She’d surrendered to Tyler.
She’d also conquered him.
But it wasn’t lovemaking, she reminded herself, even while she was still clawing at his shoulders and his back, even while she was still shuddering under him, still begging him to have her. It wasn’t lovemaking. It was getting off, being done.
Nothing less, nothing more.
Finally, he rolled onto his side next to her, breathing hard, and pulled her into his arms. Held her. Murmured the occasional senseless word into her hair.
And in some ways, that part of the encounter was even more satisfying than the shattering climaxes he’d given her only minutes before. The tender, time-out-of-time feeling of it brought fresh tears to Lily’s eyes.
Tyler held her more tightly still, and told her to shush, and the two of them drifted off into sleep.
*
WHEN LILY AWAKENED, the room was dark, except for a silvery stream of moonlight pouring in through a window that hadn’t been washed in a while. Tyler’s side of the bed was empty, but as reality coalesced around her, sound by sound, feeling by feeling, sight by sight, she heard his voice.
He was downstairs, talking to the dog.
Lily sat up, felt around for her sundress, started to pull it on and gave up. It was a wrinkled mess—how was she going to go home and face her father and daughter and little Eleanor from next door in a garment that had so obviously spent most of the evening in a crumpled heap?
She began to panic.
What had she done?
Tyler started up the stairs; she saw his head first, grinning. Then his T-shirt and misbuttoned jeans. Then his bare feet.
He offered her a jelly glass with wine in it.
“How am I going to explain the state of this dress?” Lily demanded, but she took the glass, and a gulp of the wine, and was a little surprised to realize it was good stuff, not the kind that came out of a spigoted box.
And there was music playing somewhere.
Was that Andrea Bocelli?
“I wouldn’t try to explain the dress, if I were you,” Tyler said, sitting down on the edge of the bed with a satisfied sigh. “A couple of slaps with an iron and it will look okay.”
“You own an iron?”
Tyler laughed. “Yeah,” he said. “A few other luxuries, too.”
Lily felt another rush of panic, looked at her wrist, which was bare since she’d forgotten her watch at home, and then all around the room, in hopeless search of a clock. “What time is it?”
“Early enough,” he drawled.
“Early enough for what?” Lily demanded, but she knew, of course, and her resolve was already weakening.
She hadn’t come to her senses, then.
In fact, she was nowhere near them.
“Early enough,” Tyler repeated. Then he took the wine out of her hand and set it aside. He stood and peeled the T-shirt off over his head, unbuttoned his jeans and took them off.
Once again, Lily’s eyes nearly popped at the size of his erection. He seemed even bigger than before.
How was that possible?
Deftly, he turned her onto her hands and knees, knelt behind her, stroked her belly and her thighs and her breasts until she whimpered.
“You might want to hold on,” he murmured, kissing her right shoulder even as he guided her fingers to the rails in the headboard. “This position is hell on the old G-spot.”
Lily’s palms felt moist and slick where she gripped the rails. She gave another little whimper when she felt him pressing at her vagina, about to ease inside her.
“Have you ever done it this way, Lily?” he asked, gliding his mouth across her back to her left shoulder, weighing her breast with one hand and toying with her clitoris with the other.
She shook her head, nearly hypnotized by the sound of his voice, the hard heat building inside her. She’d thought she needed to get laid, specifically by Tyler Creed, and that was it.
Slam, bam, thank you, sir.
He had satisfied her, every time. Oh, satisfaction wasn’t even the word for the things he’d made her feel.
But she’d expected to get him out of her system.
Scratch the itch, and be done with it.
Now, here she was, on her knees, bending over for him, holding on to the headboard of his bed like some—some porn queen. Even in a whole new fog of lust, she blushed to remember things she’d cried out before—do me, Tyler—make me come—
He eased inside her, smooth and slow.
Began a gentle rhythm, rocking her on the bed, murmuring softly to her.
In and out, in and out.
In five minutes, she was begging him again, groaning those same fitful phrases—and some new ones, too.
