The Last Real Cowboy

by Caitlin Crews

  “Stripper poles?”

  She looked disappointed. Or disgusted. Maybe both.

  “I would have happily sliced open your shin. Or slammed a heel into your groin. I’m not actually a complete idiot. My brothers taught me enough hand-to-hand combat to make me the slightest bit dangerous.”

  She sounded bloodthirsty enough to make him wince. But she was about as dangerous as his hat.

  “Landing a punch on someone who’s standing there, letting you punch him, isn’t the same as hand-to-hand combat. It isn’t combat at all. Most people wouldn’t actually let you punch them.”

  Amanda sniffed. “Says the man who got punched.”

  “I’m actually on your side here.” Though that was waning by the second. “I think independence is a good thing. I don’t think every kid born on a ranch needs to dive in headfirst to the family business because it’s there. I’ll wave that flag up and down Main Street. But you do have to be smart about it, Amanda.”

  “Oh, terrific. Now the guy who thinks he let me punch him is debating my intelligence.”

  “It’s not a debate. If you can’t take care of yourself—and one punch I did nothing to block is not taking care of yourself—you shouldn’t put yourself in positions like this.”

  She folded her arms and shifted her weight in a way that made his gaze drop to follow her hips—

  Brady jerked his eyes back up. Immediately. Because he was not here to ogle her hips in those astonishingly tight jeans.

  Amanda did not look appropriately grateful for his counsel, Brady couldn’t help but notice. She looked mulish and annoyed.

  “This is the Coyote, Amanda,” he said, trying to sound more friendly. More brotherly. “It’s not a theme park dressed up to look like a dive bar. It really is a dive bar. That’s not the cast of a TV show in there—those are real bikers.”

  She scowled at him, which did nothing to make her less upsettingly attractive. Quite the opposite. She looked cute.

  Way too cute.

  “When you went off to college, did every single person in your life sit you down and lecture you on how to handle yourself?”

  “I don’t really see what my going to college has to do with you working in a place like this.”

  “Just answer the question.”

  Brady stared back at her, aware his jaw was rigid in a way that made him think of Gray. And that should have appalled him, because he prided himself on not being as uptight or intractable as his oldest brother—ever. But it didn’t seem to make a difference, out here in the dark, with this maddening woman—girl, he reminded himself harshly, she is still only a girl—because with every breath, she seemed to burrow deeper and deeper beneath his skin.

  He rubbed a hand over his jaw and sure enough, he was doing that granite thing. Maybe someday he’d find that funny, but not tonight.

  “What, do you think they threw me a party?” he asked, his voice a low scrape. “My father laughed in my face. That was it. Parental pep talk achieved.”

  She frowned. “What do you mean, he laughed in your face?”

  Brady couldn’t think of a single reason he’d introduced this topic. And having done so, because he’d obviously lost all control tonight, he really should have backed away. Talked about something else. Or avoided all of this altogether, because it wasn’t his business, she wasn’t his responsibility, and he didn’t owe Riley anything—

  But that wasn’t true. Brady would have said Riley was like a brother to him, but he had brothers. And unlike his actual blood relatives, Riley had never spent years at a time treating Brady like a whiny, surly adolescent. Even when they’d both actually been whiny, surly adolescents cursed with raging hormones, bottomless appetites, and nothing but football games to save them from themselves.

  Riley had walked through that fire with Brady. More than that, he’d brought Brady home with him like a stray. His parents might not have been in the running for a Norman Rockwell painting, but their quiet acceptance of Brady had seemed like heaven after a steady diet of Amos all his life. The Kittredges had whole meals without breaking anything or shouting insults at one another.

  It was a miracle.

  Riley had given Brady that miracle. The least Brady could do was perform a very small favor, relatively speaking, in return.

  “You knew my father,” he reminded Amanda now. “Does it really surprise you that he wasn’t exactly sweetness and light?”

  “Not at all. He could get in a knock-down, drag-out fight in an empty room.”

  “And usually did.”

  “But why would he laugh?”

  Something about that caught at him. The way she asked the question, so genuinely baffled. It made a part of him that he would have said he’d long since buried, out there in the family plot with nothing but the frigid river for company … ache.

  “Because that’s what he did.” He didn’t say that in a particularly self-pitying way. It was a simple fact. “He used to ride Gray hard about living up to his responsibilities. He loved to fight with Ty and call him names. But me? He didn’t bother fighting. He laughed.”

  Brady didn’t understand what she was doing when she swayed toward him, then. Not until she reached over and put her hand on his arm. He stared down at it, uncomprehending.

  Because he could feel that touch move through him, and it wasn’t as simple as heat. As want or need. All things he navigated easily and well, and without ever giving over too much of himself.

  But Amanda’s hand was soft and strong at once. Her nails were painted something sparkly and absurd that reminded him of the fairy princess getup she’d worn when she was very small and her brothers had carried her around like a football.

  That should have horrified him, like everything else, but it didn’t. Instead, it got tangled up with the sweetness and warmth of her hand on his forearm. Pretty but capable, like the ranch-bred woman she was, instead of the soft uselessness he’d gotten used to down in Denver.

