He had his suspicions, naturally, regarding Sharlene’s spending habits—cocaine, animal-print spandex, tattoos for the fathead boyfriend du jour, if not herself. Bonnie, most likely, had subsisted on fast food and frozen pizza.
Dylan’s jaw tightened to the point of pain; he consciously relaxed it. None of this was Bonnie’s doing. Unlike him, unlike Sharlene, she was innocent, forced to live with the consequences of other people’s mistakes.
Not anymore, he vowed silently.
Much as he would have liked to put all the blame on Sharlene, he knew it wouldn’t be fair. He’d known who—and what—she was when he’d slept with her, nearly three years ago, after a rodeo, in a town he couldn’t even remember the name of now. They’d holed up in a cheap room and had sex for a week, then gone their separate ways. A few clueless months later, Sharlene had tracked him down and told him she was expecting his baby.
And he’d known it was true, long before he’d even laid eyes on Bonnie and seen her resemblance to him, the same way he’d known he wasn’t alone in the parking lot behind the Black Rose.
Listless with fatigue and probably confusion, Bonnie merely nibbled when the room-service food came, and then fell asleep in her overalls. Was she still on formula or something? Should he send a bellman into town for baby bottles and milk?
He sighed, shoved a hand through his tangled hair.
In the morning, he’d take Bonnie to a pediatrician—after buying her some decent clothes so the doc wouldn’t put a call through to Child Protective Services the minute they walked in—for a routine exam and to find out what the hell two-year-olds actually ate.
When he was sure Bonnie was sound asleep, the bedspread tucked around her, he called Madeline. She’d be expecting him, though to her credit, not at an even remotely reasonable hour, since theirs was a sleep-over-when-you’re-passing-through kind of arrangement.
He needed his clothes, and his shaving gear, and his laptop.
“It’s Dylan,” he said, to Madeline’s hello.
“You winnin’, sugar?” She’d cultivated a Southern drawl, but every once in a while, the Minnesota came through, with its faintly Scandinavian lilt.
“I always do,” Dylan murmured, looking at his sleeping child.
“Then we ought to celebrate,” Madeline crooned. “Find us a sexy movie on pay-per-view and—”
“Look, Madeline, I can’t make it over there tonight. Something—er—came up—”
“Where are you?” There was a snap in Madeline’s tone now. She wasn’t possessive—he’d have driven fifty miles out of his way to avoid her if she had been—but she had turned down other offers for the duration of his stay in Vegas, she’d made that abundantly clear, and she clearly wasn’t happy about being stood up.
“I’m at South Point,” he began.
“Damn you,” Madeline said, downright peevish now, “you picked up some—some woman, didn’t you?”
“Not exactly.”
“What do you mean, ‘not exactly’?”
“I’m with my daughter, Madeline,” Dylan said, patient only because he didn’t want to disturb Bonnie. “She’s two years old.”
The croon was back. “Oh, bring her over here! I just love babies.”
Dylan actually considered the offer, for a nanosecond. Then he remembered Madeline’s penchant for impromptu sex, the smell of stale pot smoke that permeated her condo and the bowl of colorfully packaged condoms in the middle of her coffee table.
“Uh—no,” he said. “She’s pretty tired.”
He sensed another huff building up beneath Madeline’s drawl. “Then why did you bother to call at all?” she purred. In a moment, the claws would be out, poised to rip him to bloody shreds.
“I need my stuff,” Dylan admitted, ducking his head a little, the way he had on the playground when he was a kid, in anticipation of a blow. “If you’d just put it all in a cab and send it this way, I’d be obliged.”
“I wouldn’t think of doing that,” Madeline said. “I’ll drop it all off on my way to the club.” Her slight emphasis on the last two words was a clear message—if he was going to be a no-show, far be it from her to sit home alone watching pay-per-view.
“Madeline, you don’t have to—”
“South Point? That’s where you said you are, isn’t it?”
“Yes, but—”
She hung up on him.
Dylan sat down on the edge of his bed, opposite Bonnie’s, and propped his elbows on his thighs. Madeline would want to come straight up to the room, probably to see if he’d lied about the company he was keeping, and he didn’t want her waking Bonnie. But unless he could talk Madeline into sending his things up with a bellman, which didn’t seem likely, he’d have no other choice.
