“No need whatsoever. Other than the fact I want to, it’s none of your business, and I’ll go wherever I please.”
He smiled, then. “You can try.”
She was not mistaking the challenging way he looked at her.
Something simmered in his dark gaze. It filled the space between them, like a visible humming. Amanda could feel it sinking into her, making her heavy. Misshapen. Twisted into knots that made her ache, though she barely understood what they were.
She had felt it a few nights ago too. Out in the dark, when the very fact that she’d been dealing with the garbage and standing next to a dumpster should have ruined the whole moment. The most Brady moment of all Brady moments up to that point. The stuff of fantasies, even. That she should appear and he should be waiting there. And then get out of his truck. And then stand there, with only the stars as witness—
But her wishful thinking was out of control. She had already decided to stop the madness, hadn’t she? Crushes were crushes. They made fools out of people, but that was all. Like that depressing part of Love, Actually with the sad coworkers who couldn’t get it together. Or the way everyone in town had always known that poor, sweet Abby Douglas had mooned over Gray Everett for most of her life. That had worked out for Abby, eventually, but Amanda couldn’t think of much worse than being thought of as poor, sweet Amanda Kittredge. Being known as little Amanda Kittredge was bad enough. She didn’t want to moon. And she didn’t want to miss out on her life and find herself stuck up on a shelf like Harriet Barnett part two, then straight on into Miss Patrick’s domain of mean, pursed lips and the mockery of high school students.
Her brothers hadn’t restrained themselves from having social lives. Neither had Brady. Why should Amanda?
The more she thought about how overprotective they all were, particularly in contrast to even the least scandalous rumors she’d heard about them, the more filled with self-righteous indignation she became.
Brady made it all worse.
“I thought it was your brother Ty who got hit in the head,” she said coolly now. “But apparently head injuries are going around the family.”
“The door’s behind you.” His dark eyes glinted. “And you can turn around and walk through it without talking.”
Amanda wanted to scream, and almost did, loud and long and strictly for her own benefit, because no way would anyone inside the bar hear her over the music. But she didn’t. Her brothers could rant and rave about anything they liked, and at worst, it was called venting. If Amanda did it? She was out of control. Someone was bound to ask her, in some convoluted way or another, if it was that time of the month.
Jerks, all of them.
So she only crooked an eyebrow in her best approximation of her own enigmatic mother, folded her arms over her chest, and did not give in to the urge to let her temper get the best of her.
“No one’s asked you to speak, as I recall,” she said, and he wasn’t the only one who could toss out a cowboy drawl when necessary. “And yet here you are, shooting off your mouth like it’s your job. When guess what, Brady? It’s not your job. I am not your job.”
“You have three seconds to make a decision.” Brady’s voice was as implacable as that expression on his face. And something in her … fluttered. Amanda assured herself it was more temper, but it wasn’t. She knew full well, it wasn’t. “You can turn around and walk outside of your own volition. Or I can throw you over my shoulder and take you outside myself. I don’t care which.”
“You’ve lost your mind.”
“One.”
“Have you forgotten who you’re talking to? I have four big brothers already, Brady. None of them are you. And none of them would dare throw me over their shoulder. You won’t either.”
He looked bored. “Two.”
“You should also know that Riley taught me how to fight before I could walk. Just tossing that out there so you have all the facts.”
“Three,” he said, a different light in his gaze that reminded her his eyes were that deep, dark green, and she wanted to stand her ground. She really did.
But he stood upright, then, shockingly fast when he’d been lazing there in the hallway as if he could lounge about like that until dawn.
Amanda understood in a searing split second that if he did what he’d said he would—and he looked like he couldn’t wait to toss her around like a bale of hay—something in her would … die, maybe. It would change her from whoever she was now into a woman Brady Everett carried out of a bar, kicking and screaming if necessary, and her problem wasn’t that she would be ashamed of that spectacle.
Her problem was that if he did that, she would know.
She would know what it was like to have his hands on her instead of only imagining it—and how could she possibly carry on with what she needed to do to kickstart this life of hers if she knew that?
Riley really had taught her to fight. But Zack had taught her strategy, and the most important lesson of all: when it was wiser to retreat.
Amanda turned on her heel and actually dove for the back door before Brady could take matters into his own hands. But that didn’t keep her from imagining that he had.
There was no getting those images out of her head.
When she burst out into the night, the chill of the September dark was a welcome slap. She wanted to press her hands to her cheeks to see if they felt as red against her palms as they did against the cold air, but she didn’t dare. She didn’t want to draw attention to the things her body was doing. Not when Brady was here to witness it.
The shoes she’d worn tonight were entirely too high, and much too ridiculous for rural Colorado. Her toes had gone numb about four minutes into her shift, and she was slightly worried she’d caused permanent nerve damage, but whatever, she was doing a thing.
A thing she deeply regretted when she lost her footing in the gravel out back.
