Cold Heart, Warm Cowboy

by Caitlin Crews

  Ty counted it as a win.

  When dinner was over, Abby shooed everyone out of her kitchen, and Ty walked Hannah across the yard to his bunkhouse cabin. Now their bunkhouse cabin, a shift that made his temples pulse at him.

  “That was great,” he said. Maybe too optimistically.

  Beside him, Hannah made a scoffing sound. “Thank you for demonstrating, in case I’d somehow forgotten, that you are one hundred percent male.”

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  When they reached his cabin, he opened the door and ushered her inside. It wasn’t much. Two rooms and a bathroom. A basic kitchenette on one wall and a woodstove on another. Not a whole lot different from the trailer he’d lived in and taken from rodeo to rodeo for most of his life.

  “It means that you’re a man. Supernaturally indifferent to any and all awkwardness while every woman in the room cringes.”

  “Any time the table stays on all four of its legs, I count that as a victory,” Ty said.

  The cabin felt a lot smaller than it had this morning. This had been his idea, and yet now that Hannah was standing here, blond and blue-eyed and his wife, Ty wondered if he’d really thought this through. But too late now.

  Talk about reckless. He cleared his throat. “I’ll get your bags.”

  He pushed his way back outside. The sun was flirting with the mountains, casting the sky in shades of orange and red. The lights from the ranch house spilled out into the yard, buttery and bright, and it took Ty a moment to realize that he was … different.

  Better, something in him whispered.

  But it was something else. Something bigger. Hope, maybe, no matter how his head ached at him.

  He pulled Hannah’s bags out of her pickup, then started back toward the cabin. Where she was waiting for him. His heart kicked, and he still didn’t know how he’d pulled away from her up on the hill. How he’d kept his hands to himself since.

  How he was going to keep his word when she was going to be around him all the time now.

  Because if he’d learned anything about this woman who was his wife since she’d appeared in Cold River, it was that she was shaping up to be the death of him in tight jeans.

  He ordered himself not to hurry back, and then wished he had when he saw Gray coming out of the barn, directly toward him so there was no pretending he didn’t see him. Ty could feel the look his older brother leveled on him from ten feet away.

  It was worse when Gray came closer.

  He stopped when he was a foot or two away and then … stood there. The way he did sometimes, like he really was one of the mountains. Or possibly because he knew how intimidating his silence was.

  Ty, naturally, was irritated. Not intimidated.

  “A wife is a funny thing to forget to mention for almost eighteen months,” Gray observed. Mildly. More to the night sky than to Ty.

  Ty sighed. He set Hannah’s bags down at his feet, not without a touch of theater. “If you have something to get off your chest, now’s the time. Go for it.”

  “I’m not the one who has to get things off my chest, brother,” Gray drawled. With an extra emphasis on brother, in case Ty had forgotten their family connection in the last twenty minutes. “I’m not the one who had a wife stashed away and failed to mention it. For over a year.”

  “She’s not stashed away anymore.” Ty grinned. “She’s right across the yard. Brother.”

  They stared at each other, and Ty hated that this was the only man on earth whose opinion mattered to him. Especially because, unless he’d misinterpreted every interaction they’d ever had, Gray’s opinion of him was fairly dim.

  “You want to tell me what’s going on with you?” Gray asked.

  “Because we share now? Okay, then. Great. Let’s dive right into this bonding thing we’ve never done.” Ty let his grin widen. “There’s nothing going on with me. Good talk.”

  Gray looked undeterred. Or maybe that was just his face. “Why didn’t you tell anyone about her?”

  “Who should I have told?” Ty eyed his brother. “Brady? Please. Dad? After the spectacular failure of every relationship he ever had? And Abby is a recent development. Before her, you didn’t have anything good to say about the institution of marriage.”

  “Fair enough.” That was too easy. “But it seems to me you had a lot of time to share the happy news. Particularly once you saw my new take on the institution.”

