The Last Real Cowboy

by Caitlin Crews

  Now she knew. It was this wall of silent disapproval. Normally she wilted in the face of it because her role in her family was very clear. She was here to mend things, the way she had her parents’ marriage as their later-in-life baby, or so the stories went. She was supposed to keep everyone happy, not make things worse. She was glue, and glue stayed put by definition.

  Maybe it’s time to make yourself happy, she told herself sternly, in case she was tempted to let this go.

  Not that she could. She’d gone ahead and done a thing she couldn’t easily take back. Deliberately. So she couldn’t wilt.

  “The silent treatment isn’t going to change the fact that I signed a lease on an apartment in town,” Amanda said tranquilly. “I’m moving in next week.”

  That broke the wall into pieces. Loud pieces.

  “Like hell you are,” Jensen said with a laugh.

  “Language,” Ellie snapped at him.

  “An apartment?” Zack gave her that assessing sheriff’s look of his. “What apartment building?”

  “You don’t mean by yourself, do you?” Connor demanded. “That can’t be safe.”

  Riley glared. “You already have somewhere to live. Why do you need an apartment?”

  But Amanda watched her father, a man of precious few words. Donovan wasted none of them now. All he did was look down the length of the table toward Ellie, communicated something to her with one of their unreadable glances, then set his utensils down on his plate.

  The sound rang in Amanda like judgment. Her stomach twisted into a knot, but she refused to show it. She could cry about it later. In her own place, with a lock on the door and none of her family around to see it and tell her she was being childish.

  “There aren’t that many apartments in town,” Zack said. He shook his head. “And none of them are places I’d want my baby sister visiting, much less living.”

  “Good thing it’s not up to you, then, isn’t it?” Amanda replied.

  Very, very calmly.

  Because one thing she knew all too well. If she showed the slightest bit of emotion, or temper, or anything at all but aggressive coolness under fire, they would dismiss her. Instantly. There was no crying in baseball, as Connor liked to say when there was no baseball of any kind taking place, and there was certainly no crying in the Kittredge family.

  “Where is this apartment?” Ellie asked from her end of the table, matching Amanda’s calm tone.

  Amanda couldn’t read the expression on her mother’s face. It could go either way, she knew. Ellie was nothing if not a mystery, especially to her own children.

  “Up above the Coyote,” Amanda said.

  Then she braced herself, because the Coyote was the seedier of the two bars in town. It favored simplicity and dim lighting over the craft beers, live music, and ever-expanding menu options offered in the more respectable Broken Wheel Saloon on Main Street. The Coyote was where the bikers who came through in the summers liked to drink the road away, and Zack had once said he headed over to the Coyote at closing time whether or not he’d been called, because there was always a fight to break up.

  The explosion here at Sunday dinner was instantaneous. And loud.

  All four of her brothers started talking over one another, each registering their varying degrees of dismay. There was no point fighting with them, so Amanda sat back in her chair, folded her arms, and waited.

  “That’s absolutely no place for decent girl to go, much less live,” Zack thundered.

  Amanda was tempted to inform him that she was old enough and decent enough to vote, thank you, then lie and tell him she’d voted for his opponent in the sheriff’s race.

  “You can’t live there,” Riley kept saying. At her. And when she didn’t respond, he threw it out to the rest of the table. “She can’t live there.”

  Jensen let out another laugh. “This must be a joke.”

  “Come on, monkey,” Connor said in disgust from beside her. “This is ridiculous. If you want your own place, we can fix up one of the outbuildings. You can have all the independence you want.”

  “But without actually, you know, having any,” Amanda pointed out.

  “You can have independence without putting yourself in danger,” Zack argued.

  “What’s ridiculous is that all of you are talking to me like I asked for your permission,” Amanda said into the lull. She looked around at each of her brothers in turn. “I didn’t.”

  Jensen turned to their father. “Obviously we don’t want Amanda in that kind of situation. You know the kind of people who hang around the Coyote.”

  “You mean … you?” Amanda asked.

  All of her brothers stared at her as if she’d grown seven heads.

  She smiled.

  “I didn’t ask Mom and Dad either,” Amanda told them, matter-of-factly, pleased that she sounded so certain when her stomach was still in a tangle. “Because I know this will come as a big surprise to everyone, but I’m not twelve. I’m twenty-two. I can afford rent, and I certainly don’t need anyone’s permission to pay it.”

  “How can you afford rent?” Riley demanded. “You work in a coffee shop.”

  “It’s called savings, thank you,” Amanda replied, then pulled herself back before she got too testy. “And I’m not an idiot. I have a new part-time job too. Just to make sure I’m covered.”

  That wasn’t the only reason. But she wasn’t going to get into that part of things with them. If she told them how she planned to spice up her social life, they would make one of the outbuildings into a prison cell and toss the key. The way they’d locked her in her room so she couldn’t go to her sophomore dance with a boy they didn’t like. Jerks, all of them.

  “That sounds like a reasonable plan, Amanda,” Ellie said quietly from her end of the table, still expressionless.

  Amanda had to blink away the heat in her eyes at the unexpected show of support. From such an unlikely source.

