The Last Real Cowboy

by Caitlin Crews

  Brady knew things had changed for Ty. He’d lived through those changes himself, right here. But it still took him by surprise when instead of hiding behind a sharp-edged grin and an answer that sounded considered when it was actually evasive, Ty laughed.

  “I’ve never been a morning person,” he said. “Can’t say that’s changed. Though there’s a lot to recommend an early morning with Hannah before Jack wakes up.”

  Ty and Hannah were newlyweds, in a sense. They’d married about two years ago, in secret. Then Ty had gotten stomped by a bull and forgotten all about it. The wedding they’d had a week or so back had celebrated no more secrets and no more hiding. Now they were honeymooners with a one-year-old son. As far as Brady could tell, they both seemed to like the unconventionality of it all. Then again, what else could you expect from rodeo people?

  “You mean the quiet moments of contemplation and prayer each morning, of course,” Brady deadpanned.

  Ty smirked. “God comes up a lot, as a matter of fact.”

  Brady rolled his eyes. Ty laughed at his own joke, then pushed his way inside the ranch house to the kitchen, letting out a blast of heat and light and the scent of bacon.

  It was hard for Brady to keep telling himself he wanted nothing to do with this place when something like that could wallop him the way it did. The smell of bacon in the air reminded him of the few good moments in his childhood. It was morning on the ranch, through and through.

  He stayed outside, breathing in the last of the night and that fresh, crisp breeze that came straight down from the mountains. Horses and dirt, green things and far-off snow, plus coffee and bacon. Home.

  These days, home was a lot more welcoming that it ever had been while Brady was growing up.

  He could see his two sisters-in-law bustling around the kitchen through the windows, not talking at this hour, but clearly working together in a way no one in his family ever had in his memory. It made something kick in him, like the scent of bacon, warm in the dark. Like another kind of homecoming.

  Brady had always liked Abby. She’d only been a year or so behind Brady in school. She’d also been their closest neighbor, a few miles away in the old Douglas farmhouse where her grandmother had raised her and still lived. Abby had been widely known for her decency and practicality at age twelve—learned at her equally no-nonsense grandmother’s knee, everyone agreed. This morning, she had baby Bart strapped to her chest as she cooked up the farmhouse breakfast she liked to make each day before she sent Gray out into the fields.

  Hannah, on the other hand, Brady had disliked on sight when she’d turned up earlier in the summer. He’d wanted to know where she’d been when Ty was in the hospital, recovering from his injuries. What kind of wife left her husband hurt and alone?

  But he’d come around on Hannah too, and there was no arguing with the fact that once Ty got his memory back—after a memorable, if foolish, eight seconds on the back of the bull that had stomped him two years earlier—he was happier with Hannah and their son than Brady had ever seen him.

  Happiness was going around. Like homecomings.

  Brady turned around, there at the bottom of the steps that led into the kitchen where his brothers’ happiness babbled in toddler-speak and smelled like bacon and love, and took in the land.

  The albatross. The ancient history of the Everett family in dirt and crops and cattle, stretching out across hundreds of acres. This land had been a torment and a teacher, a paradise and a prison. It still was.

  Amos had made them work along beside him when they were kids, learning the family business one tough chore at a time. He’d punished any hint of weakness. Severely. Gray had taken to it early, and by the time they’d all gotten to high school, their roles had been firmly laid out before them. The same way the ranch was laid out. The ranch house here, the corral there, and the barns and outbuildings close enough that rope could be laid out between them should the weather get so bad it threatened visibility. Farther out, the old family graveyard hunkered like a threat next to the cold river full of snowmelt that had given the ranch and the town and the whole freaking area its name.

  Everything here felt preordained, especially family positions. Gray was the responsible one. Ty was the charming one. And Brady was the eternal pain in the butt.

  Sometimes Amos had upgraded that to the smart one, but that wasn’t a compliment.