He’d have to leave Bonnie alone to go downstairs, and that wasn’t an option.
Twenty minutes later, the phone rang, causing Bonnie to stir in the depths of some baby-dream, and he pounced on it, whispered, “Hello?”
“I’m downstairs,” Madeline said. “What’s your room number, sweetie?”
Dylan suppressed another sigh. God, he hated being called “sweetie.” “Twelve-forty-two,” he said.
Madeline, a leggy redhead, almost as tall as he was, at six feet, whisked her shapely self to his door with no measurable delay. Looking through the peephole, he saw that she was flanked by a bellman with a loaded cart. Her shiny mouth was tight, and her eyes narrowed slightly.
Reluctantly, Dylan admitted her.
She immediately scanned the room, her gaze landing on Bonnie, while the bellman waited politely to unload some of the stuff from the cart. Dylan handed him a tip and brought in the laptop, his shaving kit and his suitcase himself.
“She is precious!” Madeline enthused, looming over Bonnie’s bed.
“Be quiet,” Dylan said. “She’s had a rough day.” A rough life was more like it. As soon as he got rid of Madeline, he’d bite the bullet and call Logan. They’d made some progress lately, he and his older brother, but the ground could get rocky at any time, and asking big brother for help was going to be hard on his pride.
Madeline put a shh finger to her plump mouth and batted her false eyelashes. Put her in a big Vegas headdress, with feathers and spangles, a skimpy costume, high heels and fishnet stockings, and Bonnie, if she chanced to wake up and see a stranger standing over her, would have nightmares about showgirls until she died of old age.
He took Madeline by the elbow and gave her the bum’s rush toward the door. “Good night, thank you, and what do I owe you for the favor?”
She patted his cheek. “We’ll settle up next time you come through Vegas,” she said. She paused. “The hotel could probably provide a babysitter, then we could—”
“No,” Dylan said flatly.
Blessedly, and none too soon, Madeline left.
Dylan showered, shaved, brushed his teeth and headed for bed in his boxer briefs; he hadn’t owned a pair of pajamas since grade school.
But he had Bonnie to think about now. He couldn’t go parading around in front of a two-year-old in his shorts—even if she was asleep.
Fatherhood, he thought, was getting more complicated by the minute. Especially since he didn’t know jack-shit about it—his experience had been limited to a few brief visits with Bonnie whenever Sharlene deigned to light someplace for a month.
He pulled on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, and then he crashed.
He’d call Logan the next day, he promised himself. Or the next day, or the one after that…
*
KRISTY MADISON BUSTLED around her big kitchen, opening a can of food for her white Persian cat, Winston, gathering her notes for that night’s book-club meeting at the library, grabbing her cell phone off the counter where she’d been charging it during a quick trip home for supper.
She wished she could stay in tonight, soak in her big claw-foot bathtub and read a book, but the reading group had been her idea, after all. And it had turned out to be a popular one—twen
ty-six people had signed up.
Privately, Kristy wondered how many of them simply wanted a close-up look at Briana, Logan Creed’s love interest. Before Briana had taken up with Logan, she’d been just another single mother, pulling down a paycheck at the casino on the outskirts of Stillwater Springs, homeschooling her two boys, Josh and Alec, and generally minding her own business.
Kristy bit her lower lip. Thinking of Logan inevitably led to thinking about Dylan, and that was still too painful, even though it had been five years since she’d seen him. He’d been in town recently—the busybodies had made sure she knew—but he hadn’t sought her out, and she’d been half again too proud to chase him down.
Looking at her own reflection in the dark glass of the kitchen window, Kristy saw a slender woman with fashionably mussed, midlength blond hair, blue eyes and good bone structure. But there were shadows under those eyes, her hair needed a trim, and what the hell good did bone structure do a person, anyway? She looked okay in the picture on her driver’s license—that was the extent of the advantage, as far as she’d been able to determine.
Winston, ignoring his food bowl, gave a loud and plaintive meow and slithered across the cuffs of Kristy’s black jeans, leaving a dusting of snow-white hair.
