The Last Real Cowboy

by Caitlin Crews

  “A common misconception.”

  One he’d had himself, in fact. Until he’d said something about leaving at Halloween last spring, and Gray had said something typically brusque about the promises of bankers always being worthless. That Brady was actually not a banker in the classic sense, and would certainly never call himself one, didn’t matter. Not when Gray wanted to get a dig in.

  “And what will you do once Christmas comes?” She tucked her chin deeper into the blanket and settled a little more against him. He had no idea why it felt so good. “You must be impatient to get back to your real life.”

  Brady would have said the same thing himself. And had, often, to whoever would listen. But there was something about Amanda saying it that scraped at him.

  “I figured we’d sell the ranch.” And he heard her little intake of breath. The usual horror people from around here always showed at the very idea that anyone would sell land. Ever. No matter how desperate they were. “We all agreed we’d vote on what to do after a year, but Gray’s always been against selling. And Ty hasn’t said anything, but the fact that he’s building Hannah a house makes his vote pretty clear.”

  “Do you think they’ll buy you out?”

  Not for the first time tonight, he was struck by how matter-of-fact she sounded. Far more levelheaded and clear-eyed than the twenty-two-year-olds he’d known in his time. Or than he’d been himself.

  He was reminded once again that Amanda wasn’t an overserved college coed, giggling her way through another happily blurred Saturday night. She’d spent her whole life in the company of some of the valley’s most esteemed ranchers. And that was just her family.

  If he knew anything about ranch people, it was that they kept their idealism and their sentimentality tucked away, down deep, where a tough winter or a suddenly ill animal couldn’t touch them. They expressed their dreams through hard work and their commitment to a future they might never see themselves.

  And when it came time to talk about selling up, after the gasps of horror, they tended to get straight to the point. Because otherwise, there was nothing but whatever shattered sentimentality and dreams remained, and who wanted to talk about that? Of course Amanda wanted to know if they were talking about buyouts. Not only because there must have been similar conversations around her dinner table, but because the Kittredges were their neighbors. They’d be the most likely first offer if the Everetts had to sell.

  How had he spent all this time concentrating on her age and her choice of second job, and so little time reflecting on the fact that Amanda was a Kittredge? She had Longhorn Valley ranch blood in her veins, same as him.

  Brady only realized he hadn’t answered her when Amanda shifted again.

  “I guess a better question, and one my grandparents always ask us, is what would you do if you could do anything? If there were no other factors. No brothers, no will, nothing. If all that Everett land was yours to use as you like. Every time they’ve asked us that, we’ve all always answered the same thing. We like the Bar K as it is. My brothers work it because they believe in it. I fully support it. But I like that they ask the question.” And he thought he could sense her smile. “It makes it feel less like an obligation and more like a choice.”

  “I always thought I’d stay here,” Brady found himself telling her. Because she was magic, and this rock felt like home, and he could whisper these truths to the top of her head. He could tell them to the dark and the moon and the faint scent of mint in her hair, and it didn’t feel like he was exposing himself. “I expected to come back after college and get right back into it.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  Such a simple question. And a simple answer, too, though simple wasn’t how it felt.

  “Amos didn’t want me back.” Brady had said versions of that before. But he’d never said it so baldly, and not to someone like Amanda, who knew. She knew his family. She’d known his father. More than that, her family had been in this valley as long as his, and she knew all the intricacies of that. All the layers and complications. All the reasons none of this was simple. “He was actively opposed to the idea, in fact. He wouldn’t take my money. He wouldn’t use my labor. And if it were up to him, he took care to tell me, he would have cut me off altogether. Even from the holidays. He made sure I knew he only let me come home, then, because it would have been harder to explain why I didn’t.”

  Someday, Brady liked to tell himself, he wouldn’t talk about his father at all. And if he did, it wouldn’t taste like ash on his tongue. But he still wasn’t there.

  “He could have cut you out of his will,” Amanda said levelly. “He didn’t. Maybe there was more going on, deep down inside. I don’t know. Is it possible that mean old Amos Everett had layers?”

  Brady laughed. “I’ve thought about that a lot. A lot. Because it doesn’t make sense that he would give me, or any of us, a gift. That wasn’t his style.” He blew out a breath, amazed that he was actually talking about this. “But then I realized, it wasn’t a gift. Of course it wasn’t a gift. That will was the perfect punishment.”

  He expected Amanda to argue that, but she didn’t. She only waited, her head tipped back so if he had wanted to, he could have rested his chin on the top of her head and held her there. Like they were puzzle pieces, snapped together at last.

  He told himself the image was disturbing. He told himself that was why he didn’t do it.

  “Obviously the ranch should have gone to Gray,” he said. “But Dad didn’t leave it to Gray alone. Because how better to punish Gray than to make him share the land he’d given his life to with the brothers who’d left it?”

  Brady stared at the moon, remembering all the other times he’d sat right here. All the different moons he’d watched rise and set. And he couldn’t decide if it made him feel sad or oddly connected, despite himself, that he was still sitting here trying to figure out Amos.

