Читать книгу Montana Creeds: Tyler - Linda Lael Miller - Страница 9

T YLER C REED SUPPRESSED a grin as the old guy in the Wal-Mart parking lot stared, dumbfounded, at the fancy set of keys resting in his work-roughened palm. Blinked a couple of times, like somebody trying to shake off an illusion, then gave the brim of his well-worn baseball cap an anxious tug. According to the bright yellow stitching on the hat, his name was Walt and he was the world’s greatest dad.

Walt looked at his ten-year-old Chevy truck, the sides streaked with dry dirt, the mud flaps coated, and then shifted to stare at Tyler’s shiny white Escalade.

“I thought you was kiddin’, mister,” he said. “You really want to trade that Cadillac, straight across, for my old rig? It’s got near a hundred thousand miles on it, this junker, and every once in a while, a part falls off. Last week, it was the muffler—”

Tyler nodded, weary of Walt’s prattle but not about to show it. “That’s the idea,” he replied quietly.

The aging redneck approached the Cadillac, touched the hood with something like reverence. “Is this thing stolen?” Walt asked, understandably suspicious. After all, Tyler reflected, a man didn’t run across a deal like that every day, especially in Crap Creek, Montana, or whatever the hell that wide spot in the road was called.

Tyler chuckled. “No, sir,” he said. “I own it, fair and square. The title’s in the glove compartment. You agree, and I’ll sign off on it right now, and be on my way.”

“Wait till Myrtle comes out with the groceries and sees this,” the old fella marveled, hooking his thumbs in the straps of his greasy bib overalls, shaking his head once and finally cutting loose with a gap-toothed smile. Walt needed dental work.

Tyler waited.

“I still don’t understand why any sane man would want to make a swap like this,” Walt insisted. “Could be, you’re not right in the head.” He paused, squinted up into Tyler’s impassive face. “You look all right, though.”

Involuntarily, Tyler glanced at his watch, an expensive number with a twenty-four-karat-gold rodeo cowboy riding a bronc inlaid in the platinum face. Diamonds glittered at the twelve, three, six and nine spots, and the thing was as incongruous with who he was as the pricey SUV he was virtually giving away, but he’d never considered parting with the watch. His late wife, Shawna, had sold her horse trailer and a jeweled saddle she’d won in a barrel racing event to buy it for him, the day he took his first championship.

“I don’t know as I’m eager to trade with a man in a hurry,” Walt said astutely, narrowing his weary eyes a little. “You’re runnin’ from somethin’, and it might be the law. I don’t need that kind of trouble, I can tell you. Myrtle and me, we got ourselves a nice life—nothin’ fancy—I worked at the lumber mill for thirty years—but the double-wide is paid off and we manage to scrape together ten bucks for each of the grandchildren on their birthdays—”

Tyler suppressed a sigh.

“That’s some watch,” Walt observed, in no particular hurry to finalize the bargain. The wise gaze took in Tyler’s jeans and shirt, newly purchased at rollback prices, lingered on his costly boots, handmade in a specialty shop in Texas. Rose again to his black Western hat, pulled low over his eyes. “You win it rodeoin’ or somethin’?”

“Or something,” Tyler confirmed. His own brothers, Logan and Dylan, didn’t know about his marriage to Shawna, or the accident that had killed her; he wasn’t about to confide in a stranger he’d met in the parking lot at Wal-Mart.

“You look like a bronc-buster,” Walt decided, after another leisurely once-over. “Sorta familiar, too.”

You look like a forklift driver, Tyler responded silently. He looped his thumbs in the waistband of his stiff new jeans. “Deal or no deal?” he asked mildly.

“Let me see that title,” Walt said, still hedging his bets. “And some identification, if you don’t mind.”

Knowing it wouldn’t matter if he did mind, Tyler fetched the requested document from the SUV, pausing to pat the ugly dog he’d found half-starved in another parking lot, in another town, on the long road home.

“Dog part of the swap?” Walt asked, getting cagier now.

“No,” Tyler said. “He stays with me.”

Walt looked regretful. “That’s too bad. Ever since my blue tick hound, Minford, died of old age last winter, I’ve been hankerin’ to get me another dog. They’re good company, and with Myrtle waitin’ tables every day to bank-roll her bingo habit, I’m alone a lot.”

