A Creed in Stone Creek

by Linda Lael Miller

  “Maybe,” Ashley reasoned, “it’s a matter of knowing each other well enough, instead of long enough.”

  Melissa arched an eyebrow, her hands still resting on her hips. Which felt slightly wider under her knuckles, though that was probably an illusion brought on by concern over consumption of her sister’s incomparable lasagna. “Whose side are you on, anyway?” she asked.

  “There are sides?” Ashley countered, raising her own eyebrows. “Who knew?”

  Melissa let out a big breath and sat down beside her sister on the bed. “I’m trying to be sensible, here,” she said.

  “Love isn’t sensible,” Ashley informed her.

  “Who said anything about love?” Melissa countered. “This is a case of lust. If I were in love with Steven Creed, don’t you think I would have noticed?”

  “Not necessarily,” Ashley chimed. “For such a smart woman, you can be pretty obtuse when it comes to men.”

  “Obtuse?” She took a slow, deliberate breath, in a bid for patience. “Just because you’re married now, Ash, you’re suddenly an expert on men?”

  “I’m an expert on one particular man,” Ashley responded, a little smugly. “That’s all I need to be.”

  Melissa studied her twin in silence for a long moment. Then her shoulders slumped slightly. “Don’t you ever get scared?” she asked, very softly.

  Ashley took her hand, squeezed lightly. A slight furrow appeared in her forehead. “Scared?”

  “Caring so much,” Melissa murmured. “It’s, well—it’s dangerous.”

  Ashley’s entire countenance softened, along with her face. “Oh, honey,” she said. “Is this about the breakup with Dan? That’s why you think it’s dangerous to care too much? I know you were hurt, but honestly, what are the odds of something like that happening twice in one person’s lifetime?”

  Melissa sighed again. “Have you checked the divorce statistics lately?” she asked. Her stab at humor fell flat.

  “Statistics are statistics,” Ashley said. “And people are people. Every couple is different, Mel. It’s all about finding someone who wants the same things out of life and has similar values, and then both partners trying like hell to make it work. There aren’t any guarantees, obviously—not for any of us.”

  “So you never get scared. Never worry that something could happen to Jack or, God forbid, Katie or the baby?”

  “Of course I worry sometimes,” Ashley replied. “I’m only human, and I have some of the same abandonment issues as you do, because of Mom leaving and Dad dying so young. But I try never to dwell on all the things that could go wrong. Melissa, so many things go right, every single day, for everybody, but nobody notices that.”

  Melissa leaned closer and let the side of her head rest against the side of Ashley’s. “You’re amazing,” she said.

  “Yes,” Ashley replied, with comical primness, “I am, rather, aren’t I?”

  They were quiet for a while, content just to be side by side.

  Then, perhaps because she’d missed Ashley so much while she was away visiting Jack’s family, Melissa asked a question she might have kept back, saved for another time.

  “Ash, did you ever feel as though your own life didn’t fit you anymore?”

  Ashley squeezed Melissa’s shoulders. “Before Jack, I did,” she replied quietly. “I had everything I’d ever thought I wanted—you and Olivia and Brad, this house, my own business, all of it. But I finally had to face facts after Jack turned up again. Something was definitely missing, and that something was a man to love and be loved by.” She paused, sighed happily, and kissed the top of Katie’s head. “A man I could make babies with. Share dreams with. Even argue with.”

  Melissa sighed, too, but it wasn’t out of contentment. She felt confused, as though she’d reached some kind of crossroads and didn’t know which way to turn. “We’re so different,” she reflected, “despite being twins. You’ve always been old-fashioned, baking pies and wearing aprons with ruffles on them, seemingly glad to stay right here in Stone Creek until the end of your days, while I always wanted to take on the world, prove I could hold my own against the best of them.”

  Ashley smiled, but her eyes were serious, and full of tender concern. “Maybe we’re not so different as you’d like to believe,” she said. One corner of her mouth quirked mischievously, which meant there was a zinger coming, for sure. “You’ll probably never be a decent cook,” she went on, “but I think you’d really like to have a home and a husband and some kids.”

