Kristy gave herself up to Dylan, surrendered completely, allowed her senses to riot, unchecked.
At some point, he stripped off his clothes, and while the water drained slowly around them, he took her, brought her to the fiery heart of creation itself with a series of hard, deep thrusts.
Kristy clung to him as she came, and then came again.
And when he reached his own release, she somehow knew.
They’d conceived a child, she and Dylan.
They’d conceived a child.
*
MUCH MORE SEX like last night’s, Dylan reflected, trying to will some starch into his knees while he made a predawn breakfast for Bonnie, and he’d die of sheer ecstasy, long before his time.
Oh, but as the old saying went, what a way to go.
The sun was barely edging the eastern horizon, and Kristy was still sleeping, curled up in a warm, naked little ball in the bed they’d shared. Leaving her was one of the hardest things Dylan had done in a long time, but if he was going to be at Logan’s barn by six, he had to hustle.
Would Caleb show up, the way they’d agreed?
He had no idea. He hoped so, though.
He’d wrestled Bonnie into a set of clothes before bringing her downstairs. She’d be in the way out at the barn, he supposed, but she was a Creed kid, so she had to learn to be around horses. And he’d meant what he’d said to Caleb the day before, about Logan having enough to do looking after his own responsibilities. If she got the chance, Kristy would probably volunteer to take Bonnie to the library with her again, but two days in a row of riding herd on a hellcat-in-training was more than anybody could expect.
So Dylan scribbled a note on the blackboard, under Kristy’s perpetual grocery list, explaining that he and Bonnie and Sam had gone out to the ranch to tend to Sundance. Dan Phillips was going to look the sketches over, then turn them into blueprints, but he didn’t add that information, since there wasn’t room.
Did the woman always need broccoli, baking soda, yogurt, cereal and cat food, or was she just haphazard about erasing things off the board as she bought them?
Dylan pondered the mystery, with a slight smile curving his mouth, as he locked the back door carefully behind him and carried Bonnie to the truck, Sam gamboling happily alongside.
The drive out to Stillwater Springs Ranch was uneventful, except for Bonnie yelling “poop” at regular intervals. Dylan knew she’d already done the deed back at the house in town—she just liked saying the word.
With any luck, she’d get tired of it before she started college.
Caleb was waiting by the corral fence when Dylan arrived at Logan’s, dressed in jeans, a T-shirt and brand-spanking-new boots. His father must have dropped him off, because there weren’t any extra vehicles in sight, just Logan’s truck and Briana’s navy-blue Beamer, a gift from her loving bridegroom.
Dylan smiled to himself.
Once upon a time, Logan had been a heartbreaker, running through women—including two wives—like a drunken sailor spending his paycheck. But that was before Briana Grant and, by extension, her sons. Logan loved those boys as if they were his own; that was obvious by the way he joked and wrestled with them, and allowed them to follow him all over the ranch.
Dylan understood—if Kristy had come as a package deal, like Briana had, he’d have loved her kids simply because he loved her.
Loved her?
Wait a second. He wasn’t prepared to go that far.
Caleb waited shyly while Dylan parked the truck and got out. After hoisting Sam to the ground, so the dog could run around in happy circles and then lift his leg against the old pump handle over by the fence, Dylan began turning Bonnie loose from the car seat.
She was impatient, which made the whole job that much harder, and when Briana came out of the house, smiling, her intentions clear by the purposeful, take-charge way she walked straight toward him, Dylan was secretly relieved.
Briana greeted Caleb with a cool nod as she passed him.
“You’re up early,” Briana remarked, taking Bonnie from Dylan as she looked up into his face.
“Caleb and I are going to see to old Sundance,” Dylan answered. He braced himself, expecting Bonnie to pitch a snit, but she didn’t. She cooed and tugged at Briana’s braid, perfectly willing to be spirited away into the house.
“Have you had breakfast?” Briana asked, and this time, she took Caleb in, too, though somewhat grudgingly. “Logan’s still putting away pancakes.”
“I’m good,” Dylan said, and out of the corner of his eye, he saw a flash of disappointment in Caleb’s face. “I’m not sure about my horse-wrangling buddy here, though,” he added smoothly. “He might have room for a hotcake or two.”
