The Last Real Cowboy Read online

  She wasn’t working tonight. He could hear her moving around as she talked to him and found himself trying to imagine where she was in her apartment. He knew it far too well, now.

  He chose not to examine why he wanted to picture her there. Or why it felt like another step toward an intimacy he would have sworn he didn’t want.

  “That sounds perfectly sensible,” Amanda said. “Also, that sucks.”

  “Yeah, it does.”

  Later, he knew, the fact that no alarms rang in him when he talked to her like this, or at all, was going to bother him the most. Because that was what always kept him up at night, staring at the same ceiling Amos had scowled up at, all those years.

  The problem was, it was too easy to be with Amanda.

  Brady liked too many things about her. Her cheerful practicality. Her sudden silliness. And God help him, her endless physical appetite and commitment to feeding it made him heat up even all these miles away from her.

  He’d spent his entire adult life keeping his interactions with women on a casual level. On the rare occasions that he dated a woman for more than a night here or there, he usually went to great lengths to make sure there were no misunderstandings.

  Brady had always told his friends that he liked to manage expectations early and often.

  But when it came to Amanda Kittredge and the way she lit up when she looked at him, he couldn’t bring himself to do it.

  He understood it when he was actually, physically with her. When he was moving inside her, losing himself in the little cries she made. Or marveling at how easily and eagerly she learned every last thing he taught her.

  Maybe his Amanda problem was as simple as the fact that he was the youngest of three brothers. He’d had hand-me-downs all his life. Brady couldn’t deny there was something in him that deeply liked that he’d finally found something that was only his.

  He needed to tell her some hard truths on the phone, then, since he couldn’t seem to do it in person. He glared at the ceiling. It didn’t matter if it was awkward; he needed to set boundaries. Because there was something about the look she got on her face sometimes, so filled with wonder, that made him question exactly where her head was in all this.

  Just freaking do it, he ordered himself.

  “Tell me about your day,” he said instead.

  What?

  “My day was a little weird, Brady. As a matter of fact.”

  She didn’t know he was yelling at himself. She sounded the way she always did, sweet and right and funny, and he could never predict what his small-town girl might say next.

  He could hear her sit down on her sofa. He could hear her breathe. Neither sound should have been comforting, for God’s sake. There was also the distant sound of the relentless music from the Coyote’s jukebox, and the funny thing was, Brady could hardly remember why he’d liked going there anymore. These days, if he made an appearance at all, he sat at a back table, brooded, and waited to see who he might have to kill if they strayed too close to Amanda.

  He rubbed at his chest, irritably.

  How could he miss Amanda when he saw her all the time?

  “Do you remember the one and only Miss Martina Patrick?” she asked.

  Brady laughed, despite himself, at the sheer randomness of that. “I don’t want to remember Miss Patrick. I started trying to forget her while I was still high school. I haven’t thought about her since, but now you mention it, why isn’t she retired?”

  “Because she’s a whole thing and will never retire. My friend Kat does a killer impression of her dying in her office on school grounds, but part of me feels bad about that.”

  “Is it funny? It’s hard to feel bad about something if it’s funny.”

  “I think you’ll find that’s called a worrying lack of empathy.”

  “Miss Patrick once made me stand outside in the rain because she didn’t like my ‘tone.’” But Brady laughed, because even such indignities were funny now. “I have all kinds of empathy. For other people.”

  “Okay, sure, she can be harsh on students, but I’ve always assumed she’s very sad and very lonely. Nothing but cats and an aging mother.”

  “And that enchanted gingerbread house in the woods with an oven she likes to push kids into.”

  “Today she came into the coffeehouse,” Amanda said, her voice stern. Or trying to be stern. “I found that surprising all by itself, but the two kids who worked there assured me it wasn’t. Apparently she comes in sometimes in the afternoons, I’ve just never seen her before. I watched them serve her, then do their own impressions. And I felt bad.”

