Cold Heart, Warm Cowboy

by Caitlin Crews

  “Some people might be grateful to lose their memories,” Hannah said, and he hated the note he could hear in her voice, then. And the look in her eyes that made everything inside him tighten. Viciously. “Maybe you should view this as an opportunity, Ty. You have a clean slate. You can be anything and anyone you want.”

  “You say that like I need a clean slate.”

  “The past is messy. Dirty. It’s tangled up and used. There are those who would pay to walk away from the messes they made.”

  “If you’re accusing me of something, make the accusation already.”

  “All I’m saying is that the mind is a delicate thing. Sometimes it goes to great lengths to protect you from things you don’t want to know. Maybe you should listen to what your brain is telling you. Maybe you should keep right on doing whatever it is you’re doing, hiding away on a ranch in the middle of nowhere.”

  Why did she keep echoing secrets he hadn’t told anyone? Who was she?

  “I’m not hiding.”

  That was all he could manage to get out, his head spinning like she’d sucker punched him.

  She had.

  Her expression was thoughtful and something like sad. She tipped her head to one side, and those curls of hers bounced. The sight made that weight on him press down deep. Even harder than before. Until he was surprised his solar plexus didn’t give way, right there at the bar.

  “Really?” Hannah asked, that gaze of hers never wavering and Ty went cold at the notion of what, exactly, she might see. What she might have already seen that he couldn’t remember. What she knew about him that she shouldn’t. “Are you sure?”

  4

  Hannah’s shoulda, coulda, woulda list grew longer by the second.

  She should have kept right on going when she left Cold River Ranch earlier. Instead of turning down into town and heading across the river, she could have driven right back over the mountains that separated Cold River from Colorado’s famous ski resorts. She could have made it halfway to St. Louis by now. Because there was no need to stay here. She already had her answer.

  Ty didn’t remember her.

  That meant he clearly also didn’t remember anything that had happened between them. She couldn’t decide if that was a great relief, because it meant he wasn’t ignoring his own son deliberately. Or if it made everything that much worse.

  These are things you can worry over to your heart’s content back home in Georgia, she’d lectured herself. Sternly.

  She absolutely had not looked in her rearview mirror as she’d driven herself away from him. But she went ahead and turned her truck toward cute little Cold River, not toward the interstate when she had the chance.

  There was a Grand Hotel standing proud and pretty on one of the corners along Main Street, but it looked much too rich for Hannah’s blood. She kept driving until she found a cute, small bed-and-breakfast. It was tucked between a darling bookstore and a boutique gift shop that sold a selection of bold, big necklaces Hannah hadn’t known she’d wanted desperately her whole life, if the window display was anything to go by.

  Not that she was here to shop in boutiques.

  She told herself that if the bed-and-breakfast had a room, she would stay. And if it was full up, that was a sign that she needed to get out of here immediately. What she certainly didn’t need to do was meet Ty Everett for drinks in a bar.

  If she knew anything in this life, it was the danger inherent in meeting Ty Everett anywhere.

  But the bubbly woman behind the desk introduced herself as Katrina, and assured her that they did, indeed, have vacancies. And she led Hannah to a room set up over Main Street with a lovely bay window, so Hannah could look up, down, and all around the pretty postcard town and pretend the place wasn’t a wedge in her heart.

  “Well?” Mama had asked when she’d called home. “Did you find him?”

  Like the father of her child was a lost sock, hidden at the back of a very large dryer the size of Colorado.

  “I found him.”

  “I hope that’s not emotion I hear in your voice, Hannah Leigh. You’re not on a date. That’s the man who left you pregnant by the side of the road. Just about literally. If it’s not too much trouble, I’d ask you to remember that why you’re out there, hopefully not compounding the error.”

  “I’m meeting him tonight,” Hannah had blurted out, because she had almost always been constitutionally incapable of holding back information from her mother, even when doing so would make her life easier.

  Was she a glutton for punishment? Or an idiot?

  How could she be a grown woman, a mother far removed from her rodeo queen days when Mama had acted as her chaperone, and still not know the answers to those questions?

  “I’m not going to tell you what to do,” Mama had said, which was never true. Ever. “But I will tell you this. I’ve spent your entire life so far waiting for your daddy to wake up and do the right thing no matter the hush money his parents paid us. And guess what? It never happened. It’s never going to happen. Do you want to know why?”

  Hannah had sighed. “Because you can’t trust a man.”

  “Because you can’t trust a man,” Mama had agreed, like it was a hallelujah. “Men always lie. They’re no good and they’re simply made that way. I don’t even blame you, baby girl. But you need to be smart. You lost your crown because of that man. You lost your reputation because of that man. You lost respect, decency, and your good name. What else are you going to lose?”

  Then she’d put down the phone so that Hannah would have to sit with that question instead of making cooing noises at Jack and making sure he was okay without her, which was why she’d called in the first place. Hannah had accepted that as the punishment she was due. Because the only thing Luanne had ever raised Hannah to do was not repeat her own mistakes.

  Yet here they were.

