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

by Linda Lael Miller

  Dylan closed his eyes.

  Opened them again.

  “Dylan?” Sharlene prompted sweetly.

  “There’s somebody else, Sharlene,” Dylan finally managed, his gaze locked with Kristy’s. It wasn’t an ideal choice of words, but it certainly beat his gut response, I wouldn’t marry you if you were the last woman on earth.

  “There’s always somebody else,” Sharlene wheedled. “I don’t mind if you have another woman on the side, as long as I can see other men, too.”

  “And that’s your idea of a ‘real family’?”

  “Come on, Dylan! Don’t be such a pain in the ass.”

  “This woman isn’t the kind I’d have ‘on the side,’” Dylan replied coldly. “She’s the kind I’d marry.”

  Kristy had turned her face away, most likely embarrassed to be overhearing Dylan’s half of the soap opera, but at this last, she swung around to look straight at him. He could usually read her pretty well, but this time, one conflicting emotion after another chased across her eyes.

  Sharlene was silent for a long time, except for the choking sobs—a fair indication that the boyfriend really had swiped the loot on hand and hit the road, leaving her behind with an unpaid motel bill and no car.

  “Then I’m coming to get Bonnie,” she said. “Somehow, I’ll get there—I’ll hitchhike or whatever. I want my daughter back—without her, I’m totally alone.”

  The bath was getting cold. In fact, it was giving Dylan the chills, but he didn’t move to turn on the hot-water spigot. He didn’t think he could move, even if he tried. “Look, Sharlene,” he said, his voice still gruff, but gentled down a little, “don’t hitchhike, okay? It’s dangerous. There are a lot of creeps out there.”

  “I don’t care what happens to me!” Like hell, she didn’t. Sharlene was all about Sharlene. “I just want to get back to my baby—I never should have let you have her—”

  She’d home in on Stillwater Springs like a missile, he knew she would. If Sharlene had to thumb rides with drunks and rapists and drug addicts all the way from Texas to Montana, she’d get there. And whatever his reservations, he couldn’t let her travel like that, expose herself to guys who carried duct tape and box-cutters in their bag of tricks, because she was a human being and, beyond that, Bonnie’s mother.

  “Look, I’ll get you a plane ticket,” he said.

  Kristy’s eyes widened at that, then narrowed again.

  “But there’s something you need to know before you make the trip,” Dylan went on grimly. “I’ve already filed for custody.”

  Another silence, leaden as a rock.

  Dylan hadn’t wanted to spring the custody petition on Sharlene over the phone, at least not in her current emotional state, but not telling her would have been wrong, too. This was the lesser of two evils.

  “You’re going to take her away from me?” Sharlene asked. This time, her voice was small, and the cracks in it were real.

  Fury boiled up inside Dylan, along with pity. He hadn’t had the best childhood, but Sharlene’s had been even worse. She probably loved Bonnie, in her own bruised and broken way, but responsible parenting was beyond her skill set. She knew how to hustle. She certainly knew how to lie. But the next time looking after Bonnie was inconvenient—and it was, 24/7, even for him—Sharlene would dump her again.

  “I want custody, Sharlene,” Dylan said, very quietly, his and Kristy’s gazes locked together again. “But I won’t stop you from seeing Bonnie if you want to.”

  A few sniffles. “But I’m her mother. And she’s all I have.”

  “This isn’t about what you have or don’t have,” Dylan replied carefully. “Bonnie needs a home, a family, some stability. I can give her those things.”

  Sharlene gave a derisive little laugh, and it saddened Dylan to hear it. Her back was to the wall, and she was trying to brazen it through. That was a way of life for her—perennial damage control. “Sure. Until you get tired of that woman I just talked to—or until you want to rodeo again—”

  Dylan stood up, reached for a towel, wrapped it around his middle. It was time to play the card he hadn’t wanted to play. “Of course,” he went on, as though she hadn’t said anything, “there would be a settlement.”

  Now, he would know for sure how Sharlene really felt about Bonnie. If she told him to shove the settlement, he’d still fight for custody, but he’d be a lot more liberal when they hammered out a visitation agreement. On the other hand—

  “How much of a settlement?” she asked. No tears now. Her tone was level and hyperalert.

