Montana Creeds: Dylan. Linda Miller Lael

offer, for a nanosecond. Then he remembered Madeline’s penchant for impromptu sex, the smell of stale pot smoke that permeated her condo and the bowl of colorfully packaged condoms in the middle of her coffee table.

      “Uh—no,” he said. “She’s pretty tired.”

      He sensed another huff building up beneath Madeline’s drawl. “Then why did you bother to call at all?” she purred. In a moment, the claws would be out, poised to rip him to bloody shreds.

      “I need my stuff,” Dylan admitted, ducking his head a little, the way he had on the playground when he was a kid, in anticipation of a blow. “If you’d just put it all in a cab and send it this way, I’d be obliged.”

      “I wouldn’t think of doing that,” Madeline said. “I’ll drop it all off on my way to the club.” Her slight emphasis on the last two words was a clear message—if he was going to be a no-show, far be it from her to sit home alone watching pay-per-view.

      “Madeline, you don’t have to—”

      “South Point? That’s where you said you are, isn’t it?”

      “Yes, but—”

      She hung up on him.

      Dylan sat down on the edge of his bed, opposite Bonnie’s, and propped his elbows on his thighs. Madeline would want to come straight up to the room, probably to see if he’d lied about the company he was keeping, and he didn’t want her waking Bonnie. But unless he could talk Madeline into sending his things up with a bellman, which didn’t seem likely, he’d have no other choice.

      He’d have to leave Bonnie alone to go downstairs, and that wasn’t an option.

      Twenty minutes later, the phone rang, causing Bonnie to stir in the depths of some baby-dream, and he pounced on it, whispered, “Hello?”

      “I’m downstairs,” Madeline said. “What’s your room number, sweetie?”

      Dylan suppressed another sigh. God, he hated being called “sweetie.” “Twelve-forty-two,” he said.

      Madeline, a leggy redhead, almost as tall as he was, at six feet, whisked her shapely self to his door with no measurable delay. Looking through the peephole, he saw that she was flanked by a bellman with a loaded cart. Her shiny mouth was tight, and her eyes narrowed slightly.

      Reluctantly, Dylan admitted her.

      She immediately scanned the room, her gaze landing on Bonnie, while the bellman waited politely to unload some of the stuff from the cart. Dylan handed him a tip and brought in the laptop, his shaving kit and his suitcase himself.

      “She is precious!” Madeline enthused, looming over Bonnie’s bed.

      “Be quiet,” Dylan said. “She’s had a rough day.” A rough life was more like it. As soon as he got rid of Madeline, he’d bite the bullet and call Logan. They’d made some progress lately, he and his older brother, but the ground could get rocky at any time, and asking big brother for help was going to be hard on his pride.

      Madeline put a shh finger to her plump mouth and batted her false eyelashes. Put her in a big Vegas headdress, with feathers and spangles, a skimpy costume, high heels and fishnet stockings, and Bonnie, if she chanced to wake up and see a stranger standing over her, would have nightmares about showgirls until she died of old age.

      He took Madeline by the elbow and gave her the bum’s rush toward the door. “Good night, thank you, and what do I owe you for the favor?”

      She patted his cheek. “We’ll settle up next time you come through Vegas,” she said. She paused. “The hotel could probably provide a babysitter, then we could—”

      “No,” Dylan said flatly.

      Blessedly, and none too soon, Madeline left.

      Dylan showered, shaved, brushed his teeth and headed for bed in his boxer briefs; he hadn’t owned a pair of pajamas since grade school.

      But he had Bonnie to think about now. He couldn’t go parading around in front of a two-year-old in his shorts—even if she was asleep.

      Fatherhood, he thought, was getting more complicated by the minute. Especially since he didn’t know jack-shit about it—his experience had been limited to a few brief visits with Bonnie whenever Sharlene deigned to light someplace for a month.

      He pulled on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, and then he crashed.

      He’d call Logan the next day, he promised himself. Or the next day, or the one after that …

      KRISTY MADISON BUSTLED around her big kitchen, opening a can of food for her white Persian cat, Winston, gathering her notes for that night’s book-club meeting at the library, grabbing her cell phone off the counter where she’d been charging it during a quick trip home for supper.

      She wished she could stay in tonight, soak in her big claw-foot bathtub and read a book, but the reading group had been her idea, after all. And it had turned out to be a popular one—twenty-six people had signed up.

      Privately, Kristy wondered how many of them simply wanted a close-up look at Briana, Logan Creed’s love interest. Before Briana had taken up with Logan, she’d been just another single mother, pulling down a paycheck at the casino on the outskirts of Stillwater Springs, homeschooling her two boys, Josh and Alec, and generally minding her own business.

      Kristy bit her lower lip. Thinking of Logan inevitably led to thinking about Dylan, and that was still too painful, even though it had been five years since she’d seen him. He’d been in town recently—the busybodies had made sure she knew—but he hadn’t sought her out, and she’d been half again too proud to chase him down.

      Looking at her own reflection in the dark glass of the kitchen window, Kristy saw a slender woman with fashionably mussed, midlength blond hair, blue eyes and good bone structure. But there were shadows under those eyes, her hair needed a trim, and what the hell good did bone structure do a person, anyway? She looked okay in the picture on her driver’s license—that was the extent of the advantage, as far as she’d been able to determine.

      Winston, ignoring his food bowl, gave a loud and plaintive meow and slithered across the cuffs of Kristy’s black jeans, leaving a dusting of snow-white hair.

      Now, she’d have to lint-roll—again.

      Other women carried mints and lipstick in their purses—Kristy had a tape-covered stick.

      “I know,” she told Winston gently. “You want to cuddle and watch Animal Planet, but I’ve got to work tonight.”

      Winston’s reply was another meow—this time, he’d turned the “pitiful” meter up a few notches.

      “You can have an extra mackerel treat when I get home,” Kristy promised. “I won’t be late—nine-thirty at the outside.”

      Winston, unappeased, turned and made his way between the various paint cans and wallpaper samples littering the kitchen floor. With a disdainful flip of his bushy white tail, he disappeared into the dining room.

      Kristy had been renovating her big Victorian house forever, or so it seemed. She was used to tripping over stuff from Home Depot, and so was Winston, but all of a sudden, it seemed more like a never-ending hassle than the noble restoration effort she’d undertaken as soon as she’d signed the mortgage papers.

      “I’m tired of my life,” she told her reflection. “I want a new one.”

      “Too bad,” her reflection replied. “You made your bed, and now you have to sleep in it. Alone.”

      No husband. No children.

      A few more birthdays, a few more cats, and she’d qualify as a crazy old maid. Kids would start saying she was a witch, and avoid her house on Halloween.

      Kristy turned away from her window-self, tugged her purse strap