The Creed Legacy (25 page)

Then Brody appeared, riding through the cottonwoods and swinging down off the back of his buckskin gelding, Moonshine. He smiled, took off his hat and hung it on the saddle horn. Soothed a fretful Blossom with a muttered word and a few pats on the neck.

Carolyn’s heart seized and moved up into her throat. Things like this only happened in books, or in old movies.

They did
not
happen to her, not in real life, anyway. There might have been a fantasy or two, but those were just—well—
fantasies.

“These your clothes?” Brody asked mildly, inclining his head toward the boulder and the pile of discarded garments.

Carolyn felt a surge of true annoyance and her cheeks burned. “Who
else’s
clothes would they be?” she demanded. “And what are you doing here? Did you follow me?”

“Davis sent me out to ride the fence lines,” Brody replied, kicking off one of his boots. “That’s one of his prescriptions for a case of what he calls ‘the moody blues.’ Hard work or a long ride. I happened to spot you and Blossom leaving the trail, so I decided to follow, make sure the both of you were all right.”

Off went the other boot.

Carolyn was gripped by memories of the last time she and Brody had been here, together. It had been too cold to swim then; now, she was surprised the lake didn’t start to simmer.

“What are you doing?” she snapped, still treading water but moving away from shore, away from
Brody.

“It’s a nice day,” he said, neatly evading the question, tossing his hat down on top of his boots. “Unusually warm for May, wouldn’t you say? Perfect for skinny-dipping.”

“Brody Creed, don’t you dare—”

He hauled his shirt off over his head, tossed it.

His chest was sculpted, sprinkled with gold; time had been good to Brody Creed.

Damn it.

“It’s a free country,” he told her, his belt buckle making a jingling sound as he unhooked it. “And this lake
is
on Creed land.”

“I’ll leave,” Carolyn said, on a rush of breath. “Just turn your back, so I can get out of the water and put on my clothes, and I’ll be gone—”

Brody unfastened his jeans.

That was no answer, Carolyn thought frantically.

Or was it?

She squeezed her eyes tightly shut, trying to think. Her breath was shallow, and her heart was thudding against her rib cage.

She wanted to be anywhere but here.

She wanted to be
nowhere
but here.

There was a splash, and Carolyn felt a subtle, sensual movement in the water, and when curiosity forced her to open her eyes again, Brody was right in front of her.

Crystal beads glimmered in his eyelashes, and his grin was as obnoxiously winsome as ever. Maybe more so.

From the neck down—Carolyn
did
try not to look— he was a moving shadow. Sunshine, filtered by cottonwood leaves, glimmered in his tarnished-gold hair and that grin—well,
that grin.

“Relax,” he drawled, his blue eyes percolating with mischievous delight—and something else that might have been desire. “I’d never force you or any other woman to do anything you didn’t want to do.”

This, Carolyn knew, was a perfectly true statement.

It was also no comfort whatsoever.

“Don’t,” she murmured, not knowing if she was addressing that single desperate word to Brody, or to herself.

He raised one eyebrow. “Don’t what?”

He knew damn well
don’t what
.

But did she?

With a great sigh of lusty contentment, Brody tilted his head back, closed his eyes, breathed in the blue-sky air with the same relish Carolyn had earlier.

Carolyn, though still flustered, used those few stolen moments to admire him—the strong line of his jaw, the long eyelashes, the hair bejeweled with droplets of lake water.

When he opened his eyes again, and caught her looking at him, she actually gasped, startled.

That made Brody chuckle, and Carolyn blushed.

“Remember the last time we were here?” he asked, his tone slow and almost sleepy. “It was a lot colder than it is now, and we kept the bonfire going long into the night. Not that we needed it to keep warm.”

Now it was Carolyn who closed her eyes, tangled in the vision like a fish in a net. They’d
hadn’t
needed a fire—their lovemaking had set them both ablaze.

“I remember,” she murmured softly.

“Carolyn,” Brody said, “open your eyes and
relax.
I’m not trying to seduce you, here.”

