Ty could remember all of it with the kind of detail he wished he had for those shadowy spaces still lurking in his memory. He remembered learning how to ride in slow diagonals to encourage the herd to move. He remembered the lessons on keeping pairs of cows and calves together, the hand signals, the debates about low-stress drives versus the use of dogs and hearty cursing that Amos always preferred. Mostly he remembered riding out behind Silas, the old man always straight in his saddle, no matter the ravages of time or gravity.
Silas had been the real deal. He’d never been one to start a fight, but he never ran from one either. He might not have understood his son, but he’d been the only person around who could influence him for the better. Amos had only gotten worse after his father’s death.
Now, Ty rode out again, following Gray this time, as they led the herd to the last of the summer grass they’d enjoy before fall.
“Are you up for this?” Gray said after the ranch foreman and a number of the hands had set out to get things moving. Brady was already riding out ahead of them.
“Are you asking about my leg?” Ty eyed his older brother. “Because otherwise, I didn’t realize there was an option to sit this out.”
Gray looked like Ty’s memories of their grandfather. Severe and unapproachable until you learned to look for the gleam in his eyes. “Do you need to take the honeymoon option?”
That was obviously a trick question. Ty had been the hitting the whiskey hard last fall, but he remembered pretty clearly that Gray’s version of a honeymoon had been to stay the night in the hotel in town where he and Abby had been married. The one night. Then he’d been right back to work.
“I’m good,” he said lazily. “I told you we got married a while back.”
“So you did.”
But there was no time for Ty to ask—or not ask—what that inflection in Gray’s voice meant. There were stragglers to return to the herd. There were bawlers who needed to be reunited with their calves.
He remembered all the other times he’d taken this ride. The joy of the day on horseback, and the thrill of knowing he’d be sleeping out beneath the stars. He wished he could recall what he’d felt about Cold River Ranch back then. Had he intended to grow up and take part in the ranch operation? Had he figured he’d build himself a house on the acreage somewhere, so he could have his space but always be on hand to help shoulder the load of the family enterprise?
He wished he knew. Because if he could remember what he’d felt back then, it would help him make sense of what he felt now. Whether it was nostalgia or something else that was making him a whole lot more raw out here than he ought to have been.
He would prefer to be nostalgic. That was a lot better than the thing that hunched in him, day and night. It had claws and fangs. It kept him up late, woke him up early, and he would have said it was making his life a misery—except he wasn’t miserable.
Ty was hung up on a woman. His wife, of all things.
And he had absolutely no idea what to do about it.
Luckily, a day spent handling the herd and all the usual cow nonsense didn’t give him too much opportunity to brood about his problems. Better still, as he’d told Hannah, real life ranch work was the best training a man could have for the rodeo. He put the time to good use.
They set up camp out there in the hills, where there was nothing for miles around but pure, clean Colorado air and the brilliant Rocky Mountain night sky. The hands and the foreman had peeled off while there was still daylight to make the long ride back down to the ranch, leaving Ty and his brothers to make sure the herd had settled in before heading back the next day.
This wasn’t the first of the drives they’d done this summer, and they had it down by now. Camp was easy enough to set up, since all three of them preferred a bedroll and the stars as a canopy rather than fussing around with any tents.
Gray had dryly asked Brady if he’d remembered to pack his tent the first time. Brady had blinked as if that were a real question. Then he’d responded with a rude gesture, not his words. Ty still laughed when he thought about it.
Tonight, Ty built the fire. Gray provided the ingredients for what Grandpa had always called Silas Stew—a random mix of whatever he’d brought with him that might have tasted strange at the dinner table back at the ranch house, but always tasted fantastic out here. Brady, surprisingly enough, was a decent camp cook, capable of making their version of Silas Stew even better than anything Ty remembered eating as a kid.
They sat around the fire in what Ty chose to interpret as companionable silence, listening to the cows complain in the distance, their horses muttering, and the wind high in the evergreens. There were no phones out here. No televisions. No trucks, no engines, nothing but man and beast in the wilderness the way it must have been for those first, hardy Everetts who’d crossed these mountains to find a new home.
