Montana Creeds: Tyler (10 page)

But that was impossible, of course.

Even for a Creed.

Wasn't it?

“About tonight,” she choked out, when the aftershocks began to subside. She still sounded too breathless. “I really shouldn't—”

“No getting out of it now,” Tyler broke in easily. “Your dad will be okay, and so will Tess, and it's only dinner, Lily.”

It's only dinner.
Where had she heard
that
before?

And if Tyler could bring her to climax with a leisurely once-over and a touch of his hand, what would happen if he got her alone? What would happen in the restaurant?

Lily didn't want to find out.

Much.

Desperately, she began making excuses to herself. She simply didn't have random orgasms in public places. No, it was just that she'd gone without sex for so long, that was all, and then she'd let her thoughts head down the wrong road.

No, it would probably never happen again.

Damn it.

Just as Lily was about to press on to the nearest checkout line, neatly skirting any further conversation about their date that night, a barely adolescent boy appeared from two aisles over, sporting a spider tattoo on his neck and various piercings.

“I found the hammer,” he told Tyler, holding the tool up as evidence.

Lily felt an odd little quiver of dread in the pit of her stomach, something completely unrelated to the sweet tremors of pure female ecstasy she'd just survived.

“Lily,” Tyler said lightly, but with watchful eyes, “this is Davie McCullough. Davie, Lily Ryder.”

“Lily
Kenyon,
” Lily corrected primly. Anything to establish some distance between herself and the heat mirage that was Tyler. Talk about shutting the barn door after the horse ran away.

“Hi,” Davie said. His obviously new jeans and striped T-shirt were at strange variance with the piercings and the tattoo.

Lily smiled. “Hello,” she answered.

“See you at six,” Tyler told her.

“Is this the hot date?” Davie asked.

Tyler rolled his eyes, but if he was embarrassed by Davie's remark, it didn't show. He was the legendary Tyler Creed, after all. He probably made women climax in discount stores all the time. No big deal.

“This is the hot date,” Tyler confirmed.

Lily blushed again, and then simply bolted, knowing anything she might have said would have been wrong, and probably gotten her in even deeper than she already was.

And Tyler's low, knowing chuckle trailed in her wake.

 

“T
HAT
,”
Tyler told Davie, a beat after Lily raced away, “was
not
cool.”

Davie grinned unapologetically. “Oh,
well,
” he said.
“She is hot. And you
did
warn me that I might have to bunk in at your brother's place if things went down the way you hoped they would.”

Tyler watched as Lily chose the longest line, knew she'd done so because it was the farthest away from where he was standing. She looked beyond good in those big-city blue jeans of hers, and it was a damn good thing, by his reckoning, that he had a full shopping cart to stand behind.

He'd seen Lily go over the edge, known by the blush in her cheeks and the dazed expression in her eyes that the mental trick Doreen had taught him had worked, and he'd gone hard as bedrock the moment she'd come undone.

This, along with the current state of his anatomy, came under the heading of Things Davie Didn't Need to Know, so he was careful to stay behind the cart.

“Don't be a smart-ass,” he told the kid.

“I have problems,” Davie retorted smugly. “I'm a Troubled Teenager. There's no telling what I might say.” The kid admired Lily from afar as she lobbed salad greens and a package of what looked like chicken onto the rolling counter, shook his head. “Makes a man wish he was twenty years older.”

Tyler had to chuckle at that, even though a part of him wanted to get Davie by the scruff and hustle him out of Lily-viewing range. Which was Creed-crazy. Davie was only a kid, for all his big talk. “Pull your eyeballs back into your head, Cartoon Boy. She's spoken for.”

Mercifully, Davie let the subject drop. Maybe because
he'd won a round, on their second trip to Wal-Mart in twenty-four hours, by talking Tyler into buying him a TV.

Tyler, on the other hand, couldn't seem to move on from the Lily encounter. Lily was primed, all right. If he could just get her naked, he could untie all those knots inside her. And when she turned loose for real, let herself go beyond the impromptu climax she'd just had to the genuine article, the universe would tremble on its foundations.