“You could have fooled me,” Carolyn protested, getting angry again. “Taking off your clothes and jumping right into this lake when I
specifically
asked you not to—”

He laughed—threw back his head and
laughed.
He certainly didn’t lack for nerve.

Carolyn seethed.

When Brody’s amusement abated a little, he said, “You were naked when I got here, remember? How was I to know you weren’t
hoping
I’d show up and seduce you?”

If the water hadn’t limited her momentum, Carolyn swore she would have broken all her personal rules about violence and slapped him, hard.

“How was
I
to know,” she countered, quietly furious, “that you were
following
me, like some—some
stalker?
Do you honestly think I would have
taken off my clothes
if I’d had the faintest glimmer that
you
were going to show up?”

This time, Brody didn’t laugh. His gaze was solemn, with just the faintest sparkle of mischief, as he regarded her. “I wouldn’t have thought you’d take off your clothes for
any
reason,” he drawled. “Especially to take a swim in a mountain lake that doesn’t generally warm up until the middle of August.”

When had he gotten closer? Carolyn wondered distractedly, moving back a little, scanning the lakeside for Blossom

No Blossom.

The mare must have wandered off at some point.

Which was just terrific, because now Carolyn wasn’t just naked and embarrassed and alone with Brody in what basically amounted to the Blue Lagoon. She was all of those things
and
stranded.

“Blossom!” she called out, going around Brody and heading for shore, but pausing when she realized she was about to reveal herself in the altogether. “Blossom, where are you?”

Nothing.

Brody appeared beside her.

Carolyn crouched a little and crossed her arms in front of her breasts. Her nipples felt hard and tight, and it wasn’t just because there was a slight nip to the water.

“That’s one thing about Blossom,” Brody said easily, evidently enjoying this new development in an already impossible situation. “She’s always been kind of flighty. As likely as not, she’s halfway home by now.”

“Don’t say that,” Carolyn sputtered. “Don’t even
think
it.”

“You and I can ride double, on Moonshine.” He paused, sighed. “We’d better get going. Kim will freak out when that horse trots into the barnyard with her saddle empty.”

“I
have
to get my clothes first,” Carolyn said. All she needed was for Kim to call Davis when Blossom came home without a rider, and the two of them to come searching for her.

Brody chuckled again, but very slowly he turned his back. “I won’t look until you tell me it’s all right,” he promised.

Tugging dry clothes over wet skin, especially in a hurry, had frustration singing through Carolyn’s veins by the time she was decent.

“Okay,” she said begrudgingly.

Brody turned around and started out of the water, no more concerned with his own nakedness than Adam in the Garden.

Carolyn whirled to give him her back and folded her arms tight against her chest.

Brody muttered the occasional cheerful curse as he dressed himself, and when he was ready, he whistled for Moonshine.

The buckskin came right to him, docile as a dollara-ride pony at the state fair.

“Need a boost?” Brody asked, his voice like the flick of a feather across the sensitive skin at her nape.

Carolyn cast one last look around for Blossom, didn’t see a sign of that fickle critter, and climbed into Moonshine’s saddle like the skilled horsewoman she was.

For a second or so, she actually considered riding off and leaving Brody to
walk
home from Hidden Lake, but of course she couldn’t do it. The Code of the West went way back and ran deep. And one of its tenets was that you never took off on somebody else’s horse and left them afoot.

Even now, in this modern day and age, there were too many bad things that could happen to a stranded rider.

Brody chuckled, reading her expression accurately, it would seem, and sprang up behind her, nimble as a Native warrior. “I knew you weren’t a horse thief,” he teased, leaning around her,
into
her, to take up the reins.

“H-how?” Carolyn asked. Damn Brody for suggesting that the lake was too cold to swim in at this time of year. Now her teeth were starting to chatter, and she could feel a wicked sneeze building up in her sinus passages.

He nudged Moonshine into a fast walk. “Well, for one thing,” he replied, “you’re missing the big handlebar mustache.”

