Secret Nights with a Cowboy

by Caitlin Crews

  Amanda’s eyes were gleaming. “You in the Flower Pot was questionable enough. But then there was the Broken Wheel.”

  “Not that it’s any of your business, but Rae and I have come to an understanding,” Riley said in an attempt to cut this off. “You don’t have to go around pretending that you don’t know her, the way you’ve been doing for years.”

  It was Amanda’s turn to stiffen, then act like she hadn’t. “I don’t pretend that I don’t know her. I just don’t linger.”

  “Call it whatever you want. Rae and I are good. You want to be good with her, have at. If you don’t, that’s your choice.” He frowned at her. “And why are we talking about her when we’re supposed to be talking about me donating riding lessons?”

  Amanda rolled her eyes. “Do you really think that’s going to work? You make statements and we’re all supposed to forget your entire history together?”

  Riley stared at her. Stonily.

  Eventually, Amanda sighed. “Do you want to offer single lessons or a series?”

  “I’m here to support you, Amanda. Whatever that looks like.”

  Amanda laughed. “Point taken, big brother.”

  She didn’t ask him about Rae again, but he was still relieved when Brady showed up a little while later. After Amanda had extracted a promise for a series of five lessons as well as a separate group trail ride, as soon as weather permitted. An investment of time Riley definitely wouldn’t have made if the gala were being run by Marianne Minton, the way it had been the last few years. The forbidding widow of one of the town’s few decent lawyers hadn’t known how best to extort Riley or the Bar K. Not the way his kid sister did.

  “I was going to come out to the park next,” Riley said, lifting his chin in Brady’s direction.

  “Good,” Brady replied easily. “I was just heading out there now.”

  And Riley headed out to wait for his friend in the main part of the barn, because he might fully support them, but that didn’t mean he needed to stand around watching Brady stick his tongue down his little sister’s throat.

  When the two of them emerged a few minutes later, Amanda looked flushed and Brady looked amused, and Riley stopped imagining anything else right there. In a hurry.

  “Ride with me,” Brady said as they went outside. “Unless you’re in a rush to get back?”

  “Not today. Jensen is sweet-talking a new boarding client who wants us to put up his entire stable over the holidays. He prefers to do it when I’m not around, if you can believe it.”

  “Not much of a sweet talker, are you?”

  Riley didn’t quite grin as he swung into Brady’s truck. “I try.”

  His best friend laughed. “You do not. You like being known for being bullheaded.”

  “It weeds out potential issues before they become problems.” Riley was more than fine with being called bullheaded. “What’s not to like?”

  Riley settled in as Brady drove him out of town. Over the pass into the cold fields where Kittredges and Everetts and the old Douglas farming family had been tending the land for generations. But instead of heading toward the Everett ranch house or the Bar K, he headed toward his park.

  Brady had always had a lot of big ideas, unlike Riley, who had lived and breathed horses since he was small. It had only ever been a question of how to work with horses. There had never been any ifs. But Brady had been different. He’d gone off to college in the city. He’d made something of himself. And these days, he was the kind of dreamer who liked to have a business plan in hand. After his father had died and left the family ranch to Brady and his two brothers, it had taken him a while to convince his older brothers that his ideas had merit, but he’d done it. The park was the first time they’d agreed to let him do his own thing. Brady wasn’t walking away from the ranch that required the combined work of all of the Everetts and their families in one form or another, because that was a lot of black Angus, but his park was adjacent to it.

  Literally.

  Brady and Amanda had gotten married out here on a rock overlooking the river on a pretty April day. Since then, Brady had transformed the little piece of Everett land that he’d claimed as his own. He’d spent spring whipping it into shape before summer came and campers made their way up from the city. He’d put in campsites and marked out hiking trails, and he was only getting started.

  Riley couldn’t help but be impressed. Especially when he’d never had those kinds of dreams. He’d always known exactly who he was and what he wanted. And nothing on that list had changed since he was seventeen.

  Not one thing.

  “Are you really going to build a hotel out here?” Riley asked when they stop by the main entry. Currently, it wasn’t much more than a kind of ranger station, where guests could check in, pay, then head on in to enjoy what had been, until now, a private piece of the beautiful Colorado landscape.

  Brady shrugged. “People paid three times the going rate for private campsites here, with the guarantee that there would be no noise or neighbors, because we have enough space to spread them all out. We don’t allow RVs. And there’s the option of a site with a cabin to keep the elements out. I have to think that if I offered a higher-end experience, people would want to pay for that too.”

  “Imagine paying to camp,” Riley said with a laugh.

  Brady laughed too. “I know.”

  Because they’d grown up out here. The land was part of who they were. They’d slept beneath the stars more times than Riley could count. They’d lived their lives out in the elements, born to big skies and mountains that claimed whole horizons.

  Brady drove them through the entry, waving at his man at the counter, then heading deeper into his park. Riley was still staring out his window at the Rockies, towering in the distance with winter already sprawled across the peaks like a crown. “There are campgrounds all over the place. It’s all national forest land in the hills.”

