Kitabı oku: «The Cowboy Way: A Creed in Stone Creek / Part Time Cowboy»

CHAPTER ONE

SOME INSTINCT—OR maybe just a stir of a breeze—awakened Steven Creed; he sat up in bed, took a fraction of a moment to orient himself to unfamiliar surroundings. One by one, the mental tumblers clicked into place:

Room 6. Happy Wanderer Motel and Campground. Stone Creek, Arizona.

The door stood open to the fresh high-country air, which was crisply cool on this early June night, but not cold, and the little boy—Steven’s newly adopted son—sat on the cement step outside. A bundle—probably his favorite toy, a plush skunk named Fred, rolled up in his blanket—rested beside him, and the boy’s tiny frame was rimmed in an aura of silvery-gold moonlight.

Something tightened in Steven’s throat at the poignancy of the sight.

Poor kid. It wasn’t hard to guess who he was waiting for. Matt was small, with his dad’s dark hair and his mother’s violet eyes, and he was exceptionally intelligent—maybe even gifted—but he was still only five years old.

How could he be expected to comprehend that his folks, Zack and Jillie St. John, were gone for good? That they wouldn’t be coming to pick him up, no matter how hard he hoped or how many stars he wished on, that night or any other.

Steven’s eyes burned, and he had to swallow the hard ache that rose in his throat.

Jillie had succumbed to a particularly virulent form of breast cancer a year and a half ago, and Zack had only lasted a few months before the grief dragged him under, too—however indirectly.

“Hey, Tex,” Steven said, trying to sound casual as he sat up on the thin, lumpy mattress of the foldout sofa—he’d given the bed to the child when they checked in that evening. Steven shoved a hand through his own dark blond hair. “What’s the trouble?” His voice was hoarse. “Can’t sleep?”

Matt looked back at him, shook his head instead of answering aloud.

He looked even smaller than usual, sitting there in the expanse of that wide-open doorway.

Steven rolled out of bed, shirtless and barefoot, wearing a pair of black sweatpants that had seen better days.

He crossed the scuffed linoleum floor, stepped over the threshold and sat down beside Matt on the step, interlacing his fingers, letting his elbows rest on his knees. There was enough of a chill in the air to raise goose bumps wherever his skin was bare, so he figured Matt had to be cold, too, sitting there in his cotton pajamas. With a sigh, Steven squinted to make out the winding sparkle of the nearby creek, sprinkled in starlight, edged by oak trees, with night-purple mountains for a backdrop.

Matt leaned into him a little, a gesture that further melted Steven’s already-bruised heart.

Carefully, Steven put an arm around the boy, to lend not only reassurance, but warmth, too. “Having second thoughts about turning rancher this late in your life?” he teased, thinking he couldn’t have loved Matt any more if he’d been his own child, instead of his best friend’s.

In the morning, Steven would attend the closing over at the Cattleman’s Bank, and sign the papers making him the legal owner of a fifty-acre spread with a sturdy though run-down two-story house and a good well but not much else going for it. The rickety fences had toppled over years ago, defeated by decades of heavy snow in winter and pounding rain come springtime, and the barn was unsalvageable. Yet something about the place had reached out to him and grabbed hold, just the same.

The small ranch had been a home once, and it could be one again, with a lot of elbow grease—and a serious chunk of change. Fortunately, money wasn’t a problem for Steven, which wasn’t to say there weren’t plenty of other things to chap his figurative hide.

Sometimes, he felt just as lost as Matt did.

Matt’s mouth quirked up at one side in a flimsy attempt at a smile, all the more touching because of the obvious effort involved. “I’m only five years and three months old,” he said, in belated reply to Steven’s question, in that oddly mature way of his. “It’s not late in my life, because my life just got started.” The little guy had skipped the baby-talk stage entirely; he hadn’t even tried to talk until he was past two, but he’d spoken in full sentences from then on.

