Montana Creeds: Tyler Read online

  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.”