Tricia was standing next to Conner’s chair now, with her hands propped on her hips and her stomach sticking halfway into next week and her head cocked to one side. “Those lousy rumors have been knocking around Lonesome Bend for years, Brody. How can you be the only one who’s never heard them?”
Brody swallowed, still careful not to look at his brother’s face. “Joleen might have said something about it once, but I didn’t take it seriously.”
Tricia patted Conner’s shoulder and he pushed back his chair a little ways, so she could sit on his lap without being pinned between him and the table’s edge. “Carolyn almost left town because of it, several times,” she confided. “Between that and the stunt you pulled, it was almost too much humiliation for one woman to put up with. It’s a testament to how much she loves Lonesome Bend and wants to make a home here that she didn’t bolt a long time ago.”
Brody’s ears felt hot. “This is my fault?”
“Partly, yes,” Tricia said. “You were probably one of the first people Carolyn ever allowed herself to trust— you have no idea what things have been like for her— and you let her down.”
“Tricia,” Conner interrupted quietly, his arm around her, “you know Brody had his reasons for what he did.” Conner was defending him? Brody could barely believe it.
“We’ll be lucky if Carolyn doesn’t pull up stakes and take off for good,” Tricia said, though some of the wind had gone out of her sails by then, and she was resting against Conner’s chest. “Did you explain that you made a mistake?”
Brody closed his eyes to count to ten, but only got as far as seven before he had to blurt out, “I made a mistake? I practically refurbished the Bluebird Drive-in for one date and I made a mistake? Hell, Tricia, I didn’t even look at the titles of those movies—I just grabbed a DVD and shoved it into the machine, and two seconds after I got back to the car, Carolyn was freaking out.”
Conner chuckled. “Sounds like most of the drama never got as far as the screen,” he observed.
“Hush,” Tricia scolded, giving her husband a light jab with one elbow. “This is serious, Conner.” She turned to Brody. “You’ve got to talk to her,” she insisted, as serious as an old-time preacher describing the torments of hell. “Right now, tonight.”
“He’s not going anywhere,” Conner stated. “He’s been swilling beer like his insides were on fire.”
“I have not,” Brody answered.
“Nevertheless,” Conner reiterated, “you’re still not going anywhere tonight.”
Normally, Brody would have argued, just on principle, because he didn’t take kindly to anybody—Conner in particular—telling him what to do. Trouble was, Conner was right. He probably wasn’t over the legal limit on a beer and a half, but he wasn’t exactly in his right mind, either, so why take unnecessary chances?
“You made her cry,” Tricia accused sadly, spotting the makeup stain on his shirt. At least, he thought it was his shirt. Might be that he had it mixed up with one belonging to Conner.
“She went ballistic,” Brody recalled, before finishing the second beer. “Granted,” he said, when he’d caught his breath, “I should have checked out the movies before shoving one in the hopper, but it was an honest mistake, Tricia. Even if Carolyn had had an affair with Gifford Welsh, it wouldn’t be any of my damn business, now would it?”
“This is all a big mess,” Tricia said despairingly.
Conner gave her a one-armed squeeze. “But it’s Brody’s mess, sweetheart,” he reminded her. “And he’ll have to straighten it out. In the meantime, let’s go back to bed.”
That now-familiar sensation of benevolent envy ground in Brody’s middle. He, of course, would be sleeping alone, in his boyhood bed, unless Barney decided to join him.
And that didn’t seem too likely, the way that dog was snoring.
Brody decided he needed a third beer after all.
Tricia got to her feet, and so did Conner.
While his wife padded back toward the bedroom, Conner paused to lay a hand on Brody’s shoulder. “Go easy on the brew,” he said. “You’re going to have problems enough in the morning without waking up to a hangover.”
Brody sighed, too stubborn to agree. “Good night,” he said, in a grudging tone.
Conner merely chuckled, shook his head once and followed Tricia into the corridor.
CAROLYN MANAGED TO GET some sleep that night, though it was certainly nothing to write home about.