“Five, huh?” Steven teased, raising one eyebrow. “If you weren’t so short, I’d say you were lying about your age. Come on, admit it—you’re really somebody’s grandfather, posing as a kid.”

The joke, a well-worn favorite, fell flat. Matt’s small shoulders moved with the force of his sigh, and he leaned a little more heavily into Steven’s side.

“Feeling lonesome?” Steven asked, after clearing his throat.

Matt nodded, looking up at Steven. His eyes were huge and luminous in the predawn darkness. “I need a dog,” the boy announced solemnly.

Steven chuckled, ruffled Matt’s hair, gleaming dark as a raven’s wing in the night. Relief swelled inside him, flailed behind his chest wall like a living thing doing its best to escape. A dog was something he could manage.

“Soon as we’re settled,” he promised, “we’ll visit the animal shelter and pick out a mutt.”

“Do they have ponies at the shelter, too?” The question cheered Steven; Matt was pushing the envelope, so to speak, and that had to be a good sign.

They’d already had the pony discussion—repeatedly.

“You know the deal, Tex,” he reminded the little boy quietly. “The fences need to be replaced before we can keep horses, and the barn, too.”

Matt sighed again, deeply. “That might take a long time,” he lamented, “since you’ll be working in town every day.”

Steven fully intended to settle down in Stone Creek, build a normal life for his young charge and for himself. And to him, normal meant showing up somewhere on weekday mornings and putting in eight hours—whether he needed the paycheck or not.

He’d had to fight just to get through high school, let alone prelaw in college, and then earn the graduate degree that had qualified him to take the bar exam—a frustrating variety of learning disorders had all but crippled him early in his life. Although they’d been corrected, thanks to several perceptive teachers, he’d had a lot of catching up to do.

Still felt as if he was scrambling, some of the time.

Steven ruffled Matt’s hair. “Yep,” he agreed. “I’ll be working.”

“What about me? Where will I be when you’re gone?”

They’d already covered that ground, numerous times, but after everything—and everybody—the little guy had lost over the past couple of years, it wasn’t surprising that he needed almost constant reassurance. “You’ll be in day camp,” Steven said. “Until you start first grade in the fall, anyhow.”

Matt’s chin jutted out a little way, the angle obstinate and so reminiscent of Zack that the backs of Steven’s eyes stung again. Zack St. John had been his best friend since middle school, a popular athlete, excellent student and all-around good guy. Losing Jillie had been a terrible blow, knocking Zack for the proverbial loop—he’d gone wild and finally died when, driving too fast down a narrow mountain road, he’d lost control somehow and laid his motorcycle down.

“Couldn’t I just go to the office with you?” the boy asked, his voice even smaller than he was. “I might not like day camp. Anyhow, it’s summer. Who goes to day camp in summer?”

Steven sighed and got to his feet. “Lots of kids do,” he said. “And you might just wind up thinking day camp is the greatest thing since 3D TV.” He extended a hand. “Come on, Tex. Let’s get you back to bed. Tomorrow might be a long day, and you’ll need your rest.”

Matt reached for the stuffed skunk, and wound up in the now-tattered blanket he always kept close at hand. Jillie had knitted that herself, especially to bring her and Zack’s infant son home from the hospital in, but the thing had been through some serious wear-and-tear since then.

Steven supposed that Matt was too old to be so attached to a baby blanket, but he didn’t have the heart to take it away.

So he watched as the little boy got to his feet, trundled back inside, took a brief detour to the bathroom and then stood in the middle of the small room, looking forlorn.

“Can I sleep with you?” he asked. “Just for tonight?”

Steven tossed back the covers on the sofa bed and stretched out, resigned to the knowledge that he probably wouldn’t close his eyes again before the morning was right on top of him. “Yeah,” he said. “Hop in.”

Matt scrambled onto the bad mattress and squirmed a little before settling down.

Steven stretched to switch off the lamp on the bedside table.

“Thanks,” Matt said, in the darkness.

“You’re welcome,” Steven replied.

