The Last Real Cowboy Read online

  But he would have to have been made of stone like Gray not to understand, as he sat there as a grown man in the football bleachers, that the hollow thing inside him wasn’t because he looked down on any of this. He’d been telling himself that lie for so long that he’d stopped questioning it. It wasn’t that he hated this place. It was that he’d missed out on it.

  Even when he’d been right here, doing it, he’d missed out on it.

  If he didn’t belong in his own family—something his father had made abundantly clear—then how did he belong anywhere? All the lights of the big city and what he’d built down there was commotion, not connection.

  He knew that too, though it was another thing he’d stopped looking at directly.

  Brady had always considered himself a simple man. He liked the fuss of a high school football game, like anyone else. It was even better on the stands than it had been on the field, because there was no pressure. He didn’t miss quarterbacking.

  What he missed was what he’d never had. The idea that his father could be up here, cheering him on. The idea that he could care enough about anything Brady did—about Brady himself—to show up.

  If he squinted, he could almost see a version of his father here, like a phantom limb.

  Brady knew plenty of folks down in the city who would be only too happy to tell him how stupid they thought it was to care about a high school football game. In or out of high school.

  But it wasn’t the game that got people out. It was the community. The sense of being part of something bigger than their own lives. That by identifying themselves as a Cowboy like the boys on the field, they felt like one for a while. It was no more than a few fall nights every year, scattered in against the coming darkness, but it felt like a talisman.

  Tonight, it felt like one more ache.

  Brady shouted something about hitting the head to Matias, who nodded. Then he picked his way down through the crowd. He did his neighborly part, nodding and smiling, as he climbed down to the ground. Even as he waited in line for the facilities.

  On his way back, he stopped for a moment down at the bottom of the stands, letting the memories of his time here wash over him. Down in Denver, high school seemed like it had happened to someone else. It still did, but now it also felt like a movie, maybe. One he’d watched recently, so he could pick up the nuances.

  After ten months back in town, he recognized a lot of the faces in the stands. He would have sworn up and down that familiarity was the sort of thing he wanted to get away from. But tonight, here in all the bright lights and noise of the homecoming football game, he could admit there was a part of him that liked it.

  Home was home, after all. No matter how complicated.

  When he caught a movement out of the corner of his eye, he turned his head, saw Amanda, and liked that even more.

  The very fact of her, picking her way beneath the stands. She was laughing uproariously while she and her friend Kat linked their arms together and navigated their way beneath all those stamping feet. And it walloped him.

  He had to check to see if he’d actually ended up on the ground.

  Her friend veered off, heading for the bathrooms. Amanda kept walking, and only as she drew closer did she look up.

  If she felt a similar wallop when she saw him, she didn’t show it. Her eyes sparkled. Her laughter turned into something else, some kind of too-hot smile, and he should have turned tail and run for it. He knew that.

  Two of her brothers were sitting in the stands above him. He’d come with them. Her other two brothers were at large. Connor could be anywhere. Zack was almost certainly in this same crowd and could appear at any moment, flashing his badge.

  Though his badge would be the least of Brady’s worries.

  Brady needed to get away from her before anyone saw them. Before anyone saw her and that look on her face that was broadcasting the fact that they’d kissed.

  But he couldn’t seem to move as she came closer.

  “I’ve been looking for you,” she announced, reckless and careless as she rocked to a stop beside him.

  They weren’t exactly hidden. Still, he could have backed up a step or two to put more space between them, and he didn’t do that either.

  It was as if he wanted to be caught. As if he wanted to cause himself trouble. Maybe he really was like his father, in all his self-destructive glory.

  What an unpleasant thought.

  “I’m the last person you should be looking for,” he told her, his tone dark and oppressive, as if that could get the message through her thick head.

  It did not.

  He knew that because she swayed closer, one hand on one of the metal supports that kept the stands up, and the other out in front of her as if she planned to rest it on him.

  Which would be as good as her signing his death warrant.

  But he still didn’t move back.

  He would never know why it suddenly occurred to her to be cautious. But instead of touching him, she let her hand drop.

  It was a funny thing, how much he hated that. How much it turned out he wanted her hand on him, no matter the price.

  Brady would have preferred not to know that about himself.

  “I’ve come to a decision,” Amanda said, with the tone of someone sharing a delicious secret. “And involves you.”

  “Does it involve you needing a ride to a nunnery?”

  That smile of hers should have been illegal. “It does not.”

  “It should.”

  “It’s been a while since you came into the Coyote,” she said.

  “Has it? I haven’t noticed. You shouldn’t have noticed either.”

  Amanda rolled her eyes. “Okay. Whatever. I think you might be right. That is possibly not the best place to try to meet someone.”

  Brady felt light-headed. “Meet someone? Why would you even…” He dragged a hand over his face. “You know what? This is not my business.”

  “It is your business,” she said, and it was her earnestness that got to him. She looked like she could be talking to him about buying Girl Scout cookies, for God’s sake. “That’s the whole point, Brady. You can probably tell that I don’t know anything about … well, anything.”