Not just for her, but for him, too.

Whoa, cowboy,
he told himself silently. Thoughts like that weren't going to make the lodgepole pushing at the front of his jeans go down, and he couldn't hide his hard-on behind that shopping cart forever.

He needed to get some perspective.

Perspective, hell. He was already planning the call he meant to make to Dylan, as soon as he could get out of Davie's earshot.
Would you mind babysitting a thirteen-year-old?

He was already picturing Lily, crooning in his bed, arching her back under his hands and mouth, already imagining her afterward, when they'd both recovered, stripped to her delectable skin, bobbing in the cool, dark waters of Hidden Lake, just off the end of his ancient swimming dock.

Skinny-dipping with Lily
Kenyon,
as she'd so carefully reminded him.

Oh, yeah.

Welcome home, Tyler Creed.

Welcome home.

 

“H
OW DO
I
LOOK
?”
Lily asked nervously, at five-thirty that evening, modeling her red sundress in the kitchen of her dad's house. Tess and her new friend, Eleanor, were sitting at the table, picking at the chicken breasts she'd broiled earlier, for their supper and Hal's.

Both the girls seemed stricken to silence, as though they'd never seen a woman in a dress before, but Hal found words. “That's some getup,” he said. Was that a twinkle she saw lurking in his eyes? “I'm glad you took my advice and went with red.”

“It's only dinner,” Lily said. Hadn't people been telling
her
that all day?

She wasn't eloping with Tyler.

They probably wouldn't even kiss, since they were virtually strangers to each other.

Hal laughed, shook his head.

Had she said something funny? And if so, when?

“My mom has a name for shoes like that,” Eleanor said sagely. Eleanor, like Tess, was a miniature adult, disguised as a child. The old-fashioned name suited her perfectly, in fact.

“They're straight out of
Sex and the City,
” Tess observed.

“Tess Kenyon,” Lily challenged, “what do you know about
Sex and the City?
”

Being no dummy, Tess subsided. “Just that the older girls talk about it at school sometimes,” she said sweetly. “And that all the women in the TV show can run in
really
high heels.”

“That does it,” Lily said. “I'm blocking cable.”

“I don't have cable,” Hal put in. “So no worries.”

“You look beautiful, Mom,” Tess said, with such sincerity and even wonder that Lily forgot all about the things her daughter might have been watching on TV when she wasn't around. “Like a princess.”

“A princess in sexy shoes,” Eleanor said.

Eleanor's parents, Lily had learned over the course of the long, lazy, front-porch afternoon, were going through a bad divorce. It was important to show tolerance and understanding, but there were limits.

“Can Eleanor spend the night?” Tess asked. “Her aunt said it was okay.”

“If it's all right with your grandfather, yes,” Lily said. Then she turned her gaze to her dad. “No TV,” she added ominously. “Unless it's Disney, or educational in some way.”

Hal sighed, raised both hands, palms out, in a gesture of benign surrender. “I was planning on a game of cutthroat Monopoly. Is that curmudgeonly enough for you?”

Lily gave him a look.

“Are you driving, or is Tyler picking you up?” Tess asked Lily. From her tone, she might have been forty, not six.

Lily's cheeks felt hot again. She was a fool for even going on this dinner date at all, let alone not taking her rental car, but since she'd been in such a dither from the first encounter with Tyler, the day before yesterday, she hadn't thought to suggest that they meet at the restaurant.

Was she
trying
to get herself seduced?

Did she
want
to let Tyler have his way with her, and to hell with the consequences?

It was a possibility she didn't dare examine too closely.

“Tyler is picking me up,” she finally answered.

Eleanor and Tess high-fived each other.

And before Lily could respond to that, the doorbell rang.

Lily's heart shimmied into her throat.

There was still time to back out. She could pretend to be sick, maybe even persuade Hal to lie for her, though the chances of
that
were slim to none.

