It was all about the smile. And she fixed hers on her face like the armor it was as she looked around.
Cold River Ranch spread out on all sides, as pretty as it was vast. She found herself moving toward the barn and the paddock where a pair of horses watched, their clever gazes and quiet muttering making her feel lighter than she had in a long while. Because she recognized these horses. She’d gotten to know them on the sly as she and Ty had toured the country together. Together, but always in secret—like everything else. Hannah moved to the fence and stood there a minute, murmuring nonsense words as she stroked her palms down familiar silken muzzles, breathing in the rich scent of earth and these horses who were part of the life she’d left behind.
It was worth it. Jack was worth it.
But that didn’t mean she didn’t miss what she’d lost.
After a while, the heaviness in her chest shifted a bit and turned into something less raw and more … nostalgic. Eventually she turned around again, because she wasn’t here for the horses. That Ty’s horses were here meant she’d been right to come. He was here. Or he’d been here. But hard as she looked, there didn’t appear to be a soul around the place or any sign of activity. Not in the big house and not in the collection of outbuildings dotted around this part of the property.
Hannah hadn’t really thought past getting here.
She blew out a breath, shakier than she’d like.
And that was when she saw him.
He came out through the screen door of one of the buildings set back from the barn and started toward her, all slow swagger and summer heat.
It was like the first time. It was like every time. All Ty Everett ever needed to do was laze his way onto the scene, and her heart stopped. The world stopped.
And this time, the punch of it—of him, even from a distance—nearly took Hannah to her knees.
Hannah had imagined this moment over and over. She’d plotted. Prayed and planned, then prayed some more. She’d revised what she would say time and time again. She’d cried. Lord help her, how she’d cried, until her pillows were damp and her cheeks hurt and her eyes felt welded shut.
Her eyes were wide open today. Up above, the sky was blue and the sun was warm, dancing on the breeze that smelled rich like livestock and sweet like the mountains in the distance. The last time she’d seen this man he’d been a dark, wounded fury strapped to a hospital bed. Tubes and bandages and beeping machines and that terrible blankness when he’d stared straight at her.
When he’d told her to leave and never come back.
Though not that nicely.
Today, he stood upright. And she couldn’t keep herself from letting her gaze move all over him, looking for remnants of that hospital room. Looking for signs that he really had survived what that angry bull had done to him. That he was somehow in one piece.
And was actually planning to get back up on that same ornery bull next month and do it all over again.
He’s walking, she snapped at herself. And he’s clearly still ambitious. He’s fine.
Fine enough to man up to his responsibilities if he’d wanted to. If he knew he had responsibilities, that was.
She expected him to say her name, which would have been its own torture, but he didn’t. He kept coming toward her.
His hair was dark and thick beneath his cowboy hat, his gaze that same guarded, mysterious dark green. He was tall, especially for a man who’d made his living riding bucking creatures that wanted him off. He looked lanky and careless, but she knew that he was all sinew and grace, hardpacked muscle and astonishing control, especially when he seemed the laziest.
He walked toward her like he’d always been heading for the same fence, and everything about him screamed languid. Slow and unhurried in his Wranglers and boots, when the truth of him was a seething, earthy intensity. Darker and infinitely more dangerous than he pretended.
Her treacherous heart kicked at her, and worse still, her body shivered into that same, alarming awareness that had gotten her into all this trouble in the first place.
Hannah couldn’t speak. She felt frozen solid. Trapped out here in this yard with the horses looking on, staring down her past.
Ty appeared to have no such trouble.
He came to a stop when he was still a few feet away from her. The corner of his mouth kicked up as if he was about to drawl something at her. In that way he did, with that voice she remembered too well sounded like whiskey and a long, hard night, no matter what time of day it was. Rough like velvet, bright with sin, and the memory of his voice in her ear made her shudder, deep inside.
And she hated herself for that too.
But there was only one reason she’d come all the way here to put herself through this. Jack. And that snapped her out from under his spell—
Well. It reminded her what happened when that spell wore off, anyway. And how he’d left her, broken and ashamed, when he was done.
She waited for him to speak, but he didn’t. He shifted, an arrested expression playing over a face that was almost too beautiful, save for that decidedly masculine jaw that he often—like today—didn’t bother to shave.
He was looking at her as if he’d seen a ghost.
Hannah would very much like to haunt him. Poltergeist his butt and leave him screaming for mercy. For starters.
“Hello, Ty,” she said, because the sudden spike of fury loosened her tongue once again. And it was much better than that raw ache. “It’s been a long time.”
He shook his head as if he couldn’t quite make sense of this. Of her. Or of the way his favorite horses acted like they recognized her when he looked very much as if he didn’t.
“You know me,” he said, and then his head tilted to one side, his dark green gaze warier than before. “And my horses, apparently.”
“Don’t worry if you can’t return the favor,” she drawled, long and loose, because Hannah was a Georgia girl and she’d never met a vowel she couldn’t make into its own alphabet. Or two. Especially when she wanted to cry. “The last time you saw me, you were sure you’d never laid eyes on me before in all your life.”
