looking.”

“Why?” Brody asked. “In what universe is that my business, Kim? Or yours, for that matter? Carolyn was nervous in the first place—my guess is, that’s why she was swilling wine like she was. And then you had to make everything worse by blurting out something she probably told you in confidence.”

Kim stopped folding, and tears brimmed in her eyes.

Brody ached when any woman cried, but with Kim, it was the worst. She was, for all practical intents and purposes, his mom, and he loved her accordingly.

“It seemed like a good idea at the time,” she admitted with a sniffle. “I’ll apologize to Carolyn tomorrow.”

Brody put his arms around Kim, gave her a brief squeeze. “Maybe you could lay off the matchmaking, too, for a while, anyway,” he suggested, taking a towel from the basket and folding it.

“Trust me,” Kim said, “I’ve already had this entire lecture from Davis. If you and Carolyn are both too thickheaded and stubborn to see that you’re meant for each other, well, it’s out of my hands, that’s all. You’re on your own.”

“Thank you,” Brody said, smiling. “I’ll take it from here.”

Kim’s eyes widened, and her hands froze in mid towel-folding. “What do you mean, you’ll take it from here? Are you...?”

Brody held up one index finger and shook his head, grinning as he turned to head for Davis’s shop to bid the man good-night before heading back to the cabin at River’s Bend.

The spacious room smelled pleasantly of leather and saddle soap and the wood fire that crackled in the Franklin stove, the flames casting a dancing reflection on the worn planks in the floor. Davis stood at one of several worktables, tooling an intricate design into a strip of cowhide.

At Brody’s entrance, he looked up and grinned. Set the rubber mallet and the awl aside and dusted off his hands on the sides of his jeans, a gesture of habit more than necessity.

“Carolyn still feeling peaky?” Davis asked, evidently to get the conversational ball rolling.

“She’ll be all right,” Brody replied, looking around and recalling when he and Conner were kids, always getting underfoot in their uncle’s first shop, a much smaller room than this one, connected to the barn at the other place. Back then, they’d believed nothing and no one could hurt them if Davis was around. They’d grown up feeling safe, and that had fostered self-confidence.

Or arrogance, depending on how you looked at it.

Davis tilted his head to one side, studied his nephew in silence for a few moments, then went back to his worktable, picked up a chamois and began polishing the piece he’d been tooling before.

“How’s that fancy house of yours coming along?” Davis asked, at some length. He wasn’t a man for chatter.

Brody spotted the little dogs under one of the tables, snuggled up in a bed made to look like a plush pink slipper, and smiled. Dragged back a wooden chair and sat astraddle of it, resting his forearms across the back.

“Slowly,” he replied, eliciting a bass note of a chuckle from Davis.

“Pretty big place for one cowboy and his dog,” Davis commented. Barney had wandered in behind Brody by then, and lay down at his feet.

“Don’t start,” Brody warned, leaning to ruffle the dog’s floppy ears so the critter would know he was welcome.

“Don’t start what?” Davis asked, though he knew damn well what.

Brody merely sighed.

Davis chuckled, shook his head. “My wife did stir something up at supper tonight, didn’t she?” he said, polishing away at that hunk of leather.

“You might say that,” Brody said dryly.

Davis paused in his work, gave Brody a mirthful assessment before going on. “Conner and Tricia turned out to be a good match,” he observed. “Kim put her foot in it, sure enough, but she just wants you to be as happy as your brother is, that’s all.”

“I know,” Brody answered, on a long sigh. Then, presently, he added, “Here’s the thing, Davis. Something happened between Carolyn and me, a long time ago, and she’d sooner throw in with a polecat than with me. We’re never going to get together, she and I, no matter how much you and Kim want that.”

“Is that right?” Davis asked, with his customary note of charitable skepticism. He’d finished with the polishing, and now he was wiping his hands off on a shop towel.

“Take it from me,” Brody said. “If it came down to me or a polecat, the polecat would win, hands down. Carolyn wants no part of me, and I can’t really say I blame her for it.”

Davis laughed. “Is it just me, or was there something mournful in your tone of voice just now, boy?” Smidgeon and Little Bit tumbled out of their slipper-bed and rushed him, scrabbling at Davis’s pant legs so he’d bend down and pick them up.

Which he did.

“Mournful?” Brody scoffed, a beat or two too late. “Not me.”

“You’re taken with Carolyn,” Davis said quietly, standing there with a froufrou dog in the crook of each elbow. “Nothing wrong with that. She’s a beauty, and a hand with a horse, too.”

Brody chuckled ruefully. Saying somebody was “a hand with a horse” was high praise, coming from a Creed—better than a good credit score or a character reference from a VIP. “Well,” he said, “I kind of messed things up with her.”

Davis put the little dogs down gently, and they scampered off, probably in search of Kim. Then the rough-and-tough cowboy pulled up a chair for himself and sat down, regarding Brody solemnly, but with a crook at the corner of his mouth.

“I’ve messed up with Kim more times than I care to recall,” Davis said, once he was settled. “And here we are, married thirty-five years as of next October.”

A companionable silence fell; they both sat listening to the fire in the stove for a while, thinking their own thoughts.

Brody’s throat tightened a little. “Did you and Kim ever regret not having kids of your own?” he asked, the words coming out rusty.

“We had kids,” Davis pointed out, with a smile. “You and Conner and Steven.”

“Of your own,” Brody persisted. Davis’s marriage to Steven’s mother hadn’t lasted.

Davis thought a moment, and there was a twinkle in his eyes when he replied. “We’d have liked to have had a girl,” he allowed. “But now that Melissa and Tricia have married into the family, why, Kim and I feel like we’ve got everything anybody could rightfully ask for.”

Brody stayed silent.

Davis reached out, laid a hand on his nephew’s shoulder, squeezed. “I know I’ve said it before,” he told Brody, “but it’s better than good to have you back home where you belong, boy. We all missed you something fierce.”

With that, the conversation appeared to be over.

Davis stood up and went to the stove to bank the fire.

Brody told Barney they’d better get on the road, stepped into the corridor outside the shop, then remembered what he’d come for and stuck his head back in.

“’Night, Davis,” he said.

His uncle nodded, smiled. “’Night,” he replied. “You drive carefully now, because we can’t spare you.”

Brody nodded back.

He didn’t run into Kim on his way out.

Twenty minutes later, he pulled up at River’s Bend, near the unfinished barn, and parked the truck. He and Barney went inside to make sure Moonshine was settled for the night—he was—and headed for the cabin.

Brody flipped on the lights and went straight to his computer to log on.

While he was doing that, Barney drank loudly from his water bowl on the floor and then curled up on his dog-bed to catch up on his sleep.

Once he got online, Brody skipped his email—he often went days without checking it—and called up his favorite search engine instead.

Hunt-and-peck style, he typed Friendly Faces.

Something like ten thousand links came up.

He narrowed the search to dating services, blushing a little even though nobody was ever, by God, going to find out he’d stooped to such a lame-assed thing.

There it was, the website Carolyn evidently hoped would land her a husband.

Brody’s back teeth ground slightly; he released his jawbones by deliberate effort.

Finding her took some doing, but eventually, Brody came across Carolyn’s profile. She was calling herself Carol, he soon discovered.

For some reason, that made him feel a little better.

He decided to send her a message.

To do that, he had to sign up for the free trial membership, which was very much against his better judgment.

Having no stock alias to fall back on, as Carolyn evidently did, he used his own name. Since he didn’t keep pictures of himself on hand, he uploaded a snapshot of Moonshine instead.

That made him grin. According to Kim, no self-respecting woman would take up with a cowboy unless she’d seen his horse.

He completed the few remaining cybersteps, and the way was finally clear: he could send Carolyn a message.

Right off, Brody hit a wall. Now that he’d gone to all that trouble, he couldn’t think of a darn thing to say.

Feeling mildly beleaguered, he sighed, sat back in his chair, frowning at the screen as if something might materialize there if he concentrated hard enough.

Well, slick, he taunted himself silently, where’s all that smooth talk and country charm you’ve always relied on?

Brody sighed again. Rubbed his chin pensively.

This was ridiculous.

A simple howdy ought to do, even if there was some bad blood between him and Carolyn.

Only howdy wasn’t going to pack it.

“For a good time, call Brody” sprang to mind next, and was mercifully discarded.

He decided on Hope you feel better, and he was tapping that in when the instant message popped up.

Hello, stranger, Joleen wrote. What luck to catch you online—is there a blue moon or something? Anyway, I wanted to give you a heads-up—I’ll be back in Lonesome Bend in a few days.

Brody went still. And cold.

Joleen had hit the road weeks ago, swearing she’d stay away for good this time.

“Shit,” he muttered. Timing, like luck, was never so bad that it couldn’t get worse.

Hello? Joleen cyber-nudged.

Hi, he responded.

Joleen was faster on the draw, when it came to keyboards. I was hoping I could stay at your place. Mom and Dad have room, but they’re not too pleased with me these days.

Brody let out a ragged breath. Sorry, he wrote back, using only the tip of his right index finger. Quarters are too tight for a visitor.

Still mad over that little spat we had? Joleen inquired, adding a row of face icons with tears gushing from their eyes.

It isn’t that, Brody replied laboriously.

Joleen’s reply came like greased lightning. Are you dumping me, Brody Creed?

Brody sighed again, dug out his cell phone and speed-dialed Joleen’s number.

“Hello?” Joleen purred, like she couldn’t imagine who’d be calling little old her.

“I just think it’s time we called it quits,” Brody said, seeing no reason to bother with a preamble. “The sleeping-together thing, I mean.”

“So you are dumping me!” Joleen chimed. To her credit, she sounded cheerful, rather than hurt. One thing about Joleen—she was a good sport.

“Okay,” Brody said. “Have it your way.”

“If I had things my way,” Joleen immediately retorted, “we’d be married by now. With a bunch of kids.”

Brody closed his eyes. He could envision the kids all too clearly, but they were all dead ringers for Carolyn, not Joleen.

“We had a deal,” he reminded Joleen gruffly. “We agreed from the first that we wouldn’t get serious.”

Joleen laughed, but the sound had a bitter edge to it. “So it’s finally happened,” she said, after a lengthy silence. “Some filly has you roped in, thrown down and hog-tied.”

“Nice image,” Brody said, without inflection. “And for your information—not that I owe you an explanation, because I sure as hell don’t—nothing has happened.”

“Right,” Joleen scoffed. “Well, I’m coming back anyway. If you get lonely, I’ll be at my folks’ house, trying to convince them that I’m a good girl after all.”

“Good luck with that one,” Brody said, sensing a letup in the tension, however slight. He’d never loved Joleen, and they’d had some wild fights in their time, but he liked her. Wanted her to be happy.

“You and me,” Joleen mused, surprising him with the depth of the insight that came next, “we pretty much just use each other to keep everybody else at a safe distance, don’t we?”

“Yeah,” Brody agreed presently. “I think that’s what we’ve been doing, all right.”

“Huh,” Joleen said decisively, as though she’d come to some conclusion.

“And it’s time we both moved on,” Brody added. You go your way, and I’ll go mine.

“Just tell me who she is,” Joleen urged.

“There isn’t a specific she, Joleen.”

“The hell there isn’t, Brody Creed. I know you, remember? You’ve been on this path for a while now, coming back to Lonesome Bend, making up with Conner and Kim and Davis, building a house—” She made a moist sound then and, for one terrible moment, Brody feared Joleen was either already crying or about to. “Silly me,” she finally went on. “I thought all that talk about not getting too serious was just that—talk. We go way back, Brody.”

Brody shut his eyes for a moment, remembering things he’d been doing his best to forget right along. Joleen had been Conner’s girlfriend, back in the day, and with plenty of help from him—Brody—she’d driven a wedge between the brothers that might have kept them estranged for a lifetime, instead of a decade.

And a decade, to Brody’s mind, was plenty too long to be on the outs with Conner.

“I’m sorry if you misunderstood,” Brody said quietly, when the air stopped sizzling with Joleen’s ire. “But I never gave you any reason to think whatever it was we had together was going anywhere, Joleen, and I’m not responsible for what goes on in your imagination.”

She sighed, calming down a little. “Is this the part where you say we’ll always be friends?” she asked, at long last.

“That’s up to you, Joleen,” Brody said, wishing he could ask her not to come back, at least not right away, because things were complicated enough already. Trouble was, Lonesome Bend was as much her home as his, and she had every right to spend time there. “We can be friends, or we can steer clear of each other for a while and let the dust settle a little.”

“I could make trouble for you, you know,” Joleen reminded him mildly.

Was she serious or not? He couldn’t tell.

“You could,” he allowed.

“You might as well tell me who she is, Brody,” Joleen went on reasonably, ignoring what he’d said. “I can find out with a phone call or two, anyway.”

“Up to you,” Brody reiterated. “Goodbye, Joleen.”

She paused, absorbing the finality of his words. Gave another sniffle...and hung up on him.