“I dreamed about Mom and Dad,” Matt confided, after a silence so long that Steven thought he’d gone to sleep. “They were coming to get me, in a big red truck. That’s why I was sitting on the step when you woke up. It took me a little while to figure out that it was just a dream.”

“I thought it was something like that,” Steven said, when he could trust himself to speak.

“I really miss them,” Matt admitted.

“Me, too,” Steven agreed, his voice hoarse.

“But we’re gonna make it, right? You and me? Because we’re pardners till the end?”

Steven swallowed, blinked a couple of times, glad of the darkness. “Pardners till the end,” he promised. “And we are definitely gonna make it.”

“Okay,” Matt yawned, apparently satisfied. For the moment, anyhow. He’d ask again soon. “’Night.”

“’Night,” Steven replied.

Soon, the child was asleep.

Eventually, though he would have bet it wouldn’t happen, Steven slept, too.

* * *

MELISSA O’BALLIVAN WHIPPED her prized convertible roadster, cherry-red with plenty of gleaming chrome, up to the curb in front of the Sunflower Bakery and Café in downtown Stone Creek, shifted into Neutral and shoved open the door to jump out.

It was a nice day, one of those blue-sky wonders, so she had the top down.

Setting the emergency brake and then leaving the engine running, she dashed into the small restaurant, owned and operated by her brother-in-law Tanner Quinn’s sister, Tessa, and made her way between jam-packed tables to the counter.

Six days a week, Melissa breakfasted on fruit smoothies with a scoop of protein powder blended in, but most Fridays, she permitted herself to stop by the popular eatery for her favorite takeout—Tessa made a mean turkey-sausage biscuit with cheese and egg whites.

“The usual?” Tessa grinned at her from behind the counter, but she was already holding up the fragrant brown paper bag.

Melissa returned the cheerful greetings of several other customers and nodded, fishing in her wallet for money as she reached the register. Out of the corner of her eye, she spotted a face she didn’t recognize—a good-looking guy with dark blond hair, a little on the shaggy side, perched on one of the stools in front of the counter. He wore black slacks and an expensive sports shirt that accented the periwinkle-blue of his eyes.

For some reason Melissa couldn’t have explained, she was suddenly picturing him in old jeans, beat-up boots and the kind of Western-cut shirt most of the men around Stone Creek wore for every day.

She looked away quickly—but not quickly enough, going by the slight grin that tugged at a corner of the stranger’s mouth as he studied her. Who was this? Melissa wondered, while she waited impatiently for Tessa to hand back change for a ten-dollar bill.

Just somebody passing through, she decided, completing the transaction and noticing, somewhat after the fact, that the mystery man wasn’t alone. A small boy sat beside him, busily tucking into a short stack of Tessa’s incomparable blueberry-walnut pancakes.

Melissa accepted her change and her breakfast and turned on one high-heeled shoe, consulting her watch in the same motion. Her meeting with Judge J. P. Carpenter was due to start in just fifteen minutes, which meant she’d have to gobble down the sandwich instead of savoring it at her desk while she listened to her voice mail, as she usually did on Fridays.

Even without looking, she knew the stranger was watching her leave the café; she could feel his gaze like a heartbeat between her shoulder blades, feel it right through her lightweight green corduroy blazer and the white cotton blouse and lacy bra beneath.

Outside, Alice McCoy, the oldest meter maid in America, by Melissa’s reckoning, had pulled up beside the roadster in her special vehicle, a rig resembling a three-wheeled golf cart. A yellow light whirled slowly on the roof as, ticket book in hand, mouth pursed with disapproval, Alice scribbled away.

“Not another traffic citation, Alice,” Melissa protested. “I was only gone for two seconds—just long enough to pick up my breakfast!” She held up her sandwich bag as evidence. “Two seconds,” she repeated.

