While they ate, Kristy was conscious of the intermittent stares slithering their way. Even after the Danvers tribe trooped out, Mike stopping to shake hands with someone at every table, she and Zachary were the center of none-too-subtle attention.
“They’re saying I finally managed to get you to go out with me,” Zachary said, apparently amused.
“This,” Kristy said, “is not a date.”
Zachary pulled a woebegone face, though his eyes sparkled with his trademark mischief. “Is there someone else?” he asked, with so much drama that Kristy wouldn’t have been surprised to hear somber organ music.
There was someone else, of course, though Kristy wasn’t about to share that with Zachary Spencer.
And, as luck would have it, that someone else was the very next person to walk through the front door of the Marigold Café.
As if he had radar, Dylan Creed stepped over the threshold and immediately swung his blue gaze straight to Kristy.
CHAPTER EIGHT
DYLAN HAD AGREED to have dinner out with Logan and Briana while Cassie looked after Bonnie and Briana’s boys, Alec and Josh, at the main ranch house. He’d wanted a distraction from all that was weighing on his mind—the truth about Jake’s death, filing for permanent custody of his daughter, and all the rest.
Instead, he got Kristy sitting with a movie star. People’s Sexiest Man Alive a year or so ago, if he remembered correctly.
Dylan had no claim on her, of course, no right to say who she had dinner with and who she didn’t, but he bristled just the same. And Logan knew it, prodded him from behind, murmuring, “Move it, lover boy. I’m hungry.”
With more effort than he liked, Dylan tore his attention from Kristy. Waited while the hostess found a table for him and Logan and Briana.
“Cool it with the ‘lover boy’ stuff, all right?” he snapped to Logan. “I don’t give a damn who Kristy goes out with.”
Logan chuckled, and his dark eyes danced as he pulled back a chair for Briana, his beautiful, glowing bride. “Is Kristy here?” he asked, pretending surprise. “I wouldn’t have known that by the way you stopped cold in the doorway when you caught sight of her.”
“Logan,” Briana said sweetly, used to governing two rambunctious young sons and therefore highly diplomatic, “leave your brother alone.”
Before sitting down, Dylan leaned to kiss his sister-in-law resoundingly on top of the head. “Thanks, beautiful,” he said, glaring at Logan.
Logan simply grinned. Sat himself down beside Briana and took her hand.
They looked good together, Logan and Briana, Dylan thought grudgingly. Better than good. Obviously, the sex was beyond excellent, the energy of it crackled around the two of them like a live wire sparking blue on a rain-wet road, but there was more to the marriage than that.
Damned if his brother hadn’t fallen in love for real this time, and Briana loved him, too.
Lucky bastard, Dylan reflected, still glaring at Logan.
Logan ignored him, reached for a menu. He and Briana sat with their heads close together, reading it.
“What looks good to you?” Briana asked her husband.
Logan, a husband. Incomprehensible.
Logan kissed her lightly. “What looks good to me isn’t on the menu,” he said.
“Please,” Dylan said.
Logan grinned across the table at him. “Eat your heart out, little brother,” he said.
Briana elbowed him playfully. “Stop it.”
“Don’t call me ‘little brother.’” In Dylan’s mind, that salutation belonged to Tyler.
“Touchy,” Logan replied.
“I can still whip your ass,” Dylan asserted.
“You’re welcome to try,” Logan said happily. Even the big shiner on his right eye didn’t seem to dampen his spirits. It was disgusting, that was what it was. The man was almost high.
“Enough,” Briana interjected, smiling. “We came here to have a nice meal and for Dylan to sign the custody petition you spent the whole afternoon writing up, Logan Creed. And if either of you think I’m going to referee a brawl just because the two of you are on testosterone overload, you’d better think again.”
“You’ve already drawn up the papers?” Dylan asked, watching Logan.
“I told you I was the best,” Logan said, as Briana pulled a legal-size manila folder out of her big purse. “I’ll file them in the courthouse tomorrow, if you approve them.”
