Cold Heart, Warm Cowboy

by Caitlin Crews

  He lifted his chin in the direction of the usual familiar faces as he walked inside. The Kittredge boys—who would be called boys until the day they died, and were certainly not boys now as they were mostly in their thirties, same as Ty—sat around one of the scratched and scarred wood tables with a few beers and some friends. He and Jensen Kittredge had been in the same high school class, so Ty gave the man an extra head nod to acknowledge that he remembered and yet indicate that he didn’t really want to revisit old times.

  Without stopping to engage, he made his way to the wide, polished bar where one of Doc Winthrop’s girls—though Tessa Winthrop was about as much of a girl as Ty and the Kittredges were boys—was slinging drinks under the direction of newcomer Jackson Hale, who had bought the place some years back. Jackson had found Cold River after some time out on the West Coast, or so Ty had been told, at length, by Brady. He certainly hadn’t asked. Jackson liked to rattle on about local microbrews and IPA flights in a way that made Brady and his investment portfolio excited, which Ty knew entirely too much about for someone who didn’t care about any of those things.

  Tessa slid Ty his usual drink—a regular local beer on this side of his romance with a whiskey bottle last year—without him having to ask. Ty smiled his thanks because he was a nice, friendly guy as long as he didn’t have to talk to anyone who knew his family or had once interacted with him in elementary school. Then he turned, so he could look out at what passed for Cold River’s rocking nightlife.

  It was a weekday, so the lights were on, the music from the jukebox was there for background instead of as a soundtrack to regrettable Saturday night decisions, and most folks were engaged in conversation at their tables over burgers and fries.

  Ty should have suggested that Hannah meet him at the other bar within Cold River city limits. The Coyote catered to more disreputable types. Bikers. Committed drunks. Folks out looking more for a fight or the bottom of their bottle of choice. Ty had almost suggested it, because the benefit of the Coyote was that it wouldn’t be chock-full of Ty’s old friends and nosy neighbors. And no one in the Coyote tended to talk too much about what they might have seen there any given evening. Shame by association was its built-in insurance policy. He’d opened his mouth to tell Hannah to meet him there and somehow had told her to come to the Broken Wheel instead.

  He had no idea why.

  Maybe the problem wasn’t that he’d been stomped on the head by a bull. Maybe the trouble was there hadn’t been much there to worry about stomping on in the first place.

  He took a swig of his beer and settled in. And at eight o’clock on the dot, the door to the bar swung open in his peripheral vision. By that point Ty was busy watching Matias Trujillo, back home after a stint in the marines, hit the bull’s-eye on the dartboard. Again and again, with unnerving accuracy, like he was quietly announcing his competence. It got Ty thinking about things he usually preferred to repress or drink away, like what a man was supposed to do when the dreams that had taken him out of Cold River ran their course. He had his one shot next month, but it was a one-night kind of deal. Then what?

  Small towns like this one were filled with dusty old heroes of bright and shining former lives only they remembered. Ty couldn’t decide if it was a comfort or a tragedy that they all ended up back in the same bar on the same street in the same town where they’d first vowed they would be bigger and better—and had been, for a while. Just a little while.

  He heard the door open. And then it didn’t matter what he was doing or what he was brooding about.

  Because he could feel her.

  That strange electricity seared through him all over again. He felt it settle at the base of his spine, hot and insistent, then reverberate out through his body like a summer storm. It lit him up, everywhere. It made him wonder why, exactly, he’d lived through his injuries, was whole in all the ways that mattered and stronger by the day, yet hadn’t celebrated his continued existence the way a man should.

  He took his time turning his head, because he already knew who he was going to see. And while he was lollygagging, he got to witness the table full of Kittredges and assorted other reprobates get an eyeful of the new arrival. It was like a ripple effect, rolling through the bar like a wave, and Ty had the simultaneous urge to laugh out loud at the dumbstruck expressions he saw everywhere and start kicking the butt of every man who was looking at her that way.

  He shook it off. Then turned his head all the way.

  And there she was. Hannah.

