The Creed Legacy (18 page)

“You didn’t have to,” Carolyn said. She folded her arms. “It’s quite obvious.”

“I don’t know how you figure that,” Brody said, clearly irritated. “Do you see Joleen standing around here somewhere, waiting for me to help her on with her coat or pin a corsage to her party dress so we can go out on the town?”

It just went to show a person, Carolyn thought, how quickly a spring breeze could turn into an ill wind. Not more than a minute before, she and Brody had had all they could do not to have sex right there in his brother’s kitchen.
Now
they were practically at each other’s throats.

“You’re the one who wanted to keep their options open when it came to dating,” Carolyn pointed out, proud of being—okay,
sounding
—so collected and reasonable.

“And
you’re
the one who’s
already dating,
” Brody bit out.

So he
did
know about Bill. She’d wondered.

“Look at that,” Carolyn retorted, flinging her hands out from her sides because she had to do
something
with the buildup of energy that wouldn’t constitute felony assault. “I was already playing by the ground rules before I even knew there
were
any!”

Brody glared at her.

Carolyn glared back.

One of the dogs gave a mournful little whimper, as though the poor creature had just spotted a mushroom cloud billowing on the horizon.

“What kind of guy is so hard up for a date that he joins an outfit like Friendly Faces?” Brody finally demanded. That familiar muscle in his cheek was bunched up again.

“One like you, I guess,” Carolyn took great delight in saying. “Or are you going to claim it was your
horse
who signed up for a membership?”

Brody leaned in, his nose nearly touching hers. “
This
is why we need ground rules,” he said.

“I think we need a
referee,
” Carolyn replied. “Why don’t we just call it a day, Brody? Why don’t we cut our losses and run?”

That was when he rested his hands on her shoulders, bent his head and kissed her, lightly at first, then hard and deep, with tongue.

The effect was tectonic, and she was literally breathless when the kiss finally ended.

“
That’s
why we’re not going to
cut our losses and run,
” Brody all but growled. “Get your things, Carolyn. I’m taking you home.”

She should have been glad about that, but, oddly, she was stung instead.

She did return to the bathroom, however, collect her original clothing, now rolled up in a soggy clump, and stomped back to the kitchen, where Brody was waiting, with his truck keys already in hand.

Talk about anxious to get rid of somebody.

Carolyn squelched a crazy urge to cry and marched out through the back door, which Brody obligingly held for her.

The two dogs followed, eager, like all their species, for any chance to go
anywhere.

When Brody reached his truck, he went immediately to the passenger side and opened the door. Once Carolyn was in, he hoisted the dogs, one at a time, into the rear part of the extended cab.

Carolyn fixed her gaze straight ahead, silently noting that the windshield needed washing.

Brody got behind the wheel, slammed his door shut and cranked the key in the ignition, causing the starter to make an ominous grinding sound.

“This is going to keep happening,” he told her tersely, “until we go to bed and get each other out of our systems.”

Carolyn shifted in the confines of her seat belt and would not look at him. “Way to sweep a girl off her feet,” she snapped. “Take me home, Brody.
Now.
”

The truck made another odd noise when he shifted it into gear. “Fine,” he replied. “I’ll be
glad
to take you home. Of course, there’s always the possibility that Conner and Tricia are swinging naked from the chandeliers or something, but I guess that’s a risk you’ll just have to run.”

Carolyn blushed so hard it hurt. What if Tricia and Conner
were
still somewhere in Natty McCall’s wonderful old Victorian house, thinking they had the place to themselves and, well,
whooping it up?

In the next moment, though, Brody’s words took root and blossomed into an image—Tricia, six months pregnant, swinging nude from one of the light fixtures, like the daring young girl on the flying trapeze.

Carolyn laughed. She couldn’t help it.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw that Brody was grinning. “What?” he asked.

“I was just thinking about the chandelier thing,” Carolyn admitted.

That made Brody chuckle. “It brings one hell of a picture to mind, all right,” he agreed. “My guess is, my brother and his lovely bride are probably behaving themselves again by now. Tricia mentioned that they were headed out to dinner.”

“Are we crazy?” Carolyn asked, very softly and after long consideration. Every silence that fell between them seemed to throb with things that wanted saying and
couldn’t
be said. “The way we go from being this close to having sex to fighting like a pair of feral cats in a back alley—what
is
that, Brody?”

He thought before he answered. Finally said, “I think they call it passion.”

With that, he reached over and gave her thigh a squeeze, about midway between her knee and her hip.

Carolyn tilted her head back, closed her eyes and offered up a silent prayer that Brody didn’t know he’d turned her insides to molten lava with a single touch.

