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Ashley, too, was almost continually involved in one fundraising event or another—and their brother, Brad? He was a country-music superstar, even though he’d technically retired around the time he and Meg McKettrick got married. His specialty was writing whopping checks for pretty much any worthy cause—and doing the occasional benefit performance.
“You have the wrong O’Ballivan,” she told Tom, feeling like a slacker. They were overachievers, her sibs, with a tendency to make her look bad. “Talk to Olivia—or Ashley. Better yet, have Brad buy you a parade.”
Tom grinned faintly and then gave his head a sad little shake. “Olivia’s too busy,” he said. “Ashley is out of town. And Brad has his hands full running Stone Creek Ranch—”
“No,” Melissa broke in, to stop the flow. “Really. I wouldn’t be any good at organizing a parade. I’ve watched a lot of them, on TV and right here in Stone Creek. I’ve seen Miracle on 34th Street four million times. But that’s the whole scope of my experience—I wouldn’t know the first thing about putting something like that together.”
The sheriff colored up a little, under the jaw and around his ears. “You think Aunt Ona was an expert on parades, back when she took over? No, ma’am. She just pushed up her sleeves and plunged right in. Learned on the job.”
“There must be someone else who could do this,” Melissa said weakly.
But Tom shook his head again, harder this time. “We got the Food Concession Committee, and the Arts and Crafts Show Committee, and the committee to deal with the carnival folks. Everybody’s either already volunteering, doing something else or out of town.”
Melissa set her jaw. By then, she was starting to feel downright guilty, but that didn’t mean she was going to give in.
Out front, Andrea chirped a sunny greeting to someone. Melissa felt an odd little zip in the air, like the charge before a summer thunderstorm.
“Then I guess you’ll have to cancel the parade this year,” Melissa said.
And that was when the little boy she’d seen at the café that morning, eating pancakes at the counter, popped into her office.
He looked up at Tom, then over at Melissa, his dark violet eyes troubled. His lower lip began to wobble.
“There isn’t going to be a parade?” he asked.
CHAPTER TWO
QUICKLY—BUT NOT QUITE quickly enough, as it turned out—Steven pursued Matt through the open doorway, scooped him up from behind and immediately locked eyeballs with the certifiably hot woman he’d checked out while he and the boy were having breakfast earlier that morning, over at the café.
When their glances connected, his-meets-hers, there was an actual impact, it seemed to Steven. He half expected things to explode all over the place, walls to tumble, ceilings to collapse, founts of fire to shoot up out of the floor, as in some apocalyptic action movie.
Damn, he thought, dazed by the strength of his reaction. He’d known plenty of beautiful women in his time, none of whom had ever affected him in just this way. Was it the amazing body, the face, the crazy mane of thick brown hair, falling past her shoulders in spiral curls, the jarringly blue eyes that seemed to see past all his defenses?
Who knew? He glanced down at the nameplate on her desk.
Melissa O’Ballivan. Prosecutor.
Uh-oh, he thought. Been there, done that.
After what Cindy Ryan had done to him, he’d sworn off dating other lawyers—especially DAs and their assistants.
“Sorry,” Steven said, finally finding his voice and dredging up the patented, lopsided grin that had been serving Creed men well for generations. “We stopped by to pay a parking ticket, and Matt here got away from me.”
It was only then that he noticed the uniformed lawman standing just inside the small room, arms folded, assessing him with a certain noncommittal detachment, as if he might be running through a mental database of wanted criminals, in case he could match up Steven’s face to one of them. Here was a man who took his job seriously.
Maybe he’d been the one to write that ticket and place it neatly under the windshield wiper of Steven’s old truck.
Either way, Steven liked him right off, and figured that liking would stick. His first impressions of people were usually, though not always, accurate ones.
“County Clerk’s office is just down the hall,” the cop said, relaxing visibly. “You can settle up on the ticket there.” That said, he put out his hand in that quintessentially small-town way Steven knew so well. “Tom Parker,” he said.
“Steven Creed,” Steven replied, setting a squirmy Matt on his own two feet.
“How come there isn’t going to be a parade?” Matt piped up. He wheeled to look up at Steven. “You said there would be a parade. And a rodeo, too. That’s the main reason I didn’t run away from home when you told me we were moving here!”