Ty wasn’t sure about the home part. But this felt a lot like heaven.
Gray handled the cleanup in his usual, efficient manner. Ty lounged there beside the fire, watching the flames jump and crackle. He had a beer. His belly was full. He had a good night’s sleep ahead of him and Trixie, his favorite horse, right there to make sure he got back to the ranch.
Life didn’t get much more perfect. And instead of counting his blessings, he was missing Hannah.
He liked the way she slept, her forehead furrowed and her eyes squeezed tight like her dreams took fierce concentration. He loved it when she did herself up, but he also loved the glimpses he got of her at night or in the early morning when she hadn’t had time to put her face on yet. When she was all sleepy blue eyes and the naked mouth it caused him physical pain not to taste. He liked waking up with the weight of her against him and often on top of him, all those soft curves pressed against him. Ty liked keeping her warm, and he liked the noises she made sometimes when she dreamed. If he listened closely, he was sure they were versions of that same slow drawl.
He was used to his own space and a big fan of his own company, so he’d expected it to be an adjustment with her there. The cabin was so small and the potential for getting and staying on top of each other’s nerves was high. But the strangest thing was that he liked it.
He liked all of it. He liked looking across the table in the ranch house’s kitchen to see her sitting there, eating with his family. He liked walking back to their bunkhouse in the dark, the way he always had, but with company. He liked talking to her, because he never knew what she would say. Or what she would very distinctly not say, and only gaze back at him instead. He liked that they’d gotten past the point where there always needed to be conversation, and sometimes they sat there in the evening with music on, reading, lost in their different worlds but together in this one.
Ty discovered she was as handy with a needle as he was, after all that time out on the road with a required costume every night. That she could work miracles with the laundry, getting stains out of absolutely anything if she put her mind to it, and had a lot of opinions about line drying versus electric dryers. She liked her coffee tooth-achingly sweet, her toast brown and crunchy, and had a great many opinions on the perfect piecrust and how best to achieve it. She didn’t like to cook regular meals, though she could. She preferred what she called statement meals. Thanksgiving or Easter. Sunday dinner or a birthday.
You know me, sugar, she would drawl. I like a show.
Ty found himself fascinated by the sheer array of products she claimed she had to use each and every day or the sight of her might scare off small children. Nor was she the least bit ashamed of her stockpile.
It might take a village to raise a child, she told him one day when she found him gazing in astonishment at what was left of the counter space in the tiny bathroom they shared. Think how many people and products it takes when that child is all grown up and needs to fight off the signs of age.
Given she was all of twenty-five, she didn’t have a whole lot to worry about there.
What Ty was learning, more each day,
was that his wife intrigued him on pretty much every level. She was funny. She was smart. She really could hold a conversation on any given topic because she picked up a little bit of everything and carried it around with her like a very pretty encyclopedia.
All that and she was magic with horses, helped around the ranch, and was unfailingly sweet to his family, which wasn’t something Ty could say for himself.
Basically, Hannah was the perfect woman.
It didn’t surprise him in the least that he’d put a ring on it. What he still couldn’t figure was what the hell he had done the night of his fall. Or why.
He kept worrying at those blank spots in his head, when a wiser man might have tried to enjoy what he had, whether he could remember how he got it or not.
Ty realized that he’d been off in his own world when he tuned back in to find Brady and Gray engaged in another one of their skirmishes.
“Diversification isn’t losing focus,” Brady was saying. Tensely. “It’s making sure there’s always something to focus on, no matter what happens.”
“Seems to me I can focus on one thing better than five,” Gray replied in that maddeningly calm way he had. Then his mouth curved. “But what do I know? I don’t have a fancy college degree.”
“But you sure have a chip on your shoulder about the whole thing.”
Ty sighed, loud and dramatic, so they both looked at him.
