The Creed Legacy (31 page)

And for still
another
thing, Brody hadn’t asked her to a formal gala at the White House or a coronation at Buckingham Palace—he’d offered dinner and a movie. She’d look like a fool, getting that dressed up for a blueplate special at some country café, followed by a flick and popcorn.

She couldn’t resist catching one of the ribbons between her fingers, though, and imagining how it would feel to be a princess for just one night.

“Wear the skirt, Cinderella,” Tricia said gently.

“I couldn’t,” Carolyn murmured, sorely tempted to do just that. To be rash and reckless, for once in her life, instead of careful.

To be beautiful.

To be Cinderella.

Oh, but Brody Creed was a cowboy, not a prince.

Lonesome Bend was planted squarely in the real world, not in a fairy-tale kingdom, where fairy godmothers waved wands and pumpkins turned to coaches, mice to prancing steeds.

She was Carolyn Simmons, an ordinary woman, and she’d better remember it.

Tricia wasn’t one to give up. “Well, then, just
try it on,
” she said, waddling over to stand next to Carolyn. With a sigh, she stretched to ease the pressure on her lower back and sighed, “I swear this kid is getting ready to audition for
Riverdance.
The way he kicks, he’ll be born wearing tap shoes.”

Since Tricia and Conner had been closemouthed about the sex of their baby, this was the clue Carolyn had been waiting for.

“Ah-ha!” she cried, jubilant, forgetting the skirt and all its magic for a much greater miracle, the formation of a brand-new human being. “You’re having a boy!”

“Don’t tell,” Tricia said, in a conspiratorial whisper, putting a finger to her lips. “Outside the doctor’s office, nobody knows but Conner and me.”

“Why the secrecy?” Carolyn asked.

Again, Tricia sighed, but softly, and with an air of contentment. “We’re not trying to be mysterious,” she said. “It’s just that…well, we’re both sort of oldfashioned when it comes to having a baby. Not that long ago, nobody knew if they were having a boy or a girl until after their delivery. Now, people have the nursery furnished in either pink or blue and the name picked out months ahead of time. I’d rather have been surprised, and Conner agrees.”

Carolyn studied her friend. “You’re not superstitious, are you? One of those people who think it’s bad luck to buy things for a baby before it’s born? In case—in case something goes wrong?”

Tricia smiled. “No,” she said. “I’m not. There is nothing wrong with this baby, trust me. He kicks like a mule.”

Carolyn smiled back, relieved. “I don’t suppose you want to tell me what you’re going to name young Mr. Creed, now that the figurative cat is out of the bag?”

“Davis Blue,” Tricia answered readily. “We’ll probably call him Blue.”

“Blue?” Carolyn asked. The Davis part needed no explanation, but—
Blue?

“For Conner and Brody’s father,” Tricia said. “Davis’s older brother. The story goes that the sky was a knock-out shade of azure when Blue was born—hence the name.”

“I like it,” Carolyn mused and, for the briefest of moments, she allowed herself to wonder what name she and
Brody
might give a child of their own.

“Me, too,” Tricia agreed. “And don’t you dare tell anybody. Davis and Kim don’t know, and neither does Brody. We want our baby’s sex
and
his name to be a surprise.”

Carolyn made a zipping motion across her mouth. Then she laughed again, out of pure joy at her friends’ good fortune, and gave Tricia a quick hug.

“Now,” Tricia said, with a little sniffle, once they’d had their girl moment, “back to the gypsy skirt.
Try it on.
I want to see what it looks like on an actual person, and heaven knows, I’m in no condition to model haute couture.”

“Tricia.”

“It’s the least you can do,” Tricia insisted, “after I told you my big secret.”

Carolyn sighed, took the skirt from the hook, still on its hanger and held it against her chest, careful not to crush the ribbons. “Oh, all right,” she said, starting for the bathroom. “But I’m telling you right now, it’s going to look downright weird with a T-shirt.”

Tricia went to the bureau, tugged open a drawer and extracted a wispy black silk camisole with spaghetti straps, waving it at Carolyn like a flag. “Wear this,” she said.