  “I have a home,” Melissa said, thinking of her tidy, mortgage-free cottage.

  “You have a house,” Ashley corrected her gently. “That isn’t the same thing at all.”

  “Ashley O’Ballivan McKenzie,” Melissa challenged good-naturedly, “are you saying a woman can’t live happily ever after without a man in her bed and a gold band on her finger?”

  “Of course not. Lots of women thrive on being single. Men, too. But that’s them and this is you, Mel. Olivia and Meg and I have been worrying about you for a long time—since you and Dan called it quits, especially. You put on a good show, sister mine, but we—your nearest and dearest—are not so easily deceived.”

  “All right, so I get lonely sometimes,” Melissa retorted. “Who doesn’t?”

  “I don’t,” Ashley said. “And I don’t think Olivia and Meg do, either.” She paused again, looking thoughtful. “In my opinion, you’ve gotten so used to being lonely that you think it’s normal to feel that way.”

  Melissa huffed out a sigh, ready for the conversation to be over. Ashley’s comments struck a little too close to the bone. “What would you suggest I do?” she asked, going against her own decision to change the subject. “Shall I just cut some poor, unsuspecting guy out of the herd, throw him down on the ground and hog-tie him?” She pretended to ponder the plan. “He’d have to be a pretty slow runner, of course.”

  Ashley gave a soft hoot of laughter at that. The woman twinkled all over, like a tree bedecked with fairy lights. Was it even legal to be that happy?

  “Do you know what your problem is, Melissa?” Ashley challenged, with a note of smugness in her tone.

  “A twin sister with a penchant for minding my business instead of her own?” Melissa teased.

  Ashley stopped smiling then, and the fairy lights dimmed a little. “Your whole life is geared to wins and losses. No gray areas for you—and you really don’t like to lose. When your relationship with Dan went under, you saw it as a personal defeat. After that, you were scared to try again.”

  “Nonsense,” Melissa said, but her tone was decidedly hesitant.

  “I was always the old-fashioned type,” Ashley maintained gently. “And you were always competitive. Because you weren’t the one to put an end to the whole thing, instead of Dan, you counted it as a rejection.”

  Melissa’s throat tightened, and she swallowed, but it didn’t help. She didn’t have the words to contradict Ashley, or the conviction, either.

  On some level, the breakup with Dan had left her with the idea that love worked for other people, but not for her.

  Still holding Katie, Ashley stood, bent to kiss the top of Melissa’s head. “Just have a good time tonight,” she advised.

  And then she and Katie left the room.

  ONCE HE WAS THROUGH at the gas station–convenience store, Steven drove around town for a while, marveling at his own sense of blithe aimlessness, and finally realized he was hungry. He headed for the only drive-through burger place in town, ordered a cheeseburger and a cola, and ate in the driver’s seat, being careful not to spill anything on his clean shirt or his best jeans. He’d pressed them both, and he wanted to stay spiffy as long as he could.

  Even when the burger was history, there was lots of time to go before he could reasonably knock on Melissa’s front door.

  He found a flower shop, after some searching, but it was closed. From there, he proceeded to the supermarket. He’d seen roses and various houseplants in the produce sect
ions of grocery stores lots of times. He’d have preferred something a little fancier, a big bouquet with exotic blossoms and ribbon tied around the vase, but for tonight anyhow, he’d have to make do.

  Inside the store, Steven chose between daisies, rosebuds just opening up, and what was probably some kind of lily. He considered buying several bunches and putting them together, but he wasn’t sure which colors went with which. So he settled for a dozen yellow roses, stuck them, stems dripping, into their vase-shaped plastic bag, and headed for the checkout counter.

  All the lines were long. Folks with shopping carts filled to overflowing, toddlers wailing with boredom or fatigue or some combination of the two. A few last-minute Louies—like himself—who’d stopped in for flowers.

  Steven waited patiently. After all, a line was a line and he had plenty of time, anyway. He was caught off guard when another cart in front of his rammed into his from the side, lightly but still with a startling crash of metal.

