A Stone Creek Collection, Volume 2

by Linda Lael Miller

  Her first stop was Stone Creek Ranch. As she had at Starcross, she avoided the house and made for the barn. With luck, she wouldn’t run into Brad, and have to go into all her concerns about Ashley’s mother search.

  Luck wasn’t with her. Brad O’Ballivan, the world-famous, multi-Grammy-winning singer, was mucking out stalls, the reindeer tagging at his heels like a faithful hound as he worked.

  He stopped, leaned on his pitchfork and offered a lopsided grin as Olivia approached, though his eyes were troubled.

  “I see Rodney’s getting along all right,” Olivia said, her voice swelling, strangely thick, in her throat, and nearly cutting off her breath.

  Brad gave a solemn nod. Tried for another grin and missed. “I’ll have a blue Christmas if Santa comes to reclaim this little guy,” he said. “I’ve gotten attached.”

  Olivia managed a smile, tried to catch it when it slipped off her mouth by biting her lower lip, and failed. “Why the sad face, cowboy?”

  “I was about to ask you the same question—sans the cowboy part.”

  “Ashley thinks she found Mom,” Olivia said.

  Brad nodded glumly, set the pitchfork aside, leaning it against the stable wall. Crouched to pet Rodney for a while before steering him back into his stall and shutting the door.

  “I guess the time has come to talk about this,” Brad said. “Pull up a bale of hay and sit down.”

  Olivia sat, but it felt more like sinking. Bits of hay poked her through the thighs of her jeans. All the starch, as Big John used to say, had gone out of her knees.

  Brad sat across from her, studied her face and said—nothing.

  “Where are Meg and Mac?” Olivia asked.

  “Mac’s with his grandma McKettrick,” Brad answered. “Meg’s shopping with Sierra and some of the others.”

  Olivia nodded. Knotted her hands together in her lap. “Brad, talk to me. Tell me what you know about Mom—because you know something. I can tell.”

  “She’s alive,” Brad said.

  Olivia stared at him, astonished, and angry, too. “And you didn’t think the rest of us might be interested in that little tidbit of information?”

  “She’s a drunk, Livie,” Brad told her, holding her gaze steadily. He looked as miserable as Olivia felt. “I tried to help her—she wouldn’t be helped. When she calls, I still cut her a check—against my better judgment.”

  Olivia actually felt the barn sway around her. She had to lean forward and put her head between her knees and tell herself to breathe slowly.

  Brad’s hand came to rest on her shoulder.

  She shook it off. “Don’t!”

  “Liv, our mother is not a person you’d want to know,” Brad said quietly. “This isn’t going to turn out like one of those TV movies, where everybody talks things through and figures out that it’s all been one big, tragic misunderstanding. Mom left because she didn’t want to be married, and she sure as hell didn’t want to raise four kids. And there’s no evidence that she’s changed, except for the worse.”

  Olivia lifted her head. The barn stopped spinning like the globe Big John used to keep in his study. What had happened to that globe?

  “What’s she like?”

  “I told you, Liv—she’s a drunk.”

  “She’s got to be more than that. The worst drunk in the world is more than just a drunk….”

  Brad sighed, intertwined his fingers, let his hands fall between his knees. The look in his eyes made Olivia ache. “She’s pretty, in a faded-rose sort of way. Too thin, because she doesn’t eat. Her hair’s blond, but not shiny and thick like it was when we knew her before. She’s—hard, Olivia.”

  “How long have you been in touch with her?”

  “I’m not ‘in touch’ with her,” Brad answered gently, though his tone was gruff. “She called my manager a few years ago, told him she was my mother, and when Phil passed the word on to me, I went to see her. She didn’t ask about Dad, or Big John, or any of you. She wanted to—” He stopped, looked away, his head slightly bowed under whatever he was remembering about that pilgrimage.

  “Cash in on being Brad O’Ballivan’s mother?” Olivia supplied.

  “Something like that,” Brad replied, meeting Olivia’s eyes again, though it obviously wasn’t easy. “She’s bad news, Liv. But she won’t come back to Stone Creek—not even if it means having a ticket to ride the gravy train. She flat out doesn’t want anything to do with this place, or with us.”