  “Not everybody is as comfortable in the great outdoors as we are,” Brady said as he drove. “There are a lot of people down in Denver who like living there because it’s close to the outdoors without actually being inconvenient about it. My park gives them the opportunity to have the best of both worlds.”

  “I’ll admit I thought both you and Amanda were crazy. Shows what I know.”

  Brady smirked. “Very little as I recall. Since birth.”

  Riley invited his best friend to perform an unlikely anatomical feat. Brady declined. Then they spent an enjoyable hour or so saying very little while they went from cabin to cabin, closing them all down for the winter and making sure the small, spare structures were likely to remain standing when the heavy snows came in. Soon, by the look of the distant whitecapped peaks.

  When Brady headed back toward town, Riley lounged in the passenger seat of the truck and watched the night come in early, falling like a curtain over this land their ancestors had fought and died for. And somehow felt more at peace than he had in a long while.

  “So,” Brady said as they started to climb the hill toward town.

  “No,” Riley replied, not even looking over him. “Stop right there.”

  “Friends? Really?”

  “I’m not having this conversation.”

  That didn’t appear to concern Brady much. “On what planet are you and Rae Trujillo friends? You’ve never been friends. You’ve never been anything close to friends. Do you remember the last time you decided you were going to be friends with her?”

  “I remember the time I said I wasn’t going to have this conversation. Literally five seconds ago.”

  “You don’t have to say anything, Riley. I remember fine. It was fall of our junior year. You got together with Andrea Fields at homecoming. A dream come true by any measure. But what did you do?”

  “Andrea Fields.” Riley couldn’t help but appreciate the memory. “She only dated seniors. Until me.”

  “You mean, until you decided that you should really lean in hard to your friendship with your freshman bu
ddy in study hall.”

  “Rae was an excellent student.”

  “Not really the point. Remind me what happened between you and Andrea Fields again?”

  The inarguably succulent Andrea had dumped him unceremoniously for a graduating senior. But what Riley remembered about that time wasn’t Andrea Fields. It was Rae. Cute, maddening, fascinating Rae.

  It was always Rae.

  “This is all ancient history,” he said. “I think you might have been more into Andrea Fields than I was.”

  “Everyone was more into Andrea Fields than you were,” Brady retorted. “I know this because everyone else would have actually been with Andrea Fields instead of what you did, which was spend all your time with your supposed platonic freshman friend.”

  “If I wanted to go to a high school reunion, I would do that,” Riley replied. “I don’t.”

  His best friend sighed.

  “I don’t consider myself a dumb man,” Brady said as they reached the crest of the hill, where Cold River was spread out before them in the early dark, glittering like a bright jewel. “But it surprised me how quickly a smart man can turn dumb in the face of a certain, specific provocation.”

  Riley rubbed at his face and prayed for deliverance. “Are you … talking about my sister?”

  “You’re smart about a lot of things, Riley,” Brady replied quietly. Too quietly to dismiss. “But Rae Trujillo has never been one of them.”

  Riley was reckoning with that parting shot when Brady dropped him back at his truck, leaving him to his own devices. What he should have done was drive straight on out of town. Jensen had left him a couple of messages about work issues, but nothing that couldn’t wait. There was no reason that Riley needed to call him back, or stick around town in case he came in for the evening, or even head out to the ranch to hunt him down.

  And there was definitely no good reason he should find himself in the Broken Wheel, ordering himself a beer and a burger when he had a perfectly good house out in the foothills and a fridge full of food.

  He already had the beer and was waiting on the burger when someone stood next to him. With such silent intent that he knew it was Matias before he looked over.

  “Beer?” he asked his brother-in-law. Or former brother-in-law, depending how he looked at the thing.

  Riley found he did not want to look at anything.

  “Won’t say no,” Matias replied.

  Jackson—who Riley had liked well enough until he’d had his eyes all over Rae—slid Matias a beer at Riley’s signal, kept a wary distance from Riley, and retreated back down to the other end of the bar.

  And for a while, Riley and Matias stood there in a companionable silence.

  “I just moved my sister into the Mortimer house,” Matias offered sometime later. Riley said nothing. Matias took another pull of his beer. “Seems like information you might want to have.”

  Riley reminded himself that this was all part of the plan. The plan that had come to him when he was galloping back down the trail out on his property, trying to outrun a snowstorm. He’d failed, of course. Because no one could outrun the weather. Not when it had a mind of its own like it did in these parts. It would do what it liked, and did.

  By the same token, he’d tried arguing with Rae for years. It was time he took a different tack.

  She wasn’t wrong about things needing to change. What she was wrong about was how to go about changing them.

  Riley had meant every word he’d said to her in the Flower Pot. Well. Almost every word. She wanted to get out there and try to date and do her level best to move on. He had every intention of helping her. Not because he had any interest in seeing his wife date some other guy. But because he didn’t think she was going to care much for the experience.

  If he told her that right now, she wouldn’t believe him. It was something she was going to need to face on her own, and he was more than happy to do what was necessary to help her face it.

  But that didn’t mean it didn’t bother him that she’d moved again. And was now under yet another roof that wasn’t his.

  It ate him up.