“Plenty of dogs in need of homes,” Tyler pointed out. “The shelters are full of them.”

“Reckon that’s so,” Walt agreed. He studied the title Tyler handed over like it was a summons or something. “Looks all right,” he said. “Let’s see that ID.”

Tyler pulled his wallet from his hip pocket and produced a driver’s license.

Walt’s rheumy eyes widened a little, and he whistled, low and shrill, in exclamation. “Tyler Creed,” he said. “I thought I’d heard that name before, when I saw it on the title to this Caddie of yours. Four times world champion bronc-rider. Seen you on ESPN many a time. In some TV commercials, too. Takes guts to stand in front of a camera wearing nothing but boxer-briefs and a shit-eatin’ grin the way you done, but you pulled it off, sure as hell. My daughter Margie has a calendar full of pictures of you—two years out of date and she still won’t take it down off the wall. Pisses her husband off somethin’ fierce.”

Inwardly, Tyler sighed. Outwardly, he stayed cool.

“Myrtle and me, we’d be glad to have you come to our place for supper,” Walt went on.

“No time,” Tyler said, hoping he sounded regretful.

Walt looked him over once more, shook his head again and got his own paperwork out of that rattletrap truck of his. Signed his name on the dotted line. “Just let me fetch my toolbox out of the back,” he said.

“I’ll get my own gear while you’re doing that,” Tyler answered, relieved.

The switch was made. Tyler had his duffel bag, his dog and his guitar case in the Chevy before Walt set his red metal toolbox in the back of the Escalade.

“Sure you won’t come to supper?” Walt asked, as a woman emerged from Wal-Mart and headed toward them, pushing a cart and looking puzzled.

“Wish I could,” Tyler lied, climbing into the Chevy. If he drove hard, he and Kit Carson, the dog, would be in Stillwater Springs by the time the sun went down. They’d lie low at the cabin overnight, and come morning, he’d find his brother Logan and punch him in the face.

Again.

Maybe he’d put Dylan’s lights out, too, for good measure.

But mainly, heading home was about facing up to some things, settling them in his mind.

“See you,” he told Walt.

And before the old man could answer, Tyler laid rubber.

Five miles outside Crap Creek, the Chevy’s muffler dropped to the blacktop and dragged, with an earsplitting clatter, throwing blue and orange sparks.

“Shit,” Tyler said.

Kit Carson gave a sympathetic whine.

Well, he’d wanted to go back and find out who he’d have been without the rodeo, the money and Shawna. This was country life, for regular folks.

And it wasn’t as if Walt hadn’t warned him, he thought.

With a grimace, Tyler pulled to the side of the road, shut the truck off and scooted underneath the pickup on his back, with damage control on his mind. Just like the bad old days, he reflected, when he and his dad, Jake, had played shade-tree mechanic in the yard at the ranch, trying to keep some piece-of-shit car running until payday.

Whatever Walt’s other talents might be, muffler repair wasn’t among them. He’d duct-taped the part in place, and now the tape hung in smoldering shreds and the muffler looked as though somebody had peppered it with buckshot.

Tyler sighed, shimmied out from under the truck again and got to his feet, dusting off his jeans and trying in vain to get a look at the back of his shirt. Kit sat in the driver’s seat, nose smudging up the window, panting.

Easing the dog back so he could get his cell phone out of the dirt-crusted cup well in the truck’s console, Tyler called 411 and asked to be connected to the nearest towing outfit.

L ILY K ENYON WASN’T HAVING second thoughts about staying on in Montana to look after her ailing father as she and a nurse muscled him into her rented Taurus in front of Missoula General Hospital. She was having forty-third thoughts, seventy-eighth thoughts; she’d left second ones behind about half an hour after she and her six-year-old daughter, Tess, rushed into the admittance office a week before, fresh from the airport.

Lily had remembered her father as a good-natured if somewhat distracted man, even-tempered and funny. Until her teens, she’d spent summers in Stillwater Springs, sticking to his heels like a wad of chewing gum as he saw four-legged patients in his veterinary clinic, trailing him from barn to barn while he made his rounds, tending sick cows, horses, goats and barn cats. He’d been kind, referring to her as his assistant and calling her “Doc Ryder,” and it had made her feel proud, because that was what folks in that small Montana community called him .