Carolyn took the garment hesitantly—she’d worn it with a transparent shirt she’d owned, and subsequently discarded as impractical, a long time ago—and gave Tricia a rueful look. “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s pretty skimpy—”

“It’s just us girls,” Tricia reminded her, almost singing the words and shooing Carolyn toward the bathroom.
“Go.”

S
TANDING AT CAROLYN’S
kitchen door, with the first shadows of twilight falling around him, Brody tried to remember the last time he’d made a fuss like this over a simple date.

Not since his high-school prom, he decided, hooking a finger under the collar of his starched white shirt even though the top three buttons were already undone. Kim had made him wear a penguin suit that night, as she’d done to Conner, too, and Brody had stabbed the girl— Becky? Betsy? Babs?—with the little pearl-headed pin while fumbling around trying to pin on her corsage. He and Conner, along with two of their friends and all four dates, had crammed themselves into the back of a rented limo and thought they were big stuff.

He smiled at the memory.

Remembered that he hadn’t knocked.

He rapped his knuckles lightly against the door frame. Through the frosted glass in the door’s oval window, he saw Carolyn approaching to admit him, and even before she opened the door, his heart had shinnied up into his throat and swelled to three times its normal size.

Her light hair gleamed around her shoulders, looking soft enough to run his fingers through, and her perfect cleavage formed an enticing V above the black silk of her top.

After her face, though—her shy and lovely and slightly flushed face—it was the skirt he would remember until the end of his days.

It was composed of what seemed to be hundreds of ribbons and beads, and it swayed and shifted around her like a puff of glittering smoke, or shards of glass in a kaleidoscope.

“Wow,” he said. He hadn’t brought flowers, since she still had the roses from the other night, but now he wished he had. He wished there were a coach-and-six waiting on the street, instead of the car he’d borrowed from Davis and Kim.

Carolyn’s cheeks were pink. Without looking down—a skill he’d perfected since puberty—he managed to note that her nipples showed faintly through the black top.

“Wow, yourself,” she said, after giving him a flirty once-over. Then she lost whatever bravado she’d summoned up and blushed again. “Do—do you think I’m overdressed? It was Tricia’s idea to wear this—she nagged me into it—”

Brody reached out and rested an index finger lightly against her mouth—a mouth he hoped to kiss, and thoroughly, later on in the evening. “It’s perfect,” he said. “
You’re
perfect.”

She already had her purse handy, a thin little envelope of a thing she tucked under one arm. Obviously, she hadn’t brought her toothbrush and a change of clothes for morning.

He tried not to read that as an omen.

“Thank you,” she said, so belatedly that Brody had to scramble for a moment to recall what she was thanking him for.

Oh, yeah. Saying she was perfect. Well, that hadn’t been such a stretch now, had it? She
was
perfect.

He took her arm as they descended the outside stairs, the skirt whispering like poetry made visible with every move she made.

This time, she noticed he was looking and stopped, when they reached the bottom of the steps, to peer into his face. “Are you
sure
I’m not overdressed?” she demanded.

He chuckled. “As far as I’m concerned, lady, anytime you’re wearing more than skin, you’re overdressed.”

That made her laugh, albeit nervously. But her feet came loose from the ground, where she’d dug them in a moment before, and Carolyn and Brody moved on toward the waiting car.

He might have blown it with the flowers, Brody thought, but he’d gotten this part right. In that getup, Carolyn would have had a hard time getting into the cab of his truck.

He opened the passenger-side door for her, waited while she and that amazing skirt got themselves settled in the seat.

She’d already fastened her seat belt by the time he slid behind the wheel.

He was wearing his best shirt and jeans, and a pair of boots that had cost more than his first car, but now he wondered if he wasn’t the one who ought to be fretting about how they were dressed—or
under
dressed, in his case.

Carolyn sat rigidly in the seat, the sliver-thin purse on her lap, her gaze fixed straight ahead. In a sidelong glance, Brody noticed the pulse at the base of her throat.