But what kind of example would she be setting for Tess?

Lily patted her hair, pinned up in a loose twist at the back of her head. Hal smiled, reading the gesture for what it was, and Tess and Eleanor raced for the front of the house, giggling when they nearly wedged themselves into the first doorway.

Lily thought she was going to throw up.

Maybe it
wouldn't
be lying to say she was sick.

The trouble was, no one would believe her. Not her dad, not the little girls who knew too much about sexy shoes, and certainly not Tyler.

She'd just have to go through with the whole thing, that was all.

Hope she could pass a pleasant evening with an old friend without letting her inner hussy come to the fore and climb Tyler's frame like a monkey scrambling up the trunk of a palm tree.

Lily was still dealing with the Freudian aspects of
that
image when she saw Tyler, standing in her father's foyer, wearing jeans and a freshly pressed white shirt, holding a black cowboy hat in one hand and looking shy.

There was something to be said, she decided, for illicit sex.

Something to be said for just getting it over with, out of the way, so she could think straight again. Recover her balance, get some perspective.

After nodding to Hal and the girls, Tyler took the tiny white sweater from her hands and draped it over her shoulders. Leaned to whisper in her ear even as he reached for the doorknob with one hand.

“It's inevitable,” he said. “What do you say we skip dinner and get right down to business?”

L
OGAN
C
REED STOOD
with one booted foot braced on the lowest rail of his corral fence, arms resting across the top as he watched the latest stray—a dark-haired kid with piercings, tattoos and plenty of attitude—riding the tamest horse on the place, bareback.

Dylan, right beside him, watched, too, while Kristy, Dylan's bride, supervised the boy's ride from within rein-grabbing distance. Kristy was good with horses, even gifted. After a long hiatus spent grieving for her old partner, a gelding named Sugarfoot, she was training them again.

“Think the kid is Tyler's?” Logan asked quietly. Briana, the love of his life, was in the house, whipping up supper for a crowd, while Bonnie, Dylan's little girl, played on the kitchen floor, and his stepsons, Josh and Alec, worked on the summer lessons their mother had assigned them.

Briana was a stickler for education, and preferred to home-school her sons, but she'd agreed to let them attend normal classes in the fall. In the meantime, she made sure they kept their math and reading skills up to snuff.

Logan's heart bucked like a bronc fresh from the
chute, just thinking of her in the house, a ranch wife in blue jeans and a sexy cotton blouse, and the sweet secret they shared.

In roughly eight months, there would be a new Creed on Stillwater Springs Ranch, of the small, messy, noisy variety.

He could barely wait. Thought sometimes he'd burst if he had to keep the secret to himself much longer. But he and Briana had agreed not to spread the word until she was three months along, so he stayed mum.

“According to Ty, Doreen denies it,” Dylan answered. A grin cocked up one corner of his mouth, and he adjusted his hat. “I'm not sure Ty's convinced, though. It would be a good thing for him, and for Davie, too, if the kid's one of us.”

“One of us,” Logan repeated, unable to hide the touch of sorrow that phrase made him feel. “Ty doesn't want to be a Creed, remember? So even if the DNA's right—”

Dylan laid a hand on his brother's shoulder. “Our little brother's back on the ranch,” he reminded Logan. “That means something. That he's come home, that he wasted no time asking Lily out. Give him a little time to come around, Logan.”

Logan gave a rueful chuckle, part snort. Except for marrying Briana and helping to raise Josh and Alec, he'd never wanted anything as much as he wanted the Creed family restored, and the ranch back in working order.

He and Dylan, once on the outs, were brothers again. They were full partners in the newly formed Tri-Star Cattle Company; they'd bought the start of a herd and doubled the size of the ranch by purchasing Kristy's
folks' old place, but there was still a line on the official documents, awaiting Tyler's signature.

The outfit wouldn't be “Tri”-anything until Ty joined up.

And since the last time Logan had seen his youngest brother, at their dad's grave, Ty had sucker punched him, reconciliation didn't seem all that likely.

