Creed's Honor (23 page)

“His name is Valentino,” Conner said, resting his booted feet on the chrome ledge around the stove. He’d changed and showered after he was through with the chores, but he couldn’t seem to get warm.

Brody chuckled. “Valentino? I thought it was Bill or something like that.”

“Bill didn’t work for him,” Conner admitted. “So it’s back to Valentino.”

“Oh,” Brody said, moving to the refrigerator. He sighed, once he’d seen the contents. “I thought I smelled steak.”

“You did,” Conner said. “We ate it.”

Brody hadn’t closed on the property he’d bought from Tricia yet, and Carolyn was still staying up at Kim and Davis’s place, so the brothers had been sharing the main house. Giving each other lots of room and speaking only when it couldn’t be avoided.

“Kim called today,” Brody said, taking a carton of eggs from the fridge and moving on to the electric stove.
“They’re coming back early—her and Davis, I mean—and there’ll be a crowd for Thanksgiving. Boston and his pretty wife and the kids will be here.”

Boston
was and always had been Brody’s name for Steven.

“That’s good,” Conner said. Brody was in an unusually chatty mood, it seemed to him. Maybe he’d shut up, if Conner kept his responses to a word or two.

A cast-iron skillet clanged onto a burner, and Brody started cracking eggs.

“You hungry?” he asked.

“No,” Conner answered.

Right about then, thunder tore open the sky, and hard rain lashed against the sturdy walls of the house, pattered on the windows.

Valentino scooted closer to Conner’s chair, and Conner reached out to stroke the dog’s head.

“Weather like this chills a man to the core,” Brody remarked, with an audible shudder. “There ain’t much I wouldn’t give for a nice, warm woman right about now.”

The statement rankled, though Conner couldn’t have said why. Not without giving it some thought, anyhow. He decided it was the
ain’t
that got to him.

“What’s with the yokel routine?” he grumbled. Brody had a college degree, just as he did.

Brody laughed. “I was waxing colloquial,” he said. “Making conversation.”

“Well, don’t,” Conner snapped.

“Don’t wax colloquial?”

“Don’t make conversation.”

Brody gave a heavy sigh. “This isn’t about Joleen, I’m guessing,” he said.

“Nope,” Conner agreed.

“Then what? The land I bought from Tricia McCall?”

“Why would I give a damn about that?”

“Got me,” Brody said. The words had a built-in shrug. “Maybe you figure Tricia goes along with the deal.”

If it wouldn’t have scared the dog, Conner would have been on his feet, across the room and closing his hands around Brody’s throat, all in the space of a heartbeat.

“Tricia’s got better sense than to take up with the likes of you,” Conner said, still in his chair in front of the stove.
Or me,
he added silently. “She plans on moving back to Seattle pretty soon. That’s why I have the dog.”

“I do believe that’s the most you’ve said to me in ten years,” Brody commented, rattling utensils around in a drawer until he found a spatula to turn the eggs. “You like her, Conner?”

“She’s all right,” Conner said.

All right?
Kissing her had practically turned him inside out. God only knew what would happen if they ever made love. Fireworks, probably. Meteor showers.

Earthquakes, without a doubt.

Again, Brody laughed. It gave Conner that old feeling that he and Brody could see inside each other’s heads.

“I don’t have designs on Tricia,” Brody said. He’d stacked the eggs onto a plate like a pile of pancakes, and he was headed for the table.

“None of my concern if you do,” Conner said.

“Like hell,” Brody responded, busy digging in to the eggs. “You think you know all about me, brother, but you don’t.”

“Is that right?” Conner asked, wondering if it meant anything that Brody had just said “brother” instead of the usual “
little
brother.” Deciding it didn’t.

“Fact is,” Brody reflected, looking at Conner now, “I’m more like you than you’d care to admit, and you’re more like me than anybody else knows.”

Conner absorbed that statement, swallowed the immediate urge to refute it. Even in friendlier days, he and Brody had lived to disagree with each other—he supposed it was because they’d needed, as kids, to establish separate identities. In most people’s eyes, they were practically interchangeable, each of them only half a person without the other.

“Where have you been all this time, Brody?” Conner asked, taking himself by surprise. It seemed he was always saying something he hadn’t
meant
to say, lately. To Brody and to Tricia, anyway.

