The Last Real Cowboy

by Caitlin Crews

  “You have a romantic life?” Riley practically bellowed it. “With him?”

  “For all you know, I have a romantic life with every single man in town!” Amanda threw at him. Not helping, to Brady’s mind. He stood. Carefully. “It’s still not your business.”

  “You’re my little sister. Of course it’s my business. And you’re lucky all I did was hit him.” Riley slid another filthy look Brady’s way, making Brady all the happier about getting to his feet. “What do you think Zack’s going to do?”

  “Hopefully follow the law, which is his job,” Amanda snapped. “And I think you’ll find that means he can’t be throwing random men in jail because he finds them kissing his sister.”

  “Then he can put me in jail for killing the random man myself,” Riley growled. “Like a fox in a henhouse.”

  “I’m not a hen, you Neanderthal.”

  Brady checked out his jaw, because his whole face hurt, but wasn’t foolish enough to take his eyes off his best friend.

  “There’s no point fighting about this,” he managed to say. “It’s over.”

  “You’re damn right it’s over,” Riley snarled back at him. “I don’t know why I didn’t expect something like this. Of course you betrayed me. I trust someone, boom. They betray me. I should have known.”

  “News flash, Riley,” Amanda snapped, clearly not as rocked straight through by that as Brady was. He felt it like a mortal blow. She looked like she might stop shoving and start swinging. “This isn’t about you. If you want to talk about your broken heart and the mess of your marriage, I would be delighted. But this isn’t the time. You’ve had years to talk about it.”

  If possible, Riley’s scowl deepened. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Then don’t talk about how betrayed you are. Go fix it. Or don’t, I don’t really care. But what you don’t get to do is come barging in here, whaling on people.”

  Brady had never seen Amanda so fierce. And if he wasn’t mistaken, protective. Of him.

  He couldn’t really take it in. He was too busy reeling from what had happened between them, even before Riley had appeared. And Riley glaring at him like he would hate Brady forever didn’t help.

  Brady was almost grateful for the pulse of pain that radiated out from the point of impact. Almost.

  “I never meant to betray you,” Brady said, very formally, to Riley. “I know you won’t believe this, but it … just happened.”

  “She’s my baby sister,” Riley seethed at him, pushing against Amanda’s grip like he was chomping at the bit to take another swing. And Brady would have to let him, wouldn’t he? “You changed her diaper, man!”

  Amanda made a frustrated noise. “I’m going to put you both in diapers in a minute.

  Brady accepted the fury and betrayal on his best friend’s face. He nodded and didn’t offer up any further excuses or arguments. What was there to say? He’d known better, and he’d done it anyway.

  He took one last look at Amanda, even more beautiful now lit up with indignation. Even more perfectly her, if that were possible, and everything in him was a deep, hard ache. But he’d made his choice before Riley had come in swinging. He wasn’t going to change it now.

  If he thought about it, getting punched in the face was a small price to pay for tasting her. He couldn’t regret it.

  “If you want to round up a good, old-fashioned Wild West posse of Kittredge boys to hunt me down, you know where to find me,” Brady told Riley. Who growled back at him. “I’m not going to hide from you.”

  He cut his gaze to Amanda. But he couldn’t think of anything to say. Or he could, but he couldn’t bring himself to say it. All he could do was hold her gaze for another long, wrenching moment, basking in all that emotion-soaked gold.

  Then he made himself leave.

  He staggered out into the cold sunshine, the frigid breeze from the mountains cutting into him. He stood there a moment, unsteady on his feet, and wanted to blame the hit he’d taken.

  But it wasn’t Riley’s fist that had knocked him off balance. If anything, getting sucker punched had cleared his head. At last.

  It’s only you, she’d said.

  Brady couldn’t let himself believe that. He couldn’t really let himself dwell on it. Or it would hurt him a whole lot more than the thudding pulse of pain in one side of his face.

  He climbed into his truck, thinking he really should have hidden it again if he didn’t want someone driving by and seeing it. The way he assumed Riley must have. Had he wanted someone to discover him with Amanda? Had he wanted to make sure he couldn’t give in to temptation?

  That a part of him still wanted to get out of his truck and go back inside—even if Riley jumped him again—well. That was the problem, wasn’t it?

  It didn’t matter what he wanted. What mattered—finally, and too late—was what he did.

  Or didn’t do.

  Brady meant to head out to the ranch and throw himself into work—where he could sweat out all this poison and emotion, he was sure—but he didn’t. He drove over the hill and hated how beautiful the valley was today, with the sky so blue and the mountains so tall, the way they always were. He hated that his life could feel like this, broken irreparably and ugly straight through, but he’d never know it from the view.

  That was what he loved about this land. It didn’t care what happened to the men and women who broke themselves all over it. It didn’t care if they lived or died.

  At the moment, Brady felt almost … desperate. Like he didn’t care much either.

  Instead of heading back to Cold River Ranch, he headed out toward the rock where he’d taken Amanda. Once he made it through the fields and down to the river, he grabbed an old T-shirt he’d tossed in the back seat and forgotten about. He dunked it in the surging water of the cold river, then held it to his eye as he sat there.

