When was somebody going to fix that dangling sign over the gate?
“All right with what?” Josh asked, somewhat snappishly. The night before, he’d wanted to sleep in her bed. Now, in the bright light of day, he was probably embarrassed.
“Spending the day at your dad and Heather’s new place,” she said patiently. “You don’t have to, you know.”
Josh heaved a great, shoulder-moving sigh. “Maybe it won’t be so bad,” he said. “And all you’re going to do is go to the library.”
“What’s wrong with going to the library? We’ve been there at least once a week ever since we moved to Stillwater Springs.”
“We didn’t move here, Mom. Dad dumped us here.”
“What does that have to do with the library?”
In truth, Briana’s emotional survival had had everything to do with the library, before and after Vance had done his vanishing act. Libraries were warm, spacious, bright places, full of books—and money, the one thing Briana didn’t have, wasn’t required. Josh and Alec had loved the local librarian, Kristy Madison, and sat in on story hour sometimes, even though they considered themselves too big for “that stuff.”
Was this going to change, too?
Briana’s heart sank a little.
“I guess it doesn’t have anything to do with the library,” Josh finally conceded. “Alec is going to ask if he can spend the night with Dad and Heather.”
Briana wasn’t surprised to hear that last part, but it still made her heart skitter a little. What would she do if Alec decided he’d rather live with his father and stepmother full-time?
“Mom?” Josh prompted, when she didn’t answer.
They cruised past a series of signs, strung Burma-Shave style alongside the road.
Special
Election
July 1st
Have
You
Registered
To Vote???
“What?” Briana asked. She’d heard Sheriff Book was planning to retire, and she wondered who would run for his office when he stepped down.
“Will you be okay?”
She looked at Josh, saw the concern in his face.
“With Dad living in Stillwater Springs and everything,” Josh clarified, studying her anxiously.
The question wasn’t whether she’d be okay or not. It was whether Josh and Alec would. Vance had a new wife, a job and the best of intentions, but he liked the free life too much to stay in one place for long—especially a little town like Stillwater Springs. One day, sure as sunrise and taxes, he’d kick the dust of that rural burg off his feet, jettison both Heather and the job, and hit the road.
Heather would be on her own, but Briana would be the one who had to put Alec and Josh back together. Her hands tightened on the steering wheel.
“Will you be okay, Mom?” Josh persisted.
“I’ll be fine,” she managed to say.
They’d passed the road leading into the casino, and she could still see Vance’s van up ahead, belching smoke from the exhaust pipe. He was a good mechanic, if he’d kept that rig running all this time.
The trailer still had a For Rent sign in the overgrown front yard, and junk spilled out the front door—old toys, clothes and various kinds of garbage—as though the place had thrown up.
“Wonderful,” Briana muttered. Okay, her place wasn’t a palace. But she kept the lawn mowed and the yard cleaned.
“Needs a little work,” Vance enthused, walking toward her when she got out of the truck.
“Yuck,” Josh said.
Heather stepped from the van, afterAlec had bounded down from the side door, holding a big box of super-size garbage bags in one hand and smiling happily.
“Let’s get some sprucing up done around here,” Vance said.
Josh groaned as he got out of the truck, but he didn’t change his mind about going to the library with Briana, and she knew that was significant.
“It looks pretty bad right now,” Vance told her. “But it’s okay on the inside. Come on in and have a look.”
Her boys would be spending time in this trailer, Briana reminded herself. Swallowing a sigh, she got out of the truck and followed Vance around the spill of trash, up the porch steps and through the front door.
“Shouldn’t the landlord have cleaned up a little?” she asked.
“He gave us the first month free for doing it ourselves,” Heather said, as the three of them stood in the tiny living room. There was a galley kitchen, an area just big enough for a couch and a TV, and presumably bedrooms and a bath down the hallway to the left.
