The Last Real Cowboy

by Caitlin Crews

  “Weird,” Brady replied. “That’s how I felt when my best friend’s baby sister propositioned me. I dealt with it.”

  She rolled her eyes. But then looked away, because it was even less entertaining when the subject of Riley came up. Amanda had personally handled Connor herself this week, threatening him until he grudgingly gave his blessing, promised to only call her “monkey” in private, and texted said blessing to Brady so he couldn’t rescind it. Buoyed by that success, she’d gone toe-to-toe with Zack again. In his office, where he’d given up purely so she would be quiet. Or so he claimed. But she made him record a voice message all the same.

  Go ahead and date my sister, if you’re that masochistic, Zack had said, glaring at Amanda while she smiled and held her phone out between them. It’s your funeral.

  Thank you, big brother, she’d said when he finished. I love you too.

  She’d driven by the barn the other morning and found Jensen there, putting in the lighting she’d wanted.

  Wow, she’d said when he’d scowled down at her from his ladder. This could definitely be interpreted as you giving me your blessing.

  Don’t get ahead of yourself, he’d growled. Lights are just lights, Amanda.

  But later that day Brady came into the coffee shop and announced that Jensen had gone ahead and given his okay after all.

  She’d been so excited, she’d leaned over the counter and kissed him, then had nearly forgotten herself while the punch of heat and longing walloped her.

  How are male blessings on topics that don’t concern them given, anyway? she’d asked, breathlessly, when she’d pulled back. Because there was a line, not because she wanted to. Is there a ritual? A ceremony? Bloodletting of some kind?

  Brady had stared at her. We had a beer.

  But Riley was a different story. Riley wasn’t speaking to Brady at all, and he didn’t have much more to say to Amanda either. He’d spent the better part of November making deliveries that the family normally entrusted to employees—because he wanted to stay out of town and away from this mess, Amanda knew. He wanted to make it hard. The jerk.

  Brady reached over now and took her hand, squeezing it tight while the fog made the street seem eerie. Too close when the two of them were walking and talking, but too far apart.

  “Riley’s my problem” he said. “I’ll handle him.”

  “We’ll get there,” she told him, then, repeating his words back to him like a prayer. Because she needed to hear it herself.

  Brady might know where they were headed, but she wanted to get there because they both wanted to get there—because they wanted nothing more than to get there and stay there—not because Riley had caught them together.

  But she didn’t know how to say that.

  She still didn’t know how to say that, not now that everything was so public and there was the barn and he’d talked to her parents.

  Amanda took a deep breath, but she still couldn’t do it. She was too afraid of what would happen. And his fingers were threaded with hers, warm and strong, and she didn’t have it in her to throw that away. No matter what that made her.

  Pathetic. Weak. Silly.

  “I know we will,” she said instead, holding tight to Brady’s hand, and letting him lead her deeper into the cold, wet night.

  21

  It was the night before Thanksgiving when Brady and his brothers finally held their bonfire.

  They’d batted around several different ideas about how best to burn what was left of the table that had been such a symbol of the stranglehold Amos held over all of them. Every night at dinner, first in the dining room and then around the new table that Brady delivered one day from the shop of a local woodworker, they talked about what to do with all that kindling.

  Brady figured it was another way to talk about how much brighter and happier things were without that last remnant of Amos here in the house with them. Even his bedroom seemed free of ghosts these days.

  He was tempted to believe he might be getting there too.

  “We should do it out by his grave,” Gray said that afternoon. They’d been out in one of the pastures, all of them saddled up on horseback as they’d rounded up the herd and looked for stragglers. “Seems fitting.”

  They would all end up out by the river, where the family plot waited for them. That was a given. But Brady no longer viewed that as a kind of prison sentence. Instead, it seemed more and more like a fitting end to every Everett story. The land gave and the land took, season after season, but one day, they would all rest in it.

  It was practically a lullaby.

  “Too morbid,” Ty drawled, managing to look like he was lounging while on a horse. A rodeo trick, no doubt. “We’ll all be there ourselves soon enough. Why rush into it?”

  “Because that’s less morbid,” Gray said with that laugh of his that still surprised Brady, though he heard it a whole lot more these days.

  “I’m not sure I want to give the old man another somber, serious occasion.” Ty shrugged. “We had that at his funeral.”

  “You were drunk at his funeral,” Brady pointed out.

  Ty nodded. “I’m not sure he deserves a moment of clear-headed reflection from me.”

  “Maybe a moment,” Gray said, his gaze on the horizon. “If it’s the last moment.”

  “Doesn’t sit right with me.” Ty switched direction in that elegant way of his, barely seeming to move as he controlled his horse with ease. “I’m ready to move on. I have no idea if Dad can rest in peace, but it’s time to leave that to him. We have lives to live.”

  Brady kept pace with them, the way he had so many times he could have counted for a year and still not made a dent. They’d spent their lives on the backs of horses. They’d spent even more time running cattle, fixing fences, and tending to the thousand and one things that could crop up in the course of a day on a ranch. His brothers looked like cowboys through and through, riding out to the fields in the cold. He guessed that made him one too, with the cold November wind in his face. There was the crisp, clean scent of snow in the air, clouds over the mountains, and the gift of bright autumn sun while they worked.

