Both of his brothers swore. Ty kept grinning.
“I hope you told him to get the hell out,” Gray said gruffly.
“I told him I understood his concerns and as it happened, my plan was to walk no matter what the doctors said,” Ty told them. “And then I commented on how strange it was that he was still tied up in knots about Mom when she never mentioned him at all.”
Too late, Ty remembered there were minefields everywhere, and he’d gone ahead and set off about five.
Gray shook his head, but didn’t say a word. Brady, on the other hand, scowled.
“You talk to Mom?”
Once again, Ty found himself in a space where it would have been awfully helpful to have access to his memories. Not only his memories, but all the feelings he was sure he must have had about these things before he’d been stomped.
He wished he’d watched his mouth. “I don’t call her every day and ask her what outfit she picked out or what she bought at the store, if that’s what you mean.”
“Do you talk to Mom?” Brady demanded of Gray.
“No.” Gray looked mystified. “She left. The end.”
“It’s actually not unreasonable to want to leave the ranch, you know,” Ty pointed out. Because he couldn’t help himself. “You only think it is because you’re the only one who never tried.”
“That or I have a sense of responsibility. And loyalty.”
“To what?” Ty asked. “To Dad? Because you walk alone there.”
“I want to circle back to how you’ve been talking to our mother,” Brady said before Gray could reply to that, and he sounded different. Harder, maybe. “Because I didn’t think that was something we were doing.”
“I don’t recall making a blood pact,” Ty said witheringly. Which was true, he didn’t. “But even if I had, I’m a grown man. I don’t need my brothers’ permission to make a phone call. If you want to talk to Mom, Brady, go right ahead.”
“I don’t want to talk to Mom.” Gray sounded less mystified, more irritated. “Why would you? Do you remember that time she walked out on Dad and never came back—even though she’d left us with him?”
“Does Abby know your feelings on this?” Ty asked, keeping his voice deliberately mild. “Because seeking out the grandmother of her baby sounds like something that would be right up her alley.”
“If Mom wants to play grandmother all of a sudden, great. I have no feelings about this.” That Gray was rolling his eyes was clear in his voice. “Unlike the two of you, apparently, I’ve always had too much to do to worry about what I was missing.”
“Right,” Brady said, glaring across the fire. “Because whether or not someone wants a relationship with his mother has everything to do with how busy he is and nothing to do with, you know, basic human connection.”
“You start singing ‘Kumbaya,’ Denver, and you’re walking back to the ranch,” Gray warned him. “Try me.”
Ty rolled to his feet. He snagged his bedding with one hand and gave his brothers a small salute. “This is been great. Fun on a thousand levels. Let’s never do it again. I’m going to go sleep…” He waved his arm toward the trees. “Over there.”
“Why did you come back?”
Ty stopped walking. But Brady’s question still hung there.
And he kept going. “You told Dad off, and I’m sure he didn’t like that. It turns out you have a relationship with Mom. You don’t seem to care one way or the other about Dad or any of the things he said to you. So why did you bother coming back for his funeral?”
This was his fault. Ty had wanted to steer the conversation away from his marriage. From Hannah. From Gray poking at him about whether he had an opinion or not when he’d worked hard his whole life to leave people smiling in his wake, not cursing his name, which was what happened when a man started throwing his opinions around.
He’d watched his father lose friends and make enemies his whole life. Every time he’d opened his mouth.
Ty should have known better.
“Your father dies, you come home,” Gray said shortly. “It’s not rocket science.”
“I didn’t come home to mourn him, Gray,” Ty said, as much to the Rockies all around him as to his brothers. As if the dark could make the things he could actually feel less raw, somehow. As if it could wash away the ghosts and the blank spots and leave him whole. “I wanted to make sure that if he was dead, he’d stay dead.”
He left his brothers with that and walked off into the dark.
Wishing he could really believe that Amos was well and truly dead and in that grave.
Instead of living on inside Ty, in all those shadowy places he couldn’t reach. And all the terrible things he might have done that he couldn’t remember, no matter how he tried.
14
Hannah regretted agreeing to go along on Abby’s night out with her friends almost instantly.
“It’s such a great idea that your friends want to have these dinners out before the baby comes,” she said at lunch that week, on one of the days Abby wasn’t working at the coffeehouse. Abby had roasted a couple of chickens the night before, and she and Becca were putting together chicken salad sandwiches while Hannah set out plates. “But I’m not sure that you need me tagging along, getting in the middle of all your history.”
“It’s a lot of history,” Becca chimed in, smiling brightly.
Hannah smiled right back, because she had not been put on this earth to be outsmiled by a teenage girl who was clearly a tad over-possessive of her uncles.
“Don’t be silly,” Abby said, without appearing to pick up on the smile war happening all around her. “Both Hope and Rae are delighted you’re coming. They can’t wait to meet the girl who actually got Ty Everett to the altar. You’re already something of a celebrity.”
“Terrific,” Hannah said weakly.
“Hope and Rae and Abby have all been friends since they were babies,” Becca said. Dripping with helpfulness and that ear-to-ear smile that didn’t make it to her eyes. “When they get together, they tell stories about, like, third grade. It’s so funny. It’s like they have their own little world.”
