Cold Heart, Warm Cowboy

by Caitlin Crews

  “You and Brady must lead deeply depressing lives if you’re this interested in mine,” Ty pointed out. “You’re like a couple of mother hens.”

  He even made a clucking noise.

  “I’m not a hen. I don’t cluck.” Gray shook his head. “But I do pay attention to trucks coming and going in the middle of the night. Right outside my house. Where my sixteen-year-old daughter sleeps when she’s not walking around entirely too pretty for my peace of mind.”

  “It wasn’t Becca. It was me.”

  Gray shot him a darkly amused look. “Believe me, I know who it was.”

  Ty had absolutely no doubt that unlike Amos, who’d spent his nights passed out and snoring, Gray knew every single thing that happened in that ranch house. The same way he had when he’d felt it was his business to monitor his younger brothers way back when.

  “Unlike your teenage daughter, or even teenage me, I don’t need to give you an accounting of my whereabouts last night. Pleased as I am that you’re so obsessed with my social life.”

  That curve in the corner of Gray’s mouth deepened. “You can do whatever you want. But it sure does make me wonder why you want to keep secrets.”

  It wasn’t the first time Ty had noticed that his normally forbiddingly laconic older brother had gotten downright chatty, relatively speaking, since he’d married Abby. But he was still Gray, so when Ty didn’t take his bait, the conversation turned to the usual ranch concerns, like water rights and hay, or blessed silence, until they trooped back in for lunch.

  Abby was there in the kitchen, cutting slabs of freshly baked bread, while Becca stood next to her, piling the slabs high with roast beef and cheese from their own cows. There were vegetables from the summer garden, tomatoes sliced thick and dark green lettuce. There were jars of tangy homemade pickles, and the airy mayonnaise Becca had been experimenting with making this summer.

  “You need to try this version,” she told Ty with her daddy’s air of command, and the smile that Ty knew was for him. He was her favorite. “It’s lemony.”

  “Do I want lemony mayo? My gut reaction is no.”

  “You want my lemony mayo, Uncle Ty. Obviously.”

  Ty accepted the plate his niece handed him and ruffled her hair a bit, to make her grin. He liked this lighter, happier version of Becca. Abby had been good for her too. Becca was far less brittle than she’d been back in the fall. These days, she worried about perfecting her mayonnaise, not whether her dad was going to be okay.

  Ty chose not to share with her that if pickup trucks ever started showing up at the ranch for her—in the middle of the night, or at all—her dad’s reaction would be the least of her concerns. Gray was the good man in the Everett family.

  Ty went and sat at the oversize table that took up almost all the available space in the eat-in part of the kitchen. It had been fashioned from a barn door, taken from the very same barn that had made Ty bleed a million years ago—a secret only he and his wife knew.

  His wife. Ty couldn’t let himself go there. To her. Not here, in front of his family, when they were all watching him and waiting to see if he’d keel over into an alcoholic blackout at any moment. He focused on the old table instead. The door they’d started using because Amos, who had enjoyed actual alcoholic blackouts with regularity, had broken every other table that had ever sat here.

  This table was hardy and sturdy. It could take all kinds of abuse. Amos could flip it as he pleased, and he had. It went over, but it never splintered into pieces. There were scratches worn into the surface, where the old man had used to sit there with his ever-changing will, muttering darkly as he scratched out names, entered in new, angry directions, and generally used the thing to make threats and force compliance.

  Or at least, Ty assumed Gray had been compliant. Ty had been gone.

  It had been right here at this kitchen table that Amos had given Ty that black eye, after a scuffle over yet another ruined dinner.

  With such great memories, Ty couldn’t help but wonder if it was for the best he had all those blanks. And better still that he couldn’t really feel any of the things he could remember. It was all very clinical inside of him. If asked, he could have told the story well enough. He’d turned eighteen three days after graduating high school. He’d told Amos he was joining the rodeo, and Amos didn’t like it.

