Creed's Honor (8 page)

“In that case,” Conner answered, his tone dry, “I’ll take care to avoid trail rides.”

Kim quirked a smile. “Don’t give up your day job,” she whispered, before turning to walk away. “You’d never make it as a comedian.”

Conner watched her go. And he steered clear of the chow line, since his stomach felt all tensed up, as if it were closed for business. If Steven and Melissa’s visit hadn’t been such a short one, he would have gotten into his truck and gone home.

Maybe saddled a horse and headed up into the green-and-gold-and-crimson foothills, where the aspens whispered, where the streams tumbled over rocks and, except for the occasional call of a bird, those were pretty much the only sounds.

Up there, in the spectacular hills, a man could hear himself think. Get some kind of handle on the stuff that was—or wasn’t—happening in his life.

But he was stuck, for now anyway.

Might as well make the best of it, and join the party.

T
RICIA HELPED WITH THE CLEANUP
, telling herself that she ought to leave the barbecue now that she’d put in a cordial appearance, but the bonfire was nice and people
were having fun, especially the children, and somebody was tuning up a banjo. The thought of going home, even though Sasha would be with her, was an intensely lonely prospect.

Carolyn Simmons, perhaps the only person in Lonesome Bend who was even more rootless than Tricia, helped, too. A gypsy with no apparent home, Carolyn joined in with the other women and a few men, gathering paper plates and cups and plastic flatware from the ground and the tops of the picnic tables, stuffing the detritus into garbage bags.

“Are you volunteering at the rummage sale again this year?” Carolyn asked Tricia, her tone and manner at once casual and friendly.

“Natty’s been trying to pin me down for kitchen duty,” Tricia said, smiling in response. “I think she only wants me to guard the family chili recipe, though.” Like just about everyone in Lonesome Bend, Tricia was curious about Carolyn, who was always ready with a cheerful hello or a helping hand, but extremely private, too. She kept a roof over her head by housesitting, mainly for the reclusive movie stars, corporate execs and other famous types who bought or built enormous homes outside town but rarely used them. Besides that, her only known income was from the original clothes she designed and sold online or through consignment boutiques.

Carolyn chuckled at Tricia’s answer. She had shoulder-length hair, streaked blond but somehow very natural-looking, and her eyes were wide and green, surrounded by thick lashes. “I don’t blame Natty one bit,” she said warmly. “That chili is so good it ought to be patented.”

“Amen,” Tricia agreed. The chili recipe was closely
guarded indeed; only Natty and her sister, the one she was visiting in Denver, knew how to make it. The single written copy in existence was brought out of some secret hiding place every October, on the Thursday preceding the rummage sale, and carefully protected from prying eyes.

Even Tricia, a true McCall, had merely managed glimpses of that tattered old recipe card over the years, with its bent corners and its spidery handwriting slanting hard to the right, though Natty had intimated that it might be time to think about “passing the torch.” That remark never failed to alarm Tricia, who adored her great-grandmother, and couldn’t imagine a world without her in it.

“How is Natty, anyway?” Carolyn asked, dropping a full garbage bag into one of the trash containers and dusting off her hands against the thighs of her black jeans. “I usually run into her at the grocery store or the library, but I haven’t seen her around lately.”

Tricia explained about the Denver trip, and quickly realized that Carolyn wasn’t listening. Her gaze had snagged on Brody Creed, laughing with friends on the other side of the campground, and she seemed powerless to jerk it away again.

Intrigued herself, Tricia watched Brody for a few moments, too, thinking in a detached way that while he and Conner
did
resemble each other closely, there were obvious differences, too.

Conner moved with quiet purpose, for example, while Brody was loose-limbed, ready to change directions at any given moment, if it suited him to do so. There were other qualities, too—some of them so intuitive in nature that Tricia would have had a hard time putting names
to them. She knew, somehow, that even if the Creed brothers
tried
to look as alike as possible, she would still know Conner from Brody in an instant. And that was puzzling indeed.

Carolyn snapped out of her own reverie a bit before Tricia did, and when their eyes met, a sort of understanding passed between them—empathy, perhaps. Or maybe just the silent admission that some questions didn’t have answers. Not obvious ones, at least.