Hannah smiled at Abby and almost meant it. “I can’t wait to see for myself.”
Abby continued making chicken salad sandwiches with her usual quiet efficiency. Hannah wondered if she didn’t notice that her teenage stepdaughter and her new sister-in-law were engaged in a silent battle of wills, or if she was wisely choosing to ignore it.
“Maybe I don’t want to spend my life making meals for monosyllabic men, doing laundry, and seven thousand other domestic chores I would never do if left to my own devices,” she found herself complaining to Ty the night before he left to move cattle.
“Then don’t do it,” he replied. Helpfully.
“I asked how I could pitch in, and apparently, that’s how.” She watched him balefully as he put aside the very few things he planned to take with him on his camping trip. “I hope you’re enjoying your fresh, clean laundry. My wifely duties are complete.”
He was standing on one side of the bed. Their bed. She was sitting on the other. And yet when he raised that dark gaze of his to hers, it was as if they were standing right on top of each other. Hannah felt herself flush. Her heart kicked at her wildly. It was suddenly very hard to catch her breath.
“The ranch runs fine whether you’re here or not,” he said distinctly. “What I mean is that anything you do to help is a gift. If you don’t feel like giving that gift, don’t.”
She felt childish and out of sorts, then. It was no fun complaining if he was going to offer distressingly practical solutions she didn’t actually want.
“I have to do something,” Hannah said after a minute, tracing a pattern into the bedspread, in a deep burgundy that struck her as unnecessarily masculine. Unlike Ty himself, who was … perfectly masculine. “I’ve never been the type to sit around.”
“What have you been doing for the past eighteen months?” he asked, lightly enough.<
br />
The way he always did.
Hannah looked up to find him watching her intently. “Not the laundry.”
His mouth curved as he looked back down toward his bag.
Hannah had done more housework since she’d come to Cold River Ranch than she had before in her life. Because back home, Mama and Aunt Bit were involved in a lifelong competition that had begun in the room they’d shared as girls to see whose obsessive tendencies would win out. Hannah had been responsible only for her own area while she was growing up, and as she grew, the care and maintenance of her assorted rodeo costumes. When Jack came along, there was a lot more laundry, and a lot more washing of all the tiny delicate things he needed.
Jack.
God help her, but she was about at her limit. She needed to get home, to him. She missed him so much it came on sometimes like a fever, a flu. She even missed his laundry.
Here, the kind of labor required to keep the ranch running was far more daunting than a baby’s laundry. There was the care of the land and the animals, which was what Gray and the paid hands and his brothers did. Then there was the care of everything else and whatever spilled over from the land and the animals. That was Abby’s job. And since she’d been here, Hannah’s.
“I appreciate that we’re working on this marriage thing,” she told Ty now. “But I feel like we’re operating under some false pretenses here.”
He eyed her. “I don’t need a housewife, Hannah. Look at my house. It’s tiny. You don’t need to clean it. I know how to do my own laundry. We eat in the ranch house. It seems to me that a person with your background, a college degree and all your time doing the rodeo queen thing, can find something else she has to offer this place.” He shrugged. “Open a school for rodeo queens yourself. Raise horses. Whatever you want.”
“Is ranching your long-term plan?” she asked. “Because I’m pretty sure you said this was temporary. And I can wash dishes temporarily. Even temporary sandwiches I’m good at. It’s a lifetime of making food for the men that I can’t get my head around.”
“You tell me,” Ty replied. “Is this a lifetime? Do you trust me?”
That was a loaded question at the best of times. It was worse when they were on that bed the way they were now. The way they slept together—wrapped all around each other, nestling closer, snuggling in and holding on tight—became more of a problem every day.
And made her breathless every time she thought about it.
Or the secret she was keeping from him, which made her stomach twist in foreboding.
“Abby invited me out with her friends tomorrow night,” she said instead of answering him.
Ty took his time working his hand over his jaw. “Okay.”
“She’s very nice. She doesn’t have to include me. I appreciate the gesture.”
“Abby’s good people.”
“I’m worried that while the gesture is really nice, in practice, it’s going to be … awkward.”
Another hit from that dark green gaze. “Then either go, or don’t go, but don’t be awkward.”
“Thank you, that’s very helpful.”
“I don’t know what you want me to say.”
“No, no. You’re right. Why am I asking you? You make it perfectly clear, every day in a thousand ways, that you don’t care at all about a single one of your family relationships. Why should I?”
She regretted the words the moment they left her mouth. And more, that tone.
“It’s real easy to pretend to care when you haven’t decided if you’re sticking around or not,” Ty replied, his voice not all that lazy any longer. “Maybe you should think about that, Hannah.”
Then he’d walked out of the bedroom, leaving her as breathless and foreboding and confused as ever.
And now it was Friday night. Her baby was going to sleep without her yet again, her husband was off camping with his brothers and still didn’t remember her, and she didn’t know what she was doing.
