Creed's Honor (25 page)

Conner watched through the window over the kitchen sink, a slight smile crooking his mouth up at one corner, as the Pathfinder sped off down the driveway toward the road. Once the rig was out of sight, he poured himself some coffee and fired up the right-front burner on the stove to cook some scrambled eggs. He made toast and sat down to enjoy his solitary breakfast, feeling strangely peaceful, though he supposed Tricia’s quick exit wasn’t an especially good sign.

After he’d eaten, Conner headed to the barn to feed the horses and then turn them out into the corral for some exercise. Brody’s rodeo stock was way out there, on the range, and against his better judgment, Conner worried. There was plenty of water, since the river flowed clear across the ranch, but the grass was getting skimpy, now that it was November.

And Brody wasn’t back from wherever it was he’d gone. Fuming a little, Conner strode to the equipment
shed, rolled up the high, wide door, and drove the flatbed truck out, leaving it to idle beside the barn while he climbed into the hay mow and began chucking bales down. When he had a load, he got behind the wheel again and made his way through a series of gates and out onto the range. He attracted a crowd of hungry cattle right away, though the horses kept their distance at first.

Methodically, silently cursing his twin brother the whole time, Conner drove from one part of the ranch to another, cutting the twine around the bales with his pocket knife, flinging the feed onto the ground so the livestock could get at it. After he’d dropped the last pile, he drove back toward the house. All the while, he was conscious of the heavy gray clouds overhead, promising snow. Maybe a lot of it.

What he tried
not
to think about was making love to Tricia McCall. Yes, he acknowledged silently, he’d enjoyed the experience. But it had left him shaken, too, and more than a little confused.

He’d been with his share of women in his time; the mechanics were the same. What
wasn’t
the same was the way he’d felt, before, during and after. He supposed it could be compared to dying a good death at the close of a long and happy life, or being knocked off a horse on the road to Damascus by a Light so irrefutably real as to be utterly transformative.

He was thinking all those crazy, un-Connerlike thoughts as he pulled up next to the barn, shifted gears and shut down the truck’s big engine. There was no point in putting the rig away in the equipment shed; knowing Brody, he, Conner, would be out there feeding cows,
bulls and bucking broncos again, all by his lonesome, come morning.

A light rain, mixed with snow, began to fall as he stepped out onto the running board and leaped to the ground. A sound, or maybe a flicker of movement, drew his attention to the back door of the house, and there was Bill—
Valentino
—sitting on the step, looking as though his last friend had just caught a freight train for points south.

He walked quickly toward the dog, noting as he approached that the animal’s hide was damp and streaked with mud. Judging by the way Valentino sat, instead of getting up to greet Conner, he was footsore, too.

“Hey, buddy,” Conner said, crouching in front of Valentino and looking straight into those expressive, dog-brown eyes. “What brings you all the way out here?”

Valentino gave a low whine, but he didn’t move.

A chill trickled down Conner’s spine, like a drop of ice water. He glanced around, but there was no sign of Tricia or her Pathfinder.

So he reached out gently and ruffled Valentino’s floppy ears.

Valentino whined again and raised his right foreleg slightly, prompting Conner to examine the dog’s paw. It looked swollen, maybe a little bruised, but there was no blood.

Conner frowned. “Okay,” he said, partly to himself and partly to the dog. “Let’s get you inside. Give you some water and let you rest up a little.”

Valentino permitted Conner to hoist him into his arms, carry him into the kitchen. He set him gently on the bed he’d improvised when the critter first came to stay with him, then headed for the phone.

A glance at the wall clock above the stove surprised him with the realization that it was barely 10:00 a.m. Conner could have sworn he’d lived a lifetime since Tricia had left the house on a dead run.

It occurred to him that he didn’t know her number, either the landline or the cell. So he dialed Kim and Davis’s place and, as he’d hoped, Carolyn answered.

Conner identified himself and asked for Tricia’s number.

Maybe it was something in his voice. Maybe it was just woman’s intuition. In any case, Carolyn was instantly worried, and there was some intrigue there, too. “Is something wrong?” she asked.