  “Ouch,” he muttered. Freaking Riley.

  Not that he blamed his friend.

  No matter how much the side of his face throbbed.

  He sat there for a long time, reapplying the cold water to his face. He waited and waited, but the riot inside him didn’t ease.

  If anything, it got worse. Darker, thicker, and more painful.

  At some point, he accepted the fact that he might just have to live with this. With what he’d done and the fallout from it. That this was simply … how things would be now.

  Riley hated him. Brady had done that all by himself. And Amanda might think she loved him now, but he knew that would turn around. She would end up hating him too. She would meet that nice guy and wish she hadn’t thrown her innocence away. He would be her big regret.

  The inevitability of that shouldn’t have stung as much as it did. Almost worse than his eye.

  But he could see it as if it had already happened. He could see her, round and pregnant and glowing—with another man’s baby. He could see her pretending she hardly knew him.

  He could see himself dancing at her wedding, all right, with one of the elderly widows who always liked a handsome young dance partner—all while avoiding making eye contact with the bride or any of her family.

  It made him feel vaguely ill.

  But then, that was nothing new. After all, he was the kid who’d made his own mother leave. Bettina had stuck it out through Gray and Ty, but Brady was the one who’d turned the tide. He was the bridge too far, the straw that broke the camel’s back, whatever you wanted to call it.

  He deserved to be alone, he’d always thought, and he’d tried to be. He’d never seen Amanda coming.

  But thanks to her, Brady was right on track to making himself into Amos, once and for all.

  What he couldn’t get away from was the idea that this had all been a self-fulfilling prophecy from the start. He’d meant what he told Amanda. The more he thought about his brothers and their demons and the way they’d fought their way to a kind of happiness none of them had ever seen play out on the ranch, it was hard not to read Amos’s response to his
youngest as deliberate condemnation.

  The more he thought about it, the more Brady was convinced Amos had known the truth about him all along. And soon everyone else in the Longhorn Valley would too.

  Word would get out. It likely already had. And Brady knew better than to think that folks would take his side in this. He wasn’t even on his side. The whole town would choose, and it wouldn’t be the city slicker, college-educated Everett boy, who should have known better than to put his hands on that sweet little Kittredge girl.

  He’d known that going in too.

  Maybe some part of him had always known he’d end up here. On the land and of it, but connected to nothing and no one. The only difference between him and his father was the booze.

  And Lord knew he could remedy that any time he chose.

  Was this what had happened to Amos? Had he tried to be a good man once? Because Brady understood now, the great gulf between the things a man told himself about who he was and the reality of his actions, and how that could get into a person’s bones. How it could warp them. He understood how much easier it would be to dive headfirst into the slick embrace of alcohol.

  Getting drunk and mean with it meant Amos had never had to face this … emptiness. If he drank enough, the drinking caused its own problems, and the real problems never needed to be addressed. They could fester there. They could sink in deep.

  Maybe it had been easier for Amos to give in. To allow himself to go dark and stay dark, because the light hurt too much.

  Of all the things Brady might have imagined the year anniversary of his father’s death might kick up in him, it wasn’t this. It wasn’t … sympathy.

  It sat strangely on him. Like another blow to the face.

  Brady made his way back to his truck. Then he wheeled around and headed for the ranch. He was stiff and cold, and he saw he’d been sitting out there a long, long time. The day was still bright around him, but there were clouds up over the mountains, hinting at the storms to come. He rubbed a hand over his heart as he drove, trying to piece together all the strands of the heavy things that sat on him.

  But all he felt was the weight.

  When he got back to the ranch house, it looked like Abby was home, but Gray and Ty were still out in the fields. And maybe it made him a coward—or more of one—but the longer Brady could put off discussing the state of his face and how he’d come by a fist print there, the better. He parked in the yard, then headed for the entrance on the back of the house that led directly to his room.

  To Amos’s room. Where Brady had marinated for almost a year, and had turned out to be no better than the man he’d been so sure he’d done everything to avoid becoming.

  He wasn’t hiding, he assured himself as he went inside and got his first decent look at his face in his bathroom mirror. He winced, because it looked like what it was. A very hard, very deliberate blow. Ouch.

  “I’m not hiding from anything,” he muttered as he turned away from the mirror. “I’m waiting.”

  Because there was no need to dive headfirst into something he knew was going to be unpleasant, like his family’s reaction to his face. And their further reactions when they found out about Amanda, the way he knew they would.

  Amanda might tell them herself, for all he knew. The mood she’d been in, she might do anything.

  That should probably not have made him smile.

  He cracked open his laptop and immersed himself in the financial world he’d left behind him in Denver. He’d always been good at numbers, and he still was. And more, he knew exactly who to contact to start putting the wheels in motion for his diversification project. He thought it would pay off in spades, but even if he was wrong—and he hadn’t been wrong about a money-making venture in quite some time—the beauty of it was, he would preserve the land.

  That was the lesson of all of this, wasn’t it? No matter what happened, an Everett preserved the land.

