“She’s in Denver,” Tricia said stiffly.
His smile practically knocked her back on her heels. “Well, then, that explains why she didn’t come to the door. I was afraid she might have fallen or something.” A pause. “Is the coffee on?”
Though Tricia was acquainted with Conner, as she was with virtually everybody else in town, she didn’t know him well—they didn’t move in the same social circles. She was an outsider raised in Seattle, except for those golden summers with her dad, while the Creeds had been ranching in the area since the town was settled, way back in the late 1800s. Being ninety-nine percent certain that the man wasn’t a homicidal maniac or a serial rapist—Natty was very fond of him, after all, which said something about his character—she stepped back, blushing, and said, “Yes. There’s coffee—help yourself.”
“Thanks,” he said, in a cowboy drawl, ambling past her in the loose-limbed way of a man who was at ease wherever he happened to find himself, whether on the back of a bucking bronco or with both feet planted firmly on the ground. The scent of fresh country air clung to him, along with a woodsy aftershave, hay and something minty—probably toothpaste or mouthwash.
Tricia pushed the door shut and then stood with her back to it, watching as Conner opened one cupboard, then another, found a cup and helped himself at the coffeemaker.
Torn between mortification at being caught in her robe with her hair going wild, and stunned by his easy audacity, Tricia didn’t smile. On some level, she was tallying the few things she knew about Conner Creed—that he lived on the family ranch, that he had an identical twin brother called Cody or Brody or some other cowboy-type name, that he’d never been married and, according to Natty, didn’t seem in any hurry to change that.
“I’m sure my great-grandmother will be glad you brought that wood,” she said finally, striving for a neutral conversational tone but sounding downright insipid instead. “Natty loves a good fire, especially when the temperature starts dropping.”
Conner regarded Tricia from a distance that fell a shade short of far enough away to suit her, and raised one eyebrow. Indulged himself in a second leisurely sip from his mug before bothering to reply. “When’s she coming back?” he asked. “Miss Natty, I mean.”
“Probably next week,” Tricia answered, surprised to find herself having this conversation. It wasn’t every day, after all, that a good-looking if decidedly cocky cattle rancher tried to beat down a person’s door at practically the crack of dawn and then stood in her kitchen swilling coffee as if he owned the place. “Or the week after, if she’s having an especially good time.”
“Miss Natty didn’t mention that she was planning on taking a trip,” Conner observed thoughtfully, after another swallow of coffee.
The statement irritated Tricia—since when was Conner Creed her great-grandmother’s keeper? All of a sudden, she wanted him gone, from her kitchen, from her house. He didn’t seem to be in any more of a hurry to leave than he was to get married, though.
And he was using up all the oxygen in the room.
Did he think she’d bound and gagged Natty with duct tape, maybe stuck her in a closet?
She gestured toward the inside stairway. “Feel free to see for yourself if it will ease your mind as far as Natty is concerned. And, by the way, you scared the cat.”
He flashed that wickedly innocent grin again; it lighted his eyes, and Tricia noticed that there was a rim of gray around the blue irises. He had good teeth, too—white and straight.
Stop, Tricia told her racing brain. Her thoughts flew, clicking like the beads on an abacus.
“I believe you,” he said. “If you say Miss Natty is in Denver, kicking up her heels with her sister, then I reckon it’s true.”
“Gee, that’s a relief,” Tricia said dryly, folding her arms. Then, after a pause, “If that’s everything…?”
“Sorry about scaring the cat,” Conner told her affably, putting his mug in the sink and pushing off from the counter, starting for the door. “Truth is, the critter’s never liked me much. Must have figured out that I’m more of a dog-and-horse person.”
Tricia opened her mouth, shut it again. What did a person say to that?
Conner curved a hand around the doorknob, looked back at her over one of those fine, denim-covered shoulders of his. Mischief danced in his eyes, quirked up one corner of his mouth. “If you wouldn’t mind letting me in downstairs,” he said, “I could fill up the wood boxes. There’s room in the shed for the rest of the load, I guess.”
