“You’ve got those curls,” Ty was saying, looking and sounding lazy again. “Rhinestones on the pockets of your jeans. Fancy patterns on your cowboy boots and that perfectly made-up face. All you’re missing is a cowboy hat with a shiny crown slapped on the front of it.”
“I keep that in the truck.”
“Amen.” He didn’t actually grin, but she could see the hint of it in his dark green gaze, and that was far more dangerous. “I can identify a rodeo queen when I see one.”
“Past tense,” Hannah drawled, as if it didn’t hurt. As if it wouldn’t always hurt. “My crown got a bit tarnished.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. I bet you look good in a glittery crown.”
And nothing else, he’d used to tell her. The words hung there between them, as if he was thinking them now. She certainly was.
Because she was that ridiculous. That pathetic and sad.
Except … did it count as abandonment if he couldn’t remember what he’d left behind?
“Here’s what I know about rodeo queens,” Ty said, and he reached between them to pull one of her long, careful curls between his fingers, the way he’d done so many times. Hannah should have batted his hand away. But she didn’t. “Driven. Ambitious. Sweet at a glance and sharp to touch.”
“You shouldn’t go around touching rodeo queens. They’re not out there busting their butts for your entertainment.”
Everything about him was as lazy as that grin. “Are you sure about that?”
“A rodeo queen is an ambassador,” she told him primly, and pretended her heart wasn’t stuttering in her chest. “For the western way of life. They deserve respect, not cheap come-ons from drunken cowboys who are afraid to be alone because they might have to take a hard look at themselves in the mirror.”
“Now, darlin’,” Ty said, finally sounding outraged. Until he grinned again. “I like what I see in the mirror just fine.”
Hannah laughed before she could catch herself, and worse, leaned toward him, angling herself closer to that grin. It was instinctive. Natural, even.
And she hated herself for it.
What on earth was she doing here?
He was a flashback come to life, standing there before her as if nothing had happened. And that was the kicker, wasn’t it? None of it had happened. Not to him.
She was the one who should know better. She did know better. Hadn’t she already seen what happened when she let this man flirt with her? It had been bad enough when she was a rodeo queen finishing out one term and starting another. She’d had Luanne as a fierce and usually harsh chaperone and gatekeeper, but that hadn’t stopped Ty. More important, it hadn’t stopped her from sneaking out to see him and lying to her mother for the first time in her life.
It hadn’t stopped her from making every dire prediction her mother had ever uttered come true, because she’d been so sure that she was smarter and Ty was better and they were in love.
And now she had his baby. She missed his baby so much it was like a hollow behind her ribs. But he had no idea who she was.
He had no idea Jack existed.
Her response to seeing him again was to stand in a bar, like a moth to the same old flame, and make it that much worse.
She hated herself for this.
“I have to go,” she said. Abruptly.
Hannah turned in a rush, and didn’t realize that more people had come out to fill up the bar while she’d been entirely focused on Ty. The world could have ended and she wouldn’t have noticed, not when she had all of that dark green attention focused on her again.
Selfish, stupid girl. Her mother’s voice rang in her head, the way it had when she’d broken down and confessed everything after Ty’s bad fall and the scene in his hospital room. All you had to do was keep your legs closed.
Hannah felt bile, thick and acrid, at the back of her throat. She almost stumbled as she dodged around clumps of people with too much speculation all over their faces—and the only saving grace she could come up with was the fact she didn’t know a single one of them.
Though, had everything gone the way it had been supposed to when she’d married Ty, she might have. These people would have been her neighbors. They might even have become her friends.
She shoved her way out the heavy saloon doors and onto the street. The summer evening was burning itself out, hot and red. It felt like an omen.
Her phone buzzed in her pocket, but she didn’t check it. Because she knew who it was. Who it always was. Luanne, who had never quite relinquished her role as Hannah’s chaperone, even after it was clear she’d failed in her primary mission. She was checking in. And more likely checking to see if Hannah had her clothes on.
If it was an emergency with the baby, she would call back instantly. Hannah took a breath while she waited. Then another breath, deeper than the one before.
But her mother didn’t call back. Likely because she was already imagining the worst. And Hannah might not have tossed her clothes off—yet—but that didn’t mean the worst hadn’t happened.
Ty didn’t remember her. Yet she was still in love with him.
There was nothing to do but stand there on a quiet, perfect street as the summer shadows grew into full dark and ask herself what she hoped to gain from flinging herself, face-first, into the irrevocable weight of what she’d lost and couldn’t have.
“You came all this way to see me and you’re running off without a goodbye?”
Ty’s drawl was a low insinuation against the night, but Hannah didn’t turn around to face him. Her eyes closed, and she wrapped her arms around her middle, though she couldn’t have said if she was trying to keep herself from swinging at him—or from doing something far more unforgivable.
Like burying her head in the crook of his neck.
“You don’t remember me either way,” she managed to say, evenly enough. “What does it matter to you if I say goodbye?”
“It matters.”
