“This is a major moment in a person’s life, Brady. Whatever happens, screaming on an altar or something painless because of horses or whatever you said, I’m going to remember this night for the rest of my life.” She realized she was frowning at him. “No pressure, though.”
“Amanda.” And the look on his face made her shudder again, this time in sheer delight. “Every night with me is memorable. Very few involve altars. I promise.”
Then she was laughing, despite herself, as he rolled over and took her mouth again.
He kissed her, lazily and thoroughly, until she forgot that she might possibly be more anxious about this than she’d wanted to admit.
But she couldn’t focus too much on that, because Brady proceeded to teach her everything she didn’t know.
He kissed his way down the length of her body, taking his time and clearly enjoying the opportunity to explore. He worked his way back up, then settled himself between her legs—holding her thighs apart with his shoulders.
And he grinned when her eyes went wide.
“Trust me,” Brady said.
She did.
He used his mouth until she fell apart, then he did it again, until she was making strange noises out of her throat, flushed hot and wild with it. Only then did he roll off the bed again, and finally—finally—take off his own clothes.
Amanda was too busy trying to come back together from all the millions of pieces he’d torn her into to appreciate him the way she wanted to do. Then it was all a kaleidoscope of physical sensations. The reality of an actual naked man—of Brady—who pulled her over him so she could wiggle all around, feeling parts of herself she’d never understood were erogenous zones pressed against parts of him.
His chest was roughened with hair where she was smooth. He was big with long, hard muscles where she was soft. He had planes, angles, and ridges where she had curves.
She was delirious. She was delighted.
She had imagined a lot of ultimate Brady moments, but this was better.
So much better, she thought she might cry, though she wasn’t the least bit sad.
He turned her this way, then that. He used his mouth again, and his astonishing fingers. She made noises she would have sworn could never possibly come out of her. One time she clapped her hand over her mouth, not sure whether she should apologize or laugh, and Brady kissed her fingers away.
Then kissed her too.
“That’s the good stuff,” he murmured, there against her mouth. “You don’t ever want to hide the good stuff.”
Amanda had never thought of herself as a physical creature. Not really. The closest she got to it was when she was riding Cinnamon, the two of them fused together and made into one. She’d always loved the power of it, and how close she felt to flight.
But this was even better.
Brady fished a packet out of his jeans. And Amanda sprawled there, her heart thumping and her head spinning, watching him roll a condom onto himself.
There were too many new things to keep making lists, but she couldn’t seem to stop herself. She’d never seen that part of a man. Now she felt it against her, and he let her touch him too, but only for a moment. And that was surprising as well. Satin on steel and yet still proudly male.
She loved it.
Brady stretched himself out on top of her, and she felt the tip of him notch there between her legs.
“Are you ready?” he asked.
She meant to laugh, but it came out as more of a gasping sound. “I don’t know how to answer that.”
“That’s okay. You’re not supposed to know.”
“Is this like a count-of-three scenario?” Amanda’s voice was perhaps overly bright. “I can count down, if you want.”
“I got it.” Brady was grinning again, and there was a light in his dark eyes that made her whole chest feel full and giddy. He settled himself against her and leaned forward, brushing her hair back from her face and then kissing her once again.
That same solemn, sweet kiss that struck her as a kind of vow. “Thank you,” he said. “For deciding it should be me.”
“You’re welcome.” She bit her lip, then stretched a bit, down to her toes, because she felt things, but she didn’t know how to tell the difference between all the things she felt. “You haven’t done it yet, have you? Because so far, Brady, there’s a whole lot of talk but I’m still a v—”
He thrust forward then, his hard male flesh breaching her, then pushing in. Then farther in still.
Oh God, then even farther—
She felt him nudge up against something deep inside her, and he stopped, and maybe she was actually crying a little, and that was it.
Brady was inside her.
His grin took on a dangerous edge.
“No,” he said. “You’re not still.”
And then he … waited.
It took Amanda a shudderingly taut moment to realize that, too, was a gift he was giving her.
He waited, and she became aware again.
Of the fact that she’d tensed up, everywhere. That her back was arched and her fingers were clenched down, hard, on his arms. She took a breath, but all she could feel was that stretching inside. That almost unbearable fullness.
How had she never considered anything besides the potential for that initial tearing that she’d read so much about? Why did no one talk about this? The feeling of being crowded, intimately. Of being impossibly filled. Connected, shockingly, to another person who was right there. It all teetered just this side of too much.
Still he waited.
Brady smoothed her hair back again and studied her face, but he didn’t move.
So she did, because there was something growing inside her, rolling, expanding, and she was terribly afraid that she would scream. Or sob. Push him off her—
But when Amanda moved, it eased a bit. Or changed.
She did it again, rocking her hips the way she had when she’d sat astride him in his truck. And that felt different, so she kept doing it.
There was something about the movement. About the drag when she pulled herself off him, then moved back close.