“If I hadn't busted that damn guitar—” Logan mused, remembering. Regretting. It had happened the day they buried their dad—they'd all been drunk, down at Skivvie's, and Tyler had been singing and strumming some stupid song he'd written, making Jake sound like John Wayne or Roy Rodgers, not the hard-drinking, ornery son of a bitch he'd really been.

Logan, full of grief and rage and cheap beer, had suddenly lost it. He'd jerked that guitar out of Tyler's hands and smashed it to splinters against the bar. A second later, he'd have given anything to take back what he'd done, but there was no changing it.

The guitar had belonged to Tyler's dead mother, and it had been her most precious possession.

The damage had been done.

The fight was on.

And all three of them had been thrown into the clink for public drunkenness and brawling and a whole list of other misdemeanors. They'd gone their separate ways the next morning, as soon as Floyd Book turned them loose from the hoosegow, and written each other off.

“That goddamned song,” Logan muttered, watching as Davie relaxed a little on the horse, under Kristy's patient tutelage, and started showing some potential as a cow-puncher.

Dylan nodded. “Everything Tyler wanted in a father was in that song,” he recalled. “Everything we
all
wanted Jake to be.”

“Why didn't I see that?” Logan asked.

“Maybe because you were hurting, too. We all were, Logan. It was a tough day for everybody.”

Logan shook his head, not in denial of what Dylan had just said, but out of resignation and remorse. “Pretty crazy,” he said. “We hated Jake's drinking and hell-raising, and what did we do? When push came to shove, Dylan, we acted just like he would have. Came straight to Skivvie's from the funeral home and started swilling beer. Got ourselves arrested.”

“Jake would have been real proud,” Dylan joked. Since Kristy, he'd mellowed out a lot, and developed a halfway decent sense of humor. Must have been all that regular, down-home sex.

Logan knew that because of what he had with Briana. Whenever the kids weren't around, they were doing it—in the barn, in the laundry room, anywhere they happened to be. They'd tear off each other's clothes and collide. Briana liked it fast and wet and hard, liked being bent over things and taken in a single thrust, like a stallion with a mare in heat—hardly any foreplay at all.

Ironically, the foreplay came later, when they'd eased that first ferocious, almost violent need to join their bodies, when Logan would lay his flushed and still-gasping wife down on the nearest soft surface and take his time pleasing her. And in pleasing Briana, he more than pleased himself.

He shifted against the coral fence, lest Dylan spot the
instant hard-on thinking about Briana always produced, and shoved a hand through his hair.

“I guess you like being married,” Dylan observed dryly.

Damn him, he didn't miss much.

“I like it all right,” Logan allowed. “What about you?”

“If I'd known what it was going to be like with Kristy,” Dylan answered, “I'd have been the original virgin bridegroom.”

Logan gave a hoot of laughter, and some of the gloom over his broken relationship with Tyler let up. “You, a virgin? Hell, were you
ever
a virgin, little brother? This is me you're talking to—I happen to know you did the babysitter when you were barely fifteen.”

“‘Babysitter'?” Dylan balked, but there was a laugh behind the word. “Are you completely clueless? That woman wasn't a babysitter. She was one of Dad's barfly girlfriends—he brought her home from one of his binges and she stayed on when he left for work the next morning.”

“And you decided to do her?”

Dylan grinned, the cocky little bastard. “It was mutual. These days, they'd arrest her, but I've got to admit, I enjoyed being taken advantage of.”

“Yeah,” Logan drawled. “I reached that same conclusion when I came running into Jake's room to rescue you—the way you were howling, I thought somebody was killing you—and there you were, buck-ass naked, with her riding you like a bronc at the rodeo.”

“If she'd have had a hat handy,” Dylan agreed, “she'd have been waving it in the air.”

Logan laughed. Shook his head again. “It's no wonder we're so screwed-up,” he said.

