“I have a new buyer coming in this afternoon,” Jensen said as Riley made his way out of the stall. Finally getting around to his real reason for being there. “It’s that hotel guy from Jackson Hole who’s been sniffing around. Wants to make horses the centerpiece of his new program, blah blah blah.”
“You need me in on that?”
Jensen nodded slowly, a considering look on his face, which always amused Riley, because it showed the truth about his entertaining big brother. Ask anyone in Cold River about Jensen Kittredge and they’d talk a lot about high school glory on the football field, his bigger-than-life personality, that laugh of his. Happy-go-lucky. Carefree. Possibly not smart enough to realize that parachuting into active fire zones looked a lot like a death wish.
The reality was that Jensen was the businessman of their generation. Between them, Connor and Riley were sheer magic with horses. Connor had an eye for breeding lines and was already building a reputation as the man to watch. Riley had inherited their mother’s ability to train, gentle, and gain the trust of any horse she encountered—and his clinics for problem horses were usually filled up months in advance, despite his reputation for what the more polite called bullheadedness. Jensen, meanwhile, knew profit and loss, expenditures and acceptable risk like a farmer knew how to till a field but, better still, could sell pretty much anything to anyone.
And in his spare time, yes, jumped out of planes in various Western states to battle forest fires—a pastime that might be a death wish dressed up like heroism, but still required a lot more attention to his physical fitness than folks seemed to think. Something they’d know if they were ever foolish enough to work out with him when he was training for his season. It was exhausting.
“This guy has a regional chain of hotels,” Jensen was saying now. “Or is heading in that direction, anyway, and looks legitimate. I think the way to play him is to make him think he’s getting one over on us salt-of-the-earth, honest country folk.”
Riley didn’t bother to sigh. He knew this game. “I’ll be there.”
“Two o’clock.” Riley expected Jensen to walk off then, heading back to the office part of the stable complex where he spent the bulk of his time. But instead, he stayed where he was, that considering gaze of his suddenly all over Riley.
“Something going on with you?”
Riley turned to stone. “What would be going on with me?”
“Offhand, I can think of a number of things. Want me to count them?”
“About as much as I want to get kicked in the face by an ornery horse.”
He headed out of the stable toward one of the corrals, where one of his consulting cases waited. A bad-tempered Arabian filly whose owner didn’t want her spirit broken but needed her a whole lot calmer than she was now.
“You know.” Jensen’s voice was … careful. It made Riley stop walking, it was so unusual. Though he didn’t turn back to face his brother. “Anytime you want us all to stop pretending we’re blind to certain things, just say the word.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“You do.”
Riley turned slowly. “Is this like how I pretend I don’t know about your nights at the Coyote and all the girls you like to take home? Because I’m actually okay with that. I’m not your Cub Scout leader.”
“I don’t have to go to the wrong side of town to find a girl to take home,” Jensen said with a laugh. “But I also don’t pretend that’s not what I’m doing when I’m doing it.”
Riley stared, stone straight through. “Again. No idea what you’re getting at.”
Even as he said it, he wondered what he was doing. He and Rae had maintained a code of silence when it came to their personal business, but it wasn’t something they’d ever set out to do. It had just happened that way. He knew he shouldn’t feel this sense of loyalty to her when she obviously didn’t feel the same.
But he couldn’t do it.
Riley had grown up with parents at odds, and there had been a lot of years of a lot of external opinions, delivered at potlucks and church picnics and sometimes in the form of pointed prayers. He remembered that much too well. Then he and Rae had started dating while they’d been in high school, which meant there had been a lot of other people not only invested in their relationship but only too happy to share their thoughts. With the two of them and with half of Cold River.
He’d never talked about his marriage when it was good. Why would he talk about it once it went bad?
“Okay, then,” Jensen said amiably, sounding every inch the superior, know-it-all big brother. That was so irritating that even if Riley had wanted to unburden himself, he wouldn’t have. “You don’t know what I’m talking about. Fine. Meet me at two o’clock.”
“I planned on it,” Riley replied. “I never miss an opportunity to watch folks treat you like you’re dumb. It feeds my soul.”
“Noted,” Jensen replied with a big smile that maybe only a family member would see was far edgier than it appeared.
Riley felt slightly better about things as he went out to introduce himself to the horse he already knew wanted to stomp on him and rip him to pieces. Something he wished Rae had made clear a million years ago, because in retrospect—knowing that it would all end up where it had the other night—surely, it would have been better to avoid the whole thing.
And if his chest hurt as he climbed in the corral and started murmuring at the unimpressed Arabian waiting for him, he knew it was only because he didn’t know how to think about his life without Rae.
“If I could have,” he murmured to the filly like it was a little love poem, just for her, “I would have.”
He’d made incremental progress with the high-strung beauty by the time he finished his session. After he was done with her, he was thinking about heading out to see if any of the hands needed help with the fences that had gone down over the weekend, thanks to a spicy little wind that had rattled Riley’s own house as it blew.
But out in the yard, he found his parents. Ellie was standing by the side of Donovan’s truck, talking to him through the open driver’s-side window, though the day hadn’t warmed up any.
