Hannah’s lips flattened. She crossed her arms, like she was holding herself. And when she opened her mouth again, it was to let out a string of profanity-laden curses and a series of nasty observations that Ty was fairly sure would make a convict blush.
It made something inside him curl up and die.
“My father was good for pretty much nothing.” His voice was barely audible to his own ears, but he couldn’t tell if that was because his head was pounding too loud, or if he could barely speak. “But while my grandfather was around, he took the time to pick up my father’s slack. You could say he dedicated himself to it. And if he taught me anything, it was how to speak respectfully to a lady.”
“Yeah. I wasn’t too happy about it either.”
Ty couldn’t take what she was saying and make it track. He couldn’t make it him. “I’ve never talked like that to a woman in my life.”
“Except you did.”
“This was in the hospital?” He raked a hand through his hair. “When I was out of my mind on painkillers?”
“I don’t know if you were out of your mind,” Hannah retorted, her voice hitching. “I don’t know what you went through because you didn’t tell me. You told me to leave. And I did. I figured when you felt better, you would call me, but you didn’t.”
“Because I didn’t know I should.”
But she didn’t seem to hear that, gritted out from between his teeth. “You find it easier to believe you could have a marriage you forgot about than that you could have sworn up a blue streak? I really don’t know how to take that.”
“Believe me, I know my way around a curse word. But I’ve never been the kind of man who could take a strip out of a woman. Or would.” Ty shook his head again. “Whether I was married to her or not.”
But he knew a man who could. And had.
He’d watched it play out in front of him every night of his childhood. He’d heard the things Amos had said to Ty’s mother, to his second wife, to any other woman who’d been foolish enough to try to get close to him. He’d said the same and worse to his own children. When it came to nastiness, Amos Everett knew no boundaries.
He had always, always found a lower place to go.
It made Ty physically sick to imagine he could have acted like that. Like the man he’d always hated most.
“Show me our marriage certificate,” he said, surprised on some level that he could still speak.
That sick feeling was so thick inside him he was uneasy with it. He couldn’t tell if it would take him out at the knees, or send him heaving into the bushes. Or worse, continue to sit there where it was, polluting him.
Reminding him that he was no better than the worst man he knew.
“Because now you want proof. Now that you made me tell you all my happy memories, but you don’t like the bad ones.”
“I believe you,” Ty said, and it was only when she released a breath with a big sound that he realized he hadn’t told her that. Not yet. He hadn’t clued her in to that certainty in him—or how it kept growing.
“Well,” Hannah said unevenly. “I’m happy to hear that, I guess.”
He rubbed his hands over his face, but that couldn’t rub the Amos stink off of him. Could anything? Or was he stuck with it forever, whether he wanted it or not?
He focused on her, aware that his own gaze was hard. And he couldn’t make his mouth curve any longer. But he focused on that certainty in him, because none of the things he’d ever been sure about—his horses, his abilities, his talent for sticking on a bull—had anything to do with Amos. Ty had only ever been sure about the things he’d learned and become despite Amos.
“I can’t imagine falling in love. And I always vowed I would never get married. But when I make a decision, I stick to it. Always have. If I looked up one day, saw you, and my life changed forever…” He shrugged, never taking his eyes from her. “I’d act on it. That’s who I am.”
She ran her tongue over her teeth, her arms still crossed. “So this is a game of trust, but verify.”
“I said I believed you, Hannah. I didn’t say I trusted you.”
“Of course not. Because why would anything with you be easy?”
“Because it’s not lost on me that you’re leaving out a critical part of this story. Are you going to lie to me about that? Are you going to look me in the face and pretend that’s not exactly what you’re doing?”
She swallowed again, and he could see the way her throat worked. Then she moved back toward the truck stiffly, telling him more about how she’d been gripping herself tight than he needed to know. Because it didn’t do him any good.
Ty kept his eyes trained on the view while she opened the passenger door. The sweet summer day made the valley so bright, he almost forgot he was staring down into his past. His roots, whether he liked it or not. Generations of Everetts before him, mixed in with the fields and the cattle. He heard Hannah rummage around inside the truck, then slam the door shut.
When she appeared in front of him again, she was holding a thick piece of paper in one hand.
“When we move from belief to trust, I’ll decide if I can trust you with the rest of the story,” she told him, her eyes dark and glittering. “If that ever happens.”
She offered him the paper in her hand. Ty took it.
And it was right there before him. Las Vegas. A chapel on the strip. His name and hers.
“Hannah Monroe,” he said. As if it were a prayer he’d memorized when he was a child, and he could recognize the sound. But he still didn’t know the words.
She searched his face. “Monroe isn’t my married name.”
Ty reeled at that. And understood that she’d known he would—that was why she’d only told him her first name.
“Everett,” he said, as if he’d never heard the name before. “You’re Hannah Everett.”
“That’s what you liked to call me. I was in the process of switching it all over legally. But we were taking our time, waiting for my reign to end.”
