The Creed Legacy

by Linda Lael Miller

  Quietly, he repeated his order.

  Joleen turned around and fairly screeched it at Manuel, the fry cook.

  Manuel winced, tossed Brody a glance of amused sympathy and commenced to building his famous twothousand-plus-calorie gut-buster.

  After that, Joleen steered clear of Brody to such an extent that Manuel had to bring out the burger and fries himself when they were ready. As for the milk shake— well, Brody decided not to remind anybody of that, because it was too easy to picture Joleen upending the thing over the top of his head.

  Gradually, folks lost interest, probably disappointed that there hadn’t been some kind of donnybrook, and went back to their own food and the conversations they’d suspended when Brody and Joleen first faced off.

  Brody ate most of his meal, though he’d mostly lost his appetite, and he even pretended to enjoy it. When he couldn’t face another bite, he estimated the total for his check, since Joleen didn’t bring one, and left the money on the counter, next to his plate.

  He headed for the parking lot and was just opening the door of his truck when Joleen shot out of a side door and stomped over to him.

  “What about my tip?” she demanded.

  Brody grinned affably. “You’ve got to be kidding,” he said.

  “It just goes to show I was absolutely right to dump you, Brody Creed, because you have no class what soever!”

  Brody folded his arms. If Joleen wanted to rewrite history, it was okay with him. Especially if it meant she’d let him be from now on. “I guess you did the right thing for sure, that being the case,” he said. He set one foot on the running board, fixing to climb behind the wheel. “But since you wanted a tip, here it is, Joleen—move on, find yourself a big city with bright lights, because Lonesome Bend, let alone the Birdcage Café, is never going to be enough for you.”

  An impish smile played on Joleen’s mouth. Some people would have been surprised by that reaction, Brody supposed, but he wasn’t. The word mercurial didn’t begin to describe the woman’s temperament.

  “I would, if I had, oh, say, five thousand dollars to travel on,” she suggested coyly.

  “Then you’d better find yourself a sucker pronto,” Brody replied easily, “because if I fork over the money, it’s going to look like a payoff, and that kind of thing doesn’t set well with me.”

  The smile turned to ice, a thin layer over poison. “Since when do you care how anything looks to other people, Creed?”

  Since Carolyn, Brody thought, just then realizing it was true.

  He didn’t give a rat’s ass about the town’s opinion of him, or Joleen’s. Never had, really. But it mattered what Carolyn saw when she looked at him—Conner and Davis, too. Moreover, it mattered what he thought of himself.

  “Well?” Joleen prompted, angered by his silence. “Since when?”

  “Since now,” Brody replied, very quietly.

  Joleen blinked. He hoped she wouldn’t cry, but if she did, he reckoned he could endure it, since he’d be driving away here in a minute or so. “It wouldn’t be a payoff,” she finally said, her voice gone small and a little shaky now. “The five grand, I mean. It would be one friend making a loan to another. And be honest, Brody. Maybe building that big, fancy house and barn at River’s Bend is the first showy thing you’ve ever done, but that’s pocket change to you, and you know it.”

  “Sorry, Joleen,” Brody said. “Writing you a check for any amount of money is a message I just don’t want to send.”

  Her shoulders sagged and she scuffed at the gravel with the toe of her white waitress shoe. It wouldn’t be white for long, Brody supposed, but, then, Joleen wouldn’t be a waitress for long, either.

  She had the worst case of wanderlust Brody had ever seen.

  “Well, damn,” she said finally, and the sorrows gave way to that showgirl smile of hers. “It was worth a try.”

  Brody laughed. “Good luck, Joleen,” he said, “and be happy.”

  She was still smiling as he drove away, and waving one hand in farewell.

  Women, Brody thought. There was just no figuring them out.

  CAROLYN ROOTED desperately through her wardrobe for something to wear besides her normal jeans, T-shirt and boots. Bottom line, she’d shot the fashion wad with the cotton sundress she’d worn to Bill’s backyard barbecue, and recycling it for a date with Brody just didn’t seem right.