  “What do you want to do?” Gray asked Brady.

  Because that was what had changed the most since Halloween. They asked him now.

  They didn’t necessarily do what he wanted to do, or how he thought they ought to do it, but they asked.

  It seemed like such a little thing.

  But it was enough.

  That was how they ended up out in the yard later that night. Not just Gray, Ty, and Brady, but the whole family. Everyone was bundled up against the cold while Ty started a fire in the portable fire pit they usually used only in summer. They went out after dinner and gathered around it as if it weren’t a cold, damp November night too close to the end of the year.

  “No one wants to make this sad,” Brady said when the flames were jumping. “Because it shouldn’t be. Not anymore.”

  He took a moment to look around at his family, gathered there in the dark with the Colorado stars stretched out high and bright above them.

  There was Gray with his arms wrapped around Abby, a few days out from their one-year anniversary. Abby leaned back against her husband’s chest, baby Bart snuggling in her arms, and if the only thing the year had brought was the way Gray smiled down at them, that would have been enough. But next to them was Hannah, holding hands with Ty like they were loved-up teenagers. And rounding out the Everett clan was Becca, no longer overly serious and old before her time. She held Jack on her hip, singing little songs to him while he laughed at the flames.

  “I would have thought a good way to not make it sad was to avoid speeches,” Gray said, not looking up from his wife and child.

  “If it were up to you, there would never be any speeches, ever,” Brady pointed out. “Or unnecessary sentences of any kind.”

  Gray laughed. Another actual laugh, not just a curve in the corner of his mouth that was open to interpretation, which was
itself such a shock still. “Fair.”

  “I meant what I said on Halloween,” Brady continued. “I’m looking forward to what we build, and I’m happy to put Dad behind us.”

  “Hear, hear,” Ty drawled, and everyone raised what they were drinking.

  Which for Jack was a sippy cup. That Becca had to grab before he threw it in the fire. Or did the same with her Coke.

  “I hereby declare this Everett night,” Brady intoned, while everyone’s drinks were still in the air. “A night of merriment, out with the old and in with the new. Tonight, we will burn the bits and pieces of that table, and tomorrow, we’ll eat too much and give thanks. Next year, who knows? We’ll burn what doesn’t fit anymore to make way for better things.”

  Everybody cheered at that, even Gray.

  Brady pulled out his phone and put on some music. Not a mournful, funereal dirge, but some solid country to remind them where they were. Out here on the ranch that had been handed down to them, but required all of their hands, linked together, to keep going.

  They all took turns taking handfuls of splinters from the wheelbarrow they’d set up earlier, then throwing them into the fire.

  Becca danced with Jack. Hannah taught them all how to do her favorite two-step. Abby went inside at one point, then came back out with blankets to swaddle themselves in and the makings for s’mores.

  And they all sat around and talked. Not about Amos, but about life. The here and the now and finally, without any fighting or sniping, the future.

  “Think of it like a state park,” Brady said, sitting with his brothers as the splinters dwindled, and the bonfire kept going. “Except it will be private. And we’ll make money on it. There will be camping. Access to the river. And a more high-end tourist option as well, because like it or not, the tourists have found Cold River.”

  “He’s trying not to say glamping,” Ty told Gray lazily. “Because he doesn’t want you to say—”

  “What? Glamping? That’s not a word.”

  “—that, Gray.” Ty laughed. “Brady doesn’t want you to say exactly that.”

  “It’s glamorous camping, Dad,” Becca said, rolling her eyes like a proper sixteen-year-old, disgusted to death by her parent. It made Brady’s chest tight. “For people who want to camp, but without all the gross stuff.”

  “Like nature,” Hannah chimed in. “And dirt.”

  “There’s nothing gross about nature,” Gray said. “It’s nature. Dirt is the point.”

  “Gray is not going to come around on the glamorous camping thing,” Abby said, looking like she was trying not to burst out laughing.

  “You’ll like what they pay to do it,” Brady said idly. He named some competitive rates. And when Gray nodded instead of muttering darkly about real ranching and the problem with college degrees, that wasn’t just progress. It was a miracle. “I’m going to build a little lodge. More of a visitor center than a hotel, but you never know. We’ll see how things go. Maybe down the road, a hotel wouldn’t be out of the question.”

  Gray made a face at that. “Seems like a slippery slope to me. One minute it’s a hotel, and the next it’s a dude ranch. Filled with the kind of people who would pay money to go to something called a dude ranch.” He blew out a breath. “Can llamas be far behind?”

  “Obviously I’m planning the llama farm too,” Brady said. “But that’s phase two.”

  “Everyone loves llamas,” Ty drawled.

  “I’m looking forward to it,” Gray replied. He grinned. “Can you train them to actually serve the lavender hemp lattes?”

  And there, while the fire danced and the table burned, Brady believed he could. He believed he could do anything. That together, he and his brothers—he and his family—could rearrange the mountains.