  “Meanwhile, Ty got famous. But then he was broken. And the last thing he’d ever want to do was come back and have to face the possibility that he was no better than where he started. Amos left a third to him to force that, obviously.”

  “And you? How is this punishing you?” But Amanda made a noise. “Because you want to sell and sharing it means you can’t?”

  “Because I wanted to come home, and he wouldn’t let me,” Brady said quietly, because he really had thought about this. And he really did know his father. “Because he knew I would never want to come back like this, looking like I’m riding on a dead man’s coattails. Especially after he spent all these years making sure Gray thought as little of me as possible. Once again, it’s a punishment.”

  She tilted her head up, and he could feel her breath against the underside of his jaw. It shouldn’t have comforted him.

  “Amos is dead, Brady,” she said quietly. “He can’t punish you from beyond the grave. Only you can do that.”

  She settled against him so sweetly, so easily, that Brady was sure she had no idea she’d ripped him wide open. That she might as well have torn him into tiny pieces, then tossed what remained into the river below.

  He stayed where he was because he couldn’t move. He was amazed that his heart still beat. Stunned that his lungs still took in breath. He stared straight ahead at the river because he was afraid that if he so much as moved a muscle, she would know. She would see.

  And then he had no idea what might become of him.

  “What about you?” he asked, when he could keep his voice even. When there was no trace whatsoever of that body blow she’d landed on him. “Are you going to tend bar forever?”

  Amanda laughed. “I thought I was going to like bartending a whole lot more than I do.”

  “What’s not to like?” Brady asked dryly. “Nothing’s better than crowds of drunk people, wandering hands, and cleaning up all manner of sticky substances.”

  He didn’t hear her laugh again, but he could feel her body shake with it. “In a lot of ways, it’s not really any different from wor
king in coffee. Except for the clientele. And the state of the bathrooms.”

  “Especially at the Coyote.”

  “If there had been apartments available over the public library, I would have happily worked there.” He felt her shoulders rise, then fall. “Oh well.”

  “That doesn’t make it sound like something you plan to do for the rest of your life.”

  Not that he cared. He was making conversation. Because why should he care?

  “People around here are constantly doing something they don’t plan to do for the rest of their lives, and then oops. Look at that. They end up doing it anyway.”

  “I don’t think that’s a Cold River thing. That’s a life thing.”

  “There are only so many things to do here,” Amanda said.

  “Didn’t you grow up breeding quarter horses? You could do it in your sleep.”

  “I probably could. But I know, personally, the five best quarter horse breeders and trainers in Colorado. And therefore the world. And I’m related to all of them. So sure, I know a lot about horses, but is that enough to spend my life working with them by default? I don’t know.”

  “You’ve worked in the coffeehouse a long time. Maybe it’s time to make that less a job you do and more a career.”

  “I love Cold River Coffee. I do. It’s like a home to me.” Amanda sighed. “But Noah is the owner and the chef. And Abby is the manager. And I don’t see either one of them switching that up anytime soon. Where does that leave me?”

  She considered for a moment, then added, “I mean, Noah is single. And he’s not bad to look at. Women are always hanging around, ordering food they don’t actually want, just to watch him cook it.”

  Something hot and prickly swept over Brady, then. It took him a moment to recognize it for what it was. Not a sudden attack of nocturnal fire ants, but pure, unadulterated rage.

  “You can’t date Noah Connelly.” His voice was flat.

  “Because he’s so grumpy all the time?” Amanda sniffed. “Or because he’s my boss?”

  “Pick one.”

  Brady was surprised at his own reaction, to put it mildly. And deeply, wildly glad that she couldn’t see the expression on his face.

  “Anyway, I’m not planning to buy the coffeehouse from Noah, even if he were selling it, which he’s not. And I’m certainly not planning to put Abby out of a job.” Amanda laughed. “Even if I wanted to, no one would ever accept me as Abby’s replacement. Not for at least another thirty years.”

  “You don’t want to ranch. You don’t want to tend bar, something I’m betting your brothers don’t know, or they’d be less bent out of shape about this whole Coyote experiment. And you also don’t want to keep working at Cold River Coffee forever.” He found himself holding her tighter and could have sworn he hadn’t meant to do that. “Answer your own question. What do you want to do?”

  “The thing I keep coming back to is that everybody who wants to stay here and do something different has to be creative about it,” Amanda said as she sank against him. “Obviously there are a million depressing ways to stay. To end up here. But if you want a good life, and you want it to be meaningful and fulfilling—and you don’t want to take part in the family enterprise, whatever that is—you have to make your own. You have to cobble it together from whatever pieces you’ve been given.”

  “Are you going to start talking about crafting? Because my experience there is that crafting is a conversation you can better have alone. And should.”

  “People call it crafting because they need a special merit badge to do the same thing their grandmothers have done since the dawn of time.” Amanda’s voice was tart. “Some of us just knit. And make the occasional ornament.”

  “If you say so.”

  “If I could do anything,” Amanda said grandly, “I would open a farm stand.”

