Читать книгу Cowboy Country - Linda Lael Miller - Страница 10
ОглавлениеMISCHIEF LIT TRICIA’S blue eyes as she studied Brody and Carolyn, the pair of them standing still in the middle of Natty McCall’s kitchen.
Just looking at her took the edge off Brody’s irritation. He’d always wanted a sister, after all, and now he had one. He felt a similar affection for Melissa, his cousin Steven’s wife, but he didn’t see her practically every day, the way he did Tricia, since Steven, Melissa and their three children lived in Stone Creek, Arizona.
“Did Conner send you to check up on me, Brody Creed?” Tricia asked in a tone of good-natured suspicion, tilting her head to one side and folding her arms before resting them atop her impressive belly.
Out of the corner of his eye, Brody saw Carolyn turn away. Her streaky blond hair swung with the motion, brushing against her shoulders, and just that fast, she was busy thumping things around on the counter again.
“Brody?” Tricia persisted, while Brody was untangling his tongue.
“It was my own idea to look in on you while I was in town,” Brody finally answered, grubbing up a crooked grin and turning the brim of his hat in both hands, like some shy hero in an old-time Western movie. “I don’t figure Conner would object much, though.”
Tricia smiled broadly, flicked a glance in Carolyn’s direction.
The can opener whirred and a pan clattered against a burner.
Brody sighed.
“Join us for lunch?” Tricia asked him.
Carolyn’s backbone went ramrod-straight as soon as Tricia uttered those words, and Brody watched, at once amused and confounded, while she jammed slices of bread down onto the beginnings of two bologna sandwiches. She used so much force to do it that the things looked like they’d been made with a drill press.
Deciding he’d stirred up enough ill will for one day, Brody shook his head. “I’d better get back to the ranch,” he said. “We’re replacing some of the wire along one of the fence lines.”
“Oh,” Tricia said, as if disappointed.
She moved slowly to the table, pulled back a chair just as Brody went to pull it back for her and sank onto the seat.
“Hey,” Brody said, concerned. “Are you feeling all right?”
Tricia sighed. “Maybe I’m a little tired,” she confessed. “It’s no big deal.”
At that, Carolyn stopped flinging food hither and yon and turned to look at Tricia. “I think you should go home and rest,” she said. “This morning was crazy, and we’ve been taking inventory for a couple of days now.”
“And leave you to straighten up the shop and restock the shelves all by yourself?” Tricia asked. “That wouldn’t be fair.”
“I can handle it,” Carolyn said. She spoke in a normal tone, but Brody could feel her bristling, all over, like a porcupine fixing to shoot quills in every direction. She didn’t deign to glance his way, of course. “And, anyhow, I’d like to close the shop early today. That way, I could catch up on the bookkeeping, then put the finishing touches on that gypsy skirt I’ve been working on and get it posted on the website.”
Brody neither knew nor cared what a gypsy skirt was. He was feeling indignant now, standing there on the fringes of the conversation as if he’d either turned transparent or just disappeared entirely.
He cleared his throat.
Tricia didn’t look at him, and Carolyn didn’t, either.
The cat fixed an amber gaze on him, though, and Brody was affronted all over again. He’d never met a critter that didn’t take to him right away—until this one.
“Tell you what,” Tricia finally said to Carolyn, after a few moments spent looking happily pensive. “I’ll take the afternoon off. If you promise not to stay up half the night stitching beads and ribbons onto that skirt.”
“I promise,” Carolyn said quickly.
Most likely, by her reckoning, persuading Tricia to go home was the best and fastest way to get rid of him, too.
Brody felt his back teeth mesh together.
“All right, then,” Tricia conceded. “I guess I could use a nap.” With that, she headed off into the other room, probably on the hunt for her purse, and thus Brody and Carolyn were left alone again, however briefly.
On the stove, soup began to boil over the sides of the saucepan, sizzling on the burner and raising a stink.
Brody automatically moved to push the pan off the heat, and Carolyn did the same thing.
They collided, sideways, and hard enough that Carolyn stumbled slightly. And Brody grabbed her arm, an instinctive response, to steady her.
He actually felt the charge go through her, arc like a bolt of electricity from someplace inside Carolyn to someplace inside him.
Instantly, both of them went still.
Brody willed his fingers to release their hold on Carolyn’s arm.
