“Everybody needs a wingman, Rae. And I’ve been with you for so long, I wouldn’t even know how to go about picking someone new. Would you?”
She felt as if he were rummaging around inside her, deep down, so that all she could do was … wheeze a little bit.
“Picking someone new? We’re talking about … Are you really talking to me about dating?”
For a moment, she saw something entirely too male in that gaze of his, and it made her catch her breath. Even if it were shuttered in the next instant and disappeared behind that grin that was making her skin … prickle.
“Don’t worry, Rae,” Riley said. Riley, her soon-to-be-ex-husband, but still, her husband. “It’s not going to be a one-way street. I’m going to help you too.”
7
“No,” Rae said flatly. With an undercurrent of panic. “Absolutely not.”
Riley grinned down at her, enjoying himself. Almost too much, maybe, but he liked it. He’d almost forgotten what it was like to enjoy Rae when they weren’t both naked. “It’s actually the perfect solution.”
“How is it a solution?” That was definitely panic in her voice, he thought. With a great deal of satisfaction. “It sounds a whole lot more like a three-ring circus. And I have no intention of being Cold River’s newest dancing bear, thank you.”
“No one would ever confuse you for a bear, baby. You’re too little.”
“And you have to stop calling me baby, Riley. It’s a relic from the past that needs to be buried and forgotten.”
“By the past, you mean … Thursday?”
Rae didn’t like that. She stiffened, there in her cute little uniform that had been making him happy as long as he could remember. Something he opted not to share with her today. Instead, he watched her ponytail bob around with the force of how passionately she was trying to convince both of them that they needed to divorce. Now.
“It’s over,” she declared, and she sounded very certain. But that was Rae. She was always certain. That didn’t make her right. “We are over. And believe me, I understand that this feels new and uncharted, because it is. But that doesn’t make it any less real.”
Riley could have argued. But if these years had taught him anything, it was that arguing got them nowhere. If he wanted to change things, he had to do something new. He figured she might have come to the same conclusion—but he didn’t intend to go about it the same way.
So he grinned at her some more, because he could see it was making her edgy.
And he could admit that he liked that just fine.
“Understood.” He kept his voice calm. Almost soothing, which made her eyes narrow. “I can’t promise the wrong words won’t slip out now and again. But this is why approaching it as a united front is better.”
He could practically see the words united front hanging over her head in a word balloon, and she didn’t much care for them.
She even sputtered a little. “You … you can’t really think that we’re going to try dating other people together, can you?”
He only grinned wider.
Rae huffed out a breath. “We can’t do anything together, Riley. We’ve only ever been good at one thing, and it’s not like we can do that in public. Which is why we’ve spent all these years pretending we were completely broken up, remember?”
Riley didn’t intend to let her sidetrack him into discussing his take on what they’d been doing. Though everything in him tensed. He forced himself to keep on grinning. Happy-go-lucky, as if he were a different Kittredge brother altogether.
And because it clearly flummoxed Rae. Her confusion was written all over her, and if he wasn’t mistaken, making her tremble a little too.
Good.
“Tell me how you think this is going to go down,” he invited her. “You’re going to go on out one night, to the Coyote or the Broken Wheel.”
She sniffed. “I will not be going to the Coyote. I want to date, not get wasted, forget my name, and do God only knows what in somebody’s pickup truck.”
“I had no idea you were so informed about the way a typical Friday night goes down over there. Learn something new every day.”
“No judgment,” Rae said in her most judgmental voice. “If that’s the kind of thing you’re after, you are now free to do it exactly as you please.”
He didn’t allow himself to linger on unhelpful visuals of the two of them doing exactly as they pleased in that dive, and not with each other. It would only make him … testy. “Right, but how?”
“The usual way, Riley,” she snapped. “Do you need me to draw you a diagram?”
“What’s ‘the usual way’?” he asked with exaggerated patience. “Do you know? I don’t think you do. You don’t know anything about dating, hooking up, or random pickup trucks. Want to know how I know that? Because the only person you’ve ever dated was me, and look how that ended up.”
He could see that pulse in her neck that he’d been studying for years go wild as her chest rose and fell much too fast. Her eyes darkened.
Riley figured he could chalk that up as a point to him.
“This is not a productive conversation,” she said after a moment.
“I’m not fighting with you, Rae. I’m talking about reality. You go out all dressed up cute and a little bit tipsy, trying to hit on people we both know, what do you think is going to happen?”
“I don’t know. Kismet?”
“The first thing that’s going to happen is that they’re going to panic,” Riley said quietly.
She flinched at that. “Thank you. What a compliment.”
“Baby. Come on. They’re going to think that if they even look at you the wrong way, they’re going to have to deal with me. Because that’s the way it’s always been. You’ve been mine so long that nobody knows any different.” Somehow he kept his grin in place, like this really was nothing more than a friendly chat. Instead of a strategy session. “A pretty significant barrier to your new social life.”
He could see that pulse rocketing around there in her neck. He knew too many things about her and how she worked, as ever. What that flush on her cheeks meant. Why she kept worrying at her lower lip, a nervous habit he didn’t think she even knew she had.
