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

by Linda Lael Miller

  It also gave him an instant hard-on, which meant a cold shower or a header into the lake, if he didn’t want to suffer the whole night.

  “Oh, trust me,” he said, “I’m paying the price.”

  “Good,” she replied brightly, as though they’d been discussing carpet colors for the triple-wide or something. “That’s wonderful, Tyler.”

  He laughed. “You’ll pay,” he promised.

  “So will you,” she chimed in response.

  He didn’t want to let her go, but the conversation had about run its course, unless he went on to tell her that Kit Carson had barfed in the truck twice that day and Sheriff Jim had stopped by to question Davie about what might turn out to be an attempted murder. And he wasn’t about to do that.

  There was one thing he wanted to say, but you didn’t tell somebody you were ninety-nine percent certain you were in love with them over the phone. Best wait until she was home again, and he had her alone and could peel off her clothes and lick everything he uncovered.

  The hard-on progressed from uncomfortable to downright painful. Tyler bit back a groan and asked, “Can I call you tomorrow?”

  “Sure,” Lily answered. “If you think you can behave yourself.”

  “No phone sex? You don’t want me to tell you everything I’m going to do to you, and then do again until you lose your mind and come like you’ve never come before?”

  Her answer made him laugh.

  “I didn’t say that, now, did I?”

  “What time, Lily?”

  “What time?” She was flustered, then.

  Good.

  “What time shall I call you and make love to you with my voice,” he clarified. “Remember that day in Wal-Mart? It’s going to happen again, Lily, only long-distance this time.”

  There was just the slightest tremor in her voice when she answered. “Dad and Tess are going to the Museum of Natural History tomorrow morning,” she said. “Suppose I call you?”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  AFTER A PLUNGE INTO THE LAKE, long after Davie had fallen asleep on his cot downstairs, Kit Carson balanced on the teetery rigging right along with him, Tyler’s raging body calmed down.

  Mostly.

  But his mind just wouldn’t stop; it was like a bronc at the rodeo, evading the pick-up men the way broncs-on-adrenaline sometimes did, still bucking, reins dangling, long after the buzzer sounded and the cowboy had scrambled over the fence to safety.

  Davie had said he and Doreen hadn’t set him up for a scam and the story had some credibility with Tyler; after all, he’d been the one to do the paternal math and then hogtie the obvious conclusion and run with it. Doreen had denied that Davie was his, that night at the casino, when they discussed the situation, and with considerable regret. She’d said she wished it was true, but Davie’s biological father was some truck driver, long out of the picture.

  It had sounded reasonable at the time, even a little noble, given that Doreen could have been collecting child support for the past thirteen years—money she’d obviously needed. But con artists made a specialty of seeming reasonable, didn’t they?

  Of course they were convincing. They were masters of the art of bullshit—they had to be.

  Tyler couldn’t overlook that possibility. It was all too easy to imagine Doreen following his career on ESPN, in the tabloids, where he’d kicked up a deliberate fuss more than once, and in the movies. At some point, she might have decided to bide her time and go for lump sum when the opportunity was at its prime.

  It seemed likely now that he’d been carefully led, managed, from the time he came back to Stillwater Springs. And it wasn’t inconceivable—it wasn’t even all that big a stretch—to think Roy might have been in on the whole thing, too.

  He could just hear the planning they must have done—Doreen and Roy and possibly Davie, gathered around some scratched-up table, somewhere in the wonderful world of low-income housing.

  You act scared, Doreen might have told Davie. Tell Tyler Roy beats you up, regular. Roy, I’ll call you when the right moment comes. You put on a show for the pigeon. Act real mean. Tyler will buy that, it’s a hot button with him, after all he went through with his old man—

  Lying there in his loft bed, with Lily conspicuously absent, sleepless and feeling like a rube, it was no trick at all to believe he’d been suckered, taken in.

  And yet whenever Tyler was around Davie, he definitely picked up Creed vibes. He’d learned to trust his instincts over the years, rarely had a hunch that didn’t prove right—and several of them had saved his life. Deep down, he’d still have bet his share of the ranch that Davie was his son.

