us for lunch?” Tricia asked him.
Carolyn’s backbone went ramrod-straight as soon as Tricia uttered those words, and Brody watched, at once amused and confounded, while she jammed slices of bread down onto the beginnings of two bologna sandwiches. She used so much force to do it that the things looked like they’d been made with a drill press.
Deciding he’d stirred up enough ill will for one day, Brody shook his head. “I’d better get back to the ranch,” he said. “We’re replacing some of the wire along one of the fence lines.”
“Oh,” Tricia said, as if disappointed.
She moved slowly to the table, pulled back a chair just as Brody went to pull it back for her and sank onto the seat.
“Hey,” Brody said, concerned. “Are you feeling all right?”
Tricia sighed. “Maybe I’m a little tired,” she confessed. “It’s no big deal.”
At that, Carolyn stopped flinging food hither and yon and turned to look at Tricia. “I think you should go home and rest,” she said. “This morning was crazy, and we’ve been taking inventory for a couple of days now.”
“And leave you to straighten up the shop and restock the shelves all by yourself?” Tricia asked. “That wouldn’t be fair.”
“I can handle it,” Carolyn said. She spoke in a normal tone, but Brody could feel her bristling, all over, like a porcupine fixing to shoot quills in every direction. She didn’t deign to glance his way, of course. “And, anyhow, I’d like to close the shop early today. That way, I could catch up on the bookkeeping, then put the finishing touches on that gypsy skirt I’ve been working on and get it posted on the website.”
Brody neither knew nor cared what a gypsy skirt was. He was feeling indignant now, standing there on the fringes of the conversation as if he’d either turned transparent or just disappeared entirely.
He cleared his throat.
Tricia didn’t look at him, and Carolyn didn’t, either.
The cat fixed an amber gaze on him, though, and Brody was affronted all over again. He’d never met a critter that didn’t take to him right away—until this one.
“Tell you what,” Tricia finally said to Carolyn, after a few moments spent looking happily pensive. “I’ll take the afternoon off. If you promise not to stay up half the night stitching beads and ribbons onto that skirt.”
“I promise,” Carolyn said quickly.
Most likely, by her reckoning, persuading Tricia to go home was the best and fastest way to get rid of him, too.
Brody felt his back teeth mesh together.
“All right, then,” Tricia conceded. “I guess I could use a nap.” With that, she headed off into the other room, probably on the hunt for her purse, and thus Brody and Carolyn were left alone again, however briefly.
On the stove, soup began to boil over the sides of the saucepan, sizzling on the burner and raising a stink.
Brody automatically moved to push the pan off the heat, and Carolyn did the same thing.
They collided, sideways, and hard enough that Carolyn stumbled slightly. And Brody grabbed her arm, an instinctive response, to steady her.
He actually felt the charge go through her, arc like a bolt of electricity from someplace inside Carolyn to someplace inside him.
Instantly, both of them went still.
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
