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

by Linda Lael Miller

  Kristy smiled and simultaneously wiped away a tear with the back of one hand. Year after year, she’d soldiered bravely on, always smiling and maintaining that her life was fine, wonderful, perfect in every way.

  Then Dylan had come back to Stillwater Springs, and brought Bonnie along for good measure. And suddenly, without them, her life wouldn’t be fine, wonderful or perfect. It was a kind of vulnerability she hadn’t counted on, hadn’t even considered. Wasn’t sure she could endure.

  How could she have forgotten what a dangerous risk it was to love so fully that she thought her heart might burst? Hadn’t she learned anything from losing her parents, and Sugarfoot, and that younger, wilder Dylan?

  While she was thinking these thoughts, the screen door creaked and Dylan stepped out onto the porch.

  “Hey,” he said.

  Embarrassed to be caught standing there staring at her own house as though she’d never seen it before, Kristy marshaled all her forces and got moving again.

  “Supper ready?” she asked, hoping she sounded—well—normal.

  “My world-famous beans and wieners.” Dylan grinned, coming down the steps to meet her, gathering her close for a moment, kissing the top of her head. “You open a can and a package of hot dogs, mix them together and throw the whole works in the microwave. I’m expecting the Food Channel to offer me my own show any time now.”

  Kristy laughed, because if she hadn’t, she’d have cried. Her emotions were so very close to the surface these days, such a tangle of sweet hopes and wild fears, and she had zero hope that that would change anytime soon. “Sounds fabulous,” she said, but the words came out sounding broken, and Dylan gripped her shoulders and held her back a little way to look directly into her face.

  Inside the house, Sam began to bark in cheerful, semifrantic yips, Winston hissed, and something crashed to the floor. Something heavy, that shattered.

  Dylan immediately turned and bolted back into the house, and Kristy was right behind him. At the threshold, Winston shot by them like a furry little comet, darting outdoors, and Sam ratcheted up the barking until Kristy wanted to put her hands over her ears.

  Bonnie, strapped into her high chair, had nonetheless managed to upend a bowl of salad on the supper table, and lettuce leaves, tomatoes, shredded cheese and ceramic fragments covered the floor.

  “Bonnie bad,” the little girl said solemnly.

  Kristy laughed with relief, because the child wasn’t hurt, and Dylan, surely feeling the same way, immediately began cleaning up.

  “Bonnie’s not bad,” Kristy said, unfastening the toddler from the confines of her high chair and hoisting her into her arms for a resounding cheek-kiss.

  “Jury’s still out on that one,” Dylan remarked, carefully gathering up the pieces of the broken bowl. “Was this special?”

  Kristy swallowed. The bowl had been her mother’s and her grandmother’s—possibly even her great-grandmother’s. She said what any of those women would probably have said, in a similar situation. “Bonnie’s okay. That’s all that matters.”

  Remember, Kristy, she heard her mom telling her once, as a child, when she’d accidentally dropped a special ornament while decorating the family Christmas tree one December, people are important. Things are just things.

  Dylan, crouching there on the kitchen floor, looked up at her. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I should have seen that the dish was old, and left it on the shelf.”

  “People are important, Dylan,” Kristy said. “Things are just things.”

  Bonnie struggled to get down, but there were still bits of broken pottery on the floor, so while Dylan went to the utility porch for a broom and dustbin, Kristy carried the child to the playpen in the corner of the kitchen and set her inside.

  Bonnie immediately pitched a fit.

  Dylan came back, gave a shrill whistle through his front teeth.

  Bonnie went silent, her eyes enormous, not with fear, Kristy knew, but with awe.

  “Can you teach me how to do that?” Kristy asked. Such a skill would come in handy at the library, and not just when Bonnie was around, either.

  Dylan chuckled. “You’re born with the ability to whistle like that, Kristy,” he told her. “It can’t be taught.”

  Kristy supposed, regretfully, that he was right. If she’d possessed the whistling gene, the gift would have manifested itself before now. Since yelling and spanking were both out, too, she’d have to find another way to divert Bonnie from her temper tantrums.