“I did not bring enough alcohol to put up with all the squabbling,” he drawled. “You two need to have a fistfight already. Just get it over with.”
Gray let out a bark of laughter. “I’m not getting in a fistfight.”
Brady looked like he’d be up for taking a swing or two.
“Brady,” Ty said, with exaggerated patience. “You know that Gray is resistant to these ideas of yours. He’s not going to magically stop resisting because you keep bringing them up.” He looked at his older brother. “And you have hundreds of acres at your disposal. What would it hurt you to give him a few?”
“They’re our acres,” Brady said, his voice tight. “Not his. Ours.”
Gray shook his head. “I don’t want Cold River Ranch to turn into some hipster llama lavender hemp farm with a food truck selling handmade noodles and a pastel coffee cart.”
Ty stared. “That’s very specific.”
“You should have told us last fall that you hate money, Gray,” Brady said. “If I’d known that before you asked us for a year of our lives, I would have been better prepared.”
“Gray doesn’t hate money, Brady,” Ty said, turning the same theatrically patient voice on him. “Our older brother sees himself as the last living link to legendary, historic cowboys like Grandpa. He wants to be a country song. And in fairness, there aren’t a lot of country songs that focus on pastel coffee carts. Or llamas.”
“Why are we talking about llamas?” Brady demanded. “I don’t know anything about llamas. I don’t want to know anything about llamas.”
“Llamas spit,” Gray offered. Helpfully.
“Gray,” Ty began, like he was a schoolteacher. “You asked Brady and me to give the ranch a chance. That’s what we’re doing. But you’re going to have to share your toys.”
“I’m feeling a fistfight coming on every time you talk to me in that tone of voice,” Gray said, still doing that thing that was maybe him grinning. Or maybe it was a trick of the firelight. Hard to tell.
“If you don’t like me trying to make peace between the two of you, here’s a solution,” Ty said. “Quit going after each other every five seconds like a pair of pissy little terriers.”
Both of his brothers stared at him, then, sizing him up in their own way.
“Since we’re all out here sharing our feelings,” Gray said, keeping that gaze of his on Ty. And there was definitely no curve to his mouth then. “Why don’t you take this opportunity to state an opinion? On anything. We’ll wait.”
“I state my opinion constantly.”
“No, Ty, you don’t.” Gray was lounging there on his bedroll, looking as relaxed as if he were kicked back on the big leather couch in his living room. “You talk a lot, sure. You make a lot of noise when you want. But what do you actually stand for? Brady wants to sell the ranch. I want to keep it. What do you want?”
“I want to stop arguing about it for thirty seconds. That seems like a good place to start.”
“Do you?” Brady asked from the other side of fire. “Or do you like being in the middle? Always the tiebreaker. Always the final vote.”
“Have we voted on the ranch before?” Ty asked with a laugh. “Because I don’t remember it being my property before last fall. I’ve gotten pretty good at hauling my actual property around this country hitched to the back of my truck. I feel certain I would have noticed hundreds of acres back there when I tried to accelerate.”
“A lot of noise,” Gray said quietly, as if Ty was proving his point. “But never a hint as to what you think or feel about anything. Always the rodeo cowboy, putting on a show.”
Ty didn’t like the way adrenaline was spiking in him. Like there really was about to be a fight. And he might be the one throwing punches.
“I don’t trust your wife,” Brady said placidly. “See that? That’s an opinion.”
Ty’s adrenaline did more than spike at that.
“You’re welcome to your opinion, baby brother,” Ty drawled, but he didn’t do a very good job of sounding lazy and unbothered. “But that doesn’t mean I intend to sit here and listen to it. You don’t need to concern yourself with my wife.”
“Where’s she been for the last eighteen months?” Brady asked, undaunted. “What kind of wife leaves her husband to recover from life-threatening injuries in the hospital all by himself?”
“It’s none of your business what my wife does or doesn’t do.”
