The Last Real Cowboy

by Caitlin Crews

  “You’re tired of having this argument, yet here you are. Having this argument.”

  “I sure am glad that one of us inherited Dad’s ability to act like a brick wall,” Brady said. “Particularly when no brick wall is needed.”

  It was below the belt. He knew that. Then again, it was also true.

  Gray stared at him, his face the grim stone that Brady was most familiar with. “Comparing me to Dad isn’t going to make me change my mind. About anything.”

  “Because nothing could possibly make you change your mind, I know.” Brady shrugged. “You make up your mind, and it might as well be a brand-new mountain range. Immovable. Impassable. You’re perfectly happy to stand in exactly the same place for the next three hundred years, simply because you can. Or because you decided to once upon a time.”

  “I came in here to thank you for agreeing to do that homecoming thing for Becca.” Gray’s dark eyes glittered, though his voice stayed calm. “But we both know you only did it as a personal favor to her. You may have grown up here, but you shrugged that off a long time ago. It’s not like you have a connection to Cold River. Or the high school. Or this ranch.”

  “You have no idea what I have a connection to or don’t,” Brady replied, his voice harsher than necessary, but he couldn’t do anything about that. “Because you never ask.”

  “I don’t have to ask. Your absence does all the talking for you.”

  Brady understood, maybe for the first time in his life, why a person might do something like flip a table. Would that get through to Gray? Would it make a big enough statement?

  But he refused to become Amos, no matter how seductive it seemed while he was in a temper. There were some slippery slopes a man couldn’t climb back up.

  “My absence?” he demanded. “I’ve been right here, busting my ass next to yours, for the past ten months. You might have to revise your story, Gray. And then what? What will the excuse be?”

  “The ranch is not here to fuel your get-rich-quick schemes,” Gray said, all granite and disapproval.

  That was how he always sounded when he was talking to Brady, and Brady hated the fact that it still got to him. With the exception of his college scholarship, he’d given up on getting Amos’s approval early. But here he was, still wishing he could turn Gray around. And it ate at him that he cared.

  “Is this what it’s going to be like forever?” Gray was still a wall standing there in the door. “Do I have to worry that if you come up with bad hand at a poker table one night, you’ll gamble the ranch away?”

  Brady did not make his hands into fists. Or use them. “Why would I bet the ranch?”

  “Why would you do anything?” Gray pushed away from the doorjamb and moved farther into the kitchen, swiping up his Stetson from the counter. “This has been illuminating, as always. But if you don’t mind, I thought maybe we could work on the land we still have. Until you sell it out from under me.”

  “If I wanted to play poker, Gray,” Brady said, trying to keep his temper out of his voice, and failing, “I would cash in with some of that actual money you hate so much. Because I don’t need the ranch to get rich. I’m good.”

  “I’m happy for you.”

  Gray headed out the door without a backward glance. Brady shouldn’t have been surprised. That was Gray. And if this had been any other part of his life, any business meeting in the normal course of events, he would have shrugged it off. Because he would never have tolerated a corporate contact who treated him that way.

  But this wasn’t business. It was his family.

  He could admit he was more frayed around the edges than usual today.

  How could he possibly have let that happen with Amanda? And not merely let that happen. Who was he kidding? He was the one who’d made it happen. She was so innocent, she had legitimately asked him up to her apartment for coffee. She’d actually gone ahead and made them coffee.

  He was the one who’d made the moves.

  Brady was thoroughly disgusted with himself.

  The result was, he couldn’t seem to put his usual effort and energy into pretending he was less bothered by his brothers than he was. Well. Ty stirred the pot when the mood took him, because he found it all entertaining. It was Gray who drove Brady around the bend.

  Brady was following him out into the yard before he had time to think it through.

  Out in the yard, the sun was starting to contemplate its duties over to the east. The sky was bluing its way out of the night, kicking off the heavy fall shadows and the frosty temperature.

  Maybe Brady had finally had enough.