Alice bristled. “This is a no parking zone,” she pointed out firmly. “Two seconds or two hours, it makes no never-mind to me. A violation is a violation.” She made a little huffing sound and tore off the ticket, leaning to snap it in under one of the windshield wipers, even though Melissa was standing close enough to reach out and take the bit of paper directly from the woman’s hand. “You’re the county prosecutor,” Alice finished, still affronted. “You should know better.” She shook her head. “Leaving your car running like that, too. One of these days, it’s bound to get stolen and then you’ll be piping a different tune, young lady.”

Melissa sighed, retrieved the ticket from her windshield, and stuffed it unceremoniously into the pocket of her blazer. “This is Stone Creek, Arizona,” she said, knowing this was an argument she couldn’t possibly win but unable to avoid trying. She was, after all, a lawyer—and a card-carrying O’Ballivan. “Not the inner city.”

“Crime is everywhere,” Alice remarked, with a sniff. “If you ask me, the whole world’s going to hell in a handbasket. I shouldn’t have to tell you that, of all people.”

Melissa gave up, climbed into the sports car and set her bagged breakfast on the other seat, on top of her briefcase. She drove to the single-story courthouse, a brick building that also served as the local DMV, town jail and sheriff’s office, parked in her customary spot in the shade of a venerable old oak tree and hurried inside, juggling her purse, the briefcase, and her rapidly cooling sandwich.

Melissa’s official headquarters, barely larger than her assistant Andrea’s cubicle, opened off the same corridor as the single courtroom and the two small cells reserved for the rare prisoner.

Andrea, at nineteen, wore too much eye makeup and constantly chewed gum, but she could take messages and field phone calls well enough. Because those things comprised her entire job description, Melissa kept her opinions to herself.

Dashing past Andrea’s desk, Melissa elbowed open her office door, since both hands were full and her assistant showed no sign of coming to her aid, set the bag from the café-bakery on her desk and dropped her purse and briefcase onto the seat of the short couch under her framed diplomas and a whole slew of family photos. She ducked into her tiny private restroom to wash her hands and quickly returned, stomach grumbling, to consume the sandwich.

Andrea, popping her gum, slouched in the office doorway, a sheaf of pink message forms in one hand. Her fingernails were long and decorated with what looked, from a distance, like tiny skulls and crossbones. A sparkle indicated that the design might include itty-bitty rhinestones.

The girl wore her abundant reddish-brown hair short, with little spikes sticking straight up from her crown, and her outfit consisted of black jeans and a T-shirt with a motorcycle logo on the front.

Melissa sighed. “We really should talk about the way you dress, Andrea,” she said, plunking into her chair and rummaging in the paper bag for her wrapped sandwich and the accompanying wad of paper napkins.

“It’s Casual Friday,” Andrea reminded her, with a faintly petulant note in her voice, fanning herself with the messages and frowning. Her gaze moved over Melissa’s expensive slacks, blouse and blazer, and she shook her head once. “Remember?”

The sandwich, though nearly cold, still tasted like the best thing ever. “Is there coffee?” Melissa chanced to inquire, once she’d chewed and swallowed the first mouthful.

Andrea arched one pierced eyebrow, still fluttering the messages. “How should I know?” she asked. “When you hired me, you said it wasn’t my job to make coffee—just to file and answer the phone and make sure you got all your messages.”

Melissa rolled her eyes. “Speaking of messages?” she prompted.

Andrea sashayed across the span of floor between the door and the desk and laid the little pink sheets on Melissa’s blotter. “Just the usual boring stuff,” she said.

Melissa glanced at the messages, chewing.

There was one from her twin sister, Ashley. Ashley and her husband, Jack, were in Chicago, showing off their adorable two-year-old daughter at a family reunion.

Olivia, Ashley and Melissa’s older sister, was looking after Ashley’s cat, Mrs. Wiggins, but there were long-term guests—a group of elderly pals—staying at the B&B, and Ashley, who owned the establishment, was counting on her twin to stop by once a day to make sure the wild bunch were still kicking. Since one of them was a retired chef, they cooked for themselves.

The second message was from her dentist’s receptionist. She was due for a six-month checkup and a cleaning.

