Cold Heart, Warm Cowboy

by Caitlin Crews

  “But you don’t do it anymore.”

  The open, almost wistful expression on her face disappeared. “No.”

  “Didn’t you tell me that your crown was tarnished?”

  He knew she had. But now he was trying to piece together all the things she’d told him before he’d understood what was happening. And who she was.

  She took her time looking at him, and when she did, the soft smile was gone. “What I like to focus on is that I’m the only girl who’s ever won Miss Rodeo Forever two years running. That’s an accomplishment any way you look at it. It doesn’t matter what happened afterward.”

  “What happened?”

  “What always happens?” Ty was pretty sure that was a rhetorical question. “Rumors start. And it doesn’t matter if there’s any truth to them or not, does it? When a cowboy is scandalous, it only adds to his character. To his legend. But there’s no such thing as a scandalous, legendary rodeo queen. There’s either the rodeo queen or the girl who lost her crown. The end.”

  “That doesn’t seem fair.”

  Hannah laughed. “Of course it’s not fair. But then, no one ever said it would be. And luckily, it turns out there really is life after the rodeo.”

  Ty remembered his beer and took a swig. “I’m not so sure about that.”

  “At least you get to go back,” Hannah said quietly. “I assure you, no one has reached out to offer me the opportunity to reclaim my glory.”

  “It’s going to be great,” Ty said, because it was. Because it had to be. “I have no intention of going out broken. That was never the plan.”

  “How did you plan on going out, then?”

  Ty considered her a moment. Then he took another pull from his beer.

  “You’ve spent all these months here,” Hannah said, pulling her knees up farther, so she was basically hugging them. He noticed she’d taken off her boots. And her toenails were painted a soft, pretty pink that made everything in him … hurt. “There are worse things than the ranch life.”

  “This is Gray’s thing.”

  He said that so matter-of-factly. Dismissively, even.

  “I swear a girl in a coffee shop told me your father left the ranch to all three of you,” Hannah said. “Mind you, I know perfectly well that small-town games of Telephone often end up garbled.”

  “He did.” Ty felt restless, but for once it wasn’t because he couldn’t remember something. This time it was because he did. “Some people are born to be ranchers. That’s Gray. Since the day he was born, it’s like half of him was already rooted out there in the land somewhere. Like he was part of it. He never had any doubt in his mind about what he was supposed to do.”

  “Just because he’s good at it doesn’t mean you can’t be good at it too. It’s a really big ranch.”

  “I’m not a rancher.” Ty didn’t want to sit there on the couch anymore. He stood, but that didn’t exactly solve the problem. Because the cabin hadn’t grown any. And then he was … standing there. “Believe me. I come from a long line of ranchers, and I know the type. That’s not me.”

  “Okay. What is you?”

  Ty moved over to the window, where the last of the light was taking its time surrendering to the dark. “My family has been right here for generations. You know that’s like?”

  “Yes,” Hannah said. “I do. But my family doesn’t actually get along.”

  Ty snorted. “And you think mine does?”

  “I have my mom and my aunt, but that’s it. There are other family members around, but they cut us off a long time ago.”

  “Everetts don’t cut each other off,” Ty told her, feeling the same edginess in him that had gotten the best of him out there by the barn when he’d been talking to Gray. The edginess that got the better of him too often here. “We all live here, no matter how ugly it gets, and take it out on each other. Generation after generation. The only thing that matters is the land. It’s all we talk about. It’s supposed to be in our bones, like marrow. We’re supposed to live and die by what happens to every last blade of grass. And if you don’t feel that way, believe me, no one stops and asks themselves if maybe you have another path, or passion, or whatever. Everetts have this land. Right here. Or nothing.”

  “But you left home when you were eighteen,” Hannah said softly. “And you stayed away. You had an entire life and career in the rodeo.”

  “Because that’s what I’m good at. The land is what Gray is good at. The rodeo didn’t really make me popular with my family, Hannah.”

  “Granted, I don’t know your brother at all, but if he didn’t want you muscling in on his land, if it is his land, wouldn’t he say so?” She sounded so reasonable.

  “He can’t,” Ty said shortly, turning back to look at her.

  Here in this tiny, tiny cabin.

  “Are you sure? Because he didn’t strike me as the kind of man who pays much attention to can’t.”

  “Gray wants to keep the land because he’s been working it his whole life. Because that’s what Everetts do. My brother Brady wants to sell. Because, like me, he left when he could and he never wanted to come back here. But Gray asked us to give it a year.” He shook his head. “I prefer the rodeo, if I’m honest.”

  “But, Ty.” Her voice was too imploring for his liking. Her expression too careful. “Let’s say everything goes the way you want it to over the next few weeks. You get your eight seconds. You get a high score, and that’s it. You’ve done it. You’ve had your comeback. What happens next?”

  He stared at her.

  “Because I meant what I said last night,” she continued in the same voice. “You’re not a young man anymore. That fall you took could have killed you, and no one really understands why it didn’t. The next one might actually finish the job. Or put you in a wheelchair.”

  “That’s a risk I take any time I step into the ring.”