  Hannah liked to argue—in her own head, obviously, because there was no arguing with Mama when she’d worked up a head of steam, or really at all—that at least she was married. And not a teenager the way Luanne had been. But what good was a husband if he denied the marriage? Then went ahead and forgot about it either way? Was it better to be single than discarded when it all ended up the same, living in Aunt Bit’s back room, the talk of Sweet Myrtle all over again?

  More questions Hannah should surely have been able to answer, yet couldn’t.

  Instead, she’d sat there on the edge of the bed in her tidy room that smelled of gardenias, glaring at the cheerful blue-and-white bedspread, missing that familiar back room. And missing her baby so much it hurt. She scowled down at the bedspread rather than surrendering to the tears that threatened. It looked as if it had been quilted with love and skill by the sorts of women Hannah imagined lived in a place like this.

  Women who were never fooled by smooth-talking cowboys who hid lies and temptation behind all that flirtatious patter. Women who held fast to their values, were clear on what they stood for, and never, ever squandered their good reputations on well-known bad boys who lived for nothing more than one more notch in their belts.

  The kind of woman Hannah had been so certain she was. Because she’d always believed in her own virtue as if it was as much a part of her as, say, her leg. She’d never imagined that it was as fragile as a single choice. As delicate as a yes.

  Cold River looked like the sort of too-perfect town that was populated entirely by good, solid, decent people who knew their worth, never said yes when they should have shouted no, and definitely never threw away everything they’d ever worked for because of some guy.

  There was a part of Hannah that wanted to blow it up.

  But that was hugely unproductive and wouldn’t help her any, even if she knew how to operate explosives, which she didn’t. So instead of getting her gunpowder and lead on, she’d gone back downstairs and out onto Main Street. Then she’d succumbed to the siren call of Capricorn Books next door. For hours.

  She’d patted the huffy tabby cat who lived there
, fat and outraged with its tail twitching. Then she’d lost herself in books, the way she hadn’t been able to do in a long while. Not since Jack was born. And not for a long time before that, with all her commitments to the rodeo. It reminded her of being sixteen in Sweet Myrtle and spending any free time when she wasn’t on a horse, in the library. She’d read anything and everything she could, and had dreamed of all the glorious, magical things she was going to do with her marvelous life.

  She’d spent a handful of sweet hours in the used section of Capricorn Books, leafing through old comfort reads to make herself feel better. Then, when she was ready to go, she’d picked up a worthy-looking book on the opioid epidemic because she, by God, did not need to loll around in self-pity a moment more. She needed to remember that her life, though not quite what she’d expected it to be when she’d been sixteen with too many oversize daydreams in her head, was fine. Good, even. Especially in comparison to people with real problems.

  “Now, tell me something,” the woman behind the counter said, with a big, warm, conspiratorial smile that instantly made Hannah feel happier than she was. As if the woman were her friend. “Why does someone who sat here reading all the good parts of three different Jane Austen novels want to walk out of here with this? Not that it’s a bad book. It’s terrific. But it’s not exactly the same mood.”

  “I need a different mood.”

  “If you’re looking for hopeful,” the woman said mildly, “a treatise on the evils of pharmaceutical companies is probably not your read.”

  “I don’t believe in hope,” Hannah replied. “I believe in cold, hard facts.”

  “Are they mutually exclusive?” the woman asked as she rang up the purchase, still smiling. “What I like about hope is that it takes the cold and the hard out of facts and lets them simply be … factual.”

  Which, for some reason, felt like another sucker punch in a day full of them.

  Hannah had found herself back in her cheerful room in the lovely bed-and-breakfast in this pretty, happy town, staring at the depressing book she didn’t want to read. She felt as out of place as the freaking book was. As obviously wrong, surrounded on all sides by all the curated rightness. The carefully preserved brick buildings. The tidy streets. The flowers everywhere.

  Even the drive out to Ty’s family ranch and back had been like something out of a western movie. Those rolling fields beneath the summer sun with the impossible mountains soaring all around. Hannah’s own small town featured far more boarded-up windows, questionable convenience stores with grown men on small bikes milling about outside, and abandoned cars with plants growing out of them behind chain-link fences.

  Here in Cold River, she was clearly the wrong sort of small-town girl. And worse, she was sure it showed. She might as well be an unkempt yard full of discarded engines and rusted farm implements staring out through the chain link.

  Which was how she’d always felt growing up as that Luanne Monroe’s little girl with no daddy.

  Putting on her rodeo queen face and acting the part had convinced her she could be someone else, all done up in curls and a smile. The kind of someone else who deserved a marvelous, big life and all those pretty daydreams no matter how scandalous her birth had been. Ty Everett had proved otherwise.

  You can’t trust a man, a voice inside her chimed in, right on cue. And Hannah couldn’t tell anymore if it was Luanne in there, deep, or if it was her. If she’d become her mother in all the ways she’d always promised herself she wouldn’t. Ever.