  Mine, a greedy voice inside him insisted. He ignored it. Or tried.

  Her blond hair spilled past her shoulders in careful curls, highlighting that she was both delicate and strong at once. She had that delectable cowgirl physique he loved, as lean as she was curvy. She wore a shiny belt buckle to emphasize her slimness and yet was packed into those jeans that cupped her butt and made him heat right up. Like more of the same electricity, turned up high.

  She looked around the bar, and he knew she hadn’t seen him yet because she didn’t have that guarded expression on her face. Without it, he couldn’t stop staring at the softness of her lips. Or the odd, almost wistful look in her blue eyes.

  Then she found him, and he watched her face change. Like a wall came down, shifting her from wistful to wary in a heartbeat.

  Ty should have been concentrating on the error in judgment he’d made by inviting her here, where every person he knew—or worse, knew him, whether he could recognize them or not—made no attempt to do anything but stare as she headed straight for him.

  But all he could concentrate on was Hannah.

  There was a roll to her gait that made him wonder what it would be like to roll with her. It was impossible not to focus on those hips of hers, lush and sweet, and paint himself pretty pictures of the things he could do with his hands. His mouth. Her lips curved politely enough as she approached, but he’d seen how soft and vulnerable she’d looked before she caught sight of him. And all he wanted to do was taste her.

  God, what he’d do to taste her, there and then.

  You can’t, that same strange voice from earlier warned him. Not with everyone watching.

  He flashed his easy grin at her instead of investigating all that noise inside him. “Evening.”

  “You can spare me the courtly cowboy nonsense,” she replied, her voice so sweet that it took him a beat to process what she was saying. “I already know it’s a lie.”

  “That sounds a lot like vicious slander.”

  “But you don’t know, do you.” It wasn’t a question. She slid in next to him at the bar, leaning against her barstool instead of sitting on it, so she could face him. And despite the sweet voice and the smile she aimed at him, he wouldn’t describe the energy she gave off as particularly friendly. “You can’t remember your own character, can you?”

  Ty’s grin got edgy. “Character isn’t something a man remembers, darlin’. He either has it or he doesn’t.”

  “Noted. I’m assuming you think you have it. But how can you know for sure? Have you tested it?”

  “What can I get you to drink?”

  Ty supposed he ought to have been grateful to Tessa Winthrop, then, and yet another interruption. Tessa tossed down a coaster in front of Hannah with her usual efficiency, and managed to keep her expression impassive. Instead of greedy and speculative like every other person in the bar.

  “What he’s having, thank you,” Hannah said, gifting Tessa with a far warmer version of her megawatt smile than she’d so far shared with Ty.

  Tessa moved to fetch a beer, and they stood there in a silence that Ty figured Hannah probably found awkward, since she was the one who claimed she knew him. While he was … disquieted by her presence. And he was going to chalk up his odd reaction to her to his lack of female companionship ever since he’d gotten hurt. He was obviously so out of practice he didn’t know up from down.

  Tessa slid the bottle of beer in front of Hannah.

  “You can put that on my tab,�
� Ty told her.

  “No, thank you,” Hannah said stiffly. “I’ll pay for my own beer.”

  “By all means,” Ty drawled, shifting his attention back to Hannah as she busily set a few bills on the bar. “Let’s argue about that too.”

  Tessa left them to it.

  “I don’t need you to buy things for me,” Hannah told him, through a smile that looked like steel.

  “Why not? It’s a beer, not a diamond ring.”

  She went still at that. Too still, and Ty didn’t know why the back of his neck … itched.

  Hannah frowned at him, lifting a hand to toy with the chain around her neck. “A diamond ring? You like to throw those around?”

  “It’s a figure of speech.”

  “Most men don’t wander about mentioning diamonds left and right. Or at all. They’re careful not to give a girl the wrong impression. Careful to a fault, in fact. But not you.”

  “You tell me.” He was still grinning, like this was all a joke. “You’re the one who seems to know so much about me. Maybe I hand out diamond rings like a gumball machine.”