  “Why?”

  “Damn, Liv. Do you think I know the answer to that any better than you do? This has been harder on you and the twins—I realize that. Girls need a mother. But there were plenty of times when I could have used one, too.”

  Olivia reached out, touched her brother’s arm. He’d had a hard time, especially after their dad was killed. He and Big John had butted heads constantly, mostly because they were so much alike—strong, stubborn, proud to a fault. And they’d been estranged after Brad ran off to Nashville and stayed there.

  Oh, Brad had visited a few times over the years. But he’d always left again, over Big John’s protests, and then the heart attack came, and it was too late.

  “Are you thinking about Big John?” he asked.

  It was uncanny, the way he could see into her head sometimes. “Yeah,” she said. “His opinion of Delia was even lower than yours. He’d probably have stood at the door with a shotgun if she’d showed her face in Stone Creek.”

  “The door? He’d have been up at the gate, standing on the cattle guard,” Brad answered with a slight shake of his head. “Liv, what are we going to do about Ashley? I think Melissa’s levelheaded enough to deal with this. But Ash is in for a shock here. A pretty bad one.”

  “Is there something else you aren’t telling me?”

  Brad held up his right hand, as if to give an oath. “I’ve told you the whole ugly truth, insofar as I know it.”

  “I’ll talk to Ashley,” she said.

  “Good luck,” Brad said.

  Olivia started to stand, planning to leave, but Brad stopped her by laying a hand on her shoulder.

  “Hold on a second,” he told her. “There is one more thing I need to say.”

  Olivia waited, wide-eyed and a little alarmed.

  He drew a deep breath, let it out as a reluctant sigh. “About Tanner Quinn,” he began.

  Olivia stiffened. Brad could not possibly know what had happened between her and Tanner—could he? He wasn’t that perceptive.

  “What about him?”

  “He’s a decent guy, Liv,” Brad told her. “But—”

  “But?”

  “Did he tell you about his wife? How she died?”

  Olivia shook her head, wondering if Brad was about to say the circumstances had been suspicious, like in one of those reality crime shows on cable TV.

  “Her name was Katherine,” Brad said. “He called her Kat. He won the bid on a construction job in a place where, let’s just say, Americans aren’t exactly welcome. It was a dangerous project, but there were millions at stake, so he agreed. One day the two of them went to one of those open-air markets—a souk I think they call it. Tanner stopped to look at something, and Kat either didn’t notice or didn’t wait for him. When she reached the street…” Brad paused, his eyes as haunted as if he’d been there himself. “Somebody strafed the market with some kind of automatic weapon. Kat was hit I don’t know how many times, and she died in Tanner’s arms, on the sidewalk.”

  Olivia put a hand over her mouth. Squeezed her eyes shut.

  “I know,” Brad muttered. “It’s awful even to imagine it. I met him a couple of years after it happened.” He stopped. Sighed again. “The only reason I told you was, well, I’ve seen Tanner go through a lot of women, Liv. He can’t—or won’t—commit. Not to a woman, not to his daughter. He never stays in one place any longer than absolutely necessary. It’s as if he thinks he’s a target.”

  Olivia knew Brad was right. She had only to look at Sophie, forced to take
drastic measures just to visit her father over the holidays, to see the truth.

  “Why the warning?” she asked.

  Brad leaned forward, clunked his forehead briefly against hers. “I know the signs, little sister,” he answered. “I know the signs.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Over what was left of the weekend, the snow melted and the roads were lined with muddy slush. It made the decorations on Main Street look as though they were trying just a shade too hard, by Olivia’s calculations.

  Brad and Ashley didn’t get back to Stone Creek until Monday afternoon. Melissa and Olivia were waiting at Ashley’s, along with Ginger, when Brad’s truck pulled up outside. They’d considered turning on the outside lights to welcome Ashley home, but in the end it hadn’t seemed like a good idea.

  Olivia had brewed fresh coffee, though.

  Melissa had brought a box of Ashley’s favorite doughnuts from the bakery.

