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Brody willed his fingers to release their hold on Carolyn’s arm.
She jerked free.
And Tricia was back in the kitchen by then, taking it all in.
Although he and Carolyn were no longer physically touching each other, it seemed to Brody that he’d been fused to her in some inexplicable way.
The very air of the room seemed to quiver.
“I’ll drive you home,” Brody managed to tell Tricia, his voice a throaty rasp.
“I’ll drive myself home,” Tricia countered, friendly but firm. There’d be no more use in arguing with her than with any other Creed. “I don’t want to leave the Pathfinder behind, and, anyway, I told you—I feel just fine.”
Carolyn favored her friend with a wobbly smile. “Take it easy, okay?” she said.
Tricia nodded on her way to the back door. She noted the spilled-over soup on the stove and, with the smallest grin, shook her head.
Brody happened to see her expression because he’d just leaned past her, to take hold of the knob. Where he came from—right there in Lonesome Bend, as it happened—a man still opened a door for a lady.
And this particular lady was trying hard not to laugh.
Brody’s neck heated as he stood there, holding the door open for his brother’s wife, all too aware that she’d drawn some kind of crazy female conclusion about him and Carolyn.
He clamped his jaw down tight again and waited.
* * *
ONCE BRODY AND TRICIA were gone, and far enough along the flagstone walk to be out of earshot, Carolyn let out a loud, growl-like groan of sheer frustration.
The sandwiches were smashed.
Most of the soup—tomato with little star-shaped noodles, her favorite—coated the stove top. The rest was bonded to the bottom of the pan.
All of which was neither here nor there, because she wasn’t the least bit hungry now anyway, thanks to Brody Creed.
Winston, having finished his sardine repast, sat looking up at her, twitching his tail from side to side. His delicate nose gleamed with fish oil, and out came his tiny, pink tongue to dispense with it.
Comically dignified, his coat sleek and black, the cat reminded Carolyn suddenly of a very proper English butler, overseeing the doings in some grand ancestral pile. The fanciful thought made her laugh, and that released most of the lingering, after-Brody tension.
Carolyn frowned at the catch phrase: After Brody. In many ways, that simple term defined her life, as she’d lived it for the past seven years. If only she could go back to Before Brody, and make a different choice.
A silly idea if she’d ever heard one, Carolyn decided.
Resolutely, she cleaned up the soup mess, filled the saucepan with water and left it to soak in the sink. She wrapped the flattened sandwiches carefully and tucked them away in the refrigerator. When and if her appetite returned, she’d be ready.
Winston continued to watch her with that air of sedate curiosity as she finished KP duty and returned to the main part of the shop.
Winston followed; whenever Carolyn was in the house, the cat was somewhere nearby.
She tidied the display tables and put out more goats’ milk soap and handmade paper and the last of the frilly, retro-style aprons that were so popular she could barely keep up with the demand.
That task finished, she stuffed the day’s receipts into a zippered bag generously provided by the Cattleman’s First Bank, double-checked that the front door was locked and there were no approaching customers in sight and went upstairs to her apartment.
Every time she entered that cheery little kitchen, whether from the interior stairway, like now, or from the one outside, Carolyn felt a stirring of quiet joy, a sort of lifting sensation in the area of her heart.
She rented the apartment from Natty McCall for a ridiculously nominal amount of money—nominal was what she could afford—so it wasn’t really hers. Still, everything about the place, modest though it was, said home to Carolyn.
Sure, she was lonely sometimes, especially when the shop was closed.
But it wasn’t the same kind of loneliness she’d felt when she was constantly moving from one house to another and her address was simply General Delivery, Lonesome Bend, Colorado.
The irony of the town’s name wasn’t lost on Carolyn.
She’d ended up there quite by accident, a little over eight years ago, when her car broke down along a dark country road, leaving her stranded.
Her unlikely rescuers, Gifford Welsh and Ardith Sperry, both of them A-list movie stars, had been passing by and stopped to offer their help. In the end, they’d offered her the use of the guest house behind their mansion-hideaway three miles outside of town. After a series of very careful background checks, the couple had hired Carolyn as nanny to their spirited three-year-old daughter, Storm.
Carolyn had loved the job and the child. Most of the time, she and Storm had stayed behind in the Lonesome Bend house, while Gifford and Ardith crisscrossed the globe, sometimes together and sometimes separately, appearing in movies that invariably garnered Oscar nominations and Golden Globes.