“Probably not,” Conner said, after indulging in a long sigh that wouldn’t be kept inside him. “I’d just like to make sure, that’s all.”

Carolyn hunted up the number, then recited it to him.

Conner thanked her and hung up, but before he could punch in the appropriate digits, the phone jangled in his hand. The unexpectedness of it made him flinch.

“Hello?” he rasped.

“It’s Tricia,” came the answer, at once shy and anxious. “Conner, have you seen Valentino? I took him for a walk, and everything was fine, but when we got home and I unhooked his leash from his collar, he took off like a shot. I’ve looked everywhere, but—”

“He’s here,” Conner said, closing his eyes. Bracing himself against the wall by extending one hand, palm out. “Tricia, are you all right?”

She hesitated before answering. “I’m—I’m fine. What’s Valentino doing all the way out there?”

Conner chuckled, though inside, he was quaking with
relief. Nearly sick with it. He opened his eyes, straightened his spine. “I guess you’ll have to ask
him
that. I went out to feed the range stock and, when I got back, Bill—er, Valentino—was waiting for me.”

“Is he okay?” Tricia sounded anxious.

“I think his feet might be a little tender,” Conner allowed, glancing at the dog. “Must have been quite a hike, from Natty’s place to here.”

She was quiet for so long that Conner started to think the connection had been broken. “Maybe Valentino would rather be your dog than mine,” she said, at long last.

The words bruised Conner’s heart in some deep and private places. “I could bring him back,” he offered, after a long time.

“Conner—”

He sighed. Shoved a hand through his hair. “Look, if you regret what we did this morning, Tricia, I can deal with that. What I
won’t
do, under any circumstances, is pretend that nothing happened.”

She was silent for a while, but this time Conner knew she was still on the line, because he could hear her soft breathing. “I’m—I was vulnerable last night, and I didn’t mean—I don’t want to—”

“It’s
all right,
Tricia. If you don’t want things to go any further than they already have, I’m okay with that. But, as I said before, I won’t accept business as usual, either. We
did
go to bed together. It was better than good. Beyond that, you can put any spin on this that works for you.”

Again, she didn’t answer right away. “Lonesome Bend is a small town,” she said, finally. “If you—well, if you kiss and tell, Conner—”

He huffed out a snortlike chuckle, a sound completely devoid of amusement. “If you think I’d brag about our getting together, Tricia, you don’t know me very well.”

“Exactly,” she said, after a long time. “I
don’t
know you very well, Conner. And you just said you weren’t going to pretend—”

“With you,” Conner clarified, annoyed. Even a little hurt. “I’m not going to pretend
with you.
But neither do I have any intention of announcing to the whole town that we slept together.”

A low whistle of exclamation made Conner whirl in the direction of the kitchen door.

There stood Brody, wearing a grin as wide as the Mississippi River. His timing, as always, was rotten.

Conner swore under his breath, roundly and with considerable creativity.

Tricia, being a woman, instantly took offense. “I beg your pardon?”

“I wasn’t talking to you,” Conner told her, so calmly that he amazed himself. He glowered at Brody, who ignored him, crossed to Valentino, and crouched to stroke the dog with a sympathetic hand. “Listen, Tricia—I’ll bring your dog home in a little while. We’ll talk then.”

“What if I don’t
want
to talk to you?”

“Well, I guess that’s your prerogative. I could always keep Bill. Obviously, he likes it here.”

“Who’s Bill?” Tricia wanted to know.

“Bill,” Conner replied patiently, “is what I called Valentino before you decided to take him back.”

“Oh,” Tricia said.

“Yeah,” Conner said.
“Oh.”

On the other side of the room, still on his haunches
beside the dog, Brody chuckled and shook his head. “God almighty,” he told Valentino, in a voice just loud enough to carry, “no
wonder
my little brother can’t score with a woman. He has all the subtlety of a Brahma bull at a church social.”

“What if you bring Valentino back and he runs away again?” Tricia asked, her voice soft and sad, echoing faintly with losses he knew nothing about. “He could be hit by a car, out there on the road, or attacked by coyotes—”

Trying to ignore Brody, who was still inspecting the dog for injuries, Conner thrust out a sigh. “Here’s the problem, Tricia,” he said quietly. “The road goes both ways. He could just as easily take a notion to take off for your place.”

