Montana Creeds: Tyler (18 page)

“It's Nana,” she said, in a stage whisper. “I told her you were still sleeping, but she
has
to talk to you,
right now.
”

Exasperated, Lily struggled to wake up, raised herself to a sitting position with the pillows fluffed behind her and took the phone.

Tess lingered, probably curious, but Lily sent her out of the room with a waving motion of one hand.

Reluctantly, Tess left, closing the door behind her.

Lily drew a very deep breath and released it slowly before saying pleasantly, “Hello, Eloise. What's the big emergency?”

Eloise was silent for a moment, and when she spoke, it was with wounded indignation. “Can't I call my own daughter-in-law?” she asked. “Especially when she's taken my only grandchild to some godforsaken burg in
Montana?
”

Lily's temper surged. She tamped it down, forced a smile into her voice. “Tess told you I was sleeping,” she said moderately. “When you insisted on talking to me anyway, I assumed it was urgent.”

Clearly miffed, Eloise immediately snapped, “I need to know what you want me to do with Burke's things. The ones he was keeping in that storage unit.”

“Now?” Lily asked sweetly.

She felt Eloise back off before she heard it in the other woman's voice. “I've been through the stuff,” she admitted. “There's nothing that would interest you or Tess—except possibly some medical records.”

“Medical records?” Lily asked, sitting up straighter now. Feeling mildly alarmed. Had Burke been suffering from some hereditary disease—one that might have been passed down to Tess?

Eloise let out a long, broken sigh. “He had a vasectomy, Lily,” she said. “Right after Tess was born.”

Lily's head spun.
“What?”

Eloise began to cry, very softly. “I know you always
wanted more children. I wanted more
grandchildren
. Apparently, Burke deceived us both.”

Burke had had a vasectomy—without telling her.

He'd let her go on hoping, go on trying to conceive, knowing all the while that he'd already made that impossible
.

“Lily?” Eloise prompted, when Lily didn't respond. “Are you still there, dear?”

Dazed, Lily struggled to find her voice. When she did, she stammered out something incoherent and hung up. She dropped the receiver onto the bed beside her, laid both hands to her abdomen.

Tyler had asked if she could be pregnant.

And she'd said no.

A combination of exultation and fear roiled inside her.

Surprise,
she thought. But this time, she wasn't smiling.

L
OGAN'S UNSCHEDULED MORNING
visit had been brief and to the point, and it stuck in Tyler's mind long after his brother had left the cabin. Soon afterward, Dylan had stopped by, ostensibly to drop Davie off.

As it turned out, Dylan and Logan were planning a trail ride into the foothills—Logan hadn't mentioned that—and they wanted to take Davie with them. The kid looked so hopeful, Tyler never thought of refusing—not that he had any right to say yes or no where Davie was concerned anyway.

“You could come with us,” Davie suggested eagerly, stooping to ruffle Kit Carson's ears in belated greeting.

Tyler passed a glance in Dylan's direction. “Apparently, I'm not invited,” he said. “Logan didn't say a word about any trail ride when he came by here a little while ago to harass me.”

There had been something else Logan had wanted to say, something about Jake, though every time he'd gotten close to spitting out whatever it was, he'd veered off again. He'd mostly yammered on about the Tri-Star Cattle Company and how to err was human but to forgive divine.

Tyler did not aspire to divinity.

Dylan rolled his eyes. “Come on, Ty. What do you need—a printed invite? You're welcome to ride with us and you damn well know it.”

Davie's glance skittered from Dylan to Tyler. “If this is what having a brother is like,” he said, “I'm kind of glad I'm an only child.”

Tyler chuckled at that, in spite of his sour mood, and slapped the boy on the shoulder. “You go ahead. I'm going to call the repair shop in town—and maybe that truck of mine is ready to roll back onto the highway. It wasn't when I checked before.”

Davie tensed, and his eyes narrowed. “You're leaving?”

“No,” Tyler said quietly. “I just want my truck back.”

“Okay,” Davie said, relaxing a little.

Dylan was already moving toward the door. His gaze rested a moment on the Tri-Star papers Logan had left behind on the table, and Tyler wondered if they'd planned that early-morning recruitment effort between them. It seemed like something they'd do, but then again, Dylan wasn't the sort to let someone else handle his dirty work. He'd have been right there, along with Logan, if he'd had any part in the scheme. “Just leave the Blazer at the shop if your truck is running again,” he said. “Kristy and I will pick it up later.”