She braced herself, fully expecting to go facedown. A humiliating end to an already mortifying encounter—
But instead, she felt a strong hand wrap around her elbow. And then hold her there in front of him, so even though she didn’t quite have her balance, he did.
The shirt she was wearing wasn’t another one of those tank tops that her brothers had found so appalling, but it was probably worse, because it was cut even lower. Harry preferred his girls to show some skin. Not to mention the push-up bra she’d never dared wear before, in case the unavoidable evidence that she had breasts caused her brothers to topple over instantly from a series of cardiac arrests. And then what would happen to the ranch?
Amanda had thought her brothers’ reactions were completely over-the-top when they’d come into the Coyote and tried to intimidate her and anyone unlucky enough to be standing near her.
Until now.
Because Brady’s hand was on her bare arm, and in order to keep her upright, he’d swung her around to face him. And that gaze of his glittered beneath the floodlights that poured over the both of them until suddenly, Amanda felt naked.
Completely and utterly naked.
Her lungs twisted themselves into some kind of ball, then lodged themselves in the back of her throat.
Right along with her heart.
“Maybe don’t wear shoes like that,” Brady bit out, seemingly without moving his mouth.
“What do you have against my shoes?”
“You’re going to break your neck in them. You almost did.”
“They’re not hiking boots, Brady. Their function is not to race up the side of a mountain like a goat. You’re supposed to stand around in them, looking impractical.” She almost said edible, but thought better of it at the last second and frowned at him instead. “How can a grown man not know this?”
“You’re not an impractical girl.”
“One, I’m not a girl. And I wouldn’t mind people calling me a girl, but they’re never doing it for good reasons. They’re doing it to keep me in my place, and guess what? I already know how old I am. I do
n’t need to be reminded of it every three seconds.”
“Was there a number two? Or just a long, annoying number one?”
She glared at him. “And two, you have no idea what kind of girl I am.”
“Pretty sure we’ve already covered this.”
“There are a lot of people I’ve known my entire life since we all live here in the great and glorious Longhorn Valley. We all went to Cold River High. We all shop in the same stores. We not only grew up together, our parents grew up together, and their parents before them. We can all sit around and play ‘pin the baby on the family tree’ until we go blue in the face.”
“That’s not a game anyone plays. Or is that what happens at all those baby showers?”
“You might think this means I know everything there is to know about every last person in this valley. I don’t. Why? Because knowing a collection of facts about a person isn’t the same thing as knowing them. I know a lot of facts about you, for example.” She started ticking things off on one hand. “High school quarterback who ran off to the city, turning his back on his family like so many do these days, and only came back when there was a will—”
“What are you doing, Amanda?”
It was the quiet way he asked it that got to her. It cut right through the indignation, and that was a shame. Because the self-righteousness had sure helped her feel puffed up and strong. Capable of dressing down Brady Everett to her heart’s content.
The quietness was something else. And that look on his face, a wary sort of concern that made her want to … cry, maybe. Something.
“At the moment,” she said, annoyed that it felt so fraught when it shouldn’t, when it likely didn’t feel like much of anything to him, “I’m standing outside a bar I would rather be drinking in. Because it was that or find myself bodily removed by a person who, to the best of my knowledge, is not employed by Harry in any capacity. Certainly not as a bouncer.”
“Pretty sure you know that’s not what I mean.”
She felt cold, suddenly, and she hoped that meant that her cheeks were less red. But then she flushed all over again, because he was still gripping her arm.
There was nothing the least bit cold about Brady’s hand.
Amanda glanced down at the place where he touched her, where his strong fingers wrapped around her upper arm, and felt shy when she lifted her gaze to his again.
That dark, glinting thing in his eyes took her breath. Again. But he dropped his hand.
And she discovered how unsteady she could feel on her own two feet.
“I understand,” Brady said, and the shyness fell away, because he sounded much too friendly. Aggressively genial, even.
Amanda wanted to kill him. That was the same voice, overbright and pointedly helpful, that he’d used in the buffet line. Carefully calibrated to charm elderly women with hearing issues. Or misbehaving toddlers.
He even cracked a smile to go with it. “Everyone feels rebellious from time to time. I only have two older brothers, and I couldn’t wait to get away from them when I was eighteen. Put some distance between me and them. You know.”
“I’m not eighteen.”
He spread his hands open, another exaggerated show of how friendly he was that made her teeth hurt. “All I’m saying is that I get the need for independence. I support it.”
“I didn’t ask for your support. But thanks, I guess.”
“You want to be smart about it, Amanda. That’s all.”
“Maybe I don’t want to be smart. Maybe I’d like to take a big old swan dive into stupid, selfish behavior that turns into stories I’ll tell for the next two decades. Like every other person alive.”
“So, have a few adventures. Smartly.”
“Right. And when you were in your rebellious phase, did you sit around figuring out how you could do it smartly?”
He muttered something, raking a hand through his hair. Unlike some cowboys who only looked good from beneath a Stetson, Brady just … looked good. All the time.
It was so unfair.
