Cold Heart, Warm Cowboy

by Caitlin Crews

  Abby was laughing when Becca shuffled back in.

  The dress did exactly what Hannah had hoped it would. It fell from one shoulder, wrapped around Becca’s midsection, and then flowed to the other side, making her look taller. More elegant. And far more sophisticated than the sixteen-year-old on a ranch she was.

  “That’s possibly more drama than you’re going for,” Hannah allowed, after studying her. “I’m afraid my gauge has rhinestones all over it.”

  “Your father will hate it,” Abby said with a small smile for Becca.

  Becca laughed. “I love it.”

  Hannah’s smile was less rodeo queen and more pleased, then. “I’m glad.”

  “Can you really show me how to do that?”

  “Of course I can,” Hannah said. “If that’s what you’d like.”

  Becca smiled at her—a real smile, with a hint of shyness—before she ducked her head.

  Abby was still talking about the dress on the drive into town.

  “Becca is always going on about how she feels like a tomboy by default, but she doesn’t know how to stop being one,” she said. “And I’m no help, because I’m about the furthest thing from fancy there is. It’s lucky that you’re here now. Classing up the place.”

  Her earnestness made Hannah feel like a monster.

  “It’s only a dress,” she protested.

  Abby threw her a look as she navigated Gray’s truck down into the town of Cold River. Which only made Hannah feel worse.

  “Maybe to you,” she said quietly. “It’s different when you come into this world beautiful. You don’t know how hard the rest of us have to work at it. Mostly, we give up, and decide we might as well concentrate on other things. Being helpful. Dependable. As practical as an appliance, even, which it turns out has its own perks.”

  Hannah’s heart was throwing fits in her chest. “Wait. Are you the not-beautiful person in this conversation?”

  “I’m the non-rodeo queen in this conversation.”

  “Abby. If I rolled out of bed looking as pretty as you do, I would throw out my curling iron and declare myself liberated from the tyranny of mascara forever.” That was a terrible lie. Mascara was Hannah’s first and truest love. But she was making a point. “This is you while you’re pregnant, no less. And Becca—”

  “Oh, I know. But she doesn’t know she’s beautiful. Can you believe it?”

  Hannah blinked. “As a matter fact, yes. It appears to run in your family.”

  Abby laughed. “I’m sorry. I’m actually not digging for compliments. I find you…”

  “Too much? Over the top? A hundred-dollar bill when a penny would do?”

  “Intimidating,” Abby said softly. “Not that I’m surprised Ty would marry the most beautiful girl he could find. He’s not exactly hard on the eyes himself.”

  Hannah couldn’t help but grin at that, though she tried to hide it.

  “He’s okay,” she allowed.

  And for a moment—a sweet, soft moment, while the summer evening gleamed around them and everything felt possible—she pretended she could really have this. That she hadn’t wrecked it before she started. That this wasn’t coming at the cost of the baby she missed so hard the ache made her dizzy. That she could have a sister-in-law, maybe also a friend. An extended family.

  For a moment, just a moment, Hannah let herself imagine this was her real life.

  15

  Hannah and Abby parked outside one of the restaurants in town, set apart from the main stretch in a small field. It was done up to look like a barn, with reclaimed wood everywhere inside and a terrace out back that was strung with sparkling fairy lights. Abby smiled and waved at people as she led the way through the tables, taking Hannah to a table where two women waited.

  One of them, Hannah was happily surprised to see, was the woman from the bookstore.

  “I was wondering if you were that Hannah,” Hope said as the introductions were made, with that same warm, delighted smile that made Hannah smile back as if they were already friends.

  “She really was.” The petite woman next to her, Rae, let out the kind of rich, infectious laugh that had people at nearby tables turning and smiling along. She was that potent. “She spent the last twenty minutes wondering, out loud, if a random woman she met one day in the bookstore—”

  “And in Abby’s coffeeshop,” Hope interjected.

  “—was, in fact, the famous Hannah who somehow got Ty Everett to propose marriage.”