  Or was that just wishful thinking, plain and simple? His childhood had been hell, and after the old man died, he’d been estranged from Dylan and Logan for five long years. And he’d lost Shawna—his best friend if not the love of his life, like she should have been.

  Back then, still broken, Tyler hadn’t been able to love a woman full-out, no holds barred, the way he was starting to love Lily. He hadn’t had a clue what was going on in the dark recesses of his psyche, when it would have counted, when he might have given Shawna a fighting chance to get past all the walls he’d put up.

  Tyler rolled onto his side, slammed a fist into his pillow, as if pounding it to fit his thick-skulled Creed head would make a difference.

  Nothing was going to make a difference now—not to Shawna. She’d been anything but stupid, so she must have known the score from day one, but she’d carried on anyhow, cowgirl-style. Put a brave face on things, done everything she could to make him happy, and to be happy herself.

  I’m sorry, Shawna. God, I’m so sorry.

  The best—and worst—part was knowing Shawna would have forgiven him if he’d ’fessed up, said she knew he’d been doing the best he could. Shawna’s family, hardscrabble ranchers, had been so much healthier than his, and she’d grown up whole. In a better world, he would have been the one to slide off the side of a slick Nevada mountain, not her.

  Shawna would have mourned, but those folks of hers, parents and brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles and cousins, would have gathered her in, too. Kept her safe in the center of a warm circle, seen her through the worst of it, encouraged her to go on with her life when she’d had time enough to grieve.

  By now, she’d be remarried, with a couple of kids, and he’d only be a memory that gave her a pang to the heart sometimes when it snowed in the night and she woke up to a pristine landscape outside her window, or when she heard their song on the radio….

  “Stop,” Tyler growled, thrusting himself onto his elbows.

  He’d done everything but cry at his own funeral, imagining the parallel-universe scenario, and that made him feel like the damn fool he was. There was no changing the past, and he had to stop trying.

  He’d had his chance with Shawna, and he’d blown it.

  Now, he had a chance with Lily.

  Twice in a lifetime, cowboy, he thought. That’s two more chances than a lot of people get, so don’t screw this up.

  He sat upright, thrust the splayed fingers of one hand through his hair. Don’t screw this up? Hadn’t he already screwed it up, by getting involved with Doreen and Davie the way he had?

  What if he was plain-old, flat-out wrong about Davie?

  A man had died in the kid’s presence, and telling about it later, he’d finished with boo-hoo? The kid could be a sociopath, if not worse.

  Or simply a thirteen-year-old boy, used to making the best of situations most adults never had to deal with.

  On the plus side, Davie was good to the dog—he seemed to love Kit Carson as much as Kit loved him. Not typical sociopathic, or psychopathic, behavior. But did it preclude the possibility that Doreen might have purposely offed poor old Marty, and that Davie might have helped her cover it up? Even helped her do it?

  Jesus.

  What in hell might he be letting Lily and Tess in for, bringing them to live under the same roof with Davie? The little
girl would be vulnerable to Davie in ways Tyler couldn’t stand to think about, and couldn’t ignore, either.

  On the other hand, all he really had to go on was his imagination, which happened to be running wild at the moment. It wouldn’t be right to turn his back on Davie on the strength of midnight suppositions.

  And it had to be after midnight.

  He groped for his watch on the upended fruit crate that served as a bedside table, held it in the shaft of moonlight beaming in through the window. Seeing the golden cowboy on the face of that watch, riding a bronc and holding one arm high, certain to make the critical eight seconds, Tyler’s eyes burned. Shawna. She’d been so proud when she gave him that watch to celebrate his first championship, probably never even regretted selling her horse trailer and prize saddle to raise the money.

  He’d planned on buying her a bigger, better trailer and another fancy saddle, too, but like so many good intentions, that one had been a paved road to hell.

  Tyler blinked a couple of times. Squinted to read the dial.

  Quarter after eleven? That was all? Hell, it felt as though he’d been tossing and turning on that painfully empty bed for a whole night, and he hadn’t even turned in until ten.