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE HEADLIGHTS of an oncoming car splashed through the windshield of the Blazer, a cruel dazzle to the eyes, as Tyler drove Lily back to her dad’s place in Stillwater Springs. She sat huddled in the passenger seat, wearing her crumpled dress, arms clamped around her middle, being very careful not to glance in his direction.
She’d looked fantastic in that dress.
Even better out of it.
Now, at a little after one in the morning, remorse was evidently setting in. Lily, helping him pound the headboard against the wall of his sleeping loft only a little while ago, howling like a she-wolf as she came, seemed profoundly miserable now.
It grieved Tyler to know that, because regret was the last thing he felt. He was still weak in the knees from the pleasure he’d shared with Lily—it had been the best sex of his life, bar none. And he’d had a lot of sex in his life.
“Hey,” he said gruffly, hoping she’d pick up the conversational ball and run with it.
“We didn’t even use condoms,” Lily lamented, thrusting the fingers of one hand into her love-tangled hair.
Tyler always wore a condom, but the precaution hadn’t even occurred to him with Lily.
“I’m healthy, Lily,” he said. “Nothing to worry about there.” He paused, swerved slightly to avoid a doe and a young fawn dashing suddenly across the dark road. “Could you be pregnant?” he asked, after a few moments of recovery from the near-miss with the deer.
She made a strangled sound, part laugh, part sob, but distinctly neither. “No,” she said.
“You’re on the pill—or something?”
“Or something,” she said, with a touch of bitterness. “I can’t have any more children, Tyler. Believe me, I tried.”
Lily couldn’t have kids? The thought opened a hollow place deep inside Tyler, an echoing void.
“You have Tess,” he pointed out lamely. Like she might have forgotten.
“There were some problems,” she explained, still without looking at him. “After Tess was born, I mean.”
Tyler marveled at the scope of his disappointment. It wasn’t as if he’d planned to marry Lily and start a family or anything, but the idea that it wasn’t possible to have a child with her had struck him hard, like an unexpected punch to the gut. He might have doubled over, if he hadn’t been at the wheel of Kristy’s Blazer.
“You’re sure?” he asked.
“I’m sure. Burke and I wanted more children—or, at least, I did. But after Tess was born, I couldn’t get pregnant again.”
They’d reached the outskirts of Stillwater Springs, and the place looked less scruffy in the dark. “Were you tested?”
Lily shook her head. “There was no point,” she said. “If something hadn’t been wrong, I’d have conceived.”
“Did it ever cross your mind,” Tyler pressed, “that you might not have been the one with the problem?”
She made that sob-sound again. Hugged herself more tightly than before, as though she feared she might fly apart in pieces if she didn’t. “Burke Kenyon, the hotshot pilot, the ladies’ man, sterile? I don’t think so. Besides, he used to brag about how many abortions his mother had to pay for while he was in college.”
“Nice guy,” Tyler commented.
&n
bsp; They pulled up in front of Hal Ryder’s dark house. Hopefully, the doc and the two little girls were sound asleep by now. The kids were too young to speculate about Lily’s dress and the state of her hair and the way her mouth was swollen from too much kissing, but Doc would know the whole story at a glance.
Tyler got out of the Blazer, came around to open Lily’s door, only to find her already scrambling off the running board. She stood there in the street, trying to straighten that hopelessly messed-up dress.
He knew she’d probably slap him silly if he tried to kiss her good-night, but he couldn’t just dump her in front of her dad’s front gate after all that had happened between them out at his place.
He took her by the arm and walked her through the gate, up the walk, onto the porch. Waited while she fumbled with the handle on the screen door. Beyond it, the front door stood open.
“Lily,” he said, very quietly, lest he wake the neighbors or Lily’s dad.
“What?” she snapped, but she kept her voice down.
“I wouldn’t change what we did tonight for anything,” he answered.
She opened the screen door, and it creaked a little on its hinges.
Lily winced, looking as anxious as a teenager out after curfew. “You got what you wanted,” she whispered. “I got what I wanted. Now, we’ll just act as if it never happened.”