  “You don’t want to talk about diversification, fine,” he said to his brother’s back. He didn’t yell. He didn’t have to yell. “You don’t want to talk about any ideas I have. You demanded that I promise you a year, and I’m delivering that, but you don’t want to give me anything in return.”

  Gray turned slowly. The sun poked over the eastern ridge in earnest as he faced Brady, making him look like some kind of holy relic. “I’m giving you room and board.”

  “I own one-third of this land and that house. I’m giving myself room and board, Gray. And in case you missed it, I’m the one who put my life on hold.”

  “You want to do this? Fine. I’m tired of hearing about how you had to walk away from your great life. I’m tired of hearing about all your sacrifices.”

  “Why? You want to hang up on that cross all by yourself?”

  “This should be your life,” Gray thundered. “This is my life. It looks like it’s Ty’s life these days too. It was good enough for generations of Everetts, and it’s good enough for us. Why is nothing good enough for you?”

  Brady was aware the sounds from over by the garage had stopped. If he turned his head, he was sure he would see Ty over there, listening in on this latest confrontation. But he stayed focused on Gray.

  “It’s not a question of whether or not it’s good enough for me. It’s a question of that sacrifice you don’t want to hear about. This is your life, like you said. There’s no sacrifice for you to be here, is there? And Ty’s rodeo career is over. Looks like the ranch is a good solution for him too. Out of the three of us, I’m the only one who gave up something to spend this year here.”

  “Well, shoot,” came Ty’s drawl. Inevitably. “And here I am without my violin.”

  Brady gave him a one-fingered salute without looking in his direction. He kept his gaze trained on Gray. And kept going, since he’d started.

  “I don’t want a violin. I don’t need any sympathy. I could have said no, and believe me, I know it.” He shook his head. “But just once, Gray, it would be nice if you would acknowledge that you’re asking more of me than you’re asking of anyone else. Including yourself.”

  He watched something flicker on his oldest brother’s face. He braced himself, because a year ago, Gray would not have accepted that. He would have laughed in Brady’s face with that call to violence in his dark eyes.

  But today, he only studied Brady for another too-long moment.

  “Okay,” he said. Eventually. “I acknowledge that you had to give up your life in Denver for the family. Is that really it, Brady? That’s what you need?”

  “I can go find that violin,” Ty offered from the garage. “It’s no trouble.”

  This time, Brady glared in his direction too.

  “If you two wanted to go to college, you could have,” he said quietly. But intensely enough one of Ty’s rodeo horses over in the corral nickered quietly.

  Predictably, both Gray and Ty let out big laughs at that.

  “That’s a hard pass from me, baby brother,” Ty said when he was done howling. “I barely made it through high school. I’m about as good behind the desk as you are on the back of a bull.”

  “I thought about college for maybe three seconds,” Gray added darkly. “But what I know is land and cattle. And I don’t need to sit in the classroom for that.”

  “Then stop giving me a hard time becaus
e I did go.” Brady belted that out like jab.

  Over by the garage, Ty looked to the ground. But Gray kept his gaze steady.

  “I don’t mind that you went to college,” he said. “You were always smart like that. It made sense for you to go. What I mind is that you never seem to connect the life you live now with what gave it to you.”

  “You mean my hard work?”

  “I mean, this land. The cattle. The ranch, Brady. It supports all of us, you included. You treat it like a weight around your neck, dragging you down with every step.” His jaw tightened. “It isn’t just Dad’s folly or the family legacy. It’s our future. All the book learning in the world, and you can’t get that through your head.”

  “I’m not the one the land drags down, Gray,” Brady objected. “You spent a decade here, trapped.”

  “I might have been trapped in my circumstances,” Gray conceded. “But never by the ranch. The ranch is what saved me. You’ll forgive me if I can’t handle the level of disrespect you throw at it day and night.”