Briana, deftly bouncing Bonnie on her right hip, finally turned a full-fledged smile on the movie star’s kid. “Are you hungry, Caleb?” she asked. “You’re welcome to all the pancakes you want, if you are.”
He blushed so hard it looked painful, then nodded. “Dad bought me a couple of breakfast sandwiches at the drive-through in town, before we came out here, but things like that wear off quick.”
“I suppose they do,” Briana agreed, tossing Dylan a grin after the kid went by them, all but sprinting for the house.
Dylan followed, with Briana. He’d downed a couple of bowls of cereal back in town, and reheated a cup of coffee before setting up a fresh pot for Kristy, but he could definitely use a jolt of caffeine.
And maybe a pancake or ten.
*
AT FIRST, Kristy thought it was Dylan, stretched out on the bed beside her, but there was something wrong about the slight slope of the mattress and the odd, jerky meter of the breathing.
Kristy peered through her lashes, and instantly bolted to her feet with a raspy shriek of terror. A person—somehow familiar but definitely not Dylan—reclined on his side of the bed, clad in jeans, a heavy turtleneck sweater—and a ski mask.
“Dylan!” Kristy shrieked, though she knew he wasn’t in the house.
“He’s gone.” The figure rose off the bed. “Left at least an hour ago, and took the baby with him.”
Kristy’s sleep-sodden, fright-spiked mind struggled with that niggling sense of recognition. She’d have given anything for Dylan to walk through the bedroom doorway right about then, but she was wildly grateful to know Bonnie was safely away.
“Who are you?” The question sawed at Kristy’s throat. Made her raise one hand to her neck. In the next instant, she realized she was naked and snatched up the bedspread to cover herself.
The intruder reached under the sweater and brought out a small pistol. Kristy had no idea what kind it was, or what caliber; it was enough to know it could kill her—along with the child she and Dylan had started the night before.
“Put on some clothes,” the prowler said. The voice. Familiar, like the form, but disguised somehow. Just out of Kristy’s mental reach.
Shivering, Kristy moved slowly to her bureau, took out jeans and a short-sleeved pullover, scrambled into them while keeping the bedspread in place as much as she could.
Would a rapist order her to get dressed?
“What do you want?” Kristy demanded, more confident once she had clothes on. She wished she’d let Dylan show her how to use that pistol of his. Was it still on the pantry shelf downstairs in the kitchen, or had he taken it with him, wherever he’d gone? “How did you get in here?”
“Questions, questions.” The ski mask came off with a tug of the intruder’s gun-free hand, and there was Freida Turlow. “Did you think changing the locks would keep me out? There are a dozen ways into this house—I found them all while I was growing up, but evidently, you haven’t, for all the things you’ve torn up and replaced.”
Kristy’s mouth had fallen open. She had to will her jaws to work before she could reply.
“Freida! Are you insane? Coming in here with a gun—lying down on my bed—”
Freida’s face hardened instantly. Her eyes had a queer, glazed loo
k, as though they were focused on some scene only she could see. “Where is it?” she demanded.
“Where is what?” Kristy countered, honestly puzzled and already easing, a fraction of an inch at a time, toward the door. If she could just get out of that room, then down the hallway and the stairs—
“My diary!” Freida spouted furiously.
Kristy, on the verge of bolting, froze instead. She might be able to outrun Freida, but not the bullet.
“Is that why you tore out the closet wall in your old room? You were looking for a diary?”
“I know you have it!”
“Freida, I don’t have it. You must have taken it with you, when you moved out, and simply forgotten—”
“I didn’t forget! I meant to come back for it—I thought I had plenty of time before we closed escrow—but you were always here, with some wood-flooring salesman, or that guy who was going to replace the furnace, or that handyman measuring for bookshelves—”
“Why now?” Kristy asked, strangely calm, considering that she was looking straight down the barrel of a pistol, one Freida Turlow apparently knew how to use, from the easy way she handled it. “I’ve lived here for a long time. You clearly had copies of my old keys. Why wait?”