  As they peered out the front window, watching as Brad helped Ashley out of the truck and held on to her arm as they approached the gate, both Olivia and Melissa knew coffee and doughnuts weren’t going to be enough.

  Ashley looked thinner—was that possible after only a couple of days?—and even from a distance, Olivia could see that there were deep shadows under her eyes.

  Melissa rushed for the door and opened it as Brad brought Ashley up the steps. He shot a look of bruised warning at Melissa, then Olivia.

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” Ashley said.

  “You don’t have to,” Olivia told her softly, reaching for Ashley and drawing back when her sister flinched, huddled closer to Brad, as though she felt threatened. She wouldn’t look at either Olivia or Melissa, but she did stoop to pat Ginger’s head. “I just want to sleep.”

  Once Ashley was inside the house, Melissa urged her toward the stairs. The railing was buried under an evergreen garland.

  “That must have been a very bad scene,” Olivia said to Brad when the twins were on their way upstairs, followed by Ginger.

  He nodded, his expression glum. Now that Olivia looked at him, she realized that he looked almost as bad as Ashley did.

  “What happened?” Olivia prompted when her brother didn’t say anything.

  “She wouldn’t tell me any more than she just told you.” There was more, though. Olivia knew that, by Brad’s face, even before he went on. “A desk clerk at Ashley’s hotel told me she checked in, all excited, and a woman came to see her—the two of them met in the hotel restaurant for lunch. The woman was Mom, of course. She swilled a lot of wine, and things went sour, fast. According to this clerk, Mom started screaming that if she’d wanted ‘a bunch of snot-nosed brats hanging off her,’ she’d have stayed in Stone Creek and rotted.”

  The words, and the image, which she could picture only too well, struck Olivia like blows. It didn’t help that she would have expected something similar out of any meeting with her mother.

  “My God,” she whispered. “Poor Ashley.”

  “It gets worse,” Brad said. “Mom raised such hell in the restaurant that the police were called. Turns out she’d violated probation by getting drunk, and now she’s in jail. Ashley’s furious with me because I wouldn’t bail her out.”

  A sudden headache slammed at Olivia’s temples with such ferocity that she wondered if she was blowing a blood vessel in her brain. She nodded to let Brad know she’d heard, but her eyes were squeezed shut.

  “I tried to get Ashley to stop at the doctor’s office on the way into town a little while ago—maybe get some tranquilizers or something—but she said she just wanted to go home.” He paused. “Liv, are you okay?”

  “I’ve been better,” she answered, opening her eyes. “Right now I’m not worried about myself. I should have known Ashley would have done something like this—tried to stop her—”

  “It isn’t your fault,” Brad said.

  Olivia nodded, but she probably wasn’t very convincing, to Brad or herself.

  “I’ve got to get home to Meg and the baby,” Brad told her. “Can you and Melissa take it from here?”

  Again Olivia nodded.

  “You’ll call if she seems to be losing ground?”

  Olivia stood on tiptoe and kissed her brother’s unshaven, wind-chilled cheek. “I’ll call,” she promised.

  After casting a rueful glance toward the stairs, Brad turned and left.

  Olivia was halfway up those same stairs when Melissa appeared at the top, a finger to her lips.

  “She’s resting,” she whispered. Apparently Ginger had elected to stay in Ashley’s room.

  Together, Olivia and Melissa retreated to the kitchen.

  “Did she say anything?” Olivia prodded.

  “Just that it was terrible,” Melissa replied, “and that she still doesn’t want to talk about it.”

  Olivia’s cell phone chirped. Great. After the slowest weekend on record, professionally speaking anyway, she was suddenly in demand.

  “Dr. O’Ballivan,” she answered, having seen the clinic’s number on the ID panel.

  “There’s a horse colicking at the Wildes’ farm,” the receptionist, Becky, told her. “It’s bad and Dr. Elliott is on call, but he’s busy….”

  Colic. The ailment could be deadly for a horse. “I’m on my way,” Olivia said.

  “Go,” Melissa said when she’d hung up. “I’ll look after Ashley. Ginger, too.”

  Having no real choice, Olivia hurried out to the Suburban and headed for the Wildes’.