“What are we going to do?” Tricia asked.

“Keep an eye on him,” Conner answered, wanting to offer her solutions but having none to offer. “That’s all we
can
do, right now.”

Brody, getting to his feet and ambling over to the refrigerator, where he no doubt hoped to find that his favorite foods had materialized by magic, had evidently gotten the gist of the conversation by listening in on Conner’s end of it. And he jumped right in there with his two cents’ worth, unasked, like always.

“That poor dog,” he said mildly, “will run himself ragged going back and forth between the ranch and town. If he’s with you, Conner, he misses Tricia. And vice versa. He’s only going to be happy when both of you are under the same roof.”

Brody’s remark made a certain amount of sense, to Conner’s irritation.

“Stay out of this,” Conner said, adding, at Tricia’s indrawn breath, “Brody.”

Brody shrugged. He’d shaved recently, and his hair was still fairly short. Furthermore, he was either wearing Conner’s clothes again, or he’d gone to a Western store and outfitted himself with similar ones. What the
hell
was going on with him, anyhow?

“So,” Tricia interjected, “are you bringing Valentino back or not?”

“Might as well,” Conner said lightly. If Brody hadn’t been right there, he’d have reminded her that she’d left her suitcase behind, though he was pretty sure she must have realized that by now. “I’ve been feeding my brother’s livestock,” he added, putting a point on his words and raising his voice a notch, “so I have to shower and change first. See you in about an hour?”

“Yes,” Tricia said, rallying audibly from some distraction all her own. Her tone and her words were formal. They might have been business associates, or mere acquaintances, the way she talked, instead of two people who’d been wound up in a sweaty tangle together just a few hours before. “Yes, that would be fine.”

Frowning, Conner said goodbye and hung up.

Brody was still rummaging through the fridge. “Don’t you ever buy food?” he complained.

“Don’t you?” Conner countered.

Brody closed the refrigerator door briskly. His jaw tightened as he studied Conner, but then mischief twinkled in his eyes.

“You slept with Tricia McCall,” Brody said. “Little brother, I’m proud of you.”

Conner gave a ragged laugh, but he wasn’t amused. “Brody?”

“What?”

The dog lifted his head off the blanket-bed and looked at them curiously.

“Stay the hell out of my private business.”

Brody leaned back against the counter, in that old, familiar way, folding his arms, tilting his head to one side and planting the toe of his right boot on the other side of his left one. “Thanks for feeding my stock,” he said idly. “But it wasn’t necessary. I made arrangements with Clint and Juan before I left, and I figured on being back in time to haul out a load of hay this morning. Which I was.”

Conner was still annoyed, but the subject they were on was better than kicking around what had gone on between him and Tricia—by a long shot.

“Well, I didn’t have any way of knowing that, now did I?” he asked.

Brody sighed, looking put upon and sadly amused, both at once. “Those critters belong to me,” he said. “And I’ll take care of them. If I need your help, Conner, I’ll ask for it.”

Conner cleared his throat. Looked away. Momentarily, and with a stab of pain so sudden and so fierce that it nearly stole his breath, he wondered what things would be like by now, between him and Brody, if Joleen had never come between them.

“I want to get along, Conner,” Brody said, surprising him. “But you’re not exactly making it easy.”

“Imagine that,” Conner snapped, but the truth was, the grudge was starting to weigh him down. He was getting tired of carrying it.

Brody huffed out another sigh. “I’m heading for town to pick up some grub at the grocery store,” he said. “If
you want, I could drop the dog off at Tricia’s and save you the trip.”

Conner felt a whisper of distrust, fleeting and foolish.

He wanted to see Tricia again, and any excuse would do, but he knew she needed space, and time to think.

“Okay,” he said, secretly pleased to see that Brody had expected him to refuse the offer out of hand.

Conner crossed to the dog, crouched beside him. “You be good, now,” he told the animal. “No more running away.”

T
HE OLD
V
ICTORIAN HOUSE
literally echoed all around Tricia, whenever she made the slightest sound.

