Linda Lael Miller Montana Creeds Series Volume 1: Montana Creeds: LoganMontana Creeds: DylanMontana Creeds: Tyler

by Linda Lael Miller

  Sundance was skittish, but he didn’t balk.

  Kristy held her breath, though, when Dylan grabbed hold of the horse’s glowing mane and swung himself up onto its back, Indian-style.

  Sundance gathered his haunches, as if preparing to buck.

  Dylan leaned to stroke the long neck and reassure the animal with quiet words Kristy couldn’t make out.

  Kristy laid a hand to her chest, her heart pounding. She knew horses, and Dylan did, too. But they were powerful animals, unpredictable at times, especially when they’d been abused. She’d been prepared, she realized, to see Dylan thrown. And she’d been terrified.

  He waved to her, maybe knowing what she was thinking and maybe not, and rode off at an easy walk. Kristy watched until both of them disappeared into the trees.

  She should go in.

  Make sure Sam and Winston were still getting along.

  Look in on Bonnie.

  Brush her teeth and unpack.

  Instead, she listened from the porch until she was sure Dylan and Sundance had had time to get through the orchard without running into a bear.

  *

  THIS TIME, SUNDANCE STAYED in his stall, as though he understood that the arrangement was only temporary.

  “He’s a fine-looking animal,” Logan observed, leaning on the stall gate to watch as Sundance munched down on hay and a little grain.

  Dylan nodded, eyeing Logan’s poor collection of saddles. He’d left his own in storage after quitting the rodeo, and now he wondered whether to send for it, along with the rest of his stuff, or simply buy new.

  “Heard anything about Doc?” he asked.

  “He’s stable, according to the people in the admitting office,” Logan said, without looking away from Sundance. “We probably won’t know much for a while.”

  Dylan wondered if his brother knew what a lucky man he was, with a pretty wife and a ready-made family. Three dogs, too, and all these horses. Cattle on the range, though some of them would be Dylan’s, once the auction company delivered the fifty head they’d bought that morning. Riding up earlier, he’d taken in the old place, all alight in the gathering dusk, and felt a peculiar combination of yearning and hope.

  “It was something, seeing Kristy on a horse again,” Dylan said, remembering their ride across the field, just after they all got back from the political shindig in town.

  Logan turned, at last, and grinned. “It was,” he agreed quietly.

  “What?” Dylan said, irritated by the cocksure expression on his brother’s face.

  “You’ve got it bad,” Logan answered. “You remind me of a deer frozen in the headlights—or myself, when I first laid eyes on Briana.”

  Dylan sighed, standing there in the center aisle of Logan’s fine new barn. “Truth is, I don’t know what I’ve got. It’s a lot different than when Kristy and I were together before—whole new ball game, as the saying goes, and a new playing field, too. And I haven’t got a clue about the rules—or what the score is, either.”

  Logan chuckled. “Show up and suit up, little brother. That’s about all you can do.”

  Dylan needed to shift the subject away from Kristy, at least until he could get his breath. “Lily’s on her way to Missoula, to be with Doc,” he said.

  “That’s good,” Logan said, thoughtful again.

  This time, Dylan didn’t need to ask what was going through Logan’s mind. He knew.

  With another sigh, and another swipe at his hair, Dylan took the plunge. “I was real mad at you when Dad died before I could get to the hospital, Logan, and so was Tyler. It really pissed me off that you were there and I wasn’t—same with Ty, I guess. Anyhow—I’m sorry. I know it wasn’t your doing, my not getting to say goodbye to the old man before he went.”

  Logan came to face Dylan, there in that well-lit barn, and laid a hand on his shoulder. The black eye Tyler had given him at Jake’s graveside was almost gone. Wounds on the outside healed fast; not so with the ones on the inside.

  “Thanks,” Logan said, his voice gruffer than usual.

  “You were right about something else,” Dylan went on, since he seemed to be on some kind of psychological roll. “Jake Creed was a son of a bitch.”

  Logan’s mouth quirked up at one side—closest he could come to a grin, most likely. Instead of answering, he just nodded.