He wasn’t the only one who was nervous, obvi ously.

The realization relaxed him a little.

As for chitter-chatter, well, if Carolyn didn’t feel like talking, it was okay with him. He was satisfied just to be sharing a car seat with her.

They drove through town and he thought she gave a little sigh of relief when they passed the Birdcage Café without stopping—
as if
he’d take her there
—
and then the Golden Spur Saloon and Steakhouse, but maybe he imagined it.

When he steered the car onto the bumpy track leading to the Bluebird Drive-in, though, she turned and looked at him with widened eyes. Maybe she thought he doubled as a serial killer in his spare time and he was taking her somewhere remote, so she could be his next victim.

Creed,
he thought,
you are losing it.

Thanks to the generator he’d borrowed from his contractor—it was a noisy piece of equipment, but effective—the building containing the snack bar was all lit up. The ancient movie screen glowed white in the gathering twilight, ready for action.

Carolyn looked around, still wide-eyed, with her mouth slightly open.

“You wanted dinner and a movie,” Brody said, watching her.

What if this was the world’s dumbest idea? he wondered, while he waited for a reaction.

“You’re not serious,” she said, but there was a gleam in her eyes now, and that pulse at the base of her throat was beating hard.

Brody said nothing. He just shut off the car, got out and came around to her side to open the door for her.

She put out her hand, and he took it. Helped her out.

She stood there, like a goddess dressed in dancing dreams, looking up at him. Her expression was one of amused bafflement. “I don’t understand,” she said.

“You will,” Brody replied, still holding her hand.

He led her toward the snack bar, which had been filled with the caterer’s assistants until a few minutes ago. By now, there was a single waiter, hiding in the back most likely, and he’d be gone, too, as soon as Brody could reasonably get rid of him.

Inside the scrubbed and scoured snack bar, the glass enclosing the popcorn machine gleamed, as did the counter.

A round table sat in the middle of the room, draped with a snow-white tablecloth and set with china and silver. Candles glimmered and flickered in the center and, except for the faint hum of the generator, all was quiet.

Carolyn was speechless. She looked up at Brody’s face as though she expected him to say there was some mistake, they’d wandered into the wrong place, whatever.

Brody smiled and cocked an elbow at her so she’d take his arm, which she did after a moment’s confusion, and escorted her to the table. He pulled back her chair, waited until she was seated and sat down opposite her.

The candlelight danced across her face and shimmered in her hair.

Right on cue, the rent-a-waiter appeared, with a bottle of French wine and two sparkling crystal glasses.

Carolyn drew in her breath, gave Brody another look of curious surprise and finally smiled back at him.

“When you said dinner and a movie, you weren’t kidding,” she said, as the waiter poured their wine and scurried off to the back room again, to await his next scene.

Brody grinned, picked up his wineglass by the stem, and waited for Carolyn to do the same. “There are some things,” he said, “that I never kid about.”

She smiled, and their glass rims made a bell-like sound as they touched them together. “This is like something—well, out of a
movie,
” she said.

The waiter returned with salads, set them down with a flourish and immediately vanished again.

The guy certainly knew when to get lost, Brody thought with approval, and his tip was getting bigger with every passing moment.

“This is delicious,” Carolyn said, after spearing some salad with her fork and taking a cautious nibble.

Brody laughed. “You sound surprised.”

She blushed prettily. God, he loved it when she blushed. “It’s… I’ve never been on a date like this.”

“That was the idea,” Brody said. “Don’t look now, but I’m trying to impress you.”

“Well,” Carolyn said, “you’re succeeding.” She looked at him from under her eyelashes, and a corner of her highly kissable mouth twitched. “What comes next?”

Brody pretended to be puzzled. Took another sip of his wine instead of answering. But he was thinking,
You do, if I have anything to say about it.

Carolyn, so quiet before, in the car, seemed bent on conversation now. “The Bluebird has been closed for years,” she said, looking around. Her expression was nostalgic. “Tricia has a lot of old pictures of it. But surely the projector doesn’t actually work—”

“We’ll see,” Brody said.