Natty was gone. So was Sasha. Even Winston and Valentino had bailed on her.

She finally sat down in front of her computer, sorely in need of distraction, but when she booted up, there was Rusty, filling the screen saver, grinning a dog-grin. And there was her younger self, still shy, but with luminous eyes, full of hopeful expectations.

Her eyes scalded, and she swallowed. Touched the image with the tip of one finger, watching as pixels spread out in a tiny radius, like still water disturbed.

Instead of sorrow, though, she felt a soft surge of happy gratitude for Rusty, and for his devoted friendship. He’d bridged the gap in some important ways, she realized, between her and her feuding parents.

She smiled and clicked her way online. Her inbox was full, and she spent a few minutes weeding out once-in-a-lifetime offers, then scanned the list of incoming messages.

Two from Diana. One from Sasha.
Seven
from Hunter. And, finally, one from her mother. Her mother?

Tricia couldn’t resist opening that one. She and her mom weren’t close, so they didn’t chat or swap instant
messages and silly forwards. When one of them made the effort to get in touch with the other, there was a reason.

She opened the message and was surprised to see her slender, blonde mother smiling back at her from a photograph taken in front of some jungle hut.

Beside Laurel McCall stood a handsome man with a receding hairline and wire-rimmed glasses. He was beaming, too, one arm around Laurel’s waist.

Tricia gulped, flicked a glance at the subject line above the picture.

“Meet Harvey, your new stepfather,” Laurel had written, the phrase supplemented by half a dozen exclamation points.

“My new—?” Tricia whispered. She was feeling something—all kinds of things, actually—but she couldn’t have said what those things were.

A knock sounded from downstairs; someone was at Natty’s front door. Conner, bringing Valentino home? No, Tricia decided. He would have come up the outside staircase and, besides, he knew Natty was off in Denver.

Strangely jittery, Tricia closed the message without reading her mother’s long missive, pushed back her chair and went to the living room window to look out at the street. Conner’s truck was parked at the curb.

The knocking, though still polite, grew more insistent.

Tricia hurried downstairs, worked the stiff locks and pulled open the door.

Her gaze dropped to Valentino, sitting there on his haunches, panting and looking up at her, all innocence and unconditional canine love.

“You,” she told the creature fondly, “are a bad dog.”

She forced herself to look up and meet Conner’s eyes. He’d said they weren’t going to pretend, and she knew he’d meant it.

The man standing before her looked like Conner—
exactly
like him, in fact—but this
wasn’t
Conner. It was Brody.

What was going on here? Tricia wondered, glancing past Brody’s shoulder at Conner’s truck. Was this some kind of immature twin trick? The old switcheroo?

“Hey,” Brody said, and it was clear from the laughter lurking in his Conner-blue eyes that he’d picked up on her thoughts. “Brought your dog back.”

“Thanks, Brody,” Tricia said, stepping back. On the one hand, she was glad she didn’t have to face Conner quite yet, because she wasn’t ready, after the way she’d carried on in his bed and then run out of his house in a stupid panic. On the other, she felt his absence like a physical ache. “Come in. I’ll put on a pot of coffee.”

Brody’s grin was crooked, identical to Conner’s, and yet—
different
. “I guess you can tell my brother and me apart,” he said, following Valentino over the threshold. Taking off his hat and holding it respectfully in one hand, cowboy style. “Most people can’t, when we’re trying to look alike.”

Tricia, headed for the inside stairs, looked back over one shoulder. “Did you set out to fool me, Brody Creed?” she asked bluntly, but with a touch of amusement.

“If I did,” he allowed good-naturedly, “it didn’t work, did it?”

She shook her head.

“Ready for the closing tomorrow?” he asked, when
they’d reached the upper floor and her apartment. The place was too quiet without Sasha. Without Natty. But Valentino was back. That was something.

It took Tricia a moment to remember that Brody was buying her property, hence the mention of a closing.

Thanks to him, she was suddenly presented with a plethora of choices. Go or stay. Take a chance on a flesh-and-blood man or run for the hills. Decisions, decisions.

“All ready,” she answered, at last. But she was frowning slightly as she moved toward the coffeemaker. At a nod of invitation from her, Brody pulled back a chair and sat down at the table, resting his hat on the floor.

