But he didn’t say any of that.
Because the thing they’d all had in common as kids was that they’d been unhappy. Desperately, hopelessly unhappy. Gray had stayed and had his own issues around that, but Brady and Ty had gotten out. And Brady knew that even though they’d chosen different paths to follow, he and Ty had left for the same reasons.
This had never, ever been any kind of a home. This was where they were from, that was all. And maybe the land haunted them, packed deep with the sweat and tears, blood and bone, of the men and women who had come before them. But that didn’t make it home.
It had taken Hannah coming here and loving Ty as much as he deserved—and far more than anyone else ever had, especially their parents—for him to find his home on the ranch. Brady had watched it happen. He liked to think he’d even helped the two of them along at a crucial moment.
The difference between him and his older brothers was that he didn’t have it in him to fight their happiness. It was too hard won. Or he cared about it too much, maybe, after everything they’d gone through.
Not that he said this to Ty.
“You have to do what you have to do,” he said instead.
“Thank you for your rousing support.”
“And I know you’ll understand I have to do the same.”
“Whatever that means, Amos Junior,” Ty drawled, and Brady had to take that one on the chin, because he’d once called Ty that too. It turned out karma smarted as much as everyone said it did. “And while we’re talking about Dad and the things I disliked about him, the fact he always claimed his situation was forced on him has to be the top of the list. Have you ever noticed that it’s always the people who make the worst choices who claim they never had a choice to begin with?”
Brady sighed. “I know I have a choice. That’s the point I’m trying to make.”
Ty leaned back against the side of his truck again, getting his boneless on. “You talk a good game, Denver, but I don’t see it. We both shot our mouths off about never darkening Dad’s door again, but here we were. Every holiday, like clockwork. And I was the one who was drunk. You came back enough, and sober, that it’s hard to imagine some part of you didn’t like it.”
“I came back because that’s what you’re supposed to do.”
“Yeah, I’m not buying that.” Ty laughed. “Maybe at first, you wanted to show up to prove that it didn’t matter if Dad supported you or not. I respect that. But after college? Why would you bother?”
“You’re acting like I commuted to school every day while living at home; I didn’t. And by the end there, I came home pretty much only for Christmas.”
“That’s what I’m getting at,” Ty said, his gaze steady in that way that still took Brady by surprise. Because it wasn’t an act. It wasn’t Rodeo Ty at all. “You came home. You like to talk about selling, Brady, but I don’t believe that’s what you want. Not really. And if this is home to you too, even after all these years, maybe it’s time you admitted that.”
Ty ended the conversation there, getting the last word the way he liked to do by climbing in the truck and cranking up the country music. Brady pretended to shrug the whole thing off—the best weapon he had when trying to infuriate his older brothers.
As the day wore on, he thought about what Ty had said a whole lot more than he wanted to. And his phone was burning a hole in his pocket, because it took a lot of energy to avoid thinking about someone as hard as he was. He felt scraped raw with all the things he refused to name. Or admit existed in the first place.
After the day’s work was wrapped up with only a few unexpected crises along the way—meaning it was a decent, almost boring day at the ranch—he took a hot shower. And he took the opportunity to question his motives as he got dressed again in his bedroom.
Amos’s bedroom, to be more precise.
The proper ranch house master bedroom was upstairs, currently occupied by Gray and Abby. Growing up, Amos had lived up there, first with Brady’s mother Bettina, and then with each successive wife or woman foolish enough to give him a chance. But in his later years, his habit of drinking himself blind and falling down the narrow stairs had become more medically imprudent than simply a sad statement on his life choices. Amos had redone the back bedroom and claimed it was because he wanted more privacy. The reality was that it was on the main floor and so when he fell down, he wouldn’t have to risk breaking his neck on the stairs.
As Brady sat there, staring around at all the hardwood and the absence of any decoration on the walls, it occurred to him that choosing to live here this year was as much an act of penance as anything else.
Oh sure, he told himself and anyone who would listen that he’d decided to stay in the main house rather than one of the bunkhouses because he wanted to connect with his family. But it was easy enough to show up for meals from one of the outbuildings, the way Ty had all year. Because the rest of the time, Brady was sitting here in a room where a mean old drunk had calcified, stewed in his own hatefulness, and then, one fine morning almost a year ago, had gone out to the barn and died alone.
Maybe not the best plan. Not for a person who claimed he didn’t want to follow in his father’s footsteps, anyway.
There were no specific traces of Amos here, because they’d long since gotten rid of his clothes and personal effects. What few such things there’d been. Amos had been anything but sentimental.
Still, Brady couldn’t pretend the walls weren’t stained with the residue Amos had left behind. Sometimes, like tonight, he was sure he could hear the old man laughing derisively.
You’re real smart, boy, Amos had said once, clearly using the word smart as an insult. But the land don’t care. And your brain can’t feed the cows. When it comes right down to it, you don’t have what it takes.
It was easier to tell himself he didn’t care if he had it or didn’t have it, down in Denver. In Denver, he was good at his job. He’d always had a thing for math, and working with financial markets came easily. It was like doing puzzles all day long. What wasn’t fun about that?
