Cold Heart, Warm Cowboy

by Caitlin Crews

  Everything inside Ty shattered.

  He remembered his father, years ago, cuffing him on the side of the head every time he fell off his horse until Ty learned how to ride like a dream to avoid it. Fall off again and I’ll give you something to cry about. He couldn’t have been more than six. He remembered getting older, and Amos swiping the schoolbooks out from in front of him while he tried to do his homework. Then hooting with derision and telling Ty there was no point. You got looks, boy, but no brains. He’d been nine.

  He remembered his father in the chair beside his hospital bed, his hard-lined face screwed up with distaste while Ty lay there in pieces. You screw up everything you touch, boy. This was the only thing you were any good at.

  Ty felt the darkness in him. The poison. It had been flowing steady his whole life, like the river out there, cutting through fields and keeping the land green. It filled him up. It made him who he was. A rodeo cowboy who never had a home. Only the circuit, on and on until it broke him for good, which it would. That was the promise the rodeo made to any man fool enough to follow it. And the poison was what kept him hidden behind a grin and a bottle.

  It was what defined him. It made him the kind of man who spoke the way he had to Hannah. Who flipped out when he’d discovered he got his own wife pregnant.

  That was the man he was.

  He was glad he couldn’t remember any of it. Or that it hadn’t been any worse.

  Because all this time, all along, he hadn’t been becoming like Amos. He’d always been Amos. Ty was the drunk, forever and always. He didn’t have to touch a drop of whiskey for both of his brothers to still treat him like he was rolling around half in a bottle of Johnnie Walker at any given moment.

  Which could only mean he acted like a mean old drunk either way.

  The only thing Ty had ever had going for him was that he’d kept his distance from anyone he could possibly hurt.

  He couldn’t remember why he’d imagined that he could overcome all of that for Hannah. Why he hadn’t understood, deep inside of him, that all he would ever do was hurt her. Chase her away if she was lucky, ruin her if she stayed put.

  Wasn’t that why he’d stayed in touch with his mother all this time? She was no kind of parent to him, and his brothers were right—she’d abandoned them and never looked back. Ty didn’t have any particular affection for her that he could recall.

  Bettina was a cautionary tale.

  Bettina was a monument to what if. She was what Ty would do to a woman because Amos had done it all to her.

  How could Ty possibly have risked Hannah like that?

  He brought Jack closer, liking the soft, warm weight of him. Liking the way he giggled, his whole face lighting up and his chubby legs kicking, as if laughter was a full-body experience.

  Something in him shifted, sliding sideways.

  But it only made him more resolved.

  He turned back toward Hannah, holding Jack that much longer. That much closer. For one more moment.

  “You have every right to be furious with me,” Hannah began.

  Ty passed Jack back to her, and on some level, was amazed how much that hurt him. She took the baby—their baby—automatically, settling him against her shoulder with that smooth ease that made everything in Ty hum. And hurt a whole lot more.

  “He’s beautiful,” Ty told her, deep and matter-of-fact. “And so are you.”

  She let out a long breath. “Ty—”

  “Hannah, listen to me very carefully.” He didn’t dare touch her. He wouldn’t let go if he did. “You need to take him away from here and never come back.”

  “What?”

  “You already know what you should do. Your instincts were right on. You need to take him back to Georgia and stay there.” He shifted back, because he needed to put space between them. Or he would reach out to her again. “If you need money, I’m happy to give it to you. But I don’t want to be a father. I can’t be a father. Do you understand me?”

  He didn’t wait for her to answer him. He turned away, staggering as if he were drunk. Broken all over again.

  But he’d hurt himself this time, instead of letting a bull do it.

  Ty wasn’t good for much. He could ride a horse. He could rope, ride bareback, and wrestle a steer. All that meant was that he was from generations of ranchers. He could outlast an ornery bull for less than ten seconds, more often than not. He was pretty sure that made him a lunatic. But that was it. That was his skill set, the end.

  Just like his father, he had one skill. And he could drink through everything else.

  The only other thing Ty could do was protect Hannah. From him. Whether she wanted him to or not.

  Because he knew where the poison in him led.

  So he left her there, standing with the child they’d made together in the yard, both of them flooded with the light from the house. He knew he would carry that image with him, burned deep.

  And he walked out into the land.

  The damned land.

  Because he got it now. This was a particular kind of poison. And if a man tried to put it into his family, it would ruin lives. It would make a baby like Jack into a man like Ty, good for nothing and rotten to the core.

  But these fields didn’t care what kind of father he was. The mountains stood completely indifferent to what kind of husband he was.

  He’d always thought he lacked the roots everyone else from the Longhorn Valley was so obsessed with. Especially in his family. But now he understood.

  Gray was the exception, like Silas. Men who stayed, but didn’t go bad. Most members of his extended family were like Brady, who’d gotten out. Ty was the rule. He was his father, straight through.

  Everetts were like rocks. Like the mountains all around. They crushed anything they fell on, down into dust.

  He didn’t need to remember anything out here where the bones of his ancestors were part of the earth now. There was no need for ghosts down where the willow trees met the river, whispering stark and simple truths he should have heeded a long time ago. He didn’t need to feel.