She jerked free.
And Tricia was back in the kitchen by then, taking it all in.
Although he and Carolyn were no longer physically touching each other, it seemed to Brody that he’d been fused to her in some inexplicable way.
The very air of the room seemed to quiver.
“I’ll drive you home,” Brody managed to tell Tricia, his voice a throaty rasp.
“I’ll drive myself home,” Tricia countered, friendly but firm. There’d be no more use in arguing with her than with any other Creed. “I don’t want to leave the Pathfinder behind, and, anyway, I told you—I feel just fine.”
Carolyn favored her friend with a wobbly smile. “Take it easy, okay?” she said.
Tricia nodded on her way to the back door. She noted the spilled-over soup on the stove and, with the smallest grin, shook her head.
Brody happened to see her expression because he’d just leaned past her, to take hold of the knob. Where he came from—right there in Lonesome Bend, as it happened—a man still opened a door for a lady.
And this particular lady was trying hard not to laugh.
Brody’s neck heated as he stood there, holding the door open for his brother’s wife, all too aware that she’d drawn some kind of crazy female conclusion about him and Carolyn.
He clamped his jaw down tight again and waited.
* * *
ONCE BRODY AND TRICIA were gone, and far enough along the flagstone walk to be out of earshot, Carolyn let out a loud, growl-like groan of sheer frustration.
The sandwiches were smashed.
Most of the soup—tomato with little star-shaped noodles, her favorite—coated the stove top. The rest was bonded to the bottom of the pan.
All of which was neither here nor there, because she wasn’t the least bit hungry now anyway, thanks to Brody Creed.
Winston, having finished his sardine repast, sat looking up at her, twitching his tail from side to side. His delicate nose gleamed with fish oil, and out came his tiny, pink tongue to dispense with it.
Comically dignified, his coat sleek and black, the cat reminded Carolyn suddenly of a very proper English butler, overseeing the doings in some grand ancestral pile. The fanciful thought made her laugh, and that released most of the lingering, after-Brody tension.
Carolyn frowned at the catch phrase: After Brody. In many ways, that simple term defined her life, as she’d lived it for the past seven years. If only she could go back to Before Brody, and make a different choice.
A silly idea if she’d ever heard one, Carolyn decided.
Resolutely, she cleaned up the soup mess, filled the saucepan with water and left it to soak in the sink. She wrapped the flattened sandwiches carefully and tucked them away in the refrigerator. When and if her appetite returned, she’d be ready.
Winston continued to watch her with that air of sedate curiosity as she finished KP duty and returned to the main part of the shop.
Winston followed; whenever Carolyn was in the house, the cat was somewhere nearby.
She tidied the display tables and put out more goats’ milk soap and handmade paper and the last of the frilly, retro-style aprons that were so popular she could barely keep up with the demand.
That task finished, she stuffed the day’s receipts into a zippered bag generously provided by the Cattleman’s First Bank, double-checked that the front door was locked and there were no approaching customers in sight and went upstairs to her apartment.
Every time she entered that cheery little kitchen, whether from the interior stairway, like now, or from the one outside, Carolyn felt a stirring of quiet joy, a sort of lifting sensation in the area of her heart.
She rented the apartment from Natty McCall for a ridiculously nominal amount of money—nominal was what she could afford—so it wasn’t really hers. Still, everything about the place, modest though it was, said home to Carolyn.
Sure, she was lonely sometimes, especially when the shop was closed.
But it wasn’t the same kind of loneliness she’d felt when she was constantly moving from one house to another and her address was simply General Delivery, Lonesome Bend, Colorado.
The irony of the town’s name wasn’t lost on Carolyn.
She’d ended up there quite by accident, a little over eight years ago, when her car broke down along a dark country road, leaving her stranded.
Her unlikely rescuers, Gifford Welsh and Ardith Sperry, both of them A-list movie stars, had been passing by and stopped to offer their help. In the end, they’d offered her the use of the guest house behind their mansion-hideaway three miles outside of town. After a series of very careful background checks, the couple had hired Carolyn as nanny to their spirited three-year-old daughter, Storm.
Carolyn had loved the job and the child. Most of the time, she and Storm had stayed behind in the Lonesome Bend house, while Gifford and Ardith crisscrossed the globe, sometimes together and sometimes separately, appearing in movies that invariably garnered Oscar nominations and Golden Globes.