Dylan all but snatched the documents out of Briana’s hand. Read them quickly, then read them again, this time slowly, to make sure he hadn’t missed anything. It was a habit he’d acquired because of his early struggle with dyslexia—when he’d told Kristy, the other day at the library, that he’d read Lonesome Dove five times, he’d been telling the truth. It had taken that many passes for the whole story to sink in.
He tapped the blank spot on the third page, where Logan had left room for a settlement amount. “You think I should pay Sharlene off?” he asked.
“I’m giving you the option,” Logan said. “The amount—if there is one—is up to you.”
Logan probably thought he was poor. A rodeo bum, a gambler and sometime stunt man. Dylan had never seen any reason to disabuse either of his brothers of the notion.
Now, it gave him a kick to say, “A million ought to do it.”
Logan arched one eyebrow. “You have a million dollars?”
“A lot more than that,” Dylan answered. “Thanks to the stock I bought in your company way back when I was winning buckles at the big rodeo. It split four times before you sold the outfit last year, and twice since.”
Amusement—and respect—flickered in Logan’s brown eyes. “I went over the stockholders’ list a hundred times. I never saw your name on it.”
“You wouldn’t have,” Dylan allowed. “I didn’t use it.”
“Clever,” Logan said.
The waitress came, flirted a little, took their orders and left again. Five seconds after she’d gone, Dylan couldn’t remember what he’d chosen to eat. He was too conscious of Kristy, over yonder charming that movie star.
“Why keep it a secret?” Logan asked.
For a moment, Dylan didn’t know what Logan was talking about. Then he realized what his brother was referring to—the stock purchases he’d made while the boy wonder, Logan Creed, was wowing the financial community with his user-friendly legal-services Web site.
It came back to him, too, that he’d ordered the meat-loaf special. Maybe he wasn’t losing his mind after all.
“Should I have let you find out I was impressed by your success?” Dylan grinned. “That would never have done.”
Briana shook her head. “Testosterone,” she said.
“I’m not sure,” Logan said, musing, “but I think I’m flattered.”
“Don’t let it go to your head,” Dylan advised. “I still think you’re an asshole ninety percent of the time.” He turned to Briana. “Sorry, sis.”
“I like the sound of that,” Briana said, moving the custody papers out of gravy-range. “‘Sis,’ I mean. Not ‘asshole.’”
The food came. They ate.
The meat loaf was probably good, but Dylan couldn’t have sworn to it. What were Kristy and that actor talking about over there at that table on the far side of the café, anyway? Their heads were too close together to suit Dylan.
“Go over and say hello to her,” Logan said, midway through the meal. “Do you realize you’ve salted those mashed potatoes four times? Your arteries are probably hardening as we speak.”
Briana giggled. “Go,” she urged Dylan. She was a looker, Briana was, with her red-blond hair pulled back into a French braid, her emerald-green eyes, and that knockout figure of hers. Why hadn’t he noticed that, that long-ago night in front of the Stillwater Springs Wal-Mart, when her jerk of a first husband had ditched her in the parking lot with two boys and an old dog and nowhere to go?
He’d given her the keys to his house, since he wasn’t using it anyho
w, and the use of the old beater he’d driven in high school. He might have been able to win her over, if he’d stuck around and tried. Instead, he’d gone back to the rodeo circuit.
But even then his mind had been full of Kristy. He’d come back to settle his bull, Cimarron, at the ranch, and once he’d made all the arrangements for the animal’s care by a neighbor, he’d shot out of that town like a greased bullet.
Briana excused herself and left the table, probably headed for the ladies’ room.
“If I didn’t know better,” Logan remarked mildly, “I’d think you were lusting after my wife.”
“She’s primo,” Dylan admitted.
“But you’re still hung up on Kristy Madison.”
Dylan felt a hot flush climb his neck. He pushed his plate away, his appetite gone. “Are you trying to pick a fight, Logan? Because I’m game, even if you are my lawyer.”
“I’ve already got one black eye,” Logan said. “I don’t need another.”
“Did you hit Tyler back?” Dylan asked. This was ground he knew how to navigate. The things he might have told Logan, if it hadn’t been for their rocky history, were too raw to uncover.
