LITMIR.BIZ

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said the better angel.

      Sometimes she’d like to throttle that better angel.

      “You figure it out,” she said.

      “Look, I don’t need this. Maybe it would be better if I just stayed clear.”

      Briana closed her eyes, but Alec’s image was still there, yearning for a visit from the father he adored. She had to stop thinking about what she wanted—never to lay eyes on Vance Grant again—and consider her children’s needs. Right or wrong, Vance was their dad, and as much as Josh protested, he wanted a relationship with him as badly as Alec did.

      “I’m sorry,” she said, nearly choking on the words.

      “You know what’s wrong with you?” Vance countered. He’d changed tactics again, turned the dial to “charm.” “You need sex.”

      Instantly, Logan Creed came to mind. Would his chest be hairy or smooth, when he took off his shirt?

      Briana gave herself an inward shake. “Maybe I do,” she admitted. “But not with you, so don’t get any ideas. You are sleeping on the couch.”

      “I’d planned on that anyhow,” Vance said. “Which reminds me—does it fold out?”

      He’d asked that same question in the message he’d left on the answering machine. Briana was puzzled, and a little alarmed.

      “Yes,” she said slowly. “Why do you ask?”

      Vance’s chuckle sounded false. “I’ve been thrown from a lot of broncs in my time,” he replied. “Have to think about my back, now that I’m getting older.”

      “Right,” Briana said, still curious, but unwilling to pursue the subject any further. She’d been talking to Vance too long as it was. Twenty minutes out of her life, and she’d never get them back.

      “See you Saturday,” Vance said cheerfully, like she was looking forward to his arrival instead of dreading it with every fiber of her being.

      “See you Saturday,” she confirmed glumly.

      And then she hung up.

      “I OUGHT TO PUNCH you in the mouth,” Jim Huntinghorse said, the next morning, when Logan tracked him down at the Council Fire Casino.

      Logan grinned. “I’m real glad to see you again, too, old buddy,” he said, drawing back a chair at one of the tables in the coffee shop and signaling the waitress for a cup of coffee. Since Sidekick was out in the truck, he didn’t plan to stay long. He’d get the java to go. He ran his gaze over Jim’s fine black suit. “You’ve come up in the world,” he said. “General manager. Who would have thought?”

      “Who would have thought,” Jim retorted, softening a little, but not much, “that you’d leave town without saying goodbye to your best friend? No calls. No e-mails. No nothing.”

      “When the judge let me out of jail after that brawl with Tyler and Dylan, he told me not to show my face in Stillwater Springs until I’d cooled down.”

      “It took you twelve years to cool down?”

      “Chip off the old block,” Logan said as he nodded his approval when the coffee arrived in a take-out cup and reached for his wallet.

      Jim waved both the waitress and the money away.

      “You can say that again.” Jim scowled, still glowering. He stood beside the table, showing no signs of sitting down, his big fists bunched at his sides as though he might carry out the original threat. “You’re as crazy as your dad was.”

      “I’m back,” Logan announced, after taking a cautious sip of the steaming brew. “And except for buying grub at the supermarket and taking my dog to the vet for a checkup, this is my first stop.”

      “Is there a compliment lurking in there somewhere?” Jim frowned.

      “Sit down. You cast a shadow like a mountain with the sun behind it.”

      “I’m working,” Jim pointed out. But he pulled back a chair and sat.

      “You’re a priority. There’s your compliment.”

      “Gee, thanks. I get married. No best buddy since kindergarten to stand up with me. I get divorced. Nobody to drown my sorrows with. But I’m a ‘priority’?”

      “Take it or leave it,” Logan said. “Best I can do.”

      At last, Jim relented. A grudging grin flashed across his chiseled Native-American face. “You just passing through—looking for a fight with one or both of your brothers maybe? Or did you finally come to your senses and decide that somebody ought to come back here and look after that ranch?”

      Logan put a tip on the table for the waitress, who was ogling them from the other side of the service counter. During the millisecond it took to lay the money down, Jim’s face changed. Went dark again.

      “You’re not going to sell out to some movie yahoo, are you?”

      Logan shook his head. “I’m staying for good.” That refrain was becoming familiar, like a commercial heard once too often on the radio or the TV.

      Again, the dazzling smile. All those white teeth and all that handsome-savage bullshit had sure gone over with the women when they were young and on the prowl. It probably still worked, Logan reflected.

      “You mean it?” Jim asked.

      “I mean it.”

      “You meant it when you promised to be best man in my wedding, too,” Jim pointed out.

      “I was in Iraq,” Logan said.

      “You were in Iraq?”

      “Didn’t I just say that?”

      “Just because you say something, Creed, that doesn’t mean it’s true.”

      “When my stuff gets here, I’ll show you the documentation. Honorable discharge. Even a couple of medals.”

      Jim gave a low whistle. “So that’s why you dropped out of the rodeo scene. You always got a lot of play on ESPN. Then, all of the sudden, you’re just not there. You got drafted?”

      “I enlisted,” Logan said. “Can we not talk about Iraq right now?”

      Jim frowned, obviously confused. He was a veteran himself, and in buddy world, guys swapped war stories. “Why not?”

      “Because I need booze to even think about combat, let alone talk about it, and given my illustrious history, not to mention the high incidence of alcoholism in the Creed clan, I try to limit myself to the occasional beer.”

      “Oh,” Jim said. “Bad, huh?”

      “Bad,” Logan admitted.

      “You were special forces, right?”

      “Right. And this constitutes talking about Iraq. I’m stone-cold sober and I’d like to stay that way.”

      “Okay,” Jim agreed hastily, putting up both hands, palms out. “Okay.”

      Logan stood. “I just came by to say hello and let you know I’m back. My dog’s in the truck and I have contractors to meet with, plus I promised to stop by Cassie’s before I head for home.”

      Jim grinned, rising, too. “You have a dog and a truck? You really are going redneck.”

      “Nah,” Logan said, giving the waitress a wave as he turned to go. “I still have both my front teeth.”

      “Not for long,” Jim quipped, “if either of your brothers gets a wild hair to come back home the way you did.”

      Jim was only joking, but the words jabbed at a sore spot in Logan. It was too much to hope that Dylan’s and Tyler’s personal roads might turn

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