Cold Heart, Warm Cowboy

by Caitlin Crews

  But the next thing he knew, Ty was out the door and walking toward her anyway.

  There was something about this particular blonde. There was something about the way she stood there, watching him approach. There was tension all over her body and her chin was tipped up like she was bracing herself.

  And looking at her made him feel haunted.

  But as far as Ty was aware, the only thing haunting him these days was himself.

  He grinned wider, because that was easier than worrying about ghosts that tried to come at him in broad daylight. “Seems to me if you’re going to stand out here and claim there’s some complication we ought to discuss, you owe me your name.”

  She let out a laugh that struck him as a little too harsh. A little too dark. And no matter that she smiled when she was done.

  “Yes, let’s absolutely talk about what it is you think I owe you.”

  “My name is Ty Henry Everett.” Though he figured she knew that already. “Fun fact. Ty isn’t short for anything. No Tyson. No Tyler. No Titus. Just straight up Ty.”

  “Congratulations.” The word was like a slap. “You were clearly born to be a cowboy.”

  Ty figured he was missing about two solid years of his life. There were gaps here and there before that, and what he did remember was curiously absent any feeling one way or another, but those two years were gone. When he’d woken up in the hospital and had dragged himself out of the confusion, the pain, and those loopy painkillers, he’d decided no one needed to know that he was missing time.

  The doctors told him there was no medical reason he couldn’t remember those years. That sometimes the mind blocked out things it couldn’t handle. Ty had braced himself, waiting to discover what it was he couldn’t handle. But as the months passed, he’d begun to believe that there was nothing lurking in those years. Nothing but a bad fall, a long recovery, and the unpleasant parts of his life that he only wished he could forget. Like his father.

  Until this moment, he would have said that he’d never given any woman reason to stare at him with hostility simmering all over her.

  “I’m Hannah,” she said after an unduly long while. A lot like she didn’t want him to know her name. And when she shifted, it drew his attention to the curve of her hip.

  He had the strongest urge to wrap his arm around her and pull her close, and not only because he liked all her curves—no.

  You can’t touch her, something inside him said. Not where someone could see.

  He blinked at that pop of weirdness and eased himself back on his heels.

  “Hannah,” he repeated. His grin felt forced. “If that’s supposed to ring a bell, I hate to break it to you. But it doesn’t.”

  “How convenient.”

  “You think I should recognize you, clearly. Want to tell me why?”

  It wasn’t that he didn’t want to claim he knew her. He did. She was pretty in that extra-feminine way he could admit he liked. More than liked. Brady had been ranting about the appeal of natural beauty over too many beers earlier in the summer, and Ty had nodded sagely while drinking along, but he was a rodeo cowboy down into his bones. He liked big hair, too much eye makeup, and big, sugary smiles. Rhinestones everywhere and athletic thighs that could grip a horse and make a man cry tears of joy.

  Hannah had all of that going on and more. He suspected she was well aware of it. Just as he suspected she wouldn’t appreciate it much if he mentioned it.

  “Here’s what I’d really like to know,” she said, and she might have been smiling, but the look in her eyes was flinty. “If you can’t remember me or you don’t want to remember me. Because they’re not the same thing.”

  He didn’t know why he didn’t open his mouth and tell her the truth. Maybe she could fill in those missing years. But he didn’t do it.

  He hadn’t told his brothers. Or anyone at all, except the doctor in the hospital in deep, dark Kentucky where he’d recovered from his injuries and spent long, frustrating months doing physical therapy.

  It wasn’t like he was hiding what had happened to him, Ty reasoned. Anyone who looked at him could see his scars and his limp. And when people told stories he was expected to know already, he played along. Most times, all he had to do was grin and wait, and they filled in the blanks for him.