C
AROLYN WAS AMAZED
, and not just by the romantic dinner, the delicate dessert to follow, or the way the popcorn machine seemed to come on all by itself, like magic.

That Brody had even thought of something like this, let alone gone to all the trouble and expense to make it happen, blew her away.

They lingered in the candlelight until it was fully dark outside, and then Brody pulled back her chair, waited for her to stand and escorted her grandly back to Kim and Davis’s car.

They drove over a couple of humps in the ground and stopped beside one particular rusted post, with a speaker attached.

“Don’t move,” Brody told her, with a twinkle in his eyes, “I’ll be right back.”

She turned to watch as he returned to the snack bar.

Sound crackled through the dented speaker on the pole outside the driver’s side window, and light spilled across the darkened lot. Once, the Bluebird Drive-in would have been packed with all sorts of vehicles on a Saturday night, every space filled, every speaker clipped onto a car window, but tonight, apparently, it was theirs alone.

True to his word, Brody returned in a couple of minutes, carrying a silver wine cooler overflowing with fresh popcorn in the curve of one arm.

He opened the car door, handed Carolyn the popcorn and got in.

Imagining what buttered popcorn might do to the gypsy skirt, she set the cooler between them, on the console. When she closed her eyes, she felt dizzy, but the instant she opened them again, she was fine.

“I didn’t have time to hunt down any of those cardboard buckets they usually serve this stuff in,” Brody explained, with a nod at the popcorn, turning and fiddling with the speaker.

Music swelled into the car, accompanied by a few stereophonic screeches, and Brody winced as he adjusted the volume.

Only then did Carolyn look toward the movie screen, now awash in motion and color and light and opening credits.

One name jumped out at her.

Gifford Welsh.

Gifford Welsh, the man who’d single-handedly ended her brief and happy career as his daughter’s nanny.

Shock washed over her, like water charged with electricity, stunning the breath from her lungs and making every nerve in her entire body sting like molten wax.

This must be what it’s like to be struck by lightning,
she thought.

More nausea and another spate of dizziness followed the shock and for a moment, Carolyn was afraid she might distinguish herself by throwing up a
second
time, in front of the same man.

“Oh, my God—” she whispered, incapable of more.

Brody had deliberately chosen a movie starring
Gifford Welsh.

And why would he do such a thing? Because he’d heard all that stupid gossip about her supposed affair with the actor,
that
was why. He’d set her up, suckered her in with that romantic dinner in the specially refurbished snack bar—maybe the lovemaking had been part of the joke, too—and for what? To play a cruel, sophomoric prank?

“Oops,” she heard Brody say, somewhere in the pounding void of furious humiliation that surrounded her. “Carolyn, I—”

Carolyn shoved the car door open, trembling, blinded not by tears but by injured rage. She scrambled out and immediately caught the toe of her shoe in the hem of the gypsy skirt—the
beautiful
gypsy skirt—and heard the fabric give way with a terrible ripping sound.

Over it all, on the gigantic screen, Gifford’s face loomed, big as a building.

He was laughing, of course.

Carolyn lifted the skirt in both hands and ran, tripping over the rough ground, finally kicking off both shoes and leaving them behind.

“Carolyn!” Brody shouted after her, his voice gruff. “Wait!”

She didn’t, couldn’t wait. She couldn’t be rational.

This was what she got, she thought hysterically, for believing she could be Cinderella, even for one night.

Brody caught up to her, took a firm hold on her arm, held her up when she would have lost her footing and taken a tumble.

“Listen to me,” he said.

Carolyn was breathing hard, coming back to herself, and feeling even more wretchedly embarrassed than before.

Brody used the side of one thumb to brush a tear from her cheek; until then, she hadn’t known she was crying.

“Shh,” he murmured, and pulled her close to him.

Carolyn struggled at first, but then she clung. She buried her wet face in his once-white shirt, smeared foundation and mascara and lipstick all over the front and let the sniffles turn to sobs.

