“It might surprise you to learn that our baby sister is not that psyched we’re here,” Jensen said, nodding to Brady as he took a seat. “She’s getting downright salty.”
“She can be as salty as she wants,” Riley muttered. “I don’t like how any of these degenerates are looking at her.”
Brady made sure his gaze was on his beer. He’d never felt more like a degenerate, and less like getting his sin on, in his entire life.
“I don’t think any Cold River locals will be dumb enough to do anything,” Jensen said, a certain gleam in his eyes that reminded Brady that while Riley had a reputation as the most dangerous of the brothers, Jensen had always been a force to be reckoned with. The man played with forest fires for fun, for God’s sake. Some people might call that a death wish, but either way, Brady felt sorry for the poor fool who might put himself in Jensen’s crosshairs.
“Brady figures Amanda wants a little privacy,” Riley said, tipping his beer bottle Brady’s way. “After all, none of us stayed in the big house with Mom and Dad as long as she has.”
Jensen took his time taking a pull from his beer. Then he shifted his arresting gaze to Brady, and let it sit there a while.
Instantly, Brady felt like an awkward kid again. Jensen was four years older than Riley, and therefore Brady, and he’d been off doing man things while the two of them were still figuring out what being a man even meant. Brady had been pretty clear that he was going to do whatever his father hadn’t, but that still left a lot of road to cover. Jensen had always seemed to understand every curve in that road.
Brady couldn’t say he liked revisiting that old sensation now. He already had two older brothers. It irritated him that for all intents and purposes, he might as well have two more in the form of Jensen and Zack Kittredge. With the added bonus of not being a blood relative, so if they had the slightest notion he’d noticed their sister’s backside at all, they’d tear him limb from limb. Happily.
“You sound like our mother,” Jensen said. He sounded disgusted. “I can’t for the life of me recall the last time Ellie Kittredge had a positive thing to say about anything, and yet there she was, not only supportive, but helping Amanda pack.”
“Female solidarity?” Brady ventured.
Riley shook his head. “I didn’t think that was something Mom did.”
“If Amanda wanted to move out of the big house, there are a lot of ways she could have done it that make more sense in this,” Jensen said, as if he was arguing his case to the table. Clearly the actual recipient of this argument had been less receptive. “I don’t like where this is headed. Feels like trouble.”
“It’s already trouble,” Riley muttered darkly, glaring around into all the Coyote’s shadows.
Connor appeared then, dropping into the booth as well. Brady was walled in by overly large Kittredges, all of them with a mood on. Something that would not have boded well on any night, but was particularly dangerous in the current circumstances. That being their baby sister behind the bar of the Coyote, looking like she belonged there.
“That tank top is indecent,” Connor said hotly. “I told her so.”
Brady was going to be dreaming about that tank top for the rest of his natural life, but he didn’t have time to scrub his face clean of any hint he might be thinking such suicidal things because Amanda came storming up to the booth herself.
Brady focused on the center of her forehead. Nothing else, God help him.
“There’s nothing indecent about this tank top, Connor,” she snapped at her brother, pitching her voice so it could be heard perfectly well over the music. “Unless what you’re trying to tell me is that every girl you’ve ever dated was something a whole lot worse than indecent. I think we all remember the time Missy Minton showed up at the church picnic with her shirt cut down to here.”
Brady, trapped in the booth by three scowling Kittredges, did not need the visual she provided. She poked her finger directly into the area of her body that he was absolutely not looking at. Certainly not that low down, where he could see the upper edge of the bra she was wearing—
Or he could have seen it, lacy and blue, had he been looking there. Which he wasn’t. Because he wanted to live through the night.
“Missy was a misunderstood being of great generosity,” Connor said piously. “She liked to share. She was that good.”
Amanda rolled her eyes, her hands settling on her hips again. Brady could not understand what was happening to him. Why was he suddenly so aware of her? All those curves must have been there this whole time—a vaguely disquieting notion—but he’d never noticed them before. He’d never noticed her before, really. Not as anything more than one more facet of Cold River that he forgot about when he went down to Denver. Hadn’t he seen her at that Labor Day thing Abby and Hannah had wanted to throw out at the ranch to celebrate the many Everett family changes over the past year? He racked his brain and came up with a vague memory of her smiling at something. Gray’s new baby, if he had to guess.
He certainly couldn’t remember her hips.
Maybe it was because she was here. Put a girl into a den of iniquity and it didn’t matter if she was sweet. She was here. That made her fair game.
Her brothers had a point.
“Listen up, idiots,” Amanda said, her gaze hot but her voice controlled. Brady shouldn’t have been offended that she was including him in that, even though he was clearly acting like a grade A fool tonight. “It’s not me who’s going to throw you out of here if you don’t stop it. Harry takes a very dim view of men who harass his bartenders.”
They all looked over at Harry Ahearn, the grizzled owner of the Coyote, who sat on his stool at one end of the bar, kept his shotgun within reach, and had no qualms whatsoever about shooting up his own ceiling to shut down a fight.
“We’re not harassing you,” Connor threw back at her. “We’re trying to protect you.”