  But she knew she wasn’t done. Not yet.

  “Where did you get a part-time job when you already work full-time in the coffeehouse?” Zack asked suspiciously. Or maybe this was him in full interrogation mode.

  Amanda decided that since this was happening, and they were all being idiots, she might as well enjoy it.

  “Didn’t I tell you?” she asked brightly. And smiled wider. “It’s how I got the apartment. The Coyote needs a new bartender.”

  Then she sat back and enjoyed the show.

  2

  Brady Everett parked his truck in the gravel lot on the wrong side of the river, then headed into the Coyote to find himself some trouble. The more trouble, the better.

  Because there was only so much family time he could take.

  He liked to think he’d come to terms with his return to his hometown of Cold River, though it hadn’t been his choice. Left to his own devices, he still would have been enjoying his life down in Denver, far away from this place he’d always been in such a hurry to leave. But when his father had died last Halloween, Brady and his brother Ty had promised their older brother, Gray, that they would stay and work the ranch for a year. With Gray, not against him. That had been the deal the three of them made, out in the snow on a bitter Christmas Eve not far from the old man’s grave.

  Only Gray could wander over to the farmhouse next door one morning not long after their father’s funeral, announce he thought their pretty neighbor should marry him, and have that all work out for him—now complete with a baby. Even Ty had produced a wife and kid out of thin air, in typical showy, dramatic Ty style. These days, Ty was looking to build on the family land, which was a good indication he wasn’t planning to vote for selling. That meant Brady alone wanted to shift the albatross this land had been around all their necks since they were born and give them all a chance at a real life instead of working the land until it killed them. The way it had their father and grandfather in turn.

  But his brothers didn’t treat him like what he was: the only member of the family with any ac
tual business experience. And the only one with real perspective. Gray had been working this land since they were kids. Ty had spent his entire adult life trying to sit on the back of a pissed-off bull. Brady was the only one who’d gone out into the actual world.

  A strike against him in Gray’s opinion.

  Most of the time, Brady rolled with it. He could do anything for year. But some nights, like tonight, he found he had enough of his older brothers and the domestic bliss they’d rustled up for themselves since Amos had died.

  Brady wasn’t domestic. He wasn’t much into bliss either. But there was a particular kind of temporary happiness he was only too happy to indulge in, and he’d had the early morning ranch work hangovers to prove it.

  Ty had once claimed that Gray wanted to be a country song, but he’d meant one of the old-school ones about honor and steadfastness and the cowboy way. Brady liked to think that in certain parts of Cold River, like the Coyote late at night, he was the other staple of the country genre. The kind where mamas were warned against him. Songs about women and whiskey and a whole lot of sin.

  He was more than ready to get his own sin on when he walked inside the Coyote and took a moment to let his eyes adjust to the dim lighting, carefully calculated to make sure bad decisions had a place to hide. He expected the rowdy pack of bikers clustered around the pool table. He wasn’t surprised to see the same set of long-faced locals bellied up to the bar—there for the whiskey, not the company. And it wouldn’t be the Coyote without the shouting over the music, the too-intense laughter, and the dark booths filled with disreputable types tossing back alcohol like they were in a competition.

  What Brady was not expecting was little Amanda Kittredge.

  Behind the scarred, sticky bar and framed by all that classy, flashing neon.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” he barked, scowling over the bar at her.

  She stared right back. “What does it look like I’m doing?”

  “It looks like you’re tending bar here, which is impossible. Obviously.”

  The look she leveled at him then was not friendly. Worse, she did something with her body, shifted it somehow, to put her hands on her hips. And it was suddenly terrifyingly hard to remember that she was Riley Kittredge’s kid sister.

  Because little Amanda Kittredge was not dressed for church. She was dressed the way the female bartenders here were always dressed, but she was little Amanda Kittredge, for God’s sake. Her hair was in a high ponytail that was too thick, too long, and too much like honey. She was wearing a whole lot of makeup that did things to her eyes, which he had not until this moment known or cared were a hazel that looked gold, somehow.

  He told himself she looked like a kid playing dress-up, but only if she was dressing up as a hot barmaid. She had on skintight jeans tucked into cowboy boots that made him feel like a pervert. And she was wearing a scandalously tight tank top that clung to her body and made a meal of her—

  He was not looking at her chest. He was not.

  Though it was possible he was having a heart attack.

  “Does that mean you don’t want to order a drink?” she asked, an edge to her usually sweet voice.

  The whole tank top situation did not resolve itself. And no matter how many times he chanted little Amanda Kittredge, it didn’t help.

  Because for a minute there, he didn’t see little Amanda the way he always had. Always underfoot, her hair in braids and a sunburned nose, climbing on and off the back of those horses her family bred. He didn’t see the skinned knees or the dirty jeans that had marked her as a horse girl. Horse girls were a particular kind of tomboy, indistinguishable from one another in skinny packs, who hung around horses and related to them better than people.

  For a moment, all he saw was a full-grown woman who filled out her tank top a little too well. And her hair was too blond, with just enough falling down here and there to make a man’s fingers itch to get in there and pull out the rest.