“That doesn’t sound like me.” He was smiling again, that easy, public smile of his that was as empty as he’d turned out to be. Hannah had never hit another person in her life, but she wanted to punch him. “I’ve never met a pretty girl I didn’t want to recognize.”
“I’m flattered.” She wasn’t. “You finding me pretty is quite an upgrade. Last time you were convinced I was a lunatic.”
She might have been frozen in place, but he wasn’t. He ambled in her direction, and Hannah remembered too well the particular grace of his saunter. The way he’d gotten up from each and every fall except that last one and walked out of the ring under his own power. She hadn’t expected she’d ever see it again.
He favored his left leg. It had been over a year now, and all that was left of that fall of his was the suggestion of a limp that he’d turned into more of the same saunter that had always defined him. Devil may care, laid-back, and like everything about Ty Everett, a lie.
He stopped a foot or so in front of her and tucked his thumbs into the pockets of his jeans.
This close, his dark green gaze was … careful. So was his expression, but what she really noticed was that beautiful jaw of his, because she could still remember what it was like to wake up with him and press kisses there, both of them smiling in a way she hadn’t before or since.
“Did you come and see me after that bull finished with me?” he asked.
“Don’t you remember?”
Hannah held her breath. And she studied him while she waited for his answer.
Over and over on the long drive across the country, she’d told herself that she would be able to read the truth on him. That this time, armed with the rumor she’d heard from one of her overly chatty former friends and no longer hopped up on pregnancy hormones, she would know what to look for.
She saw a blankness in his gaze, followed by someth
ing sharper. And the way he smiled in the next instant, as if he wanted to cover it up.
“I don’t know a man alive who dares have too good a memory, darlin’. That’s asking for trouble.”
“That’s real folksy, Ty. I see you’re putting your charm to good use. But I want to know. Can you remember me or not?”
“You’re breaking my heart,” he said, and that smile of his was brighter than before. Lazier, if possible.
Empty, she reminded herself.
On the list of ways she’d betrayed herself with this man, she would add this. That even when he was putting on an act, it didn’t matter. She could still feel that heat and wonder inside of her. There was the hurt, the anger, and the grief, but she couldn’t deny that beneath it all, she still melted.
Like she was nothing but a country song, some done-wrong woman who didn’t have enough sense to pick herself up, brush herself off, and find herself a better man. Or live out her life the way her mother had, pointedly and defiantly and on her own.
Hannah was a terrible cliché. She was her mother’s worst nightmare come true. She was everything she had been raised to reject.
None of that changed the fact that Ty Everett’s patented, practiced grin danced around inside her like summer, encouraging her to forget every single thing he’d done to her. And not only to her.
That sobered her, instantly.
“Funny,” she said, and she didn’t bother to smile this time. “I would have sworn you didn’t have a heart.”
“That sounds perilously close to bitter.” Ty shook his head. “And if I caused it, I’m truly sorry. If it makes you feel any better, I’m a changed man.”
“Changed into what?”
“I used to be a rodeo cowboy. Now I’m a ranch hand.”
“A ranch hand.” Hannah sighed. “You mean, a ranch hand who’s going to jump back up on the bull that wrecked him. In a matter of weeks, right here at the rodeo in the great state of Colorado. That kind of ranch hand? The kind who isn’t really a ranch hand at all?”
His eyes flashed. “The backbreaking work feels about the same.”
“From where I’m standing, your back looks fine.” She looked around the empty yard. “It’s the middle of the afternoon. Shouldn’t you be out somewhere? Breaking that back?”
“I’m sorry I can’t help you,” Ty said, as if she’d asked him to. As if she’d arrived with a list of demands and a court order, the way she could have. “But if I were you, I’d climb back up into that pickup and drive on out of here before I’m tempted to lose my grip on my gentlemanly manners.”
Hannah laughed. “Wow. That bull really did stomp the sense right out of you. I’m not afraid of your temper, Ty. I’ve already survived it, haven’t I? At least it’s real.”
He stiffened, though he didn’t lose that grin. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“All this time, I thought you sent me away. Me, personally. But you didn’t, did you? You don’t remember me at all, do you?”
Ty didn’t move, but he … changed. One moment he was standing there, that lazy grin on his face and that suggestion that his actual spine might be made of molasses, and the next … this.
The truth of him, electric and vivid. A storm about to break, hectic enough to put her hair on end, and that gleaming intensity in his gaze.
She remembered this too. She remembered him all too well.
“What I remember or don’t remember is no concern of yours,” he said, and there was no laziness in his voice anymore either.
A whole lot like she’d done more than simply state the truth. More like she’d hit a nerve.
Oh, you know Ty, Laura, another former rodeo queen contestant, had said when she’d visited last week. She’d sat there on Aunt Bit’s wide front porch, her untouched glass of sweet tea sweating on the side table. Laura been the one to bring up all those glossy ads heralding Ty’s “rematch” with the bull that had thrown him, like it was a heavyweight boxing fight instead of a professional rodeo event. Hannah had pretended she hadn’t seen them. And Laura had smiled the way she always had at the rodeo, all teeth and the slightest hint of malice. More ego than sense. Could he ever resist an ad campaign? I swear, that bull must’ve stomped the memory straight out of him.
