“Maybe,” Kim said, her manner still evasive. “Did you know he adopted a dog? Brody, I mean? It’s a very good sign. He really is serious about settling down in Lonesome Bend—”
“Dogs travel pretty well,” Carolyn said, amused and, at the same time, wickedly excited over the perfectly ordinary prospect of sitting across a supper table from Brody Creed.
The bastard.
Kim straightened, looked at her directly. Her smile was a little weak. “You think he’s planning to leave again? Even though he’s building that big house and a fancy barn to go with it?”
Carolyn’s casual shrug was, in reality, anything but casual. “He could always sell the house and barn, if he wanted to move on,” she reasoned. In truth, though, she didn’t like the idea of Brody going back to his other life any more than Kim did, and that surprised her. The prospect should have been a relief, shouldn’t it?
Kim’s gentle blue eyes filled with tears. “Brody’s had a tough time of it,” she said.
Carolyn needed a few moments to recover from that tidbit—she’d always imagined Brody whooping it up, as the cowboys liked to say, riding bulls and winning gleaming buckles and bedding a different woman every night.
“How so?” she asked, finally, in an oddly strangled voice.
Kim sniffled, squared her shoulders and straightened her spine. “I can’t say,” she told Carolyn, in a forthright tone. “I’m not supposed to know what Brody went through, and neither is Davis. He’d be furious if he knew Conner had told us.”
“Oh, boy,” Carolyn said.
“He’ll tell you himself, one of these days,” Kim said, with new certainty. “And that’s the way it should be.”
Just then, the bell over the front door jingled and Smidgeon and Little Bit ran, yapping, to greet whomever was there.
Kim rolled her eyes and chased after them. “Little devils,” she muttered, with abiding affection.
Carolyn smiled, but on the inside, she was shaken.
She knew better than to go to supper at her friends’ place, since it was a given that Brody would be there. Just being around him was playing with fire, especially in light of that stolen kiss—and last night’s dream.
She’d be there, just the same.
Maybe she’d take in the gypsy skirt—just baste it to fit temporarily—and wear that.
* * *
BRODY WATCHED WITH a combination of affection and envy, that evening, in Kim and Davis’s kitchen, while Conner and Tricia flirted like a pair of teenagers.
It was enough to make Brody roll his eyes.
Get a room, he wanted to say.
Davis, sitting beside him at the unset table, nudged him with one elbow. “You remember how it was with those two?” Brody’s uncle asked, keeping his voice low. “When they first noticed each other, I mean?”
“I remember,” Brody said, grinning a little. A stranger would have given odds that Conner and Tricia would never get together, but everybody who knew them wondered when the wedding would be.
Was Carolyn going to show up for supper or not?
He hoped so.
He hoped not.
“You and Carolyn remind me of them,” Davis said, with a twinkle in his eyes.
That got Brody’s attention, all right. He swiveled in his chair to look at his uncle with narrowed eyes. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Just what I said,” Davis replied, undaunted. “You know me, son. If I say it, I mean it.”
Tricia snapped a dish towel at Conner, who laughed, and the dogs all started barking, while an apron-wearing Kim tried to shush the lot.
It was happy chaos.
It was a family.
Again, Brody felt that bittersweet sense of mingled gratitude and loneliness.
“Give things a chance, boy,” Davis told him, pushing back his chair and heading for the back door. His uncle had always been able to read him and, clearly, that hadn’t changed.
Brody hadn’t heard the car drive up, what with all the barking and shushing, dish-towel snapping and laughing, but Davis must have.
He opened the door just as Carolyn was raising one hand to knock.
She looked shy and sweet standing there, wearing black jeans and a gossamer white shirt. Her sun-streaked hair was pulled back in a French braid and, unless Brody missed his guess, she had on just a touch of makeup, too.
“Hi,” she said to Davis, with a little wobble in her voice, shoving a large plastic food container into his hands and not sparing so much as a glance for Brody. “I brought pasta salad. It’s from the deli at the supermarket, but I’m sure it’s good.”
“That’s fine,” Davis said, in that Sam Elliott voice of his, sounding amused. “Come on in and make yourself at home.”
Conner and Tricia knocked off the prelude to foreplay to greet Carolyn—Conner with a smile, Tricia with a hug. When Kim joined in, it was like something out of a reality-show reunion.
All Brody could do was wait, though he did remember enough of his manners to stand in the presence of a lady.
Carolyn finally forced herself, visibly, to look at him. Pink color pulsed in her cheeks and hot damn, she looked good.
“Hello, Brody,” she said.
“Carolyn,” he replied, with a nod of acknowledgment.
Brody immediately grew two left feet and felt his tongue wind itself into a knot.
It was junior high school all over again.
Only worse.
In junior high, it had been all about speculation. As a man, he knew, only too well, what it was like to kiss this woman, to make love to her.
Stand in a puddle and grab hold of a live wire, he thought.
That’s what it’s like.
“Kim says everything’s fine at the shop,” Tricia told Carolyn, with a sparkling little laugh. “I was hoping I’d be missed a little bit, though.”
Carolyn smiled, no longer looking quite so much like a doe poised to run after catching the scent of a predator on the wind. “Oh, you were definitely missed,” she said.
“Absolutely,” Kim agreed cheerfully, opening one of the big double ovens to check on the tamales.
They smelled so good that Brody’s stomach rumbled.
Things settled down to a dull roar over the next few minutes—Carolyn and Tricia washed up at the sink and began setting the table, while Davis pulled the corks on a couple of bottles of vintage wine.
It came as no surprise to Brody—and probably not to Carolyn, either—that they wound up sitting side by side at the huge table in the next room. The others made sure of it, the way they always did.
Brody and Carolyn were so close that they bumped elbows a couple of times. The scent of her—some combination of baby powder and flowers and a faint, citrusy spice—made him feel buzzed, if not drunk, which was weird because he let the wine bottle go by without pouring any for himself.
Tricia passed on it, too, of course, being pregnant.
Carolyn, by contrast, seemed uncommonly thirsty. She nibbled at the salad, and then the tamales and Kim’s incomparable Mexican rice and refried beans, but she seemed to be hitting the wine pretty hard.
“So,