Although Carolyn had never given in to the temptation to pretend that Storm was her own child, strong as it was some of the time, she and the little girl had bonded, and on a deep level.
For Carolyn, life had been better than ever before, at least for that single, golden year—right up to the night Gifford Welsh had too much to drink at dinner and decided he and the nanny ought to have themselves a little fling.
Carolyn had refused out of hand. Oh, there was no denying that Welsh was attractive. He’d graced the cover of People as the World’s Sexiest Man, not just once, but twice. He was intelligent, charming and witty, not to mention rich and famous. She’d seen all his movies, loved every one of them.
But he was married.
He was a father.
Those things mattered to Carolyn, even if he’d temporarily lost sight of them himself.
After fending off his advances—Ardith had been away on a movie set somewhere in Canada at the time—Carolyn had resigned, packed her belongings and, once a friend had arrived to pinch-hit as Storm’s nanny, left that house for good.
Within a few months, the property was quietly sold to the founder of a software company, and Gifford, Ardith and Storm, reportedly having purchased a sprawling ranch in Montana, never set foot in Lonesome Bend again.
Even now, years later, standing in the kitchen of her apartment, Carolyn remembered how hard, and how painful, it was to leave Storm behind. The ache returned, like a blow to her solar plexus, every time she recalled how the little girl had run behind her car, sobbing and calling out, “Come back, Carolyn! Carolyn, come back!”
Before that—long, long before that—another little girl had frantically chased after another car, stumbling, falling and skinning her knees, getting up to run again.
And that child’s cries hadn’t been so very different from Storm’s.
Mommy, come back! Please, come back!
“Breathe,” Carolyn told herself sternly. “You’re a grown woman now, so act like one.”
Indeed, she was a grown woman. But the child she’d once been still lived inside her, still wondered, even after twenty-five years, where her mother had gone after dropping her daughter off at that first foster home.
“Reow,” Winston remarked, now perched on the kitchen table, where he was most definitely not supposed to be. “Reow?”
Carolyn gave a moist chuckle, sniffled and patted the animal’s head before gently shooing him off the table. He immediately took up residence on the wide windowsill, his favorite lookout spot.
Being something of a neat freak, Carolyn moved her portable sewing machine aside, replaced the tablecloth beneath it with an untrammeled one and washed her hands at the sink.
The gypsy skirt, the creative project of the moment, hung on the hook inside her bedroom door, neatly covered with a plastic bag saved from the dry cleaner’s.
Carolyn retrieved the garment, draped it carefully over the side of the table opposite her sewing machine and silently reveled in the beauty of the thing.
The floor-length underskirt was black crepe, but it barely showed, for all the multicolored, bead-enhanced ribbons she’d stitched to the cloth in soft layers. She’d spent days designing the piece, weeks stitching it together, ripping out and stitching again.
It was exquisite, all motion and shimmer, a wearable fantasy, the kind of original women like Ardith Sperry wore to award ceremonies and premieres.
Carolyn hadn’t sized the piece for a movie star’s figure, though. It was somewhere between a ten and a twelve, with plenty of give in the seams, allowing for a custom fit.
Carolyn, a curvy eight since the age of seventeen, had deliberately cut the skirt to fit a larger figure than her own, for the simple reason that, if she could have worn it, parting with it would have been out of the question.
She’d been making purposeful sacrifices like that since she’d first learned to sew, in her sophomore year of high school. Once she understood the basics, she hadn’t even needed patterns. She’d sketched designs almost from day one, measured and remeasured the fabric, cut and stitched.
And she’d quickly made a name for herself. While other kids babysat or flipped burgers for extra money, Carolyn whipped up one-of-a-kind outfits and sold them as fast as she could turn them out.
That made two things she did well, she’d realized way back when, with a thrill she could still feel. Carolyn had an affinity for horses; it seemed as though she’d always known how to ride.
Over the years, most of her foster homes being in rural or semirural areas, where there always seemed to be someone willing to trade riding time for mucking out stalls, she’d ridden all kinds of horses, though she’d never actually had one to call her own.
Now, determined not to waste another second daydreaming, she shook off the reflective mood and picked up the skirt again, carefully removing the plastic wrap and holding it up high so she could admire the shift and shiver of all those ribbons, the wink of crystal beads.
It was silly, she supposed, but she coveted that skirt.
Aside from the money the sale would bring in, which, as always, she needed, where would she even wear a garment like that? She lived in blue jeans, cotton tops and Western boots, and for good reason—she was a cowgirl at heart, not a famous actress or the wife of a CEO or a cover model for Glamour.
