LITMIR.BIZ

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always annoyed with somebody,” he observed, barely stopping himself from saying right out loud that, faced with a choice between living with the imposing Ms. Turlow or with Kristy, he’d have thrown in with the cat.

      Kristy’s eyes turned bleak. For a few minutes, she’d forgotten about the possibility of impending scandal, but now Dylan could see that the respite was over. “Freida will be the worst,” she said, with soft despair, “if it turns out that Floyd’s suspicions are right.”

      “What will you do,” Dylan ventured to ask, “if he is?” He was surprised by the suspense he felt, awaiting her answer. It would be one hell of an irony if, just when he’d decided he’d be able to settle down on the ranch and make a home for his daughter, Kristy chose to leave town for good.

      “I don’t know,” she said. “I think—I think it might sour things—the house, my job at the library—” She paused, took another run at getting her point across. “You know how small towns are, Dylan. It was bad enough when my parents died within a year of each other, and the ranch went for debts and taxes. Everybody felt sorry for me. People would never let a story like this rest, and I’m not sure I could face all that pity and gossip again.”

       All that pity and gossip.

      Kristy looked as though she’d like to take those words back, choke on each one whole before giving voice to them. Dylan supposed there had been plenty of gossip, when he came back to Stillwater Springs to ask her to wait for him, a few months after the breakup following Jake’s funeral, and she’d waved Mike Danvers’s huge engagement ring under his nose and basically told him to get lost. He’d always supposed, though, that any pity making the rounds had been reserved for him.

      That was one of the reasons he’d stayed away so long—as a ragged kid, with the notorious Jake Creed for a father, he’d had all the sympathy he could take. Charity baskets left on the front porch, at Christmas, Thanksgiving and Easter. Well-meaning church ladies offering him their sons’ cast-off clothes. And all the rest of it.

      The biggest reason, though, had been Kristy herself.

      He’d ridden the meanest bulls in rodeo. Scraped his knuckles and bloodied his nose in a score of bar brawls—and those were the ones he’d won—but he’d known that seeing Kristy going about her wifely business around town, picking up mail down at the post office, pushing a shopping cart through the supermarket aisles, intermittently blossoming with another man’s child, would bring him to his knees.

      So, except for brief forays, when he’d brought his bull, Cimarron, back to the ranch, not knowing what else to do with him, and hired Briana Grant—now Creed— to look after his empty house, he’d stayed as far away as possible.

      Bonnie—and Logan’s telling him, during his last visit, that Kristy was still single—had changed everything.

      Coming to terms with all that was going to take a while.

      And now there might be a body moldering on the old Madison place.

      His coffee had gone cold, but since the conversation had come to a halt and he didn’t know how to start it up again, he sipped some java.

      That was another thing that hadn’t changed.

      Kristy’s coffee was still bad.

      He smiled at the thought.

      “Tell me about your little girl,” Kristy said, and he knew by the way she framed the request that she’d been working up her nerve during the silence.

      “You probably already know as much about her as I do,” Dylan admitted. “She’s two. Her name is Bonnie. She likes listening to you read aloud.”

      Kristy seemed to relax a little, though there was still a tense undercurrent. “I take it her mother is out of the picture?”

      “God knows where Sharlene is,” Dylan said, sighing. Then he met Kristy’s gaze, and held steady. “Sharlene was a mistake, no denying that. But Bonnie—well—she’s the proof that something good comes out of everything.”

      Everything but a horse’s grave, in a peaceful copse of trees, added the voice in his mind. Now that the possibility had had a chance to sink in, he knew instinctively that the sheriff and his crew would find something besides Sugarfoot’s bones when they dug that hole.

      Kristy’s smile was misty. “I envy you,” she said.

      Again, Dylan was taken aback. He’d forgotten Kristy’s capacity to surprise him—one of the things he’d loved best about her. “Why?” he asked, honestly puzzled.

      “Because you have a child,” she said slowly, and with amused patience.

      “I just hope I can keep her,” he answered. The worry that Sharlene would change her mind and take Bonnie back circled in the darkest depths of his mind, liable to drag him under when he least expected it.

      Kristy raised one eyebrow. Waited.

      “I plan to file for permanent custody when Logan gets home from Vegas,” he explained. “Until then, I’m pretty much hanging out there in the wind.” He studied Kristy, remembering—no, remembering wasn’t the right word, because he hadn’t actually forgotten in the first place—how good it had felt to hold her tightly again.

      “You didn’t—steal her, did you?”

      “You’re the second person who’s asked me that,” Dylan said. “No, I didn’t kidnap my daughter. Sharlene left her in my truck while I was inside some dive in Las Vegas, playing poker, along with a note saying she couldn’t take care of her anymore.”

      Kristy’s mouth dropped open. “She left a child alone in a truck?”

      “She was around someplace, keeping an eye out.”

      Like that made a difference. He’d probably never know what Sharlene would have done if he hadn’t found Bonnie. Even if they happened to have a reasonable conversation at some point, Sharlene wasn’t likely to be honest and straightforward.

      “Oh, well,” Kristy said skeptically, “that changes everything.”

      “Sharlene isn’t the brightest bulb in the marquee,” Dylan allowed. “But in her own crazy way, I think she was doing what she thought was best.”

      Kristy pulled in her horns a little. Sighed again. “Why not simply call you, if she felt overwhelmed by the responsibility of caring for Bonnie, and ask for help?”

      Dylan didn’t like the answer that came to him, liked saying it out loud even less. “She probably thought I’d say no, so she didn’t give me the chance.”

      A short silence fell, during which Kristy regarded Dylan long and hard. “Would you have said no?” she finally asked.

      “Of course not,” he said, mildly affronted. “Bonnie is my daughter.”

      “Excuse me,” Kristy countered, “but some guys would have married the mother of their child.”

      Just like that, she’d gotten his hackles up. That was another thing he’d forgotten about Kristy—her gift for pissing him off royally. “I didn’t love Sharlene,” he said tautly, “and she sure as hell didn’t love me.”

      “Did either one of you love Bonnie?” Kristy asked.

      Dylan had to unclamp his back molars before he could reply. “I never missed a child-support check,” he said.

      “Aren’t you noble?” Kristy challenged, bending one knee and sitting on her leg, which was still another thing he recalled about her. Her forehead was furrowed, her eyes slightly narrowed. “Did you ever see Bonnie, before you found her in your truck? Did you ever take care of her when she was teething, or had the flu? Did you even carry her picture in your wallet?”

      “Yes,”

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