  “I guess it didn’t come up,” Ty said with a show of epic unconcern. “Not everybody can wake up one morning, go next door, and randomly decide to marry the first neighbor they find.”

  Gray laughed. Which was shocking, and even disappointing, because Ty had expected it to piss him off.

  “Also fair,” he said, because he was apparently on a mission to completely mess with Ty’s head. “I’m not asking you to defend your marriage, Ty. It’s your business. If she lives with you, if she doesn’t, whatever. Entirely up to you.”

  “I sure appreciate the permission, big brother.”

  Gray laughed again. “It’s not like you’ve been all that happy since you moved back. She lightens you up some. That’s got to be a good thing.”

  “What does happy have to do with anything?” Ty asked. Rougher than he’d intended. “Was that supposed to be the goal? Because I’m trying to stay alive and in one piece. That’s it.”

  Gray’s jaw worked. “Why does every conversation I try to have with you end up like a boxing match?”

  “Oh, awesome. I can’t wait to hear how I’m doing conversations wrong too.”

  Gray sighed. “What does that mean? I’m not talking about your conversational skills, Ty. I’m pointing out that everything with you is aggressive. Or drunk.”

  “You caught me. Blind drunk yet again.”

  But he should have known that giving into the edginess inside him was a recipe for disaster. His older brother’s gaze narrowed on him. And no doubt saw too much.

  “If you’re not drunk, what? You’re always this angry? All the time?” More of that too-narrow, too-intent focus. “And married, apparently?”

  “I’m real sorry I didn’t get the perfect gene, Gray,” Ty drawled. “Maybe I should’ve worked harder at it when I was a kid. Then again, not everyone gets to grow up with Dad on one side and two messed-up brothers who can never live up to your example on the other. Only you.”

  “But sure. You’re not drunk and you’re not angry. You’re great. Perfectly fine.”

  “It must be nice to storm around through a whole life, so sure of who you are and where you belong.” Ty shoved a hand through his hair and had no idea why there was all that … mess in him. Clawing at him. “I’m happy for you. Truly.”

  Gray muttered something under his breath. “Maybe worry less about me. And Dad. Maybe—and I’m spitballing here—try being you, Ty. Drunk, angry, married, lazy, I don’t really care. But you need to pick one. Because all this constant switching around is giving me whiplash.”

  Then he headed off toward his house.

  He didn’t storm off, despite what Ty had said, because Gray Everett was a rock. Rocks didn’t storm, even when they were furious.

  It would be a lot easier if Ty could hate the guy. But he’d never managed that one, despite years of dedicated practice.

  He stood there while the sky put on a show and shadows gathered all around him, wishing he could figure out a way to do what Gray had suggested. And pick one. Pick him.

  But he still didn’t know who that was.

  The last time he’d lived here for any stretch of time, he’d been a kid. An unhappy kid. And he hated that he could be a grown man, spotty memory or not, and still feel that kid stuff tugging on him. The last thing he wanted to do was pick another fight with his brother. Either one of them. And yet.

  He took a breath, then another, but he was having trouble regulating himself the way he normally could. If he’d been back in the chute at the rodeo, getting ready to do his thing, he’d have been so calm and cool
, icicles could have formed on his shoulders. But it didn’t work here. Not with Hannah and clearly not with the rest of his family.

  He had no one to blame but himself. Because the trouble with living down to expectations was that those low expectations were all anyone ever had for him. Including him. And let those expectations sink low enough, and there was only one place to end up.

  Drunk. Aggressive. Even the random acquisition of a wife—

  It was the sort of thing Amos had been famous for.

  Everything Ty did to be less like his father made him … more like him.

  The only thing he had going for him was that his wife had come back, unlike Amos’s wives and girlfriends. He needed to focus on that. He needed to make his marriage work, no matter what had happened that he couldn’t remember.

  He would make it work.

  He was about to pick up Hannah’s bags again when someone else walked out of the barn. Becca. He smiled at his favorite and only niece, and waited as she walked over to him.

  “How’s all the gardening going?” he asked.

