The Creed Legacy (28 page)

The room began to darken.

Winston meowed at the closed door, but neither Brody nor Carolyn moved, except to settle into each other’s warmth. When they’d both recovered enough, they made love again, more slowly this time, and less frantically, but with the same shatteringly glorious conclusion.

When it was over, Carolyn was lying on top of Brody, her face buried in his neck, her senses full of him, of his scent and the texture and shape and strength of him. She drifted into a sated sleep and awakened, sometime later, with his fingers driving her straight into the throes of yet another earth-shaking orgasm.

She sighed when it was finally finished. Rolled onto her side, resting in the curve of Brody’s left arm.

“Are we going to regret this?” she asked presently.

“Probably,” Brody said, in a sexy murmur. “But I’m a great believer in living in the moment.”

She giggled at that. Knotted up her fist and thunked him lightly on the chest. “Brody Creed,” she said, “you are incorrigible.”

He kissed the top of her head. “And hungry,” he answered.

“I could whip up some scrambled eggs,” Carolyn said, and wondered who this woman was who’d taken her over. The same one, apparently, who had dashed out to the convenience store earlier to buy bread and eggs and milk.

“Sounds good,” Brody said. His voice was sleepy now.

Carolyn crawled over him to get out of bed. After a brief shower, she put the white shirt back on and went into the kitchen.

Winston eyed her reproachfully from the window sill.

“Don’t give me that look,” Carolyn told the cat. “You had your supper, remember?”

“Reow,” Winston said, and, with an air of elegant resignation, began to groom his right paw.

My cat,
Carolyn thought, flashing on her conversation with Tricia that afternoon.
My cat, my apartment, my shop.

Look who suddenly has a future.

And all I have to do now is find a way to get over Brody Creed before he breaks my heart all over again.

D
AMN BUT CAROLYN LOOKED GOOD
, standing there in her apartment kitchen, cracking eggs into a pan and wearing nothing but some guy’s shirt.

Brody frowned. Kim sometimes wore Davis’s old shirts to paint or garden or clean house, and Tricia had been known to throw one of Conner’s on once in a while, until the baby bulge got away from her. So who was the yahoo who’d left
this
one behind?

“What?” Carolyn asked, with a shy little smile curving her well-kissed mouth.

“Nothing.” Brody sighed and hauled back a chair so he could sit down at the table. The lovemaking was over, for now, at least, and maybe forever, once she’d heard what he had to say.

It was past time to set things right between the two of them, though, one way or the other. He owed her the truth about a lot of things—first and foremost, his reason for abandoning her that long-ago night, leaving her with nothing but a brief note, a lot of anger and pain, most likely, and a whole slew of unanswered questions.

Evidently, Carolyn wasn’t ready to move on. She peered down at the shirt, then looked up at him with wide, laughing eyes, as though she suspected what was bothering him, but wasn’t quite sure. Her eyebrows rose in humorous inquiry. “Why the strange look, Brody?”

“I was just wondering who that shirt belongs to,” he admitted, embarrassed but still feeling mighty territorial, too. “I’m over it now.”

“It’s yours,” she told him, taking a mischievous delight in her answer. “You left it behind when you—”

The joy drained out of her eyes as she fell silent, remembering.

“I left it behind when I left
you,
” Brody said quietly, leaning to push back a second chair. “Carolyn, take that pan off the burner and sit down.”

She turned away instead, though, shaking her head and shoveling a spatula under those eggs like she was trying to scrape road-tar off a hot surface. “That was a long time ago,” she said, her words coming out rapidfire, seeming to bounce off the cupboard doors and ricochet back at him. “Let’s forget it, okay?”

Brody sighed again, shoved a hand through his hair. “If I could forget it,” he said solemnly, and in all truth, “believe me, I would.”

Carolyn looked back at him then. A scorching smell wafted over from the stove, and she quickly glopped the scrambled eggs onto two plates, brought them to the table, went back to the counter for silverware.

“For God’s sake, Carolyn,” Brody said, “sit down. Please.”

“You
said
you were hungry,” she retorted, going bright-cheeked again, but she finally sat down.

Neither of them picked up a fork, or even looked down at their plates. Their gazes had locked, and Brody saw plenty of pain in hers. Maybe, he thought, it was a reflection of his own.

“Her name was Lisa,” he ground out. Even that much was damnably hard to say, but it was a beginning.

Bless her, Carolyn didn’t come back with a flippant “Who’s Lisa?” the way he’d half expected her to do.

“The woman who called that last night,” Carolyn said softly. “The one you wanted to be with—”

Instead of me.
The unspoken words hung between them.