  He’d spent his first couple of months back in Colorado as drunk as it was possible to get and remain upright. Or occasionally not so upright, but he’d contained that to the privacy of his cabin. Because whiskey filled the gaps. It gave him something to do. It provided order to his days: wake up with a killer hangover, tend to it, throw down a little hair of the dog, and start all over again. The best part of being drunk was that he couldn’t tell the difference between what he couldn’t remember and what he didn’t want to face.

  But come the new year, that had changed. Buck from the rodeo had called to float an idea past him. Assuming he was up to the physical challenge, would Ty—always a big fan favorite—like to make a limited comeback? Would he like to take another ride on the bull that had broken him and, fingers crossed, walk away this time?

  Sign me up, he’d said.

  Immediately.

  Which meant it had been time to put down the whiskey bottle and get himself back in shape, so that was what Ty had done. Day after bitterly cold winter day, straight on into spring. By the time the year anniversary of his accident rolled around, Ty was starting to recognize himself in his mirror again. More scarred and weaker than he liked, but the same tough and capable rodeo cowboy he remembered. If slightly more gimpy.

  Neither of his brothers appeared to notice his transformation. Out here on Cold River Ranch, the four hundred-plus acres his forebears had hacked out of the unforgiving Colorado Rockies and claimed as their own, Everetts ran cattle and tended the land they’d claimed, one tough winter after the next. Everetts also tended to drink themselves dark and mean when the mood took them, but it didn’t matter what nonsense a man spouted from the depths of a bottle when he still had to wake up before dawn to tend to the family legacy. The ranch was what mattered. As long as Ty showed up to do his part of the work and otherwise kept a low profile—meaning, didn’t flip tables and start fights like their late, unlamented father—his brothers left him to do his thing.

  Ty told himself he liked it, but he sometimes had the notion that if there really was a ghost flitting around, it wasn’t one of his ancestors. It was him.

  Maybe that was why this woman was getting to him.

  She was looking at him as if she could see straight through him. As if she knew him, inside and out. Not his name, or the popular story concerning Ty Everett, rodeo star—but the real truth about him.

  That no matter what Ty saw in his mirror, there was nothing there.

  “Am I supposed to guess at this complication of yours?” he asked her, his voice low and gritty, but he didn’t do a thing to remedy it. “It’s always the same thing when a pretty girl turns up, isn’t it?”

  “Does this happen to you a lot?”

  There was a warning in the way she asked that, but he was too busy giving in to a foolhardy, suicidal urge inside of him to take notice of it the way he probably should have.

  He stepped closer. And compounded that grave error by reaching over and cupping his hand over the curve of her cheek. His hand knew exactly where it was going. And knew it would fit. And Ty had the clear notion he needed to touch her when that didn’t make any sense.

  Because touching her was a mistake.

  A big mistake.

  It was like a bolt of lightning, searing and terrifying at once. Ty wanted to jerk his hand away like he would have if he’d accidentally slapped it down on the wood stove in his cabin—but he didn’t want her to know she got to him. He didn’t want her to see any more than she already did.

  “It’s always about sex,” he said, his voice too gruff. Too dark. “You either want to complain about it or you want more. Which is it?”

  He’d miscalculated. Badly. He should have stuck
to grinning like a fool. He shouldn’t have put his hand on her.

  She was too soft, for one thing. But that wasn’t the worst of it. Her skin was so warm that he felt like she was filling him with her heat. When all he was doing was touching her face.

  He hadn’t even realized until now how cold and empty he really was inside.

  His heart skipped a beat in his chest. His ribs felt too tight. And that voice deep in his head kept saying: No. You can’t touch her. Not here.

  When he was pretty sure he’d do almost anything to keep his hand right where it was.

  “Let me make sure I’m understanding you.” Hannah was smiling, but he was close enough to see the murder in her pretty blue eyes. “This is something that happens to you. All the time. Your discarded sexual partners turn up here on the ranch for … What? A fight? A round or two of making up?”

  “You tell me.”

  “I’m not marching along in your tawdry romantic parade, Ty,” she said, and he could have sworn there was something else in her voice then. Some kind of pain that thickened it.

