He patted her shoulder. “That’s what I thought,” he said.
They went into the house then, father and daughter, and Lily noticed that her dad paused to lock the front door and turn the dead bolt. It hurt, knowing the town she remembered as such a safe place had changed enough to make such measures necessary.
Hal switched off various lights, and Lily went on to the kitchen, to take his pill bottles down from one of the cupboards and carefully count out the night’s dose.
Reluctantly, he swallowed the medicine, said good-night, disappeared into his room.
Lily remained in the kitchen for a few minutes, puttering. Setting up the coffeemaker for morning, checking her cell phone, which she’d forgotten to charge the night before.
She plugged it into the cord, switched it on to check for messages.
To her surprise, there were two.
Vaguely unsettled, since no one had called her on the cell phone since the day she left Chicago to rush to her father’s bedside in that Missoula hospital, Lily punched in the voice-mail codes.
The first call was from Eloise. She missed Tess—and, oh, yes, Lily, too, of course—and some storage-unit place had called about an overdue bill. Evidently, Burke had stashed some of his belongings there, and did Lily want to go through all that stuff, or should she, Eloise, have it hauled away?
Lily frowned. She’d paid all of Burke’s bills after he died, as they came in. If there had been one from this “storage-unit place,” as Eloise put it, she would have paid that, too.
Her first instinct was to call her motherin-law back, as late as it was, and ask her to have some charity haul away whatever Burke had been storing, promising to reimburse her for the storage rental and any other expenses involved. But something besides common courtesy stopped her from dialing the familiar number.
Suppose there were things in that storage unit that Tess would want someday?
That didn’t seem likely, once Lily reflected on it for a few moments. If Eloise Kenyon was willing to have “that stuff” hauled away, that meant she had all the important mementos from her son’s younger days safely in her possession.
It was all too complicated to think about that night. She’d decide what to do in the morning, when she was rested.
Lily saved her motherin-law’s message and listened to the second one.
Her boss had called.
They were sorry, and they hoped her father was getting better with every passing day, but they couldn’t hold her job open for the requested six weeks after all.
If Lily couldn’t return to Chicago by the beginning of the following week, they would have to replace her.
Numbed by the knowledge that she could be replaced so easily, Lily saved that message, too.
She couldn’t go back to Chicago so soon.
Hal wasn’t out of the woods yet, couldn’t be left to fend for himself. He’d be back at work full-time and living on greasy cheeseburgers before she and Tess hit the city limits. And he’d said some things that worried her, while they were talking on the porch earlier.
Nothing like a heart attack to make a man take stock of his life. My veterinary practice—well—it’s about the only thing I’ve done right in a long, long time.
I’d be dead in six months.
Chilled, Lily realized with a wallop how very much she wanted to get to know her father, get back to the place where she could comfortably call him “Dad” again.
As she prepared for bed, taking a long bath, pulling on the oversize T-shirt she’d always worn when she needed to feel cosseted and cozy, brushing her teeth, she reviewed her financial situation.
She wasn’t rich, but she was a good saver and she had no debt to burden her. The cost of living in a small town like Stillwater Springs was certainly lower than in the Windy City, and if push came to shove, she could always sell her condo.
Maybe it was time to consider starting her own business, as Tess, of all people, had suggested. She’d always wanted to construct a Web site and sell “outsider art” online—clothing, jewelry, collages and paintings, the work of regular people.
“Regular people,” in Lily’s experience, were incredibly talented, and their creations were unique. In a world of mass manufacturing, handmade items had more appeal.
Of course, she reasoned, throwing back the covers to get into bed, it might be years before the Web site actually showed a profit—if it ever did.
On the other hand, her own needs were simple, and thanks to the trust fund Burke had set up before his death, Tess would never want for anything, even if Lily never worked another day in her life.
After switching off the bedside lamp, Lily lay in the dark, her tired mind whirling.
Eloise Kenyon would raise hell if she brought Tess to live in Stillwater Springs.