“Yes,” Brody replied, plowing a hand through his hair. “We met while I was rodeoing, Lisa and me, and we had sort of an affair—”

Color flared in Carolyn’s cheeks, and her eyes flashed. “How do you have
sort of an affair?
” she asked.

“If you feel some need to make this harder, Carolyn,” Brody said, “go right ahead.”

She pressed her lips together into a hard line.

He flashed back to the taste of those lips, the feel of them against his.

Hot need struck him like a meteor blazing down from a clear blue sky.

“Lisa and I had an affair,” Brody went on, putting a slight emphasis on the last word. “Nothing
sort of
about it. Then we broke up—I wanted to keep on following the rodeo circuit and she wanted to stay put, get married and buy a house, and there was no way either one of us was going to compromise, so we said our goodbyes and I left.”

Carolyn waited. She looked pale now, rather than flushed, and very small inside that white shirt. Her throat worked, but she didn’t say anything.

“I knocked around the Southwest for a while, then I ended up here. I was going to try and work things out with my family, but, as you know, when I showed up at Kim and Davis’s place, they were nowhere around. I think Conner was away, too, at the time. Anyway, once I got that first glimpse of you, standing there in my aunt and uncle’s doorway, framed in light, I couldn’t think of anything
but
you, Carolyn.”

He saw disbelief in Carolyn’s face, along with something that might have been hope. Memories haunted her eyes like ghosts and she bit down on her lower lip.

“I wasn’t sure what I felt for you was love,” Brody went on, “but whatever it was, I’d never come across anything like it before.”

She raised one eyebrow, but still held her peace.

“That last night, Lisa called,” Brody said wearily. “She told me she was pregnant with my baby, and if I didn’t marry her, she was going to put him up for adoption. I freaked right out—everything was going in forty different directions, and I couldn’t seem to find the center.”

Very slowly, Carolyn reached over and put her hand in his, but her eyes were still watchful, wary.

“Now,” Brody said, with a ragged sigh, “I wish I’d
let
her have Justin and give him to some nice family to raise, because both of them might still be alive if I had. Most likely, Lisa would have found a man who loved her in ways I couldn’t, no matter how hard I tried, and Justin, well, he’d be seven now. A normal, healthy kid. Starting second grade in the fall.”

Carolyn swallowed, squeezed his hand, an I’mlistening sort of gesture. Some, but by no means all, of the ache in her eyes leaked away.

“Instead, they died in a car accident,” Brody told her, when he felt like he could go on. After that, it was like somebody else was telling the story, while he stood apart, like a silent witness, listening, watching, remembering.

But detached from the pain.

Carolyn heard him out without interrupting, and, by the time he’d finished, she was sitting on his lap, her arms around him, her head resting on his shoulder.

Brody felt broken inside, torn apart, as though he’d used himself up, not just emotionally, but physically, too. The old grief, which could only be held at bay for so long, washed back over him and a steely force wrenched him back inside himself.

Without a word, Carolyn held him…for a long, long time. Then, presently, she stood up, took hold of his hand and led him back to her bed, where she proceeded to put him back together again, piece by piece.

B
RODY LEFT A LITTLE
after midnight—he didn’t feel right leaving Barney alone for too long at a stretch, he said—and Carolyn, after locking the door behind him, went straight back to bed and slept a deep, healing sleep.

The next morning, yawning, she padded into the kitchen and immediately spotted the two plates of scrambled eggs, now congealed, still sitting on the table.

Making a face, she scraped the food into the sink and washed it down the disposal.

By that time, Winston was making give-me-breakfastnow noises, so she gave him kibble, which he disdained at first, probably angling for sardines.

Carolyn filled a cup with water, dropped in a tea bag and set the works in the microwave. While she was waiting for the timer to ring, signaling the end of two minutes, she thought about Brody. After last night,
not
thinking about him would have been quite a trick.

The lovemaking still reverberated throughout her body, in small, intermittent aftershocks, but that wasn’t something to think about, it was something to
feel.
To savor and enjoy, in secret.

No, it was all that Brody had told her about Lisa, about their little boy, about that terrible accident and how he’d lost his way after it happened, that occupied her mind now.

She’d known intuitively that he was telling the truth, so it wasn’t a question of believing or not believing what he said. Instead, it was a matter of personal damage.

How could a person ever come back from a tragedy like that?

Could
she
come back from what she’d so thoroughly believed was a cruel betrayal, even knowing the truth?

Some wounds, after all, never healed.

For Brody, the experience was beyond horrific; he’d been on the phone with Lisa when the collision
happened;
he’d heard the deafening crash and then the silence that followed. On top of that, he blamed himself—if only he’d let Lisa put their baby up for adoption, if only he’d been at home on that wintry night instead of on the road, driving an eighteen-wheeler, he’d have been at the wheel, not Lisa.