  Something inside Dylan deflated, not for his own sake, but for Bonnie’s. “It’s negotiable,” he said. The fine supper Kristy had cooked for him earlier, after they got back from Logan’s place, churned in his stomach and then went sour.

  “It would have to be a lot.”

  Dylan’s jaws felt as though they’d rusted at the hinges. He had to force his reply out. “The higher the stakes, Sharlene,” he managed, in a near growl, “the more you have to give up in return.”

  “You want me to sign off, don’t you? Agree to stay out of—Bonnie’s life.”

  “Until she’s eighteen,” Dylan said. “Then it will be up to her whether or not she wants to have a relationship with you. And if you run through the money, I won’t give you more.”

  “I have to think about this,” Sharlene said.

  What sort of woman had to think about selling her own child? He couldn’t imagine Kristy, or Briana, or any other female he knew agreeing to such terms, however generous.

  But at least Sharlene hadn’t jumped at the hook and agreed immediately.

  That was something. Not much, but something.

  “In the meantime, though,” Sharlene went on, cool and matter-of-fact now that she’d caught the scent of money, “I still have to eat and pay for my motel room.”

  “I’ll wire you enough to get by on. In the meantime, get a job.”

  “Bastard,” Sharlene said, and slammed down the phone on her end.

  Dylan considered flinging his phone against the wall, but decided against it, since he was trying to turn over a new leaf, to be a different and better man than before. A different and better man than Jake, who, in the same position, probably would have packed Bonnie’s bags for her and put her on a bus headed for Texas.

  And then smashed the phone against the nearest wall, just for good measure.

  Kristy simply watched him, standing now, wringing her hands a little. The old Dylan would have put a fist through a wall, and that was the Dylan she knew best.

  “Y-you’d marry me?” she croaked.

  “All you’ve gotta do is say yes,” Dylan said. It wasn’t the kind of proposal he would have envisioned—if he’d gotten as far as envisioning one, which he hadn’t—him standing in a prissy-assed Victorian bathroom wearing nothing but a towel, fresh from a row with the mother of his child. And Kristy a captive audience the whole time, forced to listen to his end of the conversation and try to make sense of it.

  No, he would have pictured another setting entirely. Someplace under a starry, moon-crowded sky, probably. He’d have had flowers and a diamond ring to offer, and polished his boots and ironed a shirt for the occasion.

  “Why?” Kristy asked, almost in a whisper. “Because of Bonnie?”

  “Partly,” Dylan admitted. Except by omission, when he’d turned his back on Kristy, in front of the jail the morning after his dad’s funeral, deliberately letting her believe he didn’t care if the whole thing ended right there, he’d never lied to her.

  “Only partly?” Kristy pressed, looking fragile. Again, he couldn’t read her. She looked alarmed, and semi-intrigued, as though she might actually consider doing something as crazy as marrying a Creed.

  He couldn’t answer. He was too afraid of saying the wrong thing, shifting the delicate balance.

  “Do you love me, Dylan?”

  He swallowed hard. “I don’t know,” he said.

  “I see,” she rep
lied, after a few moments of mulling things over.

  He went to her, cupped her chin in his hand. And she didn’t pull away, though her eyes—her beautiful cornflower-blue eyes—were full of confusion and proud sorrow. “I honestly don’t know, Kristy. With Sharlene threatening to take Bonnie back—and the bodies in Sugarfoot’s grave and somebody taking a shot at me with a rifle—I’m not real sure about anything right now.”

  “And yet you’d marry me.”

  “Yes.”

  “So Bonnie would have a mother.”

  “I can’t deny that’s a factor.”

  Kristy flung out her hands. “Then just about anybody would do, right?”

  “You know that’s not true. If it was, I’d have put a ring on Sharlene’s finger by now.”

  She turned away, walked out of the bathroom, into the master bedroom. It was a frilly, beribboned place, with lace at the windows and flowers the size of dinner plates rioting on the spread, but Dylan didn’t mind any of that.

  The room smelled like Kristy.

  It was permeated with her presence.