In those little-girl days, Lily had wanted to be just like her dad.

Now, though, she was having a hard time squaring the man she recalled with the one her bitter, angry mother described after the divorce. The one who never showed up on the doorstep, sent Christmas or birthday cards, or even called to ask how she was.

Let alone sent a plane ticket so she could visit.

Now, after seven long days of putting up with his crotchety ways, she understood her mom’s attitude a little better, even though it still smarted, the way Lucy Ryder Cook could never speak of her ex-husband without pursing her lips afterward. Hal Ryder, aka Doc, seemed fond of Tess, but every time he looked at Lily, she saw angry, baffled pain in his eyes.

Once her father and daughter were buckled in, Hal in the front and Tess in the special booster seat the law required of anyone under a certain age and height, Lily slid behind the wheel and tried to center herself. The day was hot, even for July; the hospital had been blessedly cool, but the vents on the dashboard of the rental were still huffing out blasts of heat.

Sweat dampened the back of Lily’s sleeveless blouse; without even turning a wheel, she was already sticking to the seat.

Not good.

“Can we get hamburgers?” Tess piped from the backseat.

“No,” said Lily, who placed great stock in eating healthfully.

“Yes,” challenged her curmudgeon of a father, at exactly the same moment.

“Which?” Tess inquired patiently. “Yes or no?” The poor kid was nothing if not pragmatic—stoic, too. She’d had a lot of practice at resigning herself to things since Burke’s “accident” a year before. Lily hadn’t had the heart to tell her little girl what everyone else knew—that Burke Kenyon, Lily’s estranged husband and Tess’s father, had crashed his small private plane into a bridge on purpose, in a fit of spiteful melancholy.

“No,” Lily said firmly, after glaring eloquently at her dad for a moment. “You’re recovering from a heart attack,” she reminded him. “You are not supposed to eat fried food.”

“There’s such a thing as quality of life, you know,” Hal Ryder grumped. He looked thin, and there were bluish-gray shadows under his eyes, underlaid by pouches of skin. “And if you think I’m going to live on tofu and sprouts until my dying day, you’d better think again.”

Lily shifted the car into gear, and the tires screeched a little on the sun-softened pavement as she pulled away from the hospital entrance. “Listen,” she replied tersely, at her wit’s end from stress and lack of sleep, “if you want to clog your arteries with grease and poison your system with preservatives and God only knows what else, that’s your business. Tess and I intend to live long, healthy lives.”

“Long, boring lives,” Hal complained. Lily had stopped thinking of him as “Dad” years before, when it first dawned on her that he wouldn’t be flying her out to Montana for any more small-town, barefoot-and-Popsicle summers. He hadn’t approved of her teenage romance with Tyler Creed, and she’d always suspected that was part of the reason he’d cut her out of his life.

“I’d be happy to hire a nurse,” Lily said, shoving Tyler to the back of her mind and biting her lip as she navigated thickening late-morning traffic. “Tess and I can go back to Chicago if you’d prefer.”

“Don’t be mean, Mom,” Tess counseled sagely. “Grampa’s heart attacked him, remember.”

The image of a ticker gone berserk filled Lily’s mind. If the subject hadn’t been so serious, she’d have smiled.

“Yeah,” Hal agreed. “Don’t be mean. It reminds me of Lucy, and I like to think about her as little as possible.”

Since Lily wasn’t on much better terms with her mother than she was with Hal, she could have done without that last remark. She peeled her back from the seat and fumbled with the air-conditioning, keeping one eye on the road. Her cotton shorts had ridden up, so her thighs were stuck, too, and it would hurt to pull them free.

Another thing to dread.

“Gee, thanks,” she muttered.

“Nana’s a stinker,” Tess commented, her tone cheerful and affectionately tolerant.

“Hush,” Lily said, though she secretly agreed. “That wasn’t a nice thing to say.”

“Well, she is, ” Tess insisted.

“Amen,” Hal added.

“Enough,” Lily muttered. “Both of you. I’m trying to drive, here. Keep us all alive.”

