Linda Miller - Montana Creeds - Dylan

“No,” Dylan said, more scared than he was about to let Tyler see. “She was upset earlier—like I said, she cried a lot—it’s probably just that.”

“Why was she crying?” Tyler demanded, as though he thought Dylan had been pinching the kid or something.

“She wanted her mother,” Dylan answered. Tyler wasn’t much comfort, but he was better than nothing.

“oh,” Tyler said, picking up his beer again, taking a swallow.

“Yeah, oh,” Dylan said, annoyed.

“I still think we should take her to a doctor.”

“Gee, all this concern. It’s almost like having a brother.”

Tyler frowned angrily. “I’m going to town to get some baby aspirin,” he said. “While I’m there, I’ll ask the pharmacist if he thinks Bonnie needs medical attention.”

In spite of himself, in spite of all that had gone down between him and Tyler over the years, Dylan felt a sudden rush of relief, and something a lot like affection. He was swallowing the lump that had risen in his throat when Tyler went on, already headed for the door.

“I’ll be back,” he said.

A few moments later, Dylan heard his brother’s rig start up outside.

He checked on Bonnie again—he’d have sworn she did have a fever—but decided to do his pacing in the kitchen so he wouldn’t disturb her sleep.

When Tyler blew in again, forty-five minutes later, he had baby aspirin, cough medicine, a stuffed animal of indeterminate species and a digital thermometer.

“If this thing reads above a one-oh-one, according to the pharmacist, Bonnie should be taken to the emergency room.”

Dylan frowned, examining the unfamiliar plastic stick in its bright green box. “Where does this thing—go?”

Tyler chuckled. He made quite a picture, standing there in Dylan’s kitchen, full of avuncular concern. The bad-ass cowboy, spilling a toy dog, if that was what it was, along with a bottle of aspirin and a carton of children’s cough syrup onto the table.

“In her ear, shit-for-brains,” he said.

“Oh,” Dylan said, squinting at the instructions on the back of the box.

Tyler grabbed the whole works right out of his hand. “Give me that,” he said, after the fact. “Bill—that’s the pharmacist—told me how to use it.”

“Great,” Dylan said.

“I ran into a friend of yours while I was at the drugstore,” Tyler added, as an aside. “You might get company any minute now.”

“What?” Dylan asked, irritated all over again.

Tyler grinned, rummaging in the drugstore bag again and pulling out a packet with a sterile wipe inside. Damned if he hadn’t thought of everything, old Uncle Ty. “The thing’s got to be sanitized,” he said.

“Who—?”

Tyler wiped down the thermometer, dispensing with all those offensive Dylan germs, and headed for Bonnie.

“Ninety-eight point seven,” he announced, in a low but triumphant voice, after gently easing the end of the thermometer into Bonnie’s right ear. “She’s probably fine.”

Suddenly, Dylan felt unaccountably territorial.

Bonnie was his daughter. He should have been the one taking her temperature.

As if in direct response to his thought, she woke up at precisely that moment, looked around, and let out one long, piercing shriek, followed by a plaintive, “Mommmmmmeeeee!”

“I see what you mean,” Tyler said.

vaguely, Dylan heard a knock at the back door. He tried to pick Bonnie up, but she flailed both arms and kicked like she’d been raised by wolves.

And then Kristy swept in, like an avenging goddess, and scooped Bonnie up into her arms.

“There, now,” she murmured, stroking Bonnie’s back. Gradually— very gradually—blessed silence filled the room. “I’m here, sweetie. I’m here. Everything will be all right.”

Over Bonnie’s head, Kristy gave Dylan a what-were-you -doing -to-her kind of glare.

“She was out of cat litter,” Tyler explained.

“Huh?” Dylan asked, stung by Kristy’s look and, at the same time, glad as hell that she was there.

“That’s why I happened to run into Kristy at the store. She stopped by for a bag of cat litter.”

“You could have warned me,” Dylan growled, after Kristy had carried Bonnie out of the bedroom.

“Ah, hell,” Tyler answered smugly. “That wouldn’t have been any fun at all.”

SOMETHING HAPPENED to Kristy, as she held Dylan’s child, there in that old, run-down ranch house that warm summer night. Something sacred and inexplicable and eternal, the kind of shift that comes along once or twice in a lifetime, if that often. It was like the meeting and melding of two colliding universes, at a quantum level.

Bonnie seemed to feel it, too. She looked up at Kristy with wide, startled eyes, then flung both her small arms around Kristy’s neck and held on for dear life.

“Mommy,” she said.

Kristy didn’t have the heart to correct the child. Over Bonnie’s head, her gaze connected with Dylan’s. She saw his jaw tighten, and a blue storm flared in his eyes.

“You have chalk on your forehead,” he said.

Still dealing with her own internal cataclysm, Kristy merely stared at him, uncomprehending.

“Guess I’ll be getting back to the cabin,” Tyler said.

Kristy barely heard him, had only the vaguest sense of his leaving the ranch house kitchen for the dark, yawning world beyond the door, while she and Dylan and Bonnie remained where they were, like the stunned survivors of a meteoric impact. About as mobile as Stonehenge, Kristy couldn’t even swallow, let alone speak.

Dylan broke the spell, stepped forward, put his arms out for Bonnie.

visceral, mother-wolf resistance flared through Kristy, almost painful in its intensity, but Bonnie was Dylan’s daughter, not hers. She was still rational enough to know that, anyway.

So she surrendered the little girl. It felt as though some vital part of her was being torn away.

Dylan murmured to the child, now nodding against his shoulder, and carried her back to the bedroom. As if pulled along behind by an invisible tether, Kristy followed.

Miraculously, Bonnie fell into an immediate sleep, most likely exhausted from all that shrieking.

Kristy, slowly returning to a state that resembled normalcy, found the bathroom, stared at her reflection in the mirror over the sink. A great splotch of blue chalk stained her forehead, from when she’d rested it against the blackboard in her own kitchen, earlier that evening, like the mark of some primitive initiation rite.

She cranked on the water tap, lathered her hands and then her face with soap, and washed the chalk away.

When she returned to the kitchen, Dylan was there, pouring coffee.

He looked exhausted—and grim.

“I was only trying to help,” Kristy said, without apology, remembering the strain she’d seen in his face when he reached for Bonnie a few minutes before.

He smiled wanly, raised a coffee mug in a halfhearted toast. “I know,” he said, husky-voiced. “And I appreciate it.”

Kristy longed to ask if he’d felt what she had, when she was holding Bonnie in her arms, but she didn’t quite dare. Why would he have felt it, standing several feet away?

“You seemed pretty angry,” she ventured, after working up her courage for several moments. “When Bonnie called me ‘Mommy.’”

“Not angry,” Dylan said, extending a cup to Kristy. “Frustrated. Scared as hell. I’m not very good at this parental thing, it seems.”

Kristy saw his vulnerability in his eyes, and in his countenance, and she was touched by it. She’d never known Dylan Creed to be afraid of anything, or to doubt himself in any way. But one very little girl had changed all that.