“No,” Logan said. That desolate look was back in his eyes.
Dylan was surprised. What Jake Creed hadn’t taught him and Tyler about fighting, Logan had. “You just let him knock you down and get away with it? Who are you, and what have you done with my brother?”
“There’s been enough brawling, don’t you think?”
“I don’t believe I’m hearing this.”
“Believe it. I came back to Stillwater Springs to make the Creed name mean something good again, and punching Tyler’s lights out, however badly I wanted to do just that, isn’t on my to-do list.”
“You have changed.”
Logan watched with something like adoration radiating from his face as Briana approached the table, Venus in blue jeans. “Oh, yeah,” he replied huskily, “I’ve changed, all right.”
“Are you going to be insulted if I tell you I think that’s a good thing?”
Logan chuckled, stood to pull back Briana’s chair. “No,” he answered. “You’re going to find it a lot harder to insult me these days, little brother.”
Dylan felt a muscle bunch in his jaw, but he didn’t protest the moniker.
“I stopped to say hello to Kristy on my way back from the restroom,” Briana announced brightly, as she sat down. “She introduced me to Zachary Spencer, and it seemed like a business dinner to me.”
So, Dylan thought, Logan had told Briana the star-crossed-teenage-lovers story. He caught his brother’s gaze and narrowed his eyes.
Logan grinned, unfazed. “I’d stroll right over there and say howdy, if I were you,” he told Dylan. “That guy looks way too much like George Clooney to be safe around women.”
“Well,” Dylan answered, “you’re not me.”
Logan shrugged one shoulder. “If you want Kristy to think you’re chickenshit, that’s your business,” he said.
Briana jabbed him with her elbow again, harder this time. “Logan!”
Dylan shoved back his chair and stood. Nobody knew which of his buttons to push better than Logan did, and he’d just pushed the one that opened half a dozen psychological missile silos. The thing none of the Creeds could abide—Dylan included—was being seen as a coward.
A gutless wonder, as Jake used to put it.
Logan’s smile was self-satisfied to the max.
Briana looked worried. Like most women—with the standout exception of Sharlene—she probably hated public scenes.
“Remember,” Logan said quietly, with a lawyer’s moderation, “everything you do and say will find its way straight to the judge if Sharlene decides to counter your custody petition.”
Inwardly, Dylan sighed. Nodded.
As he made his way toward Kristy’s table, he drummed up his laid-back-cowboy smile. By the time he got there, he must have looked downright amiable, though his guts were churning. Was it possible to sweat on the inside of your skin?
“Hello, Kristy,” he said, in a hat-in-hand voice. Actually, he’d left his hat in his truck, but he wished he had it then, so he could turn it idly in his hands.
“D-Dylan,” she said. “Hello.”
The movie star stood up, put out a hand. “Zachary Spencer,” he said.
Dylan shook his hand. “Dylan Creed,” he replied. “Good to meet you.”
Spencer looked thoughtful. “That name sounds familiar,” he said.
“I had a run-in with your boy, Caleb, over a horse,” Dylan said.
Kristy’s gaze flickered from him to Spencer and back again.
“I heard about that,” the movie star said, without apparent ill will. “Caleb’s too used to getting what he wants. Do him good to get a taste of the real world.”
Recalling the kid, and the way he’d been set on taking a lunge-whip to Sundance, Dylan’s jawline tightened.
Kristy, being privy to what had happened on the road the day before between Dylan and Caleb, made the connection, the realization plain in her face. After all, there weren’t that many movie stars, or movie star’s sons, knocking around Stillwater Springs, even with the run on real estate.
“He was about to hit that poor horse,” she said to Spencer. “Your son, I mean.”
“I talked to him about it,” Spencer said. To his credit, he looked sincere about that, at least. “Join us?” he asked Dylan.
“I’m here with my brother and sister-in-law,” Dylan said, unable to keep his gaze off Kristy. She was looking down at the remains of a big salad, which she’d hardly dented, and the color was high in her cheeks. “I just wanted to say hello to an old friend.”