“Funny you say that,” Brady said, and he sounded almost cheerful. Or maybe that was a challenge. “Because that’s pretty much what she said when I asked her directly.”
Gray rubbed a hand over his face and muttered something that sounded a lot like a prayer for deliverance. But Ty was too busy trying to keep the back of his head from coming off to pay any closer attention.
“Are you out of your mind?” he asked Brady. “That’s an actual question. Do you need medical attention? Because you’re about to.”
“I don’t understand the secrecy,” his younger brother said, with that obstinance Ty always forgot about. Because Brady was a tenacious little jackhole, or he wouldn’t have made it down in the city. But Ty wasn’t in the mood to applaud him.
More like pummel him.
“The big secret is, it’s none of your business,” Ty said, his jaw tight. “What do you care?”
“I didn’t hear about your accident for months,” Brady countered. “Why didn’t you tell anyone?”
“It was televised,” Ty retorted. “What was I supposed to do? Live stream my physical therapy sessions and text them to you?”
“Was Hannah there?” Brady asked. “Playing nurse for you?”
Ty rolled his eyes. Because it was that or start swinging.
Or tell the truth about his memory—but he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t admit that he’d very likely done something unforgivable that night, or why wouldn’t Hannah tell him? And when he imagined unforgivable, there was only one face he saw.
His father’s, twisted in rage, poison pouring out of his mouth.
It made Ty sick to imagine he’d ever treated Hannah like that. But how could he dismiss the very real possibility? Especially when of all of Amos’s sons, Ty was the one who was most like him.
“I’m beginning to question how obsessed you are with my wife, Denver,” Ty said darkly, because he needed to stop picturing things he couldn’t change, if they’d actually happened. “Get a grip or get your own.”
Brady looked horrified. “Yeah. Hard pass, thanks. I have enough family.”
“And still,” Gray said, lazily from where he sat, “I don’t r
eally know how you feel about a thing, Ty. You don’t like Brady talking about Hannah. Is that your big stand? Privacy? Because I have to tell you, if you want private, you shouldn’t be conducting your secret marriage in the middle of the family ranch.”
“Dad visited me in the hospital,” Ty said.
He threw that out there as a kind of life raft, or possibly a bomb, and it worked. Gray went still. Brady winced.
And for a blessed moment, there was quiet.
“I wouldn’t have considered Dad the type for a hospital visit,” Brady said, sounding dubious.
“It turns out he actually watched me on television.” Ty eyed Brady. “Imagine that. That’s how he knew where I was and what happened to me, by the way.”
Gray only shook his head. As if he already knew where this was heading.
“I have to say I really can’t picture Dad rushing off to be there for you in your time of need.” Brady made a face. “Unless…”
Ty let that sit there. Then he got his rodeo cowboy on, as justly accused, and grinned nice and wide.
“Dad came to assess the extent of the damage,” he told his brothers, not without a certain sense of relish. “He shared with me that he’d heard the doctors talking and the consensus was I was unlikely to walk again. He wanted to make real sure that I understood I had always been a disappointment to him. This, I knew. But it turned out that having a rodeo star as a son, while not quite moving me out of the disappointing column, was something he’d gotten used to. Enjoyed, even, especially when I did well and the folks down at Mary Jo’s mentioned it when he stopped in for a bite on his way to get a part. What he couldn’t abide was a cripple.”
If Ty’s goal had been to silence his brothers completely, he’d succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. There was nothing but the crackle of the fire. The breeze all around, the stars above. Even the horses were quiet.
“I wasn’t dependable like Gray. I wasn’t smart like Brady. The only thing I had going for me, despite the fact I reminded him in every possible way of the worthless female he made me with, was the rodeo. Without that? His prediction was that I would—how did he put it—suckle off the teat of his land for the rest of my days. He’d told me a long time ago I didn’t have what it took to stay on the ranch. No Everett blood in me, by his reckoning. He might not have had the science to back that up, but he was sure all the same.”
Cold Heart, Warm Cowboy Page 18