Tricia nodded. She had an odd sense of disorientation, as if she’d suddenly been thrust underwater and held there, and on top of that had to translate everything this man said from some language other than her own before his meaning penetrated the gray matter between her ears.
“I’ll meet you at Natty’s back door,” she said, still feeling muddled, as he went out.
She stood rooted to the spot, listening as the heels of Conner’s boots made a rapid thunking sound on the outside steps.
Winston crept out of the short hallway leading to the apartment’s one bedroom and slinked over to Tricia, purring companionably while he turned figure eights around her ankles.
Wishing she had time to pull on some clothes, fix her hair and maybe even slap on a little makeup, Tricia went back down to Natty’s place, bustled through to the kitchen, turned the key in the lock and undid the chain, and wrenched open the door.
Conner was already there, standing on the porch, grinning at her. After looking her over once more in that offhand way that so disconcerted her, he shook his head slightly and rubbed the back of his neck with one hand.
“Thanks,” he said, his tone husky with amusement. “I’ll take it from here.”
Tricia felt heat surge into her cheeks, spark in her eyes. He knew she was uncomfortable and not a little embarrassed, damn him, and he was enjoying it.
“I’ll come back in a few minutes to lock up behind you,” she replied, ratcheting her chin up a notch in hopes of letting Conner know he wasn’t getting to her.
Well, maybe he was, a little, she admitted to herself, terminally honest. But it wasn’t because of the invisible charge buzzing around them. She wasn’t used to standing around in her bathrobe talking to strange men, that was all.
“Fine with me,” Conner answered, lifting the collar of his jacket against a gust of wind as he turned to descend the steps of Natty’s back porch. His truck, large and red, with mud-splattered tires and doors, was parked alongside the woodshed.
Possessed of a peculiar and completely unreasonable urge to slam the door behind him, hard, Tricia instead shut it politely, turned on one heel and fled back upstairs to her apartment.
There, in her small bedroom, she hastily exchanged her robe and pajamas for jeans and a navy blue hooded sweatshirt, replaced the slippers with sneakers. Advancing to the bathroom—she’d had larger closets, she thought, flustered—Tricia washed her face, brushed her teeth and whipped her renegade hair into a tidy plait.
Intermittently, she heard the homey sound of wood clunking into the boxes beside Natty’s fireplace and the old stove in the kitchen.
She nearly tripped over Winston, who was lounging in the hallway, just over the bedroom threshold.
“That,” Tricia sputtered, righting herself, “is a great place to stretch out.”
“Meow,” Winston observed casually, flicking his tail and giving no indication that he planned on moving anytime soon. He was quite comfortable where he was, thank you very much.
Tricia took a moment to collect her wits—why was she rushing around as though the place were on fire, anyway?—smoothing her hands down the thighs of her jeans and drawing in a deep, slow breath.
Consuming a carton of low-fat yogurt for breakfast, she stood on tiptoe to look out the window over her kitchen sink, which afforded her a clear view of the backyard.
And she forgot all about reading her email.
AFTER HE’D FILLED Miss Natty’s wood boxes, making sure she
had plenty of kindling, Conner unloaded the pitch-scented pine—a full cord—stacking it neatly in the shed. With that done, he could check the delivery off his mental to-do list and move on to the next project—stopping by the feed store for a dozen fifty-pound bags of the special mix of oats and alfalfa he gave the horses. When he finished that errand, he’d head for Doc Benchley’s office to pick up the special serum for the crop of calves born that spring. Doc had served as the town’s one and only veterinarian since way back.
Unlike a lot of people in his profession, Hugh Benchley didn’t specialize. He treated every animal from prize Hereford bulls to Yorkshire terriers small enough to fit in a teacup, and had no evident intention of retiring in the foreseeable future, even though he was well past the age when his fellow senior citizens preferred to spend their days fishing or patronizing the flashy new casino out on the reservation.
“I won’t last six months from the day I close my practice,” Doc had told Conner more than once.