The floor was so littered with beer bottles, empty cereal boxes and other evidence of wild living that Briana didn’t attempt to go any farther than just inside the door.
She glanced at her watch. “Well,” she said, with a smile, “I guess I’d better get those errands done.”
She wouldn’t be far away, she told herself.
The library was two blocks down and one block over.
One SOS call from Josh, who still had possession of the extra cell phone, and she’d be back in a trice. Mommy to the rescue.
“See you later,” Vance said.
At least he hadn’t expected her to stay and help.
That would have been over-the-top, even for Vance, but Briana felt a little guilty for not offering, just the same.
As she backed the truck out, she saw Heather present Vance, Alec and Josh with a garbage bag each, and they all began to pick up garbage.
Five minutes later, she pulled into the parking lot at the library—a small, one-story brick building dating from the Roosevelt administration, according to the brass plaque beside the double doors. Just the sight of the place made her feel better, and she was gathering her return stack from the backseat when Sheriff Book pulled in beside her, behind the wheel of his squad car.
Briana smiled and nodded.
Sheriff Book nodded back and rolled down his window.
“I’ve got a couple of CDs here,” he told Briana. “Wife borrowed them. Wonder if you’d mind taking them inside with your stuff.”
“No problem,” Briana said, juggling half a dozen books to take the CDs. “I hear there’s going to be a special election,” she added, recalling the progression of signs along the road outside of town.
“Yes, ma’am,” Sheriff Book said. “I announced my retirement this morning, and the election committee wasted no time getting out the word. It’s enough to make a man think folks will be glad to get rid of him.”
Briana would miss the sheriff. He reminded her a little of her dad, despite the differences in their looks, and she liked his wife, Dorothy. “Any idea who your replacement will be?”
He looked surprised, and when he spoke, she found out why. “Jim Huntinghorse is the only candidate to file so far.”
Briana’s mouth dropped open. She worked with Jim five days a week, and they were friends. He hadn’t said a single word about running for the sheriff’s job. “Oh,” she said, taking a moment to recover. “I didn’t know.”
“That much,” Sheriff Book said kindly, “was obvious by the look on your face. I think Jim would do a good job, but there are bound to be some who’ll vote against him on prejudicial grounds. Even if his is the only name on the ticket—and I doubt it will be—he’ll need a certain percentage of votes to win.”
“He’s got mine, anyway,” Briana said.
The sheriff chuckled, popped the squad car into Reverse. “Tell him that, and you’ll probably wind up managing his campaign,” he teased. “Thanks again for taking Dorothy’s CDs inside.”
Briana nodded and watched as Sheriff Book backed out of his parking space, made a wide turn and hit the main road.
More change.
She was happy for Floyd and Dorothy. Happy for Jim, too, if being sheriff was what he wanted, though she knew he’d be leaving the casino once he took office. They’d all have a new boss then, and that was always a scary prospect for people who lived from paycheck to paycheck, the
way she did.
She held the stack of books and CDs a little more tightly as she headed for the library entrance.
Kristy Madison smiled at her from behind the main desk.
A lifelong resident of Stillwater Springs, Kristy wasn’t the stereotypical librarian. Tall and slender, she kept her blond hair in a perky chin-length style, and her eyes were china blue. She wore jeans, a blouse or sweater and boots to work most days, and this one was no exception.
“Hey,” she said, with a warm smile.
Briana set the books and CDs on the counter, next to the hand-lettered sign that read Returns. “Hey, yourself,” she responded. Now that her hands were free, she shifted her bag to the other shoulder and pulled her new cell from the pocket of her jeans, switching it to Vibrate, since ringing phones were verboten in the library.
Kristy took the top book off Briana’s stack and held it up. “What did you think of this?” she asked. “I haven’t read it yet.”
“Well,” Briana said slowly, “I finished it.”