With a sigh, Carolyn put the skirt back on its hook on the bedroom door—out of sight, out of mind.
She crossed to the small desk Tricia had left behind when she moved to the ranch, and booted up her laptop. While the magic machine was going through its various electronic thumps, bumps and whistles, Carolyn heated a cup of water in the microwave to brew tea.
Winston, still keeping his vigil over the side yard from the windowsill, made a soft yowling sound, his tail swaying like a pendulum in overdrive. His hackles were up, but his ears were pitched forward instead of laid back in anger. While Carolyn was still trying to read his body language, she heard someone coming up the outside stairs.
A Brodylike shape appeared in the frosted oval window at the door, one hand raised to knock.
Before he could do that much, however, Carolyn had yanked the door open.
“I don’t believe this,” she said.
Over on the windowsill, Winston expressed his displeasure with another odd little yowl.
“What is that cat’s problem, anyway?” Brody asked, frowning as he slipped past Carolyn, graceful as a billow of smoke.
Carolyn shut the door. Hard.
“Winston,” she said stiffly, “is a very discerning cat.”
Brody sighed, and when Carolyn forced herself to turn around and look at him, he was gazing at Winston with an expression of wounded disbelief on his handsome face.
“Does he like Conner?” Brody inquired.
Carolyn hesitated. Brody threw an emotional wrench in the works every time she encountered him, but she didn’t hate him. Not all the time, that is. And she didn’t enjoy making him feel bad.
“Yes,” she replied, eventually. “But you shouldn’t take it personally.”
“Easy for you to say,” Brody answered.
“Tricia’s okay, isn’t she?” That was it, she decided. He was there because he had bad news. Why else would he have come all the way back in from the ranch, where he was supposed to be stringing new fence lines with Conner and the crew?
Brody must have seen the alarm in Carolyn’s eyes, because he shook his head. Holding his range-battered hat in one hand, he ran the other through his shaggy, tarnished-gold hair.
Sighed again.
In a searing flash, it came back to her, the feel of that mouth on her skin.
“As far as I know, she’s taking a nap.” Another grin flickered in Brody’s eyes and twitched at one corner of his amazing mouth. “As soon as Tricia turned in, Conner decided he was a little tired, too. That was my cue to make myself scarce.”
Carolyn’s cheeks were stinging a little, but she had to smile. “Probably a good call,” she agreed. And then she waited. It was up to Brody to explain why he’d come back.
His remarkable blue eyes seemed to darken a few shades as he looked at her, and the gray rim around the irises widened. “I know the word doesn’t mean much,” he said, at long last, “but I meant it before, when I told you I was sorry about the way things ended with us.”
Suddenly, Carolyn wanted very much to cry. And this was a sign of weakness, an indulgence she rarely allowed herself. All her life, she’d had to be strong—as a matter of survival.
She swallowed painfully and raised her chin a notch. “Okay,” she said. “You’re right. We’ll just...let it go. Act as though it never happened.” She put out her hand, the way she might have done to seal a business agreement. “Deal?”
Brody looked down at her hand, back up at her face. “Deal,” he said hoarsely. And in the next moment, he was kissing her.
Carolyn felt things giving way inside her and, as good as that kiss was, she wasn’t about to surrender so much as an inch of the emotional ground she’d gained after the cataclysm that was Brody Creed.
She wrenched herself back out of his arms, put a few steps between them and then a few more.
Brody merely looked at her, with his mouth upturned at one corner, a bemused I thought so gleaming in his eyes.
Stunned, not only by his audacity, but also by what he made her feel, Carolyn touched her lips, as if relearning their contours after a long absence from her own body.
“Don’t you dare say you’re sorry,” she muttered.
Brody chuckled as he opened the door to leave. “Oh, believe me,” he intoned. “I’m not the least bit sorry—not for that kiss, anyhow.” His gaze shifted to Winston, who watched him from the windowsill, ears laid back, fur ruffled. “So long, cat,” he added. “For now.”
In the next moment, Brody was gone—so thoroughly gone that Carolyn felt as if she might have imagined the visit, at the same time certain that she hadn’t.
After that, her concentration was shot.
She waited until Brody had had plenty of time to drive away. Then she logged off her computer, pulled on a lightweight blue corduroy jacket and retrieved her purse and car keys.
Sewing was out of the question, and so was doing the bookwork. She was too jumpy to sit still, or even stay inside.