“Around,” Brody said.

“Come on,” Conner said, in an angry rasp, turning his chair around so his back was to the stove now, and he was facing Brody, who was still sitting at the table, though he’d stopped eating. Valentino adjusted himself to the new arrangement, sticking close enough to rest his muzzle on Conner’s right boot.

“Just around,” Brody reiterated. “For now, Conner, that needs to be enough.”

Conner didn’t answer.

Brody wasn’t finished, though. And that was strange, given that this time he’d been the one to pull his punches. “I’ll tell you what I told Boston, back when he asked me the same question,” Brody said. “I wasn’t in jail, or anything like that. There’s no big secret—but there is some stuff I’m not ready to talk about. Fair enough?”

“Fair enough,” Conner replied.

Brody left the table, carried his plate and his silverware to the sink, set them down. “I’ll be out of town for a few days, as of tomorrow,” he said, as though it mattered. “But I’m coming back to Lonesome Bend, for sure. Soon as I close on that real-estate deal, I’ll be living in that log building at the campground and you’ll be rid of me.”

“Whatever,” Conner said.

“Yeah,” Brody said hoarsely. “Well, good night, little brother.”

“Night,” Conner ground out.

When he and Valentino were alone in the kitchen again, the dog lifted his head off Conner’s instep and gave an inquiring little whine.

“We might as well turn in, too,” Conner said.

Tired as he was, sleep eluded him for a long time.

T
WO DAYS LATER
, Conner awakened to a loud pounding at the back door.

Grumbling, he rolled out of bed, pulled on a pair of jeans and padded out into the kitchen.

Dawn hadn’t even cracked the horizon yet, but the porch light was on, and he could see Tricia standing out there, hands cupped on either side of her face, peering in through the window beside the door.

Conner’s heart did a funny little spin, right up into his throat.

Valentino, at his side as ever, gave a happy little yelp.

“I want my dog back,” Tricia said, first thing, when Conner had pulled open the door. With that, she dropped to her knees, right there on the threshold, and hugged
Valentino, laughing as he licked her face in welcome. “Oh, buddy, I’ve missed you.” she crooned, burying her face in the dog’s ruff.

Conner rubbed his bare chest with the heel of one palm. “You mind coming inside?” he asked, in a tone that would have led some people to believe things like this—women showing up at his house in what amounted to the middle of the night—happened to him all the time. “So I can shut the door?”

She got to her feet, smiling, and stepped into the house.

Conner pushed the door closed, looking her over.

He saw her eyes widen as she registered that he wasn’t wearing a shirt. “Hold on,” he said, heading into his old room, the one Brody had taken over, and grabbing the first garment he got his hands on.

Turned out to be a T-shirt with a lot of holes and a lewd slogan on the front.

“I guess I woke you up,” Tricia said, sounding chagrined. She’d already hunted up Valentino’s leash, and she was bending to attach it to his collar. He supposed it should have galled him, her certainty that he’d just give back the dog and say nothing about it, but it didn’t.

“Bound to happen,” Conner observed dryly, glancing at the stove clock, “at three forty-five in the morning.”

She had the good grace to blush. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I took a red-eye from Seattle to Denver and all the way home, I was thinking about Valentino—”

Conner tried to remember the last time he’d been jealous of a dog and came up empty. Besides that, his sleep-drugged mind got snagged on the word
home
. Since when did Tricia McCall consider Lonesome Bend
“home”? All she’d wanted was to get the hell out of there.

Just a figure of speech, he decided, rummy but waking up fast.

“He’s still your dog,” Conner said, folding his arms. Drinking in the sight of her. For somebody who’d been up all night, Tricia looked good—deliciously so. “Took off twice, after you left, and both times, I found him waiting on your doorstep. Coffee?”

Tricia blinked, probably at the conversational hairpin turn—Conner was prone to those, since his brain moved a lot faster than his mouth. “I couldn’t impose,” she said.

Conner laughed. “As if. This from a woman who couldn’t wait till daylight to reclaim her dog?”

She blushed. She looked damn good, with color blossoming in her cheeks and that shine in her eyes. It would be interesting to see what a nice long orgasm did for her.

“I’m sorry,” she repeated.