“From yourself, apparently,” Brady chimed in, because she was glaring at him too.
For some reason, that made Amanda’s eyes blaze. All that hazel lit into liquid gold, and something in him kicked. Hard.
“You’re not family.” She sounded like he’d sunk a knife in her back. “You have no excuse.”
Riley made a scoffing sound. “Brady might as well be family. He’s known you since you were born. Mom made us learn how to change your diapers together.”
Brady really could not have said why he … didn’t like that. At all. Especially because it was true.
Amanda looked like she was on the verge of homicide. It reminded Brady that she was, in fact, a Kittredge. Just like her hotheaded, rabble-rousing brothers.
“I respect the jobs all of you do,” she said. She shifted her gaze to Brady. “I would respect what you do, but no one knows what that is.”
“Oh, ouch,” Connor said lazily, and pretended to wince. “Burn.”
Brady would have died before admitting that it felt like a burn too.
Amanda was still talking. “I don’t show up to your places of business, acting like a fool, with no other purpose than to harass you. Do I?”
“Amanda,” Jensen began, a conciliatory note in his voice.
But she held up her hands. “All I ask is that you give me the same respect you would give anyone else. This is my job. I don’t care if you like it. But if you come in here, it better be to have a drink and get rowdy like everybody else. If you can’t handle that, you can head over the river to the Broken Wheel, eat some truffle fries, and stay away from me altogether.”
She didn’t wait for anyone to reply. She glared at them all, then turned on her heel and stormed off.
Brady absolutely, positively, did not watch her as she walked away.
Sometime later, when the Kittredges decided they’d better go before Amanda really lost her cool and encouraged Harry to get trigger happy, Brady left with them.
He walked out into the cool night, high up here where fall was already gathering in the mountains, and cou
ldn’t help but think he was dodging a bullet.
That didn’t make much sense, but then, it was a feeling he was getting used to after almost a whole year back here, neck-deep in family dynamics whether he liked it or not. His own family and everyone else’s family too, because that’s how small the town was.
“I don’t like this,” Connor muttered as he headed for his truck.
“Not one bit,” Jensen agreed.
Brady nodded goodbye to Riley, then swung into his own truck. He needed to head home because mornings came ugly-early on a ranch, but he didn’t move. He sat there, staring out the windows at the night sky, thick with stars above and the gentle lights of downtown Cold River, such as it was, shining on the other side of the river.
Down in Denver, he had a life. Friends. Business associates. People at his gym. He’d come home for holidays here and there because that was what sons did. That was what his friends who’d grown up elsewhere did, and Brady had learned early that it was easier to pretend his family was like other families. It was better not to talk about Amos’s rages. His drinking. The many times he’d flipped the kitchen table and broken it, until they’d taken down an old barn door and made it into a table he couldn’t break. Or that will and testament he’d liked to shuffle around with, marking and remarking it in red pen every time someone made him mad—which was always.
Brady had always been good at pretending.
Still, he’d put his entire life on hold when Gray had asked. Sometimes he liked to work up a head of steam about that, usually after Gray dismissed yet another one of his ideas or suggestions, but out here in his truck, with his hometown sparkling in the night, he didn’t bother to lie to himself.
It hadn’t been a hard decision to stay here. He’d been waiting his whole life for his family to ask for his help. To indicate, in any way at all, that he could be useful. Helpful. A part of things.
The truth was, he’d come running.
Brady watched the Kittredges drive out and a new truck filled with Coyote customers roll in, but he still didn’t start his engine. He stayed where he was.
He was closer to his brothers now than he’d ever been before, but he couldn’t say that was all that close. He knew as much about the two of them as he always had. Neither one of them knew the first thing about him. He’d watched first Gray, then Ty, come to grips with themselves, and on some level he envied that. Marriage certainly wasn’t for Brady, after growing up in the shrapnel of his parents’ nasty, bitter relationship. To say nothing of Gray’s first marriage, which had failed long before Cristina had crashed her car that terrible night.
“No, thank you,” he muttered to himself. Out loud in the cab of his truck.
But watching his brothers get their comeuppance from their wives, while satisfying, wasn’t why he was here.
Gray wanted them all to work the land, he’d said. He wanted them to experience their birthright hands-on. But Brady knew what Gray really wanted was for them all to come around to Gray’s way of thinking. To ranch the way they’d always ranched, generation after generation of Everetts stretching back to the pioneer days.
It never ceased to amaze Brady that a man whose life depended so heavily on Mother Nature’s unpredictable moods could be so devoutly disinterested in change. But that was Gray—more mountain-like than the Rockies all around him. Amos had sneered and called him a martyr. Brady thought he was a pain. And proud of it.
But he couldn’t help wondering, after spending an evening with a front-row seat to another family’s dynamics, if what he really wanted was for his older brother to take him seriously. Just once.
“Why not get out a tiny violin and play it?” he asked himself darkly. Boo freaking hoo.