  “I’m working in the Flower Pot, not gardening,” she said, for the millionth time. The eye roll was implied. Or it usually was. “It’s the Trujillos’ florist shop, not a greenhouse.”

  Tonight, Becca looked serious. She’d pulled her hair back into a ponytail, so she was all cheekbones and those big, dark eyes she’d gotten from her mother. Good thing everything else about her, like her good heart and her steady nature, she’d gotten from Gray.

  Abby had dedicated herself to making Cristina something other than a dirty word around the ranch. She and Gray both worked hard to make sure Becca knew that there were no hard feelings, not anymore. That it didn’t matter what Cristina had done, that people in town liked to shoot off their mouths, but everybody here—everybody who mattered, in other words—wished that Cristina was still around the way she should have been.

  Ty figured that was their job. And it was probably good for Becca.

  But he was Gray’s brother, not his kid, and it turned out that his reaction to his former sister-in-law’s extramarital activities was the same as it always had been. It was one grudge he still carried. He might not know how to do the brother thing. But he could carry the hate on Gray’s behalf. And did.

  He didn’t need to share that with his niece.

  “Congratulations on your wedding,” Becca said, her voice oddly somber.

  Ty tugged on her ponytail. “Thanks, peanut.”

  She pulled her ponytail out of reach and considered him a moment. “Are you and my dad fighting? Is that why you didn’t invite us to your wedding?”

  “No one can be in a fight with your dad, Becca, because your dad doesn’t fight.” Ty heard his own words and the irritating truth in them, and laughed. “And I got married a while back. It was a private ceremony. Nobody was there but me and Hannah.”

  “Hannah.” Becca pronounced the name as if she had to test it out, yet still wasn’t too sure about those two syllables. “Was the private ceremony her idea? She wears a lot of makeup.”

  Ty blinked. “Uh … the private ceremony was my idea.”

  Becca smiled sweetly at him, reminding him of the way she’d used to go around smiling as if, were she to stop, the world would collapse. “The one time I tried mascara, my dad told me it looked like I had a black eye.”

  Ty considered her for a moment. “Good thing Hannah knows how to use it properly, then.”

  Becca gave him an even wider, sunnier smile and a kiss on the cheek he didn’t believe at all. And then left him as she made her way back to the house. Though unlike her father, she was definitely, if not storming, getting her stomp on.

  Ty watched her slam into the house. He stood there for another minute or two, waiting to see if Brady would roll out to share his thoughts.

  When he didn’t, Ty thanked the heavens for small mercies, picked up Hannah’s bags, and headed for his cabin.

  Their cabin.

  Inside, Hannah was sitting on the small couch in the main room, her phone to her ear. “I have to go,” she said as she looked up and saw him at the door. She switched her phone off, but kept it clenched in her hand.

  Ty stepped inside, shifting the bags to the floor as he closed the door behind him.

  “That was my mother,” Hannah said.

  “I didn’t ask.”

  “I’m telling you. It was my mother.”

  “Okay.”

  And it was one thing to make sweeping pronouncements about working on a marriage. But what did that mean? When most people talked about working on their marriage, as far as Ty knew—because he wasn’t exactly anyone’s idea of a marriage counselor—they did things like argue about who did more of what. They talked about taking more vacations. Spending more or less time with the kids, depending. They promised to have more sex.

  None of those things applied to this situation, except the last one—and Ty didn’t want to think about sex. Because all he wanted to think about was sex. And all the many glorious ways he could indulge himself in Hannah.

  “You’re looking at me like I’m dessert,” Hannah said from the couch. “But I’m pretty sure you decided that we’re on a diet.”

  “You’re the one who remembers our marriage,” he said.

  He moved over to the small fridge and pulled out a beer. He lifted another one in her direction as a query, waited for her to nod, then kicked the fridge closed. He retraced his steps—all three of them—handed it to her, and then sat on the couch himself. Unlike her, he didn’t perch on the edge like something might bite him. He sat back, sprawled out, and told himself he was perfectly at his ease.

