Cold Heart, Warm Cowboy

by Caitlin Crews

  It wasn’t that late, and she wasn’t that decent anymore thanks to him, but she didn’t say that. The Ty she’d known would have grinned lazily at her and encouraged her to sin her way into the nearest scandal. Preferably starring him. This Ty only frowned.

  “It hasn’t escaped my attention that you haven’t given me your whole name, Hannah. You keep waiting for me to do or say something, but I haven’t. And now … what? You’re running away?”

  She let out a laugh that felt like one more bruise tonight. “What’s really funny is you don’t know how hilarious that is.”

  “Tell me something.” His voice was more urgent then, his gaze darker. And Hannah wanted so desperately to believe he could feel the enormity of the things he didn’t know. She wanted so badly to imagine that somewhere inside him, he remembered something. That she’d left some part of herself behind in him. Stupid girl. “Tell me one thing that proves I know you.”

  “Is this a test?”

  “Call it what you want.”

  Hannah waited for him to back down, but this was Ty Everett. He was as bullheaded as the great beasts he rode, and twice as stubborn.

  “You have a scar on your left side,” she said quietly.

  “I have a lot of scars. And a lot of them on my left side.”

  “This one isn’t from a bull. It isn’t from getting thrown off a horse when you were a kid on the ranch either. You sometimes tell people that it’s one or both of those things, but it’s not.”

  His expression tightened into a kind of alertness that surged through Hannah like a new heat. But she had always been good at tests. She’d passed every test she’d ever taken. She’d had big plans and even bigger dreams before she’d met this man.

  Maybe someday that would stop hurting, but she doubted it.

  “You were playing hide-and-seek with your brothers,” she told him, repeating the story he’d told her himself. “You were about ten. There was an old barn on the property that was off limits, so naturally that’s where you went to hide. You were in such a hurry, you tripped and fell, ripping a chunk out of your side. And you’d get in trouble if you admitted where you’d been and how you’d hurt yourself. So you had to sneak back out, creep into the other barn, and pretend to hurt yourself on something inside it. But the thing you chose was rusty, and before you knew it, you were being whisked off to get stitched up. With a bonus tetanus shot. And what you’re really mad about to this day is that you lost the game.”

  She didn’t tell him how or when he’d told her that story. They’d been stretched out in a beautiful meadow in Montana with nothing to entertain them but the crowded night sky above. So many stars it hurt to look at them, but that was okay. They’d only had eyes for each other. Hannah had been propping herself up on one elbow, gazing down at him, and somehow managing to keep her hands to herself. Even when he’d wrenched up his T-shirt to show her the scar in question, that lazy grin of his making her smile despite herself and acres of his mouthwatering torso on display.

  He’d been infectious. That had been the word that kept boomeranging around inside of her then. Infectious.

  She had tried so hard not to fall in love with him. Maybe that was the test she should have worried about acing. Instead, she’d been so certain she would pass it with flying colors that she hadn’t even seen her own failure coming straight at her. Like a train. Not until it was too late.

  That was the sort of thing she liked to turn over and over in her head when she was awake in the middle of night, pretending she heard the baby when really, it was her conscience clamoring. And her eternal shame.

  But here and now, on this street in the Colorado summer dark, Ty looked stricken straight through, the way she’d always imagined she wanted. She wanted it less, now. Because she’d neglected to factor in how little she actually enjoyed seeing him in pain.

  “You told me you never admitted the truth of how you got that scar to anyone, not even your brothers,” she managed to say. She could feel how heavy her eyes were. Too full of emotion she didn’t dare show in front of him. Not when she had no idea what to do with it any longer.

  “But I told you.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  And what was she supposed to say? How was she supposed to answer that?

  We were falling in love, you see, and you wanted me to know everything about you. That was the night you would tell me that you hadn’t been the same since you clapped eyes on me. I would pretend not to believe you, but I did, because it was the same for me.

  We were falling in love, and then we fell, and when you proposed to me, you told me it would be forever.

  How could she say any of that?

  Or was the truth that she didn’t want to say it? Because how could you tell someone they were in love with you when they didn’t feel it? When they couldn’t even remember your name on their own? She would sooner bash her head against the nearest brick wall. It would feel about the same.

  “Maybe you only pretended you never told anyone about it so you’d seem mysterious,” she suggested, though she knew better. “Maybe you actually told everybody whenever possible. Maybe there were billboards.”

  “Did I have a particular reason for telling you a story like that?” He sounded baffled.

  Because the man standing before her would no more tell a random woman that story—or any story about himself—than he would strip off all his clothes, run naked down the center of Main Street, and give his neighbors a show. She understood that.

  She didn’t know whether to congratulate herself because she truly had been special to him, or grieve the loss all over again.

  Neither option did a thing for her fatherless child.

  “This is the problem with this entire situation,” she said, and there was a different kind of electricity shooting through her then. A restlessness. Because she was tired of holding it all together. She wanted to go scream into her pillow for an hour or two. Or a year. “I can’t give you an emotional context for these things you don’t feel. I might as well be talking to you in a different language. There’s no point to it.”