  She toyed with that chain, though whatever pendant hung from it was concealed by her shirt. And she was looking at him like he was a specimen under a microscope. “You don’t remember anything, do you?”

  His neck itched again. More. That same weight that had been there since he’d woken up in the hospital, weird and heavy and dragging down on his solar plexus, shifted and sunk deeper. His head wasn’t right. And he was used to all of that. It had been this way for over a year.

  But Hannah made it worse.

  “That sounds like a loaded question,” he said after a minute, doing his best not to let any of the weirdness into his tone.

  “You don’t know if it’s loaded or not because you won’t answer it.”

  “I don’t know how to answer it,” he said, more gruffly than he’d intended. So gruffly it made his throat hurt. “I was under the impression admitting you might not recall a woman who clearly recalls you was impolite.”

  “Impolite.” Her eyes were too sharp, too bright, as she repeated that word. She made it roll on forever with that drawl of hers until it almost sounded like a song. “Heaven forbid you be impolite.”

  “I appreciate the sarcasm. I do. But that’s circling right back around to character, isn’t it? Maybe there are men in this world who enjoy stomping all over a woman’s feelings, but I’m not one of them.”

  “You’re sure of that?”

  He couldn’t be, of course, which made him feel that same … disquiet. Only stronger. But all he did was shrug, then make an opera out of tossing back his drink and setting the bottle down on the bar. Without allowing the complicated sensations inside him to bleed through. He hoped.

  “Here’s what I know,” he said, leaning in. Which maybe wasn’t his smartest move. She smelled fresh, new. As if she’d bathed herself in sunlight, then added sweet-smelling flowers to lock it all in place. Which registered like a kick to his gut. “You hunted me down out on the ranch.”

  “I didn’t so much hunt you down as drive down a dirt road, sit there, and wait for you to appear.”

  “You keep wanting me to answer questions. Why don’t you return the favor and tell me what you want?”

  “What I want is what I already asked you. Do you remember me or not?”

  “I don’t really—”

  There was something in her blue gaze that made his lungs constrict. “It’s a yes or no question, Ty. Yes, you remember me. Or no, you don’t. The end.”

  Was he afraid that if he answered the question truthfully, she would go away? Or was he worried that she wouldn’t?

  He could remember the feel of her soft, warm cheek beneath his palm. And the strangest sensation that he’d held her like that before. And more.

  Or maybe that was wishful thinking. He’d gotten used to blank spaces. But why couldn’t he tell the difference between a wish and a want?

  “No,” he forced himself to admit, and his voice shouldn’t have sounded like that. Gritty and rough. As if this were hard for him. “I don’t remember you.”

  He was too close to her. Ty could see the way her pulse beat in her throat. He could tell that she’d been holding her breath as she’d waited for him to answer. And he could feel it when she let it go.

  Hannah nodded, once. Then blinked, as if she was trying to keep him from noticing the too-bright sheen in her gaze.

  “To clarify, what is it you don’t remember? That I visited you in the hospital? Or … anything?”

  “If you were in the hospital, you shouldn’t have been,” he bit out, because his temples throbbed and that itch on the back of his neck was irritating him. He missed the oblivion that only whiskey could bring him, smooth and sure like a hammer with a kick. He didn’t really want to poke at those first days strapped to a hospital bed, when he’d been lost in a haze of painkillers and broken bones. He didn’t like to think about it now that he’d not only survived it, but planned to redeem the situation. “It was family only while I was in the ICU, and none of my family were in Kentucky. And by the time they moved me to a regular room, the tour had left the city. Then there was nothing but month after month of excruciating physical therapy. I’m glad there were no witnesses.”

  That wasn’t entirely true, but then, Ty didn’t count Amos as a witness. More like a grave misfortune.

  “You were in a lot of pain,” Hannah said. Not as if she was projecting so she could empathize with him. As if she knew. “It’s not surprising that you don’t remember.”

