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

by Linda Lael Miller

  A quick peek in the refrigerator told her what she already knew—no food until Hal and Tess returned with bagels and whatever else they could find in the plethora of well-stocked delis the neighborhood boasted. Unless, of course, she wanted a tasty mix of baking soda, Dijon mustard and wrinkly green olives for breakfast.

  The repast might, she had to admit, have suited her mood.

  A minute or so after she’d reached this conclusion, the doorbell rang.

  Lily started the coffee, left the kitchen and headed for the front door, smiling as happily as she could, given the ordeal she was about to face. God bless her dad—he’d keep Tess out of range as long as he could, but time was of the essence, just the same.

  “Coffee?” Lily asked, stepping back to admit Eloise. The brew wasn’t ready, but she knew her motherin-law would refuse the offer.

  Early as it was, the woman was impeccably dressed, in full makeup, high heels, nylons and an expensive navy suit with white piping. Her eyes moved disapprovingly over Lily’s ratty robe, turned bleak when she recognized it as an old one of Burke’s.

  “No, thank you,” Eloise bit out. Dear God, the makeup. It was perfect, at an hour when Lily wouldn’t have trusted herself to apply mascara without putting out an eye. Had Eloise visited the cosmetics department at Neiman Marcus, her favorite, before breezing on over?

  Lily suppressed a sigh. Kept her smile in place—and it felt like a pair of those wax lips kids wear at Halloween. “Come in,” she said, as Eloise swept regally past, took in the dusty, unlived-in state of the condo and settled herself somewhat warily on the very edge of the sofa cushions.

  “What did Tess mean last night,” Eloise snapped, never one for preambles, “when she said you were going to marry someone named…Tiger whatever-it-was and live in a trailer?”

  “His name is Tyler Creed.” Just saying the name made Lily feel a little stronger, a little steadier. She tightened the belt of her robe and sat down in the easy chair facing Eloise. “We are planning on getting married.”

  We’ve just been too busy having maniacal sex to set a date yet.

  Eloise closed her eyes and paled a little, as though absorbing a physical blow. Obviously she’d cherished illusions that Tess might have had the wedding part wrong. “I see,” she said, looking at Lily again. Drilling a hole right into her with her gaze. “And you’re going to live in a mobile home, if I understood my granddaughter correctly?”

  Distantly, the coffeemaker chortled busily away.

  It was a comforting sound, and the aroma made Lily’s dry mouth suddenly water.

  “Temporarily,” Lily said mildly, chin up, smile still fixed in place. Inside, though, she wanted to counter with, What’s so terrible about a mobile home? And what gives you the right to be such an insufferable snob? “Tyler and I intend to build a house. The trailer is temporary.”

  “You can’t be serious,” Eloise said, aghast.

  “I’m quite serious,” Lily said evenly. “About marrying Tyler and about raising Tess in Stillwater Springs. It’s a very nice little town, you know.”

  Eloise actually shuddered, perhaps still thinking about the mobile home, or maybe small towns in general. “I can’t believe you would do this, Lily, take my only grandchild—all I have left of my son—so far away—”

  Lily felt a pang of sympathy, and would have reached out to touch Eloise’s hand if she hadn’t expected the gesture to be slapped away. It wasn’t hard to imagine herself in her motherin-law’s position, at least where Tess was concerned. If she were grown-up, getting married and moving someplace far away, Lily would be devastated.

  The difference was, she’d accept that the decision was Tess’s to make.

  “You can visit as often as you want to, Eloise,” she offered gently. “Montana is on the North American continent, you know.”

  Eloise fanned herself with her tasteful alligator-skin clutch, dyed to match the navy suit. “And stay in a trailer? That would be cozy, with you and your new—husband.”

  Lily bit the inside of her lower lip, something she did when she needed a second or two’s delay before she spoke. “Eloise, Burke has been gone a while,” she said, when she thought she could trust herself to speak in a civil manner, “and we were getting a divorce, remember?”

  Eloise waved off the divorce, along with the decent interval since Burke’s death, presumably. “You would have worked things out,” she said, maddeningly certain of something she knew nothing about. In the next moment, though, she closed her mouth tightly, as if to stanch things she didn’t want to say, and was about to go on when she registered the expression on Lily’s face.