  “Every kid who’s graduated from Cold River High in the past forty years does impressions of Miss Patrick.”

  “Does that make it right?”

  “Well, Amanda, it doesn’t make it wrong.”

  He was still staring at the ceiling. But he caught himself grinning.

  “I decided it was time to make up for my youthful callousness. I marched over to her table, plopped myself down, and gave her my friendliest smile.”

  Brady could picture that smile. Vividly. He liked imagining it in the coffee shop a whole lot more than he liked seeing it in the Coyote, where none of those degenerates deserved it. “I’m sure she melted.”

  Amanda laughed, and he liked the sound of it. He could feel it inside of him, kicking up a little fuss and making that grin on his face feel like it might be permanent.

  Something else he could be pissed about later.

  “She did not melt. She stared at me like I’d violated her.”

  “That’s the Miss Patrick I remember.”

  “She makes me anxious. I found myself nervous-talking about how I never really got to know her while I was a student, but it was so much fun that she came to the coffeehouse now, because the bond. Or something. I hope I didn’t really say bond, but I might have, it’s all a big blur. But do you know what she said?”

  Brady tucked an arm behind his head, stopped critiquing his own inability to stop grinning, and surrendered to the reality. Which was that he even liked being on the phone with this woman. Talking about nonsense.

  That was probably a clue he should pay attention to. Instead, he concentrated on her.

  “‘Get thee behind me, Satan’?” he suggested.

  Amanda laughed. “That was implied. She stared at me, for an uncomfortably long period of time, with that awful face she makes.”

  “I knew it well, many years ago.”

  “‘Miss Kittredge,’ she said, in exactly that tone.” And Amanda pulled off Miss Patrick’s chilly, unimpressed voice so perfectly that Brady found himself grinning like a fool again. “‘I am perfectly comfortable with my own company. In fact, I prefer it.’”

  “Oh, ouch.”

  “She said it exactly like that. Dripping with disdain.”

  Brady hadn’t been kidding when he said he’d started forgetting about Miss Patrick while he’d still been in high school. He hadn’t given the woman a single thought in all the years since, and now he could picture her so vividly, she might as well have been standing in the corner of the room. Glaring at him, as always.

  “I hope you thought better of your attempt to befriend her and ran away,” Brady said. “I can’t prove it, but I’m pretty sure she can turn people into stone.”

  “I was stuck! I kept smiling at her, and in desperation I said something about how she was an inspiration. And it gets worse, Brady. She laughed.”

  “What?” He was laughing, but he couldn’t imagine the eternally bitter school secretary succumbing to hilarity of any kind. “Miss Patrick? Are you sure she laughed? You can’t be remembering that right.”

  “She laughed. At me, to be clear. Then she stopped laughing and got serious.” And Amanda’s voice got more serious too. “‘You think you pity me, Miss Kittredge,’ she said. ‘The truth is that you fear me. You don’t know, yet, that lives are choices we make or that I am perfectly content with mine.’”

  Amanda didn’t laugh
after she said that. Brady didn’t either. And suddenly the ceiling up above him seemed a lot closer. A lot lower.

  “I told her I was delighted with my choices,” Amanda said, but she sounded different. Shaken, maybe. “That’s the exact word I used. Delighted. And all she did was laugh again, and then shoo me away.”

  Suddenly Brady couldn’t get past the reality that he was stretched out on the bed that had once been his father’s. Staring at the bare and empty walls or the oppressive ceiling. And in the middle of an intense phone conversation with a woman he should never have been intimate with in the first place.

  He sat up, ran a hand over his face, and told himself he was annoyed that she was telling him stories. That was why his chest felt so weird. “You can’t let a bitter old woman like that get in your head.”

  “That’s what’s been bugging me all day,” Amanda replied. She made a sound that could have been a laugh or a sigh. “What if she’s not bitter at all?”

  Brady shifted where he sat, ready to launch into his prepared speech. Because there was no time like the present to set appropriate boundaries. Or to keep ahead of any conversations about choosing which life to have or how to be content in it.

