The Last Real Cowboy

by Caitlin Crews

  “Is that what you think?”

  “I told you that I loved you, Brady.” And the bravado and agitation that had got her here deserted her. It all blew away on a gust of cold air, and all that was left was her growing, painful awareness of her own vulnerability. She didn’t like exposing herself like this. But what else did she have? “And I told you that I was pretty sure you loved me too. And neither of those things mattered. You were saying goodbye.”

  The way he looked at her made her feel light-headed. “What I remember doing was kissing you when I shouldn’t have.”

  Amanda felt so many things then that she couldn’t have picked them apart if her life depended on it. It was all a big, messy snarl. And yet, somehow, she finally understood.

  He’d been so determined this past month to set things right. To take their scandal and make it a sweet story. She understood in a flash, then, that he’d been doing that for her. So what people remembered wasn’t Brady’s black eye, but those walks. Folks could speculate about what happened behind closed doors, but he’d balanced that out with what they’d seen. He’d created a counterargument.

  It was so sweet, she wanted to cry. Maybe she was crying.

  “I don’t think I love you because I was a virgin and I don’t know any better,” she told him now, because she was already too wide open. She felt like the sky, endless in all directions and gray straight through. “I loved you while we were having sex, and I love you even now that we’re not. It’s not going away. But, Brady.” And her voice cracked a little, because she wasn’t the sky after all. “I don’t think one person can do all the loving. I don’t think it works that way.”

  He took another step toward her, but she put up her hands. And somehow, they got tangled in his. Amanda thought that later, maybe, she would marvel that the cold made her shiver, but the heat of his fingers made her shake twice as hard.

  “It’s okay if you don’t love me,” she told him, and she wanted that to be true. She really did. “I mean, to be clear, I’ll probably hate you for it, but it’s okay. I would never want you to feel trapped. There’s no shotgun, and you don’t owe me anything. I’m the one who propositioned you.”

  “Amanda—”

  She tried to pull her hands away, but he didn’t let her. “I don’t think this is what you want. We should end it. For real this time.”

  “That’s not going to work,” Brady drawled, the look in his dark green eyes so intense, she forgot to feel queasy and exposed. Or to breathe. “You’re not the only one in love here. You never were. I’m completely, totally, head-over-heels in love with you, Amanda. I think you’re going to have to stay with me.”

  Then Amanda couldn’t tell anymore if she was the one who couldn’t breathe or if the world had collapsed all around them.

  She also didn’t care.

  “I’ve spent years going out of my way to not notice you,” Brady said, low and fierce. He pulled her even closer. “It was obviously a defense mechanism, because all it took was one glimpse of you where I wasn’t expecting you. One look at that freaking tank top, and I was done for. There was no pretending you were still a little girl anymore. And once I really saw you? That was it. I fell that fast, that hard.”

  “Brady…”

  “There is not a single thing on this earth that could make me go back on my word to your brother,” Brady said, urgent and intense. “Except you.”

  “But ever since Halloween…”

  “Listen to me, baby.” And she didn’t know which one of them moved, but she was in his arms again, and nothing else mattered. “You really are young. That’s not an insult, it’s a fact. You should go out there in your tight little tank tops and see what kind of trouble you can get into. That was what you wanted, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t know what I wanted.”

  “Yes, you do. And those are perfectly reasonable things to want. All those regrets and mistakes. All those adventures. You have all of that before you.”

  She wanted to scream at him that she knew what she wanted now, and that was what mattered. That she’d found herself the best adventure, and she didn’t need to sample others to know that. Amanda knew quality when she found it. She knew what suited her.

  But she couldn’t make her mouth work the way it should.

  And Brady was still talking, in that same fierce way. “But it turns out, I really am a selfish man. I want you to do every little thing that your heart desires, Amanda. But I want you to do them with me.”

  She couldn’t tell if she was sobbing or laughing, breathing, or maybe even dreaming. But his eyes were dark and green, and when he looked at her, the mountains moved. And the sky felt blue, even when, like today, it was a sullen snowstorm waiting to happen.

  Then he made the summer sun appear because he sank down before her on one knee.

  Amanda stopped worrying whether she was breathing or not. Maybe she said his name. Maybe she screamed it.

  It didn’t matter because he reached into the pocket of his coat and he pulled out a ring.

  Her heart, already working overtime, kicked into higher gear.

  Because she recognized it.

  “I went and saw your grandmother,” he told her, gazing up at her as if she were the sky. “We sat with her Bible and we looked through that family tree, looking for evidence that there had ever been an Everett and Kittredge match before. But no matter how we looked, we couldn’t find one. She figured old, founding families learned how to keep proper distances. I told her I had a better idea.”

  Until this moment, Amanda hadn’t realized that a person could be laughing and crying at the same time. The human version of a fox’s wedding, like her grandmother always said.

  “And she told me that regretfully, she didn’t think a whole lot of my father,” Brady continued. Almost gravely. “But she’d known my grandfather Silas, and a finer, more upstanding man had been hard to find around these parts. She wondered if I thought I took more after him.”