  That flush of hers was going to kill him. Maybe it did, because having actually died already was the only explanation for why he was still standing there, frozen solid, as if he couldn’t move. He should have been halfway back to the ranch by now.

  “We’re not talking about that,” he gritted out. Clearly not dead. “We’re pretending that never happened.”

  She wrinkled up her nose, like he was being silly. “I don’t want to forget about it.” And again, that smile. Little Amanda Kittredge was going to kill him with a smile. “Brady. I want it to be you.”

  He was pretty sure he really did die, then. Of a heart attack that felt a lot like a sledgehammer to the chest.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  He couldn’t have sounded as mean and forbidding as he wanted, because she moved closer. Then she pressed her fingertips so gently against his chest that he shouldn’t have been able to feel them at all.

  But he did.

  Like she was beaming light and sensation directly into all the places he ached.

  “I want it to be you, Brady,” Amanda said, shining gold eyes and that impossible smile. “I want you to teach me everything there is to know.”

  When he only stared back at her, possibly dead, that flush of hers deepened.

  But it didn’t stop her. Amanda smiled wider. “About sex.”

  9

  Amanda didn’t know what she expected from Brady.

  Okay, maybe she did. Maybe she thought her announcement—more of an invitation, really—would inspire a little enthusiasm. Maybe not cartwheels. But a smile, possibly. Something to show he’d heard what she said and wasn’t standing there, trying not to laugh at her. Or actively repulsed.

  It had occurred to her that a person who’d
never really been kissed before should probably figure out whether or not she’d done it right before leaping into offers of sex, but caution was Old Amanda’s game. New Amanda was all about leaping in first and seeing what happened.

  Old Amanda had gone into her shower to hide from that kiss. New Amanda had come out wanting more.

  Tonight, Brady stared down at her with an expression she couldn’t decode. For what felt like a lifetime to Amanda. Maybe several lifetimes, and while he wasn’t laughing at her, he wasn’t jumping for joy either.

  She wanted to say something. Make it into a joke, maybe. Do something—anything—to divert attention from the fact she’d asked him to have sex with her.

  But having thrown that out there, she couldn’t make her vocal cords produce a single other sound. Not one.

  A thousand lifetimes later, Brady simply turned on his heel and walked away, back into the Friday night football crowd. A crowd that was kicking it up even more than usual, because it was homecoming weekend.

  Amanda was tempted to feel slighted.

  Maybe a whole lot more than simply slighted.

  But when she emerged from beneath the stands, she got swept up in the crowd, and the marching band, and it got inside her ribs. It made her feel like dancing when she should have felt more like curling up in the fetal position somewhere.

  She should have felt deflated. But all she could think about was that look on his face. That gorgeous, incredulous face of his. And he hadn’t said anything, but all she could seem to feel was exhilaration. And before she knew it, Kat found her standing at the fence at one end of the field, clapping along and cheering her heart out.

  “You really don’t look like someone who’s done with the small-town experience,” Kat said over the noise and music, grinning widely.

  “When did I say I was done with it?” Amanda thought of those lifetimes beneath the bleachers, nothing but Brady’s gaze on hers, far better than any touch. Far more intense. “I want to expand it a little bit, that’s all. Complicate it. Change it up.”

  “I can’t tell if that means you want to move to California, dye your hair purple, or truly live dangerously and bring a microwave dinner to the next potluck.”

  “I want to complicate my life,” Amanda said dryly. “Not end it.”

  “Some people think complicating their life means going to a different service at the same church on a Sunday,” Kat said loftily.

  “I’m a twenty-two-year-old woman,” Amanda said, gesturing grandly with one arm, like the homecoming queen she’d never been.

  Kat laughed. “Thank you. I’m aware. As I am also a twenty-two-year-old woman. One who’s known you since birth.”

  “You’re a twenty-two-year-old woman who’s actually been in a relationship. You’re in one now. I’m not. And everything I’ve read and watched or even heard about in passing tells me that as a twenty-two-year-old single woman, I should be out there.” She gestured at the crowd again, though she didn’t quite mean out there on the football field. “Living it up.”

  “You’re talking about sex.”

  “I’m talking about one-night stands, Kat. Morning-afters. Walks of shame and awkward silences when you run into last night’s hookup in the grocery store line. These things, I’m told, are the spice of life.”

  “Told by who?”

  “The internet, mostly.”

  “Shame and awkwardness have never appealed to me, personally,” Kat said. Diplomatically, for her.

  “That’s the thing, isn’t it? We don’t know if they’re more appealing than they sound. Because we’ve never actually experienced any of them ourselves.”

  Kat made a face. “I haven’t experienced being set on fire. Or a root canal. But I feel pretty sure I wouldn’t enjoy either one.”

  Amanda shrugged. “You always seem to think that making out with Brandon is fun. Why wouldn’t making out—and more—in general also be fun?”

  “Brandon has been deployed so long, I can’t really remember making out with him. Or even what he looks like in real life.”

  Amanda bumped her shoulder against her friend’s. “You remember.”