Brody closed his phone and stood there looking at it for a few moments, frowning.

Barney, snugged down over by the stove, raised his head off his muzzle and regarded his master with something resembling pity.

He was probably imagining that part, Brody decided.

“Women,” he told the dog, before turning back to the computer and the message he’d been trying to write to Carolyn. “There’s no making sense of them, no matter how you try. They say one thing when they mean another. They cry when they’re sad, and when they’re happy, too, so you never know where you stand.”

Barney gave a little whimper and settled back into his snooze.

Grimly, Brody glared at the message box on the screen in front of him. Hope you’re feeling better was as far as he’d gotten, as far as he was likely to get, if inspiration didn’t strike soon.

There didn’t seem to be much danger of that.

He rubbed his chin again, aware that his beard was growing in. He’d shaved just that morning—hadn’t he?

Brody tried to round up his thoughts, get them going in the same direction, but it was hard going. He was mystified to find himself so confused and at a loss for words. He’d been a smooth talker all his life, he reflected, but when it came to Carolyn Simmons, it seemed, he was about as verbal as a pump handle. Presently, Brody gave up and hit the delete key, logged off of the computer and turned around in his chair.

The bed was still unmade, and there was still no woman in it.

The microwave and the minifridge, inanimate objects posing as some kind of kitchen, presented a sad image of the bachelor life.

The only bright spot in the whole place, Brody decided glumly, after mulling it all over, was the dog.

CHAPTER SIX

DENIAL, CAROLYN DECIDED, as she went through the motions of opening the shop for business promptly at nine the next morning, would be the watchword of the day.

All she had to do was pretend. That she hadn’t gotten tipsy on wine at Kim and Davis’s tamale supper, in front of Brody Creed.

That she hadn’t leaned out the door of a hot guy’s truck and thrown up on the side of the road.

That she hadn’t made an utter and complete idiot of herself.

Like hell she hadn’t. She’d done all those things and more, and the worst part was, she didn’t know why. It wasn’t like her to drink at all, let alone overindulge. She simply didn’t have the capacity to assimilate alcohol, never had.

Now, confounded as well as queasy, Carolyn looked up at the Weaver, the art piece gracing the high place on the wall, seeking wisdom in all that quietness and color, but all she got was a crick in her neck and the conclusion that her longtime coping mechanism had failed her.

Without denial to fall back on, she’d be stuck with reality.

Yikes.

There were positive sides to the situation, though. She had slept through the night, at least, and two more aspirin, with a water chaser, had made her head stop pounding.

She hadn’t been able to manage coffee, though, or even herbal tea.

Breakfast? Forget about it.

Her stomach was still pretty iffy.

So she’d fed Winston, taken a shower and gotten dressed for the day, choosing faux-alligator flats, black pants and a rather prim-looking white shirt over her usual: jeans, T-shirt and Western boots. She applied makeup—without blusher, she’d have had no color at all—and even put her hair up in a sort of twisty do she hoped looked casually elegant, then donned her one and only pair of gold posts.

She wanted to look...well, businesslike. A woman of substance and good sense.

But she’d settle for looking sober.

Tricia breezed in at nine-fifteen, wearing sandals and a soft green maternity sundress and carrying two mega-size cups of coffee from the take-out place down the street. She glowed like a woman who’d spent the night enjoying great sex with her adoring husband.

Carolyn felt a stab of envy. Great work, if you could get it.

Casting a glance at Carolyn before she set the cups on the display counter, Tricia smiled warmly, taking in the slacks and the shoes and the fussy shirt.

“Well, look at you,” she observed finally. “All dressed up like somebody about to head over to the bank and ask for a big loan. Or apply for membership in a country club.”

Carolyn sighed, and the truth escaped her in a rush. “I think I was trying to change my identity,” she said. The scent of the coffee, usually so appealing, made her stomach do a slow tumble backward. “Become somebody else. Lapse into permanent obscurity, disappear forever. Create my own one-woman witness protection program.”

Tricia laughed. “You’ve got it bad,” she said forthrightly. “And I’m not talking about the flu, here.”

Carolyn’s cheeks burned, and she felt her chin ratchet up a notch. “If you mean the hangover, thanks for reminding me. I already feel like four kinds of a fool, after everything that happened last night.”

Tricia picked up one of the cups and held it out, and Carolyn shook her head, swallowed hard.

“You had a little too much wine,” Tricia said gently, with a shrug in her tone. “It’s no big deal, Carolyn—we’ve all done that at one time or another. And if you do have a hangover—your word, not mine—it doesn’t show.” She paused while she went behind the counter and stuck her purse into its usual cubbyhole. Then, straightening, she went on. “I was referring, my prickly friend, to the bare-socket electricity arcing between you and Brody all evening. I’m surprised all our hair didn’t stand on end, and our skeletons didn’t show through our skin.”

Carolyn had to laugh, though the sound was hoarse and it hurt her throat coming out. “That was visual,” she said. “And what an imagination you have, Tricia Creed. If there was anything ‘arcing’ between Brody and me, it was hostility.”

“Sure,” Tricia agreed smoothly, and a little too readily, fussing with a display of sachet packets beside the cash register. Unless a tour bus came through unexpectedly, they probably wouldn’t be very busy that day, and Carolyn’s heart sank at the prospect of long hours spent making work where none existed.

“I’ll check for internet orders,” Carolyn said, desperate to change the course of their conversation before it meandered any deeper into Brody Territory. They kept the shop computer in their small office, a converted bedroom, off the living room. “Maybe we’ve sold a few more aprons online.”

“Maybe,” Tricia said, shooting another glance at Carolyn as she was about to turn and walk away. Then she came right out with it. “How come you didn’t mention signing up for cyberdates to me, but Kim knew?”

Carolyn wanted to lie, but she simply couldn’t. Not to Tricia, one of the first real friends she’d ever had. “I wasn’t planning on telling anybody,” she admitted ruefully, folding her arms. “Kim and I were upstairs, having lunch, and this message just popped up on my laptop screen.” She drew in a breath, huffed it out again. “That website—Friendly Faces, I mean—is a little scary. The thing talks. If the computer is on, and a message comes in, it just pipes right up with the news. ‘Somebody likes you!’” She threw her arms out wide, let her hands slap against her sides. “When that happened, Kim was onto my secret and I had no choice but to explain.”

Tricia smiled. “Relax,” she said. “It’s a new world. Lots of people connect online before they meet in person.”

“Easy for you to say,” Carolyn pointed out. “You don’t have to resort to desperate measures—you’re already married.”

Tricia gave a dreamy sigh. “Yes,” she said. “I am most definitely married.”

Carolyn barely kept from rolling her eyes.

Tricia came back from the land of hearts and flowers and cartoon birds swooping around with ribbons in their beaks and studied Carolyn with slightly narrowed eyes. “I just have one question,” she said.

“Of course you do,” Carolyn said, resigned. This was the troublesome thing about friendships—they opened up all these private places a person liked to keep hidden.

“Why go online and meet strangers when the perfect man is right in front of you?”

Carolyn pretended to look around the surrounding area in search of this “perfect man” of Tricia’s. Arched her eyebrows in feigned confusion and set her hands on her hips. “He is? I don’t see him.”

“You know I’m talking about Brody,” Tricia replied, going all twinkly and flushed again. She might have been talking about Brody, but it was a good bet she was thinking about Conner.

Carolyn reminded herself that Tricia meant well, just as Kim did. She was being prickly with her friend, and she regretted it.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“For what?” Tricia wanted to know.

“I might have been a little snappish.”

“And I might have been meddling,” Tricia said. Another long pause followed, then she added, “Was it really so bad, whatever happened between you and Brody?”

Carolyn opened her mouth, closed it again, stumped for an answer.

Tricia touched Carolyn’s arm. “There I go, meddling again.”

“Could we not talk about Brody, please?” Carolyn asked, after a long time. She realized she was hugging herself with both arms, as though a cold wind had blown through the shop and chilled her to the bone.

“Of course,” Tricia said, her eyes filling. “Of course.”

Carolyn turned on her heel and marched off to the bedroom-office, keeping her spine straight.

Was it really so bad, whatever happened between you and Brody?

Yes, answered some voice within Carolyn, too deep to be uttered aloud. He was the first man I ever dared to love. I gave Brody Creed everything I had, everything I was and ever planned to be. I thought he was different from all the others—Mom, the social workers, the foster families—so I trusted him. In the end, though, he threw me away, just like they did. He left and I watched the road for him for months, hoping and praying he’d come back, and he stayed gone.

So much for hope and prayer. When had either one of them ever done her any good at all?

Reaching the office, Carolyn booted up the computer, only to be rewarded with an all-too-familiar greeting as soon as she went online.

“Somebody likes you!”

“Imagine that,” she muttered.

Why was this happening? She hadn’t signed on to Friendly Faces through this computer; she’d used the laptop upstairs.

It was creepy.

On an annoyed impulse, Carolyn clicked on the Show Me! icon.

And there was a picture of a buckskin horse.

Give me a chance, read the message beneath the photo.

It had been posted in the middle of the night, and it was signed, Brody.

Carolyn put a hand to her mouth. Then, in a shaky voice, she called out, “Tricia?”

Her friend appeared almost immediately. Tricia was light on her feet, for someone so profoundly pregnant.

“Is something wrong?” she asked, from the doorway.

“Am I seeing things?” Carolyn countered, gesturing toward the screen.

Tricia crept forward and peered at the monitor. “That’s Brody’s horse,” she said, very quietly. “Moonshine.”

“Apparently,” Carolyn quipped, “Moonshine is looking for action.”

Tricia giggled, but it was a nervous sound. “Brody sent you a message through Friendly Faces?” she marveled. “Wow. He must really like you.”

Carolyn felt a crazy thrill. “Yeah,” she retorted. “That would be why he’s hiding behind his horse.”

“He knows you like horses,” Tricia reasoned. It was a weak argument.

“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” Carolyn scoffed.

“You registered as ‘Carol’?” Tricia asked, frowning a little.

“Never mind that,” Carolyn said briskly. “What do I do now?”

“Go out with Brody?”

“Oh, right.”

“What can it hurt? The two of you go out for a bite to eat, maybe take in a movie? Harmless fun.”

“Nothing about Brody Creed is harmless,” Carolyn said, with conviction.

“True,” Tricia agreed, wide-eyed. “But is that the kind of man you really want? Somebody harmless, who makes zero impact?”

“He scares me,” Carolyn admitted. The words were out before she’d had a chance to vet them as something she actually wanted to say out loud. And Brody did scare her, because no one, not even her feckless mother, had ever had as much power to hurt her, to crush her, as he did.

“One date,” Tricia negotiated. “You set the terms. How bad can that be?”

“Trust me,” Carolyn said, “it can be really bad.”

“He must have done you a number,” Tricia ventured, meddling again and showing no signs of apologizing for it. “You can tell me, Carolyn.”

“Like I told Kim?”

Tricia made the cross-my-heart motion with her right hand and then held it up in the oath position. “I will tell no one. Not even Conner.”

Carolyn sighed. She turned to Tricia and, against years of conditioning, took a chance. “Brody was passing through Lonesome Bend,” she said wearily, like an old-fashioned record player on slow speed. “It was years ago. I was house-sitting for Kim and Davis, and he—well, he just showed up on their doorstep. Something happened. Then something else happened. The next thing I knew, we’d been sharing a bed for a week and I was crazy in love with Brody Creed. We were making plans for a future together—babies, pets, a house somewhere on the ranch, the whole thing. Brody was going to reconcile with Conner, and with his aunt and uncle, and we were going to get married. Then, one morning, I woke up and found a note. ‘Something came up,’ he said, and he had to leave. That was it. He was gone.”

“Oh,” Tricia said, absorbing the story like an impact. “You didn’t hear from him again?”

“He called me a month later, drunk out of his mind. It was worse than not hearing from him at all.”

“I’m so sorry,” Tricia whispered, looking so broken that Carolyn immediately forgot her own pain.

“Don’t,” Carolyn said. “Don’t agonize over this, Tricia. It’s ancient history. But you know what they say about history—those who fail to learn from it are condemned to repeat it.”

“I love my brother-in-law,” Tricia said, “but right now, I could wring his neck.”

“The last thing I want is to turn you against Brody,” Carolyn told her friend. “He’s your husband’s brother, Tricia. Your baby’s uncle. It would be so, so wrong if what I’ve told you caused problems within the family. I couldn’t bear that—families are precious.”

Tricia hugged her, briefly but hard. “Don’t worry about me,” she said. “You need to do what’s right for you, Carolyn. When was the last time you put yourself first?”

Carolyn searched her mind, then her soul, for an honest reply. “Always,” she said. “And never.”

