Creed's Honor (16 page)

“All over,” Carolyn answered. “That’s my job. I take care of people’s houses for them when they’re away.”

“But where’s
your
house?” Sasha persisted.

“Sasha,” Tricia protested quietly.

Carolyn swallowed, went to shove her hands into her jacket pockets before remembering that she wasn’t wearing the garment. Still, her smile held. “I don’t really need a house,” she told the child, after tossing an
It’s okay
sort of glance at Tricia.

“
Everybody
needs a house,” Sasha maintained. She could be stubborn, when she took a notion.

“Sasha,” Tricia repeated, this time more forcefully. “That’s enough, honey.”

Sasha looked up at her then, and Tricia was startled to see tears shining in the little girl’s eyes. “But what if people stop going on trips?” she fretted. “If everybody stays home, all at once, Carolyn will be
homeless
.”

Tricia felt that familiar pang of love for this amazing child, but she was a little embarrassed by the outburst, too. “I’m sure Carolyn earns a very good living,” she said, in an awkward rush. The words were out of her mouth before she realized how lame they sounded.

Carolyn smiled and gave Sasha a sideways hug. “As the cowboys say, don’t you worry your pretty little head, missy. I enjoy being a gypsy.”

Sasha looked only partly mollified by the claim. In her world, people without homes slept on sidewalks and
panhandled for change in downtown Seattle. “But, you don’t
look
like a gypsy—”

“Figure of speech, kiddo,” Carolyn said, the soul of kindness. Then she held up one arm and tapped at the face of her watch. “Look at the time,” she went on, her smile mega-bright. “We’d better get ourselves down to the main barn if we want first pick of the horses.”

That was all it took to distract Sasha from the plight of the homeless. For the moment, at least.

The ten-year-old let out a whoop of sheer pleasure and dashed for the door, grabbing her coat from the peg where Tricia had hung it earlier, along with her own.

Within moments, they were back in their vehicles, on their way to one of the last places Tricia wanted to go. And it wasn’t just because she was timid around horses.

Tricia would have liked more time to brace herself for another encounter with Conner Creed, but, alas, it wasn’t to be. He was standing in front of the barn when they pulled in, and he looked wicked good.

I
F
B
RODY
C
REED WAS AROUND
,
there was no sign of him, which probably accounted, at least in part, for Carolyn’s good spirits. Not that Tricia was really paying that much attention; even before she’d parked the Pathfinder beside her friend’s car and turned off the ignition, she was feeling it again, that sense of being
magnetized
to Conner.

The vulnerability of that made her want to drive right on past, back to town. Forget the whole crazy idea of going on a trail ride, of all things, with a guy who affected her like a turn on a runaway roller coaster.

As if escape were even possible, with Sasha along and excited enough to jump out of her skin.

Although she didn’t notice until after the fact, there
were
other people around, and other vehicles, mostly trucks and large SUVs, with horse trailers hitched behind them. Friends and neighbors began unloading various mounts and saddling up.

“This is Buttercup,” Conner said, as Sasha hurried up to him, Tricia lagging a pace or two behind the child.

Tricia blinked. The docile-looking mare might have materialized beside Conner by magic, so thoroughly had the creature evaded her notice.

Conner’s smile was slow and easy, and fetchingly crooked in that way that made Tricia’s nerves skitter wildly out of control. Holding Buttercup’s reins loosely
in his left hand, he stroked the horse’s neck with the other.

“Is that the horse I get to ride?” Sasha asked, almost breathless.

“Nope,” Conner replied, never looking away from Tricia’s face. “Buttercup is more suited to a greenhorn.” At last, his gaze slanted to Sasha. “You’ll be on the one we call Show Pony. She’s gentle, too, but old Buttercup, here, she’s practically a rocking horse.”

Tricia tensed ever so slightly, her pride nettled by the term
greenhorn.
Okay, so she wasn’t an experienced rider. She wasn’t a coward, either. She was
there,
wasn’t she, in spite of all her very sensible trepidation, willing to try something new?

A blue spark ignited in Conner’s eyes, there for an instant and then gone again, and Tricia knew he’d been joshing her a little. “Ready?” he asked, watching her in a way that made her feel electrified.

Everyone except for the two of them and Buttercup seemed to have slipped into some kind of dimly visible parallel universe. There was an indefinable charge, a silent buzz, in the crisply cool air, too, and Tricia was startled to recognize it as anticipation, not fear.

“Ready,” she confirmed.

Carolyn came out of the barn, leading a pinto mare she must have saddled herself, and a smaller horse that was probably Show Pony. Sasha needed no urging at all to scramble up into the waiting saddle.

Tricia, meanwhile, tried to follow Conner’s quiet instructions. Approaching Buttercup’s side, she put her left foot into the stirrup, as he told her to do, and reached up to clasp the saddle horn in both hands, praying she could make it without needing a boost.