  Another thought he didn’t need to have.

  Especially not when she was gazing up at him, and everything was golden and much too solemn.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. Short, sweet, and to the point.

  She was holding onto him, making things kick around inside him that he desperately needed to ignore. But worse, she kept gazing at him like that. As if she could see him.

  Really see him.

  The Brady who was trying to help her, out behind the Coyote, sure. But also that eighteen-year-old kid he’d been. The one who’d tried to mask his pride and wonder at his own achievement, sitting there at the family table one night with his acceptance letter and scholarship details burning a hole in his pocket. He’d tried to keep the smile out of his voice when he’d told his father. He’d tried his best to tamp down any faint whiff of excess pride.

  He wanted to show his father what he could do. He’d been so sure that a full-ride scholarship—making him the first Everett to go to college, ever—was something even Amos would be forced to respect. Like when Ty had started winning rodeo prizes. Amos liked to call Ty a punk to his face, but he sure did like bragging on Ty’s stats when he wasn’t around.

  Brady had been convinced this was his shot.

  But then, he’d always been an idiot.

  You want a round of applause, boy? Amos had asked, with a snort.

  Brady hadn’t looked over to see what Gray’s reaction was that night. Gray liked to keep his head down at dinner, as much to avoid Amos as to pretend he didn’t see his first wife’s growing unhappiness. Or maybe to play with cute little toddler Becca. And Brady had tried to model himself after his stoic, quiet oldest brother, but he never quite made it there.

  It didn’t matter anyway. Amos had taken one look at him and cackled in delight.

  Looks like you do, he’d drawled.

  Then he’d laughed. Laughed and laughed, until he had tears rolling down his weathered face and his complete and utter derision was thick enough to wrap the whole valley in a layer of fog.
/>
  We have hundreds of acres here that need tending, Amos had hooted when he could speak through all that vicious hilarity. What kind of coward signs up for four more years of books instead?

  Sometimes, Brady thought even now, he could hear that laughter echoing around and around inside of him. That and the word coward.

  Sometimes, he thought he wore those things in place of the tattoos everyone else his age seemed to have. That they were as visible to the naked eye.

  He would have said he’d gotten used to it years ago. But the idea of Amanda seeing those things made something in him twist into a hard little knot.

  “Why are we talking about this?” Brady asked, aware his voice was harsher than it should have been. That it, too, was telling her things she didn’t need to know. “Do you really want to hear more stories about life with Amos Everett? Everybody thinks they want to hear what it was really like. Or they think they already know. But they don’t. They really, really don’t.”

  “I do.” And again, she disarmed him. It was her hand. Or the look on her face that told him she would happily stand out here in the dark all night long if necessary. If that was what he wanted. If it would help. What was he supposed to do with that? “He always seemed like such a bitter, twisted old man.”

  “He was. If there was a drop of happiness around, he’d stomp it out before it could leave a mark. It was his mission in life.”

  “Can you imagine that? Taking pride in being broken?”

  Brady could feel something swell in him, then. The urge to say something scornful. Mocking. Harsh, anyway, to wash away the softness in her. The softness she was beaming around her like a spotlight when there should have been nothing out here but the accidental light from the bar, and far off, the uninterested stars.

  The need to cut this moment into jagged pieces he could understand welled up inside him, almost like a sob.

  As if Amos had been in him all along. Just waiting to come out, dark and mean.

  But Brady didn’t sob. Amos had beaten that out of him too.

  And there was her hand. On his arm, in the dark. Warmer by the second, but still capable. Still deceptively tough. He should shake her off—

  But he didn’t.

  For another long, endless, deep personal betrayal of a moment, he didn’t.

  Because he liked her hand on him. He liked her touch. He liked her voice, soft and urgent in the dark. He liked the way she tipped her face back, so she could look him in the eye, hitting him with all that smoky gold heat. He liked her attention.

  He liked all of it, and he hated himself for that, but the hate didn’t make it go away.

  It was yet another hint that he was more like Amos than he’d ever imagined. Too bitter and yet entirely too interested in the promise of a soft voice—no matter that she was forbidden.

  Ty had been gone and Gray had been involved in his own stuff while Brady was finishing high school, so Brady had been the only one around with an up close and personal view of Amos’s last live-in girlfriend, Karen, of the messy marital status and a thirst for the bottle to match Amos’s.

  Their brawls should have put Brady off women for life.

  It certainly should have taught him better than to get himself unnecessarily tangled up with a woman who could only cause him trouble.

  Particularly this one.

  He moved away, hoping it didn’t look like he was reacting to her hand on him. When he was.

  It was her fault. Because none of this would have been happening if she hadn’t started working at the Coyote, of all the dank and dirty places. If she hadn’t showed up in that freaking tank top. If she wasn’t compounding that error tonight, with the shirt she was wearing that made it physically painful not to stare at her breasts in pure male appreciation.

  God help him.

  Because Brady was going to need a little divine intervention if he didn’t want the Kittredge brothers to bury him out there on their ranch where no one would ever find him. Not even the vultures.