  “Thanks for keeping me in the loop,” he said to Matias, trying to sound at peace with it all.

  But clearly failed, because the other man laughed. Then clinked his bottle of beer against Riley’s before sinking back into blessed silence.

  It took Riley longer still—the length of his meal, a couple of conversations with friends and neighbors who happened by—to accept that he wasn’t there for any good reason. That he should take himself home before he did something stupid, because his good reason was apparently unpacking boxes at her friend’s house down the block.

  You have a long drive and an early morning, he reminded himself. Like always.

  He pushed out into the night a little while later. It was cold enough outside, now that the sun was down and the dark had gripped on hard, to make him stop for a moment, brace himself, and reconsider his options. Riley blew out a breath and saw the cloud of it in the leftover light from the Broken Wheel. Then he shoved his hands in his pockets and walked down the block toward his truck.

  He wasn’t stopping at the bookstore, closed at this hour, but he could admit he slowed down a bit. If only to torture himself. Then laugh at himself.

  Then he really did stop. Because in the little slice of an alleyway that ran between the bookstore and its nearest neighbor, long ago done over into a walkway that led back to the house behind Capricorn Books, there was a figure near the lamppost that stood sentry halfway down. Trying to juggle a stack of boxes. And failing.

  Riley watched for a moment, battling a whole host of feelings at the sight of Rae and her heavy moving boxes. The evidence, once again, that she wanted a life that had nothing to do with him. Or them.

  Those feelings weren’t going anywhere, but he didn’t see the point in indulging them.

  “Need a hand?” he asked, his voice loud in the stillness of the cold night.

  Rae jumped, sending all the boxes she was trying to juggle crashing to the ground. She whirled around to face him, slapping a hand over her chest as if her heart were clawing its way out from beneath her ribs.

  “You scared me,” she said, and she sounded it.

  Riley expected he ought to feel guilty about that.

  But he didn’t.

  “Those boxes look like they weigh more than you do.”

  He thought he deserved a pat on the back, at the very least, for the friendly tone he used. Downright neighborly, in his opinion.

  She didn’t look particularly convinced, out here in a too-light sweatshirt like she was gunning for hypothermia. “I’m fine.”

  Riley had been moving toward her as he spoke, and now he stopped, a foot or so away. “You don’t look fine. You look like you can’t carry them all at once.”

  “Are you just … hanging around in alleyways looking for heavy things to carry?”

  She sounded irritated. Riley took that as a victory. He bent down and picked up all three boxes easily, then jerked his chin toward her new home.

  Rae walked in front of him, her reluctance evident in the way she held her shoulders so stiffly.

  “I had a burger at the Broken Wheel,” Riley said as he carried the boxes down the path. “I wouldn’t have come in the alley at all, except I heard a commotion. To be honest with you, Rae, I thought it was raccoons.”

  “Raccoons,” she huffed out. “Please.”

  “Scavengers. Instead, I found you.”

  “There’s vermin everywhere, Riley. A sad fact of life.”

  Riley made it to the house and set the boxes down on the side porch. Then he stood back, studying Rae in the light that spilled out from inside another house she intended to live in without him.

  Not a helpful thought.

  “Since when do you have dinner at the Broken Wheel?” she asked him. “On a random weekday?”

  There were a lot of ways he could have responded to that question, but what he chose to d
o was grin at her. Slowly. “I’m a single man, Rae. I have to get out there, don’t I?”

  He watched with a sense of satisfaction and something a little bit brighter and a whole lot more intense as she processed what he might mean by that. The sweatshirt she was wearing had a collar that went to her chin. And he knew it was a nervous tick of hers when her jaw tightened, against the top of the zipper, like she was biting back words.

  Really, it was all the pat on the back he needed.

  “You sure do,” she said, sounding overly cheerful. Forced, even. “Were you on a date?”

  He only looked at her, still grinning, until she flushed.

  “You’re right,” Rae corrected herself quickly. “That’s none of my business. I hope you were on a terrific date. I’m sure you have a lot to offer any … selections you might…”

  She gave up.

  But Riley waited. And continued to say nothing.

  “It’s still early, so I guess it can’t have been too—”

  She stopped again.

  He allowed a brow to lift as he looked down at her. And deeply enjoyed how red her face was.

  “Thank you for helping me with these boxes,” she said at last, sounding as if she were choking. “That was very nice of you.”

  “See?” he drawled, making a meal out of it. “Isn’t being friends great?”

  “Terrific,” she said. “Absolutely the best.”

  “I couldn’t agree more.”

  And Riley left her there, her cheeks red and flustered and her mouth full of lies, and found himself smiling all the way home.

  10

  “Absolutely not,” Rae declared. “You have to find someone else.”

  It was late that Friday night, and she was sitting at a table near the dance floor at the Broken Wheel, vetoing Riley’s selections for potential dates.

  Happily.

  If anyone had ever suggested that this was something that could happen, under any circumstances—ever—she wouldn’t have believed it. She wouldn’t even have laughed it off, she simply wouldn’t have been able to take in the visual. Even a week ago, this would have seemed impossible.