Not that she had a home or anybody to write to.
“Oh, stop it,” she told herself, standing straight and tall in front of the mirror over the bathroom sink. “I’ve had it with your whining, Carolyn Simmons.”
For once, there was no snarky answer.
Carolyn lifted her chin, squared her shoulders and critically examined her face.
Her eyes, rimmed with splotches of mascara, put her in mind of a raccoon. And they were puffy, to boot.
What remained of her lipstick was a pink mark on her right cheek.
And was she getting a cold sore, there, by her nos tril?
Resolutely, she started the water running in the sink, scrubbed away the remnants of the Cinderella makeup job, and splashed her face with repeated palmfuls of cold water for good measure.
When she’d finished, she still looked bad, but she was clean at least.
She dabbed ointment on the budding cold sore and marched back out into the kitchen, where the gypsy skirt was draped over the back of a chair.
It wasn’t a hopeless case, as she’d thought the night before, but it would require fairly extensive repairs. Along with Winston and a week’s supply of sardines, she’d pack up the skirt, various sewing notions and her trusty machine to take to Kim and Davis’s place, where she’d agreed to house-sit for the next week. Stitch by stitch, she’d put the garment—and the person she really was—back together.
With this mental to-do list rolling around in her brain, Carolyn put on a pot of coffee—she needed something to get her going—and decided to reward Winston with his favorite meal for breakfast.
The moment she peeled back the lid on the sardine can, however, the nausea was upon her.
She raced to the bathroom, holding her hair back with both hands as she got very, very sick.
And in the midst of all that, it came to her.
She’d had wine the night before—several glasses of it—and, dazzled by all Brody had done to make the evening special, she’d never given a single thought to her special sensitivity to alcohol.
She wasn’t crazy, she thought, with a rush of jubilation, even as another spate of retching brought her to her knees in front of the commode.
It was the wine.
BRODY DROVE Kim and Davis’s car up to their place first thing the next morning, to swap it out for his truck. While there, he’d feed the horses and have another look at the Thoroughbred, too. With luck, he could cadge breakfast from Kim, or at least a decent cup of java.
Down at Conner and Tricia’s place, a man needed an engineering degree to run the damn coffeepot. Marriage and impending fatherhood, it seemed to Brody, had rendered his twin brother a little strange.
He’d been keeping his mind busy with pithy observations like that one for much of the night and all there was of the morning so far, and it wasn’t helping. Thoughts of Carolyn were just beneath the surface the whole time, and they broke through in every unguarded moment.
Even now, he thought a dinner and a private showing of a first-run movie put him in the major leagues when it came to creative dating. He’d seen the look of wonder in Carolyn’s eyes when she saw the snack bar decked out for a romantic dinner for two. She’d been charmed, maybe even a little enchanted, exactly as he’d intended.
Okay, so he could have made a more sensitive choice when he chose the actual movie. He’d apologized, hadn’t he? Once he understood what the hell she was so upset about, anyway?
He sighed and resettled his hat.
Well, it was actually Conner�
�s hat, like everything else he had on this morning.
The question was, how could something so right have gone straight to hell in a handbasket the way last night had?
“Mornin’,” Davis called, from the back door, when Brody came out of the barn. “Coffee’s on.”
“I’ll be right there,” Brody responded, pausing to watch Firefly at the corral feeder.
Now that, Brody mused, was a horse.
“Don’t even think about it,” Davis warned, materializing beside him to set his arms on the top rail of the fence and nod toward Firefly. “He’s off-limits, Brody, and that’s the end of it.”
Brody gave his uncle a sidelong glance. “I can handle any horse,” he said evenly. “I’ve got the championship belt buckles and the prize money to prove it.”
Davis narrowed his eyes, and his tone was as solemn as his expression. “Your dad said something a lot like that once,” he said. “It was the day I warned him to stay off the stallion we’d roped wild, up in the foothills, until he’d been gelded and had some time to calm down a little. Blue told me he’d never met the horse he couldn’t ride, but I thought he was just talking, that he’d seen the sense in what I’d said. Next thing I knew, my brother was lying in the middle of the corral with his neck broken, and that stallion circling him like a buzzard, closing in, fixing to finish him off then and there.”