He might have been able to steer clear in time to avoid impact.

If only, if only.

Carolyn knew that phrase well. If only her mother had cared enough to stick around instead of dumping her into the foster-care system and taking off for good. If only her dad had been the strong, steady, reliable type, like Davis Creed, willing to raise his child.

If only pigs had wings and chickens could tap dance,
Carolyn thought. One of her foster moms had said that every time she dared to express the slightest dream for the future.

Soon, she’d stopped telling anyone what her hopes were.

Emotionally saddened but still jubilant physically, from making love with Brody, Carolyn switched on her laptop so it would boot up while she was in the shower.

Once she’d washed and dried herself off and gotten dressed, the computer was wide awake, icons flashing, robot voice repeating, over and over, “Somebody likes your friendly face!”

The thing was the auditory equivalent of stone soup, like in the children’s story. It just kept right on pumping out noise. So over the whole idea of hooking up online, Carolyn zipped over to the control-panel page and blocked all further communication from the dating site.

And then there was sweet, blissful peace.

“That’s better,” she told Winston, who didn’t offer an opinion, one way or the other.

A few clicks of the mouse took her to the auction site, where she’d posted the gypsy skirt. The bids were still pouring in, and the current number had Carolyn rubbing her eyes, sure she must be misreading it somehow. Nobody paid
that
much for a skirt, however beautiful it was—did they?

She squinted at the high bidder’s screen name, in case it was someone she knew, or maybe one of her regular customers, but she didn’t recognize the moniker. Still, a prickle in the pit of her stomach insisted that something was amiss.

Carolyn stared hard at the screen, as though that would unveil the mystery, but she remained in the dark.

She was still at the computer, catching up on legitimate email, when she heard the knocking downstairs, at the front door.

Tricia? No, she had a key, and it was still too early for her to be there, anyway.

Brody? A little OMG thrill riffed through Carolyn, but she quickly quelled it. He’d told her he had a lot to do on the ranch, and they’d agreed to take a few days to catch their breaths.

They had a date for Saturday night, dinner and a movie.

In the interim, they’d play it cool.

The knocking continued, polite but insistent.

“Hold your horses,” Carolyn muttered grumpily, nearly tumbling headfirst down the inside stairs because Winston ran past her to be on hand for the welcoming ceremony.

By the time she reached the entryway and opened the front door, Carolyn had assembled a smile and pasted it on her mouth.

It fell away when she got a good look at her visitor. Bill Venable was standing there on the porch, looking worried and uncomfortable and, as always, very attractive in his jeans and sleeveless T-shirt. His biceps were almost as impressive as Brody’s.

“Bill,” Carolyn said, unable to hide her surprise.

“I’m sorry,” Bill said. “I know I should have called before I came over.”

Carolyn stepped back to admit him. What on earth was he doing there, at that hour of the morning? The newspaper hadn’t even been delivered yet.

“Is something wrong?” she asked. “Ellie’s all right, isn’t she?”

Bill nodded. His beard was growing in, a sign of anxiety, maybe, since he was normally clean-shaven. “Ellie’s fine,” he said quickly. “It’s just that—well—there’s a fire, a big one, down in New Mexico, and I have to leave right away.”

They stood in the entryway, with Winston meowing and curling between their ankles, as sleekly sinuous as a snake with fur.

Carolyn waited, still without a clue as to why Bill was there.

He gave a tentative smile. “We were planning on going up in my plane together, sometime soon?” he reminded her. “I didn’t want you thinking I’d forgotten. I’m not sure how long I’ll be gone, and I’ll probably be too busy to call and, anyway, the fire’s pretty remote, so there might not be cell service out there—” He appeared to be struggling, and Carolyn felt a stab of empathy for him. When he finally went on, what he said alarmed her a little. “There’s always a chance I won’t—I just needed to tell you face-to-face that I won’t be around for a while.”

Carolyn’s spirits sank. It was almost as if Bill had come to say goodbye—forever—as he had reason to worry. She’d heard of pilots having premonitions of a crash or some other fatal disaster, of course.

Was Bill telling her that he thought he might be
killed
fighting this fire?

Her eyes filled and, for a crazy moment, she wanted to beg him not to go, to think of Ellie, and of Angela, and all the other people who must have loved him.

“Will Ellie be staying with her grandparents while you’re gone?”

Bill shook his head, still looking miserable. “Not for the next few days. A friend of theirs passed away unexpectedly, so they’ve gone to Houston for the funeral. Ellie’s staying with Angela until Charlie and Stella get back.”