  She reached her hand up to his, and for a moment—the slightest, scant moment—covered his hand with hers.

  But in the next second, she pushed him away.

  “If you can’t remember me, that’s fine,” she said, though her eyes were suspiciously bright. It made his ribs ache. “I only want to know if it’s because I’m that unmemorable, which says more about you than me, or if it might be a medical condition.”

  How did she know to ask him that?

  “Does it make a difference?”

  “Of course it makes a difference. One makes you an amnesiac. The other makes you a garden-variety ass.”

  If she’d wrapped her hands around his throat and squeezed tight, Ty couldn’t have been more surprised. Something swelled in him, a dark and terrible wave, and he wasn’t sure he could keep his feet beneath him while it crested over him.

  But he blinked that away. Because he could hear his brother’s truck in the distance.

  An ill-timed interruption—or his salvation. He couldn’t tell which.

  “My brother Gray is coming in from the fields for lunch,” he heard himself say, as if from far up on one of the watching, waiting mountains. As if he was as distant as the far-off peaks. That removed. “You’re welcome to hang around and exchange cryptic remarks with him. It’s one of his favorite things to do. Does that sound like fun?”

  “The only one having fun is you.”

  That hit him like a blow, and it shouldn’t have. Because he didn’t know her. He didn’t want to know her. If he’d gone to all the trouble of closing off all those doors inside him, he was sure he had a reason.

  He was positive there had to be a good reason.

  “What do you want from me, Hannah?”

  She looked away then. “What I want isn’t going to be served up with lunch in a ranch kitchen.”

  “Your call.”

  He didn’t know what that thing inside him was then, clawing and harsh. He only knew that there wasn’t a single part of him that wanted to let her walk away. And that shocked him most of all.

  He didn’t want anyone. He didn’t need anything, except another shot at that bull.

  “Where are you staying?” he heard himself ask gruffly. “In town?”

  She didn’t say yes or no. She only turned back, fixing that steady blue look of hers on him again.

  And Ty didn’t know if he wanted to cup her face in his hands, then tilt her mouth to meet his—or if he remembered doing it. He couldn’t tell the difference.

  “Meet me tonight,” he urged her, because he was a stranger to himself anyway, and nothing he did made sense. He’d never wanted to drown himself in a bottle of whiskey more. “At the Broken Wheel. It’s a bar.”

  “You want to meet me in a bar?”

  He didn’t understand that note in her voice, then. It was almost … Weary. Resigned, maybe. “Why not a bar?”

  “A bar sounds great,” she replied, and that wasn’t the right answer. Or it wasn’t true, anyway.

  But Gray’s truck was drawing closer and Ty felt a certainty deep in his gut that he needed to keep this woman away from his older brother. From his entire family. From everyone and everything on this ranch, because they not only didn’t know he couldn’t remember years of his life, he still hadn’t exactly gotten around to telling them he planned to take a break from the ranch next month to redeem himself.

  He didn’t think Gray would be all that into Ty’s redemption tour. And he knew Gray couldn’t be around Hannah, in a way he’d known very little since he’d woken up to the exciting news that a two-thousand-pound bull named Tough Luck had vented its considerable spleen all over him, ending his life as he’d known it, whether he remembered every detail of that life or not.

  “Eight o’clock,” he said.

  Hannah swallowed, but then her eyes narrowed before he was tempted to imagine that had been a flash of vulnerability on her part. “Because I have nothing better to do than hang around in bars, waiting for cowboys who think I’m after them for sexcapades.”

  “If you have anything better to do than that, Hannah, I truly feel sorry for you.”

  Her gaze was much too blue. But she didn’t throw any kind of clever retort back at him, and he felt something unpleasant and familiar turn over inside him. Shame.

  She turned away then, swift and sure like she was used to walking away from him. He couldn’t say he liked that notion. Or the fact he couldn’t manage to keep his eyes off of her as she headed toward the driver’s side of her pickup. A lot like he was used to watching her walk away.