Brady had built up an excellent life over the years. He made friends easily, because he worked hard and played hard. He was used to being liked.
But none of that mattered when he was back here. Back home.
This year had already been too long. These days, when he went back down to Denver to handle things he couldn’t from afar, it was Denver that no longer seem to fit. And it turned out, he got more from prickly, irritating conversations with his brothers than he did from happy, frictionless parties in the city.
And he was still sitting here, in an empty bedroom, trying to come to terms with a dead man. He could definitely hear Amos cackling with malicious glee.
Maybe he shouldn’t be so surprised that he couldn’t seem to stay away from Amanda. He was clearly not right in the head. He could hear his dead father laughing, for God’s sake.
He headed down the hall toward the kitchen, passing the office where Amos had always holed himself up, and now Gray sat in the evenings, handling the endless paperwork. Abby usually sat in the office with him, these days with baby Bart, and it was a different house with the two of them in there, talking, laughing, and living out their happy life together. None of the stark, tense silences that had reigned when Amos had been locked away in there. Usually drinking himself into yet another rage.
The ghost of Amos might still have a grip on Brady, but not this house. Not anymore. There were different noises now. Ty and Hannah’s Jack, squealing and laughing. The sound of little Bart crying, and then being soothed.
“You’re just in time!” Becca cried when Brady walked into the kitchen, making it hard to feel as out of place as he always had here. “I made an experimental pasta … thing.”
“That sounds appetizing.”
His niece made a face at him, then returned her attention to the stove. Brady had come to think of the kitchen as Abby’s domain, but things had shifted around now that Bart was here. He could hear t
he low murmur of female voices over the sounds of small humans from the other room, and figured Hannah and Abby were out there … mothering.
That, too, was a big difference from his childhood. His parents had never taken their responsibilities seriously. If they thought about them at all. Brady couldn’t remember the last time he’d spoken to his own mother, something he felt a vague, enduring anger about—though he had no intention of changing anything. Bettina was the one who’d abandoned her children. He didn’t think it was his responsibility to track her down to ask why.
Though he could admit it bothered him that Ty, apparently, had seen her over the years.
He shoved that aside and let Becca put him to work in the kitchen. He got the table ready for the usual big family dinner, then helped plate up sizable portions of the big, gooey pasta dish she’d made.
“Thank you for the parade,” Becca said as they carried plates and serving dishes to the table. “It was the biggest returning alum presence in years.”
“Is that a good thing?”
She wrinkled her nose at him. “Of course it’s a good thing. People like to see returning heroes.”
“You don’t know this yet, but there’s nothing heroic about a washed-up high school star. People don’t like seeing the old high school quarterback because they think he’s a hero.” Brady laughed. “It’s because they want to see how low he’s fallen.”
“Good Lord, sugar,” came Hannah’s drawl. His sister-in-law sauntered in from the other room, a babbling Jack on her hip and her trademark mascara making her eyes smoky. She set the toddler down in his high chair, but her gaze was on Brady. “That’s breathtakingly cynical, even for you.”
“Is it? Or is it the simple truth?”
“Sometimes,” Hannah said, in a voice that sounded awfully close to the one Ty had used on him earlier, “a parade is just a parade.”
The rest of the family trickled in, and they all took their places. Brady hadn’t felt particularly cynical before Hannah had called him that, but now it felt like pure discontent, clawing at him from the inside out.
The more settled his brothers became, the happier they seemed, the more restless Brady felt. No matter how much he supported their happiness. Philosophically.
When he was younger, the only cure for restlessness had been getting away from this place. And maybe it didn’t make sense that he’d had the same reaction to Amos’s reign of terror back then as he did now to his brothers’ growing contentment … but that didn’t change the edginess in him. And these days, he couldn’t go and blow off steam the way he had in the past. There was Amanda now.
He thought of her, then, though he shouldn’t have. The way she’d stopped in the entrance to her parents’ living room and stared at him as if she’d been struck over the head. To his way of thinking, she might as well have taken out a megaphone and announced to her entire family what was going on between them. He couldn’t believe no one had noticed.
Every time she’d looked at him, he could feel the heat. He’d left the house with every intention of getting in his truck and driving away, because walking into that barn and talking with her was asking for trouble. It was begging all four of her brothers to get suspicious.
It was plain dumb.
But he’d seen her gallop back in from the fields, bareback and beautiful, as if she and her horse were one.
He might dress himself up like a city boy from time to time, but at heart, he was all country. He wasn’t built to do anything but marvel at a girl on her horse, her hair blown back and her body low, lithe, powerful, and as perfect as the scenery.
He been so disconcerted, and so struck, that he’d been standing inside the barn watching her brush down her horse and murmur sweet nothings before he knew it.
Basically daring her family to catch him.
But the funny thing was, sitting here around the battered old barn door that was the Everett family table, thinking about Amanda seemed to take away that restless edginess inside him.
It wasn’t only when he was touching her. Just looking at her did the trick. He’d been a little keyed up about going to the Kittredge Sunday dinner, but the moment he’d seen her, it had gone away. He’d worried about her brothers figuring out what had happened between them, but the mess in him just … eased.