  “She did like your grandfather. She’s always said that.”

  “I said I expected that was a bit of a trick question. A man like my father would claim that, of course, he was like my grandfather. While men like my grandfather would be too humble. I’d have to settle for hoping I took the best of each man.”

  “You’re the best of all men,” Amanda whispered fiercely. “And you don’t have to keep proving yourself to my family.”

  “Don’t you understand, baby? I’m not proving myself to your family. I love your family, but it won’t keep me up at night if I’m not their favorite person every minute of the day.” Brady kept his gaze trained on her. “But you’re a different story. You might have moved out. You might have defied them by working at the Coyote. You might like to poke at them, whenever possible. But you love them.”

  “Sometimes more than other times. And lately not at all.”

  He didn’t smile, but still, the way he looked at her warmed her. “You could never be happy with a man who didn’t take the time to make sure they approved. Not for me, but for you. It matters to you what they think, or you would have dated someone just to date them. Years ago.”

  He held the ring out between them. “Your grandmother told me this was a ring that had been passed down in your family for a long while. And that if you didn’t like it, I could go do what young men did and try to express myself in carats.”

  He took her hand and slid the ring onto her finger. It was an old gold with a pretty ruby in the center. And she knew without having to ask that this was the ring she’d seen on her grandmother’s hand when she was younger. The one that the original Kittredges had made out of gold from the California rush and a ruby from the old country.

  “It’s perfect,” she whispered. “You’re perfect.”

  “I never want you to forget where you came from,” Brady told her. “Where we came from. This valley and these fields and all the people who came before us and made us who we are. Including your brothers. That’s what this ring is.”r />
  “I love it, Brady. I love you.”

  “But we also have a future,” Brady said, then. “And the future is all ours. I want so many things from you, Amanda. I want love. I want more mornings waking up with you next to me. I want a house on our own land, with a beautiful view and the sound of our kids roughhousing from the other side of a firmly locked door.”

  They both smiled at that, but he kept going.

  “I want that barn of yours to take off. I want my park project to bring in every single tourist from Denver and beyond. I want to take all that we’ve been given, put our spin on it, and hand it on to the next generation. I want to teach our children that it’s always okay to go out there and see what the world has to offer, but that this is their home, and they can always come back here. And that we hope they will.”

  To her surprise, he pulled out another ring. And as he slid it onto her finger, moving it into place with the first ring, she understood that this was the kind of methodical he meant. That he’d planned for these two rings to sit there, side by side. One, the old, historical Kittredge ruby. And the other, a gleaming diamond she knew he must have chosen himself, set in a delicate rose gold that played off the ruby, then somehow, together, made one. Better than before.

  Just like them.

  “Brady,” she tried to say, though she was sobbing and laughing and wasn’t sure she’d ever stop. “It’s so beautiful. They’re both so beautiful. You’re so beautiful.”

  “Amanda,” he said, still there on one knee, though he was smiling now. “Will you marry me? I want you to—”

  “Yes,” she said, too fast and too wild. She sank down, so they were both kneeling there on the cold ground, but she couldn’t even feel it. There was only him. There was only this. “Yes and yes and yes, to everything. I love you.”

  His mouth was on hers, then, and his hands were in her hair. And she was pressing herself against him, desperate and giddy. There was water on her face, but his mouth was so hot, she didn’t care.

  Then Brady pulled back and hauled her to her feet.

  “I love you, Amanda,” he said, very seriously, as if these were their vows. “I will spend the rest of my life making up for that morning in the barn.”

  “You don’t have to do that,” she said in the same tone. “Because I love you too. And we’re going to have those babies, and a lock on our door to make more whenever we like. And every other good thing under the sun because it’s Thanksgiving. And you love me. And that’s the only thing in the world I can think of that’s better than my grandma’s sweet potatoes.”

  “You humble me.” And there was laughter in his voice, but Brady’s gaze was serious.

  “While you make me feel like I can fly,” Amanda whispered. “From one perfect Brady moment to the next. And I can think of a way you could make us both fly pretty high, right now.”

  She braced herself for him to decline. To talk to her some more about the virtues of waiting.

  But instead, Brady smiled.

  “You do have my rings on her finger,” he drawled.

  “I do, indeed.”

  “And if I’m not mistaken,” he said, drawing her with him as he moved backward, heading toward his truck, “your education when it comes to the joys of pickup trucks in remote fields is patchy. At best.”

  “I’ve probably forgotten everything you’ve taught me,” she said solemnly, then laughed as he picked her up. He tossed her through the open front door into his truck. Then crawled in after her. He slammed his door, turned on the ignition, and then jacked up his heater.

  Then he turned to her on that bench seat with pure wickedness in his eyes again.

  At last.

  And it was truly the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen.

  “I’m not afraid to do a little remedial work with you, Amanda,” he told her solemnly. “That’s how much I love you.”

  She was smiling so wide, it hurt. “I appreciate your sacrifice. To education.”

  And as if the land wanted to celebrate with them, it started to snow.

