Free A Creed in Stone Creek by Linda Lael Miller Page A

area, Steven opened his laptop, booted it up and logged on. He hadn’t checked his email in a few days.
    Once he’d weeded out the junk, and the stuff he didn’t feel like dealing with at the moment, he opened a recent message from his stepmother, Kim. It was dated that afternoon.
    “Are you there yet?” she’d written. “Let us know when you get settled in Stone Creek, and your dad and I will come for a visit.”
    Smiling, Steven tapped out a brief reply. Kim had always treated him with warmth and good humor duringthose growing-up summers, never trying to take his mother’s place. “We’re here,” he wrote, “and living the high life in a country-music star’s tour bus. There are bunk beds in Matt’s room, so you and Dad could sleep there.”
    The thought of that made his grin widen.
    He added a description of Zeke, the sheepdog, recounting the pet-adoption saga, assured Kim that he and Matt were both fine, and signed off with love.
    A second message came from Conner. “I’ll be in Stone Creek for the rodeo next month,” it read. “Save me a bed.”
    And that was the whole thing.
    Steven chuckled. His cousin was definitely a man of few words.
    He hit Reply and told Conner he was always welcome and there would be a bed waiting when the time came. Compared to his cousin’s email, Steven’s was downright verbose.
    A low whimper distracted him from the computer; he looked up and saw Zeke standing with his nose to the door crack, wanting to go outside.
    Steven left the laptop on the table and accompanied Zeke out into the yard.
    It wasn’t quite dark, but a few stars had begun to pop out here and there, and the ghost of a three-quarter moon peeked over the horizon, like a performer waiting in the wings.
    Zeke sniffed around for a while, did his business and went back to the door, ready to go in.
    Steven opened the door and the dog mounted the steps, then went directly back to Matt’s room.
    Wide-awake, already bored with the internet and inno mood to watch TV, Steven sat on the fold-down metal steps in front of the threshold and looked out over what he could see of his ranch.
    Some ranch, he thought. Most of the fences are down, the barn probably collapsed ten years ago and the house is a disaster.
    He sighed and combed the fingers of his right hand through his hair, something he always did when he was questioning his own decisions.
    His dad and Conner had both tried to persuade him to stay in Colorado and raise Matt on the family’s spread. Set up a law practice in Lonesome Bend.
    He wasn’t sure they understood, his father and his cousin, why he’d needed to strike out on his own, create something new for himself and Matt and any generations that might follow.
    He wasn’t sure he understood, either.
    The Creed ranch was rightfully Conner’s, Steven figured, Conner’s and Brody’s. Their dad, dead since the brothers were hardly more than babies, had been Davis’s older brother and, therefore, the heir to the kingdom.
    Not that anybody knew exactly where Conner’s identical twin brother was keeping himself these days. He’d had some kind of knock-down-drag-out with Conner, Brody had, and except for a Christmas card every few years, with a terse message scrawled somewhere inside, the family hadn’t heard from him in a decade.
    Conner, like the good elder brother in the parable of the Prodigal Son, had worked shoulder to shoulder with Davis to make the ranch prosper, and it had. Even with the ups and downs of the economy and the ever-changing beef prices, it was a profitable operation.
    When he was younger, shuttling back and forthbetween his mother’s place back East, where he lived fall, winter and spring, and the ranch, which he’d thought of as home, Steven had been more than a little jealous of his cousins. Two years younger than he was, the twins got to live on the land year-round, and Davis was a substitute father to them, the kind he couldn’t be to Steven, for the better part of every