  Frick, he was getting old.

  He got up, pulled on some jeans, tugged a T-shirt over his head, threw a flannel work shirt on over that. Pulled on socks and boots and descended the stairs as quietly as he could, in case Davie was having better luck in the sleep department. Grabbing up his laptop, along with his cell phone, he hushed Kit Carson, who stirred on the cot, and went outside.

  Closing the door behind him, he sat down on the porch steps and looked up at the bright Montana stars. Millions of them, close enough to touch.

  They roused a sweet loneliness in Tyler, those stars.

  It would have been his salvation to call Lily—it was two hours later in Chicago, so he’d wake her up—and her voice would be all sleepy and warm. She’d be ripe for a little phone sex….

  He shook off the fantasy. Lily was wrapping things up back there; she had a lot to do. She had a child and an ailing father to look after, a condo to clean, things to pack up.

  She needed her rest.

  So he’d wait, as agreed, until she called him.

  If it killed him.

  He would have liked to talk to Logan about all this, or Dylan, or both of them. But they had wives, kids—lives. He could have put aside his pride and leveled with either one of his brothers—and that was undeniably progress—but he wasn’t about to wake them up, or interrupt something more intimate than sleep. Most likely, they were doing some headboard-slamming with their beautiful ladies.

  That made him smile.

  Cassie? She’d listen, if he let her know he needed to talk. She’d always been a rock, a refuge. She’d steered him through a lot of things, including some dark days after Shawna’s accident. But Cassie’s magic only worked in person, not over the phone, and he couldn’t drive over to her place and knock on the door at that hour. For one thing, he’d probably get her out of bed, and for another, leaving Davie home alone, at least at night, wasn’t an option.

  The kid might be thirteen, and street-wise—he might even be a psychopath—but it was a sure bet he’d spent more than his share of nights in an empty house or apartment as it was.

  And too many things could happen. What if there was a fire? What if his appendix ruptured?

  Tyler shook his head, flipped open the lightweight, superpowered laptop, logged on.

  If he couldn’t sleep, he’d do a little detective work instead.

  First stop, his favorite search engine. His mailbox was jammed, but that could wait.

  He typed in “Doreen McCullough,” expecting to wade through a hundred different Doreen McCulloughs, if not a thousand, before he found Davie’s mom and his first lover.

  The first few were strangers, as expected, but then he hit pay dirt—if a mug shot could be called pay dirt.

  There was Doreen, face bare of makeup, wearing an orange jail outfit and holding up a sign with numbers on it.

  Feeling sick, Tyler scanned page after page of a whole other kind of dirt. Doreen hadn’t hit bottom with Roy Fifer—she’d come up in the world.

  She’d been busted for soliciting in Vegas, not once but three times. She’d tried her hand at shoplifting, and done a year for credit-card fraud.

  Where had Davie been, when she was sent up?

  In a foster home? With the truck driver Doreen had originally named as Davie’s father?

  “Okay, so she has a rap sheet,” Davie said, from just behind him.

  Tyler hadn’t heard the kid get out of bed, let alone approach, but he wasn’t really surprised. Davie probably hadn’t been able to sleep any more than he had. He’d been playing possum when Tyler passed through the kitchen a little while before.

  “Want to tell me about it?” Tyler asked quietly. Evenly.

  Davie stepped around him, wearing the ratty pair of sweatpants he slept in. Sat down on the step next to Tyler.

  “What’s to tell?” he finally said. “It’s all right there, on the Internet. Most of it, anyway.”

  Tyler wondered if Jim Huntinghorse had already reviewed all this stuff and, if so, why he hadn’t mentioned it during his visit earlier in the evening. “Where did you stay, Davie, when Doreen was doing her time for credit-card theft?”

  Davie was a long time answering. He didn’t look at Tyler or at the computer screen, but straight out into a darkness that must have seemed dense enough to swallow him whole and then digest him right into oblivion.

  “With my grandmother,” he finally admitted. “Scroll a little farther—she’s on there.”