H
E’D MEANT TO GO
straight to the shop—Brody would always think of the place as Natty McCall’s house, no matter what they turned it into—but darned if his truck didn’t turn in at River’s Bend of its own volition.

Carolyn didn’t protest, or comment. She just turned her head toward the rising house and since Brody couldn’t see her face, he was left to guess at what might be going on inside her head.

The construction crew was finished for the day, loading toolboxes into the backs of pickup trucks, calling to each other, laughing.

For some reason, the sight stirred up some lonesome feelings inside Brody.

That sensation of being on the outside looking in was getting old.

Or maybe it was this confounding woman sitting in the seat just across the console, determined to say as little to him as possible.

The workmen all waved and smiled, and Brody greeted them with nods as he drove up what would one day be a paved driveway. For now, though, it was still a dirt road, thinly peppered with gravel.

“Tricia mentioned that you mean to go on calling the property River’s Bend,” Carolyn said, her head still turned toward the house, her tone bemused, or maybe wistful. “She seemed pleased by that.”

“River’s Bend is as good a name for the place as any other,” Brody said. “Besides, I liked Tricia’s dad. Most everybody liked Joe McCall.”

“Tricia misses him,” Carolyn observed, finally looking at Brody. He couldn’t read her eyes, but it didn’t matter, because she was so damn beautiful, in the late afternoon light, a gilded creature wearing somebody else’s clothes.

This nobility crap, Brody decided glumly, was overrated. By now, if he’d pressed his advantage earlier, in the ranch-house kitchen, they’d probably be recovered from round one and ready to move on to round two. Or even three.

“That’s natural,” Brody said, in belated reply to Carolyn’s remark.

“Do you miss your dad?” Carolyn asked, as he parked the truck in front of the partially completed three-car garage and shut off the engine.

She sure did have a way of coming out of left field, this woman.

Brody sighed, shook his head. “I never really knew my father,” he answered honestly. “Conner and I were just babies when he died, and our mother didn’t live long after we were born. When I think of parents, I think of Kim and Davis, and I’m sure my brother does, too.”

He opened the truck door and would have gone around to help Carolyn out of the rig—he’d been raised to treat a lady with respect and courtesy, as had Conner and their cousin, Steven—but she was over the running board with her feet planted firmly in the rocky dirt before he could get there.

He took Valentino and Barney from the back and let them circle, as dogs will do when they’ve been confined for a while, sniffing the ground and looking for a likely place to let fly.

“What about you, Carolyn?” he asked.

“What about me?” she challenged, but mildly, shading her eyes from the sun with one hand.

“You asked me about my dad. I’m asking you about yours.”

“Never knew him,” Carolyn said, like it didn’t matter.

This seemed important, though Brody wasn’t sure why. Important enough to press the issue, in fact.

“What about your mother?”

She met his gaze then, and the expression he saw in her eyes was so bleak that he felt it like a punch in the gut. “Just a memory of somebody driving away and leaving me behind,” she said.

Brody hadn’t wept since the day the Lisa and Justin were buried, side by side, in a windswept little graveyard up in Montana, but he wanted to then.

Didn’t, though.

They were both quiet for a few moments, neither one moving.

“This is quite a house,” Carolyn said, at long last.

Brody rummaged around inside himself and came up with a flimsy grin. He was proud of that house, saw its conception and construction as the first really grown-up things he’d ever done, and showing it to Carolyn made him feel good.

“Yes, ma’am,” he agreed. “It will be, if it’s ever fin ished.”

“Show me where you plan to hang the Weaver,” Carolyn said, her still-wet boots making a squishy crunch in the gravel as she approached the front door.

He was a few moments remembering what she meant by the term, but then it came to him that she was referring to Primrose Sullivan’s picture, the one he’d bought at the shop and insisted she deliver. He’d have to keep it over at the cabin for a while, of course, but he did have a spot picked out for it.

The doors and locks had been installed, and Brody found the key among the others on his ring.

The inside of the house smelled like fresh lumber and new masonry, and the windows were all glassed in. He flipped a switch, expecting nothing, and the track lighting high over their heads came on, throwing the massive living room into an oddly forlorn relief.

He was going to be lonely here, he realized. He was lonely
everywhere.

Brody shook off the thought, smiled at Carolyn and gestured toward the space over the living room fireplace.

“There,” he said. “That’s where the picture’s going to wind up.”

Carolyn seemed to see the piece hanging there. She smiled, albeit a little wanly, her hands resting on her hips. “Perfect,” she said.