“Because Brett said he had it. For a while, I believed him. I gave him money, let him use my car, sleep on my couch. But when he went into treatment after that last run-in with the law, I went through everything my dear brother owns. And he didn’t have the diary.”
“He could have hidden it someplace,” Kristy suggested reasonably. She was stalling for time now, waiting for a chance to make a break for it—and pretty certain that chance was never going to come.
“He’s not smart enough to do that!”
Kristy took a risk. “Brett was obviously smart enough to blackmail you,” she pointed out diplomatically.
Freida raised the gun. “You watch how you talk to me, Kristy Madison,” she said. “You’re nothing! The daughter of a stone-cold killer—” Something changed in the other woman’s face then, something elementally frightening.
“What was in the diary, Freida?” Kristy pressed quietly.
“You already know. You have it.”
“Okay, I have it,” Kristy said, on to Plan B—God, please let Plan B work. She had to get the gun away from Freida and run.
“Then you know what’s in it,” Freida murmured, looking confused now, even a little disoriented, as though she might be losing track of her whereabouts, if she’d ever had a handle on reality in the first place. “You know I saw your dad drag that drifter out of the bed of his pickup and dig a hole under those trees, and throw him inside. You know I killed that Clarkston girl and buried her in the same place, on top of Sugarfoot. And since you know all that, I’m going to have to kill you.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
KRISTY BARELY HEARD the sound on the stairs, over the thud-thud-thud of her heart, but it didn’t raise her hopes of being rescued before Freida Turlow shot her to death. She was sure it was only Winston, and what could he do?
“Why?” Kristy asked. “Why did you kill Ellie?”
Freida’s face contorted with some horrible emotion. Or was it a horrible memory? Both, most likely.
“You’d think she was a saint, the way everybody carried on when she went missing,” Freida sputtered, checked-out again. Or still. “Well, let me tell you, she wasn’t. She took my boyfriend—got him to sleep with her and made sure I knew about it. Rubbed my face in it. He liked her better, she said—”
Kristy swallowed. “Sheriff Book?” she asked stupidly. Rather than being a one-man-woman, Freida was generally considered the any-man type. It was just that Floyd was the only one of Freida’s lovers Kristy could recall, stressed as she was.
Freida gave an ugly, contemptuous snort. “That fat old man? He didn’t even have the guts to stand up to his wife and get a divorce!”
The sound came again, nearer now, a slight creak in the hallway.
Freida frowned, listening hard.
Run away, Winston, Kristy thought desperately. Run away.
She wouldn’t have put it past Freida to shoot the cat, if he startled her or simply because he’d decided to live with Kristy instead of moving on with his original mistress.
“Who’s there?” Freida demanded, turning aside from Kristy and raising the gun, gripping it in two hands, like someone on TV. Someone used to guns, and proficient with them.
Kristy lunged at her, but even in her madness, or perhaps because of it, Freida had the instincts of a wild creature, cornered and prepared to kill to escape.
She swung her clasped hands, still holding the pistol and striking Kristy in the face, sending her hurtling backward onto the floor. She landed hard on her backside, blood streaming from her nose; she was dazed and coldly, calmly certain that this was it.
She was going to die.
But suddenly Floyd Book loomed in the doorway to the hall, a blurry shape. A blurry shape with a service revolver in one hand. “Put the gun down, Freida,” he said evenly. “This is all over.”
Freida didn’t put the gun down. She didn’t even lower it. “You know who my boyfriend was, Floyd?” she taunted. “Don’t pretend you didn’t hear, because I know you did. It was Mike Danvers. The man who wants your job.”
“Put the gun down,” Floyd repeated wearily. “I don’t want to have to shoot you, Freida, but I will.”
“Oh God, Freida,” Kristy pleaded, unable—and afraid—to get up from her sitting position on the floor, “do what he says. Please—”
And that was when Freida whirled on Kristy, gun raised. “You took Mike. You took my house. You even took my damn cat—”
She pulled the trigger.
Simultaneously, Floyd fired from the doorway, a flame flashing briefly from the end of his gun barrel.