Riley had seen them this morning in the ranch kitchen, where everyone grabbed coffee and daily ranch jobs were allocated. Any new crises that occurred, the way they always did on days that ended in Y, were handled as they cropped up.
He walked toward them, trying to read something into their body language, but there was nothing to read. Donovan was a slab of granite. And Ellie had made herself into a kind of walking snowdrift.
“Thought I might help with those fences,” Riley said when he drew near. Donovan’s gaze slid to him, dark and unreadable as ever. He nodded. Or the Donovan version of a nod, which was more suggestion than fact.
“Good talk,” Riley muttered when his father drove off.
Ellie gave him a cool look. “You might ask yourselves where all your stubbornness comes from sometime, Riley. It isn’t me.”
“Of course it’s you,” Riley told her. “You’re the one who stayed.”
But his mother didn’t respond to that.
Which left Riley turning it over in his head while he drove out into the vast acres of land that were as much a part of who he was as his own bones. He helped wrestle some fences back into place. He ate the lunch he’d packed himself in the front seat of his truck, watching snowstorms dance over the eastern range and keeping his window cracked so he could smell winter rushing in. Then he dropped into Jensen’s meeting to quote outrageous prices, deadpan, that Jensen could then undercut in his role as the charming, supposedly more clueless brother.
When his day’s work was done, he declined his brothers’ invitation to go have a few beers in town. He didn’t think the storms in the east were coming for them just yet, but all the same, he tried to race them home.
But when he got there, he didn’t go in the house. He eyed the front porch, freaking thrilled that he could now add another memory of Rae to the mix. There
were already too many ghosts in those walls, all of them her fault, and now there was the divorce thing, hanging there—
You’re going to have to burn it down, he told himself. That’s the only way you’re going to get her handprints out.
He headed for his barn instead of his whiskey bottle, saddled his favorite horse, and headed out.
Because there was only one thing in the world that had ever made him feel as free and as right as being on horseback, and the trouble with Rae was that those good times never lasted. And now she wanted to end these not-so-good times that were all they had left?
He took his favorite trail up behind his house, into the woods and then out again, on a ridgeline that dropped him between the Rockies on one side and this valley of his on the other.
The view always settled him, and today was no exception.
Riley liked feeling as if he were the linchpin between the two. He’d felt that way his whole life. He’d always been more of a peacemaker in his family, back during the wars, as he and his brothers liked to call it. Zack and Donovan had always been butting heads. Jensen had been the comic relief. For a long time, Connor had been the baby, and he was always the squeaky wheel.
It had been up to Riley to sand the edges off, if he could. He’d always found a way, though it had left him nothing but edges. And it was only out in the familiar grip of the land that he ever found himself again.
He resented the fact that now, when he looked out over the sweep of the Longhorn Valley, all he saw was Rae. He was trapped somewhere between the brooding, careless mountains, a valley filled with history he was personally related to, and the land that had made them all, one way or another.
And still, all he saw was Rae. Brighter than the stars had ever been.
No matter what she did.
Riley didn’t like the fact that Jensen knew—or suspected, anyway—the truth about what Riley’s relationship with his supposed ex had been all this time. He didn’t like that his brother seemed to think he should unburden himself, because that meant Jensen thought Riley needed such a thing. It brought back memories of high school, and other kids asking him questions about things they shouldn’t have known the first thing about as if it were their lives. Their fights. Their feelings.
He knew it was part of living in a small town and working in his family’s business. His life wasn’t so much under a microscope as it was just … a part of everyone else’s life too. It wouldn’t occur to his brothers not to get all up in his face and deep in his business, because they figured it was their business too. Because he was.
There was a reason Riley had chosen to build his own house almost as far as it was possible to get from the central ranch house and still be on Kittredge land. And why that spot happened to be way out in the foothills, far enough out of town that it discouraged most visitors from making the long drive.
But he knew, sitting there with his horse beneath him and this land he loved all around him, that he wasn’t actually mad at Jensen.
He wished he were. That would be easier.
The truth was that he’d expected her to skip a night, but to come back. Because she always came back. He hadn’t thought much of it when she hadn’t turned up on Friday night. She was making her point, he’d thought. But then Saturday and Sunday had passed too, and Riley had woken up this morning with a slight headache and a host of unpleasant truths crouched over him like they might smother him if he wasn’t careful.
The biggest and hardest to accept being that despite what he’d thrown in her face last week, he’d never really considered it a burden to play these games with her.
Oh, sure, he liked to pretend. Rae liked to tell him he was a martyr, and he couldn’t fully deny that. This wasn’t what he’d wanted. This certainly wasn’t how he’d expected his marriage to turn out.
But he’d never expected her to end it.
He almost laughed at that. The horse stamped its feet and made a kind of laughing noise for him, so Riley murmured the usual soothing words until he settled.
Tonight, he was having trouble settling himself, and he couldn’t blame the coming storms the way he wanted.