  “Not only propose marriage,” Hope said. “But actually make it to the altar.”

  She and Rae both eyed Hannah’s left hand and the ring she wore. Hannah flushed despite herself.

  “Maybe we could sit down,” Abby suggested dryly. “And continue grilling Hannah while pretending to be civilized.” She shook her head at Hannah. “I’m sorry. They’re relentless. And yes, they’re always like this.”

  “I would consider myself more insatiably curious than relentless,” Hope argued.

  Rae belted out another laugh. “I’m just nosy.”

  They all sat at the rustic wood table out there beneath the pretty lights, and Hannah braced herself for an inquisition. But none came. They were distracted by the appearance of the waiter and the chalkboard list of specials.

  “You probably don’t know how exciting this is,” Abby said, from her place beside Hannah. “This is a new restaurant for Cold River. It only opened in May.” She nodded toward the chalkboard. “And the owner clearly believes that Cold River is bursting at the seams with hipsters and tourists galore who want to spend all their money on fancy omelet entrées for dinner when most of the people around here have their own chickens.”

  “Summer restaurants always come in all optimistic,” Rae agreed from across the table. “And then limp off sometime in mid-February. Winters are a whole thing here.”

  “It’s a new town initiative,” Hope said. “They’re trying to lure in more wedding trade from Denver. The more they can make Cold River a four-season destination, the more restaurant choices we’ll have.”

  They all ordered when the waiter came back, and then the three friends started talking, easily ranging from topics involving Cold River’s restaurant scene to names for Abby’s baby.

  “I still don’t know how you can handle not knowing what you’re having,” Rae said, shaking her head. “I would want to know immediately.”

  “You love Aunt Hope the best,” Hope was murmuring directly to Abby’s belly, reaching over the table to rest her hand on the bump. “Aunt Hope.”

  “I’m going to know soon enough,” Abby said cheerfully, swatting Hope’s hand away.

  Hannah felt as out of place as she’d worried she would, but, oddly, she didn’t mind. If anything, it was an unexpected treat to be able to sit there, participate in the conversation as she chose, but otherwise not feel compelled to do anything at all but be present. She didn’t have to perform. She didn’t have to make anyone feel better. She wasn’t the ambassador for anything anymore, but at home, she still acted the part.

  She’d been so determined to keep her heartbreak to herself as much as she could in Sweet Myrtle. To prove to anyone who might be watching her—from her mother to the folks she’d gone to high school with to her disappointed donors—that she was fine. Good, even. That really, despite any rumors to the contrary, she’d wanted it all to be this way.

  Hannah had worked so hard to always keep her head up, always remain calm and courteous. Even when uppity, jealous old classmates like that Heather Wardley questioned whether Hannah was moral enough to be around Heather’s ill-mannered kids. To Hannah’s face.

  But that act wasn’t required here. For one thing, Abby and her friends could carry on the conversation all on their own, whether Hannah participated or not. And for another, they knew nothing about her. They certainly didn’t know the key bit of information that kept everyone in Sweet Myrtle so focused on her trajectory from rodeo to regret.

  Maybe because of that, she let herself
drift. She let herself tumble a bit, straight off into the kind of daydream that was nothing but dangerous. Hannah allowed herself to imagine what it would be like if this really was her life. If Jack were here in Cold River and home with Ty tonight, for example—an image that about made her start sobbing right there at the table.

  What if she and Ty really did live here, tucked up together in that sweet little house, raising Jack together, the way it had been supposed to be? What if she got to have nights like this, filled with laughter, entertaining conversation, and women she strongly suspected she could be friends with? Real friends. The kind of friends who were thrilled about a pregnancy and celebrated it, instead of avoiding their friends’ eyes in public or trying way too hard to act overly supportive when they clearly weren’t.

  “What if” will only wreck you, Mama had always told her.

  Hannah knew better than to indulge in it. Especially here.

  Because she was lying to everyone.