There was something about the way the light hit her, he thought. Neon lights at the Coyote or the late September sun. There was something in the way she smiled. There was even something about the way she sat across from him at a crowded table, obviously going out of her way not to look at him directly.
Brady didn’t understand how she could turn him on and make him feel oddly soothed all at the same time, two things he would have said didn’t go together. Or why he was leaning in deeper to that guaranteed disaster, every time, when if he was really as smart as he’d always thought he was, he’d run in the other direction.
Like his life depended on it. Because it did.
He was so busy turning that conundrum over and over in his head that it took him too long to realize Gray was talking to him.
“Already planning your next trip to the city?” Gray asked, and in case Brady was tempted to tell himself that this was another instance of his big brother joking around, he saw Abby cut her husband an exasperated look.
Clearly not joking, then.
“It doesn’t require that much planning,” Brady drawled. “Mostly I just get in my car and go. But I guess that might seem overwhelming to a man who doesn’t like to leave Longhorn County.”
He expected Gray to get terse. Stern and harsh. But instead, he could have sworn that his older brother’s eyes gleamed in what might have been amusement. On someone else.
It was confronting to admit that he almost preferred it when they were all wholeheartedly at one another’s throats. It was less confusing, in its way.
“It’s hard to leave the land,” Gray said, leaning back in his chair in a way that set alarms to ringing inside Brady. He cut a glance Ty’s way, and that made it worse. Because Ty was sprawled back in his chair, one arm draped over Hannah, and that big old grin of his flashing wide.
Terrific.
“Again,” Brady said, all drawl and bravado, “it’s really not that hard. You just drive away. With or without a cloud of dust, depending on how dramatic you’re feeling at the time.”
“That’s easy enough to do when you know someone else is tending your land, I imagine,” Gray said, evenly. “It’s lucky for you that I don’t leave this valley much. In fact, the only night I’ve spent away from this ranch that I can recall was my wedding night a year ago.”
“Thank you, Gray,” Brady said, grinning to take the sting out of it. Or some sting. “I think we all know that you’re the responsible one. Since birth.”
“I didn’t know you’d ever tried to help.” Gray’s gaze was steady and his voice direct. “I’m sorry. The truth is, I should have known there was more to the story than Dad ever told. Because there always is.”
“Amen,” Ty chimed in.
Brady stared back at his oldest brother, feeling the usual mix of resentment, frustration, and helpless admiration that characterized all interactions with Gray.
This was a classic example. How was he supposed to stay outraged at a person who looked him in the eye and apologized for something that wasn’t his fault?
“Don’t apologize for Dad,” Brady managed to say. “We’ll be here all night.”
“All night, all month, and straight on into the next millennium,” Ty agreed. “And that would still be nothing more than a good start.”
“You were right to take a piece out of me,” Gray continued. He nodded decisively. “I deserved it.”
Becca’s eyes went wide. She swallowed, then put her silverware down on her plate. Carefully.
“You’re freaking out your daughter,” Brady told him. “And me. I appreciate the apology, but you know what they say about gift horses.”
“I’m not the mouthy one in this scenar
io,” Gray replied, with a little curve in the corner of his mouth. And this time, Brady didn’t have to look at Abby, the human barometer, to determine that was Gray’s newly discovered lighthearted side making an appearance.
“Ty and I have been talking,” Gray continued. “And no, before you get your nose all out of joint, not behind your back. We’re not hiding anything from you.”
“That’s real convincing.”
“Easy there, Denver,” Ty said, amiably enough. “You don’t have to fight everyone. Maybe save it for people who are actually attacking you.”
“Sage advice from a man who, until a couple of months ago, was engaged in a desperate cage fight against every last thing in the known universe.”
But Ty only laughed. “I’m the voice of experience, baby brother. You should listen. Do as I say, not as I did.”
“Everybody does as you say and not as you do, sugar,” Hannah drawled from beside him. “That’s not exactly advice. More like common sense.”
Brady didn’t catch the look Ty threw his wife, but Hannah sure did. And she laughed, though her face looked more flushed than it had before.
“I figure I’ve been going about this the wrong way,” Gray said, taking control of the table again. “The fact is, I expected you to bail months ago.”
“I didn’t realize I had a reputation as a man who goes back on his word.” Brady barely kept his tone civil. And he had to all but bite his own tongue to keep from sounding defensive. “I can’t wait to see where the rest of this conversation is going.”
“You’ve been after me to diversify for a year, more or less.” Gray sat back in his chair with his arms crossed, looking like the Marlboro Man and some kind of judge all rolled into one. “But you know my feelings on that.”
“I do, indeed.”
“And I can’t say I’ve been overly sympathetic when you talk about what you sacrificed to be here, but it’s been pointed out to me”—Gray’s gaze moved from Abby to Ty, then back again—“repeatedly, that there’s a possibility I’m being stubborn on that. Particularly now that Ty and Hannah are looking to settle here, and it seems pretty clear that if we put the land up to a vote, you’d be outvoted.”
The Last Real Cowboy Page 18