Read Creed's Honor for Free Online Page B

wheel of her own rig, with the engine running. Then he backed up, turned around and drove away.
    Why did she feel sad all of a sudden? To cheer herself up, Tricia pulled her phone from its special pocket in her purse and pressed one of the buttons. Hunter’s smiling face appeared on the screen, along with the message he’d texted earlier.
    I miss you. Let’s get together—soon.
    Tricia waited to be overtaken by delight and excitement—hadn’t she been missing Hunter for a year and a half, yearning to “get together” with him?—but all she felt was a strange letdown that seemed to have more to do with Conner Creed than the man she believed she loved. Weird.
    There was no figuring it out, she decided with a sigh. She put the phone away and went over her mental shopping list as she headed for the big discount store where a person could buy pretty much anything.
    The dog beds weren’t on sale, but she found a nice, fluffy one for a decent price and wadded it into her cart. On top she piled a small bag of kibble, two large plastic bowls, a collar and a leash and, because she didn’t want Valentino to feel lonely when she left him at the office for the night, she sprang for a toy—a blue chicken with a squeaker but no stuffing—to keep him company.
    There were a few other things Tricia needed to pick up, but none of them were urgent and her cart was full,so she wheeled her way up to the long row of checkout counters and got in line.
    Twenty minutes later—a woman ahead of her paid for a can of soup with a credit card—she drove back to the campground office with her purchases, arranging the bed in front of the woodstove and hauling the kibble to the storeroom, where she opened it and filled the bowls—one with food and one with water.
    She set them carefully within reach of the dog bed, adjusted everything and was finally satisfied that the arrangement looked welcoming. As the finishing touch, Tricia removed the price tag from the blue chicken and laid the toy tenderly on the bed, the way she might have set out a teddy bear for a child.
    “There,” she said aloud, though there was nobody around to hear. Talking to herself—she had definitely been alone too much lately, she decided ruefully, especially since Natty had left to visit her sister.
    Conner popped into her mind, but Tricia blocked him out—with limited success—and told herself to think about Hunter instead. In the end, she had to bring up the phone picture again just to remember what Hunter looked like.
    And even then the image didn’t stick in her mind when she looked away.
     
    N OT GOOD, C ONNER THOUGHT when he pulled in at the ranch and saw Davis, his uncle, waiting in the grassy stretch between the ranch house and the barn. Davis’s expression would have said it all, even if he hadn’t been pacing back and forth like he was waiting for a prize calf to be born.
    “What?” Conner asked, once he’d stopped the truck, shut it down and stepped out onto the running board.
    Davis was an older version of his son, Steven, with the same dark blond hair and blue eyes. He was a little heavier than Steven, and his clothes, like Conner’s, weren’t fancy. He was dressed for work.
    Steven had a ranch of his own now, down in Stone Creek, Arizona, not to mention a beautiful wife, Melissa, a six-year-old son named Matt and another of those intermittent sets of twins, both boys, that ran in the Creed family.
    In fact, if Conner hadn’t loved Steven like a brother—had the same strong bond with his cousin that he’d once shared with Brody—it would have been easy to hate him for having more than his share of luck.
    “Did you get the serum?” Davis asked, as though Conner were on an urgent mission from the CDC, carrying the only known antidote to some virus fixing to go global.
    Conner gave his uncle—essentially the only father he’d ever known, since his own, Davis’s older brother, Blue, had died in an accident when Conner and Brody were just