Although Carolyn had never given in to the temptation to pretend that Storm was her own child, strong as it was some of the time, she and the little girl had bonded, and on a deep level.
For Carolyn, life had been better than ever before, at least for that single, golden year—right up to the night Gifford Welsh had too much to drink at dinner and decided he and the nanny ought to have themselves a little fling.
Carolyn had refused out of hand. Oh, there was no denying that Welsh was attractive. He’d graced the cover of People as the World’s Sexiest Man, not just once, but twice. He was intelligent, charming and witty, not to mention rich and famous. She’d seen all his movies, loved every one of them.
But he was married.
He was a father.
Those things mattered to Carolyn, even if he’d temporarily lost sight of them himself.
After fending off his advances—Ardith had been away on a movie set somewhere in Canada at the time—Carolyn had resigned, packed her belongings and, once a friend had arrived to pinch-hit as Storm’s nanny, left that house for good.
Within a few months, the property was quietly sold to the founder of a software company, and Gifford, Ardith and Storm, reportedly having purchased a sprawling ranch in Montana, never set foot in Lonesome Bend again.
Even now, years later, standing in the kitchen of her apartment, Carolyn remembered how hard, and how painful, it was to leave Storm behind. The ache returned, like a blow to her solar plexus, every time she recalled how the little girl had run behind her car, sobbing and calling out, “Come back, Carolyn! Carolyn, come back!”
Before that—long, long before that—another little girl had frantically chased after another car, stumbling, falling and skinning her knees, getting up to run again.
And that child’s cries hadn’t been so very different from Storm’s.
Mommy, come back! Please, come back!
“Breathe,” Carolyn told herself sternly. “You’re a grown woman now, so act like one.”
Indeed, she was a grown woman. But the child she’d once been still lived inside her, still wondered, even after twenty-five years, where her mother had gone after dropping her daughter off at that first foster home.
“Reow,” Winston remarked, now perched on the kitchen table, where he was most definitely not supposed to be. “Reow?”
Carolyn gave a moist chuckle, sniffled and patted the animal’s head before gently shooing him off the table. He immediately took up residence on the wide windowsill, his favorite lookout spot.
Being something of a neat freak, Carolyn moved her portable sewing machine aside, replaced the tablecloth beneath it with an untrammeled one and washed her hands at the sink.
The gypsy skirt, the creative project of the moment, hung on the hook inside her bedroom door, neatly covered with a plastic bag saved from the dry cleaner’s.
Carolyn retrieved the garment, draped it carefully over the side of the table opposite her sewing machine and silently reveled in the beauty of the thing.
The floor-length underskirt was black crepe, but it barely showed, for all the multicolored, bead-enhanced ribbons she’d stitched to the cloth in soft layers. She’d spent days designing the piece, weeks stitching it together, ripping out and stitching again.
It was exquisite, all motion and shimmer, a wearable fantasy, the kind of original women like Ardith Sperry wore to award ceremonies and premieres.
Carolyn hadn’t sized the piece for a movie star’s figure, though. It was somewhere between a ten and a twelve, with plenty of give in the seams, allowing for a custom fit.
Carolyn, a curvy eight since the age of seventeen, had deliberately cut the skirt to fit a larger figure than her own, for the simple reason that, if she could have worn it, parting with it would have been out of the question.
She’d been making purposeful sacrifices like that since she’d first learned to sew, in her sophomore year of high school. Once she understood the basics, she hadn’t even needed patterns. She’d sketched designs almost from day one, measured and remeasured the fabric, cut and stitched.
And she’d quickly made a name for herself. While other kids babysat or flipped burgers for extra money, Carolyn whipped up one-of-a-kind outfits and sold them as fast as she could turn them out.
That made two things she did well, she’d realized way back when, with a thrill she could still feel. Carolyn had an affinity for horses; it seemed as though she’d always known how to ride.
Over the years, most of her foster homes being in rural or semirural areas, where there always seemed to be someone willing to trade riding time for mucking out stalls, she’d ridden all kinds of horses, though she’d never actually had one to call her own.
Now, determined not to waste another second daydreaming, she shook off the reflective mood and picked up the skirt again, carefully removing the plastic wrap and holding it up high so she could admire the shift and shiver of all those ribbons, the wink of crystal beads.