Tyler merely nodded.

“You're sure you won't come along?” Dylan pressed.

The truth was, Tyler wouldn't have minded a long trail ride up into the foothills, even if it meant spending time with his brothers. It had been too long since he'd been
in the saddle, except to perform some lame-brained stunt for a movie camera. But he needed his own rig—he couldn't drive Kristy's Blazer forever. And besides, there were some other things he wanted to do.

“Maybe next time,” Tyler said, figuring there probably wouldn't
be
a next time.

Dylan shrugged one shoulder and left the kitchen, headed outside, and Davie followed, though reluctantly, stopping on the threshold to try just once more. “It would sure be cool if you'd go with us,” he said.

Tyler's throat tightened. He remembered asking Jake to come to the first basketball game of the season at Stillwater Springs High. It was his sophomore year, and he'd made the varsity team; the coach had promised he'd be on the court from the start, and he'd wanted his dad to be there. To be proud of him, maybe even nudge somebody sitting next to him in the bleachers with his elbow and say something embarrassing, like, “You see Number 22, there? That's my son.”

Instead, Jake had blithely replied that he had a game that night himself—a high-stakes pool tournament, down at Skivvie's. As an afterthought, on his way out the back door at the main ranch house, he'd told Tyler, “Break a leg, kid.”

Tyler had lost his taste for basketball after that, and taken up rodeoing instead—both Logan and Dylan, though still in high school, were already making more in prize money than they could have earned flipping burgers or sweeping floors someplace. And that was on the local circuit.

Anyhow, Tyler had decided, those shorts basketball
players wore were just plain sissified, almost as bad as those stretchy shorts people wore to ride bicycles.

“I can't make it today, Davie,” he said quietly, telling himself that it wasn't the same as Jake's refusing to watch a basketball game. Davie wasn't his son—probably. “Tomorrow, you and I will find a couple of horses and saddle up. Take a ride of our own. How's that?”

Davie looked partially appeased, but still disappointed, too. He nodded and left the house without another word. Drove off with Dylan.

“It's just you and me now, dog,” Tyler told Kit Carson, as he took his cell phone from the counter, scrolled through his collection of numbers for the one for the auto-repair place in town and pressed the Call button.

Sure enough, the rig was ready. They'd installed a new muffler and done some work on the engine, too, though they recommended a total overhaul.

Tyler figured a trade-in would be easier—and cheaper.

He'd been a damn fool to swap his Escalade—though for him it was roughly in the same category as basketball shorts and ten-speed gear—for an old wreck of a truck.

He'd done it on impulse, shedding that too-fancy SUV the way a snake shed an old skin.

Now, he'd have to live with the consequences.

With that much settled in his mind, if not much else, Tyler loaded Kit Carson into the back of the Blazer and headed for town.

The bill for the towing, not to mention the repairs, probably exceeded the actual value of the truck. Tyler
paid it just the same, chalking it up to penance for rash behavior, locked up the Blazer and gave the keys to the girl working the parts counter for safekeeping and took off.

He and Kit Carson stopped off at the lumberyard on the way out of town, and he ordered enough to shore up some of the stuff that was sagging out at the cabin, figuring he'd have the carpentry thing figured out once he'd replaced the small back porch and laid a new kitchen floor. He took a load home in the back of his pickup, too.

He felt ambitious, and hoped this enterprise wouldn't turn out the way the truck deal had. But he had brand-new power tools, a hammer, a brown bag full of nails, and a lot of gumption. How hard could it be to rebuild the back steps and put in some new floorboards in the kitchen?

He picked up a few more groceries before leaving town, and then cruised casually by Doc Ryder's place, hoping for a glimpse of Lily, but there was no sign of her or the little girl or of Doc himself.

Just call her,
he thought.

“Oh, right,” he answered himself aloud, drawing a concerned look from Kit Carson, who was riding shotgun as usual. “I can hear it now. ‘Hello, Lily. This is Tyler. What do you say we get together and boink each other's brains out again, just for the hell of it?'”

The dog whimpered. Maybe he thought he was getting chewed out for something. Or maybe he just disapproved of the turn the conversation had taken.

Tyler reached over and patted the mutt's head. “You a moralist, Kit?” he asked affably.