  No matter what he sacrificed. No matter what he lost. No matter what he gave up along the way, none of that mattered as much as the land. That view he’d hated and loved in equal measure when he’d come over the hill today.

  Whatever else Brady was, he’d finally come to understand that above all else, he was an Everett.

  That probably should have felt like more of a victory.

  Instead, what he felt was that same heaviness, so he ignored it and started reaching out to colleagues and friends.

  When the commotion started in the main part of the house, he ignored that too. There were a lot of people living in and around this house these days, and no need for him to go sticking his nose in every time he heard a noise.

  But the second time he heard a particular voice, he couldn’t ignore it. Because it sounded a whole lot like Amanda.

  Even though that should have been impossible. Hadn’t Riley locked her up by now? Built her a tower and thrown away the key, or something equally dramatic?

  He slid his laptop off to the side, then headed out of the back room. But Becca was there in the hallway again.

  “Why are you lurking out here?”

  She gasped. “What happened to your face?”

  “I walked into a door. And that still doesn’t tell me what you’re doing back here, clearly up to no good.”

  Becca looked wounded. “I was looking for you.”

  “You could have knocked.” He wanted to look away from her dark, too-clever gaze, but didn’t.

  “Why is Amanda Kittredge here?”

  “She’s your neighbor, Becca.”

  “She didn’t come by with brownies or a pot roast, Uncle Brady. She came to see you.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” he muttered.

  But Becca was studying him, that considering look on her face that he both recognized and intensely disliked.

  “Is Amanda the girl you were talking to the other night? When you lied?” And she reminded him a little too much of her father just then. “Twice?”

  “I marched in your parade, Becca. Surely that should buy me fewer questions.”

  Becca rolled her eyes, but she stepped aside. And Brady moved past her, aware that he was walking like his bones might give way. Like he’d been on a bender. It annoyed him.

  He moved faster, out into the living room where, sure enough, Amanda was standing in that archway that connected the big room to the kitchen.

  Amanda.

  Looking stubborn and furious and so beautiful it made his ribs feel a little precarious inside his chest.

  She was saying something to whoever was still in the kitchen, hidden by the wall, but stopped when she saw him.

  “Brady…,” she breathed, and his curse was that he loved the way she said his name. It got into him like heat. It warmed him up and made that weight ease a little too—and that was a problem. She was a problem. “Your face…”

  He glared at her. “You shouldn’t be here. And I’m fine.”

  “You’re not fine. Your face is swollen and you already have a black eye.” Her hands twitched, as if she’d started to reach for him and then thought better of it, and Brady didn’t know why that hurt even worse than the rest. “It’s probably going to turn colors before it’s done.”

  “I said I’m fine.”

  It had been hard enough to do this once already today. Almost impossible, before Riley had turned up swinging. He didn’t think he could go through it again.

  Why couldn’t she understand that he was trying to do the right thing here?

  Brady opened his mouth to ask her that, when he remembered they weren’t alone this time. Because Abby moved from deeper in the kitchen to stand behind Amanda, a dumbstruck look on her face and Bart strapped to her front. She was cradling the baby’s head with one hand, but she didn’t take that scandalized gaze off Brady.

  “What on earth is going on?” she asked.

  “I told you he had a girl,” Becca said from behind him, sounding far too satisfied.

  He decided she’d won herself a spot as his least favori
te niece, then and there. But he couldn’t tell her that, because Abby was still staring at him. The same way Riley had earlier.

  Like the monster Brady had always suspected he was.

  He wasn’t going to fight it anymore. What would be the point? He lifted his chin and met his sister-in-law’s appalled gaze.

  “Are you…? Are you and Amanda…? No, that’s impossible. Tell me that’s impossible.”

  It was like a nightmare. A nightmare he’d had quite a few times over the past month. Because it wasn’t enough that Abby was here, looking at him like he’d killed someone. Worse, everyone else crowded in right behind her.

  Gray, clearly straight from the fields. Ty right behind him. And a split second later, Hannah too. She was toting Jack, all kitted out in a Halloween costume that made him look like the cutest bear cub Brady had ever seen.

  “Hey, Amanda—” Hannah began happily, but then stopped when the tension in the room got to her.

  Or when she got a good look at Amanda’s reddened eyes and Brady’s busted-up face. It was hard to tell.

  For a long moment, no one said a word. Even Jack and the baby were quiet.

  They all stared.

  Brady stared back, but he couldn’t bring himself to care about his family’s reaction the way he probably should have. Not when Amanda was there, with curls in her hair and swollen eyes and all that hurt and hope in her expression that told him she hadn’t gotten around to hating him yet.

  He wanted this part to be over.

  He wanted to fast-forward straight into getting his Amos on.

  “Take a good look,” he growled, his chin still lifted. “Amanda and I had a thing. It’s over. Riley took exception and punched me in the face. That brings everyone up to speed. No need to discuss it further.”

  There was another long beat of silence.

  Then everyone reacted all at once.

  Ty laughed. Because of course he did. Hannah didn’t actually laugh out loud, but she didn’t look particularly scandalized either. Gray looked like a thundercloud, as ever.