Conner understood, since he thrived on work himself—the more physically demanding, the better. That way, he didn’t have time to think about things he wished were different—like his relationship, if you could call it that, with his twin brother, Brody.
Dusting his leather-gloved hands together, the last of the wood safely stowed for Miss Natty’s use, he started for the driver’s-side door of his truck. Something made him look up at the second-story window, a feeling of prickly sweetness, utterly strange to him, and he thought he saw Tricia McCall peering through the glass.
Wishful thinking, he told himself, climbing into the rig.
He’d seen Tricia lots of times, usually at a distance, but close-up once or twice, too.
How was it that he’d never noticed how appealing Natty’s great-granddaughter was, with her fresh skin and her dark, serious eyes? She had a trim little body—he’d figured that out right away, her sorry bathrobe notwithstanding—and just standing in the same room with her had put him in mind of an experience when he and Brody were kids. Nine or ten and virtually fearless, they’d dared each other to touch the band of electric fence separating the main pasture from the county road that ran past the ranch.
It had been raining until a few minutes earlier, and they were both standing in wet grass. The jolt had knocked them both on their backsides, and once they’d caught their breath, they’d lain there laughing, like the pair of fools they were.
Because any memory involving Brody tended to be painful, the good ones included, Conner avoided them when he could. Now, as he shifted the truck into gear and eased out of Miss Natty’s gravel driveway, his thoughts strayed right back to Tricia like deer to a salt lick.
He signaled a right turn at the corner, heading for Main Street, and the feed store.
As a kid, he recalled, Tricia had spent summers in Lonesome Bend with her dad. Shy, she’d kept to herself, sticking to Joe’s heels as he went happily about his business. Even then, the run-down drive-in theater, with its bent screen, had been a losing proposition, and the campground hadn’t been much better.
Like all his friends, Conner had gone swimming at River’s Bend every chance he got, but he didn’t remember ever seeing Tricia so much as dip a big toe into the water. She’d sit cross-legged and solemn on the dock, always wearing a hand-me-down swimsuit, with a towel rolled up under one arm, and watch the rest of them, though, as they splashed and showed off for each other.
At the time, it was generally agreed that Tricia McCall was a little weird—probably because her parents were divorced and lived in different states, an unusual situation in those days, in Lonesome Bend if not in the rest of the country.
Since his older cousin, Steven, split his time between the ranch and a mansion back in Boston, neither Tricia nor her situation had struck Conner as strange—she was just quiet, liked to keep to herself. He’d been mildly curious about her, but nothing more. After all, she always left town at the end of August, the way Steven did, turning up again sometime in June.
Drawing up to the feed store, Conner pulled into the parking lot and backed the truck up to one of two loading docks. He shut off the engine, got out of the rig and vaulted up onto the platform to help with the bags, stacked and waiting to be collected.
And still Tricia lingered in his mind.
As a teenager, Tricia continued to visit her dad every summer, and she went right on marching to her own private drumbeat, too. The popular girls had declared her a snob, a snooty city girl who thought she was too good for a bunch of country kids. But she was wearing some guy’s class ring on a chain around her neck, Conner recollected, and he’d steered clear because he figured she was going steady.
And because he’d been bone-headed crazy about Joleen Williams, the platinum blonde wild child with the body that wouldn’t quit.
Somebody elbowed Conner, and that brought him back to the here and now, pronto. Malcolm, Joleen’s half brother and a classmate of Conner’s since kindergarten, grinned as he pushed past with a bag of horse feed under each arm. “Clear the way, Creed,” Malcolm teased, his round face red and sweaty with effort and a penchant for triple cheeseburgers and more beer than even Brody could put away. “People are trying to work here.”
Conner grinned and slapped his friend on the back in greeting. The day was cool and crisp, but the sun was climbing higher into a sky blue enough to make a man’s heart catch, and the aspen trees, lining the streets of Lonesome Bend and crowding the foothills all around it, were changing color. Splashes of bright crimson and gold, pale yellow and rust, and a million shades in between, blazed like fire everywhere he looked.