“Now there’s a ringing endorsement,” Kristy remarked, smiling. She’d invited Briana out to lunch a couple of times, but Briana had always made some excuse. Restaurant lunches weren’t in the budget, along with a lot of other things. Anyway, she liked to spend her free time with the boys.
Now, as then, she wondered if Kristy thought she didn’t want to be friends.
“Some books are better than others,” Briana conceded.
“We’re starting a once-a-month reading club,” Kristy said. “Our first meeting is Tuesday night. I was going to suggest this book, since we have several copies of it, but now I’m not so sure.”
Briana, who had been about to excuse herself and head for the new releases shelf—a person had to be quick to get the latest books—stopped. “A reading club?”
“For adults,” Kristy replied, with a nod. In high school, according to Dorothy Book, who played penny slot machines at the casino on a fairly regular basis, Kristy had been a cheerleader, queen of the winter carnival and the drama group’s favorite leading lady.
Briana didn’t hold any of that against her.
“Really?”
Kristy nodded again. “Would you be interested?”
Briana was so used to turning down things like that that she almost said no. But Heather was right—she was going to have more free time. “I’d like that a lot,” she said.
“Tuesday at seven,” Kristy reiterated. “We’ll meet in the community room in back, after the library closes. I guess we can all decide that night what we want to read first.”
“Sounds good,” Briana said, feeling reckless. Reading was nothing new—she’d been doing that voraciously since she was five years old, thanks largely to her dad—but doing something just because she wanted to was.
An older woman approached the desk to ask Kristy where to find a certain reference book, and Kristy zipped off to help her.
Briana zeroed in on the new releases. There was a one-book limit, and the return time was shorter, but she snatched up the latest Nora Roberts novel and felt rich.
She checked out several other books—a western, a thriller and a memoir—and left the library, resisting the temptation to drive by Vance and Heather’s trailer to make sure the boys were okay.
Wanda was home alone.
She’d head for the ranch, let the dog out, make herself a grilled cheese sandwich for lunch and read until Vance either brought the boys home or called and asked her to come and get them.
She was getting the hang of this not-being-amother-hen thing.
Sort of.
*
LOGAN SAW the dust roiling up from behind the truck and horse trailer when they were still a mile away, and he and Sidekick were waiting by the corral gate when it arrived.
When Briana pulled in right behind though, in the old pickup Dylan used to drive, he was a little surprised.
The truck driver climbed out of his rig, tugged at the brim of his billed cap to greet Briana and went around to the back of the trailer to open it up.
“You’ve got horses?” Briana asked, shading her eyes from the sun. Her tone was breathless, almost reverent.
“Do now,” Logan said. “Excuse me for a second. I’ve gotta help unload.”
Briana stayed on his heels. “I was just passing by, on my way home, and I saw the trailer—”
Logan grinned, glad she was there. She stayed close while he and the driver—Bob, according to the name stitched on his shirt—put halters on the new horses and brought them down the ramp, one by one. Sidekick kept a wise distance, retreating to the porch to watch the proceedings.
The big, heavy-shouldered buckskin gelding came first, and Briana was right there to greet him. She was comfortable around horses, Logan thought, impressed. But then she was Wild Man McIntyre’s daughter. Of course she knew horses.
He felt a wrench just looking at her, standing there in all that road dust, her attention completely focused on the buckskin, tendrils of her strawberry-blond hair escaping the braid to glitter in the sunlight.
His first wife had been terrified of horses.
His second was allergic.
But here was Briana, nose-to-nose with one, and obviously communicating. Maybe even bonding.
Logan shook off the vision, turned back to the task at hand. Bob brought the brown-and-white pinto mare out next, then the gray gelding, and by the time Logan had unloaded the fourth animal, a black filly still too young to ride, Briana had already led the buckskin into the corral.
She greeted each horse as they were turned loose, carrying on some kind of silent conversation, and Logan wanted in the worst way to know what she’d said to them.