  Instead, Tyler closed the laptop, set it aside on the newly repaired porch. Kit Carson squeezed between him and Davie and trotted out into the high grass to lift a leg against the right rear tire of the new Chevy. It gleamed in the thin light of a waning moon, that pickup, a thing of beauty. The kind of rig he should have bought in the first place. “I’d rather hear it from you,” he said.

  Davie sighed. “Gramma plays bingo all the time, so she wasn’t much interested in me—I just got in her way, mostly.” The boy gave Tyler a sidelong look and did the Creed grin again, flawlessly. “Not what you were expecting, huh? You thought I was going to say I was taken in by wolves while Mom was in the slammer, or maybe a band of outlaw bikers—”

  While Mom was in the slammer.

  How many kids had to cope with something like that?

  “I thought you were probably in a foster home,” Tyler said.

  “That would have been better. Mom is the greatest disappointment of my Gramma’s life—not counting me, of course. She had two other kids before I came along and, not being married at the time, or particularly flush, gave them both up for adoption.” Davie paused, shrugged in a way that made Tyler’s heart crawl right up into the back of his throat and pound there. “For whatever reason—my best guess would be that I was a financial ace in the hole, if there was any chance I was yours—she kept me. Came and picked me up as soon as she got out of jail—and was I ever glad to see her.”

  “I’m going to have to call her, Davie. Your grandmother, I mean.”

  “Good luck dumping me on her,” Davie said, with heartbreaking bravado. “Like I said, I’m not Gramma’s favorite person.”

  Somewhere out in the gloom, Kit Carson began to bark.

  Thinking of coyotes, or the bears that sometimes roamed the ranch in search of a meal, Tyler gave a shrill whistle to call the dog back.

  After that, things happened so fast that he never got a chance to tell Davie he hadn’t intended to foist him off on anybody.

  Lights swung through the trees, coming up the driveway, and the roar of a big engine driven too fast in too low a gear made the air vibrate.

  Tyler got to his feet. “What the hell?”

  “Kit!” Davie yelled, in an instant panic. “Kit!”

  Kit was only a shadow, darting along the edge
of the tree line between the cabin and the lake, and he’d evidently dropped out of obedience school, because he stayed clear.

  The roar got louder, and the ground began to shake.

  “Get out of here!” Tyler yelled, fairly pushing Davie off the porch. “Run!”

  “Run where?” Davie shouted back.

  The headlights were high off the ground, and coming straight at them now, jostling and jumping like the eyeballs of some gigantic monster sprung up out of the earth and bent on destruction.

  Tyler grabbed Davie by the back of the neck and flung him to one side, dived after him. They both hit the ground face-first, scrambled back to their feet.

  There was a crash, loud enough to rattle the stars overhead, and Tyler looked back to see the big rig pushing his new truck in front of it like a cow-catcher on a freight train. The semi’s engine was screaming now, rising toward a shrill crescendo.

  “Shit!” Tyler hollered furiously. “I just bought that truck!”

  Now Davie was the one taking the lead. He had Tyler by the arm and was trying to drag him out of the crazy, swaying beams of those headlights.

  “If he sees us,” Davie shouted, pulling for all he was worth, “we’re dead meat!”

  They’d only covered about a dozen yards when the demon semi from hell rammed Tyler’s truck into the side of the cabin, and then straight through the wall.

  And not just the front wall, but the back one, too.

  Dust billowed, fit to choke everything that breathed.

  The semi motor gave one last excruciating whine of agonized protest and then died, with a series of metallic clunks. The hand-hewn timbers of the cabin roof groaned and finally gave way with an uncanny grace, smashing down on top of the big truck. On top of Tyler’s pickup.

  “Christ,” he murmured, not sure if he was praying or cursing.

  “It was just like in that Stephen King movie,” Davie piped up. “The one with the crazy car that went around crushing people against walls—”

  “Davie,” Tyler said quietly, plucking his cell phone from his pocket. “Shut up.”

  Logan got there first, tearing up the driveway in his truck. He’d heard the crash all the way over at his place, he yelled up to Tyler, who was already on the roof, tossing down boards.