  He tried to slam that door closed. On his own face, if necessary. He tried to lock it up and pretend it hadn’t happened.

  His body objected, so he ignored that too.

  “Whiskey,” he croaked out.

  Then the horror continued, because when she wheeled around to get him his drink, he got a good look at her long, lean legs packed into tight denim and that curvy—

  Brady didn’t actually punch himself in the face, to get a jump on what Riley and his brothers would do if they ever suspected Brady’s thoughts had strayed in this direction. He just thought about it. A lot.

  Pull it together, Everett, he ordered himself.

  And when little Amanda Kittredge turned back around and slid him his drink, he threw some bills on the bar, managed a nod, and then got the hell away from her before he disgraced himself further. He didn’t usually like to venture back into the questionable booths on the other side of the pool table, all of them filled with drama of one sort or another, but he obviously couldn’t stay at the bar. Or near the bar.

  He sat by himself, scowled to discourage any social overtures, even though that was why he’d come here, and was nursing his whiskey straight on toward philosophical.

  Until the door swung open and three of Amanda’s brothers walked in.

  All of them except Zack, which made sense. The sheriff couldn’t hang out in a place like the Coyote. It was bad for business. Both his and theirs.

  Jensen and Connor shouldered up to the bar, looking grim and pissed. Given that Brady’s own reaction to Amanda had been completely inappropriate, he understood their concern.

  But all he did was smile when Riley slid into the booth opposite Brady, like he didn’t have a care in the world. And certainly hadn’t been ogling Amanda’s butt in tight jeans like every other red-blooded man in this joint.

  “Have you seen anyone mess with her?” Riley asked, not bothering with any niceties.

  That suited Brady fine. He and Riley had grown up together. They’d played football together in high school. Then Riley had stayed here to work on the family ranch and marry his high school sweetheart while Brady had gone off to college. They had less in common every time they saw each other, but that only made them like each other more as the years passed. When Riley’s marriage with Rae had busted up, he’d come down to stay with Brady in Denver for a while, until he got his head back on straight enough to carry on.

  Tonight, Brady was glad their friendship didn’t require a whole lot of talking. No chance, then, that he’d accidentally say something he really shouldn’t about what his best friend’s little sister was wearing.

  “What is she doing here?” he asked, mildly enough, with no mention of that freaking tank top.

  Riley shook his head, his dark gaze moving restlessly from one questionable character to the next in the dim lighting. The jukebox swung from country to rock as over at the pool table, two gentlemen who clearly belonged to a couple of the Harleys parked outside disagreed about something that had the rest of their friends moving to pull them apart.

  But this was the Coyote, where a man minded his own business unless he wanted a bloody nose for his trouble. Or worse, a broken bottle over the head.

  “I have no idea what she’s doing,” Riley muttered. “She showed up at Sunday dinner and announced she was moving out. And when everyone freaked out, she laughed. We all told her we wouldn’t help her do something so dumb, and she didn’t care. She moved herself and then told us not to visit her. Can you believe that?”

  Brady looked over toward the bar with new interest, though he shouldn’t have. If the look on Amanda’s face was anything to go by, she was not pleased that two of her brothers were now standing there, intimidating the other patrons. He looked at her face and only her face. He did not look any lower. Then he swung his gaze back to Riley.

  “I know you all like to do it up commune style over there at the Bar K,” he drawled. “But it’s actually normal not to want to live with your family. You know that, right?”

  “We ha
ve thousands of acres, and we each have our own spread,” Riley replied. “We’re not exactly living in one another’s pockets. How is an apartment over the Coyote better than the land?”

  “You’re talking to a man who spent the last ten months living in his parents’ house,” Brady pointed out. He didn’t touch the land part because his opinions on albatrosses and generations of needless toil were not exactly welcome around here. Certainly not by people who’d given their lives over to said albatrosses and needless toil. “An apartment over the Coyote sounds pretty good right about now, especially with the new baby in the house. Do you know how loud babies are?”

  A hint of a smile moved around on Riley’s mouth, which was the equivalent of full-scale laughter from him. “That’s why I’ve never wanted any.”

  “It’s getting a little crowded.” Brady shrugged. “But I only have a few months left. I’m assuming your sister has to be of legal age if she’s working behind the bar here.”

  He raised his brows at Riley, who frowned. “She’s twenty-two.”

  Brady tapped his glass. “Ten years ago, there’s no way I would have spent a summer in my parents’ house. Much less lived there forever with no end in sight. And neither did you, if I remember it right.”

  “It’s different,” Riley grunted. He jerked his chin at Amanda as she served drinks farther down the bar, ignoring her brothers as they hulked there on one end, sending evil looks at anyone who spoke to her. “I was married. Just look at her. She’s like Snow White. And Brady, the people who spend time in a place like this are not Disney dwarves.”

  Brady did not want to look at Amanda. Because no matter how he chanted to himself that he should be seeing scraggly braids and dirt on her cheeks, like she was still about seven years old, he didn’t.

  No, he really didn’t.

  He decided he needed to stop drinking whiskey before he forgot his amiable nature. So when Jensen ambled their way with enough beers to go around, he took one gratefully.