“I did change her diaper,” he drawled. “What’s a little babysitting on top of it?”
His oldest, best friend smiled. As far as Riley ever smiled, that was. Then he nodded once, like they’d shaken hands on it. “I knew I could count on you.”
Which only made Brady feel worse.
They talked about nothing in particular for a few more minutes, and then Riley drove off, kicking up dirt as he went. Leaving Brady to sit there in a dried-up riverbed, on his own beneath the mocking sky and mountains that saw too much for his peace of mind, trying to convince himself that he was no liar.
That he could do what Riley wanted him to do and watch over little Amanda Kittredge like she was a member of his family. Like she was his baby sister too.
Because until last night, if he thought of her at all, that’s exactly how he would have described her.
“No problem,” he said, out loud to the fence. The dried-up sediment beneath his wheels. The watchful sky. “No problem at all.”
One way or another, he’d get back there. To that place where Amanda was safely in the sister-he-never-had zone, no tank tops or strange moments, and certainly no ideas that required a whiskey chaser to erase from his head. He would get back there if he had to beat himself up. And if he had to beat up every last fool in the Coyote who imagined he could get a piece of his best friend’s baby sister, so be it. He would.
Brady would do this. He vowed it, then and there.
Because he had no other choice.
4
Amanda’s new apartment was small, smelled forlorn, and had fallen far short of her standards of cleanliness when she’d taken possession of it. Someone had swept it. Maybe.
The first thing she did was clean the place. When she was done, the wood floors gleamed. And the windows, initially grimy with years’ worth of buildup and a great many other things she didn’t want to identify, sparkled as they let the late-summer light pour in.
With all the light dancing everywhere, and the smell of lemons and elbow grease instead of sadness and neglect, the apartment no longer felt cramped. It felt cozy. A place that could actually be a home.
Even if it was lodged there on top of the most notorious building in the whole of the Longhorn Valley.
The Coyote owed at least part of its disreputable reputation to its location, down by the river but across from the town proper. Back in the gold rush days, the Coyote had been one of a number of buildings that constituted the town’s red-light district. When a few concerned citizens—the historical record suggested they were less hopped up on righteousness than looking to avoid paying off their debts—set fire to the infamous bordello next door, the rest of the buildings on this side of the river burned down with it. But the Coyote stood tall.
The building remained empty until the early 1900s, when it was finally sold and repaired. It had existed as a watering hole of one sort or another ever since. These days, its location provided its clientele with the same privacy this side of the river always had. Visitors could drive in from out of town and turn down the riverside road before anyone saw them. Residents could show up for a dark night of debauchery without necessarily advertising their intentions up and down the length of Main Street.
Amanda liked being a part of so much history, especially because it was all so scandalous. She particularly liked the fact that anyone lucky enough to be living in the apartments above the bar had views of the river, the bridge that crossed it, and the whole of pretty little Cold River nestled there outside her windows. From the two church steeples to the Grand Hotel, with the mountains rising up behind like an embrace. Or a warning. As this was Colorado and those were the Rockies, usually both at once.
She loved it.
When Amanda had left her parents’ house, she’d taken nothing with her she couldn’t fit into her tiny hatchback. But by the end of her first week in her new apartment, she’d assembled a delightfully ragtag assortment of furniture that didn’t go together at all and yet somehow worked together beautifully, thanks to friends and the local flea market.
By the time Connor showed up to drive her out to Sunday dinner the following week—obviously so he could spy on her new place and report back—she was proud of the whole thing. She’d done it. She’d moved out. She had a key on her keychain that unlocked a door to a space that was only hers.
Not a hand-me-down. Not up for debate. Not something she had to share whether she wanted to or not. Hers.
Amanda really didn’t see that getting old any time soon.
“Wow,” Connor said, leaning against one of her beautifully clean walls just inside the door. With a typically jerky sort of expression on his face. “Really, monkey? You look like you’re living in a garage sale.”
“I don’t recall asking for your opinion.” Amanda shoved him back out into the hall. She slammed her door shut behind her, then locked it. Her door. Her lock. “And you want to know why? Because I’ve seen where you live. It looks like a hunting magazine threw up all over your cabin.”
“If you mean, it looks like a man lives there, sure.”
“You’re not invited into my home, Connor. Ever.”
He treated her to an eye roll. “Okay.”
“Anything that works on vampires should work on annoying brothers too.”
“Should I be concerned that you’re talking about vampires?” He stopped at the top of the metal staircase out back, then stuck his face much too close to hers. “Are you on drugs?”
“I’m not on drugs.” Her throat actually hurt, then, from not screaming at him. “But I’m taking my own car.”
Because she wouldn’t put it past any of them to “accidentally” strand her on the Bar K when she had to be at work, claiming they couldn’t possibly make the thirty-minute drive into town for whatever reason. And then ignoring her protests, the way they liked to do.
“Your stubbornness is going to get you in trouble,” Zack growled at her over her mother’s mashed potatoes a little while later, more sheriff than big brother.
“Has yours?” she replied sweetly.
He glared. She smiled.