  This was all wrong.

  But Ty had to stand there, unsettled straight through, as she climbed in the pickup, turned it around, and drove away.

  He was still standing there when his older brother pulled up from his morning in the upper fields.

  Gray unfolded himself from his truck, frowning back toward the road where Hannah had driven away in a cloud of summer dust. “Georgia plates? Who was that?”

  Ty shrugged. “A tourist who got lost,” he lied. With such ease it gave him pause. Because surely it shouldn’t have been quite so easy to lie to his own brother, and no matter if it was Gray. Grave, certain Gray, who often seemed indistinguishable from the mountains that had loomed over the land Ty’s entire life. That enduring. That annoying. Gray, who had always known his place was right here. Gray, who had never bothered to fight their father when he could tend to the land instead.

  Of course, Ty had been lying to his brother since he’d come back. He usually did it by omission.

  Gray slammed his truck door shut, that relentlessly stern gaze of his moving over Ty the way it always did. Ty didn’t even know what he was looking for. Evidence of intoxication? Proof that Ty was as useless here as Amos had always claimed he was? Maybe he was looking for something Ty couldn’t remember, and therefore couldn’t ask about without showing how little he knew. Or did Gray know more about what was going on with Ty than he let on?

  Gray nodded toward Ty’s left side. “Your leg okay?”

  “I’m fine,” Ty said gruffly. Perfectly fine.

  “Glad to hear it. You planning to work this afternoon?”

  “I’m always planning to work,” Ty said with a grin, the way he usually did.

  Gray studied him for another tense moment.

  Possibly only Ty was tense. He couldn’t tell anymore if there was stuff in these silences, or if his guilty conscience put it there.

  “Abby left us lunch,” Gray said after a moment, and started toward the house. “Come eat something.”

  Ty didn’t know why the slightest expression of kindness from his brother—or, really, anyone at all, including his new sister-in-law Abby who acted like she wanted to cook for Gray’s surly brothers—hit him like this. It made him feel … raw. Open in ways he knew, in the strange, out-of-body way that he knew anything these days, was no good. Not for him.

  But there was
nothing he could do about it unless he wanted to have a conversation about all the things he didn’t remember, didn’t understand, and didn’t want to learn. Not to mention the plans he’d made for next month when he’d promised Gray the ranch would have his full focus for a year.

  Gray wouldn’t understand because he couldn’t understand. Gray was a part of this ranch, always had been. He had those Everett roots that sank down deep into this soil and anchored him here. Ty was like their mother in more than the looks his father had sneered at and called much too pretty for a man. Bettina had gotten out of Colorado; she hadn’t looked back, and she’d been floating around out there ever since. No connections. No generations of land, land, and more land. Bettina did as she liked, rootless and easy.

  Some people weren’t meant to stay put. It was as simple as that.

  Ty was giving the ranch thing a year because he’d promised. But a promise wasn’t roots. And unlike his older brother, this land had never wanted anything to do with him. As far as he could tell, it still didn’t.

  He tried to shove the mysterious Hannah out of his head as he dutifully followed Gray into the kitchen of the ranch house.

  Home, something in him said, but that, too, didn’t land.

  Because home was one more thing Ty couldn’t quite remember.

  3

  One of the indignities about getting older, Ty thought as he pushed his way through the doors of the Broken Wheel Saloon before eight that evening, was that the hometown bar he’d tried so hard to talk his way into when he’d been underage didn’t bother to card him anymore. Or even inquire.

  Not only that, but the supposed den of iniquity right there on Main Street served tasty burgers and truffle fries, not exactly sin and vice on a toasted bun. There was live music from local bands on the weekends, not fistfights and intrigue. And the saloon itself, with its rough-hewn walls covered in old pictures of Cold River when it had been little more than a pioneer outpost inhabited by Ty’s far-hardier ancestors, was significantly friendlier and more family-oriented than it had been in his imagination when he was eighteen and certain he was a man grown.