Secret Nights with a Cowboy

by Caitlin Crews

  She was not always extended the same courtesy, because people knew her too and had their opinions.

  And maybe she took a little bit of pleasure in smiling the widest at the people who she knew judged her the most harshly, like Lucinda Early, reigning town dragon.

  Still, she was grateful when she finally made it up to Capricorn Books, Cold River’s only bookstore that was currently run by her friend Hope, and Hope’s sisters. The Mortimer family had been selling books here for three generations.

  Rae pushed through the door, the entry bell chiming above her. She expected to find Hope where she usually was, half hiding behind the mountains of books she liked to keep stacked on the counter as a barrier and an ever-expanding to-be-read pile. Instead, her friend’s voice floated from farther back in the store, indicating she was engaged with a customer.

  But this bookstore was Rae’s second home. She, Hope, and their other best friend, Abby, had spent half their lives here. When they’d been younger, Hope’s mother and aunt had run the place, and the three girls had whispered their secrets into each other’s ears in the depths of the stacks. Both Abby and Rae were from longtime Cold River families who lived outside of town in opposite directions. That made afternoons after school here in the bookstore convenient for everyone. Their families could pick them up at their leisure, later in the evening, and the three of them took their firm school day friendships and made themselves more like sisters.

  Because she considered herself family, Rae rounded the counter—taking care not to accidentally tip over any of the stacks of books—and made a beeline for the big, oversize armchair that sat behind the desk. It was currently occupied by Orion, a cat of enormous size and what Rae assumed would be a fearsome temper. If he could ever stir himself to display it.

  Instead, he merely gave her a baleful glare and refused to move from the high back of the chair.

  That was where Hope found her when she walked back to the front of the store with her customers in tow and a small armful of books. Hope began ringing up the books with a single raised eyebrow in Rae’s direction, but Rae knew it wasn’t because Hope was surprised to find her here. It was never surprising to find Rae here.

  When the bell jangled behind her customers, Hope came and dropped down onto the wide arm of the chair. And then all that was missing was Abby, who would historically have taken the other arm. The three of them had spent years jumbled up like this. Lying there like a heap of puppies, Hope’s mother had said.

  But Abby had a different life these days. Though she was still a manager at Cold River Coffee, just around the corner, she didn’t spend the kind of time she’d used to hanging out in town with her oldest friends in the world. She had a husband now. A teenage stepdaughter.

  And a baby who’d turned one at the end of August.

  A baby Rae loved so much it hurt.

  It actually hurt.

  “Your mood is way too loud,” Hope said after a while.

  “Matias is moving out of the house,” Rae informed her. “Apparently, this whole time he’s been home, he’s been remodeling one of the outbuildings to his specifications. Whatever that means.”

  “How enterprising. If I wanted to renovate an outbuilding, my only option would be that terrifying shed out back. Not really worth braving the inevitable spider situation.” Hope shuddered.

  “Living in town cuts both ways, I guess. No agricultural chores or barn duties, depending on what the land is used for. But no outbuildings to choose from, either.”

  “Better still, when winter comes, no getting snowed in on the wrong side of the pass.”

  “Is that in the plus column?” Rae asked. “Because I seem to remember you complaining that it wasn’t fair when Abby and I would miss school when the passes were closed, but you still had to go.”

  “That was sheer injustice,” Hope shot back.

  Rae reached up and tugged out the tight, professional ponytail she wore at work, rolling her shoulders while she let her hair down. And the longer she sat in this familiar chair, in this place where she’d always felt far more comfortable than in the house where she still lived, that gnawing, insistent knife-edged thing inside her seemed to throb.

  “Abby has her own family now,” she said softly, pretending to study her close-cropped nails that she always meant to spice up with a manicure, but never did. There was no point when she spent so much of her time with her hands in dirt. “She spent her entire life mooning around after Gray Everett, with literally zero hope of him ever noticing. Much less marrying her. Now she has his baby.”

  Hope sighed happily. “It never gets less amazing, does it?”

  “But what are we doing?” Rae asked, swerving her head around so she could really look at Hope. And too aware she was talking mostly to herself. “It’s a big joke, I know. You’re eternally single. I have a complicated past. But here we still are. Alone. Both of us still living in our mothers’ houses.”

  “My mother does not live in said house, thank you,” Hope said indignantly. “It’s completely different.”

  “But your sisters do. It’s not like it’s your house, is it?”

  “I’m not the one in this chair who’s living with her parents, that’s all I’m saying.”

  Rae rubbed at her face. “My baby sister lives all by herself in an apartment in Austin. Matias apparently built himself his dream house. I was the responsible, grown-up one, once upon a time. Yet I still live at home, forced to endure the endless hundred years’ war between my mother and grandmother. It’s against the natural order of things.”

  Hope shrugged, her expression carefully blank. “Then move out.”