And then Carolyn surprised Tricia by saying calmly, “What a fool I was, way back when.”

This time, it was Hunter who popped into Tricia’s mind. She shook off the image and smiled reassuringly. “Weren’t we all?”

Carolyn’s gaze strayed back to Brody, but didn’t linger. When she looked at Tricia again, it was clear that a door had closed inside Carolyn. It reminded Tricia of the way people board up a house when they know there’s a category 4 hurricane on its way. “Some of us,” she said sadly, with one more glance at Brody, “knew
exactly
what they were doing.”

Carolyn had a history with Brody Creed?

Whoa,
Tricia thought, hoping Carolyn hadn’t noticed the way her eyes had widened for a second or two there. She’d lived part of every year in this small, close-knit community, starting with that first summer after second grade, when Joe and Laurel had called it quits and filed for a divorce, and for the better part of a year and a half since her dad’s death.

None of which meant that she was any kind of insider when it came to the locals and their secrets, but, still, she usually had a
glimmer
of what was going on, if only because of things Natty and her friends said in passing,
when they got together to sip tea around the old woman’s kitchen table. In many ways, Lonesome Bend was like a soap opera come to life, and everybody kept up with the story line—except her, evidently.

Carolyn gave an awkward little laugh. “I’m sorry,” she said, embarrassed. “That came out sounding pretty bitchy.”

Tricia decided not to comment. Then she remembered that she was still holding her own bag of after-barbecue trash and tossed it into the bin.

“I’m going to be staying on the Creed ranch for a while,” Carolyn said, as she and Tricia walked away from the line of garbage cans. “Looking after things for Davis and Kim, I mean. It’s a great house, and they have horses, too. I have permission to ride the gentler ones, and I was wondering—”

Her voice fell away, perhaps because she’d seen something in Tricia’s face.

Tricia
had
felt a hard jab to her middle when Carolyn announced her next housesitting assignment, given that, living on the ranch, the other woman would be in close proximity to Conner, and, recognizing the emotion for what it was, she was ashamed. Yes, Carolyn was an attractive woman, presumably available. But she, Tricia, certainly had no business being jealous and, anyway, if Carolyn
was
interested in one of the Creed men, it was Brody, not Conner.

Her relief was undeniable.

“What?” she asked belatedly. “What were you wondering?”

“Well, if you and your niece might like to go trail riding sometime,” Carolyn said, almost shyly.

“I’ve never been on a horse in my life,” Tricia replied.
It wasn’t that she didn’t
like
horses, just that they were so big, and so unpredictable.

Diana was an accomplished equestrian, and because of that, Sasha was comfortable around the huge creatures.

“Well, then,” Carolyn said, spreading her hands for emphasis and grinning a wide, Julia Roberts grin, “it’s time you learned, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know—”

Just then, Sasha rushed over. Sometimes Tricia thought the child had superpowers—particularly as far as her hearing was concerned. Just moments before, she’d been on the other side of the campground, playing chasing games with other kids and several dogs. Let the word
horse
be spoken, though, and she was Johnny-on-the-spot.

“I want to go riding,” Sasha crowed. “Please, please,
please
—”

“Do you read lips or something?” Tricia asked.

“Matt’s uncle Conner is going to ask us to go riding, with a bunch of other people. Matt heard him talking about it, and he told me, and
you’ve got to say yes,
because I honestly don’t know how I’ll go on if you don’t!”

Tricia chuckled and gave one of Sasha’s pigtails a gentle tug. “When is this big ride supposed to take place?” she asked, hoping nobody would guess that she was stalling.

“Next Sunday, after the chili feed and the rummage sale are over,” Sasha expounded, breathless with excitement. “It’ll be the last of the good weather, before the snow comes.”

“We’ll see,” Tricia said.

Carolyn was still standing there, smiling.

“Please!”
Sasha implored, clasping her hands together as if in prayer and looking up at Tricia with luminous hope in her eyes.

“I have to ask your mom and dad first,” Tricia told her, laying a calming hand on the little girl’s shoulder. “I’ll send them a text, and when they land in Paris, they’ll read it and we’ll probably have our answer right away.”