He paid Bob for the delivery and waited until the truck and trailer were headed back down the driveway before approaching the corral. By then, Briana was outside the fence, perched on the lowest rail, admiring the new arrivals.
“They’re beautiful,” she whispered.
They were good-looking horses, sturdy and, as far as Logan could tell, even-tempered…but beautiful? He didn’t see it.
Maybe he was too stuck on the realization that Briana was beautiful. He’d thought she was attractive before, but seeing her with the horses—well, there had been something mystical about that. Something that touched him, way deep, and left an imprint.
“Do you ride?” he asked, climbing up beside her, standing close enough that their upper arms touched. He knew the answer—he’d only asked the question to get the conversation rolling.
She nodded, swiped a coppery-blond tendril of hair back from her forehead and never took her eyes off the horses. They were running around the corral, kicking up dust and generally celebrating being out of the trailer. Later, they’d establish a pecking order, which would involve some squealing and nipping, but the pinto mare would win out.
The oldest mare always called the shots.
“About the only thing I miss about the rodeo, besides my dad,” Briana said, without looking at him, “is the horses.”
“I’ve got to take the rough edges off them first,” Logan said, “but if they’re gentle enough, you can ride anytime you want.”
She turned her head, and he saw a variety of emotions, none of which he could readily identify, flicker in her spring-green eyes. “Oh, these horses are gentle,” she told him confidently. “They’re just excited, that’s all.”
Logan felt like a fool, though he wasn’t sure why. On top of that, he wanted to kiss Briana Grant, right then and there.
He didn’t, because even though there was nobody else around, the barn crew having refused to work on Sunday, time and a half or not, he wanted privacy when he kissed Briana.
She looked toward the house, then met his gaze again.
All he’d have to do was lean in, just a little—
He realized he was staring at her mouth.
Not good.
He stepped down off the fence rail. He’d already filled the water trough, and put some hay in the
rusty feeder. Now, there was nothing to do but wait for the horses to settle down.
“Where are the boys?” he asked, because he couldn’t think of anything else to say. He’d sound like an ass if he invited her inside for a cold drink, wouldn’t he? Might as well suggest that they skip the preliminaries and head straight for his bed.
Nix on that thought.
It was only too easy to imagine stripping off their dusty clothes, making love with the windows open to a summer afternoon’s breeze. Skin slapping skin.
“They’re with their dad,” Briana said. “And their stepmother.”
“Heather,” Logan said, hoping she couldn’t tell by the sound of his voice how relieved he was.
Briana raised a questioning eyebrow.
“Alec mentioned her yesterday,” he explained. Hot damn. There was no reconciliation in the offing. Vance Grant had a wife.
“I’d better go,” Briana said. “Wanda’s home alone.”
Logan found himself hurrying to catch up with her as she zoomed toward Dylan’s truck. “Briana—”
She stopped, the truck door open, and looked up at him. She was coated with dust, like he was, and he wished he could lick her clean.
“You and Vance—”
“Over,” she said. “He’s married, remember?”
Did he remember? He felt like hiring a sky-writer to let the whole county know. “I was thinking of firing up the barbecue tonight,” he said. Barbecue? Was there a grill anywhere on the place? “It would be great if you and the boys could come to supper.”
She took so long to respond that Logan started to wonder if he’d said the words out loud or only thought them.
“Okay,” she said. “What time?”
He had to hit town, get a barbecue grill and something to put on it. That would take an hour, tops.
“Six o’clock?” he asked, picking a time out of the air.
“I’ll be here,” she said. “Shall I bring anything? I make a mean potato salad.”
“Potato salad,” Logan agreed, almost tripping over his tongue.
“See you later,” Briana answered. Then, after closing the door, she started up the old truck and drove away.
Logan waited until she was out of sight before jumping up and punching the air with one fist.
Linda Lael Miller Montana Creeds Series Volume 1: Montana Creeds: LoganMontana Creeds: DylanMontana Creeds: Tyler Page 13