A movement out of the corner of his eye caught at him, and he turned. The last thing he needed was to see Amanda again, coming out from the side door of the building, hauling a garbage bag toward the waiting dumpster. Brady had been unable to control his unwanted reaction to her inside a crowded bar. He certainly didn’t need to see what further foolishness the dark might bring.
He didn’t mean to move, but there he was, pushing the door of his truck open. Then he climbed out. And stood there.
Amanda threw her garbage bag up over the lip of the dumpster on the side of the building, then wiped her hands on the black apron she wore around her waist.
The night was dark, but the neon the Coyote used on its signs inside and out flashed pink across the parking lot and made her skin seemed to glow as she regarded him. A little too steadily for his taste.
“Did they leave you behind?” Then she sighed. “Wait. Are you babysitting me?”
“I’m not much of a babysitter.”
“Really? And here I thought you and Riley spent all your free time changing my diapers.”
It was bad enough he was talking to her in a dark parking lot when there was no one else around. But then he compounded the error by drifting closer.
“Yeah, that was one time, and I think your mother was proving a point. It put me off babies for life.”
“That was probably her goal. She’s mysterious, but if you stare long enough, there’s usually a kind of sense buried there somewhere.”
He didn’t tell her there’d been a time he’d wished strange, unreadable Ellie had been his mother instead of angry Bettina, who’d walked out on Amos and left her three sons behind without a second thought. Or a backward glance. Ellie was frosty, but she was there.
“I’m not babysitting you,” he said.
Then something changed in the air, or in him. Or maybe it had changed earlier, and he was still reeling around, playing catch-up.
He didn’t know why he’d gotten out of his truck, but he had. And she seemed to be waiting for something, standing there in the pink light with her eyes much too wide for his peace of mind.
Brady wasn’t sure he’d ever really seen her. Not until tonight. Not until he’d walked into this dive, expecting to see a pretty girl behind the bar because Harry always had at least one.
And he had, but it was her.
He couldn’t seem to come back from that.
“You know what it’s like out there,” Amanda said, her complicated gold eyes mysterious and shadowed. And a problem. “You escaped.”
He would have used that exact same word himself, and had, but he didn’t like the way she said it. “I went to college. It’s not really an escape. Just a different path.”
“A path that took you away from here. Isn’t that what everybody claims they want?”
“Not everybody.” He found himself smiling. “You know better than that, Amanda. The Kittredges, Everetts, and Douglases founded this place. Mostly, we don’t go anywhere. We sink ourselves into the ground, like roots.”
Amanda laughed. “Those roots are getting gnarled. Now that Abby Douglas took it upon herself to become Abby Everett, uniting two proud families in one fell swoop, we’re basically all a big knot.”
“Everybody claims there was no historical intermingling. But I’ve always had my doubts.”
“My grandmother keeps the family Bible in her front room. She’s written down every known Kittredge going back five generations, and no, there are no other Cold River founding families in there. I’ve looked.”
“It always seemed funny to me,” Brady said, and the weirdness of before—that strange compulsion—loosened its grip on him. He could breathe again. “Families are like countries unto themselves out here. It’s not like that in the city.”
“We’re not related, Brady,” she said, and there was a different note in her voice, then. It reminded him, again, that she wasn’t the little girl who’d tagged around after the rest of them. She was a woman. And for all he probably knew half the names in that family Bible her grandmother kept, it occurred to him that he didn’t know her at all. “You’re not one of my brothers. If you haven’t noticed, I have enough brothers already. I don’t need any more.”
“I know I’m not your brother,” he gritted out, gruffly
, and everything felt strange again.
And worse this time. Suddenly the pink from the neon light seemed too bright, and he had the notion it revealed too many things on his own face that he couldn’t control. Because he didn’t know what they were.
“Good,” Amanda said.
And with a look his way that would make her brothers take turns killing him, she turned around again and headed back for the bar door.
But this time, for an odd moment out here in the dark where no one could see, Brady stopped pretending.
He watched little Amanda Kittredge until the door slammed shut behind her.
Loud enough to snap him out of it.
And horrify him.
So deep and wide, he figured he’d need a bottle or two of the hard stuff to wash it out.
3
“Rough night?”
Ty sounded far too entertained for approximately five in the morning, which meant Brady would rather die right there in the dirt outside the barn than admit he was anything but 100 percent.
“Never better, brother,” he drawled, even forcing a grin as they walked back toward the ranch house after their early morning rounds of tending to the animals. A month ago, the summer sun would already have been peering over the eastern mountains, but now it was September. It was still dark. Brady hoped it concealed the worst of the drinking he’d done when he’d come back to the ranch last night and holed up in his bedroom—the bedroom that had been his father’s, not that he liked to draw parallels between himself and Amos—and tried his best to pretend the entire evening at the Coyote had never happened.
A common reaction to nights at the Coyote, sure. But never before had his best friend’s little sister claimed a starring role in Brady’s regrets.
“Real convincing,” Ty replied, sounding even more amused than before. “That might work better if you weren’t so bleary-eyed.”
“Since when did you become a morning person? I seem to recall you stumbling your way to the barn not so long ago.”
The Last Real Cowboy Page 3
