Linda Lael Miller Montana Creeds Series Volume 1: Montana Creeds: LoganMontana Creeds: DylanMontana Creeds: Tyler

by Linda Lael Miller

  She pointed in the direction of her room.

  His strides were swift, his arms strong. Although she knew better, knew she would live to regret this night, Kristy let herself be swept away. She had simply needed Dylan too much, for too long.

  The bedside lamp was still burning in her room.

  Dylan laid her gently onto the bed, stared down at her for a long, incendiary moment.

  The whole encounter felt predestined to Kristy. Profoundly inevitable.

  “Do you have—something?” she asked, turning her head aside on the pillow, mortified. She wasn’t on any kind of birth control, and she didn’t keep condoms around; she hadn’t had any reason to, after Dylan left town. Her engagement to Mike had never gotten beyond the handholding-kissing stage.

  Poor Mike. She’d told him she wanted to save herself for marriage.

  As if.

  “I have something,” Dylan assured her, with a hoarse chuckle.

  Kristy’s gaze swung to him—she should have been relieved; instead, she was stung. “Always ready?” she asked, with just the merest touch of sarcasm.

  “I just bought them, Kristy,” he told her, popping the snaps on his shirt. “This has been coming on ever since I stepped into the library the other day, and you know it as well as I do.”

  She had known, she realized. Her body, dormant for so long, had begun to awaken again, not just when Dylan first walked into the library, but probably when he passed the city limits. She’d always had a special sense where Dylan was concerned, a kind of global positioning system.

  He took a packet out of his jeans pocket, set it on the bedside table.

  “You’re sure, right?” he asked.

  She bit her lower lip, nodded. Until Dylan made love to her, she wasn’t going to be able to think straight.

  “Fast, Dylan,” she whispered, blushing with embarrassment and need. “Fast and hard, this first time.”

  He undressed her very, very slowly, shoes and jeans first. Then he stretched out on the bed beside her, kissed her again, nibbled along the length of her neck, flicked at her earlobe with the tip of his tongue. When he bared her breasts, he paused to weigh them in his hands, chafing the nipples until they tightened.

  Kristy whimpered again, arched her back.

  He suckled at her right breast, lightly at first, and then harder. At the same time, he slid a hand down under the lacy waistband of her panties, parted her, stroked her with an easy, languid circling of his fingers.

  “Oh God, Dylan,” she cried, “fast and hard—please—It’s been so long—I need—”

  He kissed away her words, kissed away her breath and her sanity.

  But he knew how to make love to Kristy, knew what she wanted. What she’d always wanted, since the very first time, long ago, in the high summer grass of the orchard where the bears came to feed.

  He drew down her panties, reached for the packet, and all the while she writhed and undulated beneath him, seeking the only thing that would satisfy her.

  He was inside her in one deep, breathtaking thrust, and Kristy’s starved body immediately seized upon him. He raised himself onto his knees, pulling her with him, and held her cheeks in his hands, watching her face while she rode astraddle of him. And then she came, in one sweet, violent spasm after another, her head flung back, and she shouted his name, shameless and wild in the throes of an ever-rising satisfaction.

  Dylan never let up on the friction, but when she finally sagged against him, spent, her body still quivering from its very core, he laid her down on the pillows again, hiked her legs up over his shoulders and went after his own release.

  Instinctively, Kristy grasped the brass rails in the headboard of her bed, knowing that even though she’d already given him everything, he would still want more. When the next orgasm began, it was more intense, more desperate, more shattering than any that had gone before.

  When Dylan’s powerful body plunged deep and stiffened, Kristy wrapped her legs around his hips and bucked beneath him, no longer sure whether she was giving or taking, whether they were two creatures or one, set ablaze, fused, and sure to be consumed.

  At long last, Dylan fell to the mattress beside her, his breathing ragged and swift. She buried her fingers in his hair, felt his skin, moist along the length of her own perspiring body.

  “Was that ‘hard and fast’ enough for you?” he asked, much later.

  Kristy giggled, snuggled close to him. “You may have noticed that I enjoyed it,” she answered.