Davis paused, took a ragged breath and gazed off into the middle distance like he could see the scene playing out in front of him, clear as crystal, even after so many years.
“I had the hunting rifle in the truck,” he went on presently, without looking at Brody, “and I brought that horse down with one shot, right where he stood.” He made a sound that might have been a laugh, but wasn’t. “I thought there was still a chance that Blue would pull through,” he added. “If I’d seen him tossed by one horse, I’d seen him fly off a hundred, and a couple of those times, he’d even broke a few bones. But Blue didn’t move, didn’t open his eyes. Kim called the ambulance, and I stayed there with Blue, in the corral, with that dead horse a dozen feet away, telling my brother it would be all right. ‘Just hang on, help is coming. I’m here, Blue, right here, and I’m not going anywhere—’”
Davis choked up then, had to stop for a second or two to get a grip.
Brody waited, hot behind the eyes, while his uncle, one of the toughest men he’d ever known, pulled himself back together.
“You know what happened,” Davis said, looking right into Brody’s face now. “Your dad never came out of the coma. Six miserable weeks later, he was gone.” The older man swallowed hard, and his eyes glistened with rare moisture. “I brought Firefly to this ranch to save his life, Brody. Nobody else wanted him, said he was worthless, nothing but trouble. But you hear me, son, and hear me well…I’ll put a bullet in his brain before I’ll let anybody—and I mean anybody—ride him. Do we understand each other?”
“Breakfast is getting cold!” Kim sang out, from the side porch.
Neither Brody nor Davis moved, or looked away from each other’s faces.
“Do we understand each other?” Davis asked, for the second time.
Brody thrust out a sigh. “We understand each other,” he replied.
Davis slapped him on the shoulder, and he even smiled a little, but his eyes were as serious as Brody had ever seen them. “I need your word, son,” he said.
“You have it,” Brody replied. “I won’t ride the horse.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CAROLYN HAD JUST RELEASED a very disgruntled Winston from his crate into the wide-open spaces of the Creeds’ erstwhile empty kitchen when she heard a vehicle drive up and stop with a squeak of brakes.
She glanced at the clock—it was a little after noon— before peeking out the window, half-expecting to see Kim and Davis, ostensibly well on their way to Stone Creek in the RV, with Smidgeon and Little Bit, returning for something they’d forgotten.
Instead, Tricia, cumbersome, climbed from her Pathfinder, waving one hand in front of her face to dispel some of the dust she’d stirred up arriving.
Heartened, but at the same time feeling like one big bruise, exposed to every jostle and bump, Carolyn opened the side door to greet her friend with a smile and a wave. “You’d better get those brakes checked. I could hear them from inside the house.”
Tricia smiled. “Don’t worry. Conner made me promise to trade my rig for Kim and Davis’s car until the mechanic in town can have a look at it. That’s the main reason I’m here.”
The main reason, Carolyn thought wryly, but not the only reason.
By now, Tricia would have at least an inkling about the things that had happened last night, at the storied Bluebird Drive-in.
“You look like five miles of bad road,” Tricia observed bluntly, confirming Carolyn’s suspicion and duckwalking toward her. Carolyn wondered idly—and very briefly—if her friend wasn’t further along in her pregnancy than everybody thought she was. Tricia looked as though she might deliver baby Blue at any moment.
“Gee, thanks,” Carolyn chimed merrily, holding the screen door wide so Carolyn could squeeze past and enter the kitchen. Immediately, she hung the Pathfinder keys from the hook nearby and took the ones for Kim’s car.
The car Brody had picked her up in the night before, predisaster.
“But,” Tricia went on, dropping into a chair at the table with a relieved sigh and tossing Kim’s keys into her purse, “I’m happy to relate that Brody looks even worse than you do.”