  “Why don’t you wear the gypsy skirt?” Tricia asked. They’d closed the shop an hour early that day, and she’d stuck around to quiz an admission out of Carolyn—yes, she was going out with Brody that night.

  It was no big deal, she’d insisted to Tricia.

  “Are you kidding me?” Carolyn retorted. “The bid is in four figures. Whoever is so determined to buy that skirt isn’t looking for anything that’s already been worn.”

  “They’d never know,” Tricia said.

  “I’d know,” Carolyn countered.

  “Then maybe they wouldn’t care if they did know,” Tricia said cheerfully.

  “Fat chance,” Carolyn retorted, unearthing a black sundress with white polka dots and holding it up for a critical examination. When had she made the thing? It had to have been a long time ago, because she didn’t remember it at all.

  Tricia chuckled. “And yet you would have me believe this date with Brody was no big deal,” she teased. “Why don’t you just jump in your car and come out to the ranch? We’ll ransack every closet on the place if we have to—between Kim and I, we must have something you could wear tonight.”

  “There’s no time for that,” Carolyn practically wailed, casting a speculative glance at the gypsy skirt, draped neatly on a hanger and suspended from the hook on the back of her bedroom door.

  She couldn’t wear that skirt.

  For one thing, it didn’t really belong to her.

  For another, she might spill something on it, ruin it forever. Then what?

  And for still another thing, Brody hadn’t asked her to a formal gala at the White House or a coronation at Buckingham Palace—he’d offered dinner and a movie. She’d look like a fool, getting that dressed up for a blueplate special at some country café, followed by a flick and popcorn.

  She couldn’t resist catching one of the ribbons between her fingers, though, and imagining how it would feel to be a princess for just one night.

  “Wear the skirt, Cinderella,” Tricia said gently.

  “I couldn’t,” Carolyn murmured, sorely tempted to do just that. To be rash and reckless, for once in her life, instead of careful.

  To be beautiful.

  To be Cinderella.

  Oh, but Brody Creed was a cowboy, not a prince.

  Lonesome Bend was planted squarely in the real world, not in a fairy-tale kingdom, where fairy godmothers waved wands and pumpkins turned to coaches, mice to prancing steeds.

  She was Carolyn Simmons, an ordinary woman, and she’d better remember it.

  Tricia wasn’t one to give up. “Well, then, just try it on,” she said, waddling over to stand next to Carolyn. With a sigh, she stretched to ease the pressure on her lower back and sighed, “I swear this kid is getting ready to audition for Riverdance. The way he kicks, he’ll be born wearing tap shoes.”

  Since Tricia and Conner had been closemouthed about the sex of their baby, this was the clue Carolyn had been waiting for.

  “Ah-ha!” she cried, jubilant, forgetting the skirt and all its magic for a much greater miracle, the formation of a brand-new human being. “You’re having a boy!”

  “Don’t tell,” Tricia said, in a conspiratorial whisper, putting a finger to her lips. “Outside the doctor’s office, nobody knows but Conner and me.”

  “Why the secrecy?” Carolyn asked.

  Again, Tricia sighed, but softly, and with an air of contentment. “We’re not trying to be mysterious,” she said. “It’s just that…well, we’re both sort of oldfashioned when it comes to having a baby. Not that long ago, nobody knew if they were having a boy or a girl until after
their delivery. Now, people have the nursery furnished in either pink or blue and the name picked out months ahead of time. I’d rather have been surprised, and Conner agrees.”

  Carolyn studied her friend. “You’re not superstitious, are you? One of those people who think it’s bad luck to buy things for a baby before it’s born? In case—in case something goes wrong?”

  Tricia smiled. “No,” she said. “I’m not. There is nothing wrong with this baby, trust me. He kicks like a mule.”

  Carolyn smiled back, relieved. “I don’t suppose you want to tell me what you’re going to name young Mr. Creed, now that the figurative cat is out of the bag?”

  “Davis Blue,” Tricia answered readily. “We’ll probably call him Blue.”

  “Blue?” Carolyn asked. The Davis part needed no explanation, but—Blue?

  “For Conner and Brody’s father,” Tricia said. “Davis’s older brother. The story goes that the sky was a knock-out shade of azure when Blue was born—hence the name.”