  Brady could remember being ten or so, raising a pig for the FFA and feeling like the man he’d always thought he’d become as he cared for that pig. He’d fed it, grown it, then taken it to market. Back then, he’d never questioned that he would stay here, another Everett in the shadow of these mountains, eking out the same existence so many of his ancestors had. Eight years later, he’d taken the free ride to the University of Colorado at Boulder he’d won with those smarts Amos sneered at, driven himself out of these mountains in the rickety old truck he’d bought with his own money, and had never planned to return for more than a brief visit.

  These days, he felt strung out somewhere between those two visions of his future. And he’d never been much of a tightrope walker. When his father had raged, Brady had done his best to fade into the walls around him.

  He’d spent years telling himself that was why no one could see him. And still couldn’t.

  But it was too early in the morning—and he had too much of a headache—to dig around in the swamp of his family memories. He concentrated on the view instead.

  The sun was taking its time these days, sending glimmers of hope over the mountains in streaks of gold and red. Fall was already coming, and every hint of crispness brought with it the promise of winter right behind it. There was already snow on the highest peaks, and this was Colorado. There could as easily be a blizzard tomorrow as a gorgeous summer day. Both, maybe.

  His grandmother had always liked that kind of contradictory weather. She’d called it a fox’s wedding when it rained while the sun was shining.

  Which for some reason made him think about Amanda Kittredge.

  In that tank top of doom.

  Brady had all of that sitting on him, uneasily, when he saw Gray’s headlights coming back in from his initial run up through the fields to check on the stock and the fences.

  He waited as his brother parked in the yard, then swung out of his truck. People claimed the Everett brothers favored one another, but Brady had never thought so. Gray looked the way he always did, like he was chipped from the same granite that made mountains around here. And Ty had always seemed to shine a little brighter.

  “Don’t tell me you’re lurking out here to come at me with another one of your multilevel marketing schemes.” Gray didn’t raise his voice in the slightest as he walked toward the ranch house, but still, it echoed. “If you start talking about leggings or skin care products, I can’t promise I won’t snap.”

  All thoughts of happy homes and granite faded into the usual kick of irritation that colored every interaction Brady had with his oldest brother. “When have I ever tried to involve you in a multilevel marketing scheme? Or any scheme at all?”

  “Llama farms. Hemp milk latte nonsense. Whatever, I’m not interested.”

  “Again with the llamas.” Brady shook his head, wondering if one of these days, he’d grind his back teeth down to dust. “I was watching the sunrise, actually. But it’s good to know you really don’t listen to a single word I say about anything.”

  There was a time when a comment like that would have gotten a sharp rebuke from Gray, but not this morning. He didn’t look like he was carrying all four hundred acres of the ranch right there on his shoulders any longer. He only looked amused.

  It wasn’t much better.

  “I’ll tell you what I tell Becca, Brady. You want to be treated like an adult, then act like one.”

  In the split second Brady took to wrestle with his temper, he knew three things. One, Gray wanted him to lose it, whether he would admit it or not. It would prove every point he’d ever made about Brady still being a
kid. Two, it was unwise to imagine that because Gray was mellowing about some things now that he had a new wife and baby, that meant he was in any way mellow overall.

  And three, Amos had done his job too well.

  Brady didn’t know what he was going to have to do to get Gray to treat him—not like an equal. That was impossible to imagine when a person had as much faith in his own authority as Gray did. But as his associate. As his brother.

  “Does your sixteen-year-old daughter have ideas for the diversification of the family’s ranching assets with respective business plans?” Brady asked, aware there was an edge in his voice. It was better than all that gravel and spleen. “I can’t wait to see them. I’ve always said she was the brightest of all my nieces.”

  Gray did that thing where he didn’t actually smile, but still, the smirk came right on through. “It’s too early for this. You never wanted any part of this life. You don’t now. Diversification isn’t going to fix that problem.”

