Cowboy Country. Linda Lael Miller

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      Brody put his arms around Kim, gave her a brief squeeze. “Maybe you could lay off the matchmaking, too, for a while, anyway,” he suggested, taking a towel from the basket and folding it.

      “Trust me,” Kim said, “I’ve already had this entire lecture from Davis. If you and Carolyn are both too thickheaded and stubborn to see that you’re meant for each other, well, it’s out of my hands, that’s all. You’re on your own.”

      “Thank you,” Brody said, smiling. “I’ll take it from here.”

      Kim’s eyes widened, and her hands froze in mid towel-folding. “What do you mean, you’ll take it from here? Are you...?”

      Brody held up one index finger and shook his head, grinning as he turned to head for Davis’s shop to bid the man good-night before heading back to the cabin at River’s Bend.

      The spacious room smelled pleasantly of leather and saddle soap and the wood fire that crackled in the Franklin stove, the flames casting a dancing reflection on the worn planks in the floor. Davis stood at one of several worktables, tooling an intricate design into a strip of cowhide.

      At Brody’s entrance, he looked up and grinned. Set the rubber mallet and the awl aside and dusted off his hands on the sides of his jeans, a gesture of habit more than necessity.

      “Carolyn still feeling peaky?” Davis asked, evidently to get the conversational ball rolling.

      “She’ll be all right,” Brody replied, looking around and recalling when he and Conner were kids, always getting underfoot in their uncle’s first shop, a much smaller room than this one, connected to the barn at the other place. Back then, they’d believed nothing and no one could hurt them if Davis was around. They’d grown up feeling safe, and that had fostered self-confidence.

      Or arrogance, depending on how you looked at it.

      Davis tilted his head to one side, studied his nephew in silence for a few moments, then went back to his worktable, picked up a chamois and began polishing the piece he’d been tooling before.

      “How’s that fancy house of yours coming along?” Davis asked, at some length. He wasn’t a man for chatter.

      Brody spotted the little dogs under one of the tables, snuggled up in a bed made to look like a plush pink slipper, and smiled. Dragged back a wooden chair and sat astraddle of it, resting his forearms across the back.

      “Slowly,” he replied, eliciting a bass note of a chuckle from Davis.

      “Pretty big place for one cowboy and his dog,” Davis commented. Barney had wandered in behind Brody by then, and lay down at his feet.

      “Don’t start,” Brody warned, leaning to ruffle the dog’s floppy ears so the critter would know he was welcome.

      “Don’t start what?” Davis asked, though he knew damn well what.

      Brody merely sighed.

      Davis chuckled, shook his head. “My wife did stir something up at supper tonight, didn’t she?” he said, polishing away at that hunk of leather.

      “You might say that,” Brody said dryly.

      Davis paused in his work, gave Brody a mirthful assessment before going on. “Conner and Tricia turned out to be a good match,” he observed. “Kim put her foot in it, sure enough, but she just wants you to be as happy as your brother is, that’s all.”

      “I know,” Brody answered, on a long sigh. Then, presently, he added, “Here’s the thing, Davis. Something happened between Carolyn and me, a long time ago, and she’d sooner throw in with a polecat than with me. We’re never going to get together, she and I, no matter how much you and Kim want that.”

      “Is that right?” Davis asked, with his customary note of charitable skepticism. He’d finished with the polishing, and now he was wiping his hands off on a shop towel.

      “Take it from me,” Brody said. “If it came down to me or a polecat, the polecat would win, hands down. Carolyn wants no part of me, and I can’t really say I blame her for it.”

      Davis laughed. “Is it just me, or was there something mournful in your tone of voice just now, boy?” Smidgeon and Little Bit tumbled out of their slipper-bed and rushed him, scrabbling at Davis’s pant legs so he’d bend down and pick them up.

      Which he did.

      “Mournful?” Brody scoffed, a beat or two too late. “Not me.”

      “You’re taken with Carolyn,” Davis said quietly, standing there with a froufrou dog in the crook of each elbow. “Nothing wrong with that. She’s a beauty, and a hand with a horse, too.”

      Brody chuckled ruefully. Saying somebody was “a hand with a horse” was high praise, coming from a Creed—better than a good credit score or a character reference from a VIP. “Well,” he said, “I kind of messed things up with her.”

      Davis put the little dogs down gently, and they scampered off, probably in search of Kim. Then the rough-and-tough cowboy pulled up a chair for himself and sat down, regarding Brody solemnly, but with a crook at the corner of his mouth.

      “I’ve messed up with Kim more times than I care to recall,” Davis said, once he was settled. “And here we are, married thirty-five years as of next October.”

      A companionable silence fell; they both sat listening to the fire in the stove for a while, thinking their own thoughts.

      Brody’s throat tightened a little. “Did you and Kim ever regret not having kids of your own?” he asked, the words coming out rusty.

      “We had kids,” Davis pointed out, with a smile. “You and Conner and Steven.”

      “Of your own,” Brody persisted. Davis’s marriage to Steven’s mother hadn’t lasted.

      Davis thought a moment, and there was a twinkle in his eyes when he replied. “We’d have liked to have had a girl,” he allowed. “But now that Melissa and Tricia have married into the family, why, Kim and I feel like we’ve got everything anybody could rightfully ask for.”

      Brody stayed silent.

      Davis reached out, laid a hand on his nephew’s shoulder, squeezed. “I know I’ve said it before,” he told Brody, “but it’s better than good to have you back home where you belong, boy. We all missed you something fierce.”

      With that, the conversation appeared to be over.

      Davis stood up and went to the stove to bank the fire.

      Brody told Barney they’d better get on the road, stepped into the corridor outside the shop, then remembered what he’d come for and stuck his head back in.

      “’Night, Davis,” he said.

      His uncle nodded, smiled. “’Night,” he replied. “You drive carefully now, because we can’t spare you.”

      Brody nodded back.

      He didn’t run into Kim on his way out.

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