  Because Amos really didn’t like it when the people he was used to controlling and beating on took off. It wasn’t personal.

  Still, it had felt personal when the old man leaned in and called Ty names.

  You’ve never been anything but a disappointment, he’d sneered. If you didn’t have your grandfather’s build, I’d swear there wasn’t a drop of Everett blood in you. You have your mother’s face, boy, but pretty fades. You think you have some bright future out there? Wake up. You’ve never had a talent for anything but causing trouble.

  Sounds like a rodeo champion to me, Ty had snapped back.

  Working in the rodeo takes respect. That stock could kill you as soon as look at you. You have no respect.

  I give respect when it’s due, Ty had thrown at him with a sneer.

  You’re a useless waste of space, Ty, Amos had growled right back. You’re not dependable like Gray. You’re not bright like Brady. You’re nothing but a joke. You really do take after your mother, don’t you?

  Ty had swung on him and gotten a shiner for his trouble. He remembered it all. He could even make the story funny in the retelling, if he wanted. That Amos, always so predictably nasty, ha ha. But whatever way he told the story, he didn’t feel a thing. Not what it was like to have his father whale on him. Then kick him out, which had stung even though he’d already planned to go.

  And he couldn’t have said why, when he remembered these things, he thought about Hannah. Had he told her that story? Had he made her laugh?

  But even as he wondered it, he knew better. Hannah wouldn’t have laughed at a story like that. Her big, beautiful blue eyes would have filled up with tears instead, for the angry, essentially fatherless eighteen-year-old kid he’d been. She would have looked crushed. For him. She would have reached out, taken his hand, and—

  Ty blinked. Was that a memory? Or a daydream?

  Either way, he was unsettled when Brady swung into the seat next to him. Abby lowered herself down into the chair across the table, one hand rubbing her enormous belly as she went. Only when Abby was settled and Becca sat down next to her did Gray take his seat, and only then did they all start eating.

  As if they were marginally civilized after all.

  Obviously that was more of Abby’s influence. If Ty remembered those drunken holidays when Amos was alive correctly, when they’d been left to their own devices, they’d all choked their food down like they were in jail.

  As they ate, Abby asked Gray direct questions about the state of the ranch and how he’d spent his morning. Gray answered her, in detail, and not for the first time, Ty was struck by how much of an actual partnership the two of them had hammered out. Abby was invested. She was genuinely interested. She also did all of the ranch’s paperwork, which was much different than what Ty remembered from watching his mother interact with his father right here in this same kitchen.

  All Bettina had ever done at the ranch was complain. Ty couldn’t recall a single instance of her helping Amos with anything. There had been other women around after Bettina, but none of them had pitched in either. And Ty hadn’t spent a whole lot of time here after he’d started up with the rodeo, but his memories of Gray’s first wife, Cristina, had put her firmly in the unhelpful camp.

  Ty could remember sitting at this very table years back, listening to Gray and Amos argue about calving season. When he’d looked up, Cristina had been angrily spearing green beans on her plate while rolling her eyes.

  Cows, cows, and more cows, she said, supposedly to Ty. But loud enough so there was no doubt Gray could hear her too. Some days I wake up and ask myself, what was life like when I talked about something else? An
ything else?

  Cattle pays for the roof over your head, girl, Amos had growled.

  Gray had said nothing, which had been normal. Ty didn’t remember him smiling much back then either.

  Abby, by contrast, was a farm girl, born and bred. She didn’t complain about the livestock. She’d grown up five miles down the same road on the old Douglas farm, here in these fields where her own ancestors had eked out their living over the course of generations. Her grandmother came from a long line of dairy farmers. She could talk about cows forever, and did.

  But it wasn’t the conversation about the latest issue with this or that buyer that fascinated Ty today. It was the way Gray tilted his head toward his wife as they talked. He leaned into her as they spoke.