  “I want to know.”

  “You don’t want to know it, you want to feel it. And my telling you stories about people who don’t make any sense to you now isn’t going to make you feel anything. Except maybe confused.”

  “For God’s sake,” he gritted out. “Tell me what the hell I did to you.”

  “I’m sorry, Ty, but I can’t.”

  Because she couldn’t. Of course she couldn’t. What would she do? Show him one of the approximately twenty thousand pictures of Jack she had on her phone—so he could stare at them blankly?

  This is the baby we made together, she could say. The one you weren’t too excited to hear about in the first place.

  And then maybe, if she was lucky, they could relive the terrible fight they’d had the night he’d gone out and taken his last ride.

  “I can’t,” she said again, more fiercely this time.

  Because she could break her own heart. And had. But she would protect Jack’s no matter what.

  She could no longer control her tears, then. They spilled over, humiliating her. Horrifying her.

  Telling Ty too much, too quickly.

  She didn’t wait to see how he planned to handle that. If he planned to do anything. She turned on her heel, accepted that she had no dignity left to lose where Ty Everett was concerned—whether he could remember it or not—and ran.

  * * *

  Ty spent the drive home from Cold River … unsettled.

  Disquieted straight on through, making that scar Hannah had mentioned begin to throb in time with his heart, until they were both kicking at him.

  He was missing things, sure. Two years and change.

  But that game of hide-and-seek he could remember down to the moment after he’d hurt himself in the decrepit old barn he definitely wasn’t supposed to play in. He remembered staring down at the hunk missing from his side in sick fa
scination, waiting for the pain and the blood to follow the injury. And the dizzying wallop when they did.

  He remembered that as completely as he’d forgotten those critical two years. And yet he still felt certain—the way he was about his name, the fact he dressed to the left, and the soapy evil that was cilantro—that he didn’t usually make women cry.

  Not at him and because of him. Not like Hannah had.

  Or, even worse, turn and run away from him. Literally. Down the street like she was being chased, so she could fling herself through the front door of the bed-and-breakfast on Main Street, and leave him standing out there like … He didn’t even know what.

  His own father, maybe, who had excelled in nothing so much as chasing the women in his life away from him. And everyone else while he was at it.

  A comparison that made Ty want to break things.

  Which, of course, would make him even more like the old man.

  Ty had wanted nothing so much as he’d wanted to turn back around once Hannah was inside the B and B, take himself back to the bar, and reacquaint himself with the whiskey he hadn’t touched since he’d decided he was going back to the rodeo. At least for one night.

  Instead, he’d headed back to the ranch, which still didn’t feel like home to him, but was as close as he was going to get. Because what was a man supposed to do when he’d forgotten how to feel much of anything? Whiskey had picked up that slack for a while, but it made him maudlin. He was pretty sure that if he kept at it long enough, it would turn him mean like Amos.

  The only other thing that had gotten under his skin since he’d dragged himself back to the ranch last fall was Hannah. And Ty had no earthly idea what that meant or what to do about it.

  The drive over the hill and out into the fields was long and dark, and left him with nothing to do except rack his brain for any stray bit of memory lurking around in there.

  There was nothing. But something about Hannah called to him.

  At one point, out there on the street, he’d wanted to haul her into his arms and … hold her, or something. What was that?

  She’d told him that he should view his missing years as an opportunity. And maybe he should. Who was he really? Who did he want to be?

  He didn’t particularly want to be the guy who had to paste a smile on his face when he got back to the ranch because his brother Brady was pulling in at the same time, back from a few days tending to his former life down in Denver.

  But whatever else Ty might have lost along with his memory, he still had his grin. He could still turn it on and off at will. He could still flash it around until people mistook that for actually saying something.

  “Where have you been?” Brady asked as he swung a duffel bag over his shoulder.

  “Didn’t realize I had to check in with my den mother,” Ty drawled. Still grinning. “Don’t worry, Denver. Look at your watch. I made curfew and all.”

  Brady made a genial anatomical suggestion that was, happily, biologically impossible. “Glad to see you’re as charming as ever. Every time I go away for a few days, I tell myself that I must be imagining it. That both my brothers can’t be this much of a pain in the butt. And yet every time I come back, here you are to prove me wrong.”

  “I’m the charming, disreputable drunk, Brady,” Ty chastised him. And it didn’t escape him that Brady didn’t argue with that description. Meaning he thought Ty was still as drunk as he’d been after Amos’s funeral. Which was to say, constantly. “Come on now. Gray’s the grumpy, overbearing pain in the butt.”

  “Not since he married Abby, he’s not.” Brady eyed him. “Luckily we have you to carry that torch.”

  “Because you’re so personable.”

  Brady grinned. “I’m a freaking delight.”

  “As long as your right hand agrees, little brother, you’re good to go.”

  He headed toward his bunkhouse, waving off Brady’s raised middle finger. Brady headed into the ranch house itself and the room downstairs where he’d been staying since he’d moved up here after Christmas.