Now, she’d have to lint-roll—again.
Other women carried mints and lipstick in their purses—Kristy had a tape-covered stick.
“I know,” she told Winston gently. “You want to cuddle and watch Animal Planet, but I’ve got to work tonight.”
Winston’s reply was another meow—this time, he’d turned the “pitiful” meter up a few notches.
“You can have an extra mackerel treat when I get home,” Kristy promised. “I won’t be late—nine-thirty at the outside.”
Winston, unappeased, turned and made his way between the various paint cans and wallpaper samples littering the kitchen floor. With a disdainful flip of his bushy white tail, he disappeared into the dining room.
Kristy had been renovating her big Victorian house forever, or so it seemed. She was used to tripping over stuff from Home Depot, and so was Winston, but all of a sudden, it seemed more like a never-ending hassle than the noble restoration effort she’d undertaken as soon as she’d signed the mortgage papers.
“I’m tired of my life,” she told her reflection. “I want a new one.”
“Too bad,” her reflection replied. “You made your bed, and now you have to sleep in it. Alone.”
No husband. No children.
A few more birthdays, a few more cats, and she’d qualify as a crazy old maid. Kids would start saying she was a witch, and avoid her house on Halloween.
Kristy turned away from her window-self, tugged her purse strap onto her shoulder, dropped her cell phone into the bag, along with her notes and a copy of that month’s book-club selection, and headed for the back door.
No matter how blue she might be, the sight of the Stillwater Springs Public Library always lifted her spirits, and this evening was no exception. She loved the squat, redbrick building, with its green shutters and shingled roof. She loved being surrounded by books and readers.
She and a few other people who’d grown up in or around the small western Montana town had fought some hard battles to get the funding to build and stock the library after the old one burned down.
Parking her dark green Blazer in the spot reserved especially for her, Kristy hurried toward the side door, keys jingling. The main part of the library had closed early that night for plumbing repairs in one of the restrooms, but the two small meeting rooms would be open—the reading group in one, AA in the other.
She hung her purse on a peg, washed her hands at the sink in the little kitchenette between the meeting rooms and started wrestling with the big coffee urn.
Sheriff Floyd Book was the next to arrive—he carried in a box of books from his personal car and greeted Kristy with a smile and a nod. “I knew if I didn’t get here too quick, you’d make the coffee,” he teased.
Kristy laughed. “Everything in place for your retirement?” she asked, setting out columns of disposable cups, packets of sugar and powdered creamer and the like.
“Everything except me,” Floyd replied, through the open doorway leading to the AA side, already setting out books and pamphlets for that night’s meeting. In Stillwater Springs, nobody was anonymous, but for the sake of what was called The Program, everyone pretended not to notice who came and went from the side entrance to the library on a Tuesday night. “I can’t hardly wait for that special election. Hand my badge over to Jim Huntinghorse or Mike Danvers, and kick the dust of this town off my feet—for a few weeks, anyhow. Dorothy and I are all packed for that cruise to Alaska.”
“Soon,” Kristy soothed good-naturedly. She’d been too busy, until the mention of the woman’s name, to notice that Mrs. Book was nowhere around. “Dorothy isn’t coming to the reading group meeting? She signed up.”
Dorothy Book was confined to a wheelchair, following an automobile accident some years before, and there were people who said she wasn’t right in the head. Kristy had always liked Dorothy—so what if she was a little different?—and she’d been looking forward to having her come to the group’s first meeting.
Floyd shook his head. He’d looked weary lately, worn down to a nubbin, as Kristy’s late mother used to say. Maybe it was the buildup to his retirement, the stresses of his job, and the uncertainty of the special election, but it seemed to Kristy that he was more strained than usual.
“It’s hard for her to get in and out of the car,” the sheriff told Kristy. “And she hates fussing with that wheelchair. I’m hoping the cruise will put some color back in her cheeks and a twinkle in her eyes.”