It was silly, she supposed, but she coveted that skirt.
Aside from the money the sale would bring in, which, as always, she needed, where would she even wear a garment like that? She lived in blue jeans, cotton tops and Western boots, and for good reason—she was a cowgirl at heart, not a famous actress or the wife of a CEO or a cover model for Glamour.
With a sigh, Carolyn put the skirt back on its hook on the bedroom door—out of sight, out of mind.
She crossed to the small desk Tricia had left behind when she moved to the ranch, and booted up her laptop. While the magic machine was going through its various electronic thumps, bumps and whistles, Carolyn heated a cup of water in the microwave to brew tea.
Winston, still keeping his vigil over the side yard from the windowsill, made a soft yowling sound, his tail swaying like a pendulum in overdrive. His hackles were up, but his ears were pitched forward instead of laid back in anger. While Carolyn was still trying to read his body language, she heard someone coming up the outside stairs.
A Brodylike shape appeared in the frosted oval window at the door, one hand raised to knock.
Before he could do that much, however, Carolyn had yanked the door open.
“I don’t believe this,” she said.
Over on the windowsill, Winston expressed his displeasure with another odd little yowl.
“What is that cat’s problem, anyway?” Brody asked, frowning as he slipped past Carolyn, graceful as a billow of smoke.
Carolyn shut the door. Hard.
“Winston,” she said stiffly, “is a very discerning cat.”
Brody sighed, and when Carolyn forced herself to turn around and look at him, he was gazing at Winston with an expression of wounded disbelief on his handsome face.
“Does he like Conner?” Brody inquired.
Carolyn hesitated. Brody threw an emotional wrench in the works every time she encountered him, but she didn’t hate him. Not all the time, that is. And she didn’t enjoy making him feel bad.
“Yes,” she replied, eventually. “But you shouldn’t take it personally.”
“Easy for you to say,” Brody answered.
“Tricia’s okay, isn’t she?” That was it, she decided. He was there because he had bad news. Why else would he have come all the way back in from the ranch, where he was supposed to be stringing new fence lines with Conner and the crew?
Brody must have seen the alarm in Carolyn’s eyes, because he shook his head. Holding his range-battered hat in one hand, he ran the other through his shaggy, tarnished-gold hair.
Sighed again.
In a searing flash, it came back to her, the feel of that mouth on her skin.
“As far as I know, she’s taking a nap.” Another grin flickered in Brody’s eyes and twitched at one corner of his amazing mouth. “As soon as Tricia turned in, Conner decided he was a little tired, too. That was my cue to make myself scarce.”
Carolyn’s cheeks were stinging a little, but she had to smile. “Probably a good call,” she agreed. And then she waited. It was up to Brody to explain why he’d come back.
His remarkable blue eyes seemed to darken a few shades as he looked at her, and the gray rim around the irises widened. “I know the word doesn’t mean much,” he said, at long last, “but I meant it before, when I told you I was sorry about the way things ended with us.”
Suddenly, Carolyn wanted very much to cry. And this was a sign of weakness, an indulgence she rarely allowed herself. All her life, she’d had to be strong—as a matter of survival.
She swallowed painfully and raised her chin a notch. “Okay,” she said. “You’re right. We’ll just...let it go. Act as though it never happened.” She put out her hand, the way she might have done to seal a business agreement. “Deal?”
Brody looked down at her hand, back up at her face. “Deal,” he said hoarsely. And in the next moment, he was kissing her.
Carolyn felt things giving way inside her and, as good as that kiss was, she wasn’t about to surrender so much as an inch of the emotional ground she’d gained after the cataclysm that was Brody Creed.
She wrenched herself back out of his arms, put a few steps between them and then a few more.
Brody merely looked at her, with his mouth upturned at one corner, a bemused I thought so gleaming in his eyes.
Stunned, not only by his audacity, but also by what he made her feel, Carolyn touched her lips, as if relearning their contours after a long absence from her own body.
“Don’t you dare say you’re sorry,” she muttered.
Brody chuckled as he opened the door to leave. “Oh, believe me,” he intoned. “I’m not the least bit sorry—not for that kiss, anyhow.” His gaze shifted to Winston, who watched him from the windowsill, ears laid back, fur ruffled. “So long, cat,” he added. “For now.”