Brody cupped a hand under her elbow, loosely, wanting her to look at him, not wanting her to turn skittish and spook. “Now that we’ve established the ground rules,” he began, pausing once to clear his throat, “there’s the part that comes after.”

She held his gaze, and she deserved credit for that, because it was so obvious that she wanted to look away instead. “You’re a persistent man,” she said, very softly.

Brody had never wanted to kiss a woman—Carolyn or anyone else—as badly as he wanted to now.

At the same time, he knew it might be the mistake of a lifetime if he went ahead and did it.

“
Persistent
doesn’t begin to cover it,” he said, when he figured he could trust himself to speak. “You’ve never met a man with more stick-to-it in him than I have, except for Conner, maybe, and he’s taken.”

“Yes,” Carolyn agreed, almost in a murmur, her whole attention focused, it seemed to Brody, on his mouth. Her voice was dreamlike, almost sleepysounding. “Conner is definitely taken.”

Brody wondered, momentarily, if Carolyn had had a thing for Conner, before he married her best friend. Wondered if by chance her attraction to him was a case of transference.

But that was crazy. Before Lisa’s call that fateful night, seven years back, Carolyn had been in love with
him,
Brody—hadn’t she?

This is
me
standing here,
he wanted to say.
This is me, Brody Creed. Not Conner.
Brody.

But, of course, he didn’t, though the decision couldn’t be chalked up to good sense; he was just plain thunderstruck by the possibility.

“What comes after the ground rules, Brody?” Carolyn asked quietly. “After the no-sex pact, and the freedom to see other people if we want to, what happens then?”

At last, Brody found his voice. He even rummaged up a passable grin, one that might even have masked all the catastrophic things happening in the core of his being.

“Maybe,” he said, struck by sudden inspiration, “we could start with dinner and a movie?”

D
INNER AND A MOVIE
.

With Carolyn.

Sounded like a good start to Brody. But
no sex? Had he actually been the one to stipulate that? Was he out of his ever-lovin’
mind
or
what?

“Dinner and a movie,” Carolyn repeated thoughtfully, mulling his invitation over. She looked wicked-hot, standing there in the middle of what would one day be his living room. The borrowed shirt was a little too tight across her breasts and a little too short in the bargain, revealing a tantalizing glimpse of stomach skin whenever she moved just right.

Brody shifted uncomfortably, and he was just about to jump in and try to renegotiate the whole no-nooky thing when Carolyn rocked him with a tiny smile and announced her decision.

“A tame enough evening, I think,” she said, and was quick to add, “As long as we don’t have to sleep together, of course.”

Tame?
Was that how she saw him—as
tame?

Brody gulped. “Of course.”

But he was thinking,
You and your big mouth. Brody Creed, you are five known kinds of fool, and a few that haven’t been discovered yet.

“When?” Carolyn asked.

Brody just stood there for a moment, stumped by the question, simple as it was. Then he untangled his tongue and said, “Tomorrow night? I promised Tricia I’d feed their horses and these dogs tonight, and it’s getting pretty late anyhow.”

Carolyn bit her lower lip, thinking again. Was it really
that
hard to make the decision?

“Tomorrow night isn’t good,” she said, with a little shake of her head. “I have other plans. How about Friday or Saturday?”

“Saturday would work,” Brody suggested, cagey now. Carolyn was probably playing hard to get, and two could ride in
that
rodeo. The only reason he didn’t go for Friday instead was that he didn’t want to seem too eager.

“Great,” she said, looking around. “Is there more?” she asked, with a quirky little grin. “To the house, I mean?”

“Yeah,” Brody replied, oddly relieved even though, by his reckoning, Saturday was on the yonder side of forever. He offered his hand, letting her decide whether to take it or not.

She did.

By then, the dogs were already off on an expedition of their own, checking out other parts of the house.

Brody showed Carolyn the kitchen first, with its big stove and center island and its many windows, then the room he planned on using as an office, then the guest quarters and the family bedrooms and, finally, the master suite.

“Big place,” Carolyn said, hesitating in the double doorway of the main bedroom.

“Carolyn,” Brody teased, shaken and, at the same time, buzzed, “it’s okay to go inside. There isn’t even a bed in here yet.”

She blushed a little, stooped to pet Barney when he doubled back briefly to brush against her before taking off again. After that, like a person wandering in a dream, Carolyn moved to the middle of the room. Putting her hands out from her sides, she tilted her head back, closed her eyes and did a slow, graceful pirouette.

In that moment, Carolyn seemed impossibly beautiful to Brody, like a sprite or a fallen angel or a fairy queen. He wouldn’t have been all that surprised if she’d sprouted gossamer wings. When she stopped moving and met his gaze again, she looked embarrassed.