  The next few hours were harrowing, with teenaged Sherry Wilde, the owner of the sick horse, on the verge of hysteria the whole time. Olivia managed to save the bay mare, but it was a fight.

  She was so drained afterward that she pulled over and sat in the Suburban with her head resting on the steering wheel, once she’d driven out of sight of the house and barn, and cried.

  Presently she heard another rig pull up behind her and, since she was about halfway between Stone Creek and Indian Rock, she figured it was Wyatt Terp or one of his deputies, out on patrol, stopping to make sure she was okay. Olivia sniffled inelegantly and lifted her head.

  But the face on the other side of the window was Tanner’s, not Wyatt’s.

  She hadn’t seen him since supper at his place a few nights before.

  He gestured for her to roll down the window.

  She did.

  “Engine trouble?” he asked.

  Olivia shook her head. She must look a sight, she thought, with her eyes all puffy and her nose red enough to fly lead for Kris Kringle. She was a professional, good under pressure, and it was completely unlike her to sit sniveling beside the road.

  “Move over,” he said after locking his own vehicle by pressing a button on the key fob. “I’m driving.”

  “I’m all right—really…”

  He already had the door open, and he was standing on the running board.

  Olivia scrambled over the console to the passenger side once she realized he wasn’t going to give in.

  “Where to?” he asked.

  “Home, I guess,” Olivia said. She’d called the bed-and-breakfast before leaving the Wildes’ farm, and Melissa had told her Ashley still wanted to be left alone. The family doctor had dropped by, at Brad’s request, and given Ash a mild sedative.

  Melissa planned to stay overnight.

  “When you’re ready to talk,” Tanner said, checking the rearview mirror before pulling onto the road, “I’ll be ready to listen.”

  “It might be a while,” Olivia said, after a few moments spent struggling to get a grip. “Where’s Sophie?”

  Tanner grinned. “She stayed after school to watch the drama department rehearse for the winter play,” he said. “We’ll pick her up on our way if you don’t mind.”

  It went without saying that Olivia didn’t mind, but she said it anyway.

  Sophie was waiting with friends when they pulled up in front of the middle school. She looked puzzled for a moment, then rushed, smiling, towar
d the Suburban.

  “We really should go back and get your truck,” Olivia fretted, glancing at Tanner as Sophie climbed into the rear seat.

  “Maybe it will get dirty,” Tanner said cheerfully. Then, when Olivia didn’t smile, he added, “I’ll send somebody from the construction crew to pick it up.”

  “Can we get pizza?” Sophie wanted to know.

  “We have horses to feed,” Tanner told her. “Not to mention Snidely and Whiplash. We’ll order pizza after the chores are done.”

  “Our tree is all decorated,” Sophie told Olivia. “You should come and see it.”

  “I will,” Olivia said.

  “Are you coming down with a cold?” Sophie wanted to know. “You sound funny.”

  “I’m all right,” Olivia answered, touched.

  They were about a mile out of town, on the far side of Stone Creek, when they spotted Ginger trudging alongside the road. Olivia’s mouth fell open—she’d thought the dog was still at Ashley’s.

  “What’s Ginger doing out here all alone?” Sophie demanded.

  “I don’t know,” Olivia said, struggling in vain to open the passenger-side door even as Tanner stopped the Suburban, got out and lifted the weary dog off the ground. Carried her in his arms to the back of the rig and settled her on the blankets.

  “I don’t think she’s hurt,” Tanner said once he was behind the wheel again. “Just tired and pretty footsore.”

  A tear slipped down Olivia’s cheek, and she wiped it away, but not quickly enough.

  “Hey,” he said, his voice husky. “It can’t be that bad.”

  Olivia didn’t answer.

  Ashley would be all right.

  Ginger would be, too.

  But she wasn’t so sure about herself.

  At some point, without even realizing it, she’d fallen in love with Tanner Quinn. Talk about a dismal revelation.

  Reaching her place, Tanner let Sophie stay behind with Olivia and Ginger while he went on to Starcross to feed Butterpie and Shiloh and see to the puppies, as well.