  They’d been having some or other version of this argument for ten months. Brady couldn’t decide if that was better or worse than the previous entire lifetime in which they hadn’t talked about anything. Nothing real, anyway.

  “I have a degree in evolutionary biology. I always wanted to be a rancher, Gray. Just not a poor one.”

  Gray’s face took on that familiar, forbidding cast. “I didn’t realize I had a cash flow problem.”

  “Does any ranch not have a cash flow problem?”

  “We’re fine. The ranch is fine. There aren’t bankers trying to take a bite out of us, at present, anyway. The only people concerned with my bottom line are the realtors and property developers you sicced on us.”

  Brady wasn’t going to touch that one. He’d considered the calls he’d made to developers and realtors after Amos had died due diligence. Gray viewed it as a betrayal.

  “The fundamental problem with any kind of agricultural lifestyle is that you’re always one or two bad seasons away from disaster,” Brady said instead, keeping his voice neutral. “You might not remember those bad years when we were kids, but I do.”

  “I remember them. I’m older than you.”

  “Really? Weird. You should probably bring that up constantly and use it as some kind of weapon. Just to switch things up.”

  “You’re hilarious, Denver.”

  “Diversification means no one season can take you down,” Brady said patiently. “No more and no less. Whatever feelings you have about llama hemp farms or skin care marketing schemes, or progress, in general, or the fact it’s me telling you this and what could I possibly know about anything, that’s the simple truth.”

  “Stop ambushing me, Brady.” Gray’s voice was hard. “I want my breakfast. And then we have fences to mend.”

  He didn’t wait for Brady to reply, because Gray Everett waited for no man. And he wasn’t into metaphors either. He meant the literal fences Brady sometimes thought he went out and knocked down himself to keep them busy with the repairs. Gray shouldered his way into the house, leaving Brady outside with nothing but the late-rising September sun for company.

  That and the specter of Amanda Kittredge’s tank top, his hangover, and the usual mix of frustration and temper that marked almost every interaction he had with his family members when the topic was the ranch.

  “Welcome home, idiot,” he muttered to himself, the way he’d done a lot these last ten months. “You gave up your entire life to help out, and this is your reward.”

  The worst part, always, was that it still surprised him.

  The question he couldn’t seem to answer was what he could do to change this same old conversation when that was the heart of the matter right there. Brady thought change was the future. Gray thought it was the enemy.

  And as long as Gray kept thinking it was the enemy, he was bound and determined to think Brady was too.

  * * *

  Much later in the day, as the afternoon began to roll toward a golden finish, Brady was driving along yet another stretch of fencing way off in one of the upper pastures. He tensed when he saw a pickup coming from the other direction, expecting it to be Gray. No doubt out to issue more orders and make it clear how unimpressed he was with whatever Brady might be doing.

  But it wasn’t Gray. It wasn’t even Ty, who did a great many of the same things Gray did, but with a lot more smirk and sarcasm to spice things up.

  Brady recognized Riley’s truck some distance off and ignored the resurgence of that headache in his temples. He aimed his pickup in his friend’s direction, both of them bumping over the long, dry riverbed that marked one of the boundaries between Everett and Kittredge land.

  Back in the late 1800s, there’d been a twenty-year feud between the two families as they’d wrestled over this particular stretch of land out here, where there was nothing but sky above and mountains all around. Each family claimed the other had taken the first shot. There’d been bad feelings for years. But then, or so the story went, Buck Everett and Caleb Kittredge had walked off into the higher elevations one summer night as enemies and surprised everyone by coming back down both alive … and friends.

  The two families had been more or less on the same page ever since.

  Something that would change in a heartbeat if Riley had the faintest notion that Brady had even noticed his sister’s tank top.… or had felt the need to stick around and talk to her. Alone. Much less go on home and numb himself against any further thoughts concerning her.

  “Nice day,” Riley said when they drew up next to each other, window to window with only the fence between them.