“I guess that’s something,” Carolyn replied, with a grim little chuckle.
Tricia’s gaze had fallen on the gypsy skirt, neatly spread out on the table, awaiting rehabilitation.
“Yikes, Carolyn,” she marveled. “What happened?”
“You’ve seen Brody?” Carolyn said, letting Tricia’s question ride for the moment. She bit her lower lip and sat down, propping her chin in one hand. “Since last night, I mean?”
“He stayed at our place,” Tricia answered, squinting a little. “You really do look awful, Carolyn. You’re pale, and there are shadows under your eyes. And the skirt—what on earth…?”
Carolyn spread her fingers wide and shoved all eight of them into her hair, along with her thumbs, shaking her head as she recalled the latest calamity to befall her love life.
If it could be called a love life.
“I freaked,” she moaned. “Lost it. Ruined everything.” She made herself lift her eyes to meet Tricia’s. “First, I drank wine,” she admitted.
“Oh, no,” Tricia said.
“Oh, yes,” Carolyn responded glumly. “But I’ve thought about this a lot, and I’ve decided that’s no excuse for the way I behaved. Part of the reason, maybe, but not an excuse.” She sighed before going on. “Okay, the few times I’ve ever indulged in alcohol have all proven… imprudent. I should have anticipated that, and skipped the wine, but I was dazzled, Tricia. Honestly dazzled. What really went wrong was, I got scared, because nothing could ever be as good as that date was shaping up to be—I’m pretty sure that’s how my reasoning went, anyway—and something awful was bound to happen if I let myself believe for another second that—that—”
“That Brody might actually love you?” Tricia supplied gently, with a brief, reassuring touch to Carolyn’s hands.
“I made the mistake of thinking he did, once,” Carolyn said slowly. “And when I came to my senses, it was like being run over by a freight train. I spent a long time gathering up the pieces, Tricia, and putting myself back together.” She managed a thin smile. “Problem is, I think I might have put some of those pieces in the wrong places.”
“What happens now?” Tricia asked, after a sigh and a long pause.
“I fix the gypsy skirt and hope whoever’s driving the bid through the roof is happy with the results,” she said, fairly certain that Tricia had expected her to say she was packing up and leaving Lonesome Bend without a backward glance.
But she’d meant it when she promised herself
she was through running, literally and figuratively.
Tricia’s blue eyes twinkled with a sort of sad mischief. “Oh, I wouldn’t worry about the bidder,” she said. “She’s a very understanding woman. One of two very understanding women, actually.”
Carolyn felt her own eyes widen. “You know who…?”
Tricia smiled and struck a comical glamour pose without getting out of her chair.
“You?” Carolyn whispered. “You’re the mystery bidder?”
“Kim and I are going halves,” Tricia answered, undaunted.
Now Carolyn was really confused. Both Kim and Tricia were beautiful women, and both of them had great bodies—normally—but they were built differently, and Kim was at least three inches taller than Tricia, so there was no possible way they could wear the same garment without extensive alterations.
“Why?”
“Because we’ve both seen how much that skirt means to you,” Tricia said. “We were planning to wait a while, and then surprise you with it—for your birthday, maybe. Or Christmas.”
Carolyn knew better than to get her back up and accuse Tricia of joining forces with Kim to offer her charity. They’d done this amazing thing because they were her friends, because they had the means and because they cared about her.
Her eyes filled. “Oh, Tricia,” she said.
“Don’t cry,” Tricia said, waving her hand again, the way she had outside, when she was fanning away the dust. “If you do, I will, too, and then my nose will get all red and my eyes will practically swell shut and it will not be pretty.”
Carolyn laughed, giving her cheeks a swipe with the backs of her hands. “Not pretty?” she joked. “We can’t have that.”
Tricia smiled and sniffled once and said, “Well.”
Winston, having scouted out the new surroundings, returned to the kitchen to wind himself around and around Carolyn’s ankles in a figure-eight, purring like an outboard motor.
The Creed Legacy Page 28