  “Are we going to regret this in the morning?” He kissed her eyelids, her temples, the corners of her mouth.

  “Maybe,” Kristy purred, her senses already stirring again. She found a lock of his hair around one index finger. “Probably. Definitely. But all I care about is right now.”

  He chuckled. Kissed her neck. And got out of bed, headed for the bathroom adjoining her room. When he came back, he had moonlight caught in his hair, silver glancing off gold.

  And he was frowning.

  She sat up, alarmed by his expression. “What?”

  “How do I put this?”

  Her heart beat a little faster, and not because there would be more lovemaking before the night was over, and still more. “Dylan, what’s wrong? You’re scaring me.”

  “Let’s just say,” he answered grimly, “that they don’t make condoms like they used to.”

  Kristy’s mouth fell open.

  “It broke,” Dylan said.

  “Oh my God,” Kristy whispered, flipping through a mental calendar and gasping as she made the mind-blowing leap. “What if I’m pregnant?”

  He had been standing in the middle of the room, gloriously naked. Now, he came back to bed, stretched out, gathered Kristy in his arms. Kissed the top of her head. “Then I guess we’ll have to deal with it,” he said quietly, sounding almost wistful.

  “Dylan!”

  He propped himself up on one elbow, gazing down at her with an expression she couldn’t read, because at some point, one of them had switched off the lamp.

  When had that happened?

  Dylan traced the outline of her cheek with a lazy index finger. He seemed to exude tension, for all the distracted ease of his touch, and Kristy knew his mind was miles away.

  “Dylan?” she asked, very softly.

  “If there was a baby, you wouldn’t—well—get rid of it or anything, would you?”

  The question stunned Kristy, electrified her, all but shorted out her circuits. “No,” she said, furiously. “Of course I wouldn’t. Dylan Creed, why on earth would you think—” She stopped. Stroked his hair—his wonderful, spun-gold hair—when he buried his face deeper in her neck. “Bonnie’s mother?”

  Dylan lifted his head, and the moonlight shifted to his eyes, turned them silvery. “Sharlene,” he said hoarsely, “probably wouldn’t even have told me what she planned to do—or that she was expecting my baby at all—if she hadn’t needed money. I paid her to go through with the pregnancy—it was the only way she’d agree to carry Bonnie to term. I was supposed to raise our child—that was the deal. But when Bonnie actually arrived, Sharlene cried and wailed and claimed she’d die of grief if I separated the two of them. My guess is, she’d already gone through most of the money I gave her and decided a monthly child-support check would be just the ticket. At the time, though, I believed she’d actually bonded with our daughter, sucker that I was.” He sighed. “I’m sure Sharlene loves Bonnie, in her own crazy way. But she’s toxic. I never should have left Bonnie with her.”

  “Why did you?” Kristy asked, very quietly. Her heart ached.

  Dylan thought, shook his head. “If I had it to do over again, I’d probably marry Sharlene. That was what she wanted. But my dad had three wives, and he never loved any of them, any more than I loved Sharlene, and it was hell for Logan and Tyler and me, at least when we were younger. Tyler’s mother was so unhappy that she—” He paused, swallowed once, then again. Couldn’t seem to go on.

  Kristy laid a hand o
n his chest, felt muscle and bone and a beating heart under his skin, strong and steady. “I know,” she said softly.

  He swallowed visibly, and his eyes glistened in the darkness as he stared up at the ceiling. “I didn’t want to wind up treating Bonnie the way my dad treated us,” he said.

  “You could never have been like Jake,” Kristy told him. She was as sure of that as she was of anything in the world.

  “He probably thought he wouldn’t turn out like his old man, either,” Dylan said. “Not when he was my age.”

  Kristy understood then. She finally recognized the demon that had driven Dylan away from her the first time and might well drive him away again, child or no child. Although he probably wasn’t consciously aware of it, he clearly believed that Jake’s hell-raising and sorry luck and hard drinking were no one-generation fluke, but imprinted in his own DNA, as well as Logan’s and Tyler’s. That was the real reason he’d let Sharlene keep Bonnie, whether he knew it or not. He’d thought, at the time, even with all Sharlene’s shortcomings, that his little girl had a better chance for a happy life with her mother than with him.