  Because Hope wouldn’t call Rae out the way Matias had. They’d passed that point years ago. Rae had made it clear what she would and wouldn’t talk about, and her friends had acquiesced. But today, it was like this pretending—just like Matias had accused her—had infected her pulse. And was pounding around inside her limbs, making her feel edgy and uncertain and wrong.

  “I could do that,” she said quietly. “But if I move out of my parents’ house and I don’t move back into his house…”

  Her stomach knotted, her throat was much too tight, and she couldn’t finish the sentence. She felt winded again, the way she had when Matias had walloped her with this in the kitchen.

  Beside her, Hope’s eyes widened almost comically. “Are we … talking about him? For the first time in more years than I can count?”

  Rae wanted to tell her everything. But then, she always did. One of the reasons she didn’t like to talk about Riley was because she always wanted to unburden herself, at last. To take that sharp-edged weight she’d been carrying all this time and share it. When she couldn’t.

  If she hadn’t told him, how could she tell anyone else? The more time passed, the less she could imagine ever telling anyone. And the more she took it as a badge of honor, really, that people made all their assumptions about her when they had no idea what had really happened.

  Not her friends, who loved her unconditionally and staunchly, even if they didn’t understand. But Riley’s family, who she’d loved so much, who no longer spoke to her when they could avoid it. Her family, who had also stopped asking why, but had never quite treated her the same, either, and were always so disappointed. The whole freaking Longhorn Valley, who were more vocal and openly judgmental about the things they didn’t understand, like Lucinda Early and her pointed sniff on the walk here today.

  Threaded through it all were those secrets she’d decided to keep a long time ago. And the newer ones she told herself she regretted in the light of day.

  What if you told them at last? a voice inside whispered.

  But if Rae knew anything, it was that telling secrets was a risky business. And mostly not worth the trouble.

  As far as the world was concerned, pretty much nothing Rae had done since she’d married Riley Kittredge a month after she graduated from high school made sense. She’d decided she could live with that.


  That didn’t mean she had to live like this.

  “Okay, then,” Hope said mildly as the silence dragged on. “We can maintain the silence for another ten years, no problem. Whatever you want. You know I’m fully ride-or-die in this and all things.”

  Rae cleared her throat. “I’m not actually sure my personal life can be salvaged. Or solved. Or … anything, whether we talk about it or not.”

  And Rae was sure that she could see, swirling between them, all those things they never talked about. The suspicions she knew her friends had about her actual relationship with Riley these days. Their real opinions about how Rae had handled herself then and now, and no doubt a great many theories about what she should do about it all.

  But Hope didn’t say any of that. She waited.

  And when Rae didn’t say anything else, she leaned in and pressed her shoulder against Rae’s. “Maybe it’s time to fix it, Rae, whatever that looks like. Maybe it’s finally time.”

  The shop door opened, and Hope got to her feet, already smiling at whoever had come in.

  Rae stayed where she was. She wished Abby were here, because Abby was always so calm. Filled with the kind of quiet strength that made you think, if you were next to her, that it was actually your strength, too. Rae could use all the strength she could get, since she apparently had none where it counted.

  And the more she thought about Abby, the more she thought about Abby’s sweet little Bart. It had been getting consistently harder to think about anything else ever since he’d been born, but now he was less a squiggly baby and more of a person.

  Yesterday, Abby had come into the flower shop with Bart to preview his Halloween costume, an adorable lion that made him so happy he’d screamed with delight, and something inside her had shifted. And ached.

  Oh, how it ached.

  And now it seemed to bloom, straight on into something sharp and bright.

  I want that, something in her declared.

  Loud and clear.

  Cutting straight through the mess.

  Not Bart himself. Not Abby’s rancher husband, as remote as one of the mountains. But her own version of those things.

  She wanted the same things she’d always wanted. A crowded, cheerful house filled with family who loved each other as passionately as they argued with each other, one never overpowering the other, so it was all part of the same bright tapestry.

  As bright as all the flowers that filled her days.

  The opposite of her own family and their endless battles and silences, in other words.

  But if she wanted those things, if she was finally ready to move on the way she should have a long time ago, she knew what she had to do.

  The trouble was, she had never wanted to do it.

  “Why do you look like you’re plotting a war?” Hope asked when her customers had left with cheerful bags of books.

  “Just a little war,” Rae said softly, though it made that knife buried deep inside her slice at her. Deep, then deeper still, when she would have sworn there was nothing left to cut. “Just a tiny little war, hardly worth mentioning.”

  Hope smiled back at her, big and brilliant, but Rae had the feeling that neither one of them believed that. Not for a second.

  And later that night, she gathered up her courage and headed out into the foothills to face her demons.

  Just the one demon, really.

  Riley Kittredge, the boy she’d married, then left a hundred times, yet couldn’t manage to stay away from.

  Until now, because Matias was right.

  It was high time Rae let go, moved on, and got herself a life.

  2

  Even before the rattly old truck pulled into view, Riley Kittredge knew who was coming up his drive.