  “The thing is,” Dylan finished, “he was my dad and I loved him anyhow.”

  “Me, too,” Logan said sadly. Then he roused himself from what looked to be some pretty dark thoughts, and chuckled. “Back then, I’d have swapped him out for somebody better—anybody better—but now, I’d just like to see him again, for five minutes, and tell the old bastard I love him, whether he likes it or not.”

  “Maybe he knows,” Dylan mused.

  “Maybe he does,” Logan said.

  After that, Logan went into the house for the box of old letters, pictures and journals he’d mentioned to Dylan earlier, and probably to tell Briana he’d be back in a little while. Dylan waited on the porch the whole time, envying his older brother fiercely and, at one and the same time, happy for him, too.

  Doc’s heart attack had been one hell of a way to end the party, and it had taken something out of Dylan, to see a good friend come so close to dying.

  But he had Bonnie to go home to.

  And, for tonight at least, Kristy was there, too.

  It sure beat being on the rodeo circuit, crashing in this motel room or that one, sometimes by himself, but more often with a woman he’d never see again. Either way, he’d been just as lonely, because as warm and willing and even beautiful as most of those women had been, none of them were Kristy Madison.

  Logan came out the front door, lugging a big plastic container jammed with stuff. “Ready?” he asked, as though it were an ordinary, everyday thing for two brothers who’d beaten the hell out of each other and then steered clear for five long years to be swapping family pictures.

  Not that Dylan had anything to swap. The main house was Logan’s inheritance, and so was the history of the Creeds, evidently.

  On the way across the field—like Dylan, Logan never took a road if he could jostle over open ground instead—Dylan held that box in his lap and wondered if he really wanted to open it.

  What he knew of the Creed legacy wasn’t exactly greeting-card material.

  Happy Father’s Day, Dad.

  Yeah, right.

  Or him and Logan and Tyler mugging for a Christmas picture—the kind that usually goes out with a brag-letter run up at the copy store. He even went so far as to imagine a line from it, written in Jake’s own hand. The current wife and I are so proud…

  He made a snorting sound.

  “What?” Logan asked, swerving to avoid a log or a pothole in the field.

  “You remember that old aluminum Christmas tree you bought that year?” Dylan asked. “The one with the colored light thingy that turned, so the branches changed from red to blue to green?”

  “I remember,” Logan said. His voice sounded odd.

  “Best Christmas I can recall,” Dylan remarked.

  Logan swallowed visibly. “Yeah. The thing was made of metal, so Dad couldn’t cut it in two with a chain saw.”

  “It was more than that, Logan. You mowed lawns and shoveled snow to buy the thing. That’s what made it a good Christmas.”

  “There weren’t many presents to speak of,” Logan said. “Except for those toy tractors Dad got just before the hardware store closed on Christmas Eve.”

  Dylan laughed. “Mine had a dent,” he remembered.

  “I guess he tried,” Logan said. The house was in sight, and he stopped on that side of the fence. “Can you make it the rest of the way with that box?”

  Dylan merely rolled his eyes. Then he said, “He tried, Logan. Maybe it was the best he could do.”

  Logan didn’t look at him. He merely nodded once, a sharp motion of his head.

  Dylan got out of the truck, lugging the box. “Night,” he said. “
Thanks for the ride, the stall and that tacky Christmas tree.”

  With that, he walked away, toward the lights, toward his child, toward Kristy. He pushed the box between the strands of rusted barbed wire comprising the fence and shinnied after it.

  And when he turned around, Logan was still sitting there.

  He was about to go back when his brother shifted into gear and drove off, taillights of his truck blinking cheerfully in the night.

  It made Dylan think of the aluminum tree again.

  He smiled.

  *

  KRISTY SAT at Dylan’s kitchen table, bare feet hooked in the rung of her chair, wearing her favorite over-washed, oversize T-shirt and reading a library book. Incredibly, Winston and Sam were curled up together in a corner of the room, sharing the pile of old blankets that served as a dog-bed.

  She hadn’t heard a car, so when Dylan came through the back door, a big plastic box under one arm, she started slightly.