  She washed her hands at the kitchen sink, went to the fridge, got out the makings of another salad and started chopping.

  Bonnie curled up on the floor of the playpen, stuck one thumb in her mouth and drifted off. Sam tried to stick his muzzle between the bars and lick the top of her head, probably thinking she’d been imprisoned and wondering how to stage a jail break without opposable thumbs.

  “Peace.” Dylan sighed, dumping the remains of the previous salad and the last of the broken bowl into the trash, then putting the broom away.

  “Did Bonnie eat?” Kristy asked, as they sat down to greens served up in a plastic storage bowl and that old Montana standby, beans and wieners.

  “I shoveled some of that toddler-goop into her mouth earlier,” Dylan answered, after tossing a fond glance in his daughter’s direction. “She spit most of it back at me, but I figure enough went down to hold off starvation.”

  Kristy smiled, relaxing. It had been a long, emotional day, but she was home now, with a man who cooked—sort of. There were plans for the new house and possibly the barn on the counter, neatly rolled and secured with a rubber band.

  “You went ahead and had the blueprints drawn up?” she asked.

  Dylan shook his head, watching her with a forkful of salad greens poised halfway between his plate and his mouth. “No,” he said. “Those are just the sketches we talked about.”

  A soft warmth spread through Kristy. She didn’t expect to make a lot of changes to the designs, but she did want to have some part in the process, however small. “Oh,” she said.

  “You look exhausted,” Dylan commented. “Good thing I’ve got a surprise planned for after supper.”

  “A surprise?” Kristy asked, pausing. “What?”

  Chandelier-swinging sex? An engagement ring and an “I love you” to go with it?

  The sex was distinctly possible. When it came to the ring and the declaration, though, she knew she was getting carried away.

  “It wouldn’t be a surprise if I told you, would it?” Dylan asked.

  They finished supper. Dylan gathered Bonnie up and took her upstairs to get her ready for bed. Kristy retrieved a disgruntled Winston from the backyard, let Sam out for a few minutes and cleared the table. Overhead, the plumbing rattled, and water swooshed through the pipes.

  Dylan was a brave man, Kristy thought with a smile. He was giving Bonnie a bath.

  Remarkable. She’d never dreamed one of Stillwater Springs’ bad boys would turn out to be such a first-class father.

  Let alone run the washing machine, which went into the spin cycle at that moment, and put supper on the table.

  Her dad would have fought a whole pride of lions, bare-handed, to protect her and her mother. But she’d never known Tim Madison to wash a dish, prepare a meal or do laundry.

  Dylan returned presently—by that time, Kristy had brewed coffee and wiped the table clean in preparation for viewing the sketches—his shirt soaked. He grinned and hauled it off as he crossed the kitchen, heading for the utility porch, and came back tugging a T-shirt over his head, fresh from the dryer.

  He grabbed the rolled-up sketches and brought them to the table.

  Kristy sat down in the chair closest to his, after pouring them each a cup of coffee, and enjoyed the scent of Dylan’s still-damp skin and hair, and the newly laundered T-shirt.

  He bumped his shoulder to hers, then popped off the rubber band and unrolled the large pieces of drawing paper.

  And there was the house, dra
wn with colorful strokes, front view, back view and interior floor plan.

  Kristy drew in her breath. She’d never guessed Dylan could draw so well, and the detail was amazing—even the light switches were there. Clearly, he’d been designing the structure in his mind for years, just as he’d said.

  “I’m impressed,” Kristy said.

  “Good,” Dylan replied, watching her again. “Here’s the kitchen. State-of-the-art everything. I originally planned on slate floors, but with the munchkin around, cushioned vinyl would be a better bet.”

  “Definitely cushioned vinyl,” Kristy responded. The house was just a sketch, done on cheap paper with colored markers, but she could see it in her mind, even imagine herself living in it. The cupboards, the appliances, the combination breakfast-alcove with the overarching windows—the thing had come to life.

  It took her breath away.