  It was after eleven o’clock at night on a Thursday. It could only be one person.

  He lived a long way out from town in the foothills of the Rockies, in a clearing carved out of the woods on the twenty acres that were his personal part of the land that had been in his family since the first Kittredge had settled here way back when. There were no neighbors aside from his own family members—none within miles—and nobody happened by.

  Folks had to be looking for him to find him.

  And one person in particular always knew exactly where to find him.

  Riley had only gotten home maybe a half hour before. He’d had dinner with his sister, Amanda, and his best friend, Brady—who was also Amanda’s husband—in the small carriage house they lived in down by the river in town. It was tucked back behind the barn he’d helped them renovate so Amanda could turn it into a kind of celebration of the local goods of Cold River and Colorado. That his baby sister had gotten together with Brady was something that had bothered Riley a whole lot when he’d caught them kissing last year, but he now viewed the two of them as meant to be. No one was more surprised than he was, but there was no denying they worked.

  As pretty much the reigning expert on relationships that didn’t work, Riley should know.

  When he’d filled up on about as much newly wedded happiness as he could choke down, they’d all walked up from the river that wound through the town to the Broken Wheel on Main Street. It was the nicer of the two bars in town, complete with decent food, live musical acts, and half of Cold River there to watch your every move on any given evening—a favorite local sport. The Coyote, by contrast, was housed in what had once been a bordello, was as dim as it was loud, and though everybody might know you there too, no one tended to talk much about it the next day.

  It had been a night like any other. Right up to and including Riley’s ex sitting at a table with one of her best friends, Hope Mortimer, acting as if he weren’t in the same room. Or even on the same planet.

  When both of them knew that even though Rae had moved out years ago for her own mysterious reasons—reasons she’d never explained to his satisfaction and he’d come to doubt she ever would—she’d be showing up later.

  Because she always showed up.

  The old truck pulled into the yard and stopped. Or maybe died at last, not that Riley was supposed to care about things like her safety in that rolling disaster any longer. She cut the engine, and there was nothing but the quiet of the thick October night this far out from civilization. There were stars up above, the rush of wind through the evergreens, and the scent of potential storms in the mountains high above. Another winter coming in fast, and here the two of them were, playing the same game.

  Every time, Riley told himself that this time he wasn’t going to let her in. Every time, he assured himself that this time he was going to put an end to it.

  This time, he was going to lay down the law.

  But he didn’t do that.

  You never do that, he mocked himself. You never will.

  He walked to his front door and yanked it open. Then stood there, waiting.

  Rae took her time getting out of her truck. Riley liked to think she was filled with as many second thoughts as he was, or maybe even more, since this entire situation was how she wanted it.

  But then, Riley was really good at making himself the martyr, he acknowledged with a little dark laugh he would have concealed if she were closer. The truth was, he’d always been perfectly capable of putting an end to this. He never had.

  So he stopped thinking about who was to blame and settled in, leaning against his doorjamb and folding his arms. And waiting to see what version of their little dance was on the menu tonight.

  Sometimes he thought he was a glutton for punishment. Other times he thought he was a genius, because he had all the heat and none of the hassle.

  Either way, here he was again, standing outside in the cold. It was bracing, though not as truly cold as it would get once November rolled in and sank its teeth in deep. The Longhorn Valley sat high in the Colorado Rockies and took its seasons seriously. There was no messing around, no creeping into late autumn bashfully. Sometimes the inevitable snowstorms waited there, up on the peaks, for winter to start. Other tim
es they howled down in the kind of serious winter preview that forced him to use ropes to get from his front door to his own barn.

  And sometimes the kind of storm that blew in was Rae Trujillo, who climbed out of her truck while he watched. She slid to the ground with that same compact grace that had gotten him in trouble in the first place.

  She was always the same kick to the gut.

  They’d known each other their entire lives. They’d been buddies when they were small, according to the photographs, but that had changed as they’d grown. The two years Riley had on her had seemed like more and more of a vast, unconquerable distance. They’d gotten less and less comfortable with each other, which Riley could trace directly to the day that little, tomboyish Rae, all of twelve years old, had turned up at a church picnic with brand-new curves.

  At a worldly, sophisticated fourteen, Riley had found the sight impossible to handle.

  So he hadn’t. It had taken them three more years and a lot of adolescent drama to get together. Scenes in parking lots. Intense conversations when she was too young to date and he was supposedly dating someone else. When he’d been a junior at Cold River High, one of his classmates had tried to take her to the prom, and it embarrassed Riley to this day that such a provocation had made him snap. He’d shoved Stephen Crow into a bank of lockers, shouted something filled with a young man’s testosterone, and had taken her to the prom himself.

  Though it had taken months to convince her deeply unamused parents that he, one of the Kittredge boys renowned for the kind of behavior parents of teenage girls weren’t likely to view favorably, could be trusted to take her out at all.