In the next moment, Brody was gone—so thoroughly gone that Carolyn felt as if she might have imagined the visit, at the same time certain that she hadn’t.
After that, her concentration was shot.
She waited until Brody had had plenty of time to drive away. Then she logged off her computer, pulled on a lightweight blue corduroy jacket and retrieved her purse and car keys.
Sewing was out of the question, and so was doing the bookwork. She was too jumpy to sit still, or even stay inside.
So she drove to the Creed ranch, taking the long way around, following the back roads and bumpy logging trails to avoid running into Brody.
After some forty minutes, she reached Kim and Davis’s place, parked beside the barn and then stood next to her car for a few moments, debating with herself. She and Kim were good friends; she really ought to knock on the door and say hello, at least.
The sprawling, rustic house had an empty look about it, though, and besides, Carolyn didn’t feel like chatting. Kim was perceptive, and she’d know something was bothering her friend just by looking at her.
Because she had permission to ride any of the Creeds’ horses anytime she wanted—with the exception of the rescued Thoroughbred, Firefly—she could go ahead and saddle up one of the cow ponies without asking first.
Firefly, a magnificent chestnut, was “too much horse” for anybody but an experienced jockey, according to Davis. When they’d learned that the animal was about to be euthanized because his racing days were over and, being a gelding, he couldn’t be put to stud, Kim and Davis had hitched a trailer behind their truck and driven all the way to Kentucky to bring him home.
Passing the corral, an enclosure as large as many pastures, Carolyn stopped to admire Firefly, who had the area to himself that cool but sunny afternoon. He towered against the blue of the sky, and his beauty all but took her breath away.
She stood still as he tossed his great head and then slowly approached her.
Carolyn reached up to pat his velvety nose. Normally, if she planned to ride, she stuffed a few carrots into her jacket pockets before leaving home. Today, though, she’d made the decision impulsively as, let’s face it, a knee-jerk reaction to Brody’s kiss.
“Sorry, buddy,” she told the former racehorse. “No carrots today, but I’ll be sure to remember them next time.”
Firefly nodded, as if to convey understanding, and Carolyn’s spirits rose a little. For her, there was something therapeutic about horses—even as a kid, cleaning stalls and stacking bales of hay to earn riding privileges, she’d felt better just for being around them.
“Wish I could ride you,” she told the former champion, “but you’re off-limits.”
He stretched his long neck over the top rail of the fence, and Carolyn patted him affectionately before moving on.
Besides coming there to ride when the mood struck and time allowed, she’d spent a lot of time in that place, house-sitting and looking after the horses while Davis and Kim were off on one of their frequent road trips, and everything about the barn was blessedly familiar. In fact, Carolyn figured if she ever went blind, she’d still be able to go straight to the tack room, collect the saddle and bridle Kim had given her and get the pinto mare, Blossom, ready to ride.
The horse knew every trail on that ranch by heart. Blossom would cross the creeks without balking, too, and she was as surefooted as a Grand Canyon mule in the bargain. Snakes and rabbits didn’t spook her, and Carolyn had never known her to buck or run away with a rider.
Blossom, standing in her stall, greeted Carolyn with a companionable whinny.
Five minutes later, the two of them were out there under that achingly blue sky. Carolyn tugged at one stirrup, to make sure the cinch was tight enough, and then mounted up.
Once she was in the saddle, her jangled nerves began to settle down. Her heart rate slowed and so did her breathing, and her mouth curved into a smile.
She reined Blossom toward the green-festooned foothills, headed in the opposite direction from the main ranch house and away from the range as well, still wanting to avoid Brody if at all possible, but beyond that, she allowed the mare to chart her own course.
Blossom strolled along at a leisurely pace, stopping to drink from the icy, winding creek before splashing across it to the high meadow, one of Carolyn’s favorite places to be.
Here, wildflowers rioted, yellow and pink, blue and white, and the grass was tall and lush. From the ridge, Carolyn could not only see the river, but also Lonesome Bend beyond it.
Brody’s new house and barn, both sizable buildings, looked like toys from that distance. The workmen were no bigger than ants, moving over the framework, and the sounds of construction didn’t reach her ears, though the horse might have heard them.
Blossom grazed contentedly, her reward for making the climb to high ground, and Carolyn stood in the stirrups, in order to see even farther.
