Cowboy Country
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.