  Back in the days when he’d been so good at keeping his cool, back before he’d put his mouth on little Amanda Kittredge and knocked his whole world sideways and spinning, Brady would not have gone toe-to-toe with Gray. He would have sucked it up the way he always did. He and Gray had skirmishes, but Brady always backed down rather than take it too far.

  Right now was a great time to do just that.

  But he’d already messed up his life. Sooner or later, Riley would find out, and it would all get worse. So why not make it universal?

  “I don’t disrespect the ranch,” he threw at Gray instead of biting his tongue. “If I did, I certainly wouldn’t have spent the better part of a year working it, would I? I wouldn’t have come back at all, not even for holidays while Dad was alive.”

  “I’d believe that you respected something about this place if you’d done anything to help before I asked it of you,” Gray retorted. “Dad had to die for you to remember where you came from. I figure soon as your year’s up, you’ll forget again as fast as you can. You already did it once. Why not again?”

  “I never forgot a thing.” Brady didn’t shout. Not exactly, but he could hear his own voice echo back at him. “It’s not my fault Dad didn’t care that I got my degree in a useful subject. Just like it’s not my fault that I went out there and made money for the express purpose of sinking it into the ranch, and he wouldn’t take it.”

  For a moment, it seemed like the rising sun was making all that noise. Racketing around, tangled up in all those old, bright resentments Brady would have sworn he’d long since stopped carrying around.

  But one moment led into the next, and he realized the noise was in him. His head, his chest.

  And the astounded look on Gray’s face didn’t help.

  “What are you talking about? Ty sent home some of his winnings from time to time. But you—” Gray shook his head. “Never a penny. Dad was terrible about paying off its debts, but he recorded every cent that ever came in.”

  “He wouldn’t take it.”

  It never changed, the kick of that. The bitterness. If he listened closely, he could still hear the old man’s drunk cackle.

  I’d rather put myself out of my own misery than take a penny from a jumped-up egghead like you, Amos had said. A man deserves to lose a ranch if the only way he can keep it is by taking charity from a son so ungrateful, he put it in his rearview mirror and left it in the dust.

  “That doesn’t make sense.” Gray adjusted his hat on his head, shooting a look over toward Ty, then back to Brady. “Obviously Dad took a distinct pleasure in being mean, but this isn’t family stuff. This is money.”

  “My money,” Brady said from between clenched teeth. “And like everything that has to do with me, he preferred to ignore it.”

  “Maybe he didn’t understand—” Ty began.

  “He understood. I sent him checks. And he returned each and every one of them, ripped up into little pieces.”

  It was gratifying on some level to watch his older brothers stare at each other as if they’d never heard of such a thing. As if they couldn’t imagine it.

  “Brady,” Gray began.

  “Maybe it’s time you ask yourself not just what Dad did to you, but what he did to me,” Brady suggested. “Ty, you could ask yourself why it was that Dad watched every single one of your rides, could quote your stats, and even went so far as to visit you in the hospital after your accident. All of which would surely take a whole lot more effort than attending a Cold River High football game. But he never attended one of mine.”

  He shot his gaze back to Gray. “You were here, Gray. And I get it, you had a lot of stuff going on. Cristina, Becca as a baby, I understand. But you sat here, night after night, and watched him scribble down names into that will of his. Scratching them out, writing them back in. You listened while he told us what each and every person he bothered to mention had done to him. And he was terrible to the two of you, everybody knows that. But me? He acted like I didn’t exist.”

  Brady found he didn’t have a lot to say after that, and even less he wanted to hear.

  He stalked off to his truck, slammed his way into it, and spent the rest of his day taking out his aggression whaling on fence posts. And when the day was done, he didn’t stick around for the usual Everett family dinner. He showered in the room he’d taken in the main house because it had a private entrance—and because, maybe foolishly, he’d imagined that staying in the main house would make him feel more connected to his family, even if the room was tainted with Amos’s ghost—and he headed back into town.

  Not to the Coyote. That would have been his normal preference, given the mood he was in. But in the week or so since he’d made the vast mistake of kissing Amanda, his preferences had shifted.