  Abby was bighearted enough to welcome Hannah with open arms. And Hannah was greedy enough to let her do it, all the while knowing that there was a high probability she would be leaving, never to return.

  But she couldn’t help herself.

  “So,” Hope said when dessert came, spinning her spoon around and around in the puddle of fudge surrounding her giant slice of mud pie. “Ty Everett.”

  “That is his name, yes,” Hannah said with a laugh. “And in case you didn’t know, Ty isn’t short for anything. It’s not a nickname. Full cowboy, that one.”

  “I need you to tell me everything.” Hope smiled, big and bright. “No detail is too small or too personal.”

  “The details might be too personal for Hannah though, Hope,” Abby said, widening her eyes at her friend.

  “Will we all be sharing personal details about our love lives?” Hannah asked, grinning. “Or only me?”

  “Oh, no need,” Hope said airily. “Let me catch you up. Abby married the love of her life who she had a humiliating crush on since birth while he didn’t know she existed.”

  “I wouldn’t call it humiliating,” Abby objected.

  Hope’s expression suggested otherwise. “All’s well that ends well.” She pointed to herself. “Me, cursed to be single for the rest of my days.” She nodded toward Rae. “Rae, on the other hand…”

  Rae glared at Hope. “It’s complicated.”

  “Rae got married very young,” Abby said in aside to Hannah, though she didn’t drop her voice. “It’s better not to talk about it. Even when she brings it up.”

  “It’s only complicated because his family and my family are constantly interacting,” Rae said, rolling her eyes. “Otherwise it’s boring.”

  “The Kittredges are another founding family in the area,” Abby said. “A lot like the Everetts.”

  “Oh, like Amanda Kittredge?” Hannah smiled. “I met her in the coffeehouse.”

  “She’s a cute kid,” Rae said. If stiffly.

  Hannah pictured Amanda blowing up Main Street.

  “Is she a kid?” Hannah asked softly. “I thought she was around my age.”

  Everyone stared. Because, Hannah was sure, none of them had spent any time at all thinking about Amanda Kittredge’s age. Not since they’d fixed her as a child in their heads years back.

  “Now that you mention it, no,” Abby said after a moment. “She is not a kid. She’s in her twenties, which I know because she works for me.”

  “In my head, she will always be about nine,” Rae said, and something moved over her face. “Wow.”

  “Yes, yes, we all grow up,” Hope said impatiently. “Little Amanda Kittredge too. But Hannah. Tell us about Ty.”

  “Relentless,” Abby mouthed at her.

  Hannah sighed. “I don’t know how to answer that, really.”

  “I had such a crush on him,” Rae said with a sigh. “It was that first Christmas he came home after he ran off and joined the rodeo. Do you guys remember?”

  “Yes,” both Abby and Hope said at once. All three of them laughed.

  “He swaggered into church on Christmas Eve, and we all lost our minds,” Rae said. Dreamily. “And you married him.”

  Hannah grinned. “He still swaggers a lot.”

  “Well, he’d have to. Right? He’s so…”

  “Rae. Ty is Hannah’s husband,” Abby said reprovingly, shaking her head.

  “What is it about those Everetts?” Hope asked. She hummed to herself. Happily. “What’s in the water out there? You better watch it, Abby. You’re going to give birth to one of them.”

  That diverted all the attention back to Abby and her baby. The three friends laughed and told stories and otherwise enjoyed themselves thoroughly.

  While Hannah sat there, feeling like such a fraud. The kind of woman who would sit and have these conversations about a marriage that was built on lies and lost memories. And a baby she was still keeping hidden. The kind of woman who would let these genuinely kind and funny people treat her like one of them when she wasn’t.

  They would hate her when she was gone. And more if they discovered the extent of her lies. If they learned about Jack. They would sit around a table like this one, passing Abby’s baby from arm to arm and loving on it while they dissected this entire evening. They would look for the clues that told the truth about who Hannah really was and how she’d kept the only information that mattered to herself.

  The worst part was, unlike her so-called friends from the rodeo who hadn’t waited for Hannah to leave before they started picking her apart, Hannah would deserve every single thing these people said about her.

