have cooties. And it’s only for three weeks. And I like Miz Ada right well, but darlin’, she ain’t God. That place ain’t holy.”
She shrugged. He could see the gears working in her mind, trying to figure out ways to get rid of him. She could try her damnedest, but he wasn’t going anywhere.
He smiled. “Glad we got that straight. Are you making breakfast?”
“Hell, no!”
“Well, I am and I’m willing to make enough for two people and one scraggly old mutt. Pancakes all right? There’s sausage in the fridge and I make a mean pancake.”
She nodded. “That dog really doesn’t belong to you? Tell me the truth.”
“One thing a Riley does whether it’s painful or not is tell the truth. We’re honest, hardworking, and we state what’s on our mind. The answer is no, ma’am. That dog does not belong to me. I’d never seen him before he ran around my legs and shot into the house, but I guess he’s adopted us.”
* * *
Us!
There wasn’t going to be an us no matter what her grandmother said or did. She didn’t care if Creed had a halo under that thick brown hair and wings tucked up under his flannel shirt; he was not going to take over the Rockin’ C.
The dog whimpered and sat up when he smelled the pancakes cooking in the big cast-iron skillet. He stood up, yawned, and rested his head on Sage’s knee. She wasn’t going to pet the critter, and he was going outside right after breakfast. There was no way that ugly thing was staying in the house, and she was not changing her mind—right up until he looked at her with big brown eyes, whined, and wagged his tail.
She scratched his ears and decided maybe he could stay in the house until the storm passed and the sun came out. Grand had probably arranged for him to appear in the blizzard knowing that Sage couldn’t throw him out to freeze. She’d been trying for years to bring a pet into her granddaughter’s life. But Sage didn’t want anything or anyone that would abandon her again.
She didn’t even remember her father, who had been killed in some kind of black ops mission when she was two years old, but there had always been a gaping hole in her heart that wanted a dad. Her mother had moved home to the canyon so that Grand could help with the toddler, and then she’d missed a curve coming home from work one night when Sage was four. The hole got bigger. And now Grand had forsaken her too. She damn sure didn’t need a dog or a cat or even a hamster to remind her of just how big that black hole in her soul could get.
Creed piled three pancakes up on a plate and put them on the kitchen table. “Ladies first. I’ll fix a couple for the new pet and then make mine.”
Sage pushed herself up from the rocking chair and stretched, bending from side to side and ending with a roll of the neck that produced a loud cracking noise. “Thank you, but that miserable excuse for a dog is not my pet.”
“Did that hurt?”
“What? Popping my neck?”
Creed grinned and his eyes twinkled. “No, ma’am. That probably felt good. I was talking about it hurting to say thank you.”
The worst blizzard the canyon had seen in her lifetime looked like it would go on for three days past eternity. She was stuck in a house with no electricity and a cowboy she didn’t know and didn’t even want to like. And he was sexy as the devil when he grinned.
“Yes, it did. I speak my mind too, Creed,” she said.
Grand had been talking about selling the ranch for years, but it had all been a ploy to make her find a husband and settle down, raise a canyon full of kids, and be happy. The old girl could never get it through her thick Indian skull that Sage didn’t need a man to provide happiness. Her paint palette and easel did that job just fine.
Her cell phone rang as she smeared butter on her pancake. She recognized the ringtone as the one she’d assigned to her grandmother and jumped up so fast that her chair flipped over backwards. She didn’t even take the time to set it upright but dived for her purse, which was still on the credenza.
They called it a credenza but it was really the bottom half of an old