  She changed into something nicer, then changed back, because she didn’t want to send the wrong message. She certainly didn’t want Ty to imagine she’d dressed up for him, like the empty-headed groupie he clearly believed she was, something that would likely lay her out with breathless rage if she let it.

  She didn’t let it. She poured her fury into her curling iron and her mascara instead. And she reminded herself that homicide would mean Jack was down two parents instead of one. She had no intention of abandoning her baby the way Ty had.

  Hannah considered getting something to eat once it started to grow late, but she wasn’t hungry, because it turned out that all the times she’d eaten her feelings before, they had been the minor, inconsequential sort that were easily soothed with a pint of ice cream and three bags of chips.

  Real heartbreak—true grief—made her crave nothing but more time to try to forget it.

  Now she was standing in a bar with Ty when she, of all people, knew better. He was a clear path to sin and perdition. It was written right there on his beautiful face and sadly backed up by her own traitorous response to him. Even now.

  And throwing back beer on an empty stomach—no matter how twisted up it was—was not the smartest thing Hannah ever done. But it was that or give in to the fury that charged around in her veins like fire. And burned dark enough to hint that maybe it was despair dressed up in those flames. She’d chosen the beer.

  “I’m not hiding from anything,” Ty was saying now, and there was something stark on his face that got to her. When nothing about him should get to her. She couldn’t help being attracted to him, apparently, but was it really necessary that she feel for him? “My father died last fall. My brothers and I run the ranch now. More or less together.”

  “I’m sorry to hear about your father.”

  Ty shrugged, his gaze shuttered. “I should miss him more than I do, probably.”

  Hannah could have said a whole lot of things on the subject of disappointing fathers, but she restrained herself. “You always said you would retire here.”

  His dark green gaze sharpened. “Did I? We sat around talking about my retirement?”

  She smiled faintly, because that would indeed be weird … if she were one of his groupies. She didn’t get the impression the cowboys did too much talking with the girls who chased them from town to town.

  She would never know how she managed not to throw her beer at him for suggesting, however indirectly, that she was one of them. When she had been so good. So proper. So uptight when it was always clear everyone else was having more fun. And when she had only ever let her guard down once.

  Ty had promised her he was worth it.

  They all promised that, her mother would say. That was why there were so many painful songs about unreliable cowboys.

  “You’re on the wrong side of thirty, Ty,” she said with admirable calm, not that she expected him to appreciate it. “You didn’t have much time left riding bulls. Not well, anyway.”

  “You know a lot about riding bulls, do you?”

  “Nothing personally, because I’m not suicidal. I’ve watched you ride a bull, if that’s what you mean. And experience goes a long way, but at a certain point, the risk of permanent injury outweighs the possibility of a win. You know that.”

  “Didn’t we spend a whole lot of time establishing that I suffered a pretty big wallop to the head? Could be I think I’m invincible.”

  “Do you?”

  “You appear to know everything about me already. Including my retirement plans. Are you going to tell me why or are we going to keep playing these cute little guessing games?”

  “I don’t have to know anything about you to know that your age was always going to be a factor in whether or not you get to stay in the ring. How are you supposed to compete against eighteen-year-olds?” Hannah shrugged as if the way he glowered at her didn’t register. “You can’t.”

  “I appreciate the vote of confidence.”

  “You’re not the first person in the world who got aged out of the thing they loved. You’re unlikely to be the last. You should count yourself lucky that you have a family ranch as plan B. Not everyone can say the same.”

  His green gaze glittered, dark and dangerous. “Are you talking about yourself now? Or are we still pretending you’re talking about me?”

  Hannah hadn’t realized how close they’d gotten, standing there tucked up at the bar. She’d forgotten they were even at a bar. She’d been much too wra
pped up in him, which was vying for the phrase most likely to end up on her tombstone.

  “You definitely don’t know the first thing about me, Ty,” she said after a moment, fighting hard to make her pulse behave. And failing. “You said so yourself.”

  “Well, darlin’, I don’t have to know you personally to figure out all kinds of things about you.”

  “Have you suddenly become insightful about other people?” Her drawl was heavy and her tone was dry, and she wasn’t particularly inclined to change either. “That would sure be an exciting development.”

  “You came looking for me, not the other way around.”

  “I told you I was passing through. I thought I’d drop in on an old friend. See if you survived that bull after all.”

  “All my old friends are sitting around the same tables right here in this saloon, still talking about what we wish we did in high school, but didn’t. That means I know you from the rodeo.”

  “Everybody knows you from the rodeo. That’s the price of fame.”

  “You’re sketchy on the details, Hannah, and it’s beginning to feel deliberate. Still, it’s clear you know me personally. Possibly biblically. And look at you.”

  She didn’t know where he was going with this. She hated that she didn’t have the confidence she’d come to take for granted during her rodeo queen years. Before her body had changed so much, that was. Before she’d learned, in the most profound and beautiful way possible, what it could do—and had also had to face the fact that it would never look the way it had before.

  Hannah did the best she could with what was left of that girl she’d been, but she hadn’t had the opportunity to test it.

  Especially not where this man was concerned.