She was barely moving at all, and yet it felt momentous. Huge. And the more she did it, the more it seemed to shimmer, making her start to glow. There where they were connected, and everywhere else too.
The glowing led straight back into all that heat and longing.
That was when she was finally able to tell he’d been holding himself so rigidly this whole time. So still.
“You okay?” Brady asked, his voice husky and deep, like it cost him something to hold himself back like that.
Amanda wanted to say she thought she was okay. Or she hoped she was. She wanted to rattle off every last bit of sensation she was experiencing, and make him tell her what it meant. She wanted to slow it down and speed it up, take it apart and dive deeper into it.
So she nodded because she wasn’t sure what would happen if she tried to speak.
Then she forgot that she’d wanted to in the first place, because Brady began to move.
All the other times he’d built her up and taught her how to shatter had been leading to this. All of that had been fun, but this—this was everything.
She could feel him inside her. Around her and above her. There was nothing in the world but him, her, this. There was the rhythm of it, the deep slide, and the wild, impossible fire that lit her up, inside and out.
Amanda surrendered to it, completely, and it didn’t feel like surrender. It felt like flying.
It went on and on.
Brady kept going until she was sobbing out his name, and only then did he reach between them and press down until she exploded. Far more intensely than all the times he’d tossed her over that edge before.
She felt him keep going, faster and wilder, until she heard him cry out too. Then bury himself deep within her, at last.
Her heart was a mad drum in her chest, and she could feel his too. Amanda had wanted this. She had g
one after it, single-mindedly.
And she had finally lost her virginity, as planned.
But as she lay there in her bed, Brady stretched out on top of her and pressing her down deliciously into her mattress, her heart kept kicking at her.
Until she realized it wasn’t the only thing that hurt.
Though hurt was much too small and sharp a word to describe how she felt. How immense it all was. How layered.
None of it was new.
Of course it was Brady, a voice in her said. It was always going to be Brady. When you think of men, you think of him.
Like no other men existed. Because they didn’t. Not for her.
The truth rolled through her like thunder.
Until Amanda understood that she might have lost her innocence tonight, at last, but she’d lost her heart a long time ago.
Long before it had ever occurred to her that this could happen between them.
“Are you okay?” Brady asked again, his head near hers. He shifted, bringing her against his side as he turned.
“I’m good,” Amanda assured him. Or maybe herself.
She sounded convincing too.
Then she slipped a hand over her heart, told herself sternly that she was absolutely not in love, and ordered herself to go to sleep. Now.
Before she ruined everything and told him.
14
Gray and Ty had given him land, and leave to do with it as he pleased.
Amanda had given him her virginity.
Brady should have been happy. Or content, at the very least. All of a sudden, he had everything he’d ever wanted and more than he’d dreamed possible.
Too bad it all sat a little funny.
Maybe he really was his own worst enemy.
He preferred to blame his dead father, or try to get into it with the old man’s ghost. He’d much rather rail against his overbearing older brothers. Get a little bourbon in him, and he might even shout at the coming winter or throw stones at the moon.
But that all seemed a little foolish now.
October came in with an early snowstorm, then a fickle return to summerlike temperatures. Everybody roamed around muttering about the mountains, and out in the fields, ranchers took the warning for what it was and started getting ready for the inevitable winter.
Brady did too.
He sat with his brothers in the evenings, maps of their property spread out before them across the dining room table where Becca and Abby sometimes gathered to do projects of one sort or another. He could have used the table in the kitchen, but he hated that thing. He refused to plan good things on the same refashioned barn door where his father had spent so many nights encoding his nastiness into that will of his.
“What kind of terrain do llamas prefer?” Gray asked one night as he looked over Brady’s shoulder at the best, current map of Everett land, not precisely smirking.
“Llamas like to be close to the house, I hear,” Ty replied, deadpan, from his other side.
“Keep it up,” Brady drawled. “You might look out the window one morning and find a herd of them spitting at you.”
He still had no particular interest in llamas, though part of him wanted to get a few for the sheer pleasure of messing with Gray. But that would be childish. That was the trouble with what Gray had done. Brady had what he’d always said he wanted. Now he had to figure out which of the many ideas Gray had shot down to run with—and it had to be the one that would work.
Because this was Brady’s one shot to prove himself.
To any lingering ghosts as well as to his brothers.
And maybe to himself too.
But October hunkered down over Cold River, veering between winter and summer, making Brady feel better about how torn he felt. On every topic.
He’d made himself a lot of promises where Amanda was concerned. That night in her apartment had been a sweet, impossible madness, and part of him wanted to vow up and down that he would never do anything like that again.
Once was enough. Once was completing the bargain they’d made. Anything beyond that one time was … dangerous.
He assured himself he wasn’t foolish enough to go back for more. He’d never been much for repeats anyway. Why start now?