  The land would take his blood. His sweat.

  His fury.

  The land would make him honest no matter what his inclination. It would take the rot in him and turn it green. Make it into food for trees, cattle, people. The cold, cruel river that swept down from the mountains, brimming with snow melt, had been telling him the truth about the family who lived here all his life.

  Amos had been cruel. He’d focused on his women, his children, with deliberate intent to harm.

  The river was indifferent. It would drown a man or quench his thirst so he could live, flood the fields or keep them fertile.

  All Ty had to do was break the cycle.

  It was too late for him.

  But keep Jack away from here, away from a man who wanted to be indifferent but was far more likely to be cruel, and there was every possibility that he could be free of this.

  Of the weight of all that cold stone and unbearable grief that Ty felt deep in his shattered, stitched-together bones, and expected he always would.

  He couldn’t give Hannah what she deserved. He couldn’t be a father to his son.

  But he could give them this.

  19

  Sweet Myrtle was exactly how Hannah had left it.

  August melted along as stifling Georgia summers did. Humid and heavy, so that the air itself felt weighted.

  Hannah felt pretty much the same way herself.

  Every day that passed since that night on Cold River Ranch, the more it felt like it had all happened with a certain sense of inevitability. No matter how many times she relived it—walking outside, seeing her mother standing there in the wrong state, seeing Jack, then holding Jack as she turned to face Ty and what she’d done—

  It had felt like a memory while it was happening.

  Hannah was moving through her usual morning routine a week after that terrible scene. Nothing had changed. Everything was where she’d left it a
nd worked the same way it always had. Her life was small here, but workable. Her mother and aunt helped with Jack. Mama had moved into the main part of the house when Jack was born, leaving the room out back for Hannah and the baby. It was the most natural thing in the world to live here in the place she’d grown up. It was easy. She knew all its rhythms.

  Only now, she had no hope that things might change one day.

  That Ty might have a change of heart. That he might appear at her door and say all the things she’d always dreamed he would. Apologies, love, all of it.

  The thing about hope was that a person didn’t realize how much it lived there in a life, threaded through all the little moments. Hannah had been so sure she’d given up on Ty that day in the hospital.

  But she hadn’t.

  She’d held out hope, even though she might have lied to herself about that, across all those months.

  And now that it was gone, she could see all the empty spaces where it had lived in her.

  “You look so sad, sweetheart,” Aunt Bit said when Hannah walked into the kitchen, a freshly changed Jack on her hip.

  Hannah smiled automatically. “I wouldn’t call myself sad.”

  She had no words for what she would call herself, so she didn’t try. She put Jack down into his saucer so he could scoot around on the floor, slamming himself into walls in the kitchen. It never failed to make him shriek with delight. And as a bonus, it gave Hannah a moment to fix herself another cup of coffee.

  Aunt Bit was sitting at the table, the daily paper spread open before her and a steaming mug of tea at her elbow. Mama was already long gone to open the doctor’s office she managed.

  It made Hannah feel deeply disloyal, not exactly a new sensation, that she liked the mornings when her mother wasn’t here. Vibrating with all her tension and anxiety and focusing it all on Hannah.

  You can be mad at me all you want, Luanne had said stoutly when it was all over, out there in the ranch’s yard. Ty had walked off into the dark. Luanne had clearly been watching from the window because she came out straightaway, looking as if she was fully prepared to march Hannah straight back into that bunkhouse, pack up her things herself, and carry her out of there if necessary. I did what needed doing. If he were going to rise to the occasion, he would have.

  What I need from you, Hannah had replied, in a voice she barely recognized with her baby held in the crook of her neck, is for you to drop this subject. And never bring it up again.

  So far that had worked. They’d driven in a sad caravan all the way home, stopping a lot more often than Hannah had on the way out because they had Jack to consider. But Hannah had welcomed the miles. All that strange, suspended time between her past and her present.

  She decided she was happy. All of her questions were answered. Now she could move forward.

  She kept telling herself that, over and over, like a prayer.

  “I’ve never seen your mother cry,” Aunt Bit said now, in a lull between Jack’s earsplitting squeals as he rammed himself into the cabinets.

  Hannah dumped an extra dollop of the sweet creamer she loved into her coffee, despite the fact it had no nutritional value whatsoever and was almost certainly rotting her from the inside out. Then another big dollop, because who cared what was rotting her these days. It was better than all that emptiness where her hope had been.

  “Mama doesn’t cry,” she said. She slid into her usual chair at the round, retro kitchen table that was nothing like the wide, scarred old door in the Everetts’ ranch house. Nothing at all. She rubbed absently at her chest and told herself that sooner or later, even that would stop hurting. “She told me once she has no time for it.”

  “I don’t know anyone who doesn’t make the time for a good cry,” Aunt Bit replied. “Except your mother. And I expect that’s because she had to survive things she shouldn’t have had to, at a young age, more or less on her own.”

  “Luckily, she had you. We had you.”

  Aunt Bit smiled. “I used to say I did her crying for her. But you know what it takes to stay that strong, don’t you?”

