He still liked that idea, it turned out. More than kind of liked it.
And the certainty felt good.
“There was no possible way I was ever going to have sex before marriage,” she told him, and he didn’t need to touch her face to see how bright she was burning. But he did anyway. The faintest brush of the back of his fingers against one cheek.
She was hot like fire and soft like satin, and the feel of her sank deep into him.
Like another dose of certainty.
It was as if he was waking up.
“You said you could respect that,” she said, but her voice was softer. Shakier. “But you had no intention of marrying anybody. You’d sworn your whole life you’d never marry anyone. I figured that was the end of the conversation.”
“And the end of us … not making trouble?”
“No. We still did our thing. But it got … frustrating.”
Ty wished he could reach over and pull her memories straight from her head as easily as he’d touched her face. He wished she could project them in front of her like some kind of movie screen. Because he had the feeling he would give almost anything to rewind through what she called frustration and linger there a while.
And the hotter her cheeks got, the more sure of that he became.
“You went home for Christmas that year.” Hannah looked out the front window. “You came here. And I was sure you would probably let things fade away. Because we talked and we talked, but it never went anywhere. We didn’t want the same things.” She pulled in a breath. “Or we didn’t want them in the same way, at the same time. You talked a lot about someday. But I didn’t want to gamble everything on someday. I was already risking my reputation as it was.”
“You sure wouldn’t want to throw more than a reputation after a rodeo cowboy,” Ty drawled. With more darkness than he’d known was in him. And barely managed to keep from calling her darlin’. “That never ends well.”
She took a breath. Then she shocked him by reaching over and putting her hand on his leg. He felt the heat. That same kick of certainty.
Mine, that voice belted out, and this time, without any further instructions about when and how.
He didn’t care if it was memory or not. It felt right.
“My reputation was my job,” Hannah said, her voice quiet and her gaze direct. “And I had to fund-raise to get that job in the first place. I went to UGA on a full academic scholarship, and that certainly didn’t include appropriate rodeo outfits. Or travel costs. When I talk about losing my reputation—and my crown—I’m not talking about my ideals. I’m talking about letting down good people who believed in me and gave me their hard-earned money to represent them in a sport they love. That mattered to me. It still matters to me.”
But all Ty could really focus on was how easily she kept her hand on him. There was nothing awkward about it. Nothing new. It was intimate, not necessarily sexual, as if she’d put her hand on him a thousand times before. It underscored everything she’d told him, because Ty’s mind might have decided to play tricks on him, but his body was the same instrument it had always been. He knew every inch of it, what it could do, and where it was weak.
He also knew his own physical familiarity with another person. He didn’t have to remember her when his body was doing it for him. He didn’t need the ache in his head to kick at him again.
Hannah was still talking to him, her hand on his leg and her gaze locked to his. “But when it came to that Christmas, and why it seemed over, it was because we’d been going around and around in circles. I couldn’t give you what you wanted. You couldn’t give me what I needed. No matter how much we loved each other.”
That was like a detonation. Ty’s ears rang from the blast of it. “We loved each other?”
Her smile about broke his heart. “Of course we loved each other. Or it wouldn’t have been so hard. And it wouldn’t have hurt the way it did.”
9
Ty didn’t know what to do with that. The concept of loving anything or anyone was hard enough to get his head around. He hardly understood it when it was his brother, content in a way Ty had never believed in. Not for any truthful, real people outside of Hollywood.
Real people weren’t happy, if they were honest. People wanted to be happy so they declared they were in love. But love was nothing but a claim trotted out so no one could see the darkness inside them. The demons, the despair. They posted carefully perfect pictures all over the internet and wrote glowing stories about their own wisdom and resilience. Growth and perseverance. They made a lot of noise about faith. They practiced their public faces and they learned how to get along. They went through the motions and they numbed themselves out however they could, in sacrament or in sin, whatever worked.
Anything to feel, but not too much. Anything to pretend it all mattered. Anything to connect with the darkness inside them, through piety or shame, and call it a journey.
But none of it was real. None of it was honest. And it had never been him.
“It was hard?” he asked. “It … hurt?”
Hannah’s gaze was steady. “You can love someone with everything you have and still not be right for them. That’s where we were, then. That’s what you told me.”
The pressure inside him doubled. Tripled, maybe. It felt like a kick to the gut with a concrete block.
