Montana Creeds: Tyler (20 page)

In spite of everything, Lily giggled.

And it felt good.

 

W
HEN
T
YLER PULLED INTO
Doc Ryder's driveway, around ten o'clock that morning, Doc and Tess were in the backyard, on their knees, digging dead plants out of a flower bed and tossing them into a wheelbarrow.

Seeing him, they both looked pleased, and Doc hauled
himself to his feet. Dusted off his hands on the legs of his tattered khaki pants.

“Can your dog get out of the truck and play with me?” Tess immediately asked, fairly jumping up and down beside her grandfather while she waited for a yes.

Tyler looked to Doc for the answer.

Doc nodded. Smiled. “I could use a little canine company myself,” he said.

Tyler hesitated. Kit Carson had jumped into the driver's seat to paw at the window and yip, wanting to socialize. For a shy dog, he was sure coming out of his shell.

“Is Lily around?” Tyler asked, like he should have done in the first place.

“She's in the kitchen, talking on the phone,” Tess volunteered, drawing in close to wait for Tyler to lift the dog down out of the truck.

“Quitting her job and demanding severance pay,” Doc elaborated.

As wound up as he was inside, Tyler's spirits lifted a little. Lily was quitting her job? Did that mean she planned to stay on in Stillwater Springs instead of heading back to Chicago?

Tyler's mood took another dive. Considering what he had to say, it might not matter whether Lily stayed in town or not. She might understand—after all, he'd been a kid when he was sneaking around with Doreen, and the whole thing was way back there in the past. But she might tell him to take a flying leap, too, if only because she didn't want to get involved with him or Davie's raising.

“I think this dog needs a walk,” Doc announced, after surveying Kit Carson ponderously. “Tess, there's a leash in the pantry, hanging on a hook. Would you mind getting it, please?”

Tess rushed into the house, and Kit Carson bounded after her.

Tyler started to call the dog back, and Doc stopped him.

“It's all right, Tyler,” he said. “I'm a veterinarian, you know. I allow dogs in my house.”

Tyler wanted to avoid Doc's gaze—but he didn't.

“Is something wrong?” Doc asked.

“I'm not really sure,” Tyler answered awkwardly.

“But you need to have a private conversation with Lily, and right away, apparently. Which is why Tess and I are taking the dog for a long walk.”

“I appreciate that,” Tyler said. He felt as nervous around Doc as he had back when he was walking the razor's edge, dating Lily, saying good-night and then heading straight for Doreen's bed.

Just then, Tess burst out of the house with the looped leash, Kit Carson close on her heels. Lily followed, standing on the porch, shading her eyes with one hand and looking way too good in her jeans and a little yellow blouse with no sleeves.

She had good arms.

Good everything else, too.

Tyler steered his thoughts in another direction, but they doubled back.

Damn,
he wanted to take Lily back to bed.

And once he'd said what he'd come there to say, he'd
probably have a snowball's chance in hell of doing that, ever again.

Calmly, though he probably felt the lust rolling off Tyler in waves as he watched Lily standing there on the porch, Doc bent and slipped the loop part of the leash around Kit Carson's neck.

“We'll be over at the park if you need us,” he said. Then he looked down at Tess and smiled. “Let's go, sugarplum.”

Moments later, they were gone.

Tyler was still standing in the same place, like a weed that had sprung up out of the lawn overnight.

“I have something to tell you,” Lily blurted, before Tyler could get a word out.

That threw him, since he'd been all geared up to spill his guts about Davie.

“What?” he managed, after untangling his tongue.

Lily came down the steps, crossed the lawn to stand looking up into his face, kept her voice low in case any of the neighbors had their ears pressed to a keyhole.

“The other night, when we—” She stopped, blushed, a study in sweet misery. “When we—
you know—
and I told you I didn't use birth control because I couldn't get pregnant—”

Tyler frowned, confused.

Lily seemed to squirm, though she hadn't actually moved. “It turns out I—” Again, she faltered, but this time she couldn't get going again.