“Slow down a little, then,” Hal grumbled. “This isn’t Chicago.”

“Don’t remind me.” Lily hadn’t intended to sound sarcastic, but she had.

“Is your house big, Grampa?” Tess asked, bravely trying to steer the conversation onto more amiable ground. “Can I have my mom’s old room?”

Lily flashed on the big, rambling Victorian that had once been her home, with its delightful nooks and crannies, its cluttered library stuffed with books, its window seats and alcoves and brick fireplaces. Remembering, she felt the loss afresh, and something squeezed at the back of her heart.

“You can,” Hal said, with a gentleness Lily almost envied. She felt his gaze touch her, sidelong and serious. “Is there a man waiting in Chicago, Lily—is that why you want to go back?”

Lily tensed, searching for the freeway on-ramp, wondering if the question had a subtext. After all, Lily’s mother had left her father for another man, and he hadn’t remarried during the intervening years. Maybe he mistrusted women—his only daughter included. Maybe he expected her to drop everything and run back home to some guy she’d met at Burke’s funeral.

She sighed and shoved a hand into her blond, chin-length hair, only to catch her fingers in the plastic clip she’d used to gather it haphazardly on top of her head that morning before leaving the motel for the hospital. She wasn’t being fair. Her dad had suffered a serious coronary incident, and the doctors and nurses at Missoula General had warned her that depression was common in patients who suddenly found themselves dependent on other people for their care.

Hal Ryder had been doing what he pleased, at least since the divorce. Now, he needed her, a near stranger, to fix his meals, sort out his prescriptions, which were complicated, and see that he didn’t try to mow his lawn or fling himself back into his thriving practice before he was ready.

“Lily?” he prompted.

“No,” she said, after thumbing back through her thoughts for the original question. “There’s no man, Hal.”

“Mom’s a black widow,” Tess explained earnestly.

Hal chuckled. “I wouldn’t go that far, cupcake,” he told his granddaughter.

For a reason Lily couldn’t have explained, her eyes filled with sudden, scalding tears—and she blinked them away. Tears were dangerous on a busy freeway, and besides that, they never made things better. “I’m a widow, ” Lily corrected her daughter calmly. “A black widow is a spider.”

“Oh,” Tess said, digesting the science lesson. She began to thump her sandaled heels against the front of her seat, something she did when she was impatient for the drive to be over.

“Stop,” Lily told her.

A few moments of silence passed. Then Tess went on. “My daddy died when I was four,” she announced.

“I know, sweetheart,” Hal said, his voice tender and a little gruff.

Lily’s throat ached. She’d filed for divorce, after a tearful call from Burke’s latest girlfriend, whom he’d apparently dropped. Would he still be alive if she’d waited, agreed to more marriage counseling, instead of calling a lawyer right after hanging up with the mistress? Would her child still have a father?

Tess had adored her dad.

“His plane hit a bridge,” Tess said.

“Tess,” Lily said gently, “could we talk about this later, please?”

“You always say that.” Tess sighed; she’d been born precocious, but since Burke’s death, she’d been wise beyond her years, an adult in a first-grader’s body. “But later never comes.”

“You can talk to Grampa,” Hal said, slanting another look at Lily. “ I’ll listen.”

Helpless rage filled Lily; her hands, still damp with perspiration even though the air conditioner had finally kicked in, tightened on the steering wheel. I listen, she wanted to protest. I love my child, unlike some people I could name.

To her surprise, her dad reached across the console and patted her arm. “Maybe you ought to pull over for a few minutes,” he said. “Get a grip.”

“I have a grip,” Lily said stiffly, drawing a very deep breath, letting it out and purposely relaxing her shoulders.

“I’m hungry,” Tess said. She never whined, but she was teetering on the verge. No doubt she was picking up on the tension between the adults in the front seat.

Definitely not good.

“We’ll be in Stillwater Springs in under an hour,” Lily said, keeping her tone light. “Can you hold out till we get there?”

“I guess,” Tess said. “But then we’ll have to stop at a supermarket and everything. Grampa told me there’s no food in the house.”

