Montana Creeds: Dylan. Linda Miller Lael

when a kid started crying and wouldn’t stop.

      The knock at the back door startled him.

      Careful not to wake Bonnie, he stood, carried her with him through the kitchen, crossing the dark place worn into the linoleum by decades of passing feet.

      Tyler peered in at him through the glass.

      Dylan scowled a little, then nodded.

      Tyler came in. “Is that old bull in the pasture yours?” he asked, as though nary a harsh word, let alone a fist, had ever flown back and forth between them.

      “Yes,” Dylan answered, whispering. “Do you know anything about kids?”

      Tyler grinned. “Only that that’s about the cutest one I’ve ever seen.”

      Bonnie stirred against Dylan’s chest, whimpered a little. Her face felt hot against his shoulder, even through the cloth of his shirt. He carried her into the bedroom, laid her down carefully on the bed, made sure the inked-up rubber doll with the wild hair was within reach, and sneaked back out into the kitchen.

      By that time, Tyler was going through the cupboards.

      “No whiskey?” he asked.

      “I’m a beer man these days,” Dylan answered quietly, wondering what the unexpected visit was all about. Five would get you ten it wasn’t a social call. “In the fridge.”

      Tyler opened the refrigerator door, recoiled as if he’d found a live rattler coiled inside. “The cheap brand?”

      “Beer is beer. Keep it down, will you? The kid’s been screaming for three hours straight and she’ll probably start up again if you wake her.”

      Tyler extracted a can from the six-pack and popped the top. His expression was unreadable. “Is she sick or something?”

      “I don’t know. Her forehead felt kind of warm when I was holding her a minute ago.”

      So much for the inscrutable singing cowboy. Tyler looked alarmed. He set aside his beer—hell, it was the cheap brand, anyway—headed for the bedroom and bent over Bonnie, touching the backs of his fingers to her cheek.

      He frowned, gazing at Dylan, who stood in the doorway.

      Back in the kitchen, Tyler said, “I think she has a fever. You got any baby aspirin?”

      “No,” Dylan said, more scared than he was about to let Tyler see. “She was upset earlier—like I said, she cried a lot—it’s probably just that.”

      “Why was she crying?” Tyler demanded, as though he thought Dylan had been pinching the kid or something.

      “She wanted her mother,” Dylan answered. Tyler wasn’t much comfort, but he was better than nothing.

      “oh,” Tyler said, picking up his beer again, taking a swallow.

      “Yeah, oh,” Dylan said, annoyed.

      “I still think we should take her to a doctor.”

      “Gee, all this concern. It’s almost like having a brother.”

      Tyler frowned angrily. “I’m going to town to get some baby aspirin,” he said. “While I’m there, I’ll ask the pharmacist if he thinks Bonnie needs medical attention.”

      In spite of himself, in spite of all that had gone down between him and Tyler over the years, Dylan felt a sudden rush of relief, and something a lot like affection. He was swallowing the lump that had risen in his throat when Tyler went on, already headed for the door.

      “I’ll be back,” he said.

      A few moments later, Dylan heard his brother’s rig start up outside.

      He checked on Bonnie again—he’d have sworn she did have a fever—but decided to do his pacing in the kitchen so he wouldn’t disturb her sleep.

      When Tyler blew in again, forty-five minutes later, he had baby aspirin, cough medicine, a stuffed animal of indeterminate species and a digital thermometer.

      “If this thing reads above a one-oh-one, according to the pharmacist, Bonnie should be taken to the emergency room.”

      Dylan frowned, examining the unfamiliar plastic stick in its bright green box. “Where does this thing—go?”

      Tyler chuckled. He made quite a picture, standing there in Dylan’s kitchen, full of avuncular concern. The bad-ass cowboy, spilling a toy dog, if that was what it was, along with a bottle of aspirin and a carton of children’s cough syrup onto the table.

      “In her ear, shit-for-brains,” he said.

      “Oh,” Dylan said, squinting at the instructions on the back of the box.

      Tyler grabbed the whole works right out of his hand. “Give me that,” he said, after the fact. “Bill—that’s the pharmacist—told me how to use it.”

      “Great,” Dylan said.

      “I ran into a friend of yours while I was at the drugstore,” Tyler added, as an aside. “You might get company any minute now.”

      “What?” Dylan asked, irritated all over again.

      Tyler grinned, rummaging in the drugstore bag again and pulling out a packet with a sterile wipe inside. Damned if he hadn’t thought of everything, old Uncle Ty. “The thing’s got to be sanitized,” he said.

      “Who—?”

      Tyler wiped down the thermometer, dispensing with all those offensive Dylan germs, and headed for Bonnie.

      “Ninety-eight point seven,” he announced, in a low but triumphant voice, after gently easing the end of the thermometer into Bonnie’s right ear. “She’s probably fine.”

      Suddenly, Dylan felt unaccountably territorial.

      Bonnie was his daughter. He should have been the one taking her temperature.

      As if in direct response to his thought, she woke up at precisely that moment, looked around, and let out one long, piercing shriek, followed by a plaintive, “Mommmmmmeeeee!”

      “I see what you mean,” Tyler said.

      vaguely, Dylan heard a knock at the back door. He tried to pick Bonnie up, but she flailed both arms and kicked like she’d been raised by wolves.

      And then Kristy swept in, like an avenging goddess, and scooped Bonnie up into her arms.

      “There, now,” she murmured, stroking Bonnie’s back. Gradually—very gradually—blessed silence filled the room. “I’m here, sweetie. I’m here. Everything will be all right.”

      Over Bonnie’s head, Kristy gave Dylan a what-were-you-doing-to-her kind of glare.

      “She was out of cat litter,” Tyler explained.

      “Huh?” Dylan asked, stung by Kristy’s look and, at the same time, glad as hell that she was there.

      “That’s why I happened to run into Kristy at the store. She stopped by for a bag of cat litter.”

      “You could have warned me,” Dylan growled, after Kristy had carried Bonnie out of the bedroom.

      “Ah, hell,” Tyler answered smugly. “That wouldn’t have been any fun at all.”

      CHAPTER FIVE

      SOMETHING HAPPENED to Kristy, as she held Dylan’s child, there in that old, run-down ranch house that warm summer night. Something sacred and inexplicable and eternal, the kind of shift that comes along once or twice in a lifetime, if that often. It was like the meeting and melding of two colliding universes, at a quantum level.

      Bonnie seemed to feel it, too. She looked up at Kristy with wide, startled eyes, then flung both her small arms around Kristy’s neck and