  Because he was a Creed and, therefore, tainted. Perhaps even cursed.

  “Oh, Dylan,” she whispered. “You’re not your father.”

  He sat up suddenly, pulling free of her, turning his back to sit on the side of the bed and reach for his jeans. He didn’t answer or face her, but went on getting dressed instead.

  He was leaving.

  Again.

  “Look at Logan,” Kristy urged, hoping he wouldn’t hear the desperation in her voice. “He’s married. He’s happy. And he’s Jake Creed’s son, too.”

  Dylan turned at last, buttoning his jeans. The same moonlight that had gilded his hair and turned his blue eyes silver etched hard shadows into his face now. “How long do you think that will last?” he snapped.

  “From what I’ve seen,” Kristy said gently, trying hard not to cry, “I’d bet on forever.”

  “Forever is a fairy tale,” Dylan said brusquely, picking up his shirt, jamming his arms into the sleeves. “Logan had two wives before Briana. Both times, he was climbing the walls, trying to claw his way out, before the first anniversary rolled around.”

  Kristy wondered how he knew what Logan’s first two marriages were like when he’d been estranged from his brother for so long. Since Jake’s funeral, in fact. Since Dylan got so drunk after the services that he and both his brothers were arrested for disorderly conduct and destruction of private property.

  They’d torn Skivvie’s to pieces, along with each other.

  She’d seen Dylan the next morning, after Sheriff Book let him go, and that was when they’d had the argument that eventually ended everything. He’d told her, standing on the sidewalk in front of Stillwater Springs’ tiny courthouse and jail, that he was going back to the rodeo, and she could either wait for him or get on with her life, whichever she preferred.

  She’d been stunned, and then angry. And ashamed, too, because everyone in Montana knew Jake Creed’s funeral, for God’s sake, had ended in a boozy brawl at Skivvie’s.

  “I don’t know you anymore, Dylan,” she’d said.

  And he’d grinned, not in his usual engaging way, but cruelly. “Maybe you don’t,” he’d replied. He’d walked away from her without looking back, gotten into the secondhand truck he’d owned at the time and driven away.

  Oh Lord. If only she’d known then what she knew now.

  She sat up in bed, wrapped her arms around her sheet-covered shins, rested her forehead on her bony knees.

  She knew by Dylan’s voice that he was in the doorway—farther away, almost gone.

  “If there’s a baby—” he began.

  Strength flooded Kristy; she could not have said where it came from. It was just there, all of a sudden, filling her. “If there’s a baby,” she said, propping her chin on her knees now, “I will raise him or her, and love them more than any baby has ever been loved before, in the history of this or any other world, and you can go straight to hell, Dylan Creed.”

  He hadn’t moved, but his back was to her, and ramrod straight. He gripped either side of the doorjamb, like someone about to be blown away in a high wind, and gave a ragged laugh. “Oh, I’ll probably get there one way or another,” he said bitterly. “To hell, that is.”

  “You might be surprised,” Kristy said, “to find out you’re not the devil after all. That job’s been taken.”

  “Are you just going to let me walk out of here?” he asked. “Without even checking to see if there are monsters hiding in closets or under beds?”

  Kristy arched an eyebrow. Pursed her lips thoughtfully. Dylan didn’t want to leave? That wasn’t like him at all. He was great at exits, the king of the see-you-around-sweetheart saunter.

  Without saying anything—what was there to say, after all?—she sighed, got out of bed, pulled on a robe. Pushed past Dylan into the corridor, flipped on a light.

  The glare made her blink.

  She marched to the room Freida had vandalized, showed Dylan the destruction in the closet.

  He gave a low whistle, bending to touch the splintered drywall. “Remind me not to cross that woman,” he said. It was as if the lovemaking—along with the heavy emotions it had brought to the surface—had never happened.

  Except, of course, for the low hum throbbing in the nuclei of her cells.

  “Crowbar,” Kristy explained unnecessarily, pushing back her bangs.

  “God, Kristy, did she threaten you?”