Tricia was quiet for a long, long time. Then she said, “In the beginning, when I was first attracted to Conner, I mean, I resisted my feelings with every ounce of strength I could muster. I was so afraid. Nothing in my life had ever prepared me to believe in happy endings—not my parents’ brief marriage or, after I was grown up, my own relationships. Nothing worked. Ever. Somewhere along the line, I decided that true love was something that happened in books and movies, and to other, luckier people, and that I was better off alone, because that way, I couldn’t be hurt.” She stopped, her eyes searching Carolyn’s. “Pretty stupid, huh? Only one thing hurt worse than I thought loving and losing Conner Creed would, and that was not allowing myself to take the risk. And you know what? No matter what the future holds—even if, God forbid, Conner dies in his prime, or he leaves me, or whatever else the fates might throw at us—it would be worth it, because once you’ve loved someone the way I love Conner, once someone has loved you the way he loves me...” Tricia’s blue eyes brimmed with tears again, and she swallowed before going on. “Once you’ve loved, and been loved, that way, nothing and no one can ever take it away. Whether it lasts five minutes or fifty years, that love becomes a permanent part of you.”

Carolyn studied her friend. “It’s that way for some people,” she said, at some length.

“It can be that way for you,” Tricia insisted quietly.

“Not with Brody Creed, it can’t,” Carolyn replied. And she turned back to the monitor, clicked on the appropriate icon and replied to his message, fully intending to turn him down flat.

Instead, she found herself typing Nice horse and then clicked Send.

* * *

AFTER NUKING A frozen breakfast in the microwave, going out to the barn to feed Moonshine and walking the dog, Brody finally logged on to his computer at around nine-thirty. All the while, he was telling himself it didn’t matter a hill of beans if he’d heard from Carolyn, aka Carol.

Barney, having chowed down on his kibble, sat at Brody’s feet, waiting patiently for whatever was next on the agenda and probably hoping he’d get to participate.

Brody grinned down at the mutt and flopped his ears around gently, by way of reassurance. “We ought to be on the range already,” he confided to the animal. “Davis and Conner will be biting the heads off nails by now, and complaining to each other that some things just never change.”

Barney opened his mouth wide and yawned.

Brody laughed and turned back to his computer just as an electronic voice chirped, “Someone likes you!”

“I sure as hell hope so,” Brody told the dog, who, by that time, had stretched himself out for a spur-of-the-moment nap.

And there it was.

Nice horse, Carolyn had written.

Brody sighed. It wasn’t a yes, but it wasn’t a no, either.

He rubbed his hands together and thought hard.

Once again, inspiration eluded him.

Thanks, he finally wrote back. Want to go riding with me?

Brody sighed again, heavily this time, and shoved the fingers of one hand through his hair in frustration. He was a regular wiz with the ladies, he chided himself.

The truth was that he had lot to say to Carolyn Simmons, starting with “I’m sorry,” but he’d sooner have his thoughts posted on a billboard in the middle of town than send them over the internet.

His cell phone rang.

Distracted, Brody hit Send, and immediately wished he hadn’t.

“Hello,” he said into the phone.

“What kind of outfit do you think we’re running over here?” Conner demanded. “This is a working ranch, Brody—operative word, working—and it would be nice if you could drop by and do your part sometime before noon.”

Brody laughed. “Now, Conner,” he drawled, because he knew slow talking made his brother crazy, “you need to simmer down a little. Take life as it comes. The cattle have a thousand acres of grass to feed on, and the fences will get fixed—”

“Brody,” Conner broke in tersely, “this is as much your ranch as it is mine. We split the profits down the middle, and by God we’re going to do the same with the work!”

“What got up your backside?” Brody asked. “For a man getting regular sex, you’re pretty testy.”

He could literally feel Conner going from a simmer to a boil on the far end of that phone call.

“Enough of your bullshit,” Conner almost growled. “Get over here, unless you want me coming after you.”

“Maybe you’re not getting regular sex,” Brody speculated.

“Brody, I swear to God—”

“Okay, okay,” Brody relented affably, logging off of the computer, pushing back his chair and rising to his feet. “Don’t get your bloomers in a wad. I’m on my way.”

Barney scrambled upright, with a lot of toenail scrabbling against the plank floor, and Brody didn’t have the heart to leave him behind. He decided to give Moonshine a day off and drive out to the ranch in his truck.

It was big, that fancy new extended-cab truck, painted a bluish-silver color, and it had all the upgrades, from GPS to video screens in the backs of the front seats. For all the flash the rig had, Brody still missed his old pickup, the one he’d driven right down to the rust.

He hadn’t had to worry about denting the fenders or scraping up the bed of the previous truck with feed sacks and tools. And it would have gone anywhere.

Unfortunately, it had finally breathed its last, a few months before, and Brody had been forced to sell it for scrap.

He opened the rear door on the driver’s side and Barney leaped through the air like a movie dog showing off for the paparazzi. Settled himself on the far side and stared eagerly out the window.

Chuckling, Brody took his place behind the wheel and started up the engine. He should have been thinking about downed fences and stray calves and generally staying on Conner’s good side, but his mind was stuck on Carolyn.

Nice horse? What the devil was that supposed to mean?

Fifteen minutes later, he and Barney pulled in at the main ranch house.

He let Barney out of the truck, watched as he and Valentino met in the driveway and sized each other up.

Conner strode out of the barn while the dogs were still getting to know each other, his face a thundercloud with features.

He started right in, tapping at the face of his watch with one index finger. “Damn it, Brody, do you have any idea what time it is?”

Brody didn’t wear a watch. Hadn’t for years. He went to bed when he felt like it and got up when he was darned good and ready, and old habits were hard to break.

“No,” he replied smoothly, “I don’t know what time it is, and if I did, I probably wouldn’t give a rat’s ass anyway.”

Conner glowered at him, hard, but when it came right down to it, he couldn’t sustain his bad humor. Hoarsely, and entirely against his stubborn Creed will, Conner laughed.

Brody grinned and slapped his brother on the shoulder. “That’s better,” he said. “You’re going to be somebody’s daddy one day soon, little brother, and that means you’ve got to stop stressing out about everything. What good will you be to that kid if you keel over from a heart attack?”

Conner shook his head, took his hat off and then plunked it back in place again. Shoved out a loud sigh. “You’re impossible,” he finally said.

“So they tell me,” Brody replied lightly. “What’s on the schedule today, boss?”

Conner let the word boss pass without comment and arched one eyebrow. “The usual. There are strays to round up, calves, mostly. Davis spotted half a dozen of them down by the river, but he didn’t go after them because that gelding of his threw a shoe, and he had to head home to fetch another horse.”

“We running low on horses these days?” Brody asked, with a pointed glance at the barn, and the surrounding corral and pasture area. He counted eight cayuses right there in plain sight.

“You know Davis,” Conner said. “He wants to ride the roan, and it’s up at his place, in the pasture. He’s pigheaded and set in his ways, our uncle.”

Brody grinned. “You’d think he was a Creed or something,” he said.

Conner laughed again, started back toward the barn. “Let’s ride, cowboy,” he replied. “Calves aren’t known for their intelligence, and we’ll have a hassle on our hands if any of them take a tumble into the river and get swept off by the currents.”

The possibility was real enough; they’d lost plenty of cattle, a few horses and a handful of people to the falls. The plunge was better than a hundred feet, and there were boulders directly below, in the white water.

This probably explained Conner’s sour mood earlier, during that phone call.

Brody and Conner saddled their horses at the same pace, with the same motions, and when they rode out, they were side by side.

Barney and Valentino kept up.

Brody enjoyed that ride, enjoyed being with Conner, on horseback, and out in the open air.

But once the brothers reached the ridge overlooking the river, where a narrow trail ribboned off the dirt road and down the steep side-hill to the stony bank, the fun was over.

Five yearling calves bawled in loud dismay at edge, and a sixth was already in the drink, struggling in vain to regain its footing and get back to shore.

“How’s this horse in the water?” Brody asked Conner, with a nod to his own mount, resettling his hat as he spoke.

“He’s good,” Conner said, with grave reluctance. “Brody, maybe you oughtn’t to—”

But Brody cut him off with a whooping “Yee-haw” and headed straight down that hill, Snowy-River style, unfastening the leather strap that secured his coiled rope as he went.

Conner yelled a curse after him and followed.

Having gotten a head start, and with the trail barely wide enough for one horse, forget two, Brody reached the riverside first. He and the gelding he’d saddled back at the main barn splashed into the water at top speed.

Back in his rodeo days, Brody’s event had been bronc riding, but he was a fair roper, as well. He looped that lariat high over his head, shot a wordless prayer heavenward and flung.

The rope settled around the calf in a wide circle of hemp, and Brody took up the slack. The yearling beef bawled again and paddled furiously, being too stupid to know he’d already been helped.

The current was strong, though, and it was work, for man and horse, hauling that noisy critter back to the riverbank.

Conner was mainly dry, except for a few splashes on his shirt and the legs of his jeans, and he’d corralled the other calves into a loud bunch, his well-trained cow pony expert at keeping the animals together.

Brody, of course, was soaked, but he laughed as he brought that calf out of the water, out of sheer jubilation.

“Looks to me like your horse is doing all the work,” he called to Conner, swinging down from the saddle to grab hold of the rope and pull that calf along.

“You damn fool,” Conner retorted, messing with his hat while that pony danced back and forth, containing the calves in a prescribed area, “you’ve been away from this ranch—and this river—for too long to go taking chances like that!”

Brody grinned, removed the lasso from around the calf’s neck and prodded it toward the herd.

The poor critter didn’t need much persuading and, for a bit, the cacophony got louder, while the baleful tale was told.

This time, Conner was in the lead as they drove that pitiful little herd back up the trail to high ground. Valentino and Barney waited up top, their hides dry and their tails wagging.

It just went to show, Brody figured, that they were the smart ones in this bunch.

“What is it with you and rivers, anyhow?” Conner grumbled, as they walked their horses slowly along the dirt road curving along the edge of the ridge.

Brody sighed, took off his hat and wrung the water out of it, leaving it a little worse for wear. “First you bitch because I wasn’t here at the crack of dawn, punching cattle. Then, when I get a little wet pulling one out of a river, you complain about that. Damned if I know what, if anything, would make you happy.”

Conner shook his head. “You always were a grandstander,” he accused, though not with much rancor.

“Oh, hell,” Brody groused back, “you’ve just got your tail in a twist because you wanted to show off your roping skills.”

Conner let loose with a slow grin. “I can outrope, outshoot and outwrestle you any day of the week,” he said, “and you know it.”

Brody laughed at that. His clothes felt icy against his skin, and his boots were full of water—again. At this rate, he’d need a new pair every payday. “Keep telling yourself that, little brother, if it’ll make you feel better.”

“You could have roped that calf from the bank,” Conner pointed out, almost grudgingly, after tugging his hat brim down low over his eyes because they were riding straight into the sun. “Instead, you risked your life—and the life of a perfectly good horse—to pull a John Wayne.”

“I was safe the whole time,” Brody replied, “and so was this horse. It was the calf that was in a fix, and I got him out of it. Seems like you ought to be glad about that, in place of griping like some old lady whose just found muddy footprints on her carpet.”

Conner’s jaw tightened and he looked straight ahead, as though herding six yearling calves along a country road required any real degree of concentration. When he did speak up, Conner caught Brody off-guard, as he had a way of doing.

“I reckon Carolyn’s out to find a husband,” he said, with a hint of a smirk lurking in his tone. “And she’s not too picky about her choice, as long as she doesn’t get you.”

The words went right through Brody’s defenses, as they’d no doubt been meant to do. Heat surged up his neck, and he glared over at Conner. The two dogs were traveling between them now, both of them panting but otherwise unfazed by the morning’s adventure.

“If you’re looking for a fight, little brother, you’ve found one,” Brody said. “As far as I’m concerned, we can get down off these horses right now and settle this discussion in the middle of the road.”

Conner smiled without looking at Brody and rode blithely on. The main part of the herd was up ahead, grazing on spring grass.

The stray calves seemed to know that, too, because they picked up speed and quit carrying on like they were being killed.

Conner didn’t speak again until they’d reached the edge of the range, where the view seemed to go on forever, in every direction.

Even with his hackles raised, Brody couldn’t ignore that scenery. The land, the trees, the mountains and the sky, the twisting river—all of it was as much a part of him as his own soul.

Conner raised his hat and swung it in a wide arch, as a greeting to the mounted ranch hands on the far side of that sea of cattle.

Then he turned to look Brody’s way. “You’d better get on home,” he said. “Get out of those wet clothes before you come down with something.”

Brody just sat there, breathing in his surroundings, letting it all saturate him, through and through. “I’m already half-dry,” he argued, “and not the least bit delicate, for your information.”

Conner laughed. “I got to you, didn’t I?” he said, in quiet celebration. “I do like getting a rise out of the great Brody Creed.”

“Why don’t you go to hell?” Brody suggested mildly.

Again, Conner laughed. It seemed there was no end to his amusement that morning. “Are you just going to stand back and watch Carolyn order up a husband online?” he asked, a few moments later.

“She can do what she wants,” Brody bit out, more nettled than he would have cared to admit.

“What do you want, Brody?”