Lily’s head began to pound. She glanced into the rearview mirror, to make eye contact with her daughter. “Okay, we’ll stop,” she said. “We’ll get off at the next exit, find one of those salad buffet places.”

“Rabbit food,” Hal murmured.

“One burger wouldn’t kill us,” Tess said.

Whose side was the child on, anyway?

“No burgers,” Lily said firmly. “Fast-food places don’t offer organic beef.”

“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” Hal said.

“Kindly stay out of this,” Lily told her father evenly. “My purse is on the seat beside you, Tess. There’s a package of crackers inside. Have some, and I’ll keep my eye out for a decent market.”

Sullenly—Tess was never sullen—the child rummaged through Lily’s handbag, found the crackers, tore open the package and munched.

After that, none of them spoke. They were twenty minutes outside Stillwater Springs when they spotted the man and the dog walking alongside the highway.

Something about the man jarred Lily—the set of his shoulders, the way he walked, something— tripping all sorts of inner alarms.

“Stop,” Hal commanded urgently. “That’s Tyler Creed.”

And I thought this day couldn’t get any worse .

Lily pulled over and put on the brakes, while her father buzzed the passenger-side window down.

“Tyler? Is that you?” he called.

The man turned, flashed that trademark grin, dazzling enough to put a heat mirage to shame. Damn it, it was Tyler.

All grown-up, and better-looking than ever.

And here she was, with her back and thighs glued to the car seat and her hair tugged up into a spiky mess.

He approached the car, the dog plodding patiently at his heels. Bent to look in at Hal. When his gaze caught on Lily, then Tess, the grin faded a little.

“Hey, Doc,” Tyler said. “I heard you went through a rough spell. You feeling better?”

“I’ll be all right, thanks to Dylan and Jim Huntinghorse,” Hal replied. “I went toes-up at Logan’s place, during a barbecue, and they gave me CPR. I’d be six feet under if it hadn’t been for those two.”

Tyler gave a low whistle. “Close call,” he said. In high school, he’d been cute. Now, he was drop-dead gorgeous. His eyes were the same clear blue, though, and his dark hair still glistened, sleek as a raven’s wings. “Lily,” he added, in grave greeting.

“Get in,” Hal said. “We’ll give you a lift to Stillwater Springs.”

“Don’t you have a car?” Tess ventured, fascinated, straining in the hated “baby seat” to get a look at the dog.

Tyler grinned again, and Lily’s stomach dipped like a roller coaster plunging down steep and very rickety tracks. “It broke down on a side road,” he explained. “No tow trucks available, so Kit Carson and I started hoofing it for home.”

“Hoofing it?” Tess echoed, confused.

“Walking,” Lily translated.

Tyler chuckled.

“Well, get in,” Hal said. “That sun’s hot enough to bake a man’s brain.”

Tyler opened the right rear door of the Taurus, and he and Kit Carson took their places alongside Tess, the dog in the middle. Delighted, Tess shared the last of her crackers with Kit.

“Obliged,” Tyler said.

“My daddy died when I was four,” Tess said. “In a plane crash.”

Lily tensed. Oddly, Tess often confided the great tragedy of her short life in strangers. With counselors and well-meaning friends, she tended to clam up.

“I’m sorry to hear that, shortstop,” Tyler told her.

“Is hoofing it the same as hitchhiking?” Tess asked. “Because hitchhiking is very dangerous. That’s what Mom says.”

Lily felt Tyler’s gaze on the back of her neck, practically branding her sweaty flesh.

“Your mom’s right,” Tyler answered. “But Kit and I didn’t have much choice, as it turned out.”

“You could have called Logan or Dylan,” Hal said.

Lily wondered at the note of caution in her father’s voice, but she was too busy merging back onto the highway to pursue the thought very far.

“Cold day in hell,” Tyler said.

Lily cleared her throat.

“Cold day in heck, then,” he amended wryly.

“Who are Logan and Dylan?” Tess asked.

“My half brothers,” Tyler replied, belatedly buckling his seat belt.

“Don’t you like them?” Tess wanted to know.

“We had a falling out,” Tyler said.

“What’s that?” Tess persisted.