All this time, it turned out he’d been hopeful, after all. Optimistic that all these years were leading somewhere, though he would have denied it right up to last Thursday. And since neither one of them seemed to be any good at letting go of each other, he’d always figured they’d end up together—one way or another.
Because what was the point in moving on? Riley might not have the kind of experience Jensen had. He and Rae had gotten together young enough that his so-called reputation in high school seemed kind of silly in retrospect. But he and Rae had always been magic. When they weren’t fighting. When they weren’t breaking up with each other. When they were together, and especially when they were naked, they were golden.
Where did she think she was going to get something better than that?
Riley knew there were some who assumed there had to be someone else in this equation. They generally thought it had to have been Riley who’d done something terrible, because why else would Rae leave him like that? Moving back into her parents’ house and maintaining her silence about what had made her do such a thing.
One time, he’d overheard two local ladies at a potluck discussing when and how he could have cheated on her.
Deliveries, Genna Dawson said staunchly over a plate of her own taco cups. Those Kittredges are always driving all over the place, delivering those horses. Who knows how many women they have out there?
I thought they always did those deliveries in pairs, replied Whitney Morrow, a little bit archly, as she shoveled in her shepherd’s pie.
You can’t really believe that the Kittredge boys would sell each other out. Please, Whitney. That’s not how men are.
At the time, Riley had thought that was funny, especially because his plate was full of both shepherd’s pie and taco cups, as well as his first helping of old Martha Douglas’s famous pie. And also because their individual stock deliveries involved more than one brother because that meant they could drive straight instead of stopping off to sleep along the way. Meaning there wasn’t that much room for the kind of shenanigans the two ladies thought they were carrying on out there.
There was another vocal group of people who blamed Rae. After all, she’d always been so sharp. Assertive. Not sweet and shy and afraid to speak her mind, the way some were. Maybe it was only to be expected, Riley had heard more than one person say, that she couldn’t keep her man.
He’d obviously found that even funnier. In the sense of not being all that funny, really, but that certainly hadn’t stopped him from throwing it in Rae’s face when they fought.
Still, Riley really had thought they were heading toward something.
For years, he’d let her do as she liked with this. With him. Leave, come back, leave again. Move in, move out. Show up, ignore him.
Riley had told himself that she needed to get all this out of her system. Whatever all this was.
But that only worked if they’d been headed in the same direction.
It wasn’t that Riley was any kind of a pushover. He’d just been prepared to wait her out. But if she thought she was done, maybe it was high time he shifted from waiting to something a little more active.
Just to clarify his feelings, which he couldn’t help but notice Rae hadn’t asked about while she was busy blowing things up.
Riley had barely noticed the shift in the weather, but he certainly felt it when the first snowflakes began to fall.
Winter is coming, he thought as he rode back down the trail, faster than he’d come up. Here in these mountains, the cold season was brutal. And endless.
And he, by God, didn’t intend to spend another one in limbo.
One way or another, this thing with Rae needed to end. She wasn’t wrong about that.
But Riley had a different solution in mind.
6
Rae’s alarm came as brutally early as ever th
e following Monday morning.
The difference being, she’d actually gone to bed at a reasonable hour the night before. And for the first time since Thursday, didn’t kick off her day by sobbing in the shower.
She had to count that as a step in the right direction.
When she was in her truck in the frigid, early morning, driving that old, familiar country road into town, that step seemed more and more like a huge, momentous jump with every mile she covered.
“You can do this,” she told herself and the night still holding on out there on the other side of her windshield. “You’re already doing this.”
It was still dark when she made it into Cold River. Main Street gleamed against the last of the night, not yet done up in the Christmas lights that made it really sparkle as the year wound down, but bright all the same. This was just a regular end-of-October predawn morning, fall taking a firm grip but not standing in the way of the usual order of things. She could see the usual early-morning crowd in Mary Jo’s, ranch hands and truckers and the like gathered in the sturdy, unpretentious diner for the cheap coffee, huge platters of food, and no-nonsense, gray-haired waitresses who called them all by name. Rae knew that if she drove down to the other end of Main Street, she would find Cold River Coffee open too, with its far fancier espresso drinks and baked goods. Because this was a rural mountain town and folks took their coffee and their breakfast seriously before they headed off for a long day of hard work, no matter what form.
Flowers were not hard work, she thought as she let herself into the shop, because the things she did with them made her happy. She’d spent the better part of her Sunday refining her sketches for the Harvest Gala and planned to play around with some of her ideas once the morning rush of orders was handled.
The Flower Pot itself, on the other hand, was harder because it was a small business in a small town, subject to the whims of tourists and weather and the local economy like every other shop on Main Street. Even if everyone in the family regarded it as the not very serious part of the actual business. It was an outpost. A gesture of goodwill, according to Inez, because the Trujillos’ main business was more corporate. Their greenhouses delivered directly to Denver and cities even more distant. They developed seeds and plants to the specifications of their corporate clients, like hotels and office complexes. Rae’s father didn’t have a green thumb, he liked to joke, but a deep green spreadsheet.
Secret Nights with a Cowboy Page 7