Kristy screamed as Freida whirled to one side, like someone performing a ludicrous and graceful dance in slow motion, and then fell to the floor, still gripping the little pistol in her right hand. The pistol that had clicked, but not actually gone off.
There was blood—her own and Freida’s. And with it came the memories, vivid, crimson ones. Her dad, loading the body of that drifter into a wheelbarrow, in the sultry darkness of a summer night.
With the help of Floyd Book.
Floyd was staring down at Freida, as though he couldn’t believe he’d actually shot her, but he was still holding the service revolver.
Kristy couldn’t have spoken if it would have saved her life.
Floyd had been there, on the ranch, the night of the killing.
Slowly, as if unaware that Kristy was in the room at all, Floyd crossed to Freida, knelt beside her. She stirred, groaning, on the floor. The sheriff set his revolver down, activated the radio on his belt.
“We need an ambulance at Kristy Madison’s place,” he said to the dispatcher in his office. “Someone’s been shot, and it looks pretty bad.”
Kristy simply stared at her father’s old friend, waiting for him to realize that she’d remembered. That she’d seen him clearly, a part of that traumatic scene so long ago. She tried to gather her scattered wits, make a plan, get out of there before he shot her dead to keep her from telling what she knew, what she’d been suppressing all this time, but she couldn’t think.
She didn’t want to die.
She wanted to marry Dylan, and love him with all her heart, even if he didn’t love her in return. She wanted to see Bonnie grow up. She wanted to train and ride Sundance—
Dear God, there were so many things she wanted to do.
“You’ll be okay, Freida,” Floyd said, in a strange, gentle voice. “You’ll be okay. Just try to lie still.”
Until then, it hadn’t registered with Kristy that Freida was alive, though very badly injured.
Floyd reached for the bedspread, still lying where Kristy had dropped it when Freida ordered her to get dressed, and tucked it around the woman, careful not to cause her pain.
A mome
nt later, his gaze swung to Kristy. “I wondered when it would come back to you,” he said quietly. “That I helped your dad bury that damn worthless piece of—”
Kristy swallowed hard, struggled to get to her feet, still unsure whether Sheriff Floyd Book would gun her down if she made any sudden moves. Now that some of the shock-fog was clearing, she thought she might actually survive this confrontation—would the man have called for an ambulance for Freida if he meant to kill her?
He might, Kristy decided. Because he could use Freida’s gun, wipe it clean of his fingerprints, and then put it back in Freida’s grip, so only hers would be on the handle and trigger. All he’d have to do was say Freida had fired the fatal shot—he’d tried to stop her, but just hadn’t been quick enough.
If that was his intention, though, he was taking his time about it.
Was it because Freida was conscious, and therefore conceivably a witness? Or because he’d already summoned an ambulance, and some neighbor might hear the second shot and check the clock?
Kristy felt the blood drain from her brain, causing a dangerous dip toward unconsciousness. She gripped the edge of her bureau, somehow managed to stay on her feet. The front of her shirt was soaked red, but the bleeding had stopped. She was pretty sure it had, anyway.
“What really happened that night, Floyd?” she asked. Her voice seemed to come from somewhere far away, instead of inside her, where there was only numbness and the bleak hope that she would walk out of that room on her own two feet.
Floyd sighed heavily, smoothing Freida’s hair back from her forehead, murmuring to her to hold on, the ambulance was coming. “Tim called me, after the shooting, and he was in a real panic. Afraid he’d go to prison, or even be executed, and you and your mother would be on your own. In those days, Kristy, it was even harder for a single woman to support a child than it is now, and they were in debt up to their ears, as you know. I came right out to the ranch, and I tried to calm Tim down, tried to reason with him, but he wouldn’t listen. He begged me to help him bury the body, so I did. You have to understand, Kristy—we were in the army together, your dad and me. Saved each other’s lives half a dozen times, over in Vietnam. I couldn’t turn my back on him and besides, I’d have killed that drifter, too, if I’d found him in my little girl’s bedroom.”
Linda Lael Miller Montana Creeds Series Volume 1: Montana Creeds: LoganMontana Creeds: DylanMontana Creeds: Tyler Page 56