And then she was up, sitting astride Buttercup’s narrow back, and she’d gotten there under her own power, too, without the humiliation of being goosed in the backside. Exhilaration filled Tricia, straightening her spine, raising her chin a notch or two. Buttercup stood still as stone, bless her equine heart.

Conner smiled. “You’re doing fine,” he said. Then, with a twinkle in his eyes, he added, “It’s okay to let go of the saddle horn now.” He reached up, placing the reins in Tricia’s hands. Although their fingers barely brushed against each other, the contact sent a hot jolt racing through Tricia’s entire body. “That’s it,” he said. “Just let the reins rest easy in your grasp, and whatever you do, don’t wrap them around your hands.”

Tricia nodded, one step from terror and, at the same time, thrilled through and through.

She was on a real horse.

Of course, it wasn’t
moving
yet, but so far, so good.

Sasha rode up, buckling on the riding helmet Carolyn must have brought from the barn. The little girl’s smile stretched from ear to ear.

“You’re a natural!” Sasha said, beaming at Tricia.

Carolyn, riding up beside Sasha, held out a second helmet to Tricia. “Put this on,” she said, with an encouraging smile. Tricia knew, even without looking around, that she and Sasha were the only riders present who’d be wearing headgear, but she didn’t care. She
did
have a moment of panic, however, when she looked around for Conner and realized that he was gone.

Buttercup didn’t so much as flick her tail, but Carolyn leaned from the saddle to take a light but firm grip on the mare’s bridle strap, probably so the animal wouldn’t spook while Tricia was putting on the helmet.

Conner reappeared a moment later, ducking with magnificent grace as he rode out through the wide doorway of the barn, mounted on a black gelding with three white boots and a matching blaze on its face.

The sight of him, so at ease riding that powerful horse, literally took Tricia’s breath away. Her heart started to pound as Conner adjusted his hat with a second-nature motion of one hand, grinning at the other riders as he passed through their midst to rein in beside Tricia.

Even then, Buttercup didn’t move a single muscle. She might have been stuffed, that mare, for all the animation she seemed to possess. And that was just fine with Tricia.

The problem was that everybody else was on the move—even Sasha and Carolyn were riding away, like all the others, toward the gate opening onto the rangeland beyond the corral and the pasture.

Conner waited, shifting in his saddle once, adjusting his hat in what must have been an attempt—a vain one—to hide his grin in the shadow of the brim.

Buttercup stood still as a statue.

“Should I—well—nudge her with my heels or something?” Tricia asked.

A few of the other riders were looking back at her and Conner, and some of them were smiling. Exchanging little comments Tricia was glad she couldn’t hear.

“You could do that,” Conner answered affably, and in his own good time. “But Buttercup won’t go anywhere until Lakota heads out.”

Lakota, Tricia deduced, was the gelding Conner rode.

“Oh,” she said, at something of a loss. Now what?

This time, Conner made no attempt to hide his
amusement. Tricia could have hit him if she weren’t afraid to let go of the reins. She felt silly, sitting there like a child waiting for the carousel to start turning, the only grown-up wearing a helmet.

“Buttercup is Lakota’s mama,” Conner explained, in that same slow drawl he’d used before. “She likes to keep him in sight when they’re out of the corral.”

“I see,” Tricia said, though she
didn’t,
actually. All she could think of was a special she’d seen on TV once, and it had been about elephants, not horses. It seemed that baby elephants would follow their mother for their entire lives, unless, of course, they were separated.

“If you’re ready,” Conner went on, “we’ll start.”

Tricia swallowed hard. Sasha and Carolyn and the other participants in the trail ride—over a dozen of them—were way ahead. A few of the more experienced people were even racing each other.

“I’m ready,” Tricia lied.

Conner nodded, clicked his tongue once, and Lakota started to walk away.

Buttercup didn’t actually bolt, but she moved forward so quickly that Tricia was nearly unseated.

“You’re doing fine,” Conner told Tricia, riding alongside and obviously controlling the gelding, which wanted to run. Tricia could tell that by the way the muscles bunched in its haunches.

And then, they were trotting. Tricia bounced unceremoniously in the saddle. Conner and the others, by contrast, Sasha included, moved
with
their horses, almost as though they were part of them.

“It takes practice,” Conner said.

Tricia didn’t dare answer, bouncing like that. She’d sound like someone driving a springless wagon over a
washboard trail, and maybe even bite her tongue in the process.

Practice? she thought, skeptical. She would probably have bruises after this, along with back spasms and, as for her thigh muscles, forget about it. She was doomed.

Conner’s mouth kicked up at one corner again as he slowed Lakota to a walk, which prompted Buttercup to stop trotting, too, of course. Once again, he resettled his hat, the gesture so innately masculine that, for a moment, Tricia’s immediate predicament went right out of her head. She even allowed herself to imagine—very briefly—what it would be like to make love with Conner Creed.

