Heart Of A Cowboy: Creed's Honor / Unforgiven

Conner grinned, gave his head an almost imperceptible shake. “Sorry if I scared you a little while ago, banging on the plumbing with my wrench. I got here a little earlier than I expected and, though it seems ironic now, I was pretty sure you’d already gone out.”

Again she felt that sugary sting, inexplicably pleasant, but highly discomforting, too. “Natty asked you to come over,” she said, with a verbal shrug, “and I’m sure she appreciates your help.”

His grin was rueful now, but it tugged at her, nonetheless. “I’d do just about anything for Natty,” he said, moving to retrieve the duct tape and the wrench from the nearby counter and then stopping to look back over one shoulder. “Turn up the heat,” he added.

Tricia almost said, “I beg your pardon?” but she stopped herself in time. Nodded again.

“Sixty-eight degrees ought to do it,” Conner said. He took another long, slow look at her. “See you around,” he told her, heading for the back door.

See you around.

That was all he’d said. And it was a perfectly normal remark, too.

Just the same, Tricia stood as still as if her feet were glued to the floor until several seconds after he’d closed the door behind him.

The first thing she did, once she could move again, was turn the lock. The second was to find and adjust the downstairs thermostat.

Now, she thought, making the climb back up to her own space, if she could just turn down the heat inside herself.

Upstairs, she found Sasha eating cold cereal at the table, while Winston and Valentino enjoyed their separate bowls of dry food.

After pouring a cup of much-needed coffee, Tricia booted up her computer. The screen saver loomed up automatically, filling the monitor and taking Tricia a little aback, even though she’d seen that picture of herself and Hunter, in front of the ski lodge, at least a jillion times.

“Mom says you can do a lot better than Hunter,” Sasha remarked casually, no doubt prompted by the photograph.

A little of Tricia’s coffee splashed over the rim of her cup and burned her fingers, but beyond that, she showed no outward reaction. “Does she, now?” she asked, amused but mildly resentful toward Diana, too. Surely her very best friend in the world hadn’t meant to make such an observation within her daughter’s earshot.

“That’s what she told my dad,” Sasha said, and resumed her cereal crunching.

Tricia kept her back to the little girl, focusing on the computer’s keyboard instead, going online and clicking on the mailbox icon at the top of the screen.

Normally, she would have felt a little thrill to find no less than three messages from Hunter in among the usual sales pitches for miracle vitamins, quick riches and sexual-enhancement products. This morning, in the wake of another encounter with Conner Creed, all Tricia could work up was a dull sense of futility. Seattle seemed very far away, and so did Hunter.

Sasha, apparently, was determined to keep the verbal ball rolling. “I think Conner is really handsome,” she observed.

“Hmm,” Tricia responded noncommittally, without turning around. She’d opened the first of Hunter’s emails.

Hi, babe, he’d written.

Much to her own surprise, Tricia bristled a little. Babe? Mexican cruise or not, where did Hunter get off calling her babe? After all, the man virtually ignored her for weeks—if not months—at a time. Wasn’t that term a touch on the intimate side, considering how they’d drifted apart?

Tricia felt a twinge then; when her conscience spoke, it was usually in Diana’s voice. You did accept the invitation, Miss Hot-to-trot, came the brisk and typically no-nonsense reminder. Did you think Hunter was suggesting a platonic getaway?

Tricia’s spine straightened. Why—oh, why—had she blithely sidestepped what should have been obvious to anyone?—that she and Hunter would be sharing a cabin on the ship. And that meant sex.

“Oh, Lord,” she said aloud.

“Huh?” Sasha asked, from the table.

“Never mind,” Tricia said, focusing in on the rest of Hunter’s email.

It amounted to online foreplay, essentially, and she closed it with a self-conscious click of the mouse. Then she deleted it entirely. And felt even more foolish than before.

In that moment, she would have given just about anything to exchange some girl talk with Diana, despite the sure and certain knowledge that her best friend would tell her to kick Hunter to the curb and get on with her life.

With her friend in another time zone, though, and Sasha right there in the same room, a chat simply wasn’t feasible.

“Don’t you have to work today?” Sasha asked. Tricia hadn’t heard her push back her chair to rise, but the little girl was standing at her elbow now, studying her thoughtfully.

Tricia couldn’t find a smile. Maybe, she thought, with rueful whimsy, she could pick one up at the rummage sale.

“There isn’t much to do, with the camping season coming to an end,” she said. “We’re all ready for the weekend, so I thought we’d go over to the community center and help set up for the rummage sale.”

Sasha, who had probably never rummaged for anything in her admittedly short life, lit up at the prospect. “Awesome!” she enthused. “Can Valentino come, too?”

“I don’t think he’d enjoy that,” Tricia answered diplomatically. “What do you say we get ourselves dressed and take a certain dog out for a quick walk?”

CHAPTER EIGHT (#ulink_f82df3b9-0a0f-51fa-9551-f0d59ab41bf0)

BRODY WAS DEFINITELY up to something, though damned if Conner could figure out what it was. He’d helped himself to a pair of Conner’s own jeans, Brody had, and one of his best shirts, too, and he’d shaved for the first time since his return to Lonesome Bend. If his hair hadn’t been longer than Conner’s, and way shaggier, they’d have been mirror images of each other.

And if all that wasn’t bothersome enough, Brody not only had the coffee on by the time Conner wandered into the kitchen, after making the run into town to check on Natty McCall’s pipes, he was cooking up some bacon and eggs at the old wood-burning stove.

Conner meandered over to the counter, took the carafe from its burner and poured himself a dose of java. He’d been thinking about Tricia ever since he’d scared the hell out of her at the top of Natty’s basement steps that morning, and irritation with his brother provided some relief.

“Mornin’,” Brody sang out, as if he were just noticing Conner’s presence.

Conner squinted, studying his brother suspiciously. He’d gotten used to living his life as a separate individual since Brody left home, and it was a jolt to look up and see himself standing on the other side of the room. Gave him a familiar but still weird sense of being in two places at once.

“Since when do you cook?” he asked, after shaking off the sensation and taking a sip from his mug. Only then did he take off his coat and hang it from its peg by the back door.

Brody laughed at that. “I picked up the habit after I left home,” he replied easily. “Believe it or not, I find myself between women now and then.”

Conner rolled his eyes. “So then you just knock some hapless female over the head with a club and drag her back to your cave by the hair? Tell her to put a pot of beans on the fire?”

Brody slanted a look at him, and there was a certain sadness in his expression, Conner thought, unsettled. “I didn’t mean it like that,” Brody said, his voice quiet.

“Right,” Conner said, his voice gone gruff, all of a sudden, with an emotion he couldn’t name. He looked his brother up and down. “So what’s up with the clothes?”

Again, the grin flashed, quick and cocky. Brody speared a slice of bacon with a fork and turned it over in the skillet before looking down at Conner’s duds. “All my stuff is in the laundry,” he said. “Hope you don’t mind.”

Conner scowled and swung a leg over the long bench lining one side of the kitchen table, taking more coffee on board and trying to figure out what the hell was going on.

“Would you give a damn if I did mind?”

Brody didn’t say anything; he just went right on rustling up grub at the stove, though he did pause once to refill his own coffee cup, whistling low through his teeth as he concentrated on the task at hand. That tuneless drone had always bugged Conner, but now it really got on his last nerve.

“If you insist on staying,” he told Brody’s back, “why don’t you bunk in over at Kim and Davis’s place?”