Montana Creeds: Tyler. Linda Miller Lael

out. “You’ll wear them.”

      Kit Carson greeted them at the door when they got to Cassie’s, probably relieved to learn that he hadn’t been dumped there for the duration. Not that Cassie wouldn’t have been good to him—she was a little rough around the edges, Cassie was, but she had a gentle soul, a heart for lost dogs. And lost boys.

      “Picking up strays now?” she asked, under the bug-flecked cone of light on her porch, watching as Davie hoisted Kit Carson into the back of the borrowed Blazer.

      Tyler grinned. “Just carrying on the tradition,” he said.

      Stillwater Springs was a small town. Cassie, having lived there since before the Battle of the Little Big Horn, had to know Davie, and his mother, too. Maybe she even remembered the summer Tyler had spent in Doreen’s bed, in the little room above Skivvie’s Tavern, learning to be a man.

      “Is he yours?” she asked, proving Tyler’s theory.

      “Could be,” Tyler answered. “His mother denies it, but she could have lots of reasons for doing that.”

      “Like what?” Cassie countered reasonably.

      “Like not wanting me to have a claim on him, back when he was little and she could still handle him,” Tyler said. “Doreen was always independent to a fault. Maybe there’s still a little of that left in her, even now.”

      “This is going to complicate your life,” Cassie predicted, sounding resigned.

      “Maybe my life has gotten too simple,” Tyler replied.

      “Spoken like a true Creed,” Cassie retorted, but she was smiling—with her mouth, anyway. Her dark eyes were serious. “Folks have long memories, Tyler. Everybody—including Lily Ryder—is going to recall what happened between you and Doreen, and put two and two together.”

      Tyler sighed. He hadn’t let on to anybody that Lily was on his mind, but Cassie knew him too well to be fooled by lies of omission. “Is she involved with anybody? Remarried maybe?” he asked, his voice sounding husky. He wouldn’t have put that particular question to anyone else on earth, not even Lily. His pride wouldn’t have allowed that. But Cassie, a wise middle-aged Native American with a teepee in her yard, was like a grandmother to him.

      “No,” Cassie said. And she put a hand on his arm, a signal that she was about to say something he wouldn’t want to hear. “Her husband was a pilot. He killed himself two years ago.”

      Suicide.

      Tyler closed his eyes, thrust right back into the bad old days as surely and suddenly as if he’d stumbled into a time warp. He might have been a kid again, not a man standing on Cassie’s front porch, but a boy hiding on the other side of the kitchen door, out at the home place, listening as Sheriff Floyd Book, Jim Huntinghorse’s legendary predecessor, broke the news to Jake.

       Angie’s dead. I’m so sorry. We found her at the Skylight Motel, on the old state highway. It was an overdose, Jake… .

      Tyler had heard a wail, primitive and piercing, and thought it was Jake.

      He’d only realized the sound was coming from his own throat when Dylan and Logan each took one of his arms and hauled him up off his knees, braced him between them.

      Cassie squeezed his arm, hard, brought him back from the abyss, the place where the questions never stopped.

      All of them started with the same word.

       Why?

      “What could be that bad?” he rasped. “A wife like Lily. A little girl like Tess. What would make a man throw them away?”

      “You’re trying to understand again,” Cassie pointed out gently. “And there is no understanding, Tyler. People are fragile. They can break. It’s as simple—and as complicated—as that.”

       Don’t try to understand.

      How many times had he heard that advice, from how many people? Dylan, certainly. Logan, too. Even his late wife, Shawna, when she’d been trying to pull him out of some slump. And it wasn’t the first time Cassie had offered it, either.

      The problem was, he couldn’t help going over the old ground, looking for clues. Analyzing. His mother’s suicide was the reason for so many things that had happened—and not happened—in his life. It drove him half-crazy sometimes, the need to know why she’d done it. Why she hadn’t been able to hold on, leave Jake, make a new start somewhere else.

      “You’ll be seeing Lily, I suppose?” Cassie ventured.

      “We’re having dinner tomorrow night,” Tyler answered, braced for more advice.

       Leave it alone, Cassie had told him, after the breakup that summer, when he’d wanted to go back to Lily, beg her to forgive him for sleeping with Doreen, give him another chance.

       Forget the girl, Jake had counseled. She’s too good for you, anyway .

       Are you nuts? Logan had demanded, after bouncing him off the back wall of the barn a couple of times. Rolling in the hay with a waitress twice your age when Lily’s crazy about you?

      Sometimes, the voices from the past crowded in like that, made Tyler want to put his hands over his ears. Not that that would have shut them out.

      What had happened, had happened.

      What was done, was done.

      So why couldn’t he just let his poor mother rest in peace?

      Why couldn’t he forgive her for breaking down that final time?

      The realization hit him hard.

      That was why he’d come home to Stillwater Springs, left the rodeo and the big-money stunt work and photo shoots behind, sold his big, empty house in L.A. and traded his Escalade for a junker that wouldn’t even run.

      He’d come back to take on all the old ghosts, one by one or in a snarling pack, however they came at him. Win or lose, the fight was on.

      Would he still be standing when it was all over?

      There was only one way to find out.

      And he was through running away.

       CHAPTER FIVE

       A FTER SERVING HER FATHER and daughter a healthy breakfast—grapefruit, whole-wheat toast and scrambled egg whites—Lily sneaked into her dad’s study to pick up the phone.

      She’d call Tyler—she’d decided that while tossing and turning the night before. Tell him she couldn’t go out to dinner with him after all. Backpedal like crazy, tell an outright lie if she had to, say anything to get out of that hastily made date.

      Except that she didn’t have his number.

      She could get it from Kristy, of course. Call her or just walk over to the library and ask. Since Tyler was Kristy’s brother-in-law now, she’d surely know how to reach him.

      Her eyes fell on her dad’s tattered address book. Hal had always disapproved of Tyler Creed, but now, after picking Ty up alongside the road the day before, it seemed the man was her dad’s new best friend. Maybe the number was right there, within easy reach.

      It would be so much easier if she didn’t have to contact Kristy, either in person or over the telephone.

      Lily had flipped to the C s—the book was jammed with tattered sticky notes, names and numbers scrawled helter-skelter on each one, all of them stuck in at odd and dizzying angles—and was scanning for Tyler’s contact information, when Hal walked in.

      “Need something?” he asked, with a slight smile.

      Lily swallowed hard. “Tyler’s number,” she said. There, it was out there. Let him make of it what he would.