  “Sundance didn’t follow you home?” she asked. She’d had a shower, and her hair was still damp against her cheeks and the back of her neck.

  Dylan smiled, shook his head, his eyes lingering on her hair, her face and then the T-shirt. He shifted the box onto the counter, stepped inside and shut the door.

  “You should have locked up,” he said. “Stillwater Springs isn’t what it used to be.”

  Kristy sighed. “No place is,” she answered. “I didn’t hear Logan’s truck.”

  “That’s because he only brought me as far as the fence,” Dylan replied. His gaze seemed to be glued to her. Did she have toothpaste on her cheek or something?

  “What’s in the box?” she asked, taking a precautionary swipe at one side of her face, then the other.

  “A hundred and fifty years of Creed memorabilia,” Dylan said, crossing the room to drag back a chair and sit down. “Bonnie’s all right?”

  “Sleeping like a baby,” Kristy said. If things had been more certain between her and Dylan, she’d have gotten up, stood behind him, massaged some of the tension out of his shoulders, the way her mother had done with her dad.

  “This has been one hell of a day.” Dylan sighed, tilting his head back in a tantalizing stretch. “Logan called the hospital just before I went over there with Sundance. Doc is ‘stable.’”

  Kristy wanted to do something for Dylan, but it was too late for coffee. “Are you hungry?” she asked.

  Dylan straightened, looked at her. A grin flickered on his mouth. “Hungry?” he asked, teasing, acting as though the word was one he’d never heard before.

  “For food,” Kristy clarified, then felt stupid.

  Dylan chuckled at her blush. “No,” he said. “Not for food.”

  “Oh,” Kristy said.

  “I wouldn’t turn down some good old-fashioned sex, though.”

  “Dylan. Bonnie is in the next room.”

  His eyes twinkled, but there was a weary look in them, too. “You think people don’t have sex with a kid in the next room?” he countered. “Hell, if that were so, the human race would have died out before the wheel was invented.”

  Kristy blushed harder. That afternoon, before they’d gone to hear Jim and Mike make their why-I-should-be-sheriff speeches, she and Dylan had practically raised the roof right off the bedroom. It had been easy then, to imagine having sex with a child in the house, but Bonnie hadn’t actually been in the house then. She’d been with Logan and Briana.

  Now, she was twelve feet away, in her pretty princess bed, a pink-cheeked, sleeping angel with little blond curls haloing her face like a gossamer aura.

  “We’ll just have to be quiet,” Dylan said, reiterating an earlier statement.

  Kristy bit her lower lip, squirmed in her chair.

  “Kristy?” Dylan prompted.

  “I’m not sure I can,” she confessed.

  “Have sex?” He pretended to ponder some deep dilemma. “You seemed to have a handle on it before.”

  “Be quiet,” she whispered. “I’m not sure I can be quiet.”

  That made him chuckle, a throaty, ultramasculine sound that bent her nerves like grass rippling under a strong wind.

  “So you think Bonnie’s going to wake up because she hears the bedsprings creaking in our room and say to herself, ‘For shame, I think those two are doing the nasty’? Get real, Kristy. She’s two years old.”

  Our room. Kristy’s mind caught on that phrase, even though it had nothing to do with the price of rice in China, as her mother used to say.

  When she didn’t answer—because she couldn’t think of a single sensible thing to say—Dylan made a big drama out of stretching his delectable body and making the accompanying yawnlike sounds.

  “You sit up as long as you want,” he said. “I’m going to bed.”

  With that, he locked the kitchen door, ambled past Kristy’s chair and headed into the hallway. She heard him stop to look in on Bonnie, then go on to the bathroom.

  His belt buckle clinked when he dropped his jeans to the floor, then the shower came on.

  Kristy hesitated a few moments, then stood up, switched off the lights and went to Dylan’s room. When he came out of the bathroom, wearing only a towel around his waist, chest dotted with sparkling droplets of water, Kristy was in bed, with the blankets pulled up to her chin.

  “If I get into that bed,” he told her, “I’m going to make love to you. So I guess you can either sleep on the couch or take your chances.”