His voice was rougher than it should have been. And she couldn’t help herself. She turned, though her heart kicked at her and her stomach twisted into that knot she’d given up trying to unravel.
She should never have come here. This man was her weakness, and she couldn’t believe she’d imagined that that could change. She couldn’t believe she’d actually thought she’d grown up.
Because even now, even after everything he’d done and said that terrible night he got hurt, she looked at him and she melted.
The only difference was that now, that melting sensation came with a side helping of deep shame. Hannah wanted to kick herself. Or him. She wanted to knock their heads together, but she knew better. Touching him had only ever led to one place.
And then, eventually, straight on to right here.
“You look at me like I’m a ghost,” he said, closing the distance between them.
His dark green gaze was troubled. And God help her, but she wanted that to mean things it didn’t. It couldn’t.
“Maybe I’m the ghost,” she said quietly. “A hilariously ineffective one, if so.”
“I wouldn’t call you ineffective.”
“I shouldn’t have come here,” she said, and some of the distress she was feeling must have shown on her face, because his expression changed.
She recognized the way he looked at her, then. Hannah recognized it, and it made her want to cry, right there in front of him.
Because it turned out that there was something a lot worse than Ty Everett looking at her like he’d never seen her before. And that was him looking at her the way he used to. Like he cared when he didn’t.
“I need to go,” she said carefully. Because that wasn’t what she wanted. That was never what she’d wanted.
“I’m guessing you came to Cold River for a reason. You’ve done a good job of talking in circles all night. But you should probably tell me why you’re here.”
“I honestly don’t know if I should. You don’t remember me. So what good is calling on your memory?”
“Are you some buckle bunny, Hannah?”
“Of course not,” she retorted before she could help herself. Before she could think better of it. “I wouldn’t know where to start.”
She expected him to do what he usually did. Hide the darker thing in his gaze behind that lazy grin of his, then say something provoking, so no one would see the real him lurking there behind all the flash.
But he didn’t. He looked … uncomfortable.
“It’s not you, personally, that I can’t remember.” His voice was stiff. Gruff. “I … I’m missing some time.”
She didn’t know why that struck her as hard as it did. When surely the way he’d looked at her with no recognition on the ranch should have hurt the most. Or the fact he could make jokes about buckle bunnies with her, when she’d given him her innocence. When he’d promised her he would cherish it, and her, forever. Surely those things should have flattened her.
But instead, it was this. Ty standing before her out here in the dark, proud, scowling, and stiff with discomfort. Talking about missing some time.
This was what made tears prick the back of her eyes, while something unwieldy lodged in her chest and made her throat ache. As if she was already lost in a sob.
“What do you mean by some time?” she asked.
“Near as I can figure, two years. Give or take.”
Two years. Meaning, the entire time he’d known her. All … gone. It was one thing to suspect it. It was something else to hear him confirm it, and Hannah wanted to do something. Scream. Cry. Beat on him a while. Hold him, maybe.
Rewind to the terrible night that March and … not tell him she was pregnant. Not have that horrible fight when he’d turned into someone she barely recognized. Not watch him storm out into the ring and get thrown the way he had.
But he couldn’t remember any of that. He didn’t know who she was.
Hannah had to swallow down the sob that threatened to pour out of her. Or become her. She had to keep it to herself.
She didn’t know how she managed it. “What does your doctor say? Are you going to get those years back?”
Ty aimed for that grin of his and didn’t quite make it. “I was lucky to walk again. Asking for perfect recall is pushing it.”
“Head injuries are tricky,” Hannah said slowly. “Or so I’ve read.”
“Sometimes the memories come back and sometimes they don’t. I know who I am. I know my family. I get up every morning and I can walk. I’m going to get back on that bull and things are going to end differently this time. I’m good.”
“I’m happy for you,” she made herself say, and she almost meant it. She really, truly, almost meant it. “You’re very lucky—”
“Hannah. Tell me.”
He took a step toward her and made as if to put his hand on her again. But he stopped. She didn’t know if that was because he could feel it too. That same electric spark that had always been there between them. Every time they looked at each other in those dusty, crowded rings. Every time. She’d been so sure she disliked him, at first.
She’d wanted so badly to dislike him.
But she hadn’t then. And, though it made her deeply ashamed, she didn’t now either.
It had never occurred to her that she might feel sorry for him. All that hurt and betrayal inside of her had nowhere to go. She felt swollen with it.
“This is a terrible idea,” she muttered, and she stepped back the way she should have done back then. The way she had, day after day, until that night she hadn’t.
“Please,” he said, a different kind of grittiness in his voice. “Tell me. What did I do to you?”
It had been one thing to imagine herself yelling at him. She’d wanted to yell at him. She’d staged confrontations in her mirror a thousand times, practicing for this moment.
You have a son, she would shout, bristling with self-righteousness. He’s adorable, he’s perfect, his name is Jack, and he deserves a father—even if it’s you.