By that time, the spectacularly sexy Ms. O’Ballivan had pushed back her chair and stood, soon rounding the desk to face the boy. There was no telling what she thought of Steven, if he’d even registered on her radar, but the lady had obviously fallen for Matt, hook, line and sinker.
“Hi,” she said, with a smile that tugged at Steven’s gut like a fishhook, even though she was looking down at the child, not at him. “My name is Melissa O’Ballivan. What’s yours?”
“Matt Creed,” the boy responded, somewhat warily because he’d been taught to be careful of strangers, and Steven felt another tug, this time at his emotions. He’d given Matt the choice, when the adoption became final, of keeping his folks’ last name—St. John—or taking on his new father’s. And it still touched him that Matt, who remembered Zack and Jillie with a clarity Steven did everything he could to maintain, had decided to go by Creed.
“Matt,” Steven managed, clearing his throat. He still had that weird feeling going on inside and he wanted to get away, so he could mull it over, come to terms, make some sort of sense of it.
Whatever “it” was.
“Let’s go take care of that parking ticket,” he prompted, after an entirely rhetorical glance at his watch, failing completely to note the time. “We’re due to sign the papers for the ranch in a few minutes.”
“You said there would be a parade,” Matt repeated, turning away from the dazzle of Melissa O’Ballivan to frown up at Steven. The kid could be bone-stubborn when he’d made up his mind about something, which meant the Creed name would suit him just fine.
The lawman, Parker, cleared his throat. Slanted a glance at Ms. O’Ballivan. “Aunt Ona already did most of the work,” he told her. “Laid the groundwork, signed off on the different floats and even arranged for all the permits. Only thing you’d have to do is oversee a couple of meetings, check stuff off on a clipboard. Make sure folks live up to their commitments.”
Melissa laid a hand on top of Matt’s head and ruffled his dark hair slightly. Her shoulders rose and fell as she drew in a big breath and sighed it out, looking cheerfully doomed. “Welcome to Stone Creek, Matt Creed,” she said. “And here’s hoping you’ll enjoy the parade.”
Mollified, Matt punched the air with one small fist and turned to Steven. “Yes!” he said, with a grin.
By then, Steven had pieced the scenario together in his mind, or part of it, at least. Ms. O’Ballivan hadn’t wanted to oversee the upcoming event, but she’d been roped in anyhow—by the sheriff, from the sound of it.
Steven allowed himself a long look at Melissa—an indulgence, considering the way she shook him up. The Realtor who’d sold him the Emerson ranch had touted both the parade and the rodeo as “longstanding community traditions,” in addition to other selling points, and Steven had made a big deal about the festivities so Matt would have something to look forward to, besides the relatively immediate dog and the eventual pony.
“Thanks,” Steven told Melissa, and the word came out sounding gruff.
She made a comical face. “Don’t mention it,” she replied, rueful.
“Maybe I could help out somehow,” Steven heard himself say, as he took Matt’s hand and started to turn away. “Not that I know much about parades.”
“Join the club,” Melissa said, with another of those lethal smiles of hers.
Steven grinned, nodded and managed to peel himself away.
He forgot all about paying the parking ticket, though, because his mind was full of Melissa O’Ballivan, and it was bound to stay that way.
All through the closing, held in a meeting room over at the Cattleman’s Bank, Matt fidgeted. Steven signed papers, handed over a cashier’s check covering the cost of the property in full, probably came across as a man who knew what he was doing.
Adopting a little boy. Quitting the prestigious Denver firm where he’d worked since he’d left the family business. Winding up so far from the Creed ranch outside Lonesome Bend, Colorado, which had been in the family for well over a hundred years, only to buy a run-down spread in another state.
Was he a man who knew what he was doing? Before he’d encountered Ms. O’Ballivan, Steven would have answered with an unqualified “yes.” Now, he wasn’t so sure.
“WHAT JUST HAPPENED HERE?” Melissa asked, widening her eyes at Tom Parker and laying the splayed fingers of one hand to her chest. Steven Creed and his little boy, Matt, had probably been gone for all of thirty seconds, but it seemed as if they’d taken all the oxygen in the room away with them, leaving a vacuum.
Tom chuckled. “Stone Creek has itself a new chairman for the Parade Committee,” he said, looking pleased and maybe a little smug on top of that. Then, about to leave, he paused in the doorway to wink at her. “And unless I miss my guess, the earth just moved.” With that, he was gone.