Hannah had laughed along. But after the other girl had left in a cloud of hairspray and bad intentions, she couldn’t stop thinking about Ty and his memory. With that same mix of hope and fury that had been her constant companion over the last year.
Because Hannah had looked up that fateful day in a dusty ring in Bozeman, Montana, and there he’d been, staring right back at her with that curve to his mouth and a gleam in his gaze she’d felt everywhere.
Nothing had been the same since.
She wanted to throw it all in his face. The way he’d worked his way through her resistance, slow and steady. Their secret wedding. Her unexpected pregnancy. Her sweet, perfect Jack, who’d never met his daddy.
She didn’t know why she didn’t. Why she stood there face-to-face with Ty at last and didn’t move in for the kill, the way she’d dreamed all this time.
Almost as if she wanted to protect him too, despite everything. When she should have wanted to kill him. When she did want to kill him—but not if it would hurt him.
You’re pathetic, she told herself. But that wasn’t exactly news.
“I don’t know how to break this to you, darlin’,” she drawled instead. “But you and I are complicated, whether you remember it or not.”
2
Ty Everett wasn’t afraid of curvy blondes packed into denim with blue eyes like weapons. He wasn’t afraid of “complicated.”
He wasn’t afraid of anything, as he planned to prove next month when he returned to the rodeo, dominated, and went out on top. Instead of on a stretcher.
He was fine.
Fine.
And so what if he’d spent more time than he’d like this past year dealing with things he couldn’t quite remember? He’d learned, through careful reconstruction and entirely too much time spent googling himself, that he’d been on the rodeo circuit during the time he couldn’t remember. He’d watched himself in hundreds of videos roping, wrestling, riding bulls and broncs, winning more than his share of prizes, and occasionally ending up facedown in the dirt too.
There was even footage of the fall almost eighteen months ago that had changed everything. Entirely too much footage, given it was his body getting trampled onscreen. And from every wince-inducing angle.
Ty was perfectly happy to continue not remembering that.
Especially when it didn’t matter what he remembered, because next month he was going flip the story of his career-ending fall on its head. And own it.
“I’m not all that worried about ‘complicated,’” he told the blonde before him, who looked wholly unimpressed with him. Not a reaction he often got. It made him … restless. “Even if it does come in the form of Western Barbie.”
“‘Western Barbie’?” she repeated, and that sweet-as-peaches drawl of hers couldn’t disguise the snap in her voice. Or how her hands found her hips, drawing his attention to the way her shirt stretched over her curves. “Is that supposed to be me?”
“All that blond hair. And that sweet—”
Ty checked himself. He hadn’t felt the slightest need to flirt with anyone since he’d come back to town, angry and bitter, for the funeral of a father he would have happily raised up from the dead—so he could give Amos Everett the fight the bitter old man had always been spoiling for. And no matter how many nights Ty had warmed a stool at the more disreputable of the two bars in town, he’d never gone home with anyone. He’d never even made some time in the parking lot. Come to think of it, he couldn’t recall the last time he’d allowed himself so much as an eyeful of a woman.
Then this one turned up out of nowhere, talking about his memory. And he turned into … someone else.
“—pair of cowboy boots,” he finished.
Her blu
e eyes glinted. “Because you really appreciate a fine pair. Of cowboy boots.”
He grinned, because he was good at that. But she unsettled him.
He’d come in after a long morning playing rancher out in the fields, because his bad leg hadn’t been behaving and he had a long afternoon ahead of him. Buck Stapleton, the president of the Rodeo Forever Association, had decided to make Ty a main event again and didn’t care which way it went, but Ty had every intention of riding the bull that had trashed him again for all eight seconds and a high score. This time, he planned to leave the ring and the rodeo on his own feet and his own terms. He’d iced his leg, alternated the ice with heat, and had been contemplating cutting it off for approximately the nine hundredth time that week when he’d heard a truck pull up outside.
Ty wasn’t exactly the Everett family welcome wagon, so he’d ignored it. Neighbors tended to drop off whatever it was they had, then leave. Smaller ranch deliveries were usually the same deal. Bigger ranch deliveries weren’t random, and Ty was never left to handle those on his own.
But when he glanced out the window of the small bunkhouse he’d claimed when he’d decided to stay on the ranch, he’d seen a woman he didn’t recognize standing over by the barn. Making time with his horses.
He still didn’t know why he’d gone outside. One of his brothers would turn up, the way one of them always did. Responsible eldest son Gray had been in charge of the ranch most of his life, in and around Amos and his drunken benders. And Brady, the youngest of the three of them, had committed himself to the ranch for the time being and was always overplaying his helpfulness. Likely so that when the year he’d promised Gray was up and a discussion about selling the ranch was back on the table, Brady could remind their older brother that he’d really given this his all.
Gray’s wife, Abby, was usually around to deal with the domestic side of ranch life when Gray was out in the fields. Or Gray’s daughter, Becca, who was sixteen and often seemed to be competing with her father for the title of Most Responsible Everett Ever.
Whoever the blonde with rodeo curls was, it wasn’t any of his business.
Cold Heart, Warm Cowboy Page 2