  Kristy tugged the blankets up farther, so only her eyes and the top of her head were uncovered. “Don’t you dare make me yell like I did this afternoon,” she blustered, her voice muffled.

  “No promises,” Dylan said. “Except one.”

  “What’s that?” Kristy asked nervously.

  “You are definitely going to come. Hard and often.”

  Heat surged through Kristy’s mostly hidden body. “You are deliberately making this more difficult,” she accused.

  Dylan stood at the foot of the bed. Dropped the towel.

  Kristy scrambled to switch off the bedside lamp, but it was too late. She’d seen his erection, and she was already on the verge of climax #1, before he’d even touched her.

  Dylan immediately switched the lamp back on.

  Then, slowly, he pulled back the covers, took hold of the hem of Kristy’s T-shirt and hauled it off over her head as easily as if he’d done it a thousand times before. Which he probably had.

  “Dylan,” Kristy whimpered.

  He sat down on the mattress beside her, gloriously naked and all man, and parted her thighs with one hand. “Let’s test the theory,” he said.

  “Wh-what theory?” Kristy gasped.

  “Whether you can be quiet or not,” Dylan replied. And then he began to caress her, making her wet, making her writhe.

  “Oh God,” she said.

  He continued to stroke her, easing her legs farther apart, bending once or twice to tongue and then suck on one of her nipples.

  A honey-thick haze filled the small room.

  Dylan increased the pace.

  Kristy put a hand over her mouth, groaning aloud, her hips rising and falling with every motion of his fingers.

  The bedsprings began to creak.

  Kristy made a strangled, soblike sound, of need, of surrender, of woman-fury at being so easily tamed.

  “So far, so good,” Dylan murmured, watching her with soft, fierce eyes.

  And then his fingers were inside her, while the pad of his thumb plied her clitoris.

  Kristy erupted, flinging both hands upward to catch hold of the rails in the headboard, giving a long, low cry of pure, primitive satisfaction.

  When the waves subsided, she lay still, breathing hard. Listening.

  Dylan listened, too.

  No sound came from Bonnie’s room.

  “Guess we’re good to go,” Dylan said.

  “Didn’t we just—er—‘go’?” Kristy gasped out.

  In answer, he stretched out on top of her, the l
ight still burning on the bedside table, catching in his hair, playing over his features and his strong shoulders.

  “Dylan, are you wearing—”

  “No,” he said. Gently, he took her right hand, still moist with perspiration, and placed it on the same rail she’d gripped during the orgasm of the century. He did the same with the other.

  She knew she ought to tell him to stop, put on a condom, but the words wouldn’t come out. It was as though they were huddled in the back of her throat, holding on tight, refusing to budge.

  “How do you feel about trailers?” he asked.

  Kristy blinked. He was about to move inside her. “How do I feel about what?”

  “Trailers?” Dylan asked, bending his head to nibble idly at the length of her neck, the sensitive hollows under her ears. “It would only be temporary—until the new house is finished—”

  “The n-new house?” Kristy groped to understand. All her senses were hyped up, but her brain felt swaddled, soaked in honey, drowsy and sweet.

  He was inside her then. Deep, deep inside her.

  She whimpered, turning her head from side to side, carried away by the rising friction, the approach of pleasure so intense she wasn’t sure she could endure it. But, oh, there was no going back now.

  “Stay—with me—Kristy—” Dylan ground out, driving into her hard now.

  The climax seized her then, tore her apart, put her back together again. She was just beginning to catch hold of the world around her when Dylan stiffened and spilled himself inside her.

  Stay with me, Kristy.

  Had he really said that or, tossed about in the fiery throes of her release, off the planet, past the stars, had she only imagined the words?

  At least fifteen minutes went by before either of them spoke.

  “Will you live with me, Kristy?” Dylan asked then. Their arms and legs were still tangled, and his face was pressed deep into the curve of her neck.

  So he had asked her to stay with him.

  Not to marry him.

  To live with him.

  Just then, Kristy heard her mother’s voice in the back of her mind, clear and crisp. Why should a man buy the cow when he can get the milk for free?

  She laughed out loud, but at the same time, tears wet her face.