  Then, out there in the fields, beneath a sky that couldn’t begin to contain how much they loved each other, Amanda and Brady stopped worrying about the past and started working on their future.

  Together.

  In the best way they knew how.

  23

  It was the best Thanksgiving Brady had ever had.

  Possibly because he’d never had so many thanks to give.

  That Saturday, his family gathered to celebrate Abby and Gray’s first year of marriage. And this time, Amanda was by his side with his rings on her finger, right where she belonged.

  “I’m proud of you,” Abby told her when she arrived, giving her a hug. “I’ve been meaning to tell you that all month.”

  “That wasn’t an entrance,” Hannah drawled, grinning wide. “That was a whole stinking show!”

  Amanda was flushed with happiness, there with the women who would be the sisters she’d never had, so Brady didn’t ask what that meant. Not then.

  But later, stretched out in that bed above the Coyote, he learned all about what it meant to make an entrance, Hannah-style.

  “I think you have it covered, baby,” he told her, his voice a little rough after all that making up for lost time they’d been doing. “When you walk in a room, there’s nobody else there as far as I’m concerned.”

  Then he showed her what he meant.

  Again.

  Amanda worked that Sunday, but then went ahead and quit the Coyote the following week. “Not because you don’t like me working there. But because I don’t like working there enough to keep doing it.”

  “Noted, killer,” he drawled.

  Then he thanked her at some length, out in the woods. In the back of his pickup with a whole lot of blankets and nothing around for miles but the wind.

  In furtherance of her education, of course.

  Brady went with her to give her notice that first week of December and wasn’t surprised when Harry did nothing more than roll his eyes.

  “Can’t say I’m shocked,” the grizzled old man said. “Though I thought it would be her brothers in here with her, telling her to quit. Not you.”

  Brady shrugged. “Life is full of surprises.”

  Harry cracked a smile. “Ain’t that the truth.” He shifted his gaze to Amanda. “You can have the apartment until the end of the year. But then I’m going to have to get a new bartender, and that apartment’s pretty much the only draw.”

  “I understand,” Amanda assured him.

  But later, she confessed that she really didn’t want to move back home with her parents.

  “It was one thing before, when I didn’t know any better,” she said. “But now? It would feel like backsliding.”

  Brady thought of that bedroom in the ranch house, empty of everything but Amos’s ghost. And agreed.

  It only made him work that much harder on her barn. And the carriage house out back.

  One cold December evening, when he’d come back into town to do some more work while Amanda had one of her movie nights with Kat, he looked up from his hammering to find all four Kittredge brothers there. Coming toward him.

  “If this is a hazing ritual, is it okay we put it off?” He smiled lazily. “I’m meeting your sister in a little while, and you know how she gets when you rough me up. She likes my face pretty.”

  They all glared at him in unison.

  Until Riley grinned. “Idiot.”

  Zack did not grin. “Amanda seems to think she’s moving home when her lease is up. I’m betting you have other ideas about where my baby sister should live.”

  Brady reminded himself that he wasn’t afraid of these men he’d called friends his whole life. But there were four of them. And they were big.

  Still, a man had to stand tall in his own space. “I do, indeed.”

  “Let’s get to it, then,” Jensen said darkly. Then ruined it by laughing. “I don’t want to hear about your face, pretty or o
therwise, ever again.”

  “Amen,” Connor agreed.

  Which was how, come Christmas Eve, he took his beautiful fiancée to the carriage house off the back of the barn that he and her brothers had fixed up. They’d made a sweet little home for two people just starting out, far away from meddling family members or too many small-town eyes.

  Better yet, no one had gotten a black eye out of it.

  “Brady…” Amanda turned in a circle in the cozy front room where he’d even put up a Christmas tree. “How did you do all this? It’s perfect.”

  “How do you think?” He grinned at her. “Magic, obviously. And four big, strong elves. It’s Christmas Eve.”

  Her eyes gleamed that gold he loved so much. She came into his arms and she tipped her head up, and he wished he’d known that it was possible to love like this. He wished he’d had the slightest idea.

  Because he would have found her earlier, if he’d known. He would have moved heaven and earth.

  “It’s Christmas Eve,” she said very solemnly. “That means it’s been the full year you promised Gray. What do you think? Are you going to stay?”

  He dropped his head to hers and tasted her. Then pulled back to get another hit of that smile. “You couldn’t make me leave.”

  Amanda’s smile got even bigger. “Every time I think we’ve hit the best Brady moment ever, there’s another one.”

  “There always will be,” he promised her.

  That night, they lay in bed in their first home together while the snow fell outside. They talked about getting married in the spring, because neither one of them wanted to wait.

  “Ever again,” Amanda said, so vehemently it made him laugh.

  They decided they’d do it down on that rock by the river that had always been Brady’s favorite place in the valley.

  “Because,” Amanda said, propping herself up on his chest to gaze down at him, “that’s where it started, really.”

  Someday, they would build there, Brady thought, and make his first refuge a part of their forever home.