He wanted to tell her it was okay, that he could watch her dance like that for the rest of eternity and be perfectly happy, but he’d sound like a damn idiot if he did, so he held his tongue.

“What do you think?” he asked, just to break the silence. “Of the house, that is?”

She smiled a real smile, practically lighting the place up. “It’s
wonderful,
Brody. Did you design it yourself?”

People made plans for houses all the time, but Carolyn made it sound as though he’d personally drawn up the blueprints for Stonehenge, and that made him feel half again his normal height.

He nodded, suddenly modest.

That would have cracked Conner up for sure—his twin brother acting modest. Conner and a lot of other people besides.

“I did,” he confirmed belatedly, feeling the backs of his ears heat up. “Got me through a lot of long nights, figuring out the overall floor plan and then the details.”

She was silent for a few minutes, absorbing that statement.

“I should be getting home,” Carolyn said next, standing in a shaft of silvery moonlight spilling in through the skylights.

For as long as Brody could remember, he’d wanted to be able to lie in his bed at night and look right up through the ceiling and the roof at the stars. In a couple of months, he’d get his wish.

But what about a woman to share it all with?

Looking at stars could be lonely business without a partner. Made a man think how small he was, how small the whole planet—the whole
galaxy—
was, specks of dust in all that vastness.

“Okay,” he said, finding his voice again. It came out in a husky rasp, and he hoped he hadn’t caught a cold, crossing and then recrossing the river. That would be a hell of a note. “Let’s go.”

He whistled for the dogs and they came promptly, so he sort of herded them toward the front of the house. Stepping around Carolyn, Brody grabbed hold of a fancy brass knob and opened the door for her.

Valentino and Barney, neither one a gentleman, bounded out ahead of her to sniff around in the grass, nearly knocking her off her feet and, at the same time, making her laugh.

Brody loaded them up first, in case they had a mind to take off in all their excitement, and then waited until Carolyn was settled in the passenger seat before he sprinted around the back of the truck and jumped in behind the wheel, not because he was in any hurry to come to a parting of the ways with Carolyn, however temporary, but because he suddenly felt energized, electrified, wired for action, like the dogs.

Carolyn didn’t say anything as they drove back to the main road, the one that would take them the rest of the way into town, but this time, she didn’t seem annoyed with him. She was relaxed, and maybe a little pensive.

Brody drove her home to Natty’s place, noticed right away that Tricia’s Pathfinder wasn’t parked in the driveway and, knowing that meant his brother and his wife were nowhere around, briefly considered trying to seduce Carolyn after all.

It would have been a fine thing to peel away those clothes she was wearing, lay her down somewhere soft and warm and lose himself in her, but common sense intervened.

They’d made an agreement, and a deal was a deal.

No sex.

Yet.

Brody parked the truck at the curb, told the dogs to behave themselves and walked Carolyn all the way up the outside stairs to her door.

He waited, his hands wedged into the pockets of his jeans—
Conner’s
jeans, anyway—until she’d unlocked the door, stepped over the threshold and switched on the kitchen lights.

While he was still trying to work out whether or not he ought to follow her in, give kissing her a try, that cantankerous cat purred and wound itself around her ankles. Anybody would have thought it had a halfway decent personality, that critter, but Brody knew better—it was demon spawn.

Carolyn smiled fondly down at the animal, said a quick, soft “Good night, Brody,” and shut the door in his face with a gentle click.

Well, that settled the kiss question.

Brody gave an inward shrug, turned and descended the stairs.

He had chores to do at the ranch, and the dogs would be getting antsy soon, shut up in the truck like they were.

Despite these concerns, he took a little detour on the way home, drove past the ticket booth and the snack bar at the erstwhile Bluebird Drive-in Theater and parked, looking up at the peeling hulk of a movie screen.

He’d been meaning to have the thing bulldozed ever since the last of the snow finally melted off back in midMarch, along with the two buildings on the property, but what with the new house and barn going up and his responsibilities on the ranch, he hadn’t gotten around to making the arrangements. And, like most residents of Lonesome Bend and the even smaller towns surrounding it, he had fond memories of the place.

He still intended to clear these neglected acres, put in fences, and have it seeded for grass so he could run cattle and horses here, but in the meantime, well, it seemed to him that the Bluebird Drive-in deserved a last hurrah.

Carolyn wanted dinner and a movie?

Coming right up.

A
FTER THE VISIT TO
Brody’s house, the apartment seemed not only small to Carolyn—once, she would have said “cozy”—but also out-and-out
cramped.