  Tessa Quinn, from over at the Sunflower Café, was standing there, grinning at him. “Oops,” she said. “Sorry. I wasn’t watching where I was going.”

  “Hey,” he greeted her, with an easy smile.

  She took in the yellow roses. “Nice flowers.”

  Steven sighed. “Yeah,” he said.

  Tessa blew out a good-natured breath. “Not another man of few words,” she lamented cheerfully. “We’ve already got a surplus of those in this town.”

  He chuckled. “Looking forward to the dance tonight?” he asked, having decided to make more of a social effort. Up on the ranch, outside Lonesome Bend, Kim was forever claiming that she’d trade the whole bunch of quiet Creed men for someone who spoke in complete sentences.

  Tessa’s smile dazzled. “Oh, yes,” she said. “I thought Tom Parker would never ask me out.”

  The line moved, and Steven held back to let Tessa go ahead of him. “And I thought Melissa would never ask me,” he joked. No matter how things turned out between them, he figured he’d never get tired of the memory of that woman swallowing her formidable pride, right there in the Sunflower Café, in front of half the town, to invite him to a dance.

  Tessa laughed. “That was a surprise,” she said. “Tom must have tricked her into it.” The expression on that well-known face was priceless as she realized how the remark must have sounded to Steven. She even blushed. “It’s just that—well—the two of them have been buddies since they were little kids. After Dan Guthrie broke Melissa’s heart into about a million pieces, people thought she and Tom might finally get together—” She fell silent again, looking miserable.

  “But they didn’t,” Steven said, trying to help the poor woman off the hook.

  Tessa shook her head. “No,” she confirmed. “They didn’t.”

  He might have asked her to tell him a little more about Melissa’s broken heart if the time and place and circumstances had been different, but the clerk was waiting none too patiently to ring up Tessa’s purchases and the line behind them stretched clear back to the freezer aisle.

  When Tessa had finished with her transaction, she grabbed her grocery bags and almost ran out of the store.

  Thoughtfully, Steven paid for the flowers and headed for his truck.

  Once there, he got in, snapped his seat belt into place and then just sat for a while, staring through the windshield.

  So Melissa had some emotional baggage, he thought. Didn’t everybody, himself included?

  Cindy had done a number on him, back in the day. So had a few other women, though to lesser degrees. And as much as he loved Kim, he’d spent a lot of time wishing, as a kid, that his stepmother had never entered the equation in the first place. Why, he’d wondered privately, couldn’t his mom and dad have gotten married, and raised him together, like normal people, instead of shunting him back and forth between two very different worlds until he was old enough to make his own choices?

  Finally, Steven had been forced to accept the pertinent facts. Life was messy. It was unpredictable. And 99.9 percent of the time, it didn’t make any damn sense at all.

  For all that, it was still good.

  It was a gift.

  The trouble arose, he reasoned, when he tried to swim upstream, against the flow.

  He sighed.

  It was a warm summer night. He was going to a country dance with a beautiful woman.

  He decided to let that be enough, for the time being.

  MELISSA FELT A LITTLE QUIVER of excitement in the pit of her stomach when she opened her front door to find Steven Creed standing on the porch, a bouquet of yellow roses clasped in one hand.

  For a moment, she was a teenager again.

  Wishing Ashley had stayed to meet Steven, instead of taking Katie home, she stepped back to let him in.

  His gaze drifted over her in an appreciative way that didn’t rankle, as it would have with some men. “You look fantastic,” he said.

  Melissa smiled. You don’t look so bad yourself, cowboy, she thought, letting her eyes speak for her.

  Steven shifted, looking somewhat uneasy. “I’m probably a little early,” he said.

  Still smiling, she took the flowers. “I’ll just pop these into a vase and we’ll go,” she told him, leading the way into the kitchen.

  There, she filled a vase with water and clipped an inch or so from the end of each of the rose stems, so they’d last longer.

  “They’re from the supermarket,” Steven said, from somewhere behind her. He wasn’t touching her, but he was close enough that she could sense the hardness and the heat of him.

  Or was that her imagination?

  “The florist’s shop was closed,” he added.