“How’ve you been, Malcolm?” he asked, because in small towns people always asked each other how they were, even if they’d seen each other an hour before at the post office or the courthouse or the grocery store. Moreover, they cared about the answer.
“I was fine until you showed up,” Malcolm answered, tossing the feed bags into the bed of the pickup and turning to go back for more. “What kind of fancy horses are you keeping out on that ranch these days, anyhow? Thoroughbreds, maybe? This stuff costs double what the generic brand runs, and I swear it’s heavier, too.”
Conner laughed and hoisted a bag. “Maybe you ought to sit down and rest,” he joked. “It would suck if you had a heart attack right here on the loading dock.”
“It would suck if I had a heart attack anyplace,” Malcolm countered, continuing to load the truck. “Hell, I’m only thirty-three.”
Conner, sobered by the picture the conversation had brought to mind, didn’t answer.
“You heard about Joleen?” Malcolm asked, when they’d finished piling the bags in the back of the truck.
Conner jumped down to level ground and put up the tailgate on his rig with more of a bang than the task probably called for. He’d been over Malcolm’s sister for years, but any mention of her always stuck in his craw. “What about her?” he asked, looking up at Malcolm, who stood rimmed in dazzling sunlight on the loading dock like some overweight archangel.
“She’s coming back to Lonesome Bend,” Malcolm answered. His tone was strange. Almost cautious.
“No offense, Malcolm,” Conner replied, “but I couldn’t care less.”
Malcolm was quiet for a moment. Then, in a rush of words, he added, “You want this feed put on your bill, as usual?”
“That’ll be fine,” Conner said, opening the door of his truck and setting one booted foot on the running board, about to climb behind the wheel. “Thanks, Malcolm.”
“Conner?”
Halfway into the rig, Conner ducked out again. Malcolm had shifted his position, and his features were clearly visible now. He wasn’t smiling.
“What?” Conner asked.
Malcolm sighed heavily, swept off his billed cap and dried the back of his neck on one shirtsleeve. “She’s with Brody,” he said, as though it pained him. “I guess they’ve been—seeing each other.”
Everything inside Conner went still. It was as if the whole univ
erse had ground to a halt all around him.
Finally, he found his voice. “I guess that’s their business,” he said, flatly dismissive, “not mine.”
CHAPTER TWO
THE WIND RUFFLED THE SURFACE of the river, placid enough where it nestled in the tree-sheltered bend, the stony beach curving easy around it, like a cowboy’s arm around his girl’s shoulders, but wilder out in the middle. There, the currents were swift and, a mile downriver, there were rapids, leading straight to the falls.
Every so often, some hapless soul would be swept away in a canoe or even an inner tube, and find himself rushing at top speed toward a seventy-five-foot drop over the waterfall and onto the jagged boulders below.
It was a miracle nobody had been killed, Tricia thought, pulling her jacket more tightly around her and surveying the rocky shore in front of her. The area was littered with crushed beer cans, cigarette butts and fast food wrappers—kids had been partying there again.
Sighing, Tricia pulled a pair of plastic gloves from her pocket and snapped them on, then unfolded the large trash bag she’d tucked into the waistband of her jeans. There were No Trespassing signs posted, of course, but they seemed to have no more effect that the ones that read For Sale.
She picked up all the aluminum cans first—those were destined for the recycling bin—then collected the rest of the trash, using a smaller bag.
Tricia liked being outside, chilly as it was, under that blue, blue sky, breathing in the singular scents of autumn, though cleaning up after thoughtless people wasn’t her favorite chore. It would be a nice day for a bonfire, she reflected, bending to retrieve a potato chip bag that looked as though it had been chewed up right along with its contents.
It was then that she made eye contact with the dog.
Nestled beneath the very same picnic table where she and Joe had found Rusty all those years ago was a painfully thin mutt with burrs and twigs caught in its coat and sorrow in its liquid brown eyes.
“Hey,” Tricia said, dropping to her knees.
The dog whimpered, tried to scoot out of her reach when she moved to touch him.
Creed's Honor Page 2