There was the highway that led to Denver and points beyond.
Immediately after Brody’s return to Lonesome Bend the year before, Carolyn had considered loading up her things and following that road wherever it might lead—like in the old days, she’d had no particular destination in mind.
Just somewhere away.
But her stubborn pride had saved her.
She’d loved Lonesome Bend and its people.
She’d had friends, a library card, a charge account at the local hardware store. Not a lot by most folks’ standards, Carolyn supposed, but to her, they were important. Leaving would have meant starting over somewhere else, from scratch, and the idea of that had galled her.
She’d decided to stand her ground. After all, Brody was bound to take off again, sooner or later, because that was what Brody did.
He took off.
Looking out over the landscape, Carolyn sighed. Trust that man to break his own pattern by staying on this time, buying the land that had belonged to Tricia’s father, Joe McCall, making it part of the family ranch.
Still, staying out of Brody’s way hadn’t been very difficult at first, as small as the town was. No doubt, he’d been doing his best to steer clear of her, too.
Then Tricia and Conner fell in love, and everything changed.
As Tricia’s friend and eventually her business partner, Carolyn was included in every gathering at the Creed ranch and, since they were a sociable bunch, tending to go all out for holidays or anything that could possibly be construed as a special occasion, it happened often. Even in the rare month without a red-letter day on its calendar page, it seemed there was always a picnic, a barbecue, a trail ride, a potluck or some kind of party.
Most of the time, Carolyn attended the shindigs and did her best to have fun, but Brody was inevitably somewhere around, seldom speaking to her, or even making eye contact, but there, nonetheless, a quiet but dynamic presence she had to work hard to ignore.
And just doing that much required a level of concentration tantamount to walking barefoot over hot coals, like a participant in some high-powered seminar.
Frankly, Carolyn resented having to make the effort but, besides pulling up stakes and leaving town herself, she didn’t seem to have any options.
She kept waiting to get over Brody.
Get over the hurt.
Get over caring about him.
So far, it hadn’t happened.
Carolyn drew the scenery into her mind and spirit the way she drew breath into her lungs.
A hawk soared overhead, riding an invisible current of air.
Small animals rustled through the grass.
And beneath it all, Carolyn heard the steady tick-tick-tick of her biological clock.
At thirty-two and counting, she wasn’t getting any younger.
How long could she afford to wait around for fate to make her dreams of a home and a family come true?
She leaned forward to pat Blossom’s long, sweaty neck. Shook her head in silent answer to her own question.
She’d wasted enough time waiting around for the proverbial prince to ride up on a snow-white steed and whisk her away to Happily-Ever-After Land.
Okay, sure, she’d hoped a grand passion would be part of the package. But she’d had that with Brody Creed, hadn’t she—for a whole week and a half?
And where had it gotten her? Heartbreak Hotel, that was where.
Obviously, love wasn’t going to just happen to her, like in all those fairy tales she’d lost herself in as a child. It happened to some people—Tricia and Conner and a few others—but those were probably flukes.
Bottom line, she could wish all she wanted, but the fulfillment of said wishes was her own responsibility. Nobody was going to wave a magic wand and make things happen for her.
It was time to do something, time to take action.
Gently, she drew back on the reins so Blossom would stop grazing and continued the solitary trail ride, thinking as she went.
She’d been resistant to the idea of signing up for one of those online dating services, afraid of attracting, oh, say, a serial killer, or a bigamist, or some sort of con man set to make an appearance on America’s Most Wanted. In light of a statistic she’d recently come across—that twenty percent of all romantic relationships begin via a matchmaking website of some sort—she was willing to reconsider.
Or, more properly, she was willing to be willing to reconsider.
Denver was probably full of nice men looking for a partner. Maybe there were even a few eligible guys right there in Lonesome Bend.
It wasn’t as if she needed a doctor or a lawyer. She’d settle for a mature man, a grown-up with a sense of humor and a steady job.
The word settle immediately snagged like a hook in the center of her chest.
She drew a few deep breaths as she and Blossom started back toward Kim and Davis’s barn, traveling slowly. She wasn’t signing up to be a mail-order bride, she reminded herself. Posting her picture and a brief bio online wasn’t a lifelong commitment, but just a way of testing the water.
“You can do this,” she told herself firmly.
Now, all she had to do was start believing her own slogan.