Kristy stopped fiddling with the coffee things. Floyd Book was the sheriff of a sprawling county—he’d been elected to the office when she was in the second grade and had held it ever since. Until her dad died, just six months after her mother’s passing, Floyd had been a regular visitor out at Madison Ranch. He and Kristy’s father had been best friends, sharing a love of fishing, horseback riding and herding the few cattle Tim Madison had been able to afford to run on that hardscrabble place.
A pang struck Kristy as she started to ask Floyd, straight out, if something was wrong and if so, what she could do to help. This was a night, it seemed, for painful memories to come up.
“You all right, Kristy?” Floyd asked, crossing the hallway to lay a brawny hand on her shoulder. “You went pale for a second there. I thought you were going to faint.”
“I’m fine,” Kristy lied. She’d been raised as a tough Montana ranch kid, expected to say she was fine whether she was or not.
But the ranch was abandoned now, the barn leaning to one side, the sturdy old house empty. The last time Kristy had forced herself to go out there and stand on the high rise where she used to ride Sugarfoot, her beloved palomino gelding, she’d actually felt her heart break into pieces.
Her parents were both dead, and she had no brothers or sisters, no aunts—now that Great-Aunt Millie had passed away—or uncles, no cousins.
Sugarfoot was gone, too, buried in a horse-size grave in the middle of a copse of trees bordering the Creed ranch. After sixteen years, more than half her life, Kristy still cried when she visited her best friend’s final resting place. People urged her to get another horse—she’d loved riding, and she’d been uncommonly good at it, too—but somehow, she just didn’t have the heart to love something—or someone—that much and risk another loss.
She’d lost so much already.
Her parents, Sugarfoot…
And Dylan Creed.
“Kristy?” the sheriff prompted, peering worriedly into her face now. “Maybe you ought to go home. You might be coming down with something. I could tell the reading-club ladies the meeting’s been postponed.”
Kristy summoned up a smile, straightened her shoulders, looked her father’s old friend straight in the eye. “Nonsense,” she said. “We’ve already postponed
it once. I’m just a little tired, that’s all.”
Floyd didn’t seem entirely convinced, but a few of the AA regulars were straggling in, so he finally turned to go and greet them, the way he had every Tuesday night for years—ever since Dorothy’s car accident, and that scandal about him running around with Freida Turlow behind Dorothy’s back. He’d wept, sitting at the kitchen table with Kristy’s dad, out on the ranch, over the pain Dorothy had suffered, not only because of the wreck on an icy road, but because he’d betrayed her with another woman.
It was the first and only time Kristy, watching and listening unnoticed from the hallway, had ever seen a grown man cry.
Her kindly dad had put a hand to Floyd’s shoulder and said, “It’s the drinking, old buddy. That’s what’s messing up your life. You think I don’t know you carry a flask everywhere you go? You’ve got to do something.”
And Floyd had done something. He’d joined AA, gotten sober and, as far as Kristy knew, been a faithful husband to Dorothy from then on.
Kristy left the kitchenette for the reading group’s meeting room, and by some cosmic irony, Freida Turlow was the first to arrive.
An athletic type, attractive in a hardened sort of way, Freida, like Kristy, was a lifelong resident of Stillwater Springs. Except for college, neither one of them had been away from home for any significant length of time.
Kristy was a hometown girl—she’d never wanted to live anywhere else, even after her parents both died during her junior year at the University of Montana. By contrast, Freida, who was at least a decade older, had indeed been Kristy’s babysitter on the rare nights when her mom and dad went out dancing, or to play cards with friends, seemed out of place in Stillwater Springs. She was ambitious and well-educated, and virtually ran the local real estate office. Her brother, Brett, was a classic jerk, sleeping on her couch and famous for stealing money from her every chance he got.
Tonight, her dark chin-length hair pinned up at the back of her head, Freida wore a running suit and sneakers and carried that month’s reading selection under one arm. Like Kristy, Freida had lost her family home—the gingerbread-laced minimansion Kristy now owned—and she was touchy about it. She’d offered to buy back the old house several times, at higher and higher prices, and had gotten progressively more annoyed at every polite refusal.
Linda Lael Miller Montana Creeds Series Volume 1: Montana Creeds: LoganMontana Creeds: DylanMontana Creeds: Tyler Page 31