Amanda enjoyed confounding her brothers, who all acted like her wanting a life was a deep, personal betrayal. For once, she enjoyed not giving in because it was easier, or to smooth things over.
But she was honest enough to admit to herself when she was out of their clutches, away from their commentary, and driving too fast on the county road toward town that she probably would have caved already if it hadn’t been for Miss Martina Patrick, the first and foremost of Cold River’s small but notable spinster population.
Miss Patrick was the cautionary tale Amanda and her friends had told one another while they were growing up, unlike the much younger Harriet Barnett, who had made more recent cat and life choices. Miss Patrick was the longest serving secretary in Cold River High’s history. And if the yearbooks Amanda’s friend Katrina Hastings had dug up in the town library when she’d been supposed to be working at the B&B were any indication, she grew more ferociously pursed-mouthed every year. She lived alone in a tiny house in town, not far from the high school that she referred to as the center of her existence, from which she delighted in calling in parking violations to the sheriff’s office. She had an indeterminate number of cats. She doted on the high school’s crotchety old principal, cared for her elderly mother, and deeply disapproved of all the students in the school—an enduring opinion she was never too shy to share with any of them. And their parents. And anyone else who didn’t run off before she could bend their ear about the sad state of American youth.
Every nightmare Amanda had ever had about finding herself an old, burned-out husk of a woman was about Miss Patrick and her infamous bitterness. About turning into Miss Patrick whether she liked it or not.
Perhaps sensing that Amanda was weakening in the face of so much brotherly disapproval, Kat rolled out the big guns while she helped Amanda arrange things in her apartment one night.
“You should abs
olutely move back home,” she said, innocently washing dishes that didn’t need to be washed while Amanda wrestled with shelf liners she didn’t think her kitchen cabinets needed. But her mother had pressed a roll of them on her as if it was the Holy Grail, so of course, Amanda was going to use them. Ellie was the type who would check. “Once you do, it should only take another few years for the early stages of Miss Patrick-ism begin to show.”
“You’re a terrible person.”
“You know what I mean. A sudden collection of cats and too-shiny purses. And also the uncontrollable need to make unsolicited comments and moral judgments about other women’s clothing. To them.”
“A terrible person, Kat, and a worse friend.”
“After that, it’s the kind of disease that picks up speed, but don’t worry. I think it’s painless. Next thing you know, you’ll start doing that thing with your mouth.”
Kat demonstrated, but she was laughing too hard to mimic Miss Patrick as perfectly as she usually did. And had been doing since they’d started high school.
Amanda tried not to laugh. “For all you know, Miss Patrick’s mouth came that way.”
Kat slapped the faucet off and wiped at her forehead, leaving a trail of bubbles behind. She looked up at Amanda, balanced there on the counter as she wrestled the unnecessary shelf liner into place.
She was still laughing, but her gaze was serious. “Miss Patrick isn’t something that just happens. No one’s born that mean, Amanda. It’s a choice. Just like this apartment is a choice.”
A choice Amanda knew her friend would make in a heartbeat if she could, and likely would, when her long-term boyfriend finally got back from the navy and made good on all his promises. She knew that was why Kat looked more sad than serious, even though she was still smiling.
“If you let other people dictate your life,” Kat asked softly, “how can you ever be sure you’re the one living it?”
* * *
Later that night, Amanda served drinks at the Coyote, found various ways to smile for tips while discouraging hands on her body, and found herself searching every dim corner for one particular broad-shouldered cowboy.
But Brady wasn’t there.
She shivered every time she thought about the conversation they’d had out behind the bar. Despite all the moving, cleaning, and nesting, she’d thought about it a lot. She’d waited her whole life for him to actually see her, and she could have sworn that he did—even if it was next to the garbage.
There was probably a message in that.
She was thinking happily about messages and Brady’s deliciously raspy drawl, when a couple of women she knew came in, draped more in laughter and cigarette smoke than clothes. They settled themselves at the bar, midway through a typically too-loud and inappropriate conversation. They did the same thing in the coffeehouse. Kathleen Gillespie and Tracie Jakes had been some years ahead of her in school and had always fancied themselves far too sophisticated to talk to younger girls like Amanda, but because this was Cold River, Amanda knew their stories anyway.
Amanda had always admired them. Because she cared too much about what other people thought, while doubting such concerns had ever plagued either one of the women sitting in front of her, both of them as dangerously pretty as they’d been when they were terrorizing the boys in high school.
Tracie narrowed her eyes at Amanda when she came to take their drink order. “You’re that little Kittredge girl.”
“I’m afraid so.”
“Your brothers let you work here? Really?”
A question Amanda had already gotten too often, and always in that same scandalized tone. She’d learned to smile innocently. “I didn’t actually ask them.”
“If you’re a Kittredge, you know Brady Everett,” Kathleen said from the stool beside her friend. If she personally recognized Amanda, she didn’t show it. She swiveled to peer into the rest of the dimly lit, crowded bar instead. “Has he been here yet tonight?”
Amanda turned about seventeen different shades of red at the sound of his name, but neither woman was paying attention to her, both too busy scanning the crowd.
“No,” she managed to say, when they turned back to her. “I haven’t seen him around.”