“Ingrate,” she scolded her reflection in the door of the microwave as she stood at the counter, scraping Winston’s half-tin of sardines into one of the several chipped china bowls reserved for his use.

“Reow,” Winston said, sounding moderately concerned.

“I didn’t mean you,” Carolyn told him, setting his dinner on the floor and watching with affection as he gobbled up the stinky fish he loved so much. She washed her hands at the sink, her movements quick with pentup exasperation. “
I’m
the ingrate around here. I have everything I need, everything anybody could ask for, right here in this apartment.” She paused, remembering. “But, Winston, you should
see
that house. It’s
huge.
But it’s not one of those mansion wannabes, either, it’s—it’s
homey.
I couldn’t help imagining what it would be like to live there.” She threw her hands out from her sides, let them fall back. “How crazy is that?”

Winston, busy with his fine dining experience and, after all,
a cat,
naturally didn’t reply.

Carolyn, used to carrying on one-sided conversations, didn’t let that slow her down. “You’re right,” she said. “It is
totally
crazy.” She dried off her hands, went to the refrigerator, yanked open the door and took out a carton of cottage cheese, the kind with little chunks of pineapple mixed in. After squinting at the expiration date, she decided it would be relatively safe to eat the stuff and lobbed some onto a salad plate with a serving spoon. “The man
cons
me into going for a horseback ride with him, and I end up soaked to the skin and squeezed into clothes that belong to a woman who is at least two inches shorter than I am, and a size smaller, and I’m ready to
get it on
with Brody Creed. I swear, if he hadn’t made that speech about responsibility and setting ground rules, I probably would have jumped his bones—”

The landline rang, interrupting her discourse.

Probably for the best, she figured, reaching for the receiver.

“Hello?” she almost snapped. She needed to eat her questionable cottage cheese, put on her own clothes and get her head together, not necessarily in that order—
not
stand around talking on the phone.

She recognized Bill’s chuckle immediately. “Am I calling at a bad time?” he asked.

“Who is that?” Carolyn heard a little girl’s voice chime in, at the other end of the line. “Is that Angela? It had
better
be Angela.”

Carolyn smiled. She remembered what it was to be nine years old. What she
didn’t
remember was having a father who, like Bill, was devoted to her.

She’d never met her father. Didn’t even know his name, or if he was alive or dead, or if she looked anything like him.

“This is a private call, Ellie,” Bill told his daughter kindly, but firmly. “Beat it. Go do your homework or bug your grandmother or something.”

“Maybe I’m the one who should be asking if it’s a bad time,” Carolyn said, still amused. She loved kids, even when they were difficult.
Especially
then. She’d been a handful herself; just ask any one of her fourteen foster families.

“Have dinner with me?” Bill said. “Here, at our place? We’ll barbecue on the patio, and Ellie’s grandparents will join us, so we shouldn’t give rise to a local scandal.”

Carolyn felt warm inside. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the same kind of warm she felt when she was around Brody, or even thought about him.

Brody.

She’d lied to him, saying she had plans for the following night, simply because she’d needed a chance to catch her breath, regain her perspective, before she stepped into the lion’s den a second time by being alone with a man who could melt her with a look, a touch, a word.

“You haven’t been in Lonesome Bend long,” she joked, “if you think my coming to your place, even for an outdoor meal with your in-laws present, wouldn’t be fuel for gossip.”

Bill sighed. “Is that a no?”

She watched as Winston licked his bowl clean and then strolled regally away, tail high. “I’d love to come over for a barbecue,” she said. If she was going out with Brody, even for an innocuous evening of food and film, it was only reasonable to see other men, too. That way, she’d be in less danger of losing her head and doing something rash.

Keep your options open.

Always know where the exits are.

The foster-kid credo of life.

“Would tonight be too soon?” Bill teased.

“Yes,” Carolyn said, with a rueful glance at her cottage cheese. “It would be. Tomorrow night?”

“Perfect,” Bill said.

“What shall I bring?”

“Your beautiful smile and all the charm you can muster. The in-laws will be friendly, but Ellie—”

“I can handle Ellie,” Carolyn said, with kindness and humor.
Because I
was
Ellie, once upon a time, except that I didn’t have adoring grandparents and a first-class father.

“Okay,” Bill responded, sounding relieved. “Tomorrow night, six o’clock if that’s not too early. Casual dress, of course.” He gave her the address, and Lonesome Bend being Lonesome Bend, she knew right where it was. Two-story brick house with green wooden shutters, surrounded by a wrought-iron fence, a block and a half southeast of the public library.