  “No,” Lily said. “We wouldn’t have ‘worked things out,’ Eloise. Burke was having an affair—the latest in a long line of them—”

  “Boys—” Eloise began.

  “Don’t you dare say ‘boys will be boys,’” Lily broke in furiously. No more Mrs. Nice-guy, or whatever. “Burke wasn’t a boy, Eloise. He was a man. He should have acted more like one—thought about how all that self-indulgence might affect his daughter, if not his wife.”

  Eloise reddened, but managed, perhaps by generations of good breeding, to hold her temper. The effort was only partially successful. “If you’d been a real wife to him—”

  Lily stood up, jerked her robe belt even tighter around her waist and then sat down again, because there was no escaping Eloise, or the topic of conversation. “We’re not going there,” she said, deadly calm. “We are not going there, Eloise.”

  Eloise seemed to wilt a little then, even backpedal. “I’m sorry,” she said, with what might have been sincerity but probably wasn’t. “It’s just that I don’t know what I’ll do without Tess nearby, and it will give me fits of anxiety, worrying about what might be happening to her in that godforsaken place—”

  “Stillwater Springs,” Lily broke in, “is beautiful—breathtakingly so. In fact, we call it God’s country.”

  Eloise wasn’t listening; she’d made up her mind about Montana and about Tyler. “This man you’ve taken up with, he’ll be her stepfather—”

  “I happen to love ‘this man I’ve taken up with,’” Lily said. “Very much.”

  The coffeemaker, which always sounded as though it were circling the kitchen, came in for a steamy landing.

  “How do you know he’ll be good to Tess—this Tyler person?”

  Lily seethed. “Do you think I’d marry him if I thought he wouldn’t be?”

  Just then, a key scraped in the lock. Lily heard her father’s voice on the other side of the door, and Tess answering, and then they were both in the living room, Hal carrying a couple of deli bags, their eyes full of trepidation.

  Eloise’s driver must have been circling the block; otherwise, they’d have spotted the limo.

  Hal’s gaze moved warily between the two women. “I guess we weren’t gone long enough,” he said.

  Tess, on her best behavior, remarkably, approached her flushed grandmother, wrapped both arms around the woman’s neck and kissed her loudly on the cheek.

  “If we’re going to Nantucket,” she chimed, “let’s leave right now and get it over with.”

  Eloise flinched. “Get it over with?”

  Hal cleared his throat and looked away.

  And Lily closed her eyes, waiting for the explosion.

  “I thought you liked going to Nantucket,” Eloise said to Tess, pumping some grandmotherly cheer into her voice and still sounding wounded.

  “I do,” Tess replied philosophically, bouncing once before settling onto the sofa cushions beside her grandmother. “But I’d rather be in Stillwater Springs. My mom’s getting married, and I think there might even be a baby coming. I asked her, and she said ‘maybe sometime,’ but when people get married, they usually have babies—”

  Lily groaned and buried her face in both hands.

  “So that’s how it is,” Eloise steamed, though to give her credit, she was obviously trying not to blow up in front of Tess.

&nbs
p; “Eloise,” Lily said wearily, “that is not how it is.”

  Eloise got to her feet, shaking on her high heels, and gave Tess a distracted pat on top of the head. “We’ll talk about Nantucket later,” she said. “Right now, Nana needs to be by herself for a while, so she can think.”

  “How come grown-ups always want to be by themselves when they think?” Tess asked her grandfather. “I’m only a kid, and I can think just fine, whether anybody else is around or not.”

  “Tess,” Hal said, as Eloise whisked past him, opened the door and stormed into the corridor beyond, “be quiet.”

  “Don’t you think that advice came a little late?” Lily asked her father miserably. When she’d had a few moments to recover, she turned to Tess and added, “You knew exactly what you were doing, didn’t you, young lady? You wanted to upset your grandmother so you wouldn’t have to go to Nantucket.”

  Tess’s eyes widened in guileless surprise.

  Lily was not fooled. “Go to your room,” she said.