Risking a glance in the rearview mirror, Lily saw him ruffle Tess’s dark blond hair. She had Burke’s green eyes, and his outgoing personality, too. Telling her not to talk to strangers was pretty much a waste of time—not that Tyler Creed was a stranger, strictly speaking.

“A fight,” Tyler said.

“Oh,” Tess said, sounding intrigued. “I like your dog.”

“Me, too.”

Lily sat ramrod-straight in the sticky vinyl seat. Concentrated on her driving. She’d thought a lot about Tyler Creed since she’d hurried out to Montana to keep a vigil at her father’s bedside, but she hadn’t expected to actually run into him. He was a famous rodeo cowboy, after all—a sometime stuntman and actor, and he did commercials, too.

People like that were, well, transitory. Weren’t they?

Wandering through her kitchen with a basket of laundry one day a few years before, she’d glimpsed him on the countertop TV, hawking boxer-briefs, and had to sit down because of heart palpitations. Burke, an airline pilot by profession, had been between flights, and asked her what was the matter.

She’d said she was getting her period, and felt woozy.

She’d felt woozy, all right, but it had nothing to do with her cycle.

“Grampa and I wanted hamburgers for lunch,” Tess informed her fellow passenger, “but she said it would clog our arterials, so now we have to wait and eat salad with tofu .”

“Ouch,” Tyler commented. “That bites.”

Lily pushed down harder on the accelerator.

“Where shall we drop you off?” she asked sunnily, when they finally, finally hit the outskirts of Stillwater Springs. The place looked pretty much the same—a little shabbier, a little smaller.

“The car-repair place,” Tyler replied.

Lily had forgotten how sparely he used words, never saying two when one would do. She’d also forgotten that he smelled like laundry dried in fresh air and sunlight, even after he’d been loading or unloading hay bales all day. Or walking along a highway under a blazing summer sun. That his mouth tilted up at one corner when he was amused, and his hair was always a shade too long. The way his clothes fit him, and how he seemed so comfortable in his own skin…

Do not think about skin, Lily told herself, aware that her father was watching her intently out of the corner of his eye, and that that eye was twinkling.

“Thanks for the ride,” Tyler said, when they pulled up to the only mechanic’s garage in town. Kit Carson jumped out after him.

“Bye!” Tess called, as though she and Tyler Creed were old friends.

“Anytime,” Lily lied.

He walked away, without looking back.

Just as he had that last summer, when Lily, high on teenage passion and exactly half a bottle of light beer, had proposed marriage to him. He’d said they were both too young, and ought to cool it for a while, before they got in too deep.

Lily had been crushed, then mortified.

Tyler had simply walked away. Later, she’d learned that while he was dating her, ending every evening with a chaste peck on the cheek and a “sleep tight,” he’d passed what remained of the night in bed with a divorced waitress twice his age.

The memory of that discovery still stung Lily to the quick.

He’d written songs for her, sung them to her in a low vibrato, aching with heart, played them on his guitar.

He’d taken her to movies, and for long walks along moonlit country roads.

He’d won three teddy bears and a four-foot stuffed giraffe at the county fair, and given them to her.

And all the time, he’d been boinking a waitress with a hot body and a Harley-Davidson tattoo on her right forearm.

Lily was a grown woman, a widow, with a young daughter, a sick father and a successful career in merchandising under her belt. And damn, it still hurt to remember that the songs and the movies and the romantic walks had meant nothing to him.

Nothing to him, everything to her.

“Water under the bridge,” her father commented quietly. “Let’s go home, Lily.”

Let’s go home, Lily.

Hal had said that the night she’d come to the clinic, where he was working late, after the breakup with Tyler, carrying her bleeding, broken heart in her hands. She’d cried, and said she never wanted to see Tyler Creed again as long as she lived. Hal’s jaw had tightened, and he’d put an arm around her shoulders, held her close for a few moments.

He’s Jake Creed’s boy, honey, Hal had said. They’re poison, those Creeds. Every one of them. You’re better off without him.

She’d sobbed, destroyed as only a betrayed seventeen-year-old can be. But I love him, Dad, she’d protested.

Let’s go home, Lily, he’d repeated. You’ll get over Tyler. You’ll see.

And she had gotten over Tyler Creed.

Or at least, she’d thought so, until today.