  She stood at one of those lacy windows now, staring out into the gathering darkness. He’d have given a lot to know what she was thinking then, what she was feeling, deep down.

  Was she crying?

  God, he hoped not. She’d had enough reasons to cry in her life, without his adding to them.

  “If I loved anybody,” Dylan said, “I’d want it to be you.”

  She stiffened, but didn’t turn around. “I want children, Dylan. And if—when—you decide to move on—well—I’m not Sharlene.” She rounded slowly then, looked him straight in the eye. “I won’t ever, ever let you take any baby of mine.”

  He supposed his puzzlement showed. “What are you saying?”

  “That if I loved anybody, I’d want it to be you.”

  It felt like a slap in the face, having his own words thrown back at him like that, but fair was fair. If he and Kristy had a baby together, and then things fell apart, it would all but kill him to walk away from the child, let alone Kristy, but he’d do it. He’d do it because, as she’d said, Kristy wasn’t Sharlene.

  Alone or with him, she was perfectly capable of raising a child, and doing one hell of a good job at it. “I’m not going anywhere, Kristy,” he said, knowing she wouldn’t believe him—and why should she? “If you want Bonnie and me to leave right now, tonight, go back out to the ranch, we will. But I meant it when I said I was going to bring my little girl up on home-ground.”

  “What about the rodeo?” It was a reasonable question. He’d loved the game too much—like a mistress with her claws in his heart, it had always wooed him, despite his best intentions. For all practical intents and purposes, he’d chosen it over Kristy, when the chips were down.

  And what a damn fool he’d been.

  “I’m getting too old for that crap,” Dylan said, with a rueful smile. Sure, he was young, but rodeo—especially bull-riding—was a kid’s sport. “I’m tired of being on the road. Tired of eating in cafés and truck stops and sleeping in motels where the sheets haven’t been changed in a week.”

  She pondered all that—he guessed she was doing her level best to trust his word—and it gave him hope that she was even willing to make the attempt.

  “I want a baby, Dylan,” she said finally. “I love Bonnie—it would be privilege to help raise her, but I want a baby. Of my own.”

  “And where do I fit into this equation, besides the obvious?”

  The sadness in her eyes was almost more than he could bear. “If you stayed, and we got old together, that would be—good. If you go, I’d have our child. And I wouldn’t try to keep you from seeing him or her whenever you wanted.”

  He supposed, under present circumstances, it was the best deal either of them could hope for. Kristy was only thirty, but she could probably hear her biological clock ticking.

  “Then maybe we should give it a try,” he said, his voice sounding like he had sandpaper in his throat.

  Kristy’s spine straightened again. Her shoulders straightened and her chin came up, though she didn’t move from her post by the window. He’d instinctively stepped back by then, wanting to give her space to think, to breathe.

  “We’ll have to do a lot better than just trying,” she said. “I want this to be a real marriage, Dylan. I want a family, pictures on the mantelpiece, soccer games and Sunday school—the whole works. Even if we don’t—don’t love each other.”

  He nodded. It was a wordless promise. He would do better than try. He’d make it work, somehow, insofar as that was possible for one person in a relationship to do.

  “We’ll get a ring tomorrow,” he said, when he found his voice again. “And a license.”

  “No rings,” Kristy said quickly, with a little shake of her head.

  He waited, in silence, for her to tell him why.

  She took her time doing it. “My mother had a simple gold band,” she said, her tone dreamy and her eyes distant. “Dad probably bought it on credit, at Sears or somewhere, and by the time I was in my teens, it was scratched and dented. She treasured it, though. Because Dad put it on her finger. Because she loved him, and she knew he loved her. They lost hay crops to freak hail storms, and cattle to the bloat and a lot of other things. Once, we went a whole year with a big blue tarp tacked across our roof because we couldn’t afford to repair the leaks—”

  Dylan remembered seeing that tarp, as a kid, from the school bus. Some of the others had teased Kristy about it—until he pitched the ringleader head-first into a snowbank. That was the end of the digs at Kristy Madison, at least in his presence.