“Me?” Brody asked. “What do I want?”

“That was my question, all right, ” Conner replied, implacable and amused.

“Fine,” Brody answered, nudging his horse into a trot, figuring the dogs had had time to rest up a little by then. “I want you to stay the hell out of my business, that’s what I want.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

IT WAS TIME to take action, Carolyn thought, a wicked little thrill going through her as she reread Brody’s response to her message earlier that day.

Want to go riding with me?

She bit her lower lip.

Brody had asked her to go riding with him, and she was actually considering it. A sad commentary on her level of intelligence, she figured, since she’d been burned, and badly, the last time she played with fire.

And she’d be doing exactly that if she spent any time alone with Brody Creed, no doubt about it.

That was that, then.

She wasn’t getting any younger, and if she ever wanted a home and a husband and children, if she ever wanted to take real family vacations, instead of buying souvenir mugs at garage sales and pretending she’d been somewhere, she had to do something, take matters into her own hands.

Prince Charming, if he’d ever been headed in her direction in the first place, had obviously been detained.

“Carolyn?” Tricia appeared in the office doorway, a merciful if temporary distraction from her troubling thoughts. True to Carolyn’s prediction, they hadn’t had a customer all morning, or since lunch, and the apron orders from the website were wrapped and ready for shipping. “I’m going now. Do you want me to drop the packages off at the post office before I head for home?”

Not wanting Tricia to see that she’d been checking Friendly Faces, Carolyn turned to face her friend with a wide smile, blocking the computer monitor from view.

She hoped.

“That would be great,” she said brightly. Too brightly, probably. “Thanks, Tricia.”

Tricia eyed her curiously, maybe even a little suspiciously. “You’ll be okay working alone for the rest of the day?” she persisted.

I’ve been working alone my whole life. Why would today be any different?

“I’ll be fine,” Carolyn promised cheerfully. “I’m just tying up a few loose ends online, then I’ll go upstairs and start sewing. We’re going to need more aprons soon, and I’d like to finish the gypsy skirt before I die of old age.”

Tricia hesitated a moment, then smiled and left the doorway. “See you tomorrow,” she called, in parting.

“’Bye!” Carolyn sang out, all merry innocence.

Then she turned back to the computer, and Brody’s brief message.

If she agreed to go anywhere with this man, even for a horseback ride, she needed her head examined.

In the first note, he’d asked for a second chance.

A second chance to hurt her, to rip her heart out and stomp on it? Was that what he’d meant? Or was she being too cynical? Suppose the man simply wanted to be friends?

That would make sense, wouldn’t it, given the way they were always running into each other at social functions, both in town and on the Creed ranch? Maybe Brody was as tired of those awkward encounters as she was.

He’d said as much, just the other day, but then he’d gone and kissed her and confused the issue all over again.

And then there was the fact that Carolyn never felt freer, or more alive—or lonelier—than when she was on a horse’s back, riding through wide-open spaces.

To have someone riding alongside her out there on her favorite trails, someone who knew horses and was comfortable around them, well, that would make the experience close to perfect.

Adrenaline jolted through Carolyn’s system when she made the reckless decision: she would accept Brody’s invitation. It was, after all, a horseback ride, not an elopement, or a wild weekend in Vegas, whooping it up in the buff.

Heck, it wasn’t even a date, really.

Still, the idea made her nerves leap around under her skin like tiny Cirque du Soleil performers determined to outdo themselves.

What she needed, as she’d already concluded, was some sort of emotional insurance, protection against Acts of Brody, and there was only one way to get that—by going out with other guys. As many other guys as she reasonably could.

Not only would they insulate her, create and maintain a safe distance between her and Brody, but she also might actually fall for one of them and forget him entirely.

What began as a defense mechanism could turn out to be the kind of true and lasting love she’d always dreamed of finding.

And wouldn’t that be something?

Yes, she would make a definite and honest effort.

She finally entered a reply to Brody’s note, a lackluster okay and flashed it off to his mailbox.

She checked her new messages then.

It was sort of gratifying to know she was popular on Friendly Faces—five different men wanted to get acquainted with her, three from Denver and its close environs and two from right there in Lonesome Bend.

Forehead creased with the effort to place the pair of locals, Carolyn studied their photos, one after the other, and came up with no clear recollection of either of them.

Both were moderately attractive, in their thirties.

Richard was tall, if his bio could be believed—wasn’t she living proof that people stretched the truth, calling herself Carol?—with dark hair and brown eyes. He was a technical writer, divorced, with no children, and he’d moved to Lonesome Bend only a month before. Since he worked at home, he hadn’t made many friends.

He liked to cook, loved dogs, but was violently allergic to cats.

Carolyn, mindful of Winston, gently dispatched Richard to the recycle bin.

The other candidate was named Ben, and he, like Richard, was a fairly recent transplant to the community. He was a widower, with an appealing smile, a nine-year-old daughter and a job that took him all over the western states, fighting forest fires.

He looked like a nice guy, which didn’t mean for one second that he couldn’t have made the whole story up, invented the daughter, the adventurous career, the dead wife. Stranger things had happened, especially when it came to online dating.

Still, if she was going to have any chance at all against Brody Creed and his many questionable charms, assuming he even meant to turn that effortless dazzle on her anyway, she had to do something, get the proverbial ball rolling, here.

After drawing and releasing a very deep breath, Carolyn responded to Ben’s friendly inquiry with a short, chatty missive of her own. Not wanting to give away too much information—Lonesome Bend was, after all, a small town—she chose her answers carefully.

Ben’s response was immediate. Did the man have nothing better to do than hover over his computer, waiting for his trial membership in Friendly Faces to pay off big?

Hi, Carol, he’d written. Nice to hear from you. So to speak.

Carolyn reminded herself that what she was doing could conceivably be described as hovering, and she certainly had better things to do, so she’d better get off her high horse, and answered, I like your picture.

I like that you didn’t bail out on your daughter after your wife died.

If you even have a daughter.

If there isn’t a current wife, very much alive, innocently cooking your favorite meal or ironing one of your shirts at this very moment, unaware that you’re flirting with other women online.

Carolyn reined in her imagination then, but it wasn’t easy, and she didn’t know how long she could keep it from running wild again.

I like yours, too, Ben responded. I’m new at this computer-dating thing. How about you?

Brand-new, Carolyn confirmed. It’s awkward.

Tell me about it, Ben answered.

Carolyn drew another deep breath, rubbed the palms of her hands together. What brought you to Lonesome Bend?

That seemed innocuous enough.

I wanted to raise Ellie in a small town, and my late wife’s family lives nearby.

That’s nice, Ben. Where did you live before?

Down in L.A. I’m not scared of a wildfire, but the traffic on the 405 is another matter, especially when Ellie’s in the car.

Carolyn smiled. Ben was a conscientious father, and he had a sense of humor. She began to warm up to the conversation a little, though she was still wary of the man. I’m not crazy about crowded freeways myself, she replied.

Ben came back right away with Have you always lived in Lonesome Bend?

Carolyn hesitated. I came here eight years ago, she wrote. Before that, I traveled a lot.

You’re mysterious, Ben replied, adding a winking-face icon.

Hardly, Carolyn typed. I’m not a woman with a past or anything exciting like that.

Unless, of course, my week-long, red-hot affair with Brody Creed makes me a woman with a past.

The thought of Brody, even in that context, gave Carolyn a twinge of guilt, but she shook it off quickly. It wasn’t as if she was cheating on him, for heaven’s sake.

So why did it feel that way?

Ellie just came in, Ben told her, and she’s trying to get my attention, so I’d better find out what’s up. Hope we can chat again soon, Carol.

Me, too, Carolyn wrote in response.

Liar, accused the voice in her head, the one she was always telling to shut up. You’re interested in using this guy to keep Brody at arms’ length, nothing else. And, admit it, Ben’s other main attraction is that he has a young daughter.

“Shut up,” Carolyn told the voice.

Then she logged off, wrote a hasty note for any customer who might happen by and taped it to the front door.

Working upstairs today. Just ring the bell, and I’ll be right down to let you in, she’d printed, in large letters.

Always better off when she was busy, Carolyn felt pretty chipper as she turned the handle on the dead bolt and headed for the staircase.

Winston, who seemed to be in an unusually circumspect mood that day, scampered after her and, when she entered the kitchen, leaped gracefully onto his usual lookout perch, the windowsill.

Carolyn fussed over him a little, scratching behind his ears and nuzzling his silky scruff once, and washed her hands at the sink, prior to fixing them both lunch.

Winston had his beloved half tin of water-packed sardines, eating off a chipped china saucer right there on the windowsill, while Carolyn nibbled her way through a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, breaking all the food rules by foregoing a plate and standing up while she ate.

Actually, she could have argued that there were sensible reasons for her choice.

Number one, her sewing machine was on the table, and she’d be working there in a little while, and a stray drop of jelly might stain a piece of fabric. Furthermore, who really ate sandwiches off a plate?

In any case, the sandwich was soon gone, rendering the whole subject moot. Carolyn washed her hands again, fetched the gypsy skirt from the hook on the other side of her bedroom door and took a few sweet moments just to admire the creation.

It really was gorgeous, she thought, loving the way the gossamer ribbons shimmered and shifted. The reds, golds, blues and greens seemed to ripple, like liquid light.

Not for the first time, Carolyn was seized by a crazy urge to keep that skirt, alter it to fit her own figure and never let it go. She held it close against her chest for a few moments, as though prepared to defend it against a crazed mob.

“You’re being silly,” she murmured aloud.

Still, the skirt was so pretty, almost animate with all that subtle motion going on, a true work of art. Her art, born of her dreams and her imagination and all the fairy-tale hopes she’d cherished as a lonely child.

She ached to hold on to this one piece, this glorious thing woven with strands spun in the deepest places of her own heart.

Practicality took over quickly.

She’d been over this with herself before, hadn’t she? A garment like this should be worn, seen, enjoyed. Where would she, Carolyn Simmons of Lonesome Bend, Colorado, wear such a thing?

Horseback riding?

Sure, there were parties now and then, and she was always invited, but the occasions were never formal—people held cookouts in their backyards, and bingo was big on Wednesday evenings, in the basement of the Moose Lodge, and every year, on the weekend closest to the Fourth of July, there was an amateur rodeo and a visiting carnival.

The closest Lonesome Bend ever got to glamour was when the lodge sponsored a dance the third Saturday of every other month. The music was live, always country-western, and good enough that people came all the way from Denver to dance to it.

Most of the women wore jeans to the gathering, with a slightly fancier shirt than they might ordinarily don, and they fussed with their hair and makeup, too, but that was pretty much the extent of it.

Carolyn would have looked like a fool, just about anywhere she ever went, showing up in that skirt.

She sighed, put the skirt back on its hanger and then back on the hook behind the bedroom door. She’d finish it another day, when she wasn’t feeling so much like Cinderella left behind to sweep floors on the night of the prince’s ball.

Resolutely, she brewed a cup of herbal tea and got out a stack of fabric purchased on a recent shopping trip to Denver. By then, she’d made so many aprons—frilly ones, simple ones, ones for kids as well as adults—that she no longer needed to measure.

She chose a bluish-lavender calico from the pile, smiling at the small floral print and the tactile pleasure of crisp and colorful cloth ready to be made up into something useful. She decided to stick with the retro designs that sold so well through the online version of the shop and pictured the end result in her mind’s eye.

Then, after eyeballing the fabric once again, Carolyn took up her sewing shears and began to cut.

Sewing, like riding horses, always consumed her, drew her in, made her forget her worries for a while. She got lost in it, in a good way, and invariably came away refreshed rather than fatigued.

The apron came together in no time, a perky, beruffled thing with lace trim stitched to the pockets.

Delighted, Carolyn set it aside, to be pressed later, and delved into her fabric stash again. This time she chose a heavier weight cotton, black and tan checks with little red flowers occupying alternate squares.

She went with retro again, savoring the whir of the small motor, the flash of the flying needle and the familiar scents of fabric sizing and sewing machine oil.

When the doorbell rang downstairs, just as Carolyn was finishing up apron number two, she was so startled by the sound, ordinary as it was, that she jumped and nearly knocked over her forgotten cup of tea, now gone cold.

She glanced at the clock above the stove—three forty-five in the afternoon, already?—and, remembering the note she’d stuck to the front door, in case some prospective shopper happened by, shouted from the top of the inside staircase, “Coming!”

The bell rang again, more insistently this time.

Skipping the normal protocol by not looking out one of the flanking windows first, Carolyn opened the door.

Brody was standing on the porch, his expression so grim that Carolyn felt alarmed, thinking Tricia had gone into premature labor or someone had been in an accident.

She gulped, fumbled with the hook on the screen door that separated them. Through the mesh, she noted Brody’s wrinkled clothes, mussed hair and disturbing countenance.

“Brody...what—?”

He’d taken off his hat at some point, and now he slapped it once against his right thigh. “Can I come in?” he bit out. Then, almost grudgingly, “Please?”