Her cheeks burned as if the scene had been flashed onto the screen at the Bluebird, on a very dark night, instead of on the back of her forehead.

“You must want to ride with the others,” she said, in a tone of bright misery, nodding across the widening breach between her and Conner and the rest of the party. “We haven’t gone far. I could walk back.”

Conner tilted his head to one side, looked at her from under the brim of his hat. It was an ordinary thing to do, especially for a cowboy on horseback, but it had the same impact as before, practically knocking the breath out of her. Like a hard fall.

“You’d probably never live that down,” he teased. “Walking back to the house, I mean.”

Never mind living anything down, Tricia thought, with bleak resignation. She had to keep Sasha in sight, the way Buttercup did Lakota. Even though the child was perfectly safe riding with Carolyn.

“Probably not,” she replied, just so Conner wouldn’t think she’d been struck dumb in the interval.

“As I said, learning to ride takes time and some practice, same as anything else,” Conner told her.

“That’s easy for you to say,” Tricia responded, though she was smiling. Even starting to relax a little. “You’ve probably been riding horses since you were a baby.”

He chuckled. Made that hat move again. “Before that,” he said. “According to Davis, Brody’s and my mother was a champion barrel racer. She competed until about a month before we were born, and wouldn’t have quit then if the rodeo people hadn’t banned her from the event.”

While it wasn’t a particularly intimate thing to talk about, Tricia still felt moved, as though she’d received some kind of rare gift. She didn’t know a lot about Conner Creed, beyond the fact that he was dangerously attractive, but she
was
aware that he was the quiet type, not exactly an introvert, but not an extrovert, like Brody, either.

“I don’t think I ever met your mother,” she said, mostly to be saying something. Otherwise, his words might have just hung there, between them, fragile as icicles in a spring thaw.

Conner wasn’t looking at her now, but straight ahead, at the other riders. “Nobody around here ever did,” he said quietly, and after some time had gone by. “She wasn’t a very big woman, and carrying twins was hard on her. She fell sick right after Brody and I were born, and never got better. After the funeral, our dad brought us home to the ranch, and we were still pretty little when he died, too.”

Tricia’s heart found its way into her voice. “I’m sorry,” she said.

Conner’s smile came as a surprise, given the psychological weight of what he’d just told her. “We were lucky,” he said. “Davis and Kim raised us like we were their own. Gave us a good life.”

A rush of emotion, partly admiration for Conner’s uncle and aunt and partly something considerably harder to identify, surged through Tricia like the first hopeful breeze of a hard-won spring. Conner was stubborn, and he could be taciturn, she knew, but he was also rock-solid, to the very core—a grown
man,
not a boy, like so many other guys his age.

The realization shook Tricia up, and left her with a lot to think about.

The ride went on, Buttercup and Lakota moving at a snail’s pace. That didn’t seem to bother Conner, though Tricia could tell that he was keeping a close eye on the goings-on up ahead.

This was his ranch, and because of that, he probably felt a responsibility for every person and every animal on that trail ride.

“Your turn,” he said presently, and it took Tricia a moment or two to pick up on his meaning. “I knew your dad—he and Davis were good friends—but nobody ever said much about your mother, Natty included.”

Tricia was getting used to the slow rhythm of Buttercup’s plodding stride. She was still going to be sore, she knew that for certain, but at least she had some inkling of why people liked to ride horses. There was a sort of freedom in it, a kind of quiet power, and she could see a long way into the distance.

“Mom’s a trauma nurse,” Tricia said. “She and Dad
were divorced when I was seven, which is why I split my time between Seattle and Lonesome Bend while I was growing up. She’s out of the country now, working for one of the emergency relief agencies.”

“It was like that for Steven,” he said. “The going back and forth between his folks, I mean. His mom and Davis were married for about five minutes before they realized they’d made a terrible mistake—they might as well have come from different universes—and went their separate ways. Davis wanted to be part of his son’s life, though—he insisted Steven had to grow up as a Creed, and spend his summers here in Colorado until he was old enough to decide things for himself, and he paid child support right along, even when Steven’s mother said it wasn’t necessary because she didn’t need his money.”

There it was, Tricia thought. That quiet integrity, that steadiness she’d recognized in Conner a few minutes before. Maybe he’d inherited the trait, though not from his dad, to hear Natty tell it. Just the night before, she’d described Blue Creed as a “renegade,” said Brody took after him, but not Conner.

In this case, Tricia figured it was more a case of nurture than nature. Conner was the way he was because, despite losing both parents, he’d been raised in a loving household. It had mattered to Davis and Kim Creed how their infant nephews turned out.

Brody’s famous wild streak, on the other hand, was harder to figure out. Maybe, in his case, the reverse had been true, and nature had prevailed over nurture. The whole thing was beginning to tangle Tricia’s brain.