“I…” She stopped. Swallowed. “I did not think of that.”
“What do you think would happen if I decided to cozy up to someone in a bar one night?” he asked reasonably. So reasonably it made his ribs hurt. “They’d pick up the phone and call you. Right then and there. Just to let you know, out of the goodness of their heart, what I was up to. Or they’d drop in here the next morning to buy some flowers and accidentally mention it.”
“No one actually talks to me about you, Riley. Or they didn’t.” She shrugged, her expression defensive. “People don’t think of us as one unit anymore. As far as they know, we’ve been broken up for years.”
“Rae. No one thinks we’re broken up.” He laughed when she scowled at him. “You know what people who break up do? They date other people, sooner or later. Something neither you nor I have done since high school. Where, as I recall, I went to one movie—”
“It wasn’t the movie, Riley. It was that you lied.”
“And that I went to that movie with the captain of the girls’ volleyball team. You can talk about the principle of the thing all you want, but I think we both know the real problem was Kelly Adler.”
Rae’s eyes glittered, even as she assumed a saintly look he recognized all too well. “Kelly Adler is a perfectly nice woman. She buys flower arrangements for her poor mother in that nursing home every week. She’s one of my best customers, in fact.”
“You make her mother spite arrangements, and you know it.”
“I’m not doing this.” Rae stiffened as if it had only then occurred to her they were slipping back into their old patterns—up to and including a fight they’d been having since before they’d started officially dating in high school. “See? I can’t be around you for thirty seconds without backsliding. You need to leave.�
��
“Yes, ma’am,” Riley said, and even thumbed the brow of his hat as emphasis. “I’m not trying to make things harder for you. If this is what you want, I’m trying to support you while we do it.”
“And somehow, I just don’t believe that.”
Riley lifted his hands in an over-the-top, exaggerated gesture of mock surrender that only made her scowl at him more.
“Are you … pretending to be Jensen? Is that what’s happening here?”
“Not at all,” Riley said. Though he had been. He wouldn’t do that again. “I really thought you and I could bury the hatchet. I heard everything you said to me on Thursday, and I don’t disagree.”
She looked surprised, maybe. Possibly sad, though she cleared her throat and that part went away. “That’s something, anyway.”
And for a moment, there were no games. There was nothing but the two of them, stark and gleaming bright, the way they always had been. Too much to handle at first. Too much to handle later. Always too much, and one way or another, all they’d seemed to do was make it worse.
He’d never wanted anything more than to step forward and put his hands on her. He wasn’t sure he could take that dark gaze of hers, glittering then as if she were fighting off the same compulsion—
The door to the shop opened behind him, and the spell was broken.
“You have to go,” Rae said again in an undertone—even as she flashed a professional smile at the trio of women who’d swept in, Aspen or Vail written all over them, bringing in a blast of cold air from outside. “Don’t make this harder, Riley.”
“I’m not making it anything.” Riley made himself keep on grinning. “Don’t take my word for it if you don’t want to, Rae. Get on out there. Date up a storm. See what happens.”
“That had better not be a threat, because I will—”
“Baby. People don’t want a drink at a bar to turn into a complicated tangle with your ex. That’s all I’m saying.”
“You could start untangling things by erasing the word baby from your vocabulary.”
“I could. But what you need to worry about isn’t what I will do but what all these shiny new dates of yours think I might do. Is the risk worth the price of a beer? You tell me.”
He could see she wanted to argue with him. He could see her turning over all the small-town politics in her head.
Just like he could see when she got his point and didn’t like it.
There was no need to beat a dead horse, Riley figured. He turned and headed out of the Flower Pot, in a significantly better mood than when he’d walked in.
* * *
A couple of days later, Riley found himself kicked back at his usual table at the Broken Wheel. The remains of his dinner sat before him, because this place specialized in excellent hamburgers and the truffle fries that every cowboy in the Longhorn Valley mocked, then devoured. Him included.
The particular faces around the table changed depending on the season, or life, but it was all usually the same sprawling cast of characters. Brady and Amanda were there tonight, Brady looking on fondly as Amanda talked to his brother Ty’s wife, Hannah. Ty Everett himself sat on the other side of his wife, looking like the cocky, famous rodeo star that he’d been back before he’d gone and gotten good and stomped by a bull and come on home.
“How often do your mother and aunt let Jack stay over?” Amanda was asking Hannah. “You must love a little toddler break.”
“Not often enough,” Ty drawled.
Hannah grinned at him. “Settle down, sugar. I could have made this a girls’ night.”
But the way Ty grinned, hot and a little lazy, Riley figured there hadn’t been much danger of that.
Across the table, all three of his brothers were arguing good-naturedly about football. Or possibly over the current jukebox selection, it was hard to tell. Over at the dartboard, Matias, who’d eaten his food quicker than the rest, was making what should have been a happy-go-lucky bar game look almost militaristic as he hit bull’s-eye after bull’s-eye.
If it had been anyone else, Riley might have said something, but he and Matias treated each other … gingerly.
They’d been friends, or close enough, all their lives. But Matias had come home from the service to find his sister living back at his parents’ house, stubbornly refusing to discuss her marriage.