Was she about to tell him she'd peed on one of those sticks drugstores sold in kits, and they were going to be parents? It was too soon to know if they'd conceived a
baby—wasn't it? Surely science hadn't come that far since the last time a woman had scared the hell out of him.

Suddenly, Lily started to cry, all soft and sniffly.

Stricken, Tyler pulled her into his arms, held her close against his chest. Propped his chin on top of her head.

“Lily, talk to me,” he said.

She spoke into the hollow of his throat. “Burke had a
vasectomy,
Tyler. Without even telling me. All the time I was hoping for another baby, and he knew that, and he let me think—”

Tyler closed his eyes. He hurt because Lily hurt.

And what he couldn't leave without saying might make things infinitely worse.

W
HEN
L
ILY HAD
composed herself a little, Tyler steered her toward the back porch, sat her down on the top step. Joined her and took her hand.

He waited while she sniffled, attempted several brave little smiles and finally pulled it all together.

“I'm sorry,” she said, avoiding his gaze. “I shouldn't have dumped on you like that, but after the other night—”

Tyler squeezed her hand. “You said you wanted more kids,” he reminded her when the moment seemed right. “Isn't this
good
news, Lily?”

“It would be for me,” she replied, after thinking a while, staring at the flower bed her dad and daughter had been digging out when Tyler arrived. Then she met his eyes. “But what about you, Tyler? What if we made a baby when we—when we—”

Tyler chuckled, chafed her knuckles gently with the pad of his thumb. “Why is it so hard for you to say we had sex, Lily? While it was going on, you didn't have any trouble calling it what it was—in some pretty graphic terms.”

She winced, but she didn't pull her hand away. “Don't remind me,” she said, yet a little smile teased one corner
of her mouth, even though her eyes were serious as she studied him. “And you didn't answer my question. What if we made a baby night before last, Tyler?”

“I'd insist on making an honest woman out of you,” he replied, and though his tone might have indicated that he was kidding, he'd never been more serious about anything in his life. “You wouldn't—well—do anything, would you? To get rid of this theoretical baby?”

Lily drew in a breath that was almost sharp enough to qualify as a gasp. “Of
course
I wouldn't. And nobody needs to ‘make an honest woman' out of me, Tyler Creed, because I'm
already
honest.”

Tyler sighed, raked his free hand through his hair. “Now it's my turn,” he said gravely, unable to look at her, though he could feel her gaze burning into his flesh. “To be honest, I mean.”

She stiffened slightly and might have withdrawn if it hadn't been for the firm grip he had on her hand. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her open her mouth to say something, then close it again.

He shifted to face her. “Lily—”

“Is this about Davie?” she prompted.

He was too surprised to give a verbal answer, though he did manage a partial nod. His heart hammered at the back of his rib cage and his throat was cinched shut, as if somebody had thrown a noose around his neck and put a foot against his chest before pulling the rope tight.

“Is he yours, Tyler? Yours and Doreen's?”

Tyler swallowed, croaked out a hoarse, “Maybe.”

Lily reached up, smoothed a lock of hair back from his forehead. That wasn't the reaction he'd expected, and
something powerful moved inside him, making it necessary to look away for a moment or two. Compose himself a little.

“What do you mean, ‘maybe'?” Lily asked gently.

“He could be,” Tyler said, still sounding like he'd barely escaped a lynching. “Doreen denied it at first, then she came to me with custody papers and swore by all that was holy that he's mine. She's willing to sign him over, Lily, like a load of firewood—for a price.”

“My God,” Lily murmured. Like most women, she probably couldn't grasp the concept of selling a child. As a man, Tyler didn't find it any easier to understand. “What are you going to do?”

“Pay her and sign the papers,” Tyler answered. “Whether he's mine or not, I can't turn my back on the kid. I'm not sure why—he's a little smart-ass and I've got no place to keep him—but if Doreen is willing to deal, so am I.”