The third: the biography she’d ordered last week was waiting at the bookstore over in Indian Rock.

“Sometimes,” she joked dryly, losing her appetite halfway through the sandwich and dropping it back into the paper bag, which she promptly crumpled and tossed into the trash, “I wonder how I stand all the pressures of this job.”

Andrea looked blank. “Pressures?”

“Never mind,” Melissa said, resigned.

Just then, Judge Carpenter appeared behind Andrea, wearing a nifty summer suit some thirty years out of style and a wide grin. His hair was a wild gray nimbus around his face, and his blue eyes danced.

He’d always reminded Melissa of Hal Holbrook, doing his Mark Twain impersonation.

Andrea moseyed on out, and Melissa saw that J.P. was holding a steaming cup of coffee in each hand.

“God bless you,” Melissa said.

J.P. chuckled and advanced into the room, pushing the door shut with a jaunty thrust of one heel. He set a cup before Melissa and sipped from his own after pulling up a chair facing her desk.

“He’s here,” J.P. announced. He wasn’t much for preambles.

Melissa frowned, confused. “Who?” she asked, watching the judge over the rim of her cup.

J.P. leaned forward a little way, and dropped his voice to a confidential tone. “Steven Creed,” he said.

Melissa’s mind flashed on the drop-dead gorgeous man she’d encountered at the Sunflower that morning. He and the little boy were probably the only people in town she didn’t know, since she’d grown up on a ranch just outside of Stone Creek.

Except for college and law school, and then a stint in Phoenix, working for the Maricopa County prosecutor, she’d lived in the community all her life. So, by process of elimination...

“Oh,” she said. “Right. Steven Creed.”

Word had it that Creed was a distant cousin of the McKettrick clan, over at Indian Rock, and he was in the process of buying the old Emerson place, bordered by Stone Creek Ranch, the sprawling cattle operation that had been in Melissa’s own family for better than a century. Her brother, Brad, lived there now, with his wife, Meg, herself a McKettrick, and their rapidly growing family.

“He rented that space next door to the dry cleaners,” J.P. went on. “He’s a lawyer, you know. He’ll be hanging out a shingle any day now, I’m told.”

“Stone Creek could use a good attorney,” Melissa said, largely uninterested. Was this the reason J.P. had asked for a Friday morning meeting—because he wanted to shoot the breeze about Steven Creed? “Since Lou Spencer retired, folks have had to have their legal work done in Flagstaff or Indian Rock.”

J.P. took a loud sip from his coffee cup. “I hear Mr. Creed plans on working pro bono,” he added. “Championing the downtrodden, and all that.”

That caught Melissa’s full attention. Stone Creek wasn’t exactly a hotbed of litigation, but it had its share of potential plaintiffs as well as defendants, that was for sure. There were disputes over property lines and water rights, Sheriff Parker hauled in the occasional drunk driver, and some of the kids in town seemed to gravitate toward trouble.

“That’s interesting,” Melissa said, vaguely unsettled as some pertinent recollection niggled at the back of her brain, just out of reach. As for Mr. Creed, well, she tended to be suspicious of do-gooders—they usually had hidden agendas, in her experience—but she was also intrigued. Even a little pleased to learn that Steven Creed wasn’t just passing through town on his way to somewhere more fashionable, like Scottsdale or Sedona.

She remembered the child, his ebony hair a gleaming contrast to Creed’s light-caramel locks. “The boy must take after his mother,” she mused.

“Boy?” J.P. echoed, sounding puzzled. Then a light seemed to go on inside his head. “Oh, yes, the boy,” he said, shifting around on his chair. “His name’s Matthew. He’s five years old, and he’s adopted.”

Melissa blinked, a little taken aback by the extent of his knowledge until she recalled that J.P.’s youngest daughter, Elaine, had moved back to Stone Creek after a divorce two years before, and opened a private, year-round preschool called Creekside Academy.

Of course. Creed must have enrolled the child in advance—and Elaine had passed the juicy details on to her father.

