Read Online Holiday in Stone Creek by Linda Lael Miller - Free Book Online Page B

asked.
    Distracted, Tanner didn't know what the woman was talking about at first. Then she pointed to the wine. She was very young and very pretty, and she didn't seem to mind working on Thanksgiving when practically everybody else in the western hemisphere was bellying up to a turkey feast someplace.
    "I don't know," Tanner said in belated answer to her cordial question. He'd been something of a wine aficionado once, but since he didn't indulge anymore, he'd sort of lost the knack. "I go by the labels, and the price."
    The clerk nodded as if what he'd said made a lick of sense, and wished him a happy Thanksgiving.
    He wished her the same, picked up the wine box, the six bottles rattling a little inside it, and made for the door.
    The dream came back to him, full force, as he was setting the wine on the passenger seat of his truck.
    Kat, standing in the aisle of the barn, in that white summer dress, telling him she wouldn't be back.
    It was no good telling himself he'd only been dreaming in the first place. He'd held on to those night visits--they'd gotten him through a lot of emotional white water. It had been Kat who'd said he ought to watch his drinking. Kat who'd advised him to accept the Stone Creek job and oversee it himself instead of sending in somebody else.
    Kat who'd insisted the newspapers were wrong; she hadn't been a target--she'd been caught in the cross fire of somebody else's fight. Sophie, she'd sworn, was in no danger.
    She'd faded before his eyes like so much thin smoke a couple of nights before. The wrench in his gut had been powerful enough to wake up him up. The dream hadstayed with him, though, which was the same as having it over and over again. Last night he'd been unable to sleep at all. He'd paced the dark empty house for a while, then, unable to bear it any longer, he'd gone out to the barn, saddled Shiloh and taken a moonlight ride.
    For a while he'd tried to outride what he was feeling--not loss, not sorrow, but a sense of letting go. Of somehow being set free.
    He'd loved Kat, more than his own life. Why should her going on to wherever dead people went have given him a sense of liberation, even exaltation, rather than sorrow?
    The guilt was almost overwhelming. As long as he'd mourned her, she'd seemed closer somehow. Now the worst was over. There had been some kind of profound shift, and he hadn't regained his footing.
    They'd been out for hours, he and Shiloh, when he was crossing the field between his place and Olivia's and that dog of hers came racing toward him. He'd have gone home, put Shiloh up with some extra grain for his trouble, taken a shower and fallen into bed if it hadn't been for Ginger and the sight of Olivia standing on the bottom rail of the fence.
    She'd been wearing sweats and silly rubber boots and an old man's coat, and for all that, she'd managed to look sexy. He'd finagled an invitation for coffee--hell, he'd flat out invited himself --and thought about taking her to bed the whole time he was there.
    Not that he would have made a move on Doc. It was way too soon, and she'd probably have conked him over the head with the nearest heavy object, but he'd been tempted, just the same.
    Tempted as he'd never been, since Kat.
    At home he left the wine in the truck and headed for the barn.
    Shiloh was asleep, standing up, the way horses do. When Tanner looked over the stall door at Butterpie, though, his eyes started to sting. Butterpie was lying in the wood shavings, and Olivia's dog was cuddled up right alongside her, as though keeping some kind of a vigil.
    "I'll be damned," Tanner muttered. He'd grown up in the country, and he'd known horses to have nonequine companions--cows, cats, dogs and even pygmy goats. But he'd never seen anything quite like this.
    He figured he probably should take Ginger home-- Olivia might be looking for her--but he couldn't quite bring himself to part the two animals.
    "You hungry, girl?" he asked Ginger, thinking what a fine thing it would be to