  She turned, holding the vase full of yellow roses, and said sincerely, “All roses are beautiful. Thank you, Steven.”

  A spark of something—possibly relief—lit his blue eyes. “You’re welcome,” he said, and his voice sounded hoarse. He crooked an elbow at her. “Shall we?”

  Melissa laughed. “Let’s.”

  Outside, he hoisted her into the passenger seat of his pickup, his hands strong on the sides of her waist, stirring up all sorts of deliciously uncomfortable sense memories.

  They kept the conversation light during the drive— Steven said his barn would be going up fast, because the contractor had talked him into a prefab, and the concrete foundation was scheduled to be poured on Monday. The house would take a little longer, he told her, but it would be livable in a couple of weeks.

  “I guess that tour bus is starting to feel a little cramped,” Melissa said, and instantly regretted the remark.

  Talk about sense memories.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the slightest grin flicker across Steven’s mouth. “Actually,” he said, “it’s pretty comfortable.”

  Melissa was relieved to see the Grange Hall up ahead. The building was historic, dating back to Sam O’Ballivan’s lifetime, and the never-painted walls were weathered by a century of hard rains, deep snows and long, ground-cracking dry spells. Thanks to Brad’s generosity, the place was much sounder than it looked, the roof solid, the dance floor level, the small stage equipped for live music and the productions of the local amateur theater group.

  Tonight, cars and pickup trucks jammed the gravel parking lot, and there was a buzz of anticipation in the air. The twang of electric guitars spilled into the sultry evening, a nearly tangible vibrato, and the whole scene reminded Melissa, in a bittersweet flash, of a time long past—back when she and Ashley and Brad and Olivia were kids, their mom not yet gone and their dad still young and vital.

  How Delia had loved a community dance—looked forward to it all week long. Wore her freshly shampooed hair up in rollers all day Saturday, and often squeezed the cost of a dime-store lipstick out of the grocery budget because, as she put it, a new shade always made her feel prettier. Delia had favored dresses with full skirts, the better for twirling, and she’d primp in front of the mirror on top of her bureau, as if she was practicing her smile for th
e upcoming occasion.

  Or maybe she wasn’t practicing for the dance at all, but for the men she’d meet after she got on the bus one day and left Stone Creek—and her family—behind for good.

  Melissa sighed. Delia was gone now; she’d died of hard living and the effects of long-term alcohol use a couple of years ago. By then, the woman had been a stranger for so long that the loss felt impersonal; Melissa had done the bulk of her grieving as a small child.

  Back then, Melissa’s dad, a quiet man, thoughtful and maybe a little shy, had watched Delia’s antics with smiling admiration glowing in his eyes, as if he’d never seen a more beautiful picture than the one his wife made, spinning to make the hem of her dress fly out around her shapely legs.

  Whole families had attended the dances in those days—not just the mothers and the fathers, but babies and kids of all ages, and old folks, too. Melissa recalled running wildly around the Grange Hall, inside and out, with her brother and sisters and a flock of other local children, until they all finally ran down.

  As the evening wore on, the younger kids would collapse from sheer delighted exhaustion, one by one, and, lie down to rest on a makeshift bed, usually consisting of horse blankets or suit coats, to be carried out to the family rig around midnight, when the festivities ended.

  For a moment, Melissa was back there—she could smell her dad’s aftershave and the fresh-air scent of the jacket he wore for dress-up, feel the warmth and strength of his shoulder, where her head rested. He’d carried her in one arm and Ashley in the other, and remembering brought a lump to Melissa’s throat and a sting to the back of her eyes.

  Steven paid the modest price of admission—the money collected went partly to the band and partly to the local historical society—and she knew he’d picked up on her mood by the way his eyes narrowed slightly when he looked at her.

  He moved nearer to her and, since the noise was intense, leaned close to her ear to ask, “You look a little peaked. Are you okay?”

  She nodded, swallowed. She felt a little deflated, though, the way she always did when she remembered the demise of her parents’ marriage and the vast emptiness left behind when it was over. “I’m fine,” she told him, but it was herself she wanted to convince.