“They’ll say yes,” Sasha said confidently, beaming now. “I ride with Mom
all the time
.” The smile faded. “We mostly just ride in arenas and stuff, because Seattle’s such a big city. In France, we probably won’t get to do it at all. But this is
real
riding, on a
real
ranch, just like in that movie,
City Slickers
.”

Tricia and Carolyn exchanged looks, both of them smiling now.

Somehow, they’d gone from being acquaintances to being friends.

“Not
too
much like it, I hope,” Tricia said. “And that’s what we are, isn’t it? A pair of city slickers?”

“Speak for yourself,” Sasha joked, folding her arms decisively in front of her little chest and jutting out her chin. “I might
live
in a city, but I know how to ride a horse.”

“Yes, you do,” Tricia conceded. “Now, what do you say we head for home? Valentino probably needs to go out for a walk, and Winston likes to have his supper early.”

“Can we give Winston sardines?” Sasha asked. “It’s Sunday, and he always gets sardines on Sunday. That’s what you said.”

“It is indeed what I said,” Tricia answered, nodding to
Carolyn as the other woman waved goodbye and walked off. “And I am a woman of my word.”

“Good,” Sasha said, in a tone of generous approval.

Tricia took the little girl’s hand. “Let’s go thank Matt’s dad and mom for inviting us to the barbecue,” she said. “Then we’ll go home and walk Valentino and give Winston his sardines.”

Sasha yawned widely and against her will, politely putting a hand over her mouth. It was still fairly early in the day, but she’d been running around in the fresh air for a couple of hours now, laughing and playing with a horde of energetic country kids, and she probably wasn’t over the jet-lag of the trip from Seattle.

By the time Sasha had had a warm bath and watched part of a Disney movie on DVD, she’d be asleep on her feet.

“Can I send the text to Mom and Dad?” she asked, when goodbyes and thank-yous had been said, and the two of them were back in Tricia’s Pathfinder, headed toward home. “I know how to do it.”

Tricia smiled, remembering the message she’d received from Sasha before, from the aquarium in Seattle. “Sure,” she said. She pulled over to one side of the road, just long enough to extract the cell from her purse and hand it to Sasha. “Remember, your mom and dad’s plane didn’t leave Sea-Tac until this morning, so they’re still in transit.”

Sasha sighed in contented resignation. “And that means they won’t get the message until they land. I
know
that already.”

“I did mention it before, didn’t I?” Tricia admitted, in cheerful chagrin.

“That’s okay, Aunt Tricia,” Sasha said, already
pushing buttons on the phone like a pro. “You’re probably tired, like me.”

Love for this child welled up in Tricia, threatening to overflow. “Probably,” she agreed, her voice a little husky.

By the time they pulled into the driveway alongside Natty’s venerable old Victorian, Sasha had finished transmitting a fairly long text message to her parents and put the phone aside.

They could hear Valentino barking a welcome-home from the bottom of the outside stairway, and he was all over Sasha with kisses the moment Tricia unlocked the door.

She was about to reprimand the dog when Sasha’s delighted giggles registered.

They were having fun.

“I’ll get the leash,” Tricia said, stepping around the reunion on the threshold. She set her purse and phone on the counter and glanced at her computer monitor, across the room, wondering if Hunter had sent her any emails. There would be plenty of time to check later, she decided, collecting Valentino’s sturdy nylon lead from the hook on the inside of the pantry door.

Sasha and Tricia took the dog for his much-needed walk, bringing along the necessary plastic bag for cleanup, and Winston was waiting when they got back, prowling back and forth on his favorite windowsill and meowing loudly for his dinner.

Sasha fed the cat an entire tin of sardines from Natty’s supply downstairs, while Tricia gave Valentino his kibble and freshened his bowl of water.

Since both Sasha and Tricia were still stuffed from all they’d eaten at the barbecue, supper would be contingent
on whether or not they got hungry and, if they did, it would consist of either leftover pizza from the night before or cold cereal, sugary-sweet.

They watched a movie together, then Sasha went into the bathroom to bathe, don her pajamas and dutifully brush her teeth, all of these enterprises closely supervised by Valentino. In the meantime, Tricia folded out the living room couch, retrieved the extra bed pillows from the coat closet and fluffed them up so Sasha would be as comfortable as possible.