Montana Creeds: Dylan. Linda Miller Lael

      Still dealing with her own internal cataclysm, Kristy merely stared at him, uncomprehending.

      “Guess I’ll be getting back to the cabin,” Tyler said.

      Kristy barely heard him, had only the vaguest sense of his leaving the ranch house kitchen for the dark, yawning world beyond the door, while she and Dylan and Bonnie remained where they were, like the stunned survivors of a meteoric impact. About as mobile as Stonehenge, Kristy couldn’t even swallow, let alone speak.

      Dylan broke the spell, stepped forward, put his arms out for Bonnie.

      visceral, mother-wolf resistance flared through Kristy, almost painful in its intensity, but Bonnie was Dylan’s daughter, not hers. She was still rational enough to know that, anyway.

      So she surrendered the little girl. It felt as though some vital part of her was being torn away.

      Dylan murmured to the child, now nodding against his shoulder, and carried her back to the bedroom. As if pulled along behind by an invisible tether, Kristy followed.

      Miraculously, Bonnie fell into an immediate sleep, most likely exhausted from all that shrieking.

      Kristy, slowly returning to a state that resembled normalcy, found the bathroom, stared at her reflection in the mirror over the sink. A great splotch of blue chalk stained her forehead, from when she’d rested it against the blackboard in her own kitchen, earlier that evening, like the mark of some primitive initiation rite.

      She cranked on the water tap, lathered her hands and then her face with soap, and washed the chalk away.

      When she returned to the kitchen, Dylan was there, pouring coffee.

      He looked exhausted—and grim.

      “I was only trying to help,” Kristy said, without apology, remembering the strain she’d seen in his face when he reached for Bonnie a few minutes before.

      He smiled wanly, raised a coffee mug in a halfhearted toast. “I know,” he said, husky-voiced. “And I appreciate it.”

      Kristy longed to ask if he’d felt what she had, when she was holding Bonnie in her arms, but she didn’t quite dare. Why would he have felt it, standing several feet away?

      “You seemed pretty angry,” she ventured, after working up her courage for several moments. “When Bonnie called me ‘Mommy.’”

      “Not angry,” Dylan said, extending a cup to Kristy. “Frustrated. Scared as hell. I’m not very good at this parental thing, it seems.”

      Kristy saw his vulnerability in his eyes, and in his countenance, and she was touched by it. She’d never known Dylan Creed to be afraid of anything, or to doubt himself in any way. But one very little girl had changed all that.

      “Give yourself a chance,” she said, accepting the offered coffee. “You’re new at this.”

      “When she screams for Sharlene like that—” Dylan began, turning away from her then, to gaze out the night-darkened window above the sink. “It tears me apart.”

      Kristy wanted to cross that room and lay a hand on Dylan’s taut, muscular back, but she refrained. Things were too crazy; she felt too dazed and wrung out. She was standing on the brink of something huge and dangerous, and one wrong move would send her tumbling over the precipice.

      He turned then, and faced her, and she felt another shift, almost as staggering as the first. What was happening here?

      If she stepped outside, would she find the world changed, the stars in different places, the moon filling most of the horizon instead of riding like a small round balloon above the starkly etched rim of mountains?

      It seemed alarmingly possible.

      “What do I do, Kristy, the next time Bonnie calls for her mother? And the time after that? What’s worse, what do I do if Sharlene wants her back?”

      She set the coffee aside on the table then, and went to Dylan, regardless of that incendiary something pulsing in the atmosphere, ready to explode at the slightest spark. Laid her hands to his upper arms, tilted her head back to look into his troubled face.

      “You can do this, Dylan,” she said quietly. “You’re just tired and a little overwhelmed, that’s all.”

      He kissed her forehead, lightly, briefly.

      Spark #1.

      Despite the danger, Kristy laid her head against his shoulder, slipped her arms around his lean cowboy waist, but loosely. Sighed, because it felt so good, being close to Dylan again. He was solid and warm, hard and strong, and when he embraced her, it was a homecoming for Kristy. The healing of broken things inside her, the righting of ancient, forgotten wrongs, a sweet, soft benediction.