Linda Lael - Montana Creeds - Tyler

“Thirteen,” Doreen admitted, after some lip-biting and some hand-wringing.

“The math works,” Tyler said.

Doreen gave a rueful little laugh. Raised and lowered her stooped shoulders. “Yeah,” she said. “For a lot of guys, Ty. Not just you. Davie belongs to a trucker who stopped by Skivvie’s one summer night, crying in his beer because his wife didn’t understand him. I cheered him up. And Davie looks just like him.”

“Okay,” Tyler said. “So why do you let the boyfriend bounce Davie off walls?”

Tears filled Doreen’s eyes. “I’ve been fighting things all my life,” she said. “One day, I just ran out of fight.”

“Tough break for Davie,” Tyler said evenly.

“You think I don’t hate myself for that? For all of it?” Doreen straightened her spine a little—though not enough, unfortunately. “I never expected to end up like this. I could have had an abortion—Davie’s father offered to pay for one—but I had this crazy idea that I’d find a good man someday. Davie and I and the prince.” She laughed again. “What a fairy tale.”

“Let me take Davie home with me. Just for a while. Until you can get things under control.”

Doreen stared at him, clearly amazed. “Why? Why would you do that?”

“Because I was a kid once, with a crazy father,” Tyler said, as surprised to say what he did as Doreen probably was to hear him admit it. He’d been in denial about Jake Creed all his life, even written songs about him, for Christ’s sake. “What you’re doing now isn’t working, Doreen. Time to try something different.”

“You don’t understand,” Doreen whispered, in a teary rush of words and breath. “Davie’s a handful. He has problems, Tyler. And Roy—well, you don’t know what Roy’s like. He’ll lay for you. He’ll never forget the run-in you and him had tonight. If he has to wait the rest of his life, he’ll find a way to pay you back, and when he does, it won’t be pretty.”

“I can handle Roy,” Tyler said. “Seems to me, the more immediate concern is what he might do to you, or to Davie. Let me drive you someplace, Doreen. Right now, tonight. There are shelters, or you could stay at Cassie’s place—”

Doreen’s face turned to stone. “I know what those ‘shelters’ are like. My mother and I were in and out of them when I was a little girl. Church women, looking down their noses at us. Secondhand clothes. It was like being in prison, and all it did was make my dad even meaner, once he caught up with us. And he always caught up with us.”

“That was then, Doreen, and this is now.”

“Take Davie home with you,” Doreen said, stiff now, and flushed with shame and fury and frustration and God only knew what else. “You’ll want to give him back soon enough.”

“Maybe,” Tyler agreed. But he was remembering all those times when Cassie had stood toe-to-toe with Jake Creed and refused to let him drag his youngest son home by the hair. What would have happened to him if it hadn’t been for Cassie and, to a lesser degree, for Logan and Dylan?

Payback time.

There was a kid in trouble, and he couldn’t ignore that.

Doreen looked at her watch. A little of her favorite tattoo showed on her upper arm—a phoenix, rising majestically from the ashes. “Do what you want,” she said. “Play hero. You’ll be sorry, Tyler. You will be sorry. And that’s the last warning you’re going to get from me.”

Tyler reached for a napkin, gestured for Doreen to hand over the pen she used for taking down food and drink orders. Scrawled his cell number on it.

“Call if you need help,” he said.

Doreen eyed the number with contempt, but she took it in the end. Stuffed it into her apron pocket in a wad.

Tyler watched her go. Settled up for the coffee. Made his way through the casino to the employees’ lounge. He’d gone to high school with the security guard posted in the hallway, and hung out with Jim Huntinghorse when he was still managing the place, so nobody got in his way.

Davie sat hunkered down in a chair in the corner, alone in the room, clutching the library book in both hands.

“Time to ride,” Tyler said.

“What if he’s out there?” Davie asked. “What if Roy’s out there?”

“I couldn’t get that lucky,” Tyler told him, with a grin.

But Roy wasn’t waiting in the parking lot. Davie was surprised; Tyler wasn’t. Roy would strike back, but not when there was a chance of getting his ass kicked in a public parking lot. He was the come-from-behind type. He’d use a tire iron, or maybe even a gun.

Serious business. But Tyler had had a lot of practice at watching his back. A lifetime of it, in fact.

And being a Creed, he didn’t have sense enough to be scared.

So he and Davie made a quick stop at Wal-Mart, for a sleeping bag and a cot, the usual personal grooming necessities and a change of clothes for Davie.

“You don’t actually expect me to wear these, do you?” Davie protested, once they were back in Kristy’s Blazer, headed for Cassie’s place to pick up the dog. He was holding up the pair of jeans Tyler had chosen for him. “They are definitely not cool.”

“Being cool is the least of your problems,” Tyler pointed out. “You’ll wear them.”

Kit Carson greeted them at the door when they got to Cassie’s, probably relieved to learn that he hadn’t been dumped there for the duration. Not that Cassie wouldn’t have been good to him—she was a little rough around the edges, Cassie was, but she had a gentle soul, a heart for lost dogs. And lost boys.

“Picking up strays now?” she asked, under the bug-flecked cone of light on her porch, watching as Davie hoisted Kit Carson into the back of the borrowed Blazer.

Tyler grinned. “Just carrying on the tradition,” he said.

Stillwater Springs was a small town. Cassie, having lived there since before the Battle of the Little Big Horn, had to know Davie, and his mother, too. Maybe she even remembered the summer Tyler had spent in Doreen’s bed, in the little room above Skivvie’s Tavern, learning to be a man.

“Is he yours?” she asked, proving Tyler’s theory.

“Could be,” Tyler answered. “His mother denies it, but she could have lots of reasons for doing that.”

“Like what?” Cassie countered reasonably.

“Like not wanting me to have a claim on him, back when he was little and she could still handle him,” Tyler said. “Doreen was always independent to a fault. Maybe there’s still a little of that left in her, even now.”

“This is going to complicate your life,” Cassie predicted, sounding resigned.

“Maybe my life has gotten too simple,” Tyler replied.

“Spoken like a true Creed,” Cassie retorted, but she was smiling—with her mouth, anyway. Her dark eyes were serious. “Folks have long memories, Tyler. Everybody—including Lily Ryder—is going to recall what happened between you and Doreen, and put two and two together.”

Tyler sighed. He hadn’t let on to anybody that Lily was on his mind, but Cassie knew him too well to be fooled by lies of omission. “Is she involved with anybody? Remarried maybe?” he asked, his voice sounding husky. He wouldn’t have put that particular question to anyone else on earth, not even Lily. His pride wouldn’t have allowed that. But Cassie, a wise middle-aged Native American with a teepee in her yard, was like a grandmother to him.

“No,” Cassie said. And she put a hand on his arm, a signal that she was about to say something he wouldn’t want to hear. “Her husband was a pilot. He killed himself two years ago.”

Suicide.

Tyler closed his eyes, thrust right back into the bad old days as surely and suddenly as if he’d stumbled into a time warp. He might have been a kid again, not a man standing on Cassie’s front porch, but a boy hiding on the other side of the kitchen door, out at the home place, listening as Sheriff Floyd Book, Jim Huntinghorse’s legendary predecessor, broke the news to Jake.