The movie star nodded, smiled affably and sat down.
Before he could give in to a primal and completely unreasonable urge to grab Mr. Hollywood by the front of his fancy shirt and pitch him head-first into the pie counter, Dylan turned and walked away.
*
“THAT WENT WELL.” Kristy sighed ruefully, as soon as Dylan was out of earshot. She knew what he was thinking—that she was starstruck over Zachary Spencer, dazzled by his money and fame and all the rest, like practically every other woman in town.
“I know when I’m beaten,” Zachary said quietly.
Kristy’s eyes shot to his face. “Beaten?”
“Let’s just say,” Zachary went on, his tone gentle and full of resignation, “that if we’d been standing on dry grass when all those sparks were flying between you and the cowboy, we couldn’t have outrun the wildfire.”
Kristy opened her mouth, closed it again.
Zachary reached across the table and patted her hand. “It’s okay,” he said. “You’re probably too young for me, anyway.”
Kristy heard herself laugh, and the sound caught her off guard. “Your last wife,” she said, “was in her twenties.”
“So you have been reading up on me.” Zachary grinned.
“I’ve seen most of your movies,” Kristy admitted lightly. Now that Dylan was out of her personal space, she could breathe again, and the heat was subsiding. “And I might have read an article or two.”
“But you’re not one bit taken with me, are you?”
“Not one bit,” Kristy said, smiling.
“The cowboy?”
“I knew him when,” Kristy answered, her smile fading.
“He’s jealous as hell, you know. Because you’re here with me.”
Kristy sighed, annoyed with herself. She wanted to go to Dylan, tell him straight out that this wasn’t a repeat of the Mike Danvers situation. At the same time, she was too stubborn to do something so openly codependent. Yes, there was something powerful happening between her and Dylan, but they hadn’t made any commitments. They weren’t even at the dating stage—and might never get there, the way things were going.
“He’ll leave town,” she said, and then could have bitten off her tongue. “It’s only a matter of time.”
“He’s
a rover, our Dylan Creed?”
“He’s a rodeo cowboy,” Kristy answered. “Same thing.”
Zachary snapped his fingers. “Now I know where I’ve seen him before,” he said. “He’s done stunt work in a couple of my movies. He’s one of the best in the business—absolutely fearless.”
Absolutely fearless.
That was Dylan, all right.
And the only thing worse than loving a rodeo cowboy was loving a stuntman. Dylan might claim he wanted to settle down, make a real home in Stillwater Springs, but when he got bored, or ran low on money, he’d park sweet little Bonnie somewhere safe and be off again.
Remember that, she told herself.
Not that she’d ever taken her own good advice, at least where Dylan was concerned.
An hour later, the option agreement signed, Kristy let herself in through the kitchen door at home, and the instant she stepped into the darkened house, Winston shot past her in a white blur.
She paused, alarm prickling the pit of her stomach.
Was someone in the house?
It wasn’t like Winston to dart out like that. His usual M.O. was to scrabble at the legs of her jeans with his forepaws until she picked him up for a nuzzle and some cuddling.
“Hello?” Kristy called.
Nothing.
She was being silly, that’s all. She was on edge because of the extra bodies in Sugarfoot’s grave, and the story that was about to break over her life like a tsunami. And Dylan.
She turned, after setting her purse aside on the counter, and called to Winston.
He ignored her, though she heard a snarly meow out there in the gloom.
What was the matter with that cat?
She closed the door, flipped on the lights, filled the coffeemaker and set the timer for morning. The house still felt strange, as though it had drawn in a breath and held it.
She was really stressed out.
As a matter of principle, Kristy forced herself to venture into the dining room, then the living room beyond. She switched on the lamps at either end of her chintz couch, listened.
Her imagination took off, despite her determination to behave like a rational person.
Suppose Sheriff Book was hiding somewhere, behind a door, or in the pool of dark at the top of the stairs, planning to finish her off before she told anybody what she suspected?
Linda Lael Miller Montana Creeds Series Volume 1: Montana Creeds: LoganMontana Creeds: DylanMontana Creeds: Tyler Page 42