  Tess flung a pleading glance in her grandfather’s direction. “What about the bagels and the strawberries and stuff?” she asked plaintively. “I’ll starve if I have to go to my room.”

  “Not to mention being devoured by cooties,” Lily sniped, and instantly hated herself.

  “Better mind your mother,” Hal responded, after tossing a quelling glance in Lily’s direction. “I’ll do what I can to calm her down, and bring provisions if it looks like you’re going to be stranded for any length of time.”

  Tess fled to her room, slammed the door behind her.

  “Lily,” Hal reasoned, sitting down in the place Eloise had so recently vacated and taking one of her hands, “Tess is six years old. She didn’t set out to upset Eloise—or you.”

  “That,” Lily said, “is what you think.” She could just picture Eloise, whipping down to the lobby in the elevator, sweeping past poor, friendly Orlando without a word of acknowledgment, angrily gesturing for her waiting driver to get out of the limo and open the door for her—if he wasn’t still circling the block while he waited for Madam to appear. As soon as Eloise got back to her mansion in Oak Park, if she didn’t stop off at some private investigator’s office to start the process before then, she’d find out everything there was to know about Tyler—and all the Creeds.

  And so much of it wasn’t good.

  Eloise had contacts, and she had money. She probably had Tyler pegged for some toothless redneck with a drinking problem. Suppose she decided to sue for custody of Tess? Suppose—

  Hal vanished into the kitchen, with the deli bags he’d set on the floor when he sat down, and returned with coffee for Lily—her first of the day, and critically needed—and he held it out to her, didn’t let go of the handle until she’d gripped the mug with both hands.

  “If it wasn’t so early in the day,” he remarked, “I’d have dosed this java with Jack Daniel’s. That woman is something else.”

  “I don’t have any Jack Daniel’s,” Lily said, quite unnecessarily.

  Hal chuckled. “What kind of place are you running here?”

  Lily managed a brief smile, but she was shaken, and there was no hiding it. She didn’t even try—this was her dad she was talking to, after all. “Eloise is going to type ‘Creed’ into some search engine as soon as she gets home and fires up her computer,” she muttered, after a few steadying sips, “and when she sees what comes up, all hell is going to break loose.”

  “Honey,” Hal reasoned gently, “if Tyler were a saint, she still wouldn’t spit on him if he caught fire. He’s going to be helping to raise her granddaughter, and he’s not Burke, and that’s all it takes to piss off somebody like Eloise.”

  Lily glanced nervously in the direction of Tess’s room, dropped her voice to a whisper. “Dad, what if she—Eloise—what if she hires a bunch of lawyers and tries to take away my baby?”

  Hal had returned to his seat on the couch, now that he’d brought Lily the coffee, and his face turned granite-hard. “We’ll fight, if we have to,” he said, and he seemed so serious, and so upset, that Lily was instantly afraid he’d have another heart attack.

  She had to get herself—and the situation—under control. And fast. So she did an emotional 180 and tried to look and sound confident. “I’m sure it won’t come to that,” she said. “I just got a little carried away.”

  “No wonder Burke was such a piece of work,” Hal said. After pulling in some deep, slow breaths, he was still riled, but settling down by visible degrees. “I never liked Eloise Kenyon, and that was when she was a mere acquaintance. Now that I’ve seen her in action, up close and personal, I think I could hate her without half trying.”

  “She’s really not so bad,” Lily insisted, and she meant it. “She did spoil Burke—he was her only child and she’s a widow and, well, I know how I’d feel, in her position.”

  Hal smiled, albeit a little glumly. “I suppose it’s natural that she’s bent out of shape, after the way Tess sprang all this on her before you had a chance to smooth the lady’s feathers.”

  Lily nodded gloomily.

  “So what else is on the schedule for today?” Hal asked, determinedly positive. “Whatever it is, it can’t be worse than your motherin-law.”

  That made Lily laugh. “The first order of business,” she said, setting her cup down on the cocktail table and standing, “is to get dressed. The second is to deal with my daughter—preferably over breakfast. And the third, well, I’ve got to go over to my—the office and empty my desk.”

  “Need any moral support?”

