Read Online Montana Creeds: Tyler by Linda Lael Miller - Free Book Online

taste blood. She’d wanted more children so badly, but Burke had always refused. One was enough, he’d said. As though Tess were a mortgage with a balloon payment, an object of some kind. “What’s the old saying? ‘Act in haste, repent at leisure’?”
    â€œEven if Burke did crash that plane because you were divorcing him, Lily, it wouldn’t be your fault.”
    â€œI keep telling myself that,” Lily admitted. “But a part of me knows it’s a lie.” The truth burst out then, all on its own, too big to contain. “I didn’t love Burke—I never did. I loved the idea of love, of being someone’s wife, someone’s mother. Having a home and a family. But deep down, I never cared for Burke the way I should have, and I guess he knew it.”
    She’d never loved Burke because she’d never stopped loving Tyler, and she was the kind of woman who mated for life.
    â€œYou must have had feelings for Burke,” her dad reasoned gently. “After all, you married him. You had Tess with him.”
    â€œI guess in the beginning, I thought I’d fall in love with him in time. But it didn’t happen.” A tear slid down Lily’s cheek, and she didn’t bother to brush it away. “I shouldn’t have gone through with the wedding. He might be alive today if I hadn’t.”
    â€œThere’s no way of knowing that,” Hal told her. “Let yourself off the hook, Lily, if only because there’s no way you can change the past, and because Tess needs a happy mother, one who’s looking ahead, not backward.”
    â€œI am happy,” she insisted, for the second time that evening.
    Hal’s sigh was heavy with bittersweet amusement, and a certain degree of resignation. “No, you’re not,” he argued. “Your mother was all for the marriage, but I remember looking down into your face, just before I walked you up that church aisle and gave you away, andseeing something in your eyes that made me want to put a stop to the whole shindig, then and there. Tell all those Kenyons and their fancy friends and relations to eat, drink and be merry, but there wouldn’t be a ceremony.”
    Hal Ryder had given his daughter away long before her wedding day, but that was beside the point. Still another old, dusty skeleton that shouldn’t be exhumed.
    â€œWhy didn’t you say anything?” Lily asked softly. “To me, at least?”
    Hal sighed again. “Because I didn’t have the right. You were a grown woman, with a college education and a good job. And because I’d already interfered in your life once before that.” Just when Lily would have asked what he’d meant by that last part, he stood, stretched, yawned. “I’m worn-out, Lily,” he confessed. “I need some rest.”
    â€œI’ll get your pills,” Lily said, rising, too.
    â€œOh, yes,” Hal replied, with grim humor. “My pills. Let’s not forget those.”
    In the kitchen, she opened the pharmacy bag, studied the labels on the little brown bottles and carefully counted out the appropriate doses while her father set the coffeepot for morning and locked the back door.
    Lily raised an eyebrow at that. “People are locking their doors in Stillwater Springs these days?” she asked.
    â€œI normally don’t,” Hal admitted. “But I’ve got you and Tess to think about now. And some things have been happening around here lately—”
    He’d just made a speech, in the living room, about what a good place Stillwater Springs was to raise a child—specifically Tess. Knowing he was tired, Lilydidn’t call him on the contradiction between his words and his actions.
    I’ve got you and Tess to think about now.
    Had he convinced himself they would be staying on in Stillwater Springs permanently, after he’d recovered enough to live on his own?
    She set