  “Here’s our room,” Dylan went on, almost shyly, indicating a spacious area with its own fireplace, a gigantic master bath and a private patio. “The nursery’s here, and I’m guessing we need three other bedrooms besides, not counting the guest quarters on the other side of the living room—”

  “Dylan,” Kristy breathed.

  “What?”

  “It’s—incredible.” She frowned as her gaze caught on a smaller room with a strange object drawn in the center. “What’s this?”

  Dylan chuckled. “Mechanical bull,” he said.

  “Mechanical—?”

  “Nothing adds zip to a party,” Dylan informed her seriously—or, at least, she thought he was serious “—like a mechanical bull.”

  “What?” Kristy asked, with a twinkle. “No indoor bowling alley?”

  Dylan grinned, leaned over to kiss her lightly. “I thought about a room totally dedicated to sex, but the kids would find it for sure, so that’s out.”

  The kids. Plural, as in more than one. Kristy gave a sudden, pealing laugh, more from delight than amusement. “That I would have objected to,” she said.

  “But you’re okay with the mechanical bull?”

  “Sure, as long as you don’t expect me to ride it.”

  “You’ll ride it,” Dylan said, with such confidence that Kristy suspected he might be right. “The floor will be sawdust, with rubber pads underneath. The rest of the room will look like an old West saloon—”

  “How long, exactly, have you been thinking about this?”

  “Quite a while,” Dylan replied. “I used to lie alone on motel room beds, while I was still rodeoing, and move possibilities around in my head. After a while, it all fell into place.”

  There was something touching about the thought of Dylan lying in some lonely room, planning a house. Not, she supposed, that he’d been alone as often as he probably wanted her to believe.

  “See anything you’d like to change?” he asked, and his face was as open as Kristy had ever seen it. Was his heart, by any chance, open, too?

  She shook her head. “It’s perfect.”

  And it was perfect, except maybe for the mechanical bull, and even that might turn out to be fun.

  It almost made up for seeing her folks’ old place go to some outfit called Tri-Star.

  “Here’s the barn,” Dylan said, switching to another sketch, just as carefully planned as the one of the house had been.

  There were twenty stalls, plus a special, larger one for foaling mares, as well as ample space for storing grain and hay. A tack room, a small office and a studio apartment completed the ideal stable.

  “We’ll probably need some help around the place,” Dylan explained, tapping the center of the apartment with the tip of one finger. “This would suit most ranch hands, I guess.”

  Kristy almost laughed. Her parents’ whole house probably wasn’t as big as that apartment attached to Dylan’s barn.

  “The mortgage will be horrific, Dylan,” she heard herself say. Shades of the old days, when fear of foreclosure ran through the farms and ranches like another creek, invisible but swift of current, often reaching flood-level.

  “What mortgage?” Dylan asked.

  Kristy blinked. “Surely—this will cost a fortune—”

  “Yeah,” he agreed. “It will. This room over here? That’s a sort of family-study—the kids can do their homework there, and things like that.”

  “Dylan,” Kristy said, determined to pull him back from the brink of financial ruin. “Millions.”

  “Millions?”

  “That’s what a place like this would cost.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “But—”

  “It’s a relief to know you didn’t agree to marry me just to get your hands on my money,” Dylan joked.

  “I know you’ve done stunt work, and won a lot of championships, but this—”

  “I got a lucky break in the stock market once. Well, more than once, actually, but the first time clinched it.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Logan started a company several years ago,” Dylan answered. “Do-it-yourself legal services kind of thing. I’d just picked up a sizable paycheck at the National Finals in Vegas when it went public, and for once I was a couple of jumps ahead of the bill collectors, so I paid my taxes and plowed the rest into Logan’s outfit. We weren’t speaking back then, Logan and me, but I knew he had a good head for business so I decided to take a chance. Third best thing I ever did.”

  “Third best thing?” Kristy echoed, still reeling a little.

  Dylan wound a finger in a tendril of her hair, close to her ear, and hot shivers of response rushed through her. “First best thing would have to be a tie between fathering Bonnie and coming back here to marry you. Second, well, that’s whichever one isn’t first.”