Valentino, meanwhile, plodded over to his bed, sniffed his blue chicken a few times and laid himself down with a loud, contented sigh.

“Crazy dog,” Tricia said, shaking her head.

Brody shifted in his chair, taking off his denim jacket, setting it aside, with the hat. And grinning. “If I didn’t know better,” he said, “I’d be convinced that that critter is trying to play matchmaker.”

Tricia turned her back to Brody, because her cheeks were suddenly warm and probably pink. Her heartbeat quickened a little, and she wondered exactly how much he knew about her relationship with Conner.

But Tricia shook her head an instant later, in answer to her own unspoken question. Conner wouldn’t kiss and tell.

Brody chuckled to himself and didn’t press her for a verbal reply.

“You’d be good for Conner,” he said, after a long and thoughtful silence, just as Tricia was turning away from the coffeemaker. He looked, and sounded, totally
serious, and there was something gentle in his eyes. “He’s been alone too much, for way too long,” Brody finished.

Tricia averted her eyes, ran her suddenly moist palms down her blue-jeaned thighs. She was blushing again, and this time, there was no hiding it. Still, she couldn’t bring herself to speak.

“I walked in on that conversation you and Conner had this morning, over the telephone,” Brody explained kindly. “And I overheard a pertinent detail.”

He stood up, leaned to draw back a chair for Tricia.

She sat, still not looking at him, or saying anything.

He sat, too.

The coffeemaker chortled and hissed, and Valentino started to snore.

“Like I said,” Brody told her finally, with a smile in his voice, “I think you’d be about the best thing that ever happened to my brother.”

She met his eyes. Bit down on her lower lip, searching her brain for a sensible answer, discarding every prospect she managed to come up with.

Finally, she settled on, “I’d rather not talk about Conner.”

“Okay,” Brody said, with an agreeable nod. “Then let’s talk about River’s Bend, and the old drive-in.” He paused, chuckled. “I have some great memories of that place. By my calculations, half the kids in Lonesome Bend must have been conceived there, back in the day.”

Tricia was beginning to relax a little—she was comfortable around Brody in a way she wasn’t with
Conner—probably because she and Brody had never been intimate. She smiled, let out her breath.

“Are any of them yours?” she asked, with a twinkle.

He laughed. “Not that I’ve heard,” he replied. But then a new expression flickered in his eyes, and Tricia read it as uncertainty. She’d certainly touched a nerve, and now she wished she’d held her tongue.

She got up and poured them both a cup of the still-brewing coffee. Took a careful, steadying sip before turning the conversation back to her late father’s properties.

“I guess you’ll be getting rid of the screen and the speakers and stuff, out at the Bluebird,” she said.

There was an easing in Brody. He’d made some kind of internal shift, away from whatever had been bothering him. His grin was companionable, his manner brotherly. “Yes,” he answered. “Does that bother you?”

Tricia pondered the question—not for the first time, of course—and then shook her head. “No,” she said. “Things change. What about the campground and the ‘lodge,’ as my dad used to call it?”

Brody shifted in his chair, looked down into his coffee cup as though he saw some benevolent scene playing out on the liquid surface. A moment later, though, he met her gaze. “Come spring,” he said, “I plan on clearing that land and building a house and a barn. Putting up some pasture fences and the like.”

She recalled that Carla, her real-estate agent, had mentioned Brody’s intention to make the newly acquired land part of the Creed ranch, but hearing it directly from him made it real, took the idea outside the nebulous realm of local gossip and speculation.

“Will it seem strange,” she began, “living somewhere besides the main ranch house, I mean?” The Creeds were a legend in Lonesome Bend and for miles around, probably. Natty’s house, historical monument that it was, was new by comparison to the one Brody and Conner had grown up in.

Both the house and the ranch had been passed down from father to son for generations.

Too late, Tricia saw that her question had pained Brody, at least a little.

He cleared his throat, but his voice was still gruff when he said, “As you’re probably aware, Conner and I don’t get along very well. We inherited the ranch in equal shares, and that includes the house, but since he stayed put all this time, while I was off roaming the countryside, I figure it’s only fair to let him have the place.”