She recalled Tess’s remark about the trust fund and the insurance settlement—an inadvertent relaying of some observation Eloise had made. Lying there in the spare room bed, Lily felt a surge of anger. Damn, she hated that kind of passive-aggressive crap.
And Tess was her child, not Eloise’s.
Where Lily chose to live, and raise her daughter, was flat-out none of her motherin-law’s business. Eloise could damn well lower herself to visit rural Montana if she wanted to see her grandchild, and of course there would always be the short jaunts to Nantucket and the Kenyon mansion in Oak Park. Whatever her own issues might be with Burke’s mother, Lily knew that Eloise took very good care of Tess when the two of them were together, subtle make-sure-your-mother-hears-this comments to the little girl aside.
The first order of business, come morning, Lily decided, would be to call Eloise Kenyon and decide what to do with the contents of Burke’s secret storage unit. Once that had been determined, Lily would break the news that she and Tess might be staying on in Stillwater Springs longer than they’d originally planned.
And when that conversation was finished, she would give her soon-to-be-former employer a ring. She knew her boss expected her to rush back to Chicago, flushed with chagrin over her absence and desperate to please, and get right back into the old harness.
Surprise, she thought, with a smile.
It was a new day.
And she was a new Lily.
She closed her eyes, relaxing into exhaustion, and when she opened them again, it was morning, and Tess was standing over her with the cordless phone from the kitchen in one hand.
“It’s Nana,” she said, in a stage whisper. “I told her you were still sleeping, but she has to talk to you, right now.”
Exasperated, Lily struggled to wake up, raised herself to a sitting position with the pillows fluffed behind her and took the phone.
Tess lingered, probably curious, but Lily sent her out of the room with a waving motion of one hand.
Reluctantly, Tess left, closing the door behind her.
Lily drew a very deep breath and released it slowly before saying pleasantly, “Hello, Eloise. What’s the big emergency?”
Eloise was silent for a moment, and when she spoke, it was with wounded indignation. “Can’t I call my own daughter-in-law?” she asked. “Especially when she’s taken my only grandchild to some godforsaken burg in Montana?”
Lily’s temper surged. She tamped it down, forced a smile into her voice. “Tess told you I was sleeping,” she said moderately. “When you insisted on talking to me anyway, I assumed it was urgent.”
Clearly miffed, Eloise immediately snapped, “I need to know what you want me to do with Burke’s things. The ones he was keeping in that storage unit.”
“Now?” Lily asked sweetly.
She felt Eloise back off before she heard it in the other woman’s voice. “I’ve been through the stuff,” she admitted. “There’s nothing that would interest you or Tess—except possibly some medical records.”
“Medical records?” Lily asked, sitting up straighter now. Feeling mildly alarmed. Had Burke been suffering from some hereditary disease—one that might have been passed down to
Tess?
Eloise let out a long, broken sigh. “He had a vasectomy, Lily,” she said. “Right after Tess was born.”
Lily’s head spun. “What?”
Eloise began to cry, very softly. “I know you always wanted more children. I wanted more grandchildren. Apparently, Burke deceived us both.”
Burke had had a vasectomy—without telling her.
He’d let her go on hoping, go on trying to conceive, knowing all the while that he’d already made that impossible.
“Lily?” Eloise prompted, when Lily didn’t respond. “Are you still there, dear?”
Dazed, Lily struggled to find her voice. When she did, she stammered out something incoherent and hung up. She dropped the receiver onto the bed beside her, laid both hands to her abdomen.
Tyler had asked if she could be pregnant.
And she’d said no.
A combination of exultation and fear roiled inside her.
Surprise, she thought. But this time, she wasn’t smiling.
CHAPTER TEN
LOGAN’S UNSCHEDULED MORNING visit had been brief and to the point, and it stuck in Tyler’s mind long after his brother had left the cabin. Soon afterward, Dylan had stopped by, ostensibly to drop Davie off.
As it turned out, Dylan and Logan were planning a trail ride into the foothills—Logan hadn’t mentioned that—and they wanted to take Davie with them. The kid looked so hopeful, Tyler never thought of refusing—not that he had any right to say yes or no where Davie was concerned anyway.