  “No,” Kristy said, after the briefest hesitation, which Dylan picked up on immediately. He turned, standing there in the closet, and looked straight into her face.

  “But?” he prompted, the familiar muscle bunching in his jaw.

  She lifted both shoulders, let them down again, thrust bunched fists into the pockets of her robe. It was yellow chenille, that robe, with a duck on the back, and she’d had it since her sophomore year in high school. Trust her not to have anything black and lacy and low-cut.

  “I was a little scared,” she confessed.

  “Which is why you called my cell and then tried to convince me it was an accident?”

  She drew in a breath to protest, but she could see by the quirk at the corner of Dylan’s mouth that he wouldn’t believe her if she lied. “I felt silly, Dylan. I called you in a panic, and then—”

  He curved a finger under her chin. “And then you tried to backpedal,” he said. “Why, Kristy?”

  Because I love you.

  She couldn’t tell him that. She’d cry if she tried.

  “I’m an adult,” she said. “I’ve been taking care of myself for a long time now. No reason to stop managing my own life just because you’re back in town.” For now.

  She didn’t say that last part aloud, but it didn’t matter. She could see that Dylan knew what she’d been thinking.

  “No reason at all,” he said slowly.

  Kristy stepped back, swallowed. Averted her eyes so she wouldn’t have to watch Dylan walk away.

  Would he be back? Probably—and that only made matters worse, because with Dylan, it was a cycle. Get close, disappear. Come home, go back on the rodeo circuit.

  Poor Bonnie.

  Kristy was an adult. She could cope.

  Bonnie could easily end up a victim, though.

  The idea hurt so badly that Kristy grasped the door frame with one hand, following Dylan out of the guest room, so she wouldn’t double over.

  Dylan stopped, looked back at her. “Are you all right?” he asked.

  Oh, just dandy, Kristy thought furiously. You came here and you made love to me and now the force-field is back in place again and—surprise—you gotta be goin’.

  Things to do.

  Hearts to break.

  “See you,” he said.

  Kristy nearly did double over that time. See you?

  The Dylan equivalent of slam-bam-thank-you-ma’am.

  Well, what had she expected?


  She trailed him down the corridor and the front stairs, saw him to the main door, shut it hard behind him, turning the dead bolt and putting the chain in place. Leaned against it when he was gone.

  Winston appeared out of nowhere. “Meow,” he said, looking almost ghostly in the relative gloom of the entry hall, where only the barest frayed edges of the corner streetlight reached.

  “Oh, be quiet,” Kristy replied, tightening the belt on her duck robe.

  *

  DYLAN CLIMBED INTO HIS TRUCK, slammed the door and started the engine with a roar. He leaned to glare at his reflection in the rearview mirror and snarled, “You dumb bastard.”

  Going home was out of the question, since Bonnie wasn’t there.

  Since Kristy wasn’t there.

  Hell, even his dog and horse were at Logan’s place.

  Skivvie’s, once a favorite hangout, held no attraction at all.

  He didn’t feel like playing cards—he was in a mood, and that meant his game would be off. Poker required a kind of Zen attitude he couldn’t muster under the circumstances, so going to the casino wouldn’t help, either.

  He’d head up to the swimming hole and skinny-dip, but at this time of night the mosquitoes would eat him alive.

  Maybe Tyler was still around, though Logan seemed convinced their little brother had lit out after blacking his eye.

  So he jostled his way overland, to the far side of Hidden Lake, where Tyler’s log house stood on a high bank. It was the smallest of the three places on Stillwater Springs Ranch, but in some ways the best, since it was so secluded.

  Dylan felt his hopes plummet as he rounded the last bend, saw the darkened windows and the empty driveway. Even the lake looked lonely, flickering under moving shards of moonlight.

  “Hell,” Dylan said.

  He backed the truck up, turned around, still not ready to go home and face that old house. In a way, he felt guilty whenever he was there, intending as he did to bulldoze the whole shooting match to the ground and start over.

  Starting over.

  That was what Logan wanted to do: live down the Creed reputation, make the ranch—and the name—hum again. He’d even had some fantasies like that himself.