Carolyn’s concern eased up a little then, as she realized Brody was frustrated—maybe even angry—but not sad, as he surely would have been if he were bearing bad news.

She gave one slightly abrupt nod instead of speaking, not trusting herself to be civil now that Brody’s irritation had sparked and spread to her, like wildfire racing over tinder-dry grass.

Once the door was open, Brody practically stormed over the threshold, giving Carolyn the immediately infuriating impression that if she didn’t get out of his way, she’d be run over.

So she stood her ground, and that proved to be a less than brilliant choice, because they collided and the whoosh of invisible things reaching flash point was nearly audible.

“What?” Carolyn demanded, and found herself flushing.

His nose was half an inch from hers, if that, and fierce blue flames burned in his eyes, and his words, though quiet, struck her like stones. “I. Don’t. Like. Games.”

Carolyn felt several things then, not the least of which was a slow-building rage, but there was a good bit of confusion in the mix, too, and a strange, soft, scary kind of excitement.

“What are you talking about?” she asked tartly. It would have been prudent, she supposed, to take a step or two backward, out of Brody’s force field, but for some reason, she couldn’t move.

“I’m talking,” Brody all but growled, after tossing his hat in the general direction of the antique coat tree that dominated the entryway, “about this whole Friendly Faces thing. You trying to scare up a husband online. It’s all wrong—”

Carolyn’s temper, mostly under control before, flared up. “Wrong?” she repeated dangerously.

Brody sighed, but he was still putting out the same officious vibes. “Okay, maybe wrong wasn’t the best word,” he said.

“Maybe it wasn’t,” Carolyn replied succinctly, folding her arms and digging in her heels.

“I hate to break this to you,” Brody spouted, leaning in again—she kind of liked it when he did that, even though it was infuriating—“but you can’t just go around trusting people you’ve never even met. Men tell lies, Carolyn.”

Carolyn widened her eyes in mock surprise. “Really?” she trilled, as though she just couldn’t conceive of the possibility.

She saw his jaws clamp down, watched with some satisfaction as he relaxed them by a visible effort.

“Men tell lies,” she repeated, amazed. Then she stabbed a finger into his chest and said, “Oh, yes, that’s right, Brody. I remember now. You lied to me, through your perfect white teeth!”

“I did not lie to you,” Brody lied.

“Oh, no? You said you cared about me—you wanted to stay and make things right with your family. Settle down and start a family. And then you left, vanished, flew the coop!” Carolyn realized she was perilously close to tears, and she was damned if she’d cry in front of the man who had broken her heart so badly that even after more than seven years, she wasn’t over it.

So she turned away from Brody, not wanting him to see her face.

He caught hold of her shoulder, his grasp firm but not hard enough to hurt, and made her look at him again.

“I meant everything I said to you, Carolyn,” he said evenly.

He had not, she recalled, with a terrible clarity, said he loved her. Not in words, anyway.

“But then something came up, as you put it in that note you left me, and you hit the road and left me alone to wonder what I did wrong,” Carolyn accused, in an angry whisper.

Getting mad, in her opinion, was a lot better than bursting into tears. And it wasn’t just Brody she was furious with. She blamed herself most of all, for being gullible, for loving and trusting the wrong man and maybe missing out on the right one because she’d wasted all this time loving him. Because she’d so wanted to believe what Brody told her. What his body told hers.

“I regret leaving like I did,” Brody said. “But I had to go. I flat-out didn’t have a choice, under the circumstances.”

“And what would those circumstances be?” Carolyn asked archly. “Another bronc to ride? Another buckle to win? Or was it just that some formerly reluctant cowgirl wannabe was willing to go to bed with you?”

Brody closed his eyes for a moment. He looked pale, like a man in pain, but when he opened them again, the frustration was back. “If that’s the kind of person you think I am,” he snapped, “then it seems to me you ought to be glad I took off and saved you all the trouble of putting up with me!”

“Who says I wasn’t glad?” Carolyn demanded. Who was this hysterical person, speaking through her? Was she possessed?

“You’re not going to listen to one damn thing I say, are you?” Brody shot back.

“No,” Carolyn replied briskly. “Probably not.”

“Fine!” Brody barked.

“Fine,” Carolyn agreed.

“Reoww!” added Winston, from the top of the stairs. His hackles were up and his tail was all bushed out and he looked ready to pounce.

On Brody.

Guard-cat on duty.

“It’s all right, Winston,” Carolyn told the fractious feline. “Mr. Creed is just about to leave.”

Brody made a snorting sound, full of contempt, swiveled around and retrieved his hat from the floor next to the coat tree, where he’d flung it earlier.

He wrenched open the front door, looked back at Carolyn and growled, “We’re still going on that horseback ride.”

Carolyn opened her mouth to protest, but something made her close it without saying the inflammatory thing that sprang to her mind. She didn’t like to use bad language if she could avoid it.

“You agreed and that’s that,” Brody reminded her tersely. “A deal is a deal.”

With that, he was gone.

The door of Natty McCall’s gracious old house closed hard behind him.

Carolyn got as far as the stairs before plunking herself down on the third step from the bottom, shoving her hands into her hair and uttering a strangled cry of pure, helpless aggravation.

Winston, having pussyfooted down the stairs, brushed against her side, purring.

Carolyn gave a bitter little laugh and swept the animal onto her lap, cuddling him close and burying her face in the lush fur at the back of his neck.

Being a cat, and therefore independent, he immediately squirmed free, leaped over two steps to stand, disgruntled, on the entryway floor, looking up at her in frank disapproval, tail twitching.

“You’ve decided to like Brody Creed after all, haven’t you?” Carolyn joked ruefully, getting to her feet. “You’ve gone over to the dark side.”

“Reow,” said Winston, indignantly.

Carolyn made her way upstairs, determined not to let the set-to with Brody ruin what remained of the day. She had tea to brew—that would settle her nerves—and aprons to sew for the website and the shop, a life to get on with, damn it.

Instead of doing either of those things right away, though, Carolyn went instead to her laptop.

She turned it on and waited, tapping one foot.

Practically the moment the computer connected to the internet, the machine chimed, “Somebody likes your picture!”

“Good,” Carolyn said.

While she’d been offline, six more men had taken a shine to her—or to Carol, her recently adopted persona, anyway—and while five of them were definite rejects, the sixth was a contender, right from the instant Carolyn saw his photo.

His name was Slade Barlow, and he hailed from a town called Parable, up in Montana. For the time being, he lived in Denver. Like Ben, the firefighter, he was a widower, with a child. His eleven-year-old-son, Brendan, attended a boarding school there in Colorado but spent weekends and holidays with him.

“Hmm,” Carolyn said aloud, clicking on the response link. Tell me about Brendan, she typed into the message box.

Slade apparently wasn’t online, but Ben was, as she soon learned, when he popped up with a smiley face and a hello.

Carolyn, jittery but determined, responded with a hello of her own.

How about meeting me for a cup of coffee? he asked. Page After Page Book Store, on Main Street, five o’clock this afternoon?

Carolyn’s first impulse was to shy away, but her most recent run-in with Brody was fresh in her mind, too. The nerve of the man, showing up at her home and place of business the way he had, and announcing that she would go horseback riding with him, simply because she’d made the mistake of agreeing to his invitation.

She consulted the stove clock, saw that it was four-thirty.

She would, she decided, show Brody Creed that he couldn’t go around dictating things, like he was the king of the world, or something.

Okay, she wrote. Page After Page, five o’clock. How will we recognize each other?

Ben replied with a jovial LOL—laugh out loud—and another of those winking icons he seemed to favor. I look just like my profile photo, he responded. Hopefully, so do you.

Right, Carolyn answered. Was there a computer icon for scared to death? See you there.

Half an hour later, having refreshed her makeup and let down her hair, Carolyn arrived at Page After Page. The bookstore was, at least, familiar territory—she spent a lot of her free time there, nursing a medium latte and choosing her reading matter with care.

She spotted Ben right away, sitting at a corner table in the bookstore coffee shop, a book open before him.

As advertised, he looked like his picture. He was a little shorter than she’d expected, but well-built, with a quick smile, curly light brown hair and warm hazel eyes that smiled when he spotted her.

“Carol?” he asked, standing up.

Good manners, then.

Guilt speared Carolyn’s overactive conscience. “Actually,” she said, approaching his table slowly, “my name is Carolyn, not Carol.”

He laughed, revealing a healthy set of very white teeth, extending one arm for a handshake. He wore jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt in a dusty shade of blue and an air of easy confidence. “And mine is Bill, not Ben.”

The confession put Carolyn at ease—mostly. She managed a shaky smile and sat down in the second chair at Ben’s—Bill’s—table. “Do you really have a nine-year-old daughter named Ellie?” she asked.

“Yes,” Bill replied, sitting only when Carolyn was settled in her own chair. “Do you really work in a bank, have two dogs and like to bowl?”

“No,” Carolyn admitted, coloring a little. “I lied about my job, my hobbies and my pets. Is that a deal-breaker?”

Bill chuckled. His eyes were so warm, dancing in his tanned face.

And as attractive as he was, he wasn’t Brody.

Too bad.

“What’s the truth about you, Carol—yn?” he asked, smiling.

“I sew a lot, I look after a friend’s cat and I’m in business with a friend,” Carolyn confessed, after a few moments of recovery. She blushed. “And I can’t remember the last time I was so nervous.”

Ben—Bill—smiled. “I don’t sew, I’m strictly a dog-person and I fight fires for a living, just as I said in my bio. That said, I’m amazed, because despite all the prevarications, you look just like your picture. You’re beautiful, Carolyn.”

At that, the blush burned in Carolyn’s face. She looked down. “Flatterer,” she said.

Bill smiled. “What can I get you?” he asked.

“I beg your pardon?” Carolyn countered, a beat behind.

“Coffee?” Bill said, grinning. “Latte? Café Americano? Espresso with a double-shot of what-the-hell-am-I-doing-here?”

Finally, Carolyn relaxed. A little. “Latte,” she said. “Nonfat, please.”

Bill smiled, nodded, rose and went to the counter to order a nonfat latte.

Carolyn, desperate for something to do in the meantime, checked out the book he’d been reading when she approached.

You could tell a lot about a person by what they liked to read.

A Single Father’s Guide to Communication with a Preteen Girl.

Well, Carolyn thought, trust her to meet up with a guy who was both sensitive and masculine after she’d been spoiled for functional relationships by Brody Creed.

Presently, Bill returned with her latte, looking pleasantly rueful. “Confession time,” he said, with a sigh, as he sat down again. “I’m on the rebound, Carol—Carolyn. I didn’t mention that in my profile.”

“No,” Carolyn said, oddly relieved. She reached for her latte, took a sip. It was very hot. “You didn’t.”

“Her name,” Bill told her, “is Angela. We’re all wrong for each other.”

Carolyn considered the foam on her latte for a long moment. “His name is Brody,” she said. “Two people were never more mismatched than the two of us.”

A silence fell.

“Well, then,” Bill finally said. “We have something in common, don’t we?”

“Are you in love?” Carolyn asked, after a very long time and a lot of latte. “With Angela, I mean?”

“I don’t know,” Bill replied. “One minute, I want to spend the rest of my life with the woman, the next, I’d just as soon join the Foreign Legion or jump off the Empire State Building.”

Carolyn wanted to cry. She also wanted to laugh. “Love sucks,” she said, raising her latte cup. Bill touched his cup to hers.

“Amen,” he said. “Love definitely sucks.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

IF CAROLYN HAD had any say as to whom she fell in love with, she would definitely have chosen Bill Venable, brave fighter of forest fires, devoted father of a nine-year-old daughter, all-around good-looking hunk of a guy.

Alas, she had no such influence in an unpredictable universe, but she knew early on that she’d found a valuable ally in the man who bought her a latte.

“So, tell me more about Angela,” she said, stirring her latte and avoiding Bill’s gaze. “Does she live in Lonesome Bend?”

Bill cleared his throat, looked away, looked back. Finally nodded. “She teaches third grade at the elementary school,” he said.

“I see,” Carolyn answered, without guilt, because in many ways, she did see. “So what’s the problem between the two of you?”

“She doesn’t like my job,” Bill answered, after pondering a while. “Firefighting, I mean. Too dangerous, keeps me away from home too much, et cetera.”

“Yikes,” Carolyn observed. “How does Ellie feel about Angela?”

“She adores her,” Bill admitted. “And the reverse is true. Ellie thinks Angela would make the perfect stepmother. It’s a mutual admiration society with two members. Trust me, this is not my daughter’s usual reaction to the women I date.”

“So the fundamental problem is your job?” Carolyn inquired, employing a tactful tone. While she understood Bill’s dedication to his work, she sympathized with Angela, too. Love was risky enough, without one partner putting his life on the line on a regular basis.

Bill thrust out a sigh. “Yeah,” he said.

“Maybe you could look into another kind of career,” Carolyn suggested, already knowing what his answer would be.