Carolyn did not—
would
not—laugh.

But she wanted to, and Brody probably knew that.

They rode out of the cottonwoods and onto the trail, picking up speed as they went.

Carolyn tried not to notice that Brody felt as hardchested as a statue behind her, that the heat of his body was leaching past the chill of her damp flesh, warming her, making her heart race a little.

She should have been relieved that they hadn’t made love, she supposed, and she
was,
mostly. She was also somewhat disappointed.

Like before, he seemed to know what she was thinking.

Which just went to prove how arrogant he was.

And how right.

He bent his head, touched his tongue to the back of her neck, made a chortling sound when she reacted with a little groan.

“Back there at the lake,” he told her, his voice throaty and almost hypnotic, but audible even over the clatter of Moonshine’s hooves on the hard-packed dirt of the trail, “I wanted to lay you down in the grass and have my way with you. Know why I didn’t try?”

A tremor, as involuntary as the groan, shuddered through Carolyn. “You didn’t try,” she managed to reply, “because you knew I’d scratch your eyes right out of your head if you did.”

Brody laughed. “I didn’t try,” he said, “because I didn’t have a condom handy.”

Carolyn was still in way over her head, lake or no lake, but she
had
had the presence of mind to wonder why Brody hadn’t even attempted to make love to her, when he had the chance.

“You wouldn’t have succeeded anyhow,” she said stiffly, and maybe a beat too late.

“Are you challenging me?” Brody wanted to know. Managing the horse, even with another rider in front of him, required no discernible effort on his part. He might have been part of the animal, he was so at ease. “If you are, I’m up to it—so to speak.”

Hard need went through Carolyn’s entire being in that moment. She was half again too stubborn—and too rattled—to come up with a response.

Brody laughed, and one of his hands rose to slip inside her loose-fitting flannel shirt to cup her breast. Even with a bra and a T-shirt in between, he must have felt her nipple tighten against his palm.

It took all of Carolyn’s considerable self-control to grab his wrist and jerk his hand away. “We have an agreement, Brody,” she reminded him tersely. “
No sex.
Remember?”

“That might have been a little rash of us,” he said. “Deciding to save ourselves, I mean.” His breath brushed her right ear, and then he nibbled briefly at the lobe.

Carolyn bit back another groan. Gave him a quick jab with her elbow. “
Stop it,
Brody,” she said.

He sighed again. By then, Moonshine was traveling at a smooth lope, and the motion of that horse, and Brody at her back—well, it was beyond sensual. It was very nearly climactic.

“Is this agreement of ours…open-ended?” he finally asked.

Up ahead, Carolyn spotted Blossom, placidly munching on grass alongside the trail.

“Wh-what do you mean?” Carolyn asked, glad to see the runaway mare within catching distance, and unhurt.

“I mean,” Brody almost breathed, making no comment on Blossom’s reappearance, though he’d surely seen her, “that the no-sex deal isn’t working for me. We need to discuss it, Carolyn.”

“
Discuss
it?” Carolyn echoed. “That isn’t what you mean at all, and you know it.”

They drew up alongside Blossom, and Carolyn swung one leg over Moonshine’s neck and jumped to the ground while Brody leaned to take hold of the mare’s bridle strap in case she took a notion to run off again.

“What
do
I mean, then, since you seem to know?” Brody countered, wielding that grin again. He let go of the bridle when she was mounted on Blossom, but he didn’t make Moonshine turn, didn’t give her so much as an inch of space, so his left leg was pressing into her right.

“It’s working fine for me,” Carolyn said, ignoring the question.

“What’s working fine for you?”

She flushed. “The no-sex agreement,” she said. She pointed Blossom toward home and gave the animal a light nudge with her boot heels to get her going.

Brody kept up. “Now, that is a peculiar statement, Carolyn,” he observed mildly, “because the nooky-ban obviously
isn’t
working any better for you than it is for me—which is to say, not at all.”

“Nooky-ban?”
Carolyn shot back. “Isn’t
that
color ful?”