“You could come with us,” Davie suggested eagerly, stooping to ruffle Kit Carson’s ears in belated greeting.
Tyler passed a glance in Dylan’s direction. “Apparently, I’m not invited,” he said. “Logan didn’t say a word about any trail ride when he came by here a little while ago to harass me.”
There had been something else Logan had wanted to say, something about Jake, though every time he’d gotten close to spitting out whatever it was, he’d veered off again. He’d mostly yammered on about the Tri-Star Cattle Company and how to err was human but to forgive divine.
Tyler did not aspire to divinity.
Dylan rolled his eyes. “Come on, Ty. What do you need—a printed invite? You’re welcome to ride with us and you damn well know it.”
Davie’s glance skittered from Dylan to Tyler. “If this is what having a brother is like,” he said, “I’m kind of glad I’m an only child.”
Tyler chuckled at that, in spite of his sour mood, and slapped the boy on the shoulder. “You go ahead. I’m going to call the repair shop in town—and maybe that truck of mine is ready to roll back onto the highway. It wasn’t when I checked before.”
Davie tensed, and his eyes narrowed. “You’re leaving?”
“No,” Tyler said quietly. “I just want my truck back.”
“Okay,” Davie said, relaxing a little.
Dylan was already moving toward the door. His gaze rested a moment on the Tri-Star papers Logan had left behind on the table, and Tyler wondered if they’d planned that early-morning recruitment effort between them. It seemed like something they’d do, but then again, Dylan wasn’t the sort to let someone else handle his dirty work. He’d have been right there, along with Logan, if he’d had any part in the scheme. “Just leave the Blazer at the shop if your truck is running again,” he said. “Kristy and I will pick it up later.”
Tyler merely nodded.
“You’re sure you won’t come along?” Dylan pressed.
The truth was, Tyler wouldn’t have minded a long trail ride up into the foothills, even if it meant spending time with his brothers. It had been too long since he’d been in the saddle, except to perform some lame-brained stunt for a movie camera. But he needed his own rig—he couldn’t drive Kristy’s Blazer forever. And besides, there were some other things he wanted to do.
“Maybe next time,” Tyler said, figuring there probably wouldn’t be a next time.
Dylan shrugged one shoulder and left the kitchen, headed outside, and Davie followed, though reluctantly, stopping on the threshold to try just once more. “It would sure be cool if you’d go with us,” he said.
Tyler’s throat tightened. He remembered asking Jake to come to the first basketball game of the season at Stillwater Springs High. It was his sophomore year, and he’d made the varsity team; the coach had promised he’d be on the court from the start, and he’d wanted his dad to be there. To be proud of him, maybe even nudge somebody sitting next to him in the bleachers with his elbow and say something embarrassing, like, “You see Number 22, there? That’s my son.”
Instead, Jake had blithely replied that he had a game that night himself—a high-stakes pool tournament, down at Skivvie’s. As an afterthought, on his way out the back door at the main ranch house, he’d told Tyler, “Break a leg, kid.”
Tyler had lost his taste for basketball after that, and taken up rodeoing instead—both Logan and Dylan, though still in high school, were already making more in prize money than they could have earned flipping burgers or sweeping floors someplace. And that was on the local circuit.
Anyhow, Tyler had decided, those shorts basketball players wore were just plain sissified, almost as bad as those stretchy shorts people wore to ride bicycles.
“I can’t make it today, Davie,” he said quietly, telling himself that it wasn’t the same as Jake’s refusing to watch a basketball game. Davie wasn’t his son—probably. “Tomorrow, you and I will find a couple of horses and saddle up. Take a ride of our own. How’s that?”
Davie looked partially appeased, but still disappointed, too. He nodded and left the house without another word. Drove off with Dylan.
“It’s just you and me now, dog,” Tyler told Kit Carson, as he took his cell phone from the counter, scrolled through his collection of numbers for the one for the auto-repair place in town and pressed the Call button.