Bill shook his very attractive head. Too bad he didn’t arouse primitive instincts in Carolyn the way Brody did, because he was seriously cute. “I love what I do,” he replied. “Flying an airplane. Putting out fires. It is a definite high.”

“But...dangerous,” Carolyn said.

“Well,” Bill affirmed, “yes. But I’d go crazy doing anything else. The boredom—” He fell silent again, his expression beleaguered. Obviously, he’d been over this ground a lot, with Angela and within the confines of his own head.

Carolyn waited a beat, then went ahead and butted into a situation that wasn’t any of her darn fool business in the first place. “What about your daughter, Bill?” she asked gently. “How does Ellie factor into this whole job thing?”

He sighed, shook his head again, aimed for a smile but missed. “I love that child with all my heart, and I want to do what’s best for her,” he said. “Keep her safe and happy and healthy. Raise her to be a strong woman, capable of making her own choices and taking care of herself and, if it comes to that, supporting a couple of kids on her own. But—”

Again, Bill lapsed into pensive silence.

“But?” Carolyn prompted quietly, after giving him a few moments to collect his thoughts.

“But,” Bill responded, managing a faint grin, “like I said before, I love what I do. Doesn’t that matter, too? And what kind of example would I be setting for Ellie if I took the easy route, tried to please everybody but myself?”

Carolyn toyed with her cup, raising and lowering her shoulders slightly in an I-don’t-know kind of gesture. It was remarkable, connecting so quickly with another person—a male person, and someone she hadn’t known existed until she signed on at Friendly Faces.

They were so simpatico, she and Bill, that anyone looking on would probably have thought they’d been close friends for years.

Too bad there was no buzzing charge, no zap, between them, like there was between herself and Brody and, it was a sure bet, between Bill and his Angela.

“No,” she said, in belated response to his question. “Of course you can’t live to please other people, not if you hope to be happy, anyhow.” Carolyn paused before asking, “Does Ellie worry about you, when you’re away fighting fires, I mean?”

Bill gave a raspy chuckle. “Probably,” he acknowledged. “Ellie never lets on that she’s scared something might happen to me—she just tells me to be careful. The thing is, even though she’s only nine, she seems to get where I’m coming from better than Angela does.”

Carolyn took a sip of her coffee, which was finally cool enough to drink without burning her tongue. Now, she thought, with the inevitable rush of reluctance, it was her turn to open up.

Sure enough, Bill ducked his head to one side and a quizzical little quirk tugged at the corner of his mouth. “You’re a beautiful woman, Carolyn,” he said. “Half the men in the county, if not the state, must be trying to catch your eye. What prompted you to sign up with an online dating service?”

“Curiosity?” Carolyn speculated, blushing a little.

He smiled, settled back in his chair, watching her. “Are you looking for friends, a good time, or a partner for life?” he asked.

There was nothing offensive in his tone or manner, and he positively radiated sincerity. Bottom line, Bill was easy to talk to, perhaps because he was a virtual stranger and, therefore, the two of them had no issues, no shared baggage, nothing to get in the way of friendship.

“It’s not a new story,” she replied, quietly miserable. “I fell for the wrong man, I got hurt—fill in the blanks and you’ll probably have it just about right.”

Bill arched an eyebrow, waited. On top of everything else working in his favor, the man was a good listener. And all she could drum up was a walloping case of like.

He was the big brother she’d never had.

The pal.

And he wasn’t even gay, for Pete’s sake.

Carolyn squirmed on her chair, not sure how much more she ought to say. This was their first meeting, after all, and as genuine as Bill Venable seemed, it certainly wasn’t out of the realm of possibility that she was totally, completely, absolutely wrong about him.

It had happened before, hadn’t it?

Once, she’d been convinced that she knew Brody Creed, through and through. After a long string of shallow, going-nowhere-fast relationships, she’d believed in him, been convinced he was The One, taken the things he said and did at face value, only to be burned in the back draft of all that passion when he showed his true colors and lit out.

And there was that other lapse in judgment, too—when she’d thought she’d hit her stride by becoming a nanny. She’d trusted her movie-star boss implicitly, admired his down-to-earth manner, his apparent devotion to his wife and small daughter.

Until he’d come on to her, forcing her to abandon a job—and a child—she’d loved.

Carolyn closed her eyes, remembering—pummeled by—the rearview mirror image of little Storm running behind her car, screaming for her to come back.

Come back.

Without saying a word, Bill reached across the table and took her hand in a brotherly way. Squeezed it lightly.

Carolyn opened her eyes again, smiled weakly. Enough, she decided, was enough. For now, anyway.

“I should be getting home,” she said, bending to fumble under the table for her purse. “My cat will be wondering where I am.”

Bill sighed, glanced at his watch and nodded. “I’m sure Ellie’s perfectly happy at her grandparents’ house,” he said agreeably, “but it’ll be suppertime soon, and when I’m in town, I try to make sure we’re both sitting at the same table for at least one meal a day.”

“That’s nice,” Carolyn said, feeling awkward now.

Supper, for her, was usually a lonesome affair, something she did to stay alive.

She and Bill rose from their chairs at the same moment.

He walked her to the door, opened it for her, waited until she stepped out onto the sidewalk.

It was a balmy May evening, shot through with the first faint lavender tinges of twilight, and there were lots of people out and about, just strolling, or talking to each other under streetlamps that would come on soon, glad to be outdoors.

Winter was long in Lonesome Bend, and good weather was not only savored, it was also celebrated.

Friends smiled and waved, their expressions both kindly and curious as they took note of Carolyn’s escort, a man few, if any of them, actually knew.

By the time she went to bed that night, she thought, with a little smile, word would be all over town. Carolyn Simmons was seeing someone, and that someone wasn’t Brody Creed.

Since her car was parked on the street, in plain view of at least a dozen fine citizens, she felt no compunction about letting Bill walk her to it and open the door for her.

“I had a great time,” he said, his gaze direct as he waited for her to get settled behind the wheel.

“Me, too,” Carolyn said, fastening her seat belt and sticking her key into the ignition.

“Friends?” he asked, with a wry grin.

“Friends,” Carolyn agreed.

Bill stepped back, waved and watched from the sidewalk as she drove away.

* * *

“WHO IS HE?” Tricia demanded eagerly, when she entered the shop the next morning.

She hadn’t even put away her purse yet.

Carolyn, smiling to herself, pretended a keen interest in unpacking the most recent delivery of goat-milk soap.

“And don’t say you don’t know what I’m talking about,” Tricia warned, waggling a finger. Her eyes sparkled with mischievous affection. “Three different people called the ranch last night to ask about the hunk you had coffee with.”

Carolyn chuckled. “His name is Bill Venable,” she said, “and he fights forest fires for a living. Flies one of those airplanes that spray chemicals on the hot spots.”

“Like in that old Richard Dreyfuss movie?” Tricia asked. She was having a hard time bending far enough to stow her purse on its usual under-the-counter shelf. The baby bump seemed to get visibly bigger from one day to the next. “What was it called?” She stopped to stretch her back, her hands resting on either side of what had once been her waist. “I remember. It was Always. And Dreyfuss’s character went out in a blaze of glory, didn’t he?”

“I don’t recall,” Carolyn lied, still stacking neatly wrapped bars of soap on the counter. The truth was, being a classic movie buff, she’d long since picked up on the similarities.

“Did you meet him through that website?” Tricia persisted. “Friendly Faces?”

“Yes,” Carolyn said, making a production of removing the now-empty carton the soap had arrived in and heading toward the storage room. It was company policy to recycle cardboard boxes, among other things.

Tricia was waiting when she came back. “Do you like him? Are you going to see him again?”

Carolyn laughed. “Yes, I like him,” she said, with exaggerated patience, “and I wouldn’t be surprised if he asked me out at some point.”

Tricia’s beautiful blue eyes widened. It was hard to tell if she was excited or alarmed by the prospect.

Probably, she was both.

“Will you go? If he does ask you, I mean?”

“I haven’t really decided,” Carolyn said, with breezy nonchalance. She was looking up at the batik of the Weaver now, trying to absorb some of its serenity. “I must say, I was pleasantly surprised by how normal Bill turned out to be.”

“Normal,” Tricia echoed, her tone making it clear that she wasn’t planning on dropping the subject anytime soon. “What did you expect him to be like, Carolyn?”

Carolyn tilted her head to one side, studying the Weaver, wishing she could afford to buy the piece and keep it forever. There was something so soothing about the thing, about the figure of a woman drawn with indistinct lines, strokes of color and shapes that were hardly more than suggested.

“Carolyn?” Tricia persisted, standing beside her now, giving her a poke with one elbow. Since just about everything on Tricia’s body was rounded into soft curves, it didn’t hurt. “Talk to me.”

Carolyn sighed and turned to look at her friend. “I guess I thought there was the outside chance he might be another Ted Bundy,” she confessed.

Tricia rolled her eyes, and then laughed, and then looked serious, all in the space of a few seconds. “Brody isn’t going to like this one bit,” she said. Tricia wasn’t normally given to mood swings, but there were a lot of hormones splashing around in there.

A flash of...something—resentment? Triumph?—plucked at Carolyn’s heartstrings. “Too bad for Brody,” she replied.

Tricia studied her face. “Unless, of course, that’s exactly why you’re thinking about going out with this Bill person. To make Brody jealous.”

Carolyn’s mouth dropped open. She felt an indignant sting race through her, even as she recognized a disturbing quality of truth to Tricia’s words. She hadn’t set out to stir up Brody’s envy, not consciously anyway, but there was no denying, in retrospect, that the idea gave her a delicious little thrill.

She gasped, horrified by the insight, and put a hand to her mouth.

Tricia smiled. “Oh, relax,” she said, patting Carolyn’s upper arm briefly, in a demonstration of feminine solidarity. “I know your intentions were honorable.” She paused, looked speculative again. “But what were your intentions, exactly?” she asked, her tone and expression kind.

Carolyn sighed, her eyes burned and she swallowed hard before answering, in a small voice, “I just want to—to get over Brody Creed. Move on. Have a home and a family of my own.”

Tricia gave her a quick, impulsive hug. Awkward business, with that pumpkin-shaped tummy of hers. “Listen to yourself, Carolyn,” she said. “You want to get over Brody? You still care for him. Doesn’t that mean something?”

“It means I’m dysfunctional,” Carolyn replied briskly, swiping at her cheeks with the back of one hand even though, as far as she knew, she hadn’t actually started to cry. “Codependent, a basket case—whatever.”

“Poppycock,” Tricia said, with a dismissive wave. “Dysfunctional. Codependent. Those are just labels, buzzwords, and in my opinion they are overused in our society. You’re a smart, strong, talented woman, Carolyn, not some psychological train wreck of a person. Give yourself a little credit, will you?”

Carolyn gave a wavering smile. “And you, Tricia Creed, are a very good friend.”

“I’m also right,” Tricia said, smiling back.

Having tacitly agreed on that, they both went to work then.

After an hour or so, two vanloads of middle-aged women sporting red hats and purple outfits showed up, and a shopping frenzy ensued.

One of the ladies seemed particularly taken with the Weaver. “That’s lovely,” she said, looking up at the batik.

Carolyn, busy ringing up purchases at the register, heard the remark even over the cheerful din of oohs and ahhs bubbling up around the shop as the other red-hats examined the merchandise.

So, apparently, did Tricia.

A glance flew between her and Carolyn.

“Isn’t it?” Tricia said, edging over to stand alongside the woman who’d spoken first.

“I can’t see the price from here,” the woman said.

“I’m afraid the piece is already spoken for,” Tricia replied quickly, a pink flush rising to her cheeks. “The artist is very prolific, though. I’d be glad to give you her contact information if you’d consider commissioning something—?”

Carolyn frowned. The Weaver was spoken for? Since when?

Several people had admired the batik, but they’d all sighed and shaken their heads when they were told how much it cost.

Tricia gave her another look, as if she thought Carolyn might contradict her.

Carolyn pointedly returned her friend’s gaze, though she didn’t speak up. She simply turned her attention back to the task at hand.

It was almost lunchtime when the red-hat ladies climbed into their vans and left, leaving the shop pleasantly denuded.

Carolyn was about to ask Tricia why she’d said the batik was sold when the shop door opened again, and Conner strode in, with Brody right behind him.

Carolyn’s breath caught, though she tried to look as though she hadn’t noticed the man.

Not noticing Brody, she reflected, was like not noticing a meteor big enough to wipe out the dinosaurs.

Still, she had to try. It was a matter of principle.

Conner greeted Tricia with a resounding kiss and then picked her up and swung her around once, in a small, gentle circle, making her laugh ring out like church bells on Easter morning.

Distracted by these goings-on, Carolyn didn’t see Brody approach.

He was just there, all of a sudden, standing on the other side of the counter.

Carolyn started; every last nerve in her body jumped.

Brody favored her with a slow, unperturbed smile. Either he hadn’t heard the gossip about her coffee date with Bill—this option seemed highly unlikely given the nature of small towns—or he simply didn’t care.

