Creed's Honor by Linda Lael Miller Page B

Brody?” he asked now. His arms were folded again. When had that happened?
    “Just a place to hang my hat for a while,” Brody replied, sounding sadly aggrieved.
    “How about on Joleen’s bedpost?” Conner asked, and then could have kicked himself, hard. Not because the remark had been unkind, but because of the way Brody might interpret it.
    That slow, Brody-patented grin spread across his brother’s beard-stubbled face. “So that’s the way it is,” he said, hooking his thumbs in the belt loops of his jeans, like some old-time cowpuncher surveying the herd. Next, he’d probably turn his head to one side and spit. “I don’t mind telling you, little brother—I didn’tfigure you’d give a damn what Joleen and I might do together, after all this time.”
    The old rage seethed inside Conner, but glancing past Brody, he caught a momentary glimpse of Tricia McCall, sitting at one of the picnic tables, in the midst of a crowd of other diners, and something shifted inside him, just like that.
    It hurt, like having a disjointed bone yanked back into its socket, but there was an element of relief, too. What the hell?
    “You’re right,” Conner told his brother stiffly, finally paying attention to the conversation again. “The two of you can join the circus and swing from trapezes for all I care.”
    Brody put one hand to his chest, his fingers splayed wide, and feigned emotional injury. “Then you shouldn’t have a problem with me bunking out at the ranch for a couple of weeks,” he said. “Especially since the place is half mine anyhow.”
    By that time, Davis had worked his way over to them, probably dispatched by Kim. She wouldn’t want any fights breaking out, with all those kids and women around, and if anything happened, the gossip wouldn’t die down for years.
    “You two are bristling like a couple of porcupines,” Davis observed dryly, his Creed-blue eyes swinging from one brother to the other. “I don’t need to tell you, do I, that this is neither the time nor the place for trouble of the sort you’re probably cooking up right about now?”
    Conner let out his breath, rolled his shoulders again.
    Brody grinned at their uncle. “Just saying hello to my brother,” he said, sounding guileless, but unable to resistadding, “and meeting with the usual hostile response, of course.”
    “Where’s Joleen?” Davis asked quietly, watching Brody.
    Brody rolled his eyes and flung his hands out from his sides. “Why the hell does everybody keep asking me that?” he wanted to know. Fortunately, he didn’t raise his voice; that would have been like dropping a lighted match into a puddle of spilled kerosene. “I’m not the woman’s keeper, for God’s sake.”
    Just her lover, Conner thought, automatically, and waited for the rush of testosterone-laced adrenaline. It didn’t come. And that threw him a little.
    Brody thrust out a dramatic sigh, looking like a man who’d bravely fought the good fight, heroic in the face of great tragedy, won the battle but lost the war. “Look,” he said, still careful to speak quietly, since half the town was present and watching out of the corners of their eyes. “Joleen and I met up by accident, at a rodeo in Lubbock, that’s all. She’d just split the sheets with some yahoo, and she was too broke to even buy a bus ticket back home, so I brought her, since I happened to be headed in this general direction anyway. End of story.”
    Conner leaned in until his nose and Brody’s were almost touching. “You’ve obviously mistaken me,” he growled, “for somebody who gives a rat’s ass why you and Jolene came back to Lonesome Bend.”
    “That’s enough,” Davis said sternly, as in days of old, when Brody and Conner had been even more hotheaded than they were now. “ That will be enough. This is a party, not some dive of a bar in Juarez. If you want tobeat the hell out of each other, be my guests, but do it at home, behind the barn. Not here.”
    A brief