  She was temporary and she needed to know that.

  You need to know that, idiot, he growled at himself.

  But as he opened his mouth to lay down the law, he caught a faint motion out of the corner of his eye. He looked over and found Becca standing there in the door he must have left cracked open.

  Brady muttered that he had to go, then hung up. Like he was the teenager and Becca was a disapproving adult.

  He stared at his niece, convinced he had guilt stamped all over his face. And the kick of temper he felt as he told himself there was no need for him to feel guilty about anything, even though he knew that was a lie, only made it worse.

  “How long have you been standing there?” he asked.

  Becca was looking at him much too shrewdly. “Who was that on the phone?”

  “A friend.” He stood, tossing his phone to one side. “Do you need something?”

  “You were talking to a girl, weren’t you?”

  “What makes you think that?”

  Becca studied him a moment. “It’s that look on your face. Almost … gentle.”

  Brady tried not to openly scowl at his beloved niece. “Well, that’s about the most horrifying thing you’ve ever said to me. I was talking to my broker. And the last thing he is, especially about brokerage accounts, is gentle.”

  Becca blinked. “And now you’re lying. Why are you lying?”

  “Did you need something?” he asked again, ignoring her question.

  “Abby is making a late-night apple crumble. She thought you might want some.” Becca sniffed. “But I’ll go tell her you’re too busy talking to girls and lying about it.”

  She didn’t wait for him to respond. She pushed away from the door and stomped off down the hall.

  There was no decent way to handle this situation. If he ran after her, issuing threats and shouting his head off, he would be protesting way too much. But if he said nothing, wasn’t he tacitly confirming her take on things?

  Brady wanted to lock himself away until he got over this thing in him that kept putting Amanda in the middle of everything, when he knew better. Or he could jump in his truck and leave—though who was he kidding? If he got in his truck, snow or no snow, he’d end up at Amanda’s.

  Instead, he made himself walk casually down the hall toward the kitchen. When he reached the main room, he found Gray was now standing, rocking the baby while he fussed. And Gray didn’t laugh when he looked at Brady, but that gaze of his sure did.

  “I hear you have a girl.”

  “I can’t wait to tell Riley Kittredge that Becca thinks he’s a girl,” Brady replied, sounding more flippant than he felt.

  Another lie.

  It made him feel dirty. Worse, it made him feel like his father.

  There was no need for Amos’s ghost, because here Brady was, standing in this house making the same messes. Keeping it all nice and toxic.

  He wanted to confess immediately.

  But he didn’t.

  It did the trick, because Gray returned his attention to the infant in his arms.

  He should have been relieved. But when Brady looked over to the kitchen doorway, Becca was standing there, watching him. A speculative expression on her face.

  Lives are choices we make, Miss Patrick said in his head, as chilly and disappointed in him as ever.

  Lies were too.

  He didn’t apologize to Becca either. Or confess.

  Instead, he congratulated himself on dodging a bullet. And tried to drown anything else he might have been feeling—or hearing inside him, against his will—in too much sugar, butter, and cinnamon, the way God intended.

  15

  A few days later, Brady found himself in the Broken Wheel Saloon, surrounded by bottles of local Colorado IPAs, platters of cheeseburgers cooked to perfection, and his oldest friends.

  There was a decent crowd there as dinner hours waned and tipped over toward more of a bar scene, with a local band tuning up to play a set. It was a gathering Brady would have enjoyed a lot more if he were only visiting Cold River, the way he’d thought he’d been a year ago when he’d come home for Amos’s funeral. Now, he’d stayed long enough to cause real trouble instead of the fun kind.

  That made everything a whole lot less comfortable.

  “Where have you been?” Riley asked from beside him, where he was kicked back in a chair, toying with his beer. “You haven’t been around in weeks.”

  “It hasn’t been weeks.”