Sure enough, the rig was ready. They’d installed a new muffler and done some work on the engine, too, though they recommended a total overhaul.
Tyler figured a trade-in would be easier—and cheaper.
He’d been a damn fool to swap his Escalade—though for him it was roughly in the same category as basketball shorts and ten-speed gear—for an old wreck of a truck.
He’d done it on impulse, shedding that too-fancy SUV the way a snake shed an old skin.
Now, he’d have to live with the consequences.
With that much settled in his mind, if not much else, Tyler loaded Kit Carson into the back of the Blazer and headed for town.
The bill for the towing, not to mention the repairs, probably exceeded the actual value of the truck. Tyler paid it just the same, chalking it up to penance for rash behavior, locked up the Blazer and gave the keys to the girl working the parts counter for safekeeping and took off.
He and Kit Carson stopped off at the lumberyard on the way out of town, and he ordered enough to shore up some of the stuff that was sagging out at the cabin, figuring he’d have the carpentry thing figured out once he’d replaced the small back porch and laid a new kitchen floor. He took a load home in the back of his pickup, too.
He felt ambitious, and hoped this enterprise wouldn’t turn out the way the truck deal had. But he had brand-new power tools, a hammer, a brown bag full of nails, and a lot of gumption. How hard could it be to rebuild the back steps and put in some new floorboards in the kitchen?
He picked up a few more groceries before leaving town, and then cruised casually by Doc Ryder’s place, hoping for a glimpse of Lily, but there was no sign of her or the little girl or of Doc himself.
Just call her, he thought.
“Oh, right,” he answered himself aloud, drawing a concerned look from Kit Carson, who was riding shotgun as usual. “I can hear it now. ‘Hello, Lily. This is Tyler. What do you say we get together and boink each other’s brains out again, just for the hell of it?’”
The dog whimpered. Maybe he thought he was getting chewed out for something. Or maybe he just dis
approved of the turn the conversation had taken.
Tyler reached over and patted the mutt’s head. “You a moralist, Kit?” he asked affably.
He’d been back home for several hours, finding out the hard way that replacing a porch, even a pissant one like he had, was easier to think about than to do, when an old black-and-tan Buick sedan rolled into his driveway around noon, throwing up dust in every direction.
Shirtless, since sawing and hammering was hot work on a sunny day, even that close to the lake, Tyler straightened and wondered who his visitor was.
He didn’t have to wonder long.
Doreen got out of the dented Buick, dressed in her waitress getup and wearing a casino ID card pinned to her bodice. She’d troweled on the makeup that day, he saw, as she came closer.
“Is Davie around?” she asked, stopping about a dozen yards shy of close-up and eyeing poor old Kit Carson like he might spring at her and tear her throat out. Doreen had ridden with outlaw bikers and traveled with rock bands. And she was afraid of a stray like Kit?
But then Doreen was afraid of a lot of things these days, wasn’t she?
Tyler set his hammer aside, reached for his T-shirt and pulled it on over his head. He’d had plenty of vine-swinging, chest-pounding, Tarzan-type sex with this woman, back in the day, but now being half-dressed in front of her seemed wrong.
“Nope,” he answered. “He’s gone on a trail ride with Dylan and Logan.”
Doreen gnawed at her lower lip for a moment, and Tyler wondered if Roy had knocked her around a little the night before, or even that morning, so she had to cover up the bruises with war-paint, or if she’d just been heavy-handed with the stuff, hoping for better tips.
“Is he all right?” she finally asked.
“He’s fine,” Tyler said, approaching her. He wanted a closer look at her face, and when he got it, his blood stung in his veins like venom. He took a gentle but firm grip on Doreen’s chin and said, “The gunk isn’t working, Doreen. I can see the bruises.”
“Let it go, Tyler,” Doreen said. “Roy passed out before he did any real damage.”
Linda Lael Miller Montana Creeds Series Volume 1: Montana Creeds: LoganMontana Creeds: DylanMontana Creeds: Tyler Page 73