J.P. finished up with a flourish. “And there’s no Mrs. Creed, either,” he said.

According to Elaine—she and Melissa had gone through school together—from the day she’d jettisoned the loser husband and returned to the old hometown to make a fresh start, her dad had been after her to “get out more, meet people, kick up your heels a little... As if Stone Creek were overrun with single men,” Elaine had grumbled, the last time Melissa had run into her, a few days before, over at the drugstore.

Melissa, who hadn’t had a date in over a year herself, had sympathized. Between her sisters, Ashley and Olivia, and her big brother, Brad, somebody was always after her to go on out there and find True Love. Easy for them to say. Brad had Meg. Olivia had Tanner. And Ashley had Jack. The unspoken question seemed to be, So what’s your problem, Melissa? When are you going to get with the program and corral yourself a husband?

Melissa frowned.

J.P. either missed the expression or ignored it. Rising to his feet, he lobbed his empty coffee cup into the circular file with the grace of a much younger man. Back in the day, during high school and college, Judge Carpenter had been a basketball star, but in the end, he’d chosen to pursue a career in the law. “Well,” he said cheerfully, “I hereby declare this meeting over.”

“That was a meeting?” Melissa asked, arching one eyebrow. The subtext was: I wolfed down the one turkey-sausage biscuit I allow myself per week just so you could tell me Steven Creed is single?

“Yes,” J.P. said. “Now, I think I’ll go fishing.”

Melissa laughed and shook her head.

J.P. had just left when Sheriff Tom Parker peeked in from the doorway. Tom was a hometown boy, a tall, lean man with dark hair and, usually, a serious look on his face.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey.” Melissa smiled. She and Tom were old friends. Nothing more than that, though—he was attractive, in a rustic sort of way, if shy, and he’d been divorced from his high school sweetheart, Shirleen, for years. Everybody in Stone Creek knew he’d fallen head over heels for Tessa Quinn the day she opened the Sunflower Bakery and Café—everybody, that is, except Tessa.

“Just wanted to remind you that Byron Cahill gets out of jail today,” Tom said, looking spiffy in his summer uniform of brown khaki.

Melissa felt a mild shiver trip down her spine. Two years ago, when Cahill was still a teenager, he’d gotten high one Saturday afternoon, compounded the problem with copious amounts of alcohol, swiped his mother’s car keys and gone on a joyride. The joy was short-lived, as it turned out, and so was fifteen-year-old Chavonne Rowan, who was riding shotgun.

When the “borrowed” car blew a tire on a sharp curve outside of town, it shot through a guardrail, plunged down a steep cliff into Stone Creek, teetered on its nose, according to witnesses, and went under. Two fishermen had rescued Byron; he came out of the wreck with a few cuts and bruises and a really bad attitude. Chavonne, it turned out, had died on impact.

Byron was arrested as he left the hospital in Flagstaff, where he’d been taken by ambulance, as a precaution. Although uninjured, he’d been admitted for a week of detox.

Melissa had successfully petitioned the Court to have young Cahill tried as an adult, over his mother’s frantic protests that he was a good boy, just a little high-spirited, that was all, and then Melissa had thrown the proverbial book at him.

It was a slam dunk. Byron was convicted of second-degree manslaughter and dispatched to a correctional facility near Phoenix to serve his sentence—just over eighteen months, as it turned out.

Velda Cahill, his mother, who cleaned motel rooms and served cocktails to make ends meet, rarely missed a chance to corner Melissa and tell her about all the things poor Byron was missing out on, all because she, Melissa, “a high-and-mighty O’Ballivan,” had wanted to show off. Let everybody know that the new county prosecutor was nobody to mess with.

Melissa felt sorry for Velda. Never reminded her that Chavonne Rowan was missing out on plenty—the rest of her life—and so were her devastated parents.

Tom Parker knotted one hand into a loose fist and tapped his knuckles against the framework of the door to get Melissa’s attention, bring her back to the present moment.