“Are you kidding?” Tyler demanded, insulted.
“Shh!” Lily said, putting a finger to her lips. “Do you want to wake everyone up?”
Tyler sighed. If it had been up to him, he’d have woken up the whole damn town, whooping and hollering for joy, in true cowboy style. “Good night,” he said instead, as well-mannered as somebody’s English butler, holding the screen door for her, so it wouldn’t slam when she went inside, the way screen doors tended to do. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”
Lily didn’t answer; she just scowled at him and disappeared into the house, shutting the door decisively between them.
“Hot damn,” Tyler said, grinning, as he sprinted back down the walk and through the open gate. He hopped into the Blazer and switched on the engine, sat there at the curb for a long moment, wishing he and Logan and Dylan were still close.
If they had been, he’d have had someone to celebrate with.
He’d have told them he was getting married.
Wait—he was what?
He was getting married.
He knew that as surely as he knew the sun would climb up over the eastern hills in a few hours, spilling fiery pink and orange light over the trees and the pastures, the creeks and rivers.
He thrust a hand through his hair. Maybe it was better this way, since he needed some time to adjust to the decision himself, and the prospective bride wasn’t in on his plans quite yet.
Still, he couldn’t go straight home, knowing what he did, even though he knew poor old Kit Carson would be waiting for him there. The dog definitely suffered from separation anxiety.
He drove back to the ranch, slowly, trying to make sense of everything he was thinking and feeling, and having no luck with it at all. One minute, he’d been his old self. The next, he was suddenly husband material.
He wasn’t even sure when the shift had occurred, but the whole universe seemed to be converging on the concept now—him and Lily, married. It was mind-boggling and, at the same time, entirely natural, as though it had been inevitable from the beginning of time.
Passing by the main ranch house—it was dark, with everybody bedded down for the night—Tyler found himself yearning for the old days, when he and his brothers were still kids.
They hadn’t been all bad, those times.
When Jake was sober, he’d played driveway basketball with the three of them. There had been a hoop over the garage door, back then. He’d spun yarns, too, most of them about the glory days of the Creeds, when the ranch was one of the biggest and best in the whole state of Montana. Yes, sir, Jake had known all about the “thrilling days of yesteryear,” as he’d put it, and when Tyler, puzzled, had asked him to explain the phrase, Jake had shaken his head and said it had to do with the Lone Ranger and you had to be there to understand.
Remembering, Tyler’s eyes smarted a little.
He stopped, got out of the Blazer and opened a gate in Logan’s fancy new wooden fence, drove the Blazer through and went back to shut the gate again. There were cattle on the place now and, having grown up in the country, Tyler respected ranch etiquette. No matter what, if a gate was closed when you got to it, you made sure it was closed again when you’d passed through it.
He headed for the old cemetery, with the Blazer’s headlights switched off. If Logan or Dylan had seen their glow in the pasture, they might come out to investigate.
At the edge of the pioneer graveyard, Tyler parked the rig, shut off the engine and, ignoring Jake’s grave, found the one marked with his mother’s name.
Someone had been there recently, left a bouquet of pink, purple and yellow wildflowers in a Mason jar by her headstone. A sliver short of being full, the moon spilled a silvery glimmer over the whole place, lending it a strange and potent beauty.
Tyler crouched, touched the flowers in the canning jar and wondered who had left them. He finally concluded that it must have been Logan’s wife, Briana. Kristy and Dylan were still staying in town, at her place, while their new house was being built, but Logan and Briana lived within walking distance. And someone had mentioned in passing—Tyler couldn’t recall who—that Briana and her boys had taken care of the cemetery long before she and Logan met.
Having no idea what to say to a dead person—he wasn’t all that good at talking to live ones—Tyler simply sat there on his haunches, remembering, wishing things had been different.
Angela Creed had been a beautiful woman, delicate and spirited and full of music. Until Jake’s drinking and womanizing and chronic poverty had gotten to be too much for her, anyhow.