  “Not bad,” Brady agreed.

  It had taken him years down in Boulder, then Denver proper, to understand that when city folks talked about the weather, it was small talk. But it was never small talk out here. Or never only small talk. Out here, people made their living from soil and beast, weather and hope. Out here, a simple change in the weather could herald doom. A heavy rain could cause flooding. A drought could wreck the crops. Wind could destroy whatever it found in its path, and an early frost could destroy a year’s careful farming. A storm could drive wild things out of their usual habitats and into the middle of a carefully tended herd.

  And if you were friends with your neighbors, the way most folks around here were in some or other fashion, that meant you’d be called to help salvage what was left.

  A nice day was a blessing—a reprieve, a wish—all around.

  “I couldn’t tell which one of you was angrier last night,” Brady heard himself say. “The three of you. Or her.”

  For the first time since he’d come home for Christmas and stayed on, it occurred to him that maybe his brothers weren’t entirely wrong about him.

  You can’t help yourself, can you? Ty had asked him after another round or two with Gray the other night after an otherwise perfectly pleasant dinner. You have to stir it up.

  That was something Brady was going to have to think about. Later. Assuming Riley, who’d known him his entire life, couldn’t read his unfortunate thoughts about Amanda all over his face.

  Riley shoved his cowboy hat back from low on his brow, his dark eyes grim. “She has no idea what she’s doing. She doesn’t think she’s sheltered, but she is. She always has been.”

  Any doubts Brady might have had about whether or not he liked to stir things up disappeared then, because he was smiling blandly at his friend instead of commiserating. “I would have thought that the fact she wanted to move out in the first place means she knows exactly how sheltered she is.”

  Then he felt guilty because Riley didn’t react like it was a challenge. He only shrugged. “Amanda thinks none of us sympathize with what it’s like to be her age. We all remember how much we thought we knew. And how adult we thought we were.”

  Brady considered it an act of supreme self-sacrifice not to mention Riley’s wedding occurred when he was younger than Amanda was now. Much less what became of his marriage.

  Riley was still talking. “
Her problem is, she’s too much like our mother. Offer her a helping hand and chances are, she’ll mistake it for a fist. Every time.”

  “Looking on the bright side, a fist will come in handy down at the Coyote.”

  A little curve appeared in the corner of Riley’s mouth. “I sure do appreciate you putting out these fires instead of starting them.”

  “My pleasure.”

  “But that’s why you’re perfect.”

  “That’s what I’ve been telling everyone for years. I’m tickled you noticed.”

  Riley ignored that. “Amanda obviously can’t handle having her brothers in there.”

  “Can Amanda not handle it?” Brady thought she’d handled it fine. “Or is it Harry and his gun that’s more concerning?”

  “Either way, you’re the perfect plan B.”

  “Plan B?”

  But even as he asked the question, Brady had an inkling he wasn’t going to like the answer.

  “Just keep an eye on her,” Riley said. “She trusts you. More than us, anyway.”

  “Keep an eye on her? Babysit her, you mean.”

  “Call it whatever you want. It will be great to know that even if we’re not there, you will be. You’re in the Coyote all the time, anyway.”

  Something Riley knew because he was too. But Brady had that tank top on the brain. And more, that odd moment alone in the dark. He had definitely not been filled up to unwieldiness with notions of babysitting.

  His gut twisted at that, because it felt like more of the same old thing. The way Gray talked down to him, so kneejerk and dismissive. The way Riley was acting like Brady couldn’t possibly be a threat to his sister the way he thought every other man alive was. Brady was tempted to get a complex about whether or not he’d actually blended into the wall when he was a kid after all.

  But what could he say? Sorry, buddy, but your sister is too surprisingly hot for me to babysit. Did you really look at that tank top?

  Not if he wanted to remain friends with Riley. Or stay alive.

  So he tried to look as unthreatening as Riley clearly believed he was. Toothless and soft.