“The Coyote is a rough dive of a bar, and you know it,” he said after a moment, dark and impatient. “I’m sure that’s why you decided to work here, since you’re such a rebel all of a sudden. But there’s a big difference between working behind the bar, with Harry sitting there two inches away from his shotgun, and frequenting the place as a patron.”
“Yes, the difference being that in one part of that scenario, I’m at work. And in the other, I’m enjoying a few drinks and who knows? Maybe making new friends.”
“You can make new friends in town. At the saloon.”
“I didn’t ask for your permission.” Amanda shook her head at him. “What’s gotten into you?”
“I’m concerned about you,” he said, but she thought he sounded strained. And something flashed over his face as he looked down at her. “You’re like a sister to me.”
Oddly enough, that was what flipped a switch in her. Of all the things he’d said. Of all the threats, the slights. That was what spun her too far. That she was like a sister to him.
Amanda surged forward and poked him right in the chest.
She didn’t know which one of them was more surprised, so she did it again.
“I’m not your sister, Brady. We’re not even friends. The only thing you know about me is who my brothers are. I can’t imagine why you think that means you can interfere in my life.”
There was that arrested look in his dark eyes. That faintly astonished expression on his face, too arrogant by half, that only made him look that much more gorgeously, insufferably male. And there was something like granite along the fine line of his jaw.
“Tough,” he said.
So she poked him once more, harder.
“Here’s an idea, Brady. You stay out of my life, and I’ll return the favor and stay out of yours.”
“Yeah,” he said, barely more than a mutter. “That’s not going to happen.”
He took the finger she was poking into his chest in one hand, and then he was too close. He was looking down at her, something dark and tense between them that made her breath catch.
For a moment he looked—for a moment she could have sworn he almost—
But instead, he dropped her finger. Worse, he stepped away.
Amanda had to work much too hard to keep herself from crying, then. Actually crying, whether from frustration or that ache, she didn’t know. But it was so ridiculous that it triggered another, blessed wave of temper.
And that was why she hauled off and punched Brady Everett in his insufferable, too-hard, wholly obnoxious chest.
Just the way Riley had taught her.
5
Brady stared down at Amanda in disbelief.
He couldn’t remember the last time someone had punched him. It had probably been a family member—and long, long ago.
He had certainly never been punched by a woman.
Much less so hard.
“Do you expect that to hurt me?” he growled at her. “Because news flash, Amanda. All you’ve managed to do is piss me off.”
He fully believed that Riley had taught her to fight. He also believed he would rather die than admit to her she’d landed that punch well enough to get his attention. He might have been in the running for the position of Most Apparently Unthreatening and Toothless Man in the Longhorn Valley, despite the work he’d put in after hours in this very bar, but he did have some pride.
“If I were trying to hurt you, I would have aimed elsewhere,” she told him loftily, like she thought she was a badass out here in those ridiculous shoes and with all that smoky stuff around her eyes that made them gleam straight gold. “Believe me.”
Brady had to take a moment. He forced himself to breathe. Because no way could he react to this the way everything inside him was telling him he should. He’d threatened to pick her up and throw her over his shoulder, and the notion still held a lot of appeal, but he thought better of it.
He made himself think bette
r of it.
Because at the moment, he couldn’t really think of anything he would rather do than get his hands on her. Which led straight to all kinds of badness.
Not that Brady could think of any examples just then.
He forced himself to think about Riley. His best friend. Her brother, who had taught her how to throw the punch she’d landed. And who would kill Brady with his own two hands if Brady looked at his baby sister the wrong way.
But none of that seemed to really penetrate.
Not when Amanda’s hair was tousled like that, begging for a man’s hands to mess it up some more. Or those shoes, God help him. Ridiculous, yes, but they did things to her body, throwing her into shapes a skinny little horse girl, all tomboy and dirt, should never, ever make in the presence of a man like him.
Or any man at all.
That part got through to him, which was a blessing. Because he needed to stop before he did something he couldn’t take back.
If he concentrated on the impractical shoes, teetering out here in the gravel like a sexy suicide attempt, he could pretend that low-cut T-shirt—plastered to her curves enough to make him bite his own tongue—wasn’t burned into his brain. Possibly forever.
“What if it wasn’t me out here?” he asked her, focusing on the shoes. “What if it was someone else?”
“Hello. That was the entire point. I want it to be someone else. Anyone else. You’re the one who forced me to come out here, fleeing threats all the way, when what I wanted was to head into the bar and get a drink. To start.”
“Don’t you know better than to wear shoes like that?” Brady demanded, keeping himself on topic. And away from images of Amanda all smoky and sexy, swinging her hips up to the bar. In the Coyote. Where invitations and expectations turned into regrets at the speed of a single shot, tossed back neat. “You can’t run. You could barely walk out that door. You would have taken a header if I hadn’t caught you.”
“If it weren’t you, Brady, I would have introduced you to the real purpose of wickedly high heels.”
The Last Real Cowboy Page 6