Dylan glanced at Kristy, and his expression softened. “Not anymore, brother,” he said. “I'm not screwed-up anymore, and neither are you.”

“Nothing like the love of a good woman,” Logan conceded, just as Briana appeared on the porch and called out that supper was ready.

“Nothing like it,” Dylan said.

Davie swung a leg over and got down, and he and Kristy went into the barn to put the animal up for the night. That was part of learning to ride, as far as Kristy was concerned. You looked after the horse, first, last and always, even if it made you late for supper.

“You think Tyler's serious about Lily, or just looking for a piece of tail?” Logan asked, as he and Dylan headed toward the house. All he really knew was that Kristy and Dylan had agreed to keep an eye on young Davie while Tyler took Doc Ryder's daughter, Lily, out to dinner.

Dylan had explained, in his offhand way, that Davie had an asshole for a stepfather, and needed to live away from home for a while, so he was bunking in at Tyler's place. At the mention of Doreen's name, and Davie's age, Logan had started counting backward, summer by summer, to the most likely scenario.

“I think our little brother is
definitely
looking for a piece of tail,” Dylan replied, after some thought. “I also think he never got over Lily, any more than I got over Kristy, but he may not have figured that part out yet. Could be that Lily hasn't, either.”

Logan hoped Tyler
would
fall for his high school
sweetheart, hoped he'd marry her and get her pregnant and stay right on Stillwater Springs Ranch, where he belonged.

Where all of them belonged.

The Creed brothers ride again,
Logan thought, picturing the three of them riding abreast on well-fed horses, driving their own cattle over their own land, justifiably proud of their name because they'd turned things around, made being a Creed mean something good.

Some dreams never died.

No matter how bad the odds against them might be.

 

“W
E ARE
NOT
SKIPPING DINNER
,”
Lily whispered, as soon as the front door had closed behind her and Tyler. “And we're not ‘getting right down to business,' either!”

Tyler laughed, damnably confident. Standing there in the first pink and lavender shadows of a Montana sunset, he looked like a character in a Western movie. “You're hungry?” he teased.

Heat surged through her.

There was no way she was going to be able to get so much as a bite of food down, with the air so charged between her and Tyler, and he probably knew that as well as she did.

“I'll fix you some scrambled eggs out at my place,” Tyler went on, when she didn't speak. He took her hand and instead of pulling free, turning on one heel, dashing back into the house, slamming and locking the door behind her, like any halfway sensible woman would have done, Lily let him lead her down the steps. “How's that?”

“
Nothing
is going to happen between us,” Lily in
sisted, leaving the scrambled-egg question to dangle and casting an anxious glance over one shoulder. Her dad, Tess and Eleanor were all standing with their noses practically pressed to the glass in the living room window, taking it all in.

“Then what's the harm in scrambled eggs at the cabin?” Tyler asked reasonably, nodding cordially to the spectators. “You're putting on quite a show, you know,” he added. “Try to make this look like an ordinary dinner date—as it is, anybody would think you're expecting me to hoist you off your feet and throw you over one shoulder at any second. Carry you off to some cave and lick every part of you until you lose your mind.”

More heat, so heavy that it nearly brought Lily to her knees.

“I could still go inside and forget this whole crazy idea, you know!” Lily whispered furiously.

“You won't,” Tyler said easily. “Do you think I don't know you got off in Wal-Mart this morning? You are a woman in need of some intense sex, and I'm just the man to give it to you.”

“And
you
are
impossible!
And I did
not
‘get off,' as you so crudely put it, in Wal-Mart!”

“Smile and wave,” Tyler coached, grinning. “We're still being watched.”

She worked up a smile, waved to the delighted onlookers and against all better judgment, against all reason and good sense, let Tyler guide her down the walk to the gate, through it and up to the passenger door of a Blazer. It didn't look like the kind of rig he'd drive, she thought, distracted, but then his truck
had
broken down on some
lonely highway, leaving him and his dog afoot, which was part of the reason she was in this mess. Maybe the Blazer was a rental.