  Lily paused to rest a hand on her dad’s shoulder before heading for her room to get ready for the day. “Yeah,” she said. “I do. But this is something I have to do on my own.”

  Hal nodded. “I’ll look after the munchkin while you’re gone,” he said, with another grin. “Try to get the concept of diplomacy across to her.”

  “Good luck with that,” Lily replied.

  *

  “YOU WANT TO STOP BY the casino?” Tyler asked Davie quietly, as the two of them, and Kit Carson, drove toward Stillwater Springs. “Say hello to your mother?”

  Davie shook his head. Wouldn’t meet any of the several glances Tyler sent his way. “She’s busy,” he said. “Let’s just go on to Missoula, like we planned, and pick out that redneck castle you promised Miss Lily.”

  Tyler hurt for the boy, but he had to chuckle at the colorful description of the trailer they were about to lease. Dan Phillips was lining up a crew to bulldoze the cabin and set up some kind of temporary rigging to hold up the trailer, once it arrived. Tyler, Davie and good old Kit would be holing up at the Holiday Inn in the interim.

  Both Dylan and Logan had offered them a place to stay between the destruction of the cabin and the delivery and hookup of the trailer, but Tyler hadn’t wanted to impose. Logan had a houseful as it was, and there was construction going on at his place, on top of that. Dylan and Kristy had plenty of room in that big Victorian monstrosity in town, but Kristy had already loaned him her Blazer. Asking her to take in two guys and a dog, even briefly, was over the line. Besides, she and Dylan were still newlyweds, like Logan and Briana, and they were building a house, too. They needed what privacy they could scrape together.

  In fact, it seemed to him, things were moving pretty fast, all around.

  Not fast enough, though, when it came to marrying Lily, he thought ruefully, missing her the way he would have missed an arm or a leg after an amputation. But he’d been at odds with his brothers for a long time, and getting back on solid ground would take a while.

  It was doable, anyway. And that was miracle enough.

  One thing at a time, cowboy, he told himself. Fishing with Dylan and Tyler was one thing, and that trout supper at the main ranch house the night before hadn’t been half bad, either. But signing on the dotted line and becoming a partner in the Tri-Star Cattle Company—well, that was something he needed to think about.

  They made good time getting to Mi
ssoula, stopping for cheeseburgers on the way and cleaning up the mess after Kit Carson hurled his share all over the floorboards.

  By noon, they’d looked at every trailer the outfit had to offer—the salesman called them “manufactured homes”—and settled on a four-bedroom triple-wide that was fancier than most of the houses in and around Stillwater Springs. The kitchen even had a special refrigerator for wine, and the cabinets were solid oak.

  The living room boasted a TV that came down out of the ceiling at the push of a button—that was a hit with Davie—and the master bedroom wasn’t just a bedroom, it was a suite, with a “garden” tub in the bathroom. The whole place was wired for sound, another plus in Davie’s opinion, and the “bonus room” was big enough to accommodate a pool table—with no danger of bumping the back end of a cue stick against the wall on a wild shot.

  Tyler signed papers and wrote a whopping check, and he and Davie rejoined Kit Carson, who’d barfed in the truck again.

  “You’re sure you want to build a house?” Davie asked, making faces as he cleaned up the tattered seat with a wad of paper towels. “I wouldn’t mind living in that place for the rest of my life.”

  Tyler chuckled. Wondered how much the smell of dog vomit would lower the trade-in value of the rig. “I’m sure,” he said.

  Davie disposed of the paper towels and sprinted back to the sales office to wash his hands in the john.

  Kit gave an apologetic whine, sounding ashamed of himself.

  “It’s all right, boy,” Tyler told him. “But when it comes to cheeseburgers from now on, it sucks to be you.”

  Davie returned, turned in the passenger seat before hooking up his belt to ruffle Kit Carson’s floppy ears and tell him he wasn’t mad at him for throwing up—again—and grinned at Tyler. “Where to now?” he asked.

  “I guess we’d better get ourselves a new truck,” Tyler said. Lily would be back in two weeks—thirteen days, actually—and he couldn’t haul her and her little girl around in a rig that smelled like dog puke.