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

out with Brody?”

      “Oh, right.”

      “What can it hurt? The two of you go out for a bite to eat, maybe take in a movie? Harmless fun.”

      “Nothing about Brody Creed is harmless,” Carolyn said, with conviction.

      “True,” Tricia agreed, wide-eyed. “But is that the kind of man you really want? Somebody harmless, who makes zero impact?”

      “He scares me,” Carolyn admitted. The words were out before she’d had a chance to vet them as something she actually wanted to say out loud. And Brody did scare her, because no one, not even her feckless mother, had ever had as much power to hurt her, to crush her, as he did.

      “One date,” Tricia negotiated. “You set the terms. How bad can that be?”

      “Trust me,” Carolyn said, “it can be really bad.”

      “He must have done you a number,” Tricia ventured, meddling again and showing no signs of apologizing for it. “You can tell me, Carolyn.”

      “Like I told Kim?”

      Tricia made the cross-my-heart motion with her right hand and then held it up in the oath position. “I will tell no one. Not even Conner.”

      Carolyn sighed. She turned to Tricia and, against years of conditioning, took a chance. “Brody was passing through Lonesome Bend,” she said wearily, like an old-fashioned record player on slow speed. “It was years ago. I was house-sitting for Kim and Davis, and he—well, he just showed up on their doorstep. Something happened. Then something else happened. The next thing I knew, we’d been sharing a bed for a week and I was crazy in love with Brody Creed. We were making plans for a future together—babies, pets, a house somewhere on the ranch, the whole thing. Brody was going to reconcile with Conner, and with his aunt and uncle, and we were going to get married. Then, one morning, I woke up and found a note. ‘Something came up,’ he said, and he had to leave. That was it. He was gone.”

      “Oh,” Tricia said, absorbing the story like an impact. “You didn’t hear from him again?”

      “He called me a month later, drunk out of his mind. It was worse than not hearing from him at all.”

      “I’m so sorry,” Tricia whispered, looking so broken that Carolyn immediately forgot her own pain.

      “Don’t,” Carolyn said. “Don’t agonize over this, Tricia. It’s ancient history. But you know what they say about history—those who fail to learn from it are condemned to repeat it.”

      “I love my brother-in-law,” Tricia said, “but right now, I could wring his neck.”

      “The last thing I want is to turn you against Brody,” Carolyn told her friend. “He’s your husband’s brother, Tricia. Your baby’s uncle. It would be so, so wrong if what I’ve told you caused problems within the family. I couldn’t bear that—families are precious.”

      Tricia hugged her, briefly but hard. “Don’t worry about me,” she said. “You need to do what’s right for you, Carolyn. When was the last time you put yourself first?”

      Carolyn searched her mind, then her soul, for an honest reply. “Always,” she said. “And never.”

      Tricia was quiet for a long, long time. Then she said, “In the beginning, when I was first attracted to Conner, I mean, I resisted my feelings with every ounce of strength I could muster. I was so afraid. Nothing in my life had ever prepared me to believe in happy endings—not my parents’ brief marriage or, after I was grown up, my own relationships. Nothing worked. Ever. Somewhere along the line, I decided that true love was something that happened in books and movies, and to other, luckier people, and that I was better off alone, because that way, I couldn’t be hurt.” She stopped, her eyes searching Carolyn’s. “Pretty stupid, huh? Only one thing hurt worse than I thought loving and losing Conner Creed would, and that was not allowing myself to take the risk. And you know what? No matter what the future holds—even if, God forbid, Conner dies in his prime, or he leaves me, or whatever else the fates might throw at us—it would be worth it, because once you’ve loved someone the way I love Conner, once someone has loved you the way he loves me...” Tricia’s blue eyes brimmed with tears again, and she swallowed before going on. “Once you’ve loved, and been loved, that way, nothing and no one can ever take it away. Whether it lasts five minutes or fifty years, that love becomes a permanent part of you.”

      Carolyn studied her friend. “It’s that way for some people,” she said, at some length.

      “It can be that way for you,” Tricia insisted quietly.

      “Not with Brody Creed, it can’t,” Carolyn replied. And she turned back to the monitor, clicked on the appropriate icon and replied to his message, fully intending to turn him down flat.

      Instead, she found herself typing Nice horse and then clicked Send.

      * * *

      AFTER NUKING A frozen breakfast in the microwave, going out to the barn to feed Moonshine and walking the dog, Brody finally logged on to his computer at around nine-thirty. All the while, he was telling himself it didn’t matter a hill of beans if he’d heard from Carolyn, aka Carol.

      Barney, having chowed down on his kibble, sat at Brody’s feet, waiting patiently for whatever was next on the agenda and probably hoping he’d get to participate.

      Brody grinned down at the mutt and flopped his ears around gently, by way of reassurance. “We ought to be on the range already,” he confided to the animal. “Davis and Conner will be biting the heads off nails by now, and complaining to each other that some things just never change.”

      Barney opened his mouth wide and yawned.

      Brody laughed and turned back to his computer just as an electronic voice chirped, “Someone likes you!”

      “I sure as hell hope so,” Brody told the dog, who, by that time, had stretched himself out for a spur-of-the-moment nap.

      And there it was.

      Nice horse, Carolyn had written.

      Brody sighed. It wasn’t a yes, but it wasn’t a no, either.

      He rubbed his hands together and thought hard.

      Once again, inspiration eluded him.

      Thanks, he finally wrote back. Want to go riding with me?

      Brody sighed again, heavily this time, and shoved the fingers of one hand through his hair in frustration. He was a regular wiz with the ladies, he chided himself.

      The truth was that he had lot to say to Carolyn Simmons, starting with “I’m sorry,” but he’d sooner have his thoughts posted on a billboard in the middle of town than send them over the internet.

      His cell phone rang.

      Distracted, Brody hit Send, and immediately wished he hadn’t.

      “Hello,” he said into the phone.

      “What kind of outfit do you think we’re running over here?” Conner demanded. “This is a working ranch, Brody—operative word, working—and it would be nice if you could drop by and do your part sometime before noon.”

      Brody laughed. “Now, Conner,” he drawled, because he knew slow talking made his brother crazy, “you need to simmer down a little. Take life as it comes. The cattle have a thousand acres of grass to feed on, and the fences will get fixed—”

      “Brody,” Conner broke in tersely, “this is as much your ranch as it is mine. We split the profits down the middle, and by God we’re going to do the same with the work!”

      “What got up your backside?” Brody asked. “For a man getting regular sex, you’re pretty testy.”

      He could literally feel Conner going from a simmer to a boil on the far end of that phone call.

      “Enough