“That picture up there,” he said, indicating the Weaver with a motion of one thumb. “Is that one of Primrose Sullivan’s?”

Carolyn cleared her throat, in a way she hoped was subtle, and nodded. “Yes, but—”

Tricia sidled over. Bumped against Brody from one side. “Are you in the market for art?” she asked.

Conner, standing a few feet away, stared at his wife with an expression of baffled wonder on his handsome face. Clearly, to him at least, Tricia was a brilliantly colored butterfly in a black-and-white world.

“I might be,” Brody said. “A lot of wall space is going to need filling, once my house is finished.”

Carolyn reminded herself to breathe. Told her heart to start beating again, pronto, and no more of that Bambi-on-ice business. After all, this was a perfectly ordinary conversation.

“Primrose would be thrilled if the Weaver found a home right here in Lonesome Bend,” Tricia said brightly. “You know how sentimental she is.”

Carolyn frowned at her business partner, confused. “Didn’t you say it was already spoken for? The Weaver, I mean?”

Tricia smiled. “I was lying,” she said, with no apparent qualms whatsoever.

Carolyn opened her mouth, closed it again. Frowned harder.

Brody, meanwhile, got out his wallet, extracted a credit card and set it down on the counter. “I’ll take it,” he said.

“Don’t you want to know how much it costs first?” Carolyn asked.

He gave her that smile again. She was powerless against that smile.

Did Brody know that?

“I reckon I can probably afford it,” he said easily.

Carolyn blushed, embarrassed and clueless when it came to the reason. “Okay,” she said, and stated the price.

Brody didn’t bat an eye. He glanced down at his credit card, and Carolyn recovered enough to swipe it through the machine and push the necessary sequence of buttons.

Conner and Tricia were in the kitchen by then. Carolyn heard their voices, and the sounds of lunch being assembled.

The credit-card machine spit out a slip, and Brody signed it.

“I’ll just get the ladder,” Carolyn began nervously. “I can have the picture down off the wall and wrapped in no time.”

Brody hadn’t moved, after putting away his card and wallet. “We’re on horseback,” he said.

Carolyn blinked. “You’re what?”

“Conner and I,” Brody said, and she could feel his grin like sunshine against her skin, even though she was still being very careful not to look at him directly. “We rode our horses into town.”

“Why?”

He chuckled, and she had to look at him then. He drew her eyes the way a magnet draws metal shavings. “It’s what cowboys do,” he said simply.

“Oh,” Carolyn said, wishing she could shrink, like Wonderland’s Alice after a swig from the drink-me bottle, or just fall down any old rabbit hole.

“It would be sort of awkward, hauling that big picture over to my place on a horse, so I’m hoping you’ll be so kind as to deliver it for me.”

She stiffened her spine. Raised her chin. “I’m sure Tricia would be happy to drop it off for you,” she said.

“She can’t be carrying heavy things in her condition,” Brody answered, with a faint note of disapproval in his voice. He looked around. “Where’s that ladder?”

Carolyn told him where the ladder was, and he went and fetched it.

He came straight back, jackknifed that ladder open with a purposeful squeak of metal hinges and climbed nimbly up to the top rung. Lifted the framed batik off its hook and brought it down when he descended, the muscles in his back moving gracefully beneath the fabric of his shirt.

Blood pulsed in Carolyn’s ears.

Tricia and Conner were laughing now, their joy in life and in each other bursting out of them between silences. She heard the fridge door open and close, and plates clattering, as if from some great distance, or from fathoms under the sea.

Carefully, almost reverently in fact, Brody laid the Weaver on the round table where Carolyn and Tricia normally displayed handmade papers. She watched his face as he studied the image and knew it would hang in his new house one day soon, a thing he was proud to own.

“You’ll bring it by the lodge, then?” he asked, his voice hoarse, as if he’d gone a long time without speaking.

“You could always stop by with your truck,” Carolyn said, because it seemed important—if pointless—to stand up to him.

“I could,” Brody agreed. “But I’d like to show you my house, and you did seem taken with Moonshine’s friendly face. Here’s your chance to say howdy to him in person.”

“Moonshine?”

“My horse,” Brody said, with a ghost of a grin. “I think he gets pretty lonesome, out there in that unfinished barn. He’d probably like a visitor.”

Carolyn thrust out a sigh. She might be able to resist Brody, albeit not with anything resembling ease, but she could not resist a horse. “All right,” she said. “I’ll bring the picture over. What’s a good time?”

“I’m usually there in the evenings,” Brody replied.

Of course you are. And what big teeth you have, Grandma.

“I like to sew in the evenings,” she said.

Brody was facing her again—and the counter between them wasn’t wide enough to suit Carolyn. The whole state of Colorado wouldn’t have been wide enough.

He let his eyes drift over her, and she’d have sworn he left her clothes in smoldering rags, just by looking at her.

“And then there’s that ride you owe me,” he said, his voice low.

Carolyn’s face flamed—even after all the talk about horses she managed to misunderstand him right from the get-go—and then he laughed, the sound low again, and raspy.

“The horseback ride,” he drawled.

Carolyn gulped. “Why are you pushing this?” she whispered angrily, leaning toward him without thinking and then wishing she hadn’t.

His mouth was within kissing distance of hers and she couldn’t pull back out of reach. She couldn’t move.

“You said yes when I asked you to go riding with me,” Brody reminded her, very quietly, “and that makes it a matter of honor. Either your word is worth something, Carolyn Simmons, or it isn’t.”

That freed her from the spell he’d cast over her.

Carolyn snapped her head back and glared. She gripped the edges of the counter so tightly that her knuckles ached. “You’re a fine one to talk about honor,” she told him, her voice ragged with fury, “after what you did. Furthermore, my word has never been in question here. Yours, on the other hand—”

He had the audacity to grin, to raise both hands, palms out, in an ingenuous bid for peace that made her want to slap him silly.

“Carolyn,” he said slowly, “you are a hard woman. You are a stubborn woman. And you sure do know how to hold a grudge.”

“Count on it,” Carolyn practically snarled.

They glowered at each other for a long, silent moment.

Then Tricia pushed open the kitchen door and poked out her head, like a turtle peering out of a shell.

“Are you two joining us for lunch or not?” she asked sunnily.

“I’m not hungry,” Carolyn said.

“Me, either,” Brody agreed.

“Okaaaaay,” Tricia replied, singing the word and ducking back into the kitchen.

Carolyn rounded the counter, stormed past Brody toward the front window and dragged a lace curtain aside to look out at the street.

Sure enough, there were two horses, a buckskin and a bay, saddled and standing untethered at the picket fence. They were systematically devouring the leaves of Natty McCall’s century-old lilac bush.

Carolyn turned on Brody, full of challenge. And heat.

And things it was better not to identify.

“Two people, two horses,” she said tautly. “Let’s take that ride right now, Mr. Creed, and get it over with.”

“‘Get it over with’?” Brody sounded amused—and a little insulted.

“I didn’t promise to like it,” she reminded him. “All I said was that I’d go.” Carolyn indicated her jeans, boots and long-sleeved T-shirt. “And I want to go now.”

“Fine,” Brody said, inclining his head toward the fence, where the horses waited. “We’ll go now.”

Carolyn didn’t even pause to tell Tricia that she was leaving the shop, because then she’d have had to explain why she was leaving, and she wasn’t willing to do that. Steam would probably shoot out of her ears if she tried.

So she strode to the door, wrenched it open and crossed the threshold, then the porch.

“Take the bay,” Brody told her, when, reaching the gate, she finally hesitated. Ire had carried her this far, but now she was at a loss.

“Great,” she bit out.

She gathered the bay’s dangling reins, stuck one foot in the stirrup and mounted with an expertise born of outrage as much as long experience.

Brody was standing on the sidewalk one moment, and sitting easy in the saddle the next. Holding the buckskin’s reins loosely across one palm, he said, “One hour, Carolyn. Anything less than that doesn’t amount to a ride, unless you’re on a pony at the carnival.”

On the ground, Carolyn was uncertain about a great many things.

In the saddle, she ruled. Her confidence, once she was on the back of a horse—any horse—was complete. Unshakable.

This was something she knew, something that came as easily to her as her breathing or the beating of her heart.

“Let’s go,” she said.

“See if you can keep up,” Brody taunted, with another grin.

“If I don’t, it will be this horse’s fault, not mine,” Carolyn replied, pressing the words through her teeth.

Brody laughed, an exultant, whooping sound, and he turned that buckskin in the general direction of the ranch and took it from a trot to a gallop to a full run in the space of half a dozen strides. The animal fairly flew along that unpaved road, like a butter-colored Pegasus, with Brody bent low over its neck, the two of them melded into one magnificent creature.

Pride swelled in Carolyn, and some emotion fiercer and more intense than joy, and she let Conner’s horse have its head. The two geldings ran neck-and-neck then, over vacant lots and across dirt roads, over railroad tracks so long unused that the rails had rusted, and through breast-high brush.

When they both splashed into the river, Carolyn gave a shout of startled jubilation and held on as the waters filled her boots, soaked her jeans from the knees down and then saturated the denim covering her thighs.

Brody turned his head to look at her, and in his eyes she thought she saw the one emotion she’d never expected to inspire in him: respect.

By the time they reached the opposite bank, the horses were wearing out, slowing down. They plodded up the steep bank, laboring for high ground.

Gaining the road that edged the ridge above the river, Brody and Carolyn let the horses set their own ambling pace.

Carolyn knew this road from her own rides on Blossom, knew the direction they were taking would bring them to the main ranch house.

She was wet, and breathless, and thoroughly exhilarated. Only one thing was better than a full-out, hell-bent-for-election ride like the one she and Brody had just shared, and that was the kind of shattering orgasm he’d brought her to, so easily and so often, back when they were lovers.

A shiver went through her, but it had nothing to do with the chill of the river water.

At last, Brody deigned to break the silence. Cocky bastard.

“Tricia probably has some clothes that will fit you,” he said. “You need to get into some dry duds, and the sooner, the better.”

She looked at him, which was a concession in and of itself. “Did you plan that plunge into the river?” she asked. She wouldn’t have put it past him—what better way to get her out of her clothes?—but, on the other hand, he probably hadn’t, because he couldn’t have known whether or not she’d be able to rise to the challenge.

And whatever else she might have believed about Brody, she didn’t believe he’d deliberately put anyone at risk for any reason.

“Nope,” he said, with another easy grin. He was as wet as she was; even his hat was soaked. He leaned to pat Moonshine’s neck affectionately. “I should have seen it coming, though. This horse loves the water.” He studied her, a grin in his eyes and playing around, but not quite settling on, his mouth. “You all right, cowgirl?” he asked.

Something in his voice, in the way he sat that horse and the way he looked at her, touched Carolyn in a deep and inexplicable way.

“I’m all right,” she confirmed.

“You ride,” he said, “like a Comanche.”

It was a compliment, and Carolyn took it in. Owned it. Knew she’d bring it out, in future lonely hours, and turn it over and over in her mind, savoring it like some precious heirloom passed down through generations of forbearers.

“So do you,” she replied, as they rode slowly toward the ranch house.

“Thanks,” he answered.

After that, the horses picked up their pace, probably expecting a rubdown and a flake or two of grass-hay once they got to the barn.

Once there, Carolyn and Brody dismounted, led their tired mounts into waiting stalls and worked in easy concert with each other, grooming the animals carefully, filling their feeders and finally meeting up again in the breezeway.

“Let’s get you into some warmer clothes,” Brody said, extending his hand.

Like a sleepwalker, Carolyn accepted the offer, let him lead her out into the bright sunlight of early afternoon.

She’d expected Conner and Tricia to be around—they’d had plenty of time to drive from town to the ranch in Tricia’s Pathfinder—but there was no sign of them.

Brody tightened his grasp on Carolyn’s hand, but only briefly and only slightly.

Entering the house, they were immediately greeted by two dogs, Valentino and Brody’s Barney.

“I thought Conner and Tricia would be here,” Carolyn said.

Brody smiled. “And miss a chance for some alone-time in that big Victorian house?” he teased. “The place has a lot of meaning for them. By now, they’re probably making love.”

Carolyn blushed again. Looked away, to avoid Brody’s knowing gaze. “I should—” She hesitated, bit down on her lower lip. “I should be getting back to the shop. Would you mind giving me a lift into town?”

“Later,” Brody said, taking her hand. He led her across the kitchen, through a doorway into a long corridor. Pushing open a door, he gestured for her to enter.

Carolyn was already in so deep that there was no going back. She stepped into the full bathroom that linked two small guest suites.

Brody had to know he had the advantage, an advantage he could have pressed, but he remained in the hallway, watching her with a sort of grave amusement. “While you shower, I’ll rustle up something for you to wear,” he said.

Carolyn was cold, and the thought of a hot shower was enticing.

Still, to take a shower, one had to get naked. And getting naked in the same house with Brody Creed was asking for trouble. Especially in her present mood.