Ty handed her back the certificate, too carefully. He raked his hands through his hair again, but that didn’t help. He wasn’t sure anything would.
Hannah stood there before him, too pretty to have eyes so sad. There was all that fight in the way she raised her chin. And nothing but steel in the way she stood there before him. The way she’d walked him through the memories he’d lost.
The way she had yet to ask a single thing of him.
She was his wife. He had married her, loved her, and lost her, but she’d come back.
He couldn’t say the same about any of his father’s women. His mother in particular, who enjoyed nothing more than having a few cocktails and sharing the things Amos had said to her during their marriage. The things Ty had heard himself as a kid were bad enough. But Bettina liked to marinate in the specifically nasty things Amos had said to her in private.
It horrified Ty in ways he couldn’t articulate, down into his gut and his bones and his battered old soul, that he had ever said such things himself. Much less to Hannah.
For the first time, he understood what that doctor had been trying to tell him. There were some things it was better to forget. And sometimes the mind made that determination all on its own. He might not like it, but he got it.
“This fight you don’t want to talk about. How bad was it?”
Hannah’s chin inched higher. “It was bad.”
“You’re going to have to give me more than that,” Ty growled. “I would have sworn to you on a stack of Bibles that I wasn’t the kind of man who would say those things to a woman, but you tell me I did.”
“I’m sorry.”
That made it worse.
“I can also stand here and tell you that I also know, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that I would never lift my hand to a woman. But I have to accept the possibility that I’m wrong about that too.” His stomach was a painful knot. “Is that what I did?”
The sickness in him threatened to burst out of him, bu
t Ty swallowed it down. Because he couldn’t make sense of who he’d been, but he knew who he was.
The very least he could do while facing up to the damage he’d done was look the woman who’d suffered it in the eye.
“No,” Hannah burst out immediately. She looked appalled. “No, Ty, of course not. You didn’t hit me. That’s not who you are.”
“I’d like to agree with you,” he gritted out. “But I can’t.”
“A fight can be ugly without it being violent,” she said, her voice fierce again. “There’s a darkness in you. You know that. You never let it tip over into something worse.”
Her gaze searched his and she must not have liked what she saw, because she moved closer. And then, stunning him, she took his hands in hers.
“Hannah.” But he was touching her again, and it was better than he remembered. It was better than remembering. “I want to apologize for whatever I did that made you stay away for year and a half. But how can that mean anything when I don’t remember what it was?”
She smiled, even though he could see her tears now, tracking down her cheeks. “And I want to tell you it’s okay.”
But she didn’t.
Everything felt poised on the edge of shattering, or maybe that was only Ty. He couldn’t tell if the noise and riot inside him were trying to destroy him—or if this was what he needed to bring him back to himself.
Ty wanted to be whole. He wanted to be him. Even if that meant he had to reconcile himself to these things he couldn’t imagine himself saying or doing.
“Were you tired of keeping us a secret?” he asked.
Hannah looked startled, but she didn’t pull her hands away. “I wouldn’t say I was tired of it, because I knew why we were doing it and I knew it only had to go on like that through the summer. But it wasn’t ideal.”
“What did you do with that ring I gave you?”
Her gaze locked to his. She pulled one hand away and wiped at her face. When she met his gaze again, she smiled.
Ty watched, transfixed, as she dug beneath her T-shirt, and pulled a chain out from beneath. He’d seen the chain around her neck last night, but hadn’t paid attention to the fact he couldn’t see what was hanging from it.
He saw it now. A diamond ring.
His diamond ring. He didn’t have to remember giving it to her the first time to feel the rightness of it.
He’d spent so much of his life trying so hard not to be his father, but it turned out he’d become Amos anyway. In the most horrible of ways. But unlike Amos, Ty had a second chance. Maybe the bull kicking him to pieces was what he deserved. What he’d earned for giving into the darkness inside of him.
Whatever he couldn’t remember, he couldn’t care about that, because it had brought him Hannah.
She made him feel. She messed him up. He’d taken one look at her by the fence, making nice with his horses, and nothing had been the same.
Ty intended to make the most of his second chances.
He pulled her close. He felt the way she trembled, but she melted into him, and that heat in him tripled, like a hard kick. He let his greed and desire roll through him as he reached behind her to work the clasp of the chain, his hands a good deal less steady than he’d like.
She bent her head, giving him better access to her neck, and he almost felt like a kid again. Undone by the heat of her and the scent of her shampoo. There was something about the combination of that and whatever she rubbed into her skin that got to him. She smelled like rosemary, the way he’d wanted her to in the Broken Wheel last night. And that told him more about the kind of intimacy they’d shared than her story could have.
Because on some level, he recognized it. The scent shot through him—she blossomed her way into him—making him feel outsized things that had nothing to do with the simple undoing of the clasp of a necklace.
He let it all sink into him, through him, like memory. Then he let the ring fall off the end of the chain and into his palm.
Ty tucked the length of chain into his pocket, then he took her hand. He watched her eyes get even bluer than the sky.