  Ty liked being out in the dark. Alone. It was the only time his lack of memory was less obvious. He could see the flickering light on up the second floor that told him his niece, Becca, was home from her summer job at the Trujillo family’s florist shop in town. Gray and Abby were likely home too, but responsible, dependable Gray had always liked an earlier bedtime, given the hour at which he had to get up in the morning to tend to the ranch. When they’d been kids, Gray had never complained about morning chores, even if it meant shivering half to death out in the barn on winter mornings before school.

  Ty had always complained. With a grin, of course, to try to avoid getting a whack from their father. Brady, ever the political operative in the family, had timed his complaints better and avoided Amos’s heavy hand. But Gray had actually enjoyed all that crap.

  Ty eyed his older brother’s window, high up on the second floor of the ranch house. Gray had always been irritating like that.

  But then Gray had gotten married over Thanksgiving weekend to their long-time neighbor, Abby Douglas, uniting two of the original families that had settled this valley and stayed here ever after. And Abby actually made stern, too-serious, always-grumpy Gray … happy.

  Ty might have called it a holiday miracle, if he were that kind of person. As far as he knew, he wasn’t.

  It wasn’t that Everetts were destined for unhappiness, necessarily, no matter what Ty’s mother liked to say to the contrary. And Bettina Crowther—because she’d dropped the Everett from her name on the way out the ranch house door, long before the divorce went through—always had a lot to say on that topic. Ty had caught up with her in a variety of different places over the years. San Luis Obispo. Walla Walla. Scottsdale. Santa Fe. Baton Rouge. She never stayed any one place for long. The only constant in her life was her continued bitterness over her marriage to Amos.

  Ty figured she wasn’t one to talk about the general unhappiness of the Everett family, since she’d helped make Amos Everett into who he was when she’d run off and left him with her three boys to raise. Something he imagined he must have had feelings about, back when he could feel things.

  Ty hadn’t ever really believed that they were all cursed to follow in Amos’s footsteps straight on into a life of misery that ended alone, angry, and ungrieved, but it had sure been shaking out that way. Before Abby.

  Abby, who made Gray laugh when he had previously displayed precious little of anything resembling a sense of humor. Abby, who’d gotten her Christmas-phobic new husband to celebrate the holiday anyway when he’d declared it banned, had thrown her brand-new stepdaughter a sweet sixteen party and invited the parents of Gray’s long-dead first wife to build a bridge with them, and had quietly insisted on family dinners on Sundays all through the winter. Abby, who treated Ty like her own brother and made him imagine he could be one when he couldn’t remember what that was supposed to feel like.

  But while he was standing out in the dark thinking about his sister-in-law and all the surprising changes she’d brought to this family, he kept seeing Hannah’s face instead.

  When Ty got to his bunkhouse, he wasn’t in the mood to crack open a book or work on his push-ups. He didn’t feel like watching anything, and he felt too wired and weird to go to bed.

  The next thing he knew, he was outside again, walking away from the ranch house toward the cool, blue river that tumbled down from the mountains and through the fields and gave the ranch—and the town—its name. It was a mile or so, out there beneath the stars, and he told himself it was good to get out. To walk as much as possible on that bum leg of his. Loosen it up and get it ready for next month’s ride.

  That was true enough, but he didn’t really know what he was doing until he found himself at the family’s plot of graves that sat beneath the willow trees out this way. In the dark, the trees were little more than shadows, and the starlight made the graves themselves inky. Mysterious.

  When they weren’t. They
were just graves. A pretty, tidy end to messy, complicated lives.

  The idea that he could live out his life and end up here, stuck beneath this land that had defined every member of his family going back generations, when he wasn’t like them and didn’t deserve to be a part of the land the way they were, made Ty … restless.

  When he’d been a kid, he’d hated this place. He’d hated his father, certainly, because Amos had never been a kind man. Or much of a good one, by any measure, even before Bettina left him. He’d loved nothing more than to come down hard on his sons. Ty could remember the fights the old man would pick. The number of times Amos had flipped the kitchen table, sending everything on it flying, because he liked the commotion.

  I don’t know how you put up with that man for all those years, his mother had said when he’d seen her in Santa Fe after the rodeo spent a weekend out that way. She’d even given one of her theatrical shudders.

  I didn’t have the option of divorcing him like you did, Ty had replied. With a grin, of course. Always with the grin. And you left us with him. So he couldn’t have been too bad, right?

  But he’d always understood Bettina. When push had come to shove, literally, she’d left and she hadn’t looked back. The same way Ty had on the morning of his eighteenth birthday, with the black eye his father had given him the night before and Amos’s birthday encouragement ringing in his ears.

  You’re good for nothing, you little punk, Amos had slurred at him. Never have been, never will be, just like your mother.

  Ty had figured he might as well be a famous good-for-nothing, then.

  But that was the funny thing about his memories. Everything before those lost two years remained curiously dim. He could remember what had happened, but like there was a film over it. He could remember that he’d been angry. Or he could assume that he’d been angry, based on the memory. But he couldn’t really feel it.

  He might have been tempted to assume he was a happy-go-lucky kind of a guy. But the whiskey had taught him better than that, repeatedly. And now there was Hannah.