  “I like it,” Carolyn mused and, for the briefest of moments, she allowed herself to wonder what name she and Brody might give a child of their own.

  “Me, too,” Tricia agreed. “And don’t you dare tell anybody. Davis and Kim don’t know, and neither does Brody. We want our baby’s sex and his name to be a surprise.”

  Carolyn made a zipping motion across her mouth. Then she laughed again, out of pure joy at her friends’ good fortune, and gave Tricia a quick hug.

  “Now,” Tricia said, with a little sniffle, once they’d had their girl moment, “back to the gypsy skirt. Try it on. I want to see what it looks like on an actual person, and heaven knows, I’m in no condition to model haute couture.”

  “Tricia.”

  “It’s the least you can do,” Tricia insisted, “after I told you my big secret.”

  Carolyn sighed, took the skirt from the hook, still on its hanger and held it against her chest, careful not to crush the ribbons. “Oh, all right,” she said, starting for the bathroom. “But I’m telling you right now, it’s going to look downright weird with a T-shirt.”

  Tricia went to the bureau, tugged open a drawer and extracted a wispy black silk camisole with spaghetti straps, waving it at Carolyn like a flag. “Wear this,” she said.

  Carolyn took the garment hesitantly—she’d worn it with a transparent shirt she’d owned, and subsequently discarded as impractical, a long time ago—and gave Tricia a rueful look. “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s pretty skimpy—”

  “It’s just us girls,” Tricia reminded her, almost singing the words and shooing Carolyn toward the bathroom. “Go.”

  STANDING AT CAROLYN’S kitchen door, with the first shadows of twilight falling around him, Brody tried to remember the last time he’d made a fuss like this over a simple date.

  Not since his high-school prom, he decided, hooking a finger under the collar of his starched white shirt even though the top three buttons were already undone. Kim had made him wear a penguin suit that night, as she’d done to Conner, too, and Brody had stabbed the girl— Becky? Betsy? Babs?—with the little pearl-headed pin while fumbling around trying to pin on her corsage. He and Conner, along with two of their friends and all four dates, had crammed themselves into the back of a rented limo and thought they were big stuff.

  He smiled at the memory.

  Remembered that he hadn’t knocked.

  He rapped his knuckles lightly against the door frame. Through the frosted glass in the door’s oval window, he saw Carolyn approaching to admit him, and even before she opened the door, his heart had shinnied up into his throat and swelled to three times its normal size.

  Her light hair gleamed around her shoulders, looking soft enough to run his fingers through, and her perfect cleavage formed an enticing V above the black silk of her top.

  After her face, though—her shy and lovely and slightly flushed face—it was the skirt he would remember until the end of his days.

  It was composed of what seemed to be hundreds of ribbons and beads, and it swayed and shifted around her like a puff of glittering smoke, or shards of glass in a kaleidoscope.

  “Wow,” he said. He hadn’t brought flowers, since she still had the roses from the other night, but now he wished he had. He wished there were a coach-and-six waiting on the street, instead of the car he’d borrowed from Davis and Kim.

  Carolyn’s cheeks were pink. Without looking down—a skill he’d perfected since puberty—he managed to note that her nipples showed faintly through the black top.

  “Wow, yourself,” she said, after giving him a flirty once-over. Then she lost whatever bravado she’d summoned up and blushed again. “Do—do you think I’m overdressed? It was Tricia’s idea to wear this—she nagged me into it—”

  Brody reached out and rested an index finger lightly against her mouth—a mouth he hoped to kiss, and thoroughly, later on in the evening. “It’s perfect,” he said. “You’re perfect.”

  She already had her purse handy, a thin little envelope of a thing she tucked under one arm. Obviously, she hadn’t brought her toothbrush and a change of clothes for morning.

  He tried not to read that as an omen.

  “Thank you,” she said, so belatedly that Brody had to scramble for a moment to recall what she was thanking him for.

  Oh, yeah. Saying she was perfect. Well, that hadn’t been such a stretch now, had it? She was perfect.