  She reached out and toyed with the hand he lay on the table, almost absently. And in the middle of their conversation about the latest speculation about beef prices, without missing a beat, Abby shifted Gray’s hand from the table to her belly. Then held it there.

  “Is he kicking?” Becca asked excitedly from her place at Abby’s side.

  “Like it’s his job.” Abby smiled. “And we don’t know that he’s a boy.”

  “He could as easily be a boy as a girl,” Becca countered.

  Ty watched his brother and the way he focused on his wife’s belly. On whatever he felt beneath his hands. And the way that made his face change into pure delight. And love, if Ty wasn’t mistaken.

  He had to look away. It was all too … vulnerable.

  “My money’s on another girl,” Brady chimed in. “So far, I’ve done well with nieces. I want to continue the trend.”

  “You have one niece, Uncle Brady,” Becca said, grinning. “That doesn’t count as a trend.”

  “It will when there’s a second one.”

  “I’m personally rooting for a baby,” Abby said, her eyes on Gray. “As healthy as possible. That’s all.”

  Gray still had his hand on his wife’s belly. “What Abby said.”

  “Come on, Dad,” Becca teased him. “You must have a preference. You have a preference about everything else, including Christmas.”

  Gray eyed his daughter. “I love Christmas, Becca, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Sure you do. But if you and Abby have a boy, you’ll have one of each. Isn’t that what everybody wants? A set?”

  Gray’s hand rested on Abby’s belly, though there was that curve to his stern mouth. And something warm, and maybe approving, as he looked at his family. Becca, Abby, and the baby on the way.

  It took Ty a minute, but then he got it. Gray looked content.

  And that was like another earthquake, rocking Ty where he sat, his sandwich demolished before him.

  Gray had always been a mountain. The rock of the family. He’d basically raised Ty and Brady after their mother left, because Amos certainly wasn’t up for the job. He was grim and determined. He made the ranch work. His first wife had died in a car accident on her way to cheat on him—not for the first time—and he’d soldiered on. Ty had seen Gray at ease. He’d even seen him riled up on occasion. He’d seen him … okay, always, one way or another.

  But he never would have imagined that a man like his older brother—or any man in his family—could be content.

  Ty knew about surviving. If the last year had taught him anything, it was that he had an endless capacity for holding on against all the odds. And he could remember other parts of his life too. The rodeo tour that had been eight seconds of glory here and there, recovering from those few seconds, and a whole lot of grueling travel in between. City after city. Highway after highway. All for the dubious pleasure of a belt buckle and the prize money that went with it. And the knowledge that he could do a thing, repeatedly, a wise man never tried.

  Ty had been doing that thing his entire adult life. He was going to do it again. But he couldn’t feel it.

  And that was what hit him, like another full-size bull landing on his head.

  Hannah made him feel things. She didn’t have to do anything. She showed up, and earthquakes took him over. He didn’t know what that was, but it was better than … this. Surviving on a mix of bullheadedness and whiskey, ranch work and dreams of redemption next month, sitting at the same table where his father had taught Ty everything he needed to know about drunk and mean.

  He’d had over a year of pure survival, two missing years before his bad fall, and then the dry, clinical sweep of the life that had come before that. So many stories he could tell and not care at all about any of them. Like he didn’t really exist.

  Hannah’s number was programmed into his phone. She’d known exactly how to find it.

  She’d known exactly how to find him too.

  There was nothing in all the years he could remember that suggested Ty was the marrying kind. He would have sworn up and down he wasn’t. And yet he still wanted to touch Hannah more than he wanted to drink himself quiet inside. Even when he knew it was foolish, he wanted to talk to her, touch her, be near her. He’d gone running after her last night, twice, though he would have said that wasn’t something he did.

  He never had, according to his grayed out memories.

  Hannah rocked him, straight through, and his initial reaction to that was to deny it. To push her away. To return to the ranch and act like everything was normal.

  But what was normal?

  He had a wife. Ty let that settle into him. He let it sink in deep, like it was finding its way into his bones and settling there.