  “Yes, but how much can your body take?” She lifted a hand, and he wondered what expression he had on his face. “I don’t doubt for one second that you have the will to do anything. But you only have the one body. And you’ve kicked the crap out of it for over a decade.”

  “I’ll figure it out.”

  “Ty—”

  But he was done with this conversation. And he hadn’t really thought this part through either.

  “I have some things to do,” he told her. Stiffly. “Out in the barn.”

  He didn’t turn around to see if she could tell he was lying. Because he wasn’t, not entirely. There was always something to do in the barn. “Make yourself at home.”

  He pushed his way back outside. Then stayed out there, walking great loops around the land he claimed had no hold on him but he still knew every inch of, over and over, until the lights went out in the cabin.

  Then the joke was on him.

  Because when he went inside, he found Hannah in bed. In his bed.

  He’d agreed to do this. To be in this marriage. To make it work.

  Which he was pretty sure meant that he needed to crawl up into that bed beside her, instead of sleeping on his couch. And then he had to lie there, surrounded by her scent, without doing anything about it.

  Her hair was on his pillow. She was warm and soft. And she made the cutest sounds when she turned over and snuggled herself against him like she belonged there.

  Ty lay back, staring at his ceiling while his body went to war with itself, all that want and need making him greedy and hungry.

  And out of luck.

  Because it hadn’t occurred to him that he was making himself a martyr.

  A smart man would have kept sex on the table and slid into this bed to get his hands on the woman beside him. A wise man would have remembered that sex wasn’t only a release, or an occasional weapon, it could be the glue that kept things together. It could take the place of these conversations that kept peeling back all his different layers and exposing him to entirely too much light.

  But Ty had never been the smart one in the family. That
was Brady. And he’d never been all that wise. That was Gray.

  Ty had always been the reckless one.

  So he lay there in his bed with a beautiful woman curled up next to him, and yet as out of reach as if he still had no idea she existed. He stared at his ceiling. He contemplated martyrdom. And that impossibly hot kiss up on the hill that was likely to haunt him forever.

  He was pretty sure this had to be the most reckless, idiotic thing he’d ever done in his life.

  But it was still better than being his father.

  12

  Hannah would have sworn up and down that there was no earthly way anything with Ty could possibly feel routine. He was too elemental. Too much, too electric, too … Ty.

  But as the days slipped by, one week turning into the next—and that hollow, Jack-less place inside her blooming from an ache into a kind of agony—they built up a rhythm. Or a habit, anyway.

  He might not have known the difference, but she did.

  They had never had habits, before. Their rhythms had been stolen glances, hoarded nights, or whispered telephone conversations from two parts of the same crowded room. They had never had mornings. Maybe a glimpse of a sunrise here or there, but never one after the next.

  Hannah discovered that no matter how much careful space she and Ty left between them on the big bed that took up most of the bedroom in this tiny house, they always ended up wrapped around each other before dawn.

  That first morning, Ty’s godawful alarm had jolted them both wide awake and into a confused rush of heat and touch, because Hannah was wrapped all around him. And there was no pretending that both of them didn’t feel both his response and hers.

  He’d muttered something gruff about helping herself to any coffee she found and anything else that took her fancy. He’d been up, dressed, and out the door in under five minutes. But Hannah had stayed awake in the bed that grew less and less warm the longer he was out of it, unable to fall back asleep or keep all her tangled emotions from spilling down her cheeks, until the sun came up hours later.

  Every morning it was the same thing. The shrill of the alarm, then the jolt of sleepy awareness. Until slowly, day after day, they stopped reacting like scalded cats. Hannah didn’t gasp and fling herself away from him. Ty didn’t mutter apologies. They woke up, tangled like a knot, and he rolled her off him. So gently it made her stomach flip over, every time. Then he eased himself out of the bed and headed out to handle his first round of chores.

  They didn’t talk about any of that.

  There were a lot of things they didn’t talk about. And unless Hannah wanted to start coming clean about all the things she was keeping hidden—particularly the baby boy she called every day after Ty left their bed, with his sweet laughter on their video calls and the babbling that sounded more and more like real words every day—she needed to find a way to be okay with that.

  She told herself she was more than okay with it. This was an experiment. She was dipping her toe into intimacy with this man instead of flinging herself headlong into passion and pain. And more, she told herself piously, she was doing it as much for Jack as for herself.

  The first morning, after she’d laid there wide awake and filled with too many emotions—most of them unflattering and ugly—she’d rolled herself out of the bed, wondering if she smelled like him. She’d showered and tried her best to put her face together. Then she’d called back home, checked in with her baby, avoided her mother’s questions, and cried when she hung up. She assured herself those particular tears were hormonal and biological.

  And it was no one’s business if she cried every time she hung up from a call home, that sharp stitch behind her ribs deeper and harder.

  That initial morning she’d decided that since this was a working ranch and she was a woman who knew her way around a stable, she might as well go and see if she could make herself useful. She saw Gray and his brothers come back in from their first round of morning duties and headed over to the ranch house’s kitchen herself.

