told himself to buck up and reached across to pat the animal’s matted head. No telling what color the mutt was, under all that dirt and sorry luck. As for the mix of breed, he was probably part Lab, part setter and part a whole slew of other things. His ribs showed and a piece of his left ear was missing. Yep, he’d been nobody’s dog for too long.
When he’d pulled into the rest stop to stretch his legs after the long drive from Las Vegas, he hadn’t counted on picking up a four-legged hitchhiker, but when the dog slunk out of the bushes as he stepped down from the truck, Logan couldn’t ignore him. There was nobody else around, and if there had ever been a tag and collar, they were long gone.
Logan had known he was that dog’s last hope, and since he’d been in a similar position himself a time or two, he hadn’t been able to turn his back. He’d hoisted the critter into the pickup, and they’d shared a fastfood breakfast in the next town. The dog had horked his chow up, in short order, and looked so remorseful afterward that Logan hadn’t minded stopping at a car wash to scour out the rig.
Now, several hours later, as he steeled himself to lay eyes on the ranch house for the first time in a lot of eventful years, Logan was glad of the company, though the conversations were distinctly one-sided.
They finally crested the last hill, and Logan saw the barn first—still standing, but leaning distinctly to one side. He forced himself to swing his gaze to the house, and his spirits rose a little. Part of the roof was sagging, but the rambling one-story log structure, originally a one-room cabin smaller than most garden sheds, had managed to endure. None of the three stone chimneys had crumbled, and the front windows still had glass in them, the old-fashioned kind with a greenish cast to it and little bubbles here and there.
Home, Logan thought, with a mixture of determination and pure sorrow. Such as it was, Stillwater Springs Ranch was home.
It was probably too much to hope that the plumbing still worked, he decided, but he’d called ahead and had the lights and the telephone service turned on, anyhow. His sidekick was in sore need of a bath, and hiking back and forth to the springs for water would be taking the whole back-to-basics thing too far. His luxurious Vegas lifestyle hadn’t prepared him for roughing it.
“Sidekick,” Logan mused, as he climbed out of the truck. “Suppose you go by that for a while?”
Apparently overjoyed, Sidekick leaped across the gearshift and the console into the seat Logan had just vacated. Logan chuckled and lifted him gently to the ground. Soon as he got the chance, he’d take the animal to a vet for a checkup and some shots. There might be a microchip implanted somewhere under his hide, identifying him as someone’s lost pet, but Logan doubted it.
Most likely, Sidekick had been dumped, if he’d ever belonged to anybody in the first place.
The dog did some sniffing around, then lifted his leg against an old wagon wheel half-submerged in the ground. As Logan approached the house, with its drooping front porch, Sidekick trotted eagerly after him.
Any sensible person, Logan reflected ruefully, would bulldoze the once imposing shack to the ground and start over. But then, he wasn’t a sensible person—he had two failed marriages, a career in rodeo and a lot of heartache to prove it.
He shouldered open the front door, causing the hinges to squeal, and, after another deep breath, stepped over the threshold. The place was filthy, of course, littered with newspapers, beer cans and God knew what else, but the plank floors had held, and the big natural-rock fireplace looked as sturdy as if it had just been mortared together.
Standing in the middle of the ancestral pile—and pile was definitely the word—Logan wondered, not for the first time, if there weren’t as many rocks in his head as there were in that fireplace. Ever since he’d tracked down his distant cousins, the McKettricks, six months back, and visited the Triple M, down in northern Arizona, questions about the state of this ranch, and what was left of his family, had throbbed in the back of his mind like a giant bruise.
And that bruise had a name. Guilt.
He crossed the large room, sat down on the high ledge fronting the fireplace and sighed, his shoulders slackening a little under his plain white T-shirt. He shoved a hand through his dark hair and smiled sadly when Sidekick came and laid his muzzle on his knee.
“Some people,” Logan told Sidekick, “just can’t get enough of trouble and aggravation. And I, old buddy, am one of those people.”
Ranches in Montana, in whatever degree of disrepair, were golden on the real estate market. Especially if they had a rip-roaring history, like this one did. Movie stars liked to buy them for astronomical prices, put in tennis courts and soundstages and square-acre swimming pools. He and Dylan and Tyler could split a fortune if they sold the place. Cut the emotional losses and run.
Just about the last thing Logan needed, though, besides a dog and that old truck he’d bought because it would fit in in a place like Stillwater Springs, Montana, was more money. He had a shitload of that, thanks to the do-it-yourself legal services Web site he’d set up fresh out of law school and recently sold for a mega-chunk of change, and so far, all that dough had caused him nothing but grief.
But there was a deeper reason he couldn’t sell.
As run-down as the ranch was, seven or eight generations of Creeds had lived and died, loved and hated, cussed and prayed within its boundaries. Folks had gotten themselves born in the houses, run hell-bent for the closing bell through whatever years they’d been allotted and been laid to rest in the cemetery out beyond the apple orchard.
Logan just couldn’t leave them behind, any more than he’d been able to get into his truck back there at the rest stop and pull out without Sidekick.
They were his, that horde of cussed, unruly ghosts.
So was their reputation for chronic hell-raising.
Seeing the Triple M, something had shifted in Logan. He’d decided to stop running, plant his feet and put down roots so deep the tips might just pop up someplace in China. The Creed legacy wasn’t like the McKettrick one, though, there was no denying that.
The McKettricks had stayed together, the line unbroken all the way back to old Angus, the patriarch.
The Creeds had splintered.
The McKettrick name was synonymous with honor, integrity and grit.
The Creed name, on the other hand, meant tragedy, bad luck and misery.
Logan had come back to take a stand, turn things around. Build something new and durable and good, from the ground up. His own children, if he was ever fortunate enough to have any, would bear the Creed name proudly, and so would his nieces and nephews. Not that he had any of those, either—Dylan and Tyler, as far as he knew, were still following the rodeo, at least part of the time, chasing the kind of women a man didn’t want to impregnate, and brawling in redneck bars.
He had no illusions that it would be easy, changing the course the Creeds had taken, but at the brass-tacks level, wasn’t it a matter of making a choice, a decision, and sticking by it, no matter what?
Dylan wasn’t going to do any such thing, and neither was Tyler, and there wasn’t anybody else who gave a damn.
Which meant Logan was elected, by a one-vote landslide.
He stood and headed for the kitchen, which was in worse shape by half than the living room, but when he turned the faucet in the sink, good Montana well water flowed out of it, murky at first, then clear as light.
Cheered, Logan scouted up an old mixing bowl in a cupboard, washed it out and filled it with water for Sidekick, then set it on the grimy linoleum floor. The dog lapped loudly, and then belched like a cowboy after chugging a pint of beer.
They prowled through the rooms, dog and man, Logan making mental notes as they went. Once he’d bought out the local Home Depot and hired about a hundred carpenters and a plumber or two, they’d be good to go.
BRIANA DIDN’T GET