And still Brody held her. “I’m sorry,” he said quietly, his breath brushing past her ear. “Carolyn, I’m so sorry—”

Carolyn, I’m so sorry
. The words echoed through her memory, spoken by different voices.

Her mother:
Carolyn, I’m so sorry, but I just can’t take care of you anymore….

Social worker after social worker:
Carolyn, I’m so sorry, but the Wilsons—the Jeffersons—the Crosbys— think you’d be better off in a different foster home….

And, finally, Gifford Welsh:
Carolyn, I’m so sorry. I thought you felt the same way about me as I do about you….

“I wasn’t involved with Gifford Welsh,” Carolyn said now, her voice and her breathing as uneven as the ground around them. “I was
the nanny.
I looked after his daughter, Storm, and I loved that child and
I had to leave her
because he came on to me, while his wife was away, and—and—”

“Carolyn,” Brody repeated, gripping her shoulders and resting his chin on top of her head. “Take it easy. It’s okay. Everything is okay.”

But another wave of fury crashed over her then, and she pushed back from him. “I can’t believe I trusted you again, after what you did before. What am I to you, Brody? Just another notch on the bedpost? Well, here’s a flash for you, cowboy—I’m a
real person,
with feelings!”

Brody didn’t say her name again. Didn’t say anything at all. He just looked at her, his hands hanging loose at his sides, that damned movie looming huge behind him like some Hollywood version of the Second Coming, and odd squeaks of dialogue and music piping from the rusty speaker disintegrating behind them.

A part of Carolyn stood back from it all, detached, silently observing that by now Brody was probably expecting her head to start spinning around on her shoulders or something.

“I want to go home,” she said, with hard-won dignity, after a few moments of awkward silence.

“Okay,” Brody said, his voice hoarse now. “Let’s go.”

He took her arm, squired her back to the car and got her settled in the front seat, all without a word.

Getting in on his side, he rolled down the window, unhooked the speaker and gave it a hard toss. Then he started the car and they drove off, leaving the movie playing to an audience of ghosts and the lights burning in the snack bar.

The popcorn spilled into the backseat when they went over a bump, and Carolyn looked down at the gypsy skirt.

It was ruined, of course.

A metaphor for the evening.

A metaphor
for her life.

So much for Cinderella. Brody wouldn’t be around to try a glass slipper on her dainty little foot anytime soon, that was for sure.

Carolyn waited for Brody to ask if she’d seen her shrink lately, or maybe forgotten to take her medications, but he didn’t say anything at all.

“I might have overreacted a little,” she finally said, hollowed out by all that searing anger, when they pulled up in front of Natty McCall’s house.

“Ya think?” Brody asked mildly, and without a trace of humor.

He got out of the car, walked around to her side, opened her door.

Barefoot, except for her ruined panty hose, she clasped her purse—by some miracle, she’d managed not to lose it—to her bosom and walked as regally as she could across the sidewalk and the grass to the stairs leading up to her apartment.

Brody saw her to her door, but despite the lack of space on the tiny landing, he somehow maintained a little distance between them. A muscle bunched in his jaw, but the expression in his eyes was one of pain, not anger.

“You’ll be all right now?” he asked, like he wasn’t sure it was safe to leave her in her own company.

Carolyn bit her lower lip, nodded. “Yes,” she said.

He held out one hand, palm up, and for just a second, Carolyn thought it was an attempt to make peace. Fortunately, she realized he wanted her house key before she made an utter idiot of herself all over again by giving him her hand instead.

Brody unlocked the door for her, pushed it open. Handed the key back once she was over the threshold, and facing him.

Winston, who’d most likely been watching from the windowsill, jumped down with a solid
thump
of cat meeting floor, but he didn’t hiss at Brody the way he normally would have done, or bristle out his tail.

He actually purred, and looped himself around the man’s boots a couple of times in greeting.

Brody didn’t acknowledge Winston; he was gazing straight at Carolyn. His throat worked, and the pain in his eyes, visible even though she had yet to turn on the overhead light in the kitchen, matched the dull ache lodged in the center of Carolyn’s chest.

