A Creed in Stone Creek Read Free

a T-shirt with a motorcycle logo on the front.
    Melissa sighed. “We really should talk about the way you dress, Andrea,” she said, plunking into her chair and rummaging in the paper bag for her wrapped sandwich and the accompanying wad of paper napkins.
    “It’s Casual Friday,” Andrea reminded her, with a faintly petulant note in her voice, fanning herself with the messages and frowning. Her gaze moved over Melissa’s expensive slacks, blouse and blazer, and she shook her head once. “Remember?”
    The sandwich, though nearly cold, still tasted like the best thing ever. “Is there coffee?” Melissa chanced to inquire, once she’d chewed and swallowed the first mouthful.
    Andrea arched one pierced eyebrow, still fluttering the messages. “How should I know?” she asked. “When you hired me, you said it wasn’t my job to make coffee—just to file and answer the phone and make sure you got all your messages.”
    Melissa rolled her eyes. “Speaking of messages?” she prompted.
    Andrea sashayed across the span of floor between the door and the desk and laid the little pink sheets on Melissa’s blotter. “Just the usual boring stuff,” she said.
    Melissa glanced at the messages, chewing.
    There was one from her twin sister, Ashley. Ashley and her husband, Jack, were in Chicago, showingoff their adorable two-year-old daughter at a family reunion.
    Olivia, Ashley and Melissa’s older sister, was looking after Ashley’s cat, Mrs. Wiggins, but there were long-term guests—a group of elderly pals—staying at the B&B, and Ashley, who owned the establishment, was counting on her twin to stop by once a day to make sure the wild bunch were still kicking. Since one of them was a retired chef, they cooked for themselves.
    The second message was from her dentist’s receptionist. She was due for a six-month checkup and a cleaning.
    The third: the biography she’d ordered last week was waiting at the bookstore over in Indian Rock.
    “Sometimes,” she joked dryly, losing her appetite halfway through the sandwich and dropping it back into the paper bag, which she promptly crumpled and tossed into the trash, “I wonder how I stand all the pressures of this job.”
    Andrea looked blank. “Pressures?”
    “Never mind,” Melissa said, resigned.
    Just then, Judge Carpenter appeared behind Andrea, wearing a nifty summer suit some thirty years out of style and a wide grin. His hair was a wild gray nimbus around his face, and his blue eyes danced.
    He’d always reminded Melissa of Hal Holbrook, doing his Mark Twain impersonation.
    Andrea moseyed on out, and Melissa saw that J.P. was holding a steaming cup of coffee in each hand.
    “God bless you,” Melissa said.
    J.P. chuckled and advanced into the room, pushing the door shut with a jaunty thrust of one heel. He seta cup before Melissa and sipped from his own after pulling up a chair facing her desk.
    “He’s here,” J.P. announced. He wasn’t much for preambles.
    Melissa frowned, confused. “Who?” she asked, watching the judge over the rim of her cup.
    J.P. leaned forward a little way, and dropped his voice to a confidential tone. “Steven Creed,” he said.
    Melissa’s mind flashed on the drop-dead gorgeous man she’d encountered at the Sunflower that morning. He and the little boy were probably the only people in town she didn’t know, since she’d grown up on a ranch just outside of Stone Creek.
    Except for college and law school, and then a stint in Phoenix, working for the Maricopa County prosecutor, she’d lived in the community all her life. So, by process of elimination…
    “Oh,” she said. “Right. Steven Creed.”
    Word had it that Creed was a distant cousin of the McKettrick clan, over at Indian Rock, and he was in the process of buying the old Emerson place, bordered by Stone Creek Ranch, the sprawling cattle operation that had been in Melissa’s own family for better than a century. Her brother, Brad, lived there now, with his wife, Meg,