She’d yelled it. She’d said it quietly, with great dignity or ringing condemnation. Every way there was to say it, she’d tried it out. But she’d never expected … this. Could she yell the truth at him when he didn’t remember anything about her? Could she use it as a weapon when he didn’t remember injuring her in the first place?
Was it even okay to tell him? She was sure she’d read something, somewhere, that confronting someone with memory problems was a bad idea. Possibly even damaging.
If it was a precarious medical situation, should she have come barreling in like this? She wasn’t sure he counted as a deadbeat dad when he didn’t know he had a child. And she could ask him for a divorce here and now, but he probably didn’t know he was married. He could have broken their marriage vows a thousand times already, a notion that made her ill, except … Did it count as breaking a vow if he couldn’t remember making any promises in the first place?
Hannah needed to regroup. She needed to think, and maybe cry some more. She had to consult a better medical authority than a Google search, and figure out what was best for everyone involved. And yes, she should have thought this all through before she’d kissed her baby goodbye, jumped in her truck, and come all the way out here. Much less confronted Ty.
But the real truth was, she hadn’t really expected him not to remember her.
His potential memory issues had been an excuse. On the off chance he couldn’t remember her, she’d driven for two days straight so she could put herself in front of him again. Because she’d expected that of course he would know her. And all she’d really wanted was a good excuse to turn up again all this time later.
To see if he’d really meant it when he’d told her to leave him the hell alone.
Now she had no idea what to do. It was easier to hate him from afar.
Jack comes first, she told herself now, past the ache and the confusion. Jack has to come first.
“You didn’t do anything to me,” she forced herself to say, though the words came out wrong. They sounded too plaintive. Too much like the lie they were. “Not on purpose. After all, a famous bull rider can’t be expected to remember every groupie who comes along, can he?”
She didn’t know why she said that. The real problem was that she didn’t know what she was doing, but at least that was familiar ground. With Ty, she never had.
“The thing about groupies and buckle bunnies, Hannah, is that they’re mostly in it for the buckle. They don’t show up a year later, no rodeo in sight, no cheering crowds, and no prize money. They follow the rodeo, not the rider.”
“It’s late,” she said, her voice still much too … wispy. “I have to go.”
“It’s not even ten o’clock.”
“Good night, Ty,” she said, and then she turned around again because looking at him was too hard. She started down the sidewalk because her bed-and-breakfast was on the next block. She wanted to barricade herself in her pretty bedroom, curl up in a ball, and sob until she felt like herself again.
If that were even possible.
“Hannah,” he said. As if her name made him ache. “No one knows.”
5
Hannah stopped walking.
It felt more like she’d slammed into a wall in the middle of the sidewalk and might have the bruises to prove it, but she didn’t turn back around. She didn’t want him to see her face. She had no idea what might be written all over it.
“No one knows about my memory,” Ty said, as if the words were torn from him. Maybe that was why they felt like bullets, each one slamming into her flesh. “Not really.”
She heard the door to the bar open behind them, spilling out laughter and music into the dark street. When it closed again, the quiet was that much more treacherous. She wasn’t surprised when Ty came up beside her, his hands shoved into his pockets and that hunted, dark look on his face that made her poor, battered heart flip over inside her chest.
“I haven’t told anyone,” he said gruffly. “I keep hoping I won’t have to.”
“Because you think you’ll wake up one day and remember?”
“Why not? I woke up one day and forgot.”
Her throat ached with the tears she hadn’t shed in front of him. The words she’d barely managed to keep from saying to him. The memories only she had of what had happened between them, clamoring to get out. She curled her hands into fists to keep from reaching out to him. “Why did you tell me?”
Hannah hated the part of her that wanted so desperately for that to mean something. That he knew her, maybe, on some level. Deep inside of him.
Stupid girl, that voice inside her scolded her. Always so deeply stupid.
“I don’t know why I told you.”
“I’m not going to tell anyone else, if that’s what you’re worried about.” She said it as much to the summer night as to him. “Since one of the things you can’t remember is me.”
He was standing too close to her, which made her want to lean into him. To touch him, even if it was only briefly, and feel that heat he generated like he was his own furnace. She wanted to bury her face against him to see if he still smelled the way he should, the crisp scent of the no-nonsense soap he used and that rich, indefinable thing that was only him. But then what?
She forced herself to put some distance between them. And she faced him, because at least if she was looking at him, she couldn’t accidentally slump against him and lose herself in him. Better to see it coming if she was going to betray herself completely.
Something about the way he watched her, braced as if he expected her to take a swing at him, undid her. Made her want to swallow down all the harsh things on the tip of her tongue and tell him whatever sweet lies he needed to hear that would make this better.
When he didn’t know what this was.
“I didn’t come here to make things harder for you,” she said, when the moment stretched out from tense into something very nearly painful. Again.
“Then why did you come here?”
“I don’t know,” she said, and it wasn’t as much of a lie as it should have been. “But I’m not going to figure it out on the street. Late at night. When decent people are tucked up in their beds, getting ready for a new day.”
Cold Heart, Warm Cowboy Page 6