He'd been back home for several hours, finding out the hard way that replacing a porch, even a pissant one like he had, was easier to think about than to do, when an old black-and-tan Buick sedan rolled into his driveway around noon, throwing up dust in every direction.

Shirtless, since sawing and hammering was hot work on a sunny day, even that close to the lake, Tyler straightened and wondered who his visitor was.

He didn't have to wonder long.

Doreen got out of the dented Buick, dressed in her waitress getup and wearing a casino ID card pinned to her bodice. She'd troweled on the makeup that day, he saw, as she came closer.

“Is Davie around?” she asked, stopping about a dozen yards shy of close-up and eyeing poor old Kit Carson like he might spring at her and tear her throat out. Doreen had ridden with outlaw bikers and traveled with rock bands. And she was afraid of a stray like Kit?

But then Doreen was afraid of a lot of things these days, wasn't she?

Tyler set his hammer aside, reached for his T-shirt and pulled it on over his head. He'd had plenty of vine-swinging, chest-pounding, Tarzan-type sex with this woman, back in the day, but now being half-dressed in front of her seemed wrong.

“Nope,” he answered. “He's gone on a trail ride with Dylan and Logan.”

Doreen gnawed at her lower lip for a moment, and Tyler wondered if Roy had knocked her around a little the night before, or even that morning, so she had to cover up the bruises with war-paint, or if she'd just been heavy-handed with the stuff, hoping for better tips.

“Is he all right?” she finally asked.

“He's fine,” Tyler said, approaching her. He wanted a closer look at her face, and when he got it, his blood stung in his veins like venom. He took a gentle but firm grip on Doreen's chin and said, “The gunk isn't working, Doreen. I can see the bruises.”

“Let it go, Tyler,” Doreen said. “Roy passed out before he did any real damage.”

“Looks to me like he did
plenty
of damage,” Tyler said, after unclamping his jaw. He was almost as angry with Doreen for putting up with that kind of treatment as he was with Roy for dishing it out. “When are you going to leave that bastard, Doreen? When are you going to stand up for yourself—and for Davie?”

“You don't understand,” Doreen said, shrinking in on herself in that way she'd developed in the years since Tyler had first known her. In that way she'd passed on to Davie.

Tyler let his hand drop from her chin. Shook his head. “Oh, I understand, all right,” he told her grimly. “You're going to let him do this again and again until he kills you.”

Doreen took a step back, rummaged in her big shoulder bag, brought out a sheaf of papers. Thrust them at Tyler.

“What's this?” Tyler asked, even as he took the documents.

Evidently, this was his day for heavy-duty paperwork.

“I lied before,” Doreen said, her voice quivering a little. “Davie
is
yours. Roy says if he's going to live with you, we'll need some kind of compensation. So he had a friend of his draw up these papers, over in Choteau, at one of those legal places.”

“Compensation?” Tyler echoed, still absorbing the news that he was a father after all. He hadn't completely believed Doreen before, when she'd said Davie's father was a truck driver she'd “cheered up” one night after a shift at Skivvie's. Contradictory though it was, he didn't believe her this time, either.

“We want a hundred thousand dollars,” Doreen said, with all the bravado she could drum up. She was red at the jawline, and tears stood in her eyes. “Roy looked you up on the Internet. You've done real well for yourself, it seems, between the rodeoing and the movie work and all that. In fact, you're flat-out rich.”

“And Davie's suddenly mine, because I have money?” Tyler asked dangerously.

Doreen's wet eyes widened, and she retreated another step or two. Kit Carson made that worried sound again, a low whine, far down in his throat. “You can spare a hundred thousand dollars,” she insisted.

“And you, obviously,” Tyler countered coldly, “can spare
Davie
. Provided the ‘compensation' is right.”

Doreen swallowed visibly. “You can get blood tests, or whatever they do nowadays, you and Davie both. You'll see that I'm telling the truth.”

Doreen
wasn't
telling the truth; Tyler had played a lot of poker, with a lot of amateurs as well as pros, and he knew a stone-desperate bluff when he saw one.

“You don't
know
who Davie's real father is, do you, Doreen? Roy put you up to this because he smelled money.”

“You won't miss it,” Doreen said, but for all the attitude she was projecting, she still looked as if she wished the ground would open up at her feet and swallow her whole.