  Kat smiled, and neither one of them mentioned that her smile was more and more brittle these days. “The difference is that I’ve known Brandon since we were kids. We got together in the seventh grade. I don’t get the impression you’re actually talking about a relationship.”

  Amanda thought about brooding, overwhelming, gloriously too-much-for-her-to-handle Brady Everett. She remembered his mouth on hers. She hadn’t slept well since he’d left her apartment that afternoon. It was like he’d flipped a switch in her, and her body was still in the grip of a brand-new, breathtaking electrical current. Even now.

  “Relationships are great if it happens that way,” Amanda said with the great confidence of a person who had only ever had a deep relationship with her horse. “But what I’m talking about is experience.”

  “Terrific,” Kat replied. She turned her head and regarded Amanda so steadily, it made Amanda’s stomach twist. “But you know that kind of experience is a surefire way to end up wishing you had less, right?”

  Amanda leaned over and kissed her best and oldest friend on her cheek, grinning when Kat batted her away.

  “I know,” she said, her voice hidden beneath the sound of the crowd so only Kat could hear her. “I really do. That’s what I want.”

  She was still thinking about experience and regret and wishes later that night, curled up in her apartment while the usual Friday night party in the Coyote raged on below. Weekend nights were major nights for tips, she’d learned, and that meant the older, more seasoned bartenders covered the shifts. Brand-new girls like Amanda were relegated to the off-hours.

  Amanda didn’t mind. If it weren’t for the pounding music from the jukebox below, the raucous sound of drunken laughter, and the way her windows rattled slightly every time the heavy outdoor slammed, she would have called it an idyllic evening.

  She was coming up on a month of living on her own, the best spontaneous decision she’d ever made. And she still couldn’t quite believe she’d pulled it off. That she got to call this apartment home and newly experience this little town she would have said she already knew too well. Even if she did have to pay attention when she got into the car because if she wasn’t careful, she’d drive halfway to the Bar K without thinking.

  Amanda tucked her feet beneath her, resting her book on the wide arm of her chair. It was already cooling down considerably at night, so she’d pulled on heavy socks. And she was contemplating wrapping herself in the quilt her mother had brought by on one of her visits.

  You’re giving me Grandma’s quilt? she’d asked in surprise, when she’d opened the door to find Ellie there with the quilt in question in her arms. Instead of on the bed in what had once been Riley and Connor’s room in the big house, and now had become a guest room.

  Why not your grandmother’s quilt? Ellie had asked coolly.

  Because it’s yours.

  Ellie had smiled, though even that was reserved. Distant and untouchable, just like her.

  Amanda, she’d said briskly. It’s a quilt. Anything else attached to it is your own nostalgia. Memories. You get to decide how much weight they have.

  Maybe that was her mother’s typically roundabout way of saying it was their secret that she was quietly outfitting her daughter with all the things Amanda hadn’t taken with her when she’d left. Ellie wasn’t the type for a grand gesture, after all. She preferred quiet acts of rebellion instead.

  Amanda had waited her whole life to have secrets. Her brothers all had their share. That was obvious in all the silences and sideways glances. But Amanda’s life had always been the family’s open book. Everyone got to read along. Everyone had a say.

  But now she had her own space, her own home. And best of all, her own secrets at last.

  She had a new job, though she couldn’t say she liked bartending in the Coyote, exactly. It was more that she liked the chal
lenge of it. The funny feeling she got low in her belly at the rough clientele. The things she now knew about folks she’d known all her life, but not in the context of their late-night adventures on the wrong side of the river.

  She’d kissed Brady Everett. And it had been far, far better than even her wildest imaginings. Then she’d gone ahead and asked him for everything else she wanted. It almost didn’t matter what happened next.

  Almost, she thought, wriggling a little in her chair as all those Brady-specific sensations wound around and around inside.

  Maybe it wasn’t surprising that when she took herself off to bed some time later, with the brand-new earplugs she’d bought to combat the late-night revelry below, she dreamed of dark green eyes. Quarterback shoulders. And that brooding, intense look he’d trained on her beneath the homecoming bleachers, as if she was as much of a problem to him as he was to her.

  God help her, but she wanted to be his problem.

  * * *

  “If you had it to do over again, would you do it all the same way?” Amanda asked Abby the next day.

  They were sitting together in the back office of Cold River Coffee, recapping what had already happened over the course of a long Saturday during the Harvest Festival. And also taking a break from said festival. The coffeehouse had been jumping since opening, and this was the first time Abby had come in to work a full shift since she’d had the baby.

  “That wasn’t really a shift.” Abby gazed down at Bart, currently sound asleep in the little bassinet she brought with her. “It was more of a test run. I wanted to see if it was even possible to work with him around. That’s why I scheduled you for the same time.”

  “And it went great. Everyone loves him already. He’s better than ordering coffee. Everyone cooed at him instead.”

  Abby laughed. “Maybe a regular cup of coffee. Not those monstrously sweet things you like to drink. People are pretty clear they want their fix.”

  “I like sugar.” Amanda grinned. “But I meant … all of this. Getting married. Bart. The whole Gray situation.”