“Good night, then,” he finally said.

“Good night,” Carolyn choked out, with great ef fort.

Then Brody turned to leave, and Carolyn shut and locked the door between them. Flipped on the lights.

Winston meowed, looked up at her.

She made herself take a good look at the gypsy skirt.

Yep, it was in tatters. A total loss.

Numbly, Carolyn went into her bedroom, exchanged Cinderella’s ball gown for jeans and a T-shirt and boots and returned to the kitchen.

“I’ve done it now,” she told Winston, rummaging in the cupboards for the box of ginger tea. Her stomach was doing flip-flops.

Winston leaped back up onto his windowsill. “Reow?” he asked.

She patted his head, smiled sadly. Her eyes felt swollen, though she hadn’t cried that much, and she probably had makeup smeared all over her face, and heaven only knew what her hair looked like by now, but none of those things mattered, because it was the same old story. Déjà vu all over again.

She’d been a sucker for a fantasy, allowed herself to believe in fairy tales. For just one night, she’d wanted to be a princess.

Was that so wrong?

Carolyn forgot about the ginger tea, opened another cupboard door and began taking down souvenir mugs, one by one.

Disneyland. The Grand Canyon. Independence Hall. The Alamo.

She’d never been to any of those places, but she could have described a family vacation to each one of them, complete down to the weather what meals she’d eaten at which restaurants. There would have been lots of pictures to anchor the memories, and choosing which one to put on the front of the annual Christmas card would certainly be a challenge.

At least she hadn’t sent herself postcards, she thought ruefully, her eyes burning with another crop of tears.

In all, there were over two dozen mugs in her pitiful collection.

She’d been—all by her lonesome—to exactly three of the places represented: Boise, Idaho, Virginia City, Nevada, and Reno. Not even Las Vegas, for Pete’s sake, but
Reno.

It was pathetic.

Well, she was through pretending. Through with fairy tales. Through trying to be anybody other than Carolyn Simmons, the foster kid all grown up, with no family and no history and certainly no happy vacations to look back on.

Not that she felt sorry for herself—if anything, she was angry.

Maybe Brody had set her up tonight, and maybe he hadn’t.

Either way, she’d acted like a maniac, and he’d avoid her from now on.

Which was probably a good thing.

Carolyn picked up the cup from Disneyland, recalled buying it in a thrift shop somewhere in her totally unremarkable travels and dropped it into the trash can, where it made a satisfying
clunk
sound.

Winston looked at her curiously, but did not seem overly concerned by her strange behavior.

That made one of them.

She dropped in the mug from the Grand Canyon next, and, striking its counterpart from Disneyland, it shattered.

By the time she’d finished, she had three cups to her name.

They were nothing fancy, but at least they commemorated places she’d actually
been to
once upon a time.

She’d always heard that breaking dishes could be therapeutic, and it seemed there might be something to that theory, because she’d begun to feel just a touch better than she had before, even though her head still ached and her stomach was still twitchy.

It was a rite of passage, getting rid of those cups, Carolyn decided, briskly lifting the heavy trash bag out of the bin, tying it closed and carrying it down to the larger bin next to Natty’s detached garage.

Step one to becoming the real Carolyn Simmons.

Whoever the heck
that
was.

C
ONNER WATCHED
with a wry expression in his eyes as Brody took a beer from the ranch-house fridge, popped the top and poured some down his throat.

The kitchen was dimly lit—Tricia was in bed, probably asleep, and Conner had answered the knock at the back door muttering, hair all messed up and clad only in a pair of sweat pants.

“What happened to your shirt?” he asked, taking in the large, colorful smudge on Brody’s chest. A pensive frown followed. “Or is that
my
shirt?”

“Carolyn’s face rubbed off on it,” Brody replied, raising the beer can in a grimly humorous salute.

Conner helped himself to a beer of his own and padded over to the table where generations of Creeds, men as well as women, had carried on late-night conversations like this one.