  He had a wife.

  That probably meant a lot of things he didn’t want to face, but it was possible it also meant that she could remind him how to live. How to feel.

  How to be something more than an angry miracle after a run-in with a bull, a bottomless bottle of whiskey, or a one-night comeback story to pack the stands so people like Buck Stapleton made money.

  It was only when his entire family was staring at him that Ty realized he’d pushed back from the table and stood.

  “You doing all right over there, Amos Junior?” Brady asked mildly. He would need to pay for Amos Junior, obviously. Later. When Ty had sorted a few things out.

  Gray only studied Ty like he knew something, when Ty doubted very much he did. Given he didn’t know much himself.

  “I have to go into town,” Ty said gruffly. And too loudly. “I’ll be back later.”

  He didn’t wait to see how that announcement landed, especially since that clearly meant he was shrugging off the afternoon’s workload.

  He didn’t really care.

  Ty had a wife. And he needed to find her. Now.

  7

  Hannah was positive she would be up the rest of the night, heart and head racing, going over and over every word she’d said and every expression that she’d seen on Ty’s beautiful face. Expressions she’d once known so well, she’d been sure she could tell what was in his head at a glance.

  When she woke up the next morning, groggy and well-rested despite herself, she was shocked. When was the last time she’d slept so deeply?

  You know when, that irritating voice inside her jumped right in.

  But she didn’t want to remember those stolen nights in her secret marriage. Not when Ty’s reaction to learning she was his wife had been to shut down. Then leave.

  Then again, hadn’t that been his response to everything he didn’t like, as long as she’d known him? Why should anything change now?

  Hannah sat up in her bed and scrubbed her hands over her face as if that could reset … everything. She tried to let the glorious colors of the rising sun outside her windows soothe her. When that failed, she went to the bathroom to make sure she looked pulled together, calm, and confident. Reasonable inside and out. And then she went back, settled on her bed, and called her mother. On video, so she could see her baby and soothe that hollow feeling inside her.

  Because there was nothing on this earth that did her heart better than her baby boy’s face. And better yet, his delighted laughter when he saw her.


  Jack was her reset. Jack was what mattered. He was the reason she’d come here, and too bad if that felt more complicated than it should in Ty’s presence.

  Her broken heart would heal or not. Her child trumped her pain, every time.

  When Mama finally swung the phone around so she could study Hannah’s face while Jack amused himself with his squishy blocks, Hannah may or may not have “accidentally” switched the angle on her own phone, so she could make it clear without saying a word that she was all alone in her room.

  “How long are you planning to stay out there?” Luanne asked coolly, when Hannah held her phone steady again.

  “I don’t know yet. As long as it takes.”

  “Until what?” Luanne asked. And managed to keep from rolling her eyes. Hannah chose to view that as encouragement. “Until his convenient memory loss reverses itself?”

  “Your feelings on this topic have been noted, Mama. Repeatedly.”

  “I don’t understand your approach to this at all,” Luanne said with a sniff. “It doesn’t matter what he pretends he can’t remember.”

  “He was crushed by a two-thousand-pound bull and is lucky he’s upright and walking. He’s not faking.”

  Luanne sighed. And lost her battle—well, Hannah was assuming it was a battle on her part—with her dramatic eye rolls.

  “You have a marriage license. His name is on Jack’s birth certificate. He can remember or not remember as he pleases. The facts remain.” She shook her head, as if Hannah didn’t know all that. “He needs to step up.”

  “I’ve been in Cold River for less than a day,” Hannah pointed out, reminding herself that she needed to remain calm. If only because if she succumbed to emotion, Luanne would claim it was Ty’s bad influence on her. “I don’t know what I could have done in that time that I haven’t done already.”

  “It doesn’t take more than a moment to say, ‘Congratulations, you’re a daddy. And by the way, here’s the bill for the child support you owe me.’ Do you want me to time it?”