  “But they always, always loved each other, no matter what,” Kristy went on. “I don’t want a ring until you can tell me you love me, Dylan, and mean it. And I won’t give you one—not if we’re married fifty years—until I can do the same.”

  “Fair enough,” Dylan said gruffly.

  In the little room next door, Bonnie let out a fitful cry, as though she knew her future was being decided by two well-meaning but very mixed-up people.

  “I’ll go,” Kristy said, when Dylan made a move in Bonnie’s direction.

  He let her, since she was dressed and he was wearing a towel, and he felt rooted to her bedroom floor anyway.

  All the aches welled up inside him, some of them physical, most of them not, suddenly and overwhelmingly. He pulled back the covers on Kristy’s bed and crawled in, listening with stinging eyes while she spoke soothingly to his little girl, just on the other side of the wall.

  Did he love Kristy?

  He’d never felt what she made him feel with any other woman, but did that mean he loved her? When—and if—he ever said, “I love you” to Kristy Madison, soon-to-be Creed, he wanted it to be gospel-true. Something he’d never go back on, no matter what.

  Kristy began to sing a little tune, a soft and silly lullaby, and Bonnie giggled sleepily.

  The sounds snagged at Dylan’s heart.

  A long, long time ago, Tyler’s mother, Angela, used to sing like that. She’d always sit on the side of her little boy’s bed, and stroke his hair, and Logan and Dylan would lie in their rooms down or across the hall and soak it in.

  Dylan had closed his eyes, and pretended he still had a mother.

  Maybe Logan had, too.

  Life could be—would be—so different for Bonnie, and for any other children that came along. All he had to do was marry Kristy, and it would happen. He imagined his new house on the ranch—he’d spent years designing it in his head—full of noisy kids, dogs and cats, aunts and uncles.

  And the wanting fairly crushed him.

  He was lying there, rigid, with the sheets pulled up to his waist, when Kristy came back. She sat down on the edge of the mattress and, just as if she’d seen right inside his brain, she smoothed his hair.

  “Go to sleep,” she said. “Bonnie’s fine.”

  He stared up at the ceiling, where the night shadows danced, unable to look into
Kristy’s eyes. “It’ll be a big responsibility, being Bonnie’s stepmother,” he said. “Think it through. Because it will break her heart if you ever decide you want out.”

  Kristy leaned down, kissed his forehead. “Sleep,” she repeated. “You were shot at and thrown from a horse today. You need your rest.”

  “I wasn’t thrown—” he started to protest.

  Kristy chuckled and pressed one finger to his lips. “Okay, cowboy,” she said. “You weren’t thrown. But you’re something the worse for wear, just the same, and you need some rest.”

  “I need some—”

  “Rest,” Kristy insisted.

  And she got up off the bed.

  “Where will you be?” he asked. “While I’m resting, like some old fart in a nursing home?”

  She laughed again, but it was a sad, scrapey sound. “Oh, I thought I’d go down to Skivvie’s and dance topless on the bar,” she teased.

  “Kristy.”

  “I’m in a mood to peel wallpaper,” she said, from the threshold.

  She closed the door between them with a gentle click.

  Dylan was positive he wouldn’t sleep without her there.

  He was wrong.

  *

  HE SLEPT LIKE A DEAD MAN, and when he woke up, the room was full of sunlight, Kristy’s side of the bed was still made up and he could smell bacon cooking.

  He jumped out of bed, scrambled into jeans and a shirt and hustled it downstairs to the kitchen.

  Bonnie was bouncing happily in an old-fashioned high chair, the kind made of shiny wood, with a decal of a pink duck on the back, while Kristy stood at the stove, building an omelet and looking for all the world like a ranch wife cooking for a man she loved.

  The scene stopped Dylan on the dining room threshold, practically took his breath away.

  Kristy smiled. “There you are,” she said. Following his second glance at the high chair, she added, “That was mine, when I was little. I found it in the basement last night and washed it down—looks good as new, doesn’t it?”

  Dylan managed a nod, crossed to kiss the top of Bonnie’s head, offering a silent, desperate prayer as he did so. Let it last. Given that he wasn’t exactly a praying man, he was a little taken aback by the power of his longing to live a thousand, a million, mornings like this one.