Montana Creeds: Tyler by Linda Lael Miller

Davie said. His obviously new jeans and striped T-shirt were at strange variance with the piercings and the tattoo.
    Lily smiled. “Hello,” she answered.
    â€œSee you at six,” Tyler told her.
    â€œIs this the hot date?” Davie asked.
    Tyler rolled his eyes, but if he was embarrassed by Davie’s remark, it didn’t show. He was the legendary Tyler Creed, after all. He probably made women climax in discount stores all the time. No big deal.
    â€œThis is the hot date,” Tyler confirmed.
    Lily blushed again, and then simply bolted, knowing anything she might have said would have been wrong, and probably gotten her in even deeper than she already was.
    And Tyler’s low, knowing chuckle trailed in her wake.
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    â€œT HAT ,” Tyler told Davie, a beat after Lily raced away, “was not cool.”
    Davie grinned unapologetically. “Oh, well, ” he said.“She is hot. And you did warn me that I might have to bunk in at your brother’s place if things went down the way you hoped they would.”
    Tyler watched as Lily chose the longest line, knew she’d done so because it was the farthest away from where he was standing. She looked beyond good in those big-city blue jeans of hers, and it was a damn good thing, by his reckoning, that he had a full shopping cart to stand behind.
    He’d seen Lily go over the edge, known by the blush in her cheeks and the dazed expression in her eyes that the mental trick Doreen had taught him had worked, and he’d gone hard as bedrock the moment she’d come undone.
    This, along with the current state of his anatomy, came under the heading of Things Davie Didn’t Need to Know, so he was careful to stay behind the cart.
    â€œDon’t be a smart-ass,” he told the kid.
    â€œI have problems,” Davie retorted smugly. “I’m a Troubled Teenager. There’s no telling what I might say.” The kid admired Lily from afar as she lobbed salad greens and a package of what looked like chicken onto the rolling counter, shook his head. “Makes a man wish he was twenty years older.”
    Tyler had to chuckle at that, even though a part of him wanted to get Davie by the scruff and hustle him out of Lily-viewing range. Which was Creed-crazy. Davie was only a kid, for all his big talk. “Pull your eyeballs back into your head, Cartoon Boy. She’s spoken for.”
    Mercifully, Davie let the subject drop. Maybe becausehe’d won a round, on their second trip to Wal-Mart in twenty-four hours, by talking Tyler into buying him a TV.
    Tyler, on the other hand, couldn’t seem to move on from the Lily encounter. Lily was primed, all right. If he could just get her naked, he could untie all those knots inside her. And when she turned loose for real, let herself go beyond the impromptu climax she’d just had to the genuine article, the universe would tremble on its foundations.
    Not just for her, but for him, too.
    Whoa, cowboy, he told himself silently. Thoughts like that weren’t going to make the lodgepole pushing at the front of his jeans go down, and he couldn’t hide his hard-on behind that shopping cart forever.
    He needed to get some perspective.
    Perspective, hell. He was already planning the call he meant to make to Dylan, as soon as he could get out of Davie’s earshot. Would you mind babysitting a thirteen-year-old?
    He was already picturing Lily, crooning in his bed, arching her back under his hands and mouth, already imagining her afterward, when they’d both recovered, stripped to her delectable skin, bobbing in the cool, dark waters of Hidden Lake, just off the end of his ancient swimming dock.
    Skinny-dipping with Lily Kenyon, as she’d so carefully reminded him.
    Oh, yeah.
    Welcome home, Tyler Creed.
    Welcome home.
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    â€œH OW DO I LOOK ?” Lily asked nervously, at five-thirty that evening, modeling her red sundress in the kitchen of her dad’s