  Slowly, inch by inch, she relaxed next to him.

  “What do you remember us doing?” he asked. When she smirked, he laughed. “Besides that.”

  “There weren’t a lot of activities open to us. Given it was secret and all.”

  “According to you, we spent quite a while not doing that while we were dating. We must have done something else. Right?”

  “What do you imagine we did? We talked.”

  “I was afraid you were going to say that.”

  “Oh, right.” Hannah rolled her eyes. “Because talking is only interesting when it’s a path to getting into someone’s pants. Otherwise it’s to be avoided at all costs.”

  “Darlin’, I can’t remember getting in your pants. And I’m not bored.” He considered her a moment or two. “But you’ve already had all these conversations. I haven’t.”

  “We can have them again.”

  “If I’m honest, I’ve heard more than enough today about who I am,” Ty said. “Why don’t you switch it up and tell me who you are? With less mystery this time.”

  That seemed to throw her. She took her time taking a sip of her beer. “It’s not a very interesting story.”

  “Tell it to me anyway.”

  “I was raised in a small town in Georgia. But you can probably figure that out from the accent.”

  He only waited, because that sounded a lot like a practiced line to throw out to keep strangers from asking anything deeper. Hannah blew out a breath and pulled her knees up beneath her on the couch next to him.

  “I was raised by my mom and her sister Elizabeth, who we call Aunt Bit. I fell in love with horses when I was a kid, and I never figured out which I liked better, horses or books. I won my first Miss Rodeo Princess when I was fourteen at the county fair.” She shrugged. “And that was that. I was hooked.”

  “Which part hooked you?”

  When she wasn’t talking about their relationship, Ty noticed, her face was open. The way it had been when she’d first walked into the Broken Wheel. There was none of that wariness. He liked it way too much.

  “I loved the whole thing,” she said, tipping her head back toward the ceiling as if she were looking at that video of her past that Ty wished was real, so he could watch it too. “I loved the rodeo. All the people coming together. All the animals, and the owners who were so
proud and so careful with them. I loved how excited the little kids got when they rode sheep. And I was in awe of the barrel racers. They looked like superheroes.”

  “You didn’t notice all the cowboys?” Ty shook his head at her. “And here I was sure that was the draw.”

  “I liked the cowboys well enough.” Hannah wrinkled up her nose. “But I was captivated by the rodeo queens. They were like Disney Princesses, but they were real.”

  “And you liked them more than the barrel racers?”

  “You could always see that the barrel racers were tough and strong, and they worked so hard,” Hannah said slowly, as if she was working it out in her head as she spoke. “And the girls who did that in school were the ones who showed up in class smelling like the stables. It was only when they got on a horse that they made any sense, I guess. I felt like that too.”

  Ty tried to rub that pulsing thing out of his temple. It was better than trying to do something about how tight his chest felt.

  Hannah was still staring off into her past. “The rodeo queens were like prom queens but all the time. They were so pretty, and they were always smiling, and they always looked perfect. They were nice to everybody, no matter what, and they made it look so easy. I was pretty awkward and very shy, and kids already made fun of me, but being a rodeo queen was the best of both worlds. You got the rodeo and the horses. But you also got to be pretty. And the kind of girl who, no matter what, people would love. Because everybody loves a rodeo queen. Don’t they?”

  There was something naked in that. Vulnerable, and Ty felt … hushed. Awed, maybe, that she would let him see it. His ribs ached.

  “So, you won your first crown. And you never looked back.”

  “No, because it was even better than I’d imagined it would be. And a whole lot harder. At first, when I was only competing in local fairs and rodeos, Mama and Aunt Bit and I made my outfits ourselves. But when I kept winning, the outfits had to be better, and we couldn’t afford it, so we had to start raising money. And nobody’s going to give any money to shy, awkward girls who smell like the stables and look like they spent the day mucking out stalls. Even if they did.” Her smile was soft. Real. “I found that the more I let the queen part of me take over my real life, the better my real life was.”