  Because he couldn’t possibly go back to the Coyote while she was working there. And given that Harry didn’t exactly post his staffing information on the front door of the place, it meant Brady was out of luck unless he wanted to take his chances. Or start sticking his head in, spotting Amanda, and running away like a pathetic kid.

  He’d been opting for the Broken Wheel Saloon instead. But all the reasons the Broken Wheel would have been a far more appropriate place for Amanda to work made it less satisfying for Brady. The Broken Wheel was a family place. Folks brought their kids in for dinner, and it was only after 8 p.m. or so that things shifted over into more of a nighttime scene. But even that lacked the edges and surefire entertainment of a night at the Coyote.

  The Broken Wheel Saloon, right there on Main Street, was not a place a man went for a palate-cleansing hookup. Not unless he wanted all the gossipy old ladies in town to be plotting out wedding announcements and baby showers before dawn.

  He shuddered at the thought.

  Tonight, Brady got himself a beer from Tessa Winthrop behind the bar and ambled over to the table where Riley was sitting with Connor, Jensen, and a bunch of other friends and neighbors. Including Matias Trujillo, who wasn’t too long back from the service—and was also Riley’s ex-brother-in-law.

  How do you handle that? Brady had asked, back when he’d first come home. Isn’t it awkward?

  Everything is awkward in a small town, Riley had said darkly. It’s just a question of degrees.

  Brady reminded himself of that as the Kittredge brothers gazed back at him. He got to marinate in his own form of awkwardness, tinged with the knowledge that if they had any idea he’d had his hands on their baby sister, they’d kill him right here on the saloon floor.

  “Guess what?” he asked.

  “Is this a knock-knock joke?” Jensen asked in a drawl. “I’m a firefighter. I don’t wait for someone to open the door; I kick it down.”

  “I’m a marine,” Matias replied. “I’ll take your kick and raise it a battalion or two.”

  Jensen rolled his eyes. “You would.”

  “The only girl I love has made a special homecoming request of me,” Brady announced, pull
ing out a chair and dropping into it. “And I do not have it in me to deny my niece a single thing her heart desires. Even if what it desires is my presence at that egregious homecoming parade.”

  “The parade of faded glory.” Riley raised his beer bottle. “Good luck with that, brother.”

  “I’m not your brother, praise the Lord.” Brady smiled blandly. “But I am your former quarterback and team captain, and I’m ordering you to do this with me.”

  “You know that’s not a thing. It doesn’t last past the actual team.” Riley nodded toward Jensen and Matias. “If it did, Matias could order Jensen around to his heart’s content.”

  “Don’t I already?” Mattias asked.

  Jensen smirked. “You try.”

  “It’s not a thing,” Riley insisted. “And also, no. I’ve avoided that parade for years. I see no reason to stop now.”

  “No problem,” Brady drawled. “I’ll just tell my sixteen-year-old niece, the one who’s always idolized all of you, that each and every one of you is too afraid to walk down a street.”

  And that was how, when Brady surrendered himself to the humiliation of walking in the hometown parade that weekend, he could at least take comfort in the fact that he had company.

  Surly, furious company, sure. But company all the same.

  Then they figured they might as well stay for the game, and Brady found himself looking around the stands at all the beaming, cheering parents. All the fathers who’d come out on this Friday night to watch their sons throw balls around. All the proud smiles and extra-loud shouts.

  That was the funny thing about bitterness, wasn’t it? Poke at it, and it wasn’t bitter at all. It was nothing more than a wish for sweetness that was never fulfilled and sat there like an ache instead.

  It occurred to him—while the marching band played, the crowd cheered, and Cold River High School looked like the setting of some perfect little American dream—that he’d figured out pretty early on that he was never going to get anything he wanted from Amos. It was why he’d spent so much time at the Kittredge house. It was why he’d played his heart out on the football field, killed himself in the classroom, and told himself the only thing he ever cared about was getting away. Even after he’d done it.