Lily looked so deeply into him then that she must have seen all his secrets, even the ones he kept from himself. “Are you still involved with Doreen, Tyler?” she asked. “Because if you are, we're not going any further.”

“That's been over since the summer it happened,” Tyler answered. “And it was never anything but sex, anyway.”

“What is it with
us,
Tyler?” Lily asked, very quietly. “Is it nothing but sex with us, too?”

“It's more and you know it,” Tyler heard himself say. He grinned. “Not that there's anything wrong with the sex.”

Lily laughed and bumped him hard with her shoulder.
“Nope,” she agreed. “There's absolutely
nothing
wrong with the sex.”

“Does that mean we can have more?” Tyler asked.

And that made her laugh again, and cry again, and the combination of the two carved out places in Tyler and filled them with emotions so new to him they didn't have names.

“First chance we get,” she said.

“I'm free right about now,” Tyler said, and he was only half kidding.

“Tyler,” Lily pointed out primly, “we are sitting on
my
father's back porch. He and my six-year-old daughter will be back any minute. I don't know about you, but I see that as a logistical problem.”

“We probably have time for a quickie,” Tyler suggested, without much hope. He'd have thrown her over one shoulder and carried her back to his place caveman-style, but he'd promised Davie a horseback ride, after backing out the first time, and the kid had taken off for Logan's place right after breakfast, on foot, he was so eager to ride.

Lily traced his jawline with one fingertip, sending flames searing through him. “No quickies, Tyler,” she said, almost purring. “Not yet, anyway. I want it slow and hot and wet. And I want hours and hours of it.”

Tyler groaned. Now he had a hard-on the size of a totem pole, and no way to make it better. “That was a dirty trick, Lily Ryder,” he growled. “How am I supposed to face your dad with a boner shoving against the front of my pants?”

She wet her lips with the tip of her tongue. And she
didn't, he noticed, distracted though he was, correct him by saying she was Lily
Kenyon.
“I guess you'd better wait in the truck,” she teased. “That way, he won't see.”

“You're sure about that quickie?”

“I'm sure. When I have a climax, Tyler, I glow for hours afterward. In case you haven't noticed.”

He groaned again. “Oh, I've noticed, all right,” he said miserably, shifting on the porch. He eyed the lawn sprinkler, actually considered unscrewing it and drenching himself with the hose, right there in Doc Ryder's backyard, just to cool off.

“Tell you what,” Lily said, close to his ear. “I'll slip out later, and we'll meet somewhere.”

“Like where?”

“That old cemetery on your ranch?” Lily suggested. “I've always thought that was such a peaceful place, and there's a lot of deep, soft grass—”

Tyler was in genuine pain by then. Make that agony. He got to his feet, tried in vain to right himself without putting one hand down the front of his jeans. Doc and Tess and Kit Carson were on their way back—he caught the sound of their voices, at the vague periphery of his hearing.

“Eight o'clock?” Lily asked.

“Eight o'clock,” Tyler agreed, wondering how the hell he'd wait that long. As it was, he'd have to jump off the end of his dock into the lake before he went to meet Davie for that horseback ride.

“You're going to be thinking about this all day, aren't you?” Lily murmured.

“Yes,” Tyler answered. “And you're going to pay, once I lay you down in the grass tonight, lady.”

Having said that, he went to the truck, got behind the wheel, half in and half out, because Doc and Tess and the dog were almost to the side gate by then. Doc opened the passenger-side door of the truck, and Kit Carson jumped in on his own, scrambled from the floorboards to the seat and sat there panting and grinning, very pleased with himself.

Tyler was doing a little panting of his own, at least on the inside.

“I hope we were gone long enough,” Doc remarked casually, with a twinkle in his eyes.

Not
nearly
long enough,
Tyler thought. He supposed it was all for the best, though. He'd have had Lily bent over the nearest waist-high surface by then, if she'd agreed to the quickie, and she'd have shone like a lighthouse on a dark night after she came. And came.