Melissa stood in the middle of the office floor for a few moments, flustered. Then, because she was nothing if not professional, she walked over, gave her door a firm shove with one palm to shut it and marched back to her desk.
She didn’t have many cases to prosecute; things had been pretty quiet around Stone Creek since Byron Cahill got himself sent up, but there were a few, and she always had reports to make, files to review, emails to read and respond to. If she’d been smart, she thought to herself, she’d have gone fishing with J.P.
At midmorning, Andrea rapped on the office door and stuck her head in to say that she needed to go home because she had cramps and there was nothing to do around that place anyway.
Peering at the girl over the tops of her reading glasses, Melissa mouthed the word go and logged on to her computer. Andrea might or might not have been suffering from cramps, but there was no arguing with the fact that both of them were, for today at least, underworked.
Melissa, grateful to be putting in eight-hour days, like normal people, didn’t miss the high stress levels and double workweeks of her previous jobs. She liked having the time to paint the rooms of her little house evenings and weekends, read stacks of books, enjoy her growing gaggle of nieces and nephews and even garden a little.
Okay, so she’d been through a romantic—not to mention sexual—dry spell since her breakup with Dan Guthrie, several long and eventful years before. Nobody had everything, did they?
Something sagged inside Melissa when she asked herself that question. Her sisters had everything a person could reasonably want, it seemed to her—babies, hunky husbands who adored them, work they loved—and it went without saying that Brad had caught the brass ring. During his amazing career, he’d collected more than a dozen awards from the Country Music Association, along with a few Grammys for good measure, his marriage to Meg McKettrick was beyond happy, and they were building a beautiful family together.
Melissa sighed. Time to put away the tiny violin, stop comparing herself to her brother and sisters. Sure, she was a little lonely from time to time, but so what? She was healthy. She had kin, people who loved her. Stone Creek Ranch, with its long and colorful history, was still home. She had a fine education, no mortgage, a jazzy car custom-built to look just like a 1954 MG Roadster, and enough money socked away to retire at forty if she wanted to.
Which she probably wouldn’t, but that wasn’t the point, was it?
For Melissa, success meant having options. It meant freedom.
If she had a notion to pull up stakes and throw herself body and soul into a job in a more exciting place—say, L.A. or New York—she could do that. There was nothing to tie her down: she could simply resign from her present position, rent out her house or even sell it, say another goodbye to Stone Creek and boogie.
She loved her sisters and her brother. She had lots of friends, people she’d known all her life. But it was the idea of leaving her nieces and nephews, not being there, in person, to see them grow up but instead settling for digital photos, phone calls, rare visits and emails that made a hard knot form in her throat.
And why was she even thinking these thoughts, anyway? Because Tom had been right, that was why.
Steven Creed and his little boy had appeared in her office and, at some point, the earth had moved. Shifted right off its axis. Gravity was suspended. Up was down and down was up, and the proof of that could be stated in one short, simple sentence: She’d agreed to head the Parade Committee.
Melissa drew in a breath, huffed it out hard enough to make her bangs flutter, and scanned the list of new messages on her computer screen.
Tom Parker, sitting three doors down at his own keyboard, IMed her to say that time was wasting and she really ought to schedule a meeting so she could get on the same page with everybody on the Parade Committee.
The response she sent was not something one would normally say to a police officer, face-to-face or via email. But this was Tom, the guy she’d grown up with, the man who’d named his dog Elvis, for Pete’s sake.
Tom replied with a smiley-face icon wearing big sunglasses and displaying a raised middle finger.
Melissa laughed at that—she couldn’t help it—and went back to the official stuff.
Eustace Blake, who was ninety if he was a day and nonetheless managed to navigate the public computer over at the library just fine, thank you very much, had hunted-and-pecked his way through a complaint he’d made many times before, with subtle variations. Visitors from some faraway planet had landed in his cornfield—again—and scared his chickens so badly that the hens wouldn’t lay eggs anymore, and for all he knew, they’d contaminated his stretch of the creek, too, and by God he wanted something done about it.
Smiling to herself, wishing mightily for a fresh cup of coffee, Melissa wrote back, politely inquiring as to whether or not Eustace had reported the most recent incident to Sheriff Parker. Because, she assured the old man, he was absolutely right. Something had to be done. She even included Tom’s cell number.
The next half-dozen messages were advertisements—find love, get rich quick, clear up her skin, enlarge her penis. She deleted those.