Tracie and Kathleen looked at each other and laughed. As if they had deep, intimate, extremely personal knowledge of Brady. Something a whole lot more than a few words next to a dumpster.
Amanda couldn’t serve them their drinks and escape to the other end of the bar fast enough.
Wake up, idiot, she snapped at herself as she angrily wiped down a spill that didn’t need even half the attention she lavished on it. Whatever happened, it was only a Brady moment for you.
Because Brady might—might—have seen her as something other than a child for thirty strange seconds out there in the dark. But that certainly wasn’t the same as seeing her as an actual woman. No one seemed to be able to make that leap.
Tracie and Kathleen, on the other hand, had barely been girls when they’d been in high school. They’d always been like this, advanced beyond their years and ripe with all the feminine secrets no one had ever taught Amanda. If they were waiting around for Brady to turn up, why would he ever bother to look past them to someone like Amanda?
He wouldn’t. He won’t.
That was when she decided it was high time she found herself a man who didn’t know she was a Kittredge, didn’t know a single one of her brothers, or better yet, didn’t care.
Not to keep. Just to try. Because clearly, she needed to learn things. She needed to have as many experiences as she could while she could. She needed to try being more like Tracie and Kathleen and see where that got her. She needed to hurry up and throw herself into these things before she looked in the mirror one morning and saw Miss Patrick looking back at her.
She lifted a hand to her mouth to check for unconscious pursing and thankfully found her lips in their normal shape. Even so, she had the sinking sensation that it was already too late.
It’s only too late when you give up, her mother liked to say.
Amanda might not know what she was doing, exactly, but she wasn’t giving up. She refused to give up.
When she was done with her shift at eleven, there were still a few hours before closing, and Amanda decided there was no time like the present to keep turning over this new leaf. She dipped into the bathroom to freshen up and practice that sultry, knowing look she’d seen Tracie and Kathleen fling around earlier. They obviously knew what they were doing, since they were both currently giggling in the corner with two men Amanda vaguely recognized as paid hands from Cold River Ranch.
“There’s no reason you too can’t flirt with a paid hand,” she told her reflection brightly. “Or anyone else.”
She pulled her hair out of the ponytail she kept it in to work, tousled it, and then gave herself permission to flirt outrageously. With … whoever. It was only flirting, right? She could do that. She was sure she could do that. She’d always been a quick learner.
Amanda flung open the door, threw herself into the hall mid-pep talk, and then stopped dead.
Because Brady was standing there, blocking the door that opened into the main part of the bar. And taking up far too much of what air there was in this back hallway that led out to the dumpster of oddly charged moments.
Amanda tried to be surreptitious as she reached down and pinched herself viciously on the thigh. She needed to make sure she hadn’t tripped and smacked her head in the bathroom and was even now crumpled in a sticky corner, dreaming she could conjure up Brady Everett at will.
Ouch.
He was apparently real. And he looked edgy tonight in a way the knots in her belly told her was dangerous. Very, very dangerous.
His dark gaze dragged over her, and she could feel it like another sharp pinch. It was almost as if he were running rough hands from the low-cut T-shirt she wore down over her jeans, then back up to linger on her hair where it fell over her shoulders.
His mouth t
ightened, and he didn’t look pursed-mouthed. He looked grim.
And delicious.
Ridiculously delicious, in fact, all shoulders and that tall, lean body of his that he’d packed into nothing more exciting than a black T-shirt and jeans.
And yet looking at him was like surrendering to a roller coaster ride, only Amanda had no desire whatsoever to close her eyes.
He was a little too much cowboy tonight, which should have seemed a bit funny when he was the Everett brother who’d gone off to live in the city. But there wasn’t the faintest hint of city slicker around him. Especially with that pissed-off look on his face and the scowl he wore.
Which for reasons Amanda couldn’t begin to fathom, he was aiming straight at her.
“My shift is over,” she said, as if he’d asked.
She would have thought that was obvious. She’d gotten rid of her apron, let her hair down, and leaned in hard to her favorite lip gloss. But he was still scowling at her.
“That means you should be going home. To bed.” In case she might have been tempted to imagine that was some kind of surly invitation, he kept going. “Don’t you have to work at Abby’s coffeehouse in the morning? You need your sleep.”
“I’m sorry, you’re going to have to catch me up.” Amanda tilted her head slightly to one side as she gazed up at him, trying to puzzle out that grim look he wore. “Since when have you given the slightest bit of thought to my schedule? Or even known that I had a schedule, for that matter? Or, while we’re on the subject, the fact that I even exist?”
He looked affronted. “I know you exist.”
“Right, right. Diapers, brothers, blah blah blah. That’s all been true for twenty-two years. Why am I now suddenly subject to dramatic silences in parking lots, and this … looming thing in the hallway of a bar?”
She thought for a moment a muscle in his jaw flexed, but the light back here was weak, and she was sure she was mistaken.
“There’s a door at the end of this hallway, leading out back,” Brady told her, his voice hard. “Out back, where there is also a private staircase that leads directly to your new apartment. There’s no need for you to walk back into the bar.”
The Last Real Cowboy Page 5