Lily was a multiple-orgasm kind of gal.

And even an old fogy like Doc, who probably hadn't had sex since the first Bush administration, would have known exactly what had happened.

“Thanks for walking my dog, Doc,” Tyler said, amazed at how normal he sounded, starting up the truck. Waving to Tess as he backed out of the driveway.

Conscious that Davie was waiting, and probably impatiently, Tyler meant to make one more stop, nevertheless. Fortunately, by the time he pulled in at the casino on the edge of town, he was no longer at full mast, so he wouldn't have to stop off at home for the planned dip in the lake. Unfortunately, he was still damn uncomfortable.

He'd scanned the custody documents Doreen had given him the day before into his laptop at home, and
tucked them into a secondhand manila envelope he'd found in a drawer. Now, sitting in the parking lot, he signed them at all the little x's, pulled his checkbook from the glove compartment and wrote a draft for one hell of a lot of money. Finally, he jammed it into the envelope, along with the documents, and scrawled Doreen's name across the front.

Leaving Kit Carson fretting in the truck, he sprinted toward the side entrance, made his way to the employees' lounge and left the packet with the security guard. When Doreen came in to work her shift, her blood-money would be waiting.

Now, he just had to think of a way to break the news to Davie. The trail ride, just the two of them up in the foothills on horseback, would be a good chance to talk, but Tyler had already decided that he'd wait. Davie would be shook up afterward, of course, and need some putting back together, and that would make meeting Lily at the cemetery all but impossible.

Tyler had just paid a shitload of money to basically adopt a kid who might not even be his, and he'd do right by Davie if it killed him, but there were limits to his nobility—and they were just this side of a deep-grass tryst with Lily Ryder under a summer moon.

Since neither he nor Dylan had any horses, though Dylan was in the process of building a real fancy barn, to hear him tell it, Tyler had had no choice but to borrow a couple from Logan. With luck, his brother wouldn't be around when he got there.

As it turned out, he'd used up his quota of luck for the day when he'd leveled with Lily about Davie and
she hadn't told him to hit the road. Logan was in the corral with Davie when he pulled in at the home place, with one horse already saddled and a second just fitted with a bridle.

“I wouldn't have believed it,” Lawyer-man said lightly, “if I hadn't seen you pull in here with my own eyes.”

“I told you we needed to borrow a couple of horses for a trail ride,” Davie reminded Logan, already mounted on the saddled gelding, a pinto who looked like he'd move about as fast as cold honey flowing uphill.

Logan didn't look at the boy. He was too busy assessing Tyler. “There's something we need to talk about, little brother,” he said. “If you can work me into your busy schedule.”

Tyler climbed over the corral fence, threw a saddle blanket onto the second horse and the saddle after it. “I'm free next August,” he said. “Maybe we could do lunch.”

“Very funny,” Logan replied, and though he was smiling a little, his eyes were solemn. “It's important, Ty.”

Tyler tightened the cinch, unhooked the stirrup from the saddle horn and mounted the black gelding. When Tyler leaned to grab the dangling reins, Logan caught hold of them first and handed them up.

“Then why didn't you get around to it when you were at my place before?” Tyler chided, anxious to be gone.

But it was good to have a horse under him again.

Not half so good as it would be to have
Lily
in the same position, but one pleasure at a time.

Logan ran a hand along the gelding's neck before looking up into Tyler's face. “Because it's not an easy
thing to say,” he replied quietly. “Especially to somebody who likes to make things as hard as possible, the way you do.”

Tyler felt a stab of regret at that, and some dread, too.

Was Logan dying of some disease?

Was the ranch about to go on the auction block for back taxes?

Neither question was answered. Logan had turned, walked away to open the corral gate. Davie rode through first. Tyler hesitated in the gap, looking down at his brother.

“You're okay, right?” he asked Logan. “The ranch is okay?”

Logan tilted up one corner of his mouth, but as grins went, that one was a real bust. “Nothing like that,” he said. “It can wait until tomorrow.”