  “Never putting a wishbone where your backbone goes, like the poem,” Hannah said, right on cue.

  “Your mother never had the time to figure out that a wishbone and a backbone aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive, and don’t have to be mortal enemies forever,” Aunt Bit said. “What I’m trying to say is that your mother is terrified that one slip, one stray tear, and she’ll start crying so hard, she’ll never stop. She’d have to cry for that fifteen-year-old girl who found herself in all that trouble. The sixteen-year-old girl who was abandoned by everyone who should have taken care of her. She’d have to cry for year after year of hardship, struggle, and the fact that she never had the choice to decide whether or not to be strong. She had to be, so she was.”

  “I know what Mama did for me,” Hannah said softly.

  Aunt Bit smoothed out the newspaper page before her. “I’m not telling you a story you already know to make you feel bad, Hannah. You’re not your mother. If you want to be sad, you go right ahead and be sad. You don’t have to hide it. And between you and me, you don’t have to pretend that not feeling what you feel is a strength. We both know it’s not.”

  Hannah mulled that over across the next few days. The weather didn’t break. Her heart didn’t heal. And she could see the beauty of her mother’s take on these things. Because if only Hannah could stop feeling, she would be better. Happier, certainly.

  One August afternoon, under a sky that had been threatening to storm for a day or so now but hadn’t quite gotten around to it, Hannah drove home from her usual afternoon out at the stables. The last lesson had been canceled, so Hannah had spent the time catching up with her favorite horse, Marigold. She and Marigold had caught up on life, the world outside the rodeo, and ridden around the fields outside of town until Hannah’s heart felt, if not healed, quieter.

  So maybe she should have expected to find a strange car outside the house when she got home. And worse, when she climbed out of her pickup, the driver of that car got out too. An Everett, she knew in an instant, and her heart leapt—

  But it was Brady.

  Thunder rumbled overhead, and all through Hannah too.

  “Let me guess,” she drawled as Brady started up the drive toward her. “You came all this way to make sure I hurry up and start some divorce proceedings. Out of the goodness of your heart, no doubt. Because you love your brother that much.”

  Brady scowled at her as he came to a stop a few feet away from her. And he was the Brady she’d met in the ranch house kitchen that day. Big and powerful. Not the hapless younger brother at all.

  “I don’t know, Hannah,” he threw at her. “The question is, do you love my brother?”

  Hannah wanted to haul off and punch him. Run him over with her truck a few times. Instead, she smiled.

  “Now, sugar, I can’t believe you came all this way to question me about my romantic intentions.”

  “It’s not your romantic intentions that interest me,” Brady retorted. “It’s my brother’s fool head that he’s set to crack wide open in yet another rodeo in three days.”

  Like Hannah didn’t know that. Like she didn’t have that particular date carved into her heart.

  “He wants to reclaim his glory,” she said. Airily. “I can’t say as I blame him. If there were a way to reclaim my own, I expect that I’d be all over it.”

  “Would you?” Brady’s scowl only deepened. “Because as far as I can tell, you’re the one who walked away from your glory.”

  “If you mean Colorado, you were there. It wasn’t me who walked away. And I’m not so sure I’d call any of that glorious, but I don’t know your life.”

  “I’m not talking about Ty’s response to the child you failed to tell him about.”

  “That’s a real relief, given it’s none of your business.”

  “I’m talking about you, Hannah. Miss Rodeo Forever two years running. I assumed you got kicked o
ff the tour, but you didn’t, did you?”

  Hannah’s stomach twisted up on itself. She glanced back over her shoulder, but there was no one in the house. Aunt Bit spent her Wednesday afternoons working in the county library. Mama had her early afternoon off from the doctor’s office and decreed it her grandmother time with Jack. Meaning no one was coming to save Hannah from this conversation.

  “I don’t know why you’re scraping up all that ancient history now. None of it matters.”

  “There were rumors, but that’s all they were. If you’d really wanted to, you could have weathered them. You were set to turn over your crown to the next winner at the big pageant in May.”

  “I had no idea you were such a Miss Rodeo Forever fan.”

  “I’m trying to build a picture,” Brady said. “That’s all.”

  “I’m not sure what kind of picture that is, especially when it involves turning up on my doorstep,” Hannah replied, her drawl thick and her tone light, even though she still wanted to do something. Preferably something unbecoming, yet unmistakable. “But I’m pretty sure you can carry right on doing whatever you’re doing back in Colorado. Where you belong. I don’t even understand how you found me.”

  “It lists your hometown next to your name on every single picture they have of you in the Miss Rodeo Forever archives.”

  “I’m surprised they haven’t taken those down.”

  “It wasn’t that hard to drive into town, ask at the first store I could find, and get directions right to your door. You’re not exactly hidden away, Hannah.”

  “That’s what I used to tell myself while I was waiting for your brother to wake up and remember he was married,” Hannah retorted, then caught herself. She couldn’t talk about Ty’s memory. It wasn’t her secret to tell. And her heart thumped at her, because she could pretend all she wanted that she was halfway to turning all her feelings off like her mother, but that was a lie. She was protecting that man even now. “And you’re still not answering my question. What are you doing here, Brady?”