“I can’t remember being your husband, Hannah. But I want you to be my wife.”
“That sounds like a good start,” she whispered.
But it felt like more than a good start to Ty. It felt something like profound as he slid that diamond ring onto her left hand and stood there a moment, admiring the way it caught the sun. And enjoying the way she did too.
“Ty…”
She was going to tell him more things he didn’t want to hear. And he resolved to listen, no matter what. It was the least of what he owed her.
But instead, her smile changed. “I believe that in moments like this, it’s traditional to kiss the bride.”
“I didn’t realize there was any part of this that was traditional.”
“That’s a good point.” She swayed closer, bracing herself against his chest. “I’ve got you covered, cowboy.”
Then she surged up onto her toes and kissed him.
10
He tasted like fire. Like love and memory.
And best of all, like him.
Hannah hadn’t meant to do more than give him a quick peck. If that. Because he was here in front of her after all this time, and she’d given up believing that could ever happen. Because for the first time in a long while, there was hope.
She had told him their story, and he hadn’t laughed in her face. He hadn’t turned his back on her and walked away. Or any of the things she’d been afraid he would do.
He believed her.
And if she wasn’t mistaken, if it wasn’t simply wishful thinking on her part, there was a part of him that remembered her too.
But she’d forgotten how potent he was. How demanding.
Because the kiss didn’t stay soft or sweet.
There was that kick when her lips brushed his, flame and longing, loss and hope—and then he angled his head, took the kiss deeper, and everything went … volcanic.
It was always this way.
His hands in her hair. Her body melting, yearning.
Her hands were on his chest, and it was like a dream, getting to feel him again. Hard muscles, honed to perfection. Whipcord strength, leashed power, and all that delicious heat.
She had been the one to start this. But he took control, the way he always did. The way he always had.
Hannah felt safe once again. Beautiful and effortless. Wild and greedy for every sensation she’d believed was lost.
His lips against hers. The scrape of his tongue. His taste and the torment of it, winding through the whole of her body. The way he gathered her to him, held her against him, and she was never in the slightest bit of doubt how much he wanted her.
And in return, how very much she wanted him.
Every kiss made it hotter.
It had always been like this. It would always be like this. This was why Hannah had risked everything she had for him. This was why she’d lost it.
This was everything. He was everything. And even knowing the whole of the story she’d told him, and the rest of it besides, she couldn’t keep herself from losing herself in him.
Again and again and again.
When he pulled his mouth from hers, then set her away from him, she didn’t understand. There was too much sensation storming through her. Reacquainting her with parts of herself she’d assumed were out of commission forever.
It occurred to her that for a few brief seconds she hadn’t worried about Jack. Not while Ty kissed her. She hadn’t thought about anything except him. Them. This.
And instead of filling her with the typical guilt and shame, it made her … oddly grateful. Because she hadn’t believed she would ever feel like this again. Beautiful and sexy. Desirable. Made of fire and magic, alive beneath his hands. Instead of a collection of practical body parts there to house and care for a tiny, dependent human.
Hannah felt tears prick the back of her eyes, and she almost told him then. It a
lmost spilled out of her on its own. That they had a baby. A little boy. That he was the best thing that had ever happened to her, that being without him made her ache, and that Ty was his father whether he wanted to take on that role or not.
That in this moment—high up on this hill where she’d done nothing but break her own heart all over again—Ty, who’d made her a mother, reminded her that she was first and foremost a woman.
It was a gift. But she couldn’t thank him for it without telling him everything.
Men love sex, not babies, Luanne had always told her. Never forget that.
Hannah bit back the words. The truth and the ache and Jack. Even though it hurt.
Ty was holding her away from him, those big hands of his wrapped around her shoulders, firm and gentle at once.
The look on his face made everything in her stutter, then glow.
She remembered the first time she’d seen that expression. How stunned she had been to discover that she could do that to him. This worldly, beautiful man, who could have anyone and likely had, if all those rumors were true. But she was the one who made him look … undone. Wild with all that fire and desire, passion and longing, and something like astonishment.
“Okay,” he said now, something decidedly male in his dark green gaze and no trace of his easy, lazy grin. “I guess that explains a few things.”
Hannah didn’t understand why they were talking when there were so many other things they could be doing. Sure, there was a lot of noise inside of her, much of it sounding a lot like her mother in high dudgeon. But did it matter if it was smart to touch him like this? Did it matter what happened next?
The liberating thing about the worst having already happened was that she wasn’t afraid of it anymore. Her life had already come apart at the seams, and she was still here, with a beautiful, sweet boy in the bargain. There were no more monsters under her bed, lurking around, ready to claim her if she made the slightest misstep.
She’d survived her worst nightmares. Each and every one.
Ty had taught her things about her body she’d never known. Before or since. Hannah had been on a horse almost before she could walk. Aunt Bit had a friend outside of town with stables and a kind heart, who had taught Hannah how to ride. Riding had been her escape. Her pleasure. Her sport.
Cold Heart, Warm Cowboy Page 13