  The kitchen was warm and smelled like bacon, but in case she’d forgotten the rousing welcome she’d received the night before, there was a small, potent sort of silence when she walked in.

  “I’m not too good at being idle,” she said straight into the awkwardness, her rodeo queen smile on high. “I’d love it if y’all would put me to work.”

  There was more silence. It couldn’t have been more than a few seconds, but to Hannah, it felt like a lifetime. Three sets of Everett brothers’ eyes on her from around that big, scarred kitchen table, all of them varying takes on that same dark green. And Abby and Becca too.

  A lesser woman, one who had never had to stand in front of huge crowds trying to look delighted to find herself a runner-up to a crown she’d worked her butt off for and wholly deserved to have won, might have crumpled. Hannah smiled broader. Brighter. She drifted farther into the kitchen as if she were unaware of the tension in the room, and leaned against the counter as if that were where she’d been heading all along. And not because it was a handy barrier between her and a silent table full of her in-laws.

  “No shortage of work to do around a ranch,” Gray said over his plate of scrambled eggs, and Hannah was fiercely glad she had so many years of practice keeping her smile in place. Because it was more than tempting to wilt in the face of Gray’s stern gruffness.

  “Of course!” Abby chimed in, sounding much friendlier than her husband. She had her hands on her belly as she spoke, and the smile she aimed Hannah’s way was kind. “You may have noticed that I’m slightly pregnant.”

  “My mama took care to teach me never to ask another woman if she was pregnant,” Hannah said, and she wasn’t above playing up her drawl for effect. “Unless the baby was crowning and my assistance was needed for the delivery.”

  “Wise woman.” Abby patted her big belly. “But the cat’s out of the bag on this one. And you’ve arrived at the perfect time, because I’m only now getting around to admitting that I can’t do all the things I’m used to doing.”

  “You have me,” Becca interjected. The smile she aimed around the room, Hannah noticed with some amusement, was not kind. Or even remotely real. “We have everything handled.”

  “You’ll have it even more handled with more help,” Gray said in the same gruff tone, clearly ending the discussion.

  Becca looked at her plate. Abby smiled encouragingly at Hannah.

  Hannah had looked over at Ty, who had been supremely unhelpful. All he’d done was grin and focus on his coffee, while next to him, his brother Brady eyed Hannah in a manner she could only describe as cool.

  But then, Hannah had always thrived on challenge.

  That morning set the order of things. Every day after that, Hannah made sure to turn up after the first round of chores were done, which was when Gray decided what needed to be done next and who needed to do it. Hannah stuck with Abby on the days she didn’t work in town and with Becca when she wasn’t off at her summer job. And they handled the things that cropped up in and around the ranch house and barn. From the stables and pens to the chickens and the ornery, entertaining goats. From canning projects in the kitchen to weeding the summer garden.

  If it weren’t for how much she missed Jack, all the time, Hannah might even have said that she was happy.

  She liked the work. She always liked good, tough ranch or farm work. And it was better than what she’d been doing back home at the stables where she’d worked while she was in high school. Hannah still loved working with horses. What she liked a lot less was the sure knowledge that the local mothers didn’t want their precious children around a woman of such loose morals and deserved disgrace as the fallen rodeo queen of Sweet Myrtle.

  The Everetts might not have welcomed her with wide open arms and a parade, but they didn’t treat her like the second coming of Jezebel either. It was almost refreshing.

  Ty’s family fascinated her. The brothers put on a great show of not getting along, but here they all were. No one had cut
anyone off, the way her holier-than-thou grandparents had turned their backs on Luanne and therefore Hannah. Ty claimed he had no particular relationship with his brothers, but they worked the ranch every day. Together. And three meals a day, more or less, they gathered around the same table and ate. Also together.

  For a family who claimed to be deeply dysfunctional and broken beyond repair—or maybe that was only Ty’s take on it—they sure operated like they enjoyed each other’s company.

  Not an observation Ty enjoyed.

  “Working toward a common goal isn’t the same thing as having a happy family,” he told her one night in their cozy little bunkhouse, where there was always too much conversation circling around the things they didn’t actually want to talk about.

  And too much sexual tension choking the life out of everything else.

  Or maybe that was Hannah’s problem. Since she knew what they were missing.

  “That might be the actual definition of what a happy family is,” she pointed out. “I think you’ll find that every happy family you ever meet shares a few common goals.”

  “Maybe they do things differently in Georgia.”

  “In my part of Georgia, unhappy families don’t sit around the dinner table every night having a pleasant conversation about their day. They tend to drink a lot. Throw down, get their redneck on. Engage in all manner of bad behavior.”

  “Give it time,” Ty muttered.

  “I can’t really see your brother Gray tossing the kitchen table across the room.” Hannah was in her usual place on the couch, because they were that familiar now. That intimate. She had a place on the couch. “It seems to me that you keep waiting for your father to rise up from the dead, walk into that house, and pick up where he left off.”

  Ty had stared at her for an uncomfortably long minute or two. Then he’d very quietly set aside the book he was reading and suggested they watch something on television, instead.

  Because a reality show about wilderness escapades in Alaska was much better than searching questions and uncomfortable truths.