Now, she sucked it up, for Tess’s sake, and her own. Drove toward the house where she’d grown up, a happy kid—until her parents’ sudden and acrimonious divorce when she was eleven. Until Tyler shattered her heart, and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men, plus a certain dashing and very handsome airline pilot, had failed to put it back together again.

The big Victorian hadn’t changed, either, except for a few drooping rain gutters and peeling paint on the wooden shutters.

A blond woman in jeans stood on the wraparound porch, waving and smiling as they pulled up.

“Kristy Madison,” Lily said aloud, cheered.

“Creed, now,” Hal said. “She married Dylan a while back.”

Kristy came down the porch steps, through the open gate in the picket fence, which sagged a little on its hinges. When Hal hauled himself slowly out of the car, Kristy greeted him with a hug.

“We’ve all missed you,” she told him. “Welcome back.”

Lily peeled herself off the car seat and got out to stand in the road, while Tess scrambled out of the back.

“Hi, Lily,” Kristy said. “It’s good to see you again.” Her dark blue eyes drifted to Tess, who was just rounding the front of the car. “And you must be Tess.”

Tess nodded eagerly, probably pleased that someone in this strange new place knew her. “My daddy died in a plane crash,” she said. “When I was four.”

“I’m so sorry,” Kristy said gently.

“Are there any kids my age in this town?” Tess asked. “I’d sure like to play with some of them, if there are.”

Kristy smiled, and her gaze met Lily’s for a moment, then went immediately back to Tess’s upturned face. “I can think of several,” she said. “In the meantime, though, let’s get your grandfather inside. Lunch is on the table.”

Weary gratitude swept through Lily. Just as she’d forgotten so much about Tyler, she’d also forgotten the nature of small towns like Stillwater Springs. When someone got sick or fell on hard times, people rallied. They aired out rooms and made beds up with clean sheets and set lunch out on the kitchen table.

“I’m plum tuckered,” Hal said. “Believe I’ll take a nap on my own bed.”

He went on inside, while Lily, Kristy and Tess followed at a slower pace.

“I hope you don’t mind,” Kristy said to Lily. “Briana—that’s my sister-in-law, Logan’s wife—and I got the keys from your dad’s next-door neighbor and spiffed the house up a little.”

Again, Lily’s eyes burned. In Chicago, she’d had millions of acquaintances and clients, but no close friends. Back in the day, she and Kristy had spent a lot of time together.

“You must be worn-out,” Kristy said, reading her face. “After lunch, why don’t you lie down and rest for a while, and I’ll take Tess over to the library for story hour.”

Lily had kept her guard up for so long, living in the big city, coping with all things hectic, that letting it down left her a little dizzy. “Would you like that?” she asked Tess. “To go to the library, I mean?”

“Yes,” Tess answered. Not a major surprise; the child had taught herself to read at three.

Lunch turned out to be fresh iced tea, tuna sandwiches and potato salad. Lily fixed a plate for her dad and took it to his room off the kitchen, and when she returned, she sat down with Tess and Kristy in that dearly familiar room and ate, actually tasting her food for the first time since she’d gotten the call about her father’s heart attack.

Kristy, she remembered, had gotten in touch soon afterward. And Dylan, an old friend, had come on the line moments later, to reassure her and offer her the use of a private plane.

“You look happy,” she told Kristy, when Tess had finished eating and rushed off to explore a little before washing up for the trip to the library.

“I am,” Kristy said, glowing. Then she reached across and squeezed Lily’s hand briefly. “Things will get better,” she promised. “You’re home, among friends, and your dad’s going to be fine.”

Lily laughed, but it was a halfhearted sound, weary and a little—no, a lot—skeptical. “If you say so,” she said. “Thanks for everything you did, Kristy. And thank Briana, too. Wherever she is.”

Kristy smiled, pushed back her chair and stood to begin clearing the table. “You’ll meet her soon enough,” she assured Lily. “She and Logan are building on to their house, and she had to go home to talk to the contractor.”

Logan was married, and building on to his house.

Kristy was obviously happy with Dylan.

And Tyler was probably still sleeping with waitresses—if he hadn’t graduated to sexy movie stars and supermodels.

As if she cared.