  He thought that finally, after all this time, Cold River Ranch was really a home. His home. He had everything he’d ever wanted but had figured he wouldn’t get to have. His brothers, treating him like a friend. Their beautiful wives, funny and fascinating. And three remarkable members of the next generation too, growing up here with the land all around and a whole lot less Everett family turmoil. Relatively speaking. Who knew what they’d accomplish?

  If Brady did nothing else in his life but bask in this, he would be perfectly content.

  But he wanted to be more than simply content.

  Brady had his heart set on happy.

  “Is it safe to talk about Amanda Kittredge?” Ty asked sometime later. “Or will there be more destruction of property?”

  Gray whistled, long and low, but didn’t contribute a comment. Likely because that was his comment. Brady looked back and forth between them.

  “That depends what you have to say about Amanda Kittredge,” he said. “I can’t rule anything out.”

  “An observation, that’s all,” Ty replied. Innocently.

  He was kicked back in one of the camp chairs someone had found in the barn, because heaven forbid Ty didn’t look as lazy as possible at all times. Even when he had Jack sprawled out over him, unconscious in the wake of his s’mores-induced sugar crash.

  Brady sighed. And braced himself. “Hit me.”

  Ty grinned. “There are a lot of women out there that a man might get in a fight about, circumstances being what they are.”

  “I’ll want an accounting of those circumstances later, sugar,” Hannah said from beside him.

  Ty glanced at Hannah with laughter in his gaze, but his expression was serious when he looked back at Brady. “But a woman prepared to burn down the house for you? A woman who doesn’t pull her punches, even in the middle of some ugly family stuff? That’s gold, in my opinion.”

  “You need to lock that down, college boy,” Gray drawled, and this time, Brady knew exactly what that curve in his oldest brother’s mouth meant. “No more walks in town. Whatever that is. Get it done.”

  Brady knew Gray hadn’t been hanging around gossiping about his younger brother. Gray hardly bothered going into town at all if he could avoid it. But Abby went in all the time. So did Hannah. And Becca. All three of them smiled at him, which was as good as an admission of guilt.

  There was a time not so long ago that he would have found these small-town games of Telephone suffocating. He would have longed for the anonymity of Denver. Tonight, however, it felt good to have so many people this invested in him. In his happiness.

  Maybe that was what family was. What it was supposed to be.

  “Not to mention,” Gray said, “making an honest woman out of her might take that Kittredge bounty off your head.”

  “There’s no bounty on my head.” Brady didn’t think there was. But who knew with Riley. “I’d like to see them try.”

  Ty laughed. “Look who’s full of himself now that his shiner’s faded.”

  “I appreciate the concern,” Brady said, and he incorporated the whole family in that. With a smirk. “But don’t you worry. I know exactly what I’m doing with Amanda.”

  Because he hadn’t been kidding when he’d said that he wanted this night to be an annual thing for his family.

  And it was past time Amanda was a member of his family. Officially.

  Which meant Brady needed to handle the last holdout from hers.

  * * *

  The next morning was Thanksgiving, so he finished his usual chores and then skipped breakfast, because it was time to hash things out with Riley.

  Because even Riley Kittredge, one of the most stubborn men alive, couldn’t pretend to have urgent business somewhere outside Longhorn County on Thanksgiving. Not while his mother drew breath.

  Brady knew he’d be home.

  Riley’s cabin sat at the end of a dirt road on the edge of the forest, almost all the way out into the foothills. Brady had helped build this house. The summer before college, he and every other able-bodied member of the Cold River High School Cowboys had come out here and helped. And Riley had added to it over the years, broadening his windows to better take in the view. Adding a shop and his own barn.


  Brady hadn’t envied his friend the life of domesticity he was settling into back then. Not when Brady had been all set to take off to a better life. He’d wanted to see exactly how wide and how far he could sow his wild oats, and he had.

  But here, now, everything was different. And he understood far better why a man might take a deep pleasure in owning a piece of land, building a house with his own hands, and settling into the life he’d made.

  Maybe he understood better than Riley did these days, because last night he’d done his best to burn out what ghosts remained. He’d burned away what kept him bitter, and Brady wanted what came next. He was ready.

  He knew that wasn’t true for his friend. Not with his ghost alive and well and often popping up in the same room.

  Brady parked his truck out front, then climbed out into the still, cold morning. He could see smoke coming from Riley’s chimney, but he didn’t bother to look for his friend inside the house. Not at this time of day. He made his way over toward the barn, his feet crunching into the frigid ground with every step.

  He wasn’t surprised to look up before he got near the barn door to find Riley standing there, watching him approach.

  Without a single sign that they’d ever been friends on his face. Much less best friends. Best friends who would even have called themselves brothers not too long ago.

  Riley was acting like none of that had ever happened. Like Brady was nothing more than some guy.

  Brady knew that Amanda thought he was sad about what had gone down between him and Riley. But he wasn’t. Maybe on the day. But not now, weeks later.

  Now he was pissed.

  “You took a shot at me already,” Brady tossed out into the frigid space between them, as much of it coming from Riley as the blasts of cold air when the wind picked up. “You punched me in the face. And I let you because I deserved it. That was almost a month ago, so why are you still sulking?”