“Sit down,” Conner said, moving on to the coffeemaker and starting the brew. Once it was percolating, he turned around to look at her again. She’d taken a chair, and the dog was standing there with his head resting on her knees, his eyes rolled up at her in frank adoration.

Conner could identify.

“I thought you’d decided Valentino was too big a dog to live in the city,” he ventured. That was as close as his pride would let him get to asking her what her plans were, but he sure as hell wanted to know.

“We’ll adapt,” Tricia said, stroking Valentino lovingly.

Conner reminded himself that it was stupid to envy
a dog. “So,” he responded casually, turning away to get cups from the cupboard, “you’re still going back to Seattle?”

“I haven’t decided,” she answered. “There’s no hurry, after all.”

Conner looked back at her. “What about ski-guy?” he asked, and then could have kicked himself. Now she’d know he’d seen—and remembered—that snow-globe picture of her and the boyfriend on her computer screen.

She smiled. “Hunter? That’s over.” She said this lightly, in the same tone she might have used to say she’d once believed that the moon was made of green cheese, but now she knew it was just one big rock. “Actually, it’s
been
over for a while now, but it took me some time to notice.”

He got real busy with the cups, even though the coffee was a long way from being ready to drink. “I see,” he said, when the silence had stretched to the breaking point. Of course, he
didn’t
see. He was damned if he could figure out how a woman’s mind worked, sometimes. Especially
this
woman.

She looked around. “Where’s Brody?” she asked. Then she colored up again. “Sleeping, I suppose.”

“I doubt that,” Conner replied. “He’s out of town right now.”

“Oh,” Tricia said, squirming a little on the hard seat of that wooden chair. Not quite meeting his eyes.

Hot damn, he thought. Was it possible that she was there for another reason, besides fetching her dog?

Whoa, dumb-ass,
he told himself silently.
Don’t go jumping to conclusions.

Conner needed something to do, so he went ahead
and pulled the carafe from the coffeemaker, even though it wasn’t done doing its thing. The stuff sizzled on the little burner and scented the air with java.

He filled a cup for Tricia and one for himself and finally joined her at the table.

“Sugar?” she asked.

Holy shit,
he thought, as a zing went through his whole system. But then the request penetrated his thick skull and seeped into the gray matter.

“Sure,” he said, getting up to find the sugar bowl and get her a teaspoon so she could stir the stuff into her coffee. “You want cream, too? I’ve got some of the powdered stuff, I think.”

Tricia shook her head and concentrated on doctoring the contents of her mug. “No, thanks,” she said.

He sat down again.

The dog, he noticed, had positioned himself halfway between the two of them, and he kept turning his head from one to the other.

Tricia’s spoon rattled in her cup.

Conner sipped his own coffee and mused.

Finally, she looked up at him, and he was amazed to see tears standing in her eyes. “I can’t believe Natty won’t be there when Valentino and I go back to the house,” she said.

So that was it, Conner decided. She didn’t want to face her great-grandmother’s empty rooms—not in the dark, anyway, and not after a long and probably uncomfortable flight, followed by the drive from the airport.

“You could stay here,” Conner said. Might as well put it out there in the open. All this pussyfooting around was getting them nowhere. “Go back to Natty’s place after the sun’s up and you’re feeling a little stronger.”

She blinked and, with a subtle motion of one hand, wiped her eyes. “Would you mind?”

Mind? Would he
mind?

“I could sleep on the sofa, I suppose,” she said in a thoughtful tone.

“You can have my bed,” Conner answered. There were guest rooms in the house, of course, but none of them were made up, and he couldn’t bring himself to put her in Brody’s, empty though it was. There were probably cracker crumbs on the sheets, anyhow. “I’ll just get an early start on the chores.”

Tricia bit down on her lower lip, finally nodded. She used both hands to pick up her coffee mug this time, and they shook visibly.

“Okay,” she said, looking at him over the rim. “My—my suitcase is in the Pathfinder—”

“I’ll get it,” Conner said, on his feet immediately. Over by the door, he paused to pull on a pair of boots and his denim jacket.

“Thanks,” she said, after clearing her throat.

He braved the cold, retrieved the suitcase and hurried back inside. By then, she was standing at the kitchen sink, rinsing out her cup.