  Brady took that in. “I’ll admit, I didn’t see that coming.”

  “Not an actual stand. More a shop.” Her voice got dreamy. “I would source everything from the community, and make it a celebration of Cold River. Flowers from the Trujillos. Beef from the Everetts. Horse rides and lessons with my brothers. And that’s just off the top of my head. There are so many people here working a job and then doing what they actually love around it. Wouldn’t it be great to have a place where they could make money from that? A place that’s right here, where the rest of us can support each other locally and the tourists can come and really get a sense of what Cold River has to offer.”

  “Look at you.” And he wanted to look at her, almost more than he wanted to breathe. But Brady had the very real sense that if he turned her around his arms, all the boundaries he’d set and all the promises he’d made—to himself and to her—would blow away in the fall wind. “You might as well be a Cold River ambassador.”

  She made him wish he could see this place the same way she did.

  “It would be like a farmers’ market, but a building,” she said. “It could be open all year-round and bring a little money in for everybody. The more people make a little money, the less desperate it is around here in the middle of February. And the more likely people are happy. I don’t know about you, Brady, but I like happy people.”

  “I want to like happy people,” Brady said, only half joking. “But I can’t trust them.”

  She was the one who turned then, flipping over to her knees and kneeling there before him, the blanket around her shoulders like a cape. He could feel that wind, kicking up as the night wore on.

  Or maybe it was just her—pretty Amanda with her hair down and that wicked fire making her eyes pure gold.

  “There has been so much talking,” she said, a smile curling the corner of her lips. “It has to be time for more kissing now, doesn’t it?”

  “I thought we decided I was in control.”

  “You decided that, Brady. But you can be in control of kissing. Now, if you want.”

  Brady couldn’t have named the things he wanted. There were too many. They were like a howl inside him, loud and long, and every last one of them centered on this woman and her innocence and how deep inside him she was already, without even trying.

  He’d told himself so many lies in the truck on the way out here. He’d been so sure he would stay removed. Interested, but distant, the way he always was.

  But there was nothing about Amanda that didn’t get to him. Not one thing.

  He pulled her toward him, toppling her off balance and catching her against his chest. Then he indulged himself, rolling her over. He kept her on that blanket instead of the rock, but this time with him on top.

  That was a mistake.

  A catastrophic mistake.

  Brady might as well have doused himself in gasoline and then danced around the bonfire, hoping for the best.

  But he couldn’t seem to stop.

  This time, he kissed her without holding anything back. He poured it all into her, every ache, every surprise, every odd moment of this night and his own reactions. He kissed the impossibility of her, and how much he wanted her.

  But this was Amanda, so she rose up against him and poured herself right back into him.

  She was the one who got her hands up beneath his shirt, streaking along his flesh and moaning her appreciation. She was the one who figured out how to hook her legs around his, holding him right where he wanted to go, and rolling her hips to experiment with that snug, mind-blowing fit.

  She really would be the death of him. Brady understood that fully.

  And still he kissed her, recklessly.

  Ruinously.

  It was only when he found his hands moving restlessly at her waistband, dipping a bit beneath it, that he finally yanked himself back to reality.

  Brady was not taking Amanda Kittredge’s virginity on an old blanket a few feet away from his truck. An upgrade from the front seat of his truck, to be sure. But still. No.

  He tore his mouth from hers. With a strength he didn’t know he had, he forced himself to get up. To c
limb to his feet, scrape his hands over his face, and remind himself that he was not having sex. Not tonight.

  Even if it killed him; not tonight.

  He was going to pay for this, eventually. There was no doubt about that, no way around it. But since he knew that going in, there was no excuse for doing it shabbily.

  If there was ever a time in a man’s life when it was all or nothing, it was now. It was this.

  It was her.

  “Did you change your mind?” Amanda asked in a low, husky voice, still splayed out there on his blanket in total abandon. Brady couldn’t decide if it was because she really was that free of shame and self-judgment, or if—and this knocked around inside of him like a wrecking ball—she simply trusted him that much. “I swear to God, if you changed your mind, I will kill you myself. With my very own hands. Here and now.”

  “I should change my mind. I should be locked up.”

  She pushed herself up on one elbow and scowled at him. “For what, Brady? Adulting in the presence of another adult? A shocking sin, I think we can all agree.”

  “I haven’t changed my mind. About anything. Remember, I told you we weren’t having sex tonight. I also told you frustration was part of the deal. Did you think I was kidding?”

  “I hoped you were kidding.”

  She sounded so delightfully cranky, it made him smile.

  Brady held out his hand, and Amanda stared at it with suspicion. But she took it, and that made him smile even wider as he tugged her up from the rock and onto her feet.

  “Come on, killer,” he said. “I’m taking you home.”

  11

  Amanda would have cartwheeled into Sunday dinner the next day, complete with sparklers and a unicorn horn, had she not feared her entire family would disown her on the spot. And worse, know instantly what had happened last night.

  Which wasn’t even everything she’d wanted to have happen. But still.