Then there was the one from Velda Cahill—Melissa would have known that email address anywhere, since she’d practically been barraged with communiqués since Byron’s arrest. This time, the subject line was in caps. FROM A TAX PAYING CITIZEN, it read.
Melissa sighed. For a moment, her finger hovered over the delete key, but in the end, she couldn’t make herself do that. Velda might be a crank—make that a royal pain in the posterior—but she was a citizen and a taxpayer. As such, she had the inalienable right to harangue public officials, up to a point. She’d written:
My boy will be coming home today, on the afternoon bus. Not that I’d expect you to be happy about it, like I am. Byron and me, we’re just ordinary people—we don’t have anybody famous in our family, like you do, or rich, neither. What little we’ve got, we’ve had to work for. Nobody ever gave us nothing and we never asked. But I’m asking now. Don’t be sending Sheriff Parker or one of his deputies by our place every five minutes to see if Byron’s behaving himself. And don’t come knocking at our door whenever somebody runs a red light or smashes a row of mailboxes with a baseball bat. It won’t be Byron that done it, I can promise you that. Just please leave us alone and let my son and me get on with things. Sincerely, Velda.
Sincerely, Velda. Melissa sighed again, then clicked on Reply. She wrote:
Hello, Velda. Thank you for getting in touch. I can assure you that as long as Byron doesn’t break the law, neither Sheriff Parker nor I will bother him. Best wishes, Melissa O’Ballivan.
After that, she plunked her elbows on the edge of her desk and rubbed her temples with the fingertips of both hands.
She really should have gone fishing with J.P.
“IT’S ALL OURS,” Steven told Matt, as they made the turn off the road and onto their dirt driveway. “Downed fences, rusty nails, weeds and all.”
Matt, firmly fastened into his safety seat, looked over at him and grinned. “Can we go to the shelter and get a dog now?” he asked.
Steven laughed and downshifted. The tires of the old truck thumped across the cattle guard. Now to buy cattle, he thought, trying to remember when he’d last felt so hopeful about the future. Since Zack and Jillie’s death—hell, long before that, if he was honest with him-self—he’d concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other. Doing the next logical thing, large or small.
What was different about today?
It wasn’t just the ranch; he could admit that in the privacy of his own mind, if not out loud. Today, he’d met Melissa O’Ballivan. And he knew that making her acquaintance would turn out to be either one of the best—or one of the worst—things that had ever happened to him. Thanks to Cindy, he figured, the odds favored the latter.
“I liked her a lot,” Matt said, as they jostled up the driveway, flinging out a cloud of red Arizona dust behind them.
“Who?” Steven asked, though he knew.
“The parade lady,” Matt told him, using a tone of exaggerated forbearance. “Miss O—Miss O—”
“O’Ballivan,” Steven said. It wasn’t that she was anything special to him, or anything like that. He’d always had a knack for remembering names, that was all.
“Is she anybody’s mommy?” Matt wanted to know.
Steven swallowed. Just when he thought he had a handle on the single-dad thing, the kid would throw him a curve. “I don’t know, Tex,” he answered. “Why do you ask?”
“I like her,” Matt said. Simple as that. I like her. “I like the way she smiles, and the way she smells.”
Me, too, Steven thought. “She seems nice enough.”
But, then, so had his live-in girlfriend/fiancée. With the face and body of an angel, Cindy had been sweetness itself—until Zack died and Steven told her that Matt would be moving in for good so he thought they ought to go ahead and get married. They’d planned to anyhow—someday.
He’d never forgotten the scornful look she’d given him, or the way her lip had curled, let alone what she’d actually said.
“The kid is a deal breaker,” she’d told Steven coolly. “It’s him or me.”
Stunned—it wasn’t as if they’d never talked about the provision in his best friends’ wills, after all—and coldly furious, Steven had made his choice without hesitation.
“Then I guess it has to be Matt,” he’d replied.
Cindy had left right away, storming out of the condo, slamming the door behind her, the tires of her expensive car laying rubber as she screeched out of the driveway. She’d removed her stuff in stages, however, and even said she’d thought things over and she regretted flying off the handle the way she had. Was there a chance they could try again?
Steven wished there had been, but it was too late. Some kind of line had been crossed, and it wasn’t that he wouldn’t go back. It was that he couldn’t.