Hannah wanted—desperately—to back out of this certain-to-be-awkward evening, but she didn’t feel she could. Instead, she’d given serious consideration to toning herself down. As a kind of penance, maybe. Not being overdressed and over made-up and trying to blend, for a change.
But that wasn’t who she was.
She walked into the kitchen of the ranch house to meet Abby, then followed the sound of voices deeper inside. Abby and Becca were at the big, long table in the dining room Hannah had never seen used for a meal. She could see the remnants of several crafting projects spread over its gleaming surface, but Abby and Becca were currently working on something involving a sewing machine.
Something tricky, if their frowns were anything to go by.
Abby glanced up with a smile on her face, while Becca took an extra moment to arrange her features into something passably polite.
Abby looked the way she always did, all that simple, down-to-earth, girl-next-door prettiness, from her head to her toes. Hannah didn’t know if it was pregnancy that put the color in her cheeks and the sparkle in her eyes, but she had the suspicion that the friendly smile was her actual personality. She didn’t need to apply an entire bottle of mascara to achieve it, like some.
“Are you all going two-stepping?” Becca asked innocently. “At Dollywood?”
“Two-stepping?” Abby made a face. “I’m gigantically pregnant. Of course I’m not going two-stepping. And Dollywood is in Tennessee, last I checked.”
Hannah smirked at the triumphant-looking teenager. “I believe Becca is making a reference to my rhinestone addiction.” She held her hands out from her sides, fully aware that her jeans glittered. “Once a rodeo queen, always a rodeo queen. I’d wear my crown if I could get away with it.”
“I would look ridiculous in a crown,” Abby said, sounding wistful. “I never managed to get the queen thing down.”
“It’s amazing how quickly the queen thing comes to a person when they have a crown on their head,” Hannah assured her. “It’s like magic.”
Becca looked like she was biting back all kinds of commentary on that, and Hannah almost felt sorry for her. And because she knew what it was like to be a teenage girl with absolutely no control over anything happening around her, she moved farther into the room to look at the dress they were trying to put together from a pattern.
She squinted.
“Maybe you have it backwards,” she offered after a moment.
“We decided we were going to learn how to make our own dresses this year,” Abby said chattily. She was disarming, and Hannah didn’t get the feeling that she was doing it on purpose. It was who she was. Happy to talk to anyone, about anything. No megawatt smile required.
That was likely a lot easier when you exuded innate goodness from every pore. Hannah wouldn’t know.
Because she could dress it up with as many rationalizations as she liked. The truth of the matter was, she was a born liar. Every point along the way where she could have chosen honesty, she’d gone in the other direction. It was easy to blame that on Ty. If he’d been a better man. If he’d lived up to his promises.
But he had amnesia. Hannah had no excuse.
She might as well be her own father, who Mama had always taken great pains to make sure Hannah knew was a liar of the first degree.
Maybe it was genetic.
“Abby already knows how to sew,” Becca said, sounding like she was making an effort. “I’m the one who doesn’t know how. And I can’t seem to learn either.”
“I can teach you.”
Hannah hadn’t meant to say that. Especially when Becca looked at her with astonishment.
Abby was looking down at the mangled pattern before them. “Well, that’s a relief. My grandmother taught me how to mend things because there isn’t a single thing she can’t do with her own two hands, but dressmaking is apparently a bridge too far.”
She heaved herself up and onto her feet, sighing as she arched her back to take the weight of her belly. Then she excused herself to the bath
room, leaving Becca and Hannah alone.
“You obviously don’t have to teach me how to sew. Or anything else,” Becca said in a low voice, focusing much too intently on the sewing machine.
“I’m happy to teach you how to sew, sugar. It happens to be one of my few notable skills in this life.”
Becca looked at all Hannah’s bling, obviously dubious. “Okay.”
“Move over,” Hannah said. She slid into the chair Becca had vacated in front of the sewing machine and frowned down at the pattern. Then shook her head. “This dress won’t suit you at all.”
“I like the dress.”
“I understand. It’s cute. But it’s not right for your figure.”
The girl bristled visibly. “This really isn’t a great idea—”
“Becca.” Hannah kept her gaze steady. “You’re tall, thin, and gorgeous. Your clothes should emphasize the length of your legs and the elegance of your height. This is a dress for a much shorter, much curvier girl. Watch.”
The fabric before her was decent, so she quickly tossed together the kind of dress that would favor a girl shaped like Becca. It didn’t take long. Maybe fifteen minutes, and when she pulled it out from the sewing machine and shook it, she realized that Abby had come to stand at the doorway.
“Here,” Hannah said, handing the dress to Becca. “Don’t take my word for it. Try it on.”
“Go on,” Abby encouraged her with a smile. Hannah was sure that was the only reason Becca actually took the dress into the other room.
“You did that so quickly!” Abby shook her head. “It once took me an entire semester in middle school to sew a skirt. And that was with instruction. I still got a C.”
Hannah waved a hand. “One more skill you too could pick up if you spent your life traveling from rodeo to rodeo, constantly having to look fresh and fabulous no matter what horse stepped on you the night before.”
Cold Heart, Warm Cowboy Page 19