  Kristy smiled, even as tears filled her eyes. “Some logic, Creed.”

  “Works for me,” Dylan said, rolling up the sketches again, snapping the rubber band back on. “If you’re good with all this, I’ll get the plans drawn up right away.”

  She nodded, still in something of a daze.

  The interlude was so sweet, so delicate, that Kristy was sure something terrible would happen to end it. This wasn’t paranoia; it was based on bitter experience.

  “About that surprise,” Dylan said.

  He stood and pulled Kristy to her feet. Left her standing to lock the back door and shut off the coffeemaker. It was wasteful, Kristy reflected distractedly, since the pot was mostly full, but on the other hand, they could always nuke it the next morning.

  They left the darkened kitchen, Winston and Sam following them up the rear stairway, and Dylan stopped to look in on Bonnie as they passed her door.

  “Go on,” he urged, when Kristy hesitated in the hallway. “I’ll be along in a minute or two.”

  Kristy nodded, stood a moment longer and then walked into her room.

  The covers were turned back, and the sheets were scattered with yellow rose petals so fresh that Kristy caught their marvelous scent even from the doorway.

  Things shifted and tumbled inside Kristy, wants and needs and, conversely, a sense that with Dylan, she had no physical boundaries, no secrets. He could lay her soul bare as easily as her body. In the throes of their lovemaking, she lost herself, as a separate human being, and became part, not just of Dylan, but of something cosmic.

  She heard him come in behind her, close the door softly.

  She, the librarian, who read three books in a slow week, couldn’t come up with a single word.

  Dylan stood behind her, wrapped his arms around her waist, bent his head to kiss her neck. Outside the door, Sam whimpered softly for admission, and Winston scratched officiously at the wood.

  Dylan sighed, stepped back from Kristy, went to the door.

  “Later,” she heard him say to the animals.

  Miraculously, the scratching and whimpering stopped.

  Dylan shut the door again, and gave her backside a squeeze as he passed, headed for the bathroom. She heard the water go on in the tub.

&
nbsp; And still she didn’t move.

  She just stood there, drinking in the sight and scent of those rose petals.

  “Kristy.”

  She turned just her head, saw Dylan in the bathroom doorway, arms folded, leaning one shoulder against the frame.

  “That isn’t the whole surprise,” he said.

  “Oh,” Kristy murmured. She wasn’t sure she could handle another surprise; she was still absorbing rose petals, and the incomprehensible idea that Dylan, one of Jake Creed’s rowdy sons, could spend millions building a house without needing a mortgage.

  Dylan held out a beckoning hand.

  Kristy went to him, switched off the light when she entered the bathroom and saw the candles—at least a dozen of them—flickering romantically on every surface. Dylan had run a bath for her, and there were more rose petals, pink this time—a trail of them leading to the tub like some magical path through an enchanted wood. White petals floated luxuriously on top of the water, which was redolent of the petals and lavender and just the merest touch of gardenia.

  Kristy was speechless.

  Dylan began undressing her, very slowly and very gently.

  When she was naked, he handed her over the side of that plain claw-foot tub like a courtier helping a queen step onto a barge. She sank into bliss and water.

  Kneeling beside the tub, Dylan bathed Kristy, and while the motions of his hands were more reverential than sexual, rhythmic, almost hypnotic, so lightly did he caress her, all five of her senses and several she’d never known she had were aroused to a fever pitch.

  The candlelight, dancing across Dylan’s face, awakened her eyes.

  Soft music, seeming to come from somewhere better than earth, floated around her ears.

  The water, the air, and Dylan’s hands touching her, everywhere and nowhere at all.

  The mingling of roses and gardenias and man tempted her nose.

  And taste? Well, that was the most prevalent sense of all. The want of Dylan, the need of him, tingled on her tongue.

  This is a man who does not love you, a voice deep inside her warned, but the wanting drowned it out, forced it to the floor of Kristy’s psyche like a bit of flotsam caught in a riptide.