  But even as he said it, Brady realized he didn’t know if it were true. October was galloping along and he wasn’t ready. He wasn’t prepared. He kept on spending more time with Amanda than he meant to, for one thing. And for another, Halloween was coming up fast.

  And Halloween marked a full year since Amos’s death.

  Brady would have said that anniversaries didn’t get to him. He couldn’t remember when his mother had left, for example, only that she had. But somehow, this particular year felt significant.

  Maybe because he couldn’t quite kick his father’s ghost, no matter how he tried. He was beginning to think there was no need to look for Amos’s ghost, because the old man had taken up residence in him.

  “Could be Brady found himself a lady at the Coyote,” Jensen said from across the table. “Maybe he’s gone and shacked up with her.”

  Everyone laughed. And Brady had to laugh too, because that should have been hilarious. People didn’t shack up with folks they encountered in the dark, grim shadows of the Coyote. The Coyote was for furtive mistakes, beer-soaked regret, and enough whiskey to make it seem like trying it on all over again was a good idea.

  “The only thing I’ve ever found in the Coyote is a headache,” Brady drawled, because everyone was waiting for his reaction. “I don’t take it home. I take a few aspirin.”

  That got an even bigger laugh, and he was tempted to relax, but then the crowd on the other side of the table shifted. Brady was still laughing as he looked up. And saw Amanda standing there, previously hidden by the two women standing behind Jensen.

  Worse, she was staring straight at him.

  He felt an ugly twist in his gut. There was no reason for it. But telling himself that didn’t make it go away.

  “You don’t pick up anything at the Coyote,” Jensen said, craning his head around to squint up at his little sister. “Right, Amanda?”

  “She shouldn’t even touch the glasses,” Riley added from beside Brady. “I’ve seen who drinks from them.”

  “Nothing but headaches,” Amanda said lightly, and she even smiled, but Brady knew her better by now.

  He could see the hurt in her eyes. Worse, he could see she was trying to hide it.

  It didn’t matter how many times he told himself he had no reason to feel guilty. That they weren’t a public
thing. That of course he hadn’t announced he really had met someone in the Coyote.

  Because it didn’t work. He felt like a jerk.

  Amanda spun back to the other group standing there, on what passed for the Broken Wheel’s dance floor. He should have recognized them. And her.

  Brady had to stay where he was, lounging in a chair with the remains of his dinner in front of him. He had to grin like he didn’t have a care in the world, while all the time he was reading the tension in Amanda’s spine. The particular way she stood. Brady couldn’t believe everyone else wasn’t able to see it as clearly as he could. It was blaring her irritation and bruised feelings to the entire saloon. More than that, to all of Cold River.

  No one seemed to notice but him.

  He told himself that was a good thing.

  The conversation at the table turned to over-the-top lies about each man’s hunting prowess, a favorite local game that could last for hours. Especially when Matias started making up stories about all the elk he could take down with little more than mind control.

  “I stared him down and told him to kneel,” he said, not cracking even the faintest smile as all around him, everyone hooted and about fell out of their chairs. “And he obliged.”

  “A 400-class bull elk.” Jensen could barely speak he was laughing so hard. “Knelt.”

  Matias shrugged. “It’s called prowess, friend.”

  “It’s called fantasyland,” Jensen retorted.

  “You don’t seem like yourself, is all,” Riley said from beside Brady.

  Brady took that as an opportunity to stop looking for signs of Amanda’s mood on her freaking back. He turned toward his best friend instead.

  “I can choose some land and diversify,” Brady said with a grin. He did not ask himself why he told Riley so easily when he had yet to tell Amanda, who he’d actually been spending more time with lately. He didn’t want to know the answer. “Gray gave me exactly what I want. Is there anything worse?”

  Riley actually laughed. “It’s the only thing worse than not getting what you want.”

  “Amen.”

  Riley toyed with his beer some more. “Thing is, though, you do want it. You’ve always wanted to see what you could do if you didn’t have to be neck-deep in the usual Cold River cattle operation.”