  “What do you know about broken?” he asked her, far too gruffly. But he couldn’t stop himself, even when he saw her jolt at his change in tone. “You’re a fetus.”

  “Wow. A fetus. Really?”

  “I know how old you are, Amanda. And even if I hadn’t helped babysit you when you were a kid, the fact remains that you’ve lived a ridiculously sheltered life.”

  “I’m not sure that a person with a college degree and a one-third stake in one of the county’s wealthiest cattle ranches ought to be lecturing me—a coffee server and brand-new bartender—on my sheltered upbringing,” she drawled. A hit he had not been expecting. Because it landed hard. “But you go on ahead, Brady. Don’t let me get in the way of more male posturing I didn’t ask for.”

  “You don’t know what you’re asking for,” he bit out, because that was the point. Surely he could focus on the actual point for five seconds, no matter how many other points she scored off him when he hadn’t expected her to swing. Repeatedly. “You’re careening around in a bad situation, miraculously unharmed. For the moment. How long can you expect that miracle to last?”

  “Let me guess. You think the Coyote is a dark alley and my skirt is too short.”

  “I don’t care what you wear.” And he was deeply disconcerted to discover that even as he said that, it was not, in fact, true. On any level. “I would defend anything you wore, anywhere you wanted to wear it. But when I was finished defending it, Amanda, I might ask you what you were thinking. Because there’s a certain expectation about the kind of woman who wants to tend bar in a place like this. And wearing shirts that require half of your bra to hang out is as good as announcing you’re one of them.”

  “Thank you, Brady.” Then she laughed at him. Actually laughed. Right at him. “I’m aware of the reputation of the average Coyote barmaid. Which is why I wanted to work here, not in a kindergarten.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Amanda flung her arms wide, the kind of theatrical, dramatic gesture that both reminded him how young and uncynical she was, and made him want things he couldn’t allow himself to acknowledge.

  Desperately.

  She made him desperate.

  “You and every last one of my brothers keep storming around ranting at me about all the mistakes you think I’m going to make. Well, guess what? I want to make them. All of them.”

  “No. You don’t.”

  “You got to go off to college and figure it all out for yourself. Riley had a starter marriage. Just to pick two examples at random. I want to make my own mistakes, Brady, whatever that looks like.”

  “Regret isn’t just a word, Amanda. You should remember that. Anyone who tells you that you only regret the things you didn’t do is lucky. And obviously hasn’t made a real mistake.”

  “What do you regret?” she fired at him.

  The way this evening was going, he really should have expected that.

  “That’s the thing about regret,” he gritted out, because the things he regretted weren’t decent topics of conversation under the best of circumstances. Which this wasn’t. “It’s not something you particularly want to discuss. It’s something you live with, like arthritis, that you pretend isn’t there until it flares up again.”

  Amanda studied him for a whole lot longer than he liked. Until he started to feel a little too itchy because of it.

  “It’s easy for you to say things like that in retrospect,” she said quietly. “As you look back on all the mistakes, big and small, you made in the privacy of the life you were allowed to have. I don’t need to be protected from my own decisions.”

  He wanted to put his hands on her, because he was apparently an animal like his father. He rubbed them over his own face instead and reminded himself that unlike Amos, he could choose to be better. He could and would.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me.” He glowered at her and told himself to think about diapers. Princess outfits. But instead, there was only Amanda. “You need a leas
h. And a collar with a bell on it.”

  He immediately regretted saying that. Because it conjured up all kinds of images that were not helpful. But she only scoffed at him, obviously free and clear of any upsetting imagery involving collars and leashes and … what was wrong with him?

  “When you were my age, you’d graduated from college. I bet it didn’t occur to you that you were anything less than an adult. But somehow, I’m supposed to accept the fact that everybody in my life wants to treat me like a dim-witted ten-year-old.”

  “You should take it as a compliment, little girl,” Brady seethed at her, not sure which one of them he was more pissed at. “You have a lot of people in your life who want to protect you. Not everybody does.”

  For another long moment, there was nothing between them but all that tension. The dark. Her smoky, gold eyes, too considering and much too intelligent to give a smart man any peace. Brady’s awareness of how hard his heart was beating. And how, if he didn’t know better, he would have chalked up his body’s reaction to something other than temper.

  Diapers, you idiot, he shouted at himself.

  “Like I said some time ago, you should go on up to your apartment, lock yourself in, and get some rest,” he said, quietly and carefully. “Don’t you have a shift over at the coffeehouse in the morning? Early?”

  “Your concern over how much beauty sleep I get is commendable. Really.” She shrugged with an exaggerated lack of concern. “But I could open the coffeehouse in my sleep. And will, if necessary. Tonight, I’m going to walk right back into the bar and make some new friends. And I’m not asking you for your opinion on that, Brady. I’m telling you what’s going to happen, so you can resign yourself to reality.”

  “The only place you’re going is to bed.” He glared at her. “Alone.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. You don’t know. And guess what? It’s none of your business either way.”

  She braced herself, glaring at him like she expected him to do something. And the crazy thing was, he kind of expected it too. An electric wire ran down the center of him, and it was on fire. Lit up and buzzing and making him feel like a complete stranger.