Cowboy Country: The Creed Legacy / Blame It on the Cowboy. Delores Fossen

an hour after hanging up with Lisa, and loaded it into his truck.

      Carolyn, still flushed from their lovemaking earlier in the evening, had been smiling in her sleep when he leaned over and placed a kiss as light as a whisper on her forehead. Except for a note, hastily scrawled and left next to the coffeemaker on the counter beside the back door, that kiss was all the goodbye he could manage.

      There was no way to sugar-coat it, then or now. He’d skipped out on her.

      End of story.

      All during the long drive to San Antonio, where Lisa was living at the time, though, it had been Carolyn haunting Brody’s heart and mind, not the woman he was heading for in that beat-up old truck, not the life they would make together, him and Lisa and the baby.

      Before Lisa’s call, he’d been this close to telling Carolyn he loved her, that he wanted to marry her. Start a family as soon as they were settled.

      He’d planned to make up with his kin, too, and, if they’d have him, make a home right there on the ranch.

      Fortunately, Brody reflected, remembering his long-ago honorable intentions, he’d had enough sense to override that particular impulse, on the grounds that he and Carolyn had only known each other for about ten days, and that flat-out wasn’t long enough for anything real to get started.

      Reaching San Antonio, he’d driven to Lisa’s tiny rental house, hoisted her few belongings into the back of his truck and the two of them had headed straight for Las Vegas. Within a couple of days, they were man and wife, setting out to follow the rodeo.

      They’d been happy enough together, Brody supposed. Especially after the baby came.

      Marriage hadn’t cured Brody’s penchant for Carolyn, though. He’d been with Lisa for about a month, when, one night in a seedy bar, after guzzling too much beer with some of his bull-riding buddies, he’d tracked down the pay phone and punched in Davis and Kim’s number, without a hope in hell that Carolyn would answer.

      By then, she’d surely have finished her house-sitting stint and moved on, but he had to try. If Kim answered, he’d ask her how to reach Carolyn. Beyond that, he had no clue how to get in touch with the woman he still loved.

      Miraculously, though, Carolyn did answer the phone. His aunt and uncle were on the road again, she’d said, and then she’d fallen silent, waited for him to explain himself.

      He’d meant to, but it didn’t happen. Brody was thrown and then hog-tied by his own tongue and, in the end, all he said was that ever-inadequate phrase, I’m sorry.

      Carolyn had hung up on him then, and justifiably so. Brody had stood in the corridor of that dive of a bar, with his hand still on the receiver and his forehead against the graffiti-covered wall, feeling as though he’d been gut-punched.

      After that night, Brody had kept his alcohol consumption to a minimum. He knew Lisa loved him, and he’d made up his mind, then and there, to love her back. Even if it killed him.

      It had taken some doing, but he had come to care for his pretty young wife, especially after their son, Justin, was born. One look at that kid, and Brody would have done anything—given up anything—for him.

      And he had given up things he’d once believed he couldn’t do without.

      Carolyn.

      The old and tired dream of going home, setting things right with his family, settling down to a rancher’s life. He wanted to show Justin off to the folks, but he was scared shitless of running into Carolyn, so he stayed away.

      He’d regret that particular choice forever, probably, because three weeks before he would have turned two, Justin was killed in a car wreck, along with Lisa.

      The pain of remembering that time was as fresh as ever, and it nearly doubled Brody over, even now. He’d quit the rodeo after the accident, and stayed drunk for a solid year.

      Eventually, he sobered up, but he stayed mad at the world, and he stayed ashamed. More in need of his home and family than ever, he’d denied himself both—as a sort of self-punishment, he supposed.

      If he hadn’t been off riding bulls, after all, he’d have been driving that snowy night, not Lisa. He might have been able to avoid the drunk driver doing ninety on the wrong side of the freeway.

      And if he’d brought his wife and son home, where they belonged, the greatest tragedy of his life might never have happened.

      It was all about choices, Brody reflected, forcibly hauling himself back into the present moment again. The past was over. A man made choices, and then he had to live with the consequences, whether they were good, bad or indifferent.

      Brody squared his shoulders, walked on toward the small log structure where he’d been bunking for too damn long.

      He switched on the lights as he stepped over the threshold, but two of the three long fluorescent bulbs in the ceiling fixture were burned out, the third flickering ominously, and the ambience was just plain gloomy.

      The original furnishings were gone, except for the long counter that had served as a sign-in place for campers, when Joe McCall was still running River’s Bend, and the ancient woodstove. Brody slept on a roll-away bed he’d borrowed from Kim and Davis, never made up now that he and Joleen were in an “off” stage of the on-again-off-again thing they had going. He’d had a shower installed in the small rest room, and he did his laundry either at the Wash-and-Go on Main Street or out at the ranch. He owned a double-burner hot plate and a minifridge with a microwave the size of a matchbox sitting on top, and his desktop computer served as TV, DVD player and general, all-around communication device. He used a cell phone when he had something to say to somebody, or he went to see them in person, face-to-face.

      What a concept.

      Tricia’s dad had always referred to the shack as a lodge.

      Brody called it a log cabin—or a shit-hole, depending on his frame of mind.

      That night, despite his best efforts to alter his attitude, it was a shit-hole.

      * * *

      HE’D KISSED HER.

      Try though she might, even after the ride on Blossom and the meandering drive back to town, Carolyn could not get past the fact that Brody Creed had had the nerve, the unmitigated gall, after all he’d done to her, to haul right off and kiss her.

      “Unbelievable,” she told Winston in the apartment kitchen as she set his nightly kibble ration down in front of him. “The man is unbelievable.”

      “Reow,” Winston agreed, though he went straight to his food dish.

      Carolyn shoved up one T-shirt sleeve, then the other, still agitated. She was hungry, but not hungry enough to cook. Remembering the flat bologna sandwiches from lunch, she went downstairs, retrieved them from the refrigerator in Natty’s former kitchen and pounded back up the inside steps.

      She tossed one wrapped sandwich into her own fridge—maybe she’d have it for breakfast—and slowly removed the plastic from the other one.

      Winston was still noshing away on his kibble.

      Carolyn washed her hands and then plunked down in a chair at the table, along with her sewing machine, the day’s mail and a rapidly cooling cup of herbal tea.

      “I’m talking to a cat,” she told the cat.

      Winston didn’t look up from his bowl. “It’s pathetic,” Carolyn went on. She took a bite out of her sandwich, and it was soggy, tasteless. The crusts of the bread were curling a little, too, and none of that even slowed her down. The meal wasn’t about fine dining, after all. It was about making her stomach stop grumbling. “I’m pathetic. And do you know what, Winston? I’m no closer to achieving my goals than I was last year, or the year before that, or the year before that—”

      Winston paused at last, gave her a disapproving glance for talking with her mouth full and finished off the last of his supper.