What did you do to her? he’d demanded the first time he’d seen Riley.
Which was, to his credit, when he’d driven over to Riley’s house within the first forty-eight hours of his return.
Nice to see you too, Riley had growled in yet another front porch confrontation.
He had half a mind to rip the whole thing out, chop it to pieces, and see if not having a porch led to fewer fights on it. Though somehow, he figured that if Rae wanted to fight with him the way she always did, they’d end up squabbling out there in the dirt all the same.
And a man had to draw some lines.
Riley hadn’t mentioned any of that to Rae’s older brother, who had still looked every inch the battle-tested Marine, like his return to civilian life might take a while to settle on him.
What did you do? Matias had asked again, and there wasn’t a single hint of the guy Riley had grown up with before him then. No trace of that Matias. There had only been the soldier, the wars he’d seen in his gaze.
I wish I knew, Riley had replied, holding that gaze. You’re going to have to ask your sister.
She says you grew apart.
Then you have your answer, Riley had replied.
Matias had eyed him. What I’m trying to figure out is if I need to slap some sense into you or not.
You’re always welcome to try, Riley had drawled right back.
He and Matias stood there another while. Then the other man had let out a low noise that could have been approval or irritation. Both, maybe. Would rather have a beer.
They’d gone ahead and had a few beers, talking about very little of substance, and that had been their truce ever since. Beer was fine. Having a hamburger or two was good. Riley wasn’t sure he’d turn his back on Matias Trujillo in the dark, but the good news was, there was no blood feud between their families because of his messy marriage.
“You look alarmingly pleased with yourself,” Brady said from beside him.
Riley took his time looking back at his best friend. “Just enjoying my life. I didn’t realize it was a crime.”
“Not a crime,” Brady said with a laugh. “But also not you.”
Riley considered that. “I’m evolving.”
Brady laughed even louder. “Why do I doubt that, somehow?”
Riley leaned back, prepared to offer a long, inspired defense of his personal evolution—otherwise known as a crock—when he heard the door to the saloon open up behind him.
And he knew who it was immediately without having to look. Because he was looking at Brady, which meant he could see his sister on Brady’s other side. He watched Amanda’s expression change, the way it always did. Her eyes lit up, then clouded, and then her expression tightened.
Because she loved Rae. But she didn’t forgive Rae for leaving him. And she had to fight through that same cycle of emotion every time she saw her. It was the sort of thing that, if Riley allowed himself to think about it too much, would kick him right back into his temper. Right where he didn’t want to go. Not tonight.
Especially not when he turned to look over at Rae himself.
It was always a kick straight to the gut. He accepted that. But tonight, it was more like a sucker punch.
She was flanked by her two best friends, who he figured she’d brought along to stand sentry over her bad choices. There was Abby, tall and serene on one side of her. And Hope, just as tall but crackling with that usual electricity of hers. But all Riley really saw was Rae in the middle, dwarfed by her friends in size and yet far brighter.
She’d really gone for it, he thought, in a desperate attempt to remain calm. Her hair was down, wavy and dark and gorg
eous, just the way he liked it. She was wearing that smoky stuff around her eyes that made her look sultry and edible. Her lips were enough to make a grown man cry, and he knew how she would taste, and he had to shift a little in his seat to deal with it.
But that wasn’t the heart attack.
The heart attack was when she shrugged out of her coat, revealing the skimpy little dress beneath it. Spaghetti straps. Way too much skin. And if he wasn’t mistaken, which he might have been because he was potentially having an aneurysm, a hem that only just saved her from indecency. It was impossible not to take a moment—or ten—to really appreciate the sweet sweep of her legs, entirely too much of which were visible, in shoes that were completely inappropriate for a mountain town with winter barreling in.
He was dimly aware that his table had gone deadly silent.
“You’re the sheriff,” Jensen muttered darkly to their oldest brother. “Do something.”
“Like what?” Zack replied in a similarly dark voice. “I can’t actually arrest a grown woman for wearing a dress when she feels like it.”
No one looked at him. Directly. But still, Riley knew that they were all braced and ready for him to go ballistic.
Over by the door, Rae and her friends seemed frozen, telling him that they were waiting for his reaction too.
The entire bar seemed to be collectively holding its breath, waiting to see how badly Riley was going to take this.
Exactly like you told her this would go, he congratulated himself.
And instead of flipping the table or causing the scene everyone expected, he grinned. Wide and friendly and a little bit pleased, like he was delighted to see Rae dressed hotly and sweetly and aimed at him like a loaded gun.
That was almost enough to distract him from the sight of his wife in that dress, a sight he planned to cherish forever, because every single person at his table and within his eyesight looked … terrified.
“He’s going to kill us all,” Connor muttered.
“You okay?” Brady asked from beside him.
“What’s the matter with you people?” Riley asked with a lazy drawl that carried and made everyone at the table frown at him. Except Zack, who squinted at him in what looked like a professional assessment. “Haven’t you ever seen a pretty girl in a dress before?”
Secret Nights with a Cowboy Page 9