Tricia nodded, understanding. “It’s too bad,” she said, meaning it. “That you don’t get along, I mean.”

“I agree,” Brody said, with quiet regret. “But what’s done is done. Once Conner makes up his mind to write somebody off, the person might as well be dead. When he’s finished, that’s it.”

The statement saddened Tricia, and frightened her a little, too. If Diana had been there, she probably would have said that was the reason for Tricia’s history of arm’s-length relationships—the fear of caring too much about someone, and then being tossed aside, forgotten.

“Because of Joleen,” she said, without meaning to say any such thing.

“Because of Joleen,” Brody confirmed grimly. “Or,
to be more accurate, because of what Conner thinks happened between Joleen and me once upon a time.”

A combination of remembered pleasure and potential pain washed over Tricia; it was completely ridiculous, but she hated the idea of Conner making love to any other woman—past, present or future.

“It didn’t happen?” she asked, her voice small. She was treading private ground, she knew, and yet she hadn’t been able to keep the question inside.

Brody shook his head. “Nope,” he said. “But there’ll be no convincing Conner of that.”

She recalled the day of the trail ride, when Joleen and Brody had come racing across the range together, bent low over their horses’ necks, laughing. They’d looked like a couple in love, Brody and Joleen had—particularly to Carolyn. How
was
Carolyn, anyway? She needed to find out.

“Have you tried?” she asked. “Convincing Conner, I mean?”

Brody gave a raspy, raw chuckle, the kind of sound it hurts to make—and to hear. “He knows the truth, somewhere in that hard Creed head of his. The thing is, Conner resents me for a whole other reason, one he might not even be aware of.”

Tricia waited, desperate to know what that reason was, but unwilling to pry any more than she already had. She was way out of bounds as it was.

“Being an identical twin can be a great thing,” Brody mused, looking off into some other place, beyond Tricia and beyond her kitchen. Maybe even beyond Lonesome Bend itself. “Or it can be a bad one. Sometimes, it’s like you’re one person, the two of you, but split apart. Believe
it or not, you forget sometimes that you’ve got an exact double, and then you look up and see
yourself
standing on the other side of the room. It can be unnerving.”

Tricia nodded again. The revelation was highly personal, but Brody had been the one to put it out there. She hadn’t pried. “Is it true,” she asked carefully, “that if one of you gets hurt—thrown from a bull at a rodeo, say—the other one feels pain?”

Brody nodded. “It happens. With Conner and me, the connection tended to manifest itself in other ways, though. As kids, the teachers used to separate us on test days, even put us in different rooms, because they thought we must have worked out a way of signaling each other—the answers we gave were always the same, no matter what they did to keep us apart.” He paused, chuckled at the memory. “Even the wrong ones.”

Tricia smiled. “I didn’t go to school in Lonesome Bend,” she said, “but I remember the fuss everybody raised when you two switched places.”

“Those were the days,” Brody said. He’d finished his coffee, and now he pushed his chair back, ready to leave. Retrieved his jacket and his hat and put them on. “Guess I’d better get back to the ranch. Shoulder my share of the load, and all that.”

“I’ll see you tomorrow, at the closing,” Tricia said, rising. “Thanks for bringing Valentino home.”

She opened the kitchen door, and he stepped out onto the landing. The wind was chilly, laced with tiny flakes of snow, and it ruffled his hair, caused him to raise the collar of his jacket and shiver slightly.

“Thanks for the company,” was Brody’s belated reply.

He didn’t move to descend the outside stairs, and Tricia didn’t close the door. “You
were
trying to fool me, showing up in Conner’s truck,” she finally said. “Why?”

Brody looked away into that private distance of his again, then looked back. Gave the faintest semblance of that infamous Creed grin. “I wasn’t expecting to pass myself off as my brother, if that’s what you’re thinking,” he replied. “I just wanted to know for sure what I already suspected, since you and I ran into each other at the big chili feed that weekend—that you’re one of the few people in this world who sees Conner as one person, and me as another.”

Of course she remembered the encounter. She’d said, without any hesitation at all, “Hello, Brody.”