  He took her arm as they descended the outside stairs, the skirt whispering like poetry made visible with every move she made.

  This time, she noticed he was looking and stopped, when they reached the bottom of the steps, to peer into his face. “Are you sure I’m not overdressed?” she demanded.

  He chuckled. “As far as I’m concerned, lady, anytime you’re wearing more than skin, you’re overdressed.”

  That made her laugh, albeit nervously. But her feet came loose from the ground, where she’d dug them in a moment before, and Carolyn and Brody moved on toward the waiting car.

  He might have blown it with the flowers, Brody thought, but he’d gotten this part right. In that getup, Carolyn would have had a hard time getting into the cab of his truck.

  He opened the passenger-side door for her, waited while she and that amazing skirt got themselves settled in the seat.

  She’d already fastened her seat belt by the time he slid behind the wheel.

  He was wearing his best shirt and jeans, and a pair of boots that had cost more than his first car, but now he wondered if he wasn’t the one who ought to be fretting about how they were dressed—or underdressed, in his case.

  Carolyn sat rigidly in the seat, the sliver-thin purse on her lap, her gaze fixed straight ahead. In a sidelong glance, Brody noticed the pulse at the base of her throat.

  He wasn’t the only one who was nervous, obvi ously.

  The realization relaxed him a little.

  As for chitter-chatter, well, if Carolyn didn’t feel like talking, it was okay with him. He was satisfied just to be sharing a car seat with her.

  They drove through town and he thought she gave a little sigh of relief when they passed the Birdcage Café without stopping—as if he’d take her there—and then the Golden Spur Saloon and Steakhouse, but maybe he imagined it.

  When he steered the car onto the bumpy track leading to the Bluebird Drive-in, though, she turned and looked at him with widened eyes. Maybe she thought he doubled as a serial killer in his spare time and he was taking her somewhere remote, so she could be his next victim.

  Creed, he thought, you are losing it.

  Thanks to the generator he’d borrowed from his contractor—it was a noisy piece of equipment, but effective—the building containing the snack bar was all lit up. The ancient movie screen glowed white in the gathering twilight, ready for action.

  Carolyn looked around, still wide-eyed, with her mouth slightly open.

  “You wanted dinner and a movie,” Brody said, watching her.

  What if this
was the world’s dumbest idea? he wondered, while he waited for a reaction.

  “You’re not serious,” she said, but there was a gleam in her eyes now, and that pulse at the base of her throat was beating hard.

  Brody said nothing. He just shut off the car, got out and came around to her side to open the door for her.

  She put out her hand, and he took it. Helped her out.

  She stood there, like a goddess dressed in dancing dreams, looking up at him. Her expression was one of amused bafflement. “I don’t understand,” she said.

  “You will,” Brody replied, still holding her hand.

  He led her toward the snack bar, which had been filled with the caterer’s assistants until a few minutes ago. By now, there was a single waiter, hiding in the back most likely, and he’d be gone, too, as soon as Brody could reasonably get rid of him.

  Inside the scrubbed and scoured snack bar, the glass enclosing the popcorn machine gleamed, as did the counter.

  A round table sat in the middle of the room, draped with a snow-white tablecloth and set with china and silver. Candles glimmered and flickered in the center and, except for the faint hum of the generator, all was quiet.

  Carolyn was speechless. She looked up at Brody’s face as though she expected him to say there was some mistake, they’d wandered into the wrong place, whatever.

  Brody smiled and cocked an elbow at her so she’d take his arm, which she did after a moment’s confusion, and escorted her to the table. He pulled back her chair, waited until she was seated and sat down opposite her.

  The candlelight danced across her face and shimmered in her hair.

  Right on cue, the rent-a-waiter appeared, with a bottle of French wine and two sparkling crystal glasses.

  Carolyn drew in her breath, gave Brody another look of curious surprise and finally smiled back at him.

  “When you said dinner and a movie, you weren’t kidding,” she said, as the waiter poured their wine and scurried off to the back room again, to await his next scene.

  Brody grinned, picked up his wineglass by the stem, and waited for Carolyn to do the same. “There are some things,” he said, “that I never kid about.”