Lots of women lived with worse situations, Tyler reflected. Doreen was a good example. But they didn’t just drive off one day, hole up in some fleabag motel on a lonely stretch of highway and down a handful of pills.
Had she even thought about what her death would do to him or, for that matter, to Dylan and Logan? They’d both lost their mothers, and they’d loved Angela. Loved her singing and her guitar-playing on the back porch at night—serenading the fireflies, she’d called it.
Loved her peach cobbler, too, and the way she’d mussed their hair and straightened their collars, treated them like her own boys.
The news the sheriff brought might not have been such a shock if Angela had seemed unhappy. Oh, she and Jake had fought often, and loudly, behind the closed door of their bedroom, and there were other signs that the marriage was on its way down the tubes, but she’d always had a smile for “my boys,” no matter how bad things were otherwise.
But she hadn’t even said goodbye.
She’d made supper that night, like always, Tyler recalled, and told him and Logan and Dylan to do their chores. She’d seemed distracted and upset, that was true, but she sure hadn’t let on that she wouldn’t be coming back.
Why? Tyler asked himself silently, for about the millionth time. Why hadn’t she turned to Cassie that night, or to some other friend or relation, gone anywhere but to that damn dead-end motel? Why hadn’t she just divorced Jake Creed?
That, Tyler could have comprehended, young as he’d been at the time.
He would even have understood if she’d said she couldn’t take him with her, if she’d left him behind with Logan and Dylan, until she’d found a teaching job someplace, and managed to rent an apartment or a house.
Instead, she’d consigned herself to oblivion.
Permanent solution to a temporary problem, Jake had said, the day of her funeral. He’d worn a suit that didn’t fit him, Jake had, and smelled of stale whiskey.
Shut up, Logan had told their father furiously. Why can’t you just shut up?
Tyler blinked, yanked himself back to the
here and now, rose to his full height.
Thought about Lily.
What if whatever it was that had been wrong with Jake was wrong with him, too? What if it was hardwired into his DNA, and he took up with Lily and then one fine day woke up with a yen for whiskey?
What if.
Both Logan and Dylan must have had similar doubts, similar fears.
And yet Logan had married Briana and taken on a couple of stepchildren in the bargain, and Dylan had made Kristy Madison his wife, set out to raise two-year-old Bonnie, too.
What did his brothers know that he didn’t?
Or were Logan and Dylan just whistling in the dark? Taking a chance, throwing the dice, hoping against hope that things would work out—but well aware that, being Creeds, they were a pair of emotional time bombs, programmed to morph into the old man when some mysterious switch was flipped in their brains?
Did they wake up in a cold sweat at night, wondering when it would all come crashing down around them?
Both his brothers had been wild men when they were younger—Logan had been married at least twice before Briana, and Dylan hadn’t been a real father to Bonnie until he’d been forced into it, after finding the toddler in his truck one night in Vegas, abandoned by her mother.
Tyler left the graveyard, got back into the Blazer, started the engine and headed for his cabin.
He’d put off going back because he knew Lily’s absence would echo in the place, that the sheets would be imprinted with her singular scent. Now, because of the dog, and because Kristy or Dylan or both would be dropping Davie off first thing in the morning, he couldn’t wait any longer.
Kit Carson was ridiculously glad to see him. After some ear-ruffling and reassurances, Tyler took the dog outside. Without Lily to distract him, Tyler heard all the night sounds this time—the frogs croaking at the mossy-green edges of the lake, the crickets, an owl or two. Even fish breaking the surface of the water and splashing as they made re-entry.
For all the burdens he carried, Tyler loved that ramshackle old shack, ugly and small though it was. Jake had rented it out for a fishing cabin while he was growing up, but the old man had promised that when the time came, and the ranch was split between him and Logan and Dylan, Hidden Lake and some three thousand acres surrounding it would be his.
Linda Lael Miller Montana Creeds Series Volume 1: Montana Creeds: LoganMontana Creeds: DylanMontana Creeds: Tyler Page 69