For whatever reason, Carolyn wasn’t her usual self.

“Tricia keeps extra robes for company,” Brody went on, as calmly as if the situation were—well...a nonsituation. “They’re in the closet next to the linen cabinet.” He inclined his head, indicating the huge antique wardrobe behind her. “Help yourself.”

With that, he walked off down the hall.

Carolyn shut the door quickly, then she turned the lock. Then she scurried to make sure the doors leading into the adjoining guest suites were locked, too.

It was silly, she knew, as, shivering, she started the water running in the shower and began peeling away her soggy clothes.

Whatever his other faults might be, Brody wasn’t one to force himself on a woman.

But, then, it wasn’t what Brody might do that worried her.

It was what she might do.

CHAPTER NINE

BRODY HID OUT in the laundry room at the main ranch house, keeping his voice down as he spoke into his cell phone.

“Tricia,” he growled, feeling his neck turn warm, “cut it out. This isn’t funny. Carolyn needs to borrow some of your pre-pregnant clothes because she got wet while we were crossing the river.”

“I absolutely believe you,” his sister-in-law chimed sunnily on the other end of the call he hadn’t wanted to make. “If Carolyn had taken off her clothes for any other reason, she would simply put them back on when necessary.”

Brody had called for permission to pilfer Tricia’s wardrobe, not for a ration. Helping himself to Conner’s stuff when he needed it was one thing, and pawing through Tricia’s dresser drawers and closets was another.

Tricia went prattling on, without waiting for him to talk again, which was a good thing, because he didn’t have a clue what to say. He’d stated his business, and now all he could do was wait.

“One minute,” Tricia chirped, in a to-sum-it-all-up kind of tone, “Carolyn was right here in the shop, perfectly dry. The next, she’s racing away on a horse and winds up drenched to the skin—”

“Tricia,” Brody interrupted hoarsely, getting desperate.

She laughed. Paused to repeat Brody’s earlier request to Conner, making him laugh, too.

It didn’t help one damn bit that his brother’s easy, rumbling chortle had a distinctively satisfied quality to it. Brody, being Conner’s identical twin, and therefore wired the same way, right down to the double helix, knew what that sound meant.

Sure enough, Conner and Tricia had just made love.

Conner, you lucky SOB, Brody thought, too distracted to catch the irony.

Silently, Brody seethed, his body taut with the anticipation of something that wasn’t going to happen. Not that he couldn’t have had Carolyn—he knew he could. He’d sensed her vulnerability, and the biochemical signals had definitely been traveling both ways.

The lovemaking wasn’t going to happen, though, because he wasn’t going to let it happen. Not yet. It was too soon, the situation was delicate, and while he hadn’t learned all his life lessons, or probably even a fraction of them, he had learned that one.

Carolyn wanted him, but she wasn’t ready.

Oh, she’d respond, all right—she was a responsive woman, as spirited as a wild mare—but when the effects wore off, when the afterglow went out like yesterday’s fire in the woodstove, she’d hate him.

Worse, she’d hate herself, too.

So Brody meant to wait—no matter what it cost him.

He shoved a hand through his river-dampened hair—one dunk in the water hadn’t been enough to do him for a whole day. He’d had to get wet twice.

Serve him right if he came down with pneumonia.

While he was thinking all these thoughts, Conner and Tricia were still enjoying the hilarity of it all.

At his expense. And here he was, being freaking noble, too.

He deserved better.

At last, Tricia took pity on him. “My skinny clothes are in boxes at the back of the walk-in closet in Conner’s and my room,” she said, very sweetly. “Feel free to plunder.”

Brody had to smile then, even though he was still feeling pretty darned grumpy, all things considered. “Thanks,” he said. “I appreciate it.” He paused. In the distance, he could hear the water running in the downstairs bathroom. He pictured Carolyn naked, her trim body sluiced with soap suds and spray, and got so hard that the ache practically doubled him over. After a moment spent recovering, he cleared his throat. “You two will be coming home soon, right?” he asked.

Say yes.

Say no.

“Wrong,” Tricia said happily. “Conner is taking me out for a very romantic dinner. Would you mind feeding Valentino for us? And the horses?”

“Sure,” Brody said, thrown by what ought to have been a perfectly ordinary turn of events. “I mean, no, I wouldn’t mind feeding the critters for you. Have fun at dinner.”

“We will,” Tricia said, and he didn’t need to see her smile, because he could feel it, hear it in her voice. This, he dimly recalled, was how a woman sounded, when she was in love. “We’ll see you hours—hours and hours—from now.”

Brody chuckled, shook his head. If only. “Suit yourselves,” he said.

Goodbyes were exchanged, and the call ended.

Brody rubbed his stubbled chin, sighed as he set the cell phone aside on a counter. Obviously, Tricia thought he and Carolyn were going to spend those “hours and hours” making up for lost time, getting it on.

He was going to have the name without the game, and so was Carolyn.

It just plain sucked.

* * *

CAROLYN STEPPED OUT of the shower, dried off with a thirsty towel and appropriated one of the guest robes from the exquisitely carved antique wardrobe against the long wall. Fleece-lined, the garment brushed against her skin like a whole-body caress.

Don’t go there, she admonished herself silently. Do not think about skin and caresses. You are in deep yogurt here, lady. Out of your depth.

She padded over to one of the two sinks set into the counter, with its custom-painted ceramic sinks, and stared at her image in the mirror, combing her hair with splayed fingers and making eye contact with that other Carolyn.

“Well,” she began in a whisper, though she didn’t really think Brody had his ear stuck to any of the bathroom doors, “you have done it this time. You are in a real fix, and it won’t be easy to get out of this one.”

If you even want to get out of here without giving in to the overwhelming urge to have sex with Brody Creed.

Carolyn flushed, indignant. “Of course I want to get out of here without having sex with Brody,” she muttered. She often had these kinds of conversations with herself—what the rest of the world didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them.

Do you want to make love with him or not?

“Well,” Carolyn admitted, deflating a little as she sighed, “yes. What healthy, red-blooded woman in her right mind wouldn’t want to have sex with Brody Creed?” She drew in a deep breath, raised her chin and squared her shoulders under the sensuous fabric of that ridiculously luxurious robe. “But,” she went on, “I’m not going to give in to temptation. Period. I’ve already been down this road once, remember, and once was more than enough.”

She must have made her case because after that, the argumentative little voice in her head was silent.

A rap sounded at the door leading into the hallway.

“Yes?” Carolyn asked, with only the slightest tremor, finger-combing her hair again.

Brody’s low-pitched chuckle penetrated the thick wood of the door. “I’ve got some of Tricia’s things here,” he said. “I’ll just set them down on the floor and back away real slow.”

A smile crooked Carolyn’s mouth, but she quickly subdued it. This was a serious situation, she reminded herself, and if she wasn’t very, very careful, all her drummed-up resolution to take the high road would go right down the old drain.

“Thank you,” she called back stiffly.

She waited until she heard Brody walk away, then waited a few moments longer, for good measure. Once she was sure the proverbial coast was clear, she unlocked the door, bent to grab up the untidy stack of feminine garments from the floor and locked herself in again.

Sitting down on the edge of the humungous bathtub because, all of a sudden, her knees had gone squishy, holding the borrowed blue jeans and white cotton shirt on her lap, she considered hiding out in that bathroom until Tricia and Conner got home.

That would be silly, though.

And boring. Who knew how long they’d be gone?

So, with another sigh, Carolyn put on the jeans and the shirt, sans underwear because her own bra and panties were still wet and no self-respecting woman borrows or lends lingerie, fluffed out her hair with her fingers one more time and marched out into the corridor.

She found Brody in the kitchen, fiddling with the coffee machine. He’d showered, too, and changed into jeans and a blue chambray shirt, Western-cut with snaps. His boots were old and scuffed, which completed the singularly appealing look.

With a frown, he glanced in her direction. “Do you know how to work this thingamajig?” he asked. “I cannot for the life of me figure out why people can’t be satisfied with an ordinary coffeepot.”

The question relaxed Carolyn slightly, neutralized some of the charge in the atmosphere. Tricia loved gadgets, and Carolyn had been with her when she bought the machine. They’d given it a trial run at the shop, studying the instruction book and finally mastering the thing.

It was, in a world thick with enigmas, a problem she could solve.

“Like this,” Carolyn said, popping a pod into the top, setting a clean cup under the spigot and pushing the buttons. It was only after the java began to brew that she realized closing the gap between herself and Brody might not have been the smartest thing she’d ever done.

Brody didn’t move. Why should he? He’d been there first.

Carolyn didn’t move, either. It wasn’t pride, or stubbornness, that made her stay put. It was some strange, thrumming kind of centrifugal force.

Brody cleared his throat, an affable sound, but raw at the edges. “Just so there are no misunderstandings,” he said, finally, and Carolyn had to strain to hear him over the beat of her heart, “I can’t remember when I’ve ever wanted a woman the way I want you. Fact is, if my conscience would allow it, I’d do my cowboy-best to seduce you, right here and right now.”

Carolyn gave a twittery little laugh. “You have a conscience?”

Lame.

The single shot of fresh coffee had long since finished processing itself, but neither of them paid any attention to it.

Brody’s mouth kicked up at the corner, but the expression in his eyes was soft. “Believe it or not,” he replied, “I do indeed have a conscience. And it’s telling me not to screw up.” A pause, another quirk of his mouth. “So to speak.”

Color flooded Carolyn’s face, and heat suffused her traitorous body. “Gee, thanks,” she said, somehow keeping her tone level, despite what felt like a million tiny universes colliding within her.

His grin went full-throttle then.

It wasn’t the least bit fair.

“A while back,” Brody went on, mercifully lowering the wattage on his grin, “I asked you for a second chance. I meant it, Carolyn. Even if this doesn’t go anywhere—whatever it is that’s happening between you and me—I think we should explore it.”

Carolyn couldn’t speak. Couldn’t even swallow past the lump in her throat. So she just looked up into Brody Creed’s damnably handsome, deceptively earnest face, powerless against him. Hoping and praying he hadn’t already guessed that.

Fat chance.

He curved his right index finger under her chin, lifted ever so gently, so their gazes locked with an almost audible click, like the tumblers in a lock.

“Carolyn?”

“I’m listening,” she whispered. And she was. With her whole being, body, mind and spirit.

Again, the wicked grin flashed. He nodded once. “So do you have an opinion?” he teased. “And, if so, how about letting me in on it?”

“There is—” Carolyn had to stop, clear the frog from her throat, before she could go on. “There is apparently something...well...going on, here. And I think, most definitely—maybe—we ought to find out what it is. Sometime.”

Mischief danced, cornflower-blue, in Brody’s eyes. He arched one eyebrow and waited, calm as a seasoned fisherman with a trout on the hook.

“But not immediately, mind you,” Carolyn clarified. “I mean, the sensible thing to do would be to forget the whole stupid idea and pretend we never had this conversation. But—”

“But...?” Brody prompted, his voice husky.

He was still standing too close.

“But I’m not feeling very sensible at the moment,” Carolyn admitted, on a rush of breath.

“Me, either,” Brody said, and the twinkle was back in his eyes. “But one of us has to be strong, here. Somebody has to be responsible. So I’m telling you flat out, Carolyn Simmons—no matter how badly you may want me, I’m not available.”

Carolyn smiled wryly, calm on the outside, every nerve jangling on the inside. “Thanks for straightening me out on that score,” she said, pleasantly surprised that she was able to strike a breezy note. “What happens now?”

“We do the thing up right,” Brody said, sounding confident. “Starting with a few ground rules.”

“Ground rules?”

“Yeah,” Brody told her. “No sex, for the time being, anyhow. And both of us can see other people if that’s what we want to do.”

Carolyn hoped the pang that last stipulation gave her didn’t show on her face. She was sort of seeing Bill Venable, and sort of not seeing him, but she already knew he’d never be more than a friend to her, nor she to him.

Bill loved Angela.

And she, God help her, was still hung up on Brody.

“What?” Brody asked, when she didn’t say anything.

“If you want to go out with Joleen Williams,” Carolyn said loftily, “that’s certainly your prerogative.”

The twinkle in Brody’s eyes turned to temper. “Did I, at any point in time, say I wanted to date Joleen?”

“You didn’t have to,” Carolyn said. She folded her arms. “It’s quite obvious.”

“I don’t know how you figure that,” Brody said, clearly irritated. “Do you see Joleen standing around here somewhere, waiting for me to help her on with her coat or pin a corsage to her party dress so we can go out on the town?”

It just went to show a person, Carolyn thought, how quickly a spring breeze could turn into an ill wind. Not more than a minute before, she and Brody had had all they could do not to have sex right there in his brother’s kitchen. Now they were practically at each other’s throats.

“You’re the one who wanted to keep their options open when it came to dating,” Carolyn pointed out, proud of being—okay, sounding—so collected and reasonable.

“And you’re the one who’s already dating,” Brody bit out.

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