“Really?” Amanda asked the next night he appeared at her door well after the bar closed, though her eyes gleamed. “I thought I already got my education.”
“Education is a never-ending process, Amanda.” Brady backed her inside and kicked the door shut behind them. “It can take whole lifetimes.”
“We better get started.” Amanda wrapped her arms around his neck, arching her body into his in a way that made them both sigh a little. “After all, you’re very old. You could die any time.”
He made her pay for that. Repeatedly.
For a while then, as the October weather waffled between snowstorms and callbacks to summer, but got colder every night—a lot like Brady, really—life was okay. More than okay. There was finally harmony between the Everett brothers. It wasn’t as if they stopped poking at one another, but it all felt different when Brady knew they were taking him seriously at the same time. Or giving him space to fail spectacularly, anyway, which amounted to about the same thing.
He scoped out various parcels of land he might claim as his, trying to figure out which one he liked best. He started going back over the variety of different business plans he’d come up with over the years, trying to decide what would be the best tactic to take, now that he’d been here almost a full year and he was looking at diversification from the inside instead of from down in Denver.
One night, there was another big storm rattling around outside like October was trying to remind them all how intense the winters could get here. The family stayed in, gathered in the living room with a fire dancing in the grate and enough bright light to beat back the encroaching dark.
It was getting harder to remember how grim this house had been when Brady was growing up. Gray was pushing those memories back by the simple, revolutionary act of living here with his family and not being miserable.
Brady probably wouldn’t have believed it if he didn’t see it right there before his own eyes.
Baby Bart liked to be held, so Gray had him in the crook of his arm tonight while he watched the news. Abby and Becca sat on one of the couches together, fussing over a crochet pattern while trying to work out where they’d gone wrong in an afghan the two of them were making.
Ty and Hannah had taken Jack back out to their bunkhouse after dinner, because they liked to keep him to a strict bedtime—storm or no storm.
Mommy and Daddy like their evenings toddler-free, Hannah had said once, with that big laugh of hers. And before your mind gets all dirty, we also like to talk to each other in big, old grown-up words every now and again.
Whether they were talking to each other or communicating in other, more physical ways, that, too, was a far cry from the evenings Brady recalled when their father would shout at his current woman until she broke down and sobbed. Or started throwing things back at him. Or worse.
Brady was kicked back in the armchair by the fire with his laptop cracked open as he scanned through his business plans and proposals, aware that he was less creeped out by all this domesticity than he might have been before.
And creeped out wasn’t the right term. It was more that all this congenial quiet usually made him restless. Edgy. He’d never been one for settling down—possibly because he was always braced for the telltale sounds of his father in the next room, muttering over that will. Or pushing his chair back from the only table he couldn’t break when he flipped it, then swaggering drunkenly into the rest of the house to cause trouble and lasting damage.
“If you’re heading in a dude ranch direction,” Gray drawled when the newscast was over, “I know I promised I wouldn’t get in your face about whatever you choose to do, but you might want to give me a heads-up. So I can be prepared.”
“There’s nothing wrong with a dude ranch.”
Brady smirked. “It brings in money and tourists all at once.”
It was deeply entertaining to watch Gray fight to keep his expression blank, if not entirely judgment-free. “That’s not the direction you’re heading, is it?”
“It’s not. Though I’m tempted to change my mind because you look so horrified at the thought.”
Over on the couch, Becca and Abby exchanged a glance and laughed.
“I don’t like random people on my land,” Gray said, not looking at his wife or daughter. “I’m old school that way.”
Brady laughed. “You’re old school in every way, brother.”
“Dad is so old school he doesn’t know there’s a new school,” Becca chimed in.
“Careful, Abby,” Gray warned his wife before she had a chance to join in too. Though his eyes gleamed as he gazed at her over the top of their baby’s head. “Be very, very careful.”
“I didn’t know Gray in school,” Abby said primly. “Any school, old or new.”
Becca turned her laugh on her stepmother. “Good save.”
It wasn’t until later, when Brady was back in the bedroom that felt more like a tomb these days, that he allowed himself to admit the moment had been … nice. Truly nice, the way he’d always imagined families were supposed to be. The way the Everett family never had been.
You should be past all this, he chided himself.
But maybe that was the trouble. There was no getting past anything when you were still living in the middle of it.
He sat and called Amanda. He told himself it was a habit he’d gotten into because the weather was so iffy this time of year. He tried not to question why he sometimes called her on clear nights too.
Though he hadn’t told her about the land. About what Gray and Ty had done. And he certainly hadn’t told her he was staying. He couldn’t have said why.
Nothing he did involving Amanda stood up to much scrutiny.
“I know, I know,” she said when she picked up. “It’s snowing out there, isn’t it?”
“The pass might be open. It’s not coming down that hard.” He thought about Gray and Abby out there in the warm, cozy living room. “But it would be real hard to defend a decision to drive into town on a night like this.”
The Last Real Cowboy Page 20