Linda Miller - Montana Creeds - Dylan

Only the probate tangle had kept it off the market this long.

Technically, the local bank owned Madison Ranch now, though the name had stuck, because there had been Madisons living on that land since that part of the state was settled. They’d foreclosed two months after Kristy’s dad died.

Freida allowed herself a smug little smile.

Then Briana Grant came in. There were rumors that she and Logan Creed were secretly married or would be soon, and sleeping together either way. Briana, a pretty woman who always wore her strawberry-blond hair in a tidy French braid, certainly hadn’t confided the nature of the relationship to Kristy, though the two of them were friendly.

Seeing Freida seated at one of the chairs surrounding the conference table, her book open before her, Briana stopped on the threshold, looked as though she might turn on one heel and bolt.

“Come in,” Kristy urged her, smiling. Inside, though, she was still shaken by Freida’s smug announcement that she had a promising prospect to buy Madison Ranch, and no amount of telling herself it didn’t matter anyway seemed to help.

Briana hesitated, then met Freida’s gaze, lifted her chin a little, and took a place at the table.

“You’ve got your nerve, showing up here, after all the trouble you’ve caused my poor brother,” Freida told her flatly.

Briana flushed, but didn’t give any ground. Sheriff Book had picked Brett Turlow up for questioning a couple of times, after a break-in at Briana’s, but that was all Kristy knew. She wasn’t much for gossip.

“Everybody’s welcome here, Freida,” Kristy said staunchly. While the Stillwater Springs Public Library wasn’t exactly a hotbed of violent controversy, she’d had some experience keeping order. A lot of townspeople used the place as if it were a free day-care center, and once in a while, there was a little dust-up when two voracious readers wanted to check out the only copy of some recent bestseller.

Freida stood, her movements stiff and precise. She grabbed her purse and her book and sniffed, “I don’t know why I stay in this town, with all the riffraff coming in these days.” With that, she swept grandly out.

Tears stood in Briana’s eyes.

Kristy sat down beside her friend, took her hand. “She’s the one with nerve, calling anybody riffraff, with that brother of hers,” she said gently.

Briana sniffled, managed a smile and then a nod. She hugged her library book to her chest like some sort of treasure.

After that, the other members of the book club began trailing in, by chatty twos and threes. Those who wanted to helped themselves to the coffee in the kitchenette, and though they watched Briana with interest, surely speculating about her and Logan Creed, they included her in the discussion.

All in all, Kristy thought, as she locked up an hour later, when both meetings were over, it had been a worthwhile evening, though Winston probably wouldn’t agree.

Back in the Blazer, and alone in the library parking lot, Kristy gripped the wheel with both hands and laid her forehead against her knuckles for a long moment.

She felt strangely on edge, hyperalert, as though something big were about to happen, but big things simply didn’t happen in Stillwater Springs, Montana. Not often, anyway.

She rallied, made herself sit up straight, start the motor, head for home. Winston was waiting, and so was her claw-foot bathtub, along with the page-turner she’d been trying to finish for a week.

Maybe Sheriff Book had been right.

She might be coming down with something.

And maybe that monster-memory she’d been fighting to keep submerged was about to break the surface, finally, and ruin her carefully constructed life.

FIRST THING IN THE MORNING, after half an hour trying to spoon room-service oatmeal into Bonnie’s tightly closed mouth and finally giving up, Dylan checked out of the hotel and went looking for a Wal-Mart.

Bonnie needed a car seat, and a whole slew of other things.

So he put her into a shopping cart, and the two of them wheeled around. He guessed at her clothes sizes, and she kicked up a fuss when he went to try some shoes on her, but after a brief struggle, he won. In the toy department, he snagged a doll almost as big as Bonnie herself, mounted on a plastic horse no less, but she didn’t show much interest in that, either.

“Toys,” an older woman told him sagely, leaning in to whisper the wisdom, “have to be age-appropriate.”

“Age-appropriate?” Dylan pushed his hat to the back of his head.

The woman tapped the box containing the new doll, sitting tall and straight on her horse. “This is for children five and up. Your little girl can’t be any older than two.”

“She’s small for her age,” Dylan replied automatically, because he didn’t like other people telling him what to do, even when they were right. But once the meddlesome shopper had rounded the bend, he put the doll back on the shelf and rustled up a soft pink unicorn with a gleaming horn and a fluffy mane. According to the tag, it would do.

And Bonnie took to it right away.

After making a few more selections, and paying at the checkout counter, they were good to go. Dylan made a couple of calls from the truck and located a pediatrician on the outskirts of the city.

Jessica Welch, M.D., operated out of an upscale strip mall. She was good-looking, too, with long, gleaming brown hair neatly confined by a silver barrette at her nape. Not that it mattered, but when Dylan met a woman—any woman—he noticed things about her.

“Who do we have here?” Jessica Welch, M.D., asked, chucking Bonnie, who had both arms clamped around Dylan’s neck, under the chin.

Bonnie threw back her head and screamed out one of those ear-piercers that go through a man’s brain like a spike. Ever since Dylan had hauled her into the waiting room, a full forty-five minutes before, she’d been clinging to him. He’d been the only father present, and the looks he’d gotten from the various mothers waiting with quieter, better-behaved kids weren’t the kind he was used to getting from people of the female persuasion.

Dr. Welch was unmoved. Screaming children were not uncommon in her day-to-day life, of course. “This way,” she said.

Dylan and Bonnie followed her down a short corridor and into a small examining room. Bonnie didn’t let up on the shrieking, and she’d added kicking and squirming to the fit; hostilities were escalating.

“I guess she thinks she might get a shot or something,” Dylan said, completely at a loss. By then, Bonnie had knocked his hat off, and she was pulling his hair with both hands.

Dr. Welch simply smiled. “Let’s have a look at you, Miss—?”

“Bonnie,” Dylan said. “Bonnie Creed.”

Bonnie Creed. He liked the sound of that.

The doctor examined the papers on her clipboard. “And you’re her father,” she said. It was rhetorical, a conclusion not a question, but Dylan felt compelled to answer all the same.

“Yes.”

“I would have known by the resemblance,” Dr. Welch said. As it turned out, she had a few tricks up her sleeve. By letting Bonnie listen to Dylan’s heart through a stethoscope, she got the kid to quiet down.

“Any significant health problems?” the doctor asked, finishing up with the routine stuff, like looking into Bonnie’s ears with that little flashlight-type thing and peering down her throat.

“Not that I know of,” Dylan said. “She’s been—er—living with her mother.”

“I see,” Dr. Welch replied solemnly.

“I was hoping you could tell me what to feed her and stuff like that,” Dylan went on. He felt his ears burning. By now, the doctor was probably wondering if she should notify the authorities or something.