  She wasn’t sure why, of all the things she was going to have to live with once this time with Ty was over, that notion stung her so deeply.

  Almost as if she didn’t want to leave, when she should. And soon.

  That was the thought she took with her, after they all finished lingering over dessert and said their goodbyes out front. After she and Abby drove home together, Hannah taking the wheel so Abby could catnap on the way back, having clearly overextended herself.

  “You can’t tell Gray I passed out in the car on the way home,” Abby said when she woke up as Hannah pulled into the dirt road that led to the ranch. “He’s already so overprotective, it’s ridiculous. He doesn’t like me driving my car, which is old, but fine. He got a ridiculous satellite phone so I could reach him on the surface of the moon, if necessary.”

  “You’re lucky,” Hannah heard herself say, to her horror. Because her voice cracked. She cleared her throat. “Gray seems like the kind of overprotective dad any child would be lucky to have.”

  Unlike her child, who had no dad. Because Hannah had made certain of that.

  Men always lie, Mama always said. You can’t trust them.

  Hannah knew that was right. She’d lived it. But Hannah was lying too. How would she feel if the situations were reversed?

  She couldn’t say she much liked her own answer to that.

  The truck bounced down the dirt road, and Hannah was convinced that she’d somehow given it all away in that one sentence. That Abby somehow knew everything.

  “Men who have a father like Amos have two choices,” Abby said, very quietly, into the darkness. “They can follow his example. They can double down on all that cruelty and make sure they spend their lives making everyone around them miserable, the way he did. Or they can go in the opposite direction. And Gray and his brothers would rip out their own hearts before they would spend a single day behaving the way their father did.”

  Hannah wanted to believe that. How she wanted to believe that. But she knew better. And had to wonder if the problem wasn’t Ty. If she was the one who brought the meanness out in him. Her own father had wanted nothing to do with her to such an extent that he’d signed away his parental rights before she was born. Both sets of her grandparents had turned their back on her.

  Maybe there was a common denominator that she needed to look at more closely.

  “Did you know A
mos?” she asked instead. And then sighed. “I mean, of course you must have known him. You grew up here.”

  “My grandmother is a wise woman,” Abby said in her same quiet, kind way. “And on the day Amos Everett died, she shook her head while she was puttering around the kitchen in my family’s farmhouse, and she said that there is nothing sadder in this life than a person who is given every opportunity to make himself good, but chooses otherwise. Every time.”

  Abby was likely thinking about Amos Everett. Hannah was thinking about her own choices. Which was yet another clue that she was in no position to judge Ty on anything.

  “I’m not sure any person is one thing or another,” she said, when she could keep her voice even. “The sad truth is that most people are somewhere in the middle.”

  “Here’s what I know about men,” Abby said, turning to look at Hannah as she pulled the truck into the yard and parked it near the ranch house’s back door. “And this is based my very scientific sample of one. But they take great pride in thinking they know what they want. Until you show them what they really want.”

  “If you happen to know it.”

  Hannah shouldn’t have let that slip out. But it was too late.

  “They probably won’t thank you for it, at first,” Abby said, as if she hadn’t heard what Hannah had said. Much less the revealing way she’d said it. “But at the end of the day, all they really want—all anybody really wants—is someone who loves them. Don’t we?”

  Hannah couldn’t help the scrape of a laugh that escaped her, then. “You make it sound simple. And it’s not. Or maybe it was for you, but then again, maybe you got lucky.”

  Abby laughed. “Hope wasn’t kidding when she said I had a crush on Gray for my entire life. Or that it was humiliating. I loved my husband a long, long time before he loved me. I married him thinking I could love him enough for both of us, and he didn’t come around quickly. I’m not lucky. I’m stubborn.” She reached over and patted Hannah on her leg, a gesture of solidarity. “And from what I know about you, you’re just as stubborn. I’ve never met a man more adamant that marriage wasn’t for him than Ty. But he married you, didn’t he?”