  Ty rubbed at the nape of his neck. “I keep waiting for someone to invent a painless way to get thrown from the back of a bucking bull. Or, better yet, a painless way to survive it when a bull decides to kick you around on your way down. But as far as I know, there’s only the one way. Not dying. And yes, there’s a lot of pain.” He flashed his grin at her because it was a reflex. And because he wasn’t going to ask Tessa for the bottle of Jack he could see right there on the shelf behind her. “I’m living the dream, darlin’.”

  But Hannah didn’t smile back at him. “So, what you remember from the hospital is pain and physical therapy. Is that it?”

  Ty had no intention of sharing the rest of it with her, or with anyone. Ever. His fury at his own fragile body. The reality of the wear and tear of the years he’d spent chasing the rodeo around. All the old broken bones, bruises, pulled muscles, and whatever else he’d stitched together and ignored since he was eighteen, all come back to make him weaker.

  And then Amos in the middle of it, making it worse. The way he always had.

  In the hospital, even the parts of Ty that hadn’t been crushed and torn apart ached. He didn’t have to remember every detail of the past couple of years to know that was a constant for a man in his profession. The doctors had told him he’d been in excellent shape, all things considered, for an aged bull rider. They’d used that word. Aged.

  Ty had spent months trying to figure out what the hell he was supposed to do with his life now. Or drinking his way around the fact he had no idea what came next. He wasn’t destined to work the land like his brother. He’d never belonged here, as his father had gone to such lengths to remind him last summer. But he had no idea what else he was good for if he was really too old for the rodeo.

  A one-night stand with a bull was the perfect stopgap.

  But he wasn’t about to tell Hannah that.

  Why did you come and meet her if you didn’t want to tell her … something?

  Ty ignored that voice inside of him the same way he was ignoring the siren call of the whiskey across from him. Meaning, they both irritated him. Or she did. And he was still trying to make that freaking itch go away. “If there’s something you think I ought to remember, you should tell me what it is.”

  “Why?” Her blue gaze was uncomfortably direct. “Let’s say I knew something about your life. And I told you, but you don’t remember anything. What’s the point of that? My telling you isn�
��t going to make you suddenly recall it.”

  “It might.”

  “Why would I want you to pretend to remember something you’ve forgotten? It’s entirely possible you want it that way.”

  There’s no medical reason for your amnesia, the doctor had said, her expression entirely too kind and understanding.

  Ty didn’t understand the wave that washed over him then, but he leaned into it.

  “That sounds philosophical, Hannah. But mostly I want to know if we got naked.”

  He was sure he hadn’t meant to say that. Not so … baldly. He felt surly. Misshapen with it. But if he expected Hannah to curl in on herself, or run away, he was in for a surprise.

  Because all she did was laugh at him.

  “Explain to me again how concerned you are with being impolite,” she dared him, but he was focused on that laughter. The way it wove around her like another scent, rich and seductive. The way it danced in the space between them, making Ty … yearn. For things he didn’t know how to name.

  He would have given anything to keep her from stopping, the way she did after a moment. She shook her head as if she didn’t know why she’d been laughing in the first place. Then she picked up her beer and took a healthy pull.

  And if Ty had ever wanted anything more than to reach over and touch the column of her throat as she drank, well, he certainly couldn’t recall it.

  “I’m assuming you’re from Georgia, like the plates on your pickup,” he heard himself say, too darkly. Desperate, that voice inside needled him. “Are you passing through? Or did you come to Cold River specifically?”

  She set her bottle of beer back down on the bar and took her time looking at him. He could see her shift into that state of wariness he was pretty sure was all for him. The expression on her face turned … careful.

  “I was looking for you,” she said after a moment. “But I’m still only passing through. I mean, I certainly don’t plan to stay. So … both.”

  That wasn’t quite an answer, was it?

  “And are you getting what you wanted?” He’d meant that to come out lazy. Teasing, almost. But somehow, between his intention and his tongue, it didn’t come out that way at all. Ty leaned forward instead, feeling something grip him, hard. “Am I everything you hoped and dreamed, Hannah? Poke and prod a man long enough, and congratulations, you can find each and every hole he’s convinced himself wasn’t there in the first place.”