Ty had never believed in love. Why would he? He’d never seen it.
Yet Hannah told him he’d loved her so much it had hurt. So much he’d decided it would be better to part than to hurt more. And it was clear she didn’t mean the kind of hurt he knew best. Not the loud, ugly, drunkenness Amos had used to batter them with. At the kitchen table and everywhere else. Day and night.
All in the name of Everett family tradition.
He tried to shake that off. “I told you I loved you but I wasn’t right for you.” The words felt weighted. Barbed. “I actually said that.”
“The last time I saw you that December. It was at an event after the last rodeo of the year in Nevada, and yes, that’s what you said. And we both very sensibly agreed we should take a break, get our heads on straight, move on.” Hannah’s mouth curved. “But that didn’t work.”
Somewhere between what might have been a memory and the growing certainty that their relationship was what she’d said it was—that he’d married her, and not at gunpoint or otherwise under duress—Ty realized he’d started to care far too much about where this story was going. Especially when he already knew the ending.
“You were going to be in Vegas for New Year’s Eve because you had a bunch of sponsorship events there,” she said. “And you asked me to meet you.”
“I thought we broke up.”
Hannah made a sound that he might have optimistically called a laugh, however small. Then she sat back, taking her hand away, and Ty wanted it back with a ferocious burst of need that should have knocked him over. Instead, he sat there and let it roar in him until his leg started to ache.
Not because it hurt, like the other one. But because he wanted her to touch him again.
“We weren’t any good at breaking up,” she said, and there was a softer note in her voice that … did things to him. He tried to ignore those things and concentrate on her. “We agreed to take some time, and then we talked anyway.”
Ty tried to imagine any part of the complicated relationship she was talking about. Love, for one thing. Then nobly deciding that love wasn’t enough, only to ignore all of that and keep right on going. He couldn’t reconcile anything she was saying with what he knew about how he behaved.
But then, he didn’t react to her the way he did to anyone else. He was messed up listening to this story, which should have been as relevant to him, personally, as any other story she could have told. About anyone. Even if he’d wanted to protest and claim this wasn’t him, that certainty in him, stronger by the moment, told him it was.
Or he wouldn’t care about this story or anyone in it, and he did.
“I
told my mother I was going on a New Year’s trip with college friends,” Hannah said. “It wasn’t anything to do with my reign as Miss Rodeo Forever, so her presence wasn’t needed. There were no cowboys to ward off and no reputation to keep pristine with friends I’d studied agricultural communications with. She didn’t believe me, but what could she say?” She made a rueful noise. “By which I mean, she said a whole lot, but I went anyway.”
“You have a degree?”
“Rodeo queens have to have some education to win a crown, formal or otherwise. You know that. We have to answer any questions that come our way, whether it’s why we exist or whether we approve of the latest headline news. Or why the barrel-racing course is set up the way it is. Why steer wrestling is called bulldogging. Or if the animals are sad, which is an actual question I’ve been asked more than once.”
“Bulls are generally mad, not sad. And happy to let you know it.”
Hannah smiled. But she didn’t let the easy moment roll on too long. Her expression changed, and she continued her story. “You picked me up at the airport and took me back to your hotel room.”
Ty knew how much he’d changed already in the course of this conversation, because he didn’t make any kind of suggestive remark at that. He didn’t try to joke this away or make it matter less. He was too busy watching her, as tense as if he expected her to swing at him.
And she did.
“When we got there, you got down on one knee,” she said softly. “You told me you loved me and asked me to marry you. Right there and then.”
Ty added that to the list of things he shouldn’t have been able to imagine. And yet, it was somehow easier to picture than it had been before she’d come to town. He didn’t know if that made it better or worse.
“So.” He had to clear his throat. “We eloped?”
“Rodeo queens are single, never married,” Hannah replied in that same soft, quiet voice that he still marveled hadn’t knocked him flat. “But you’d thought it all through. You said we’d keep it to ourselves for the rest of my term. People might suspect, but suspicion wasn’t the same as an announcement, so we’d be fine. A lot of girls wander around with awfully close ‘cousins’ or ‘friends’ while they’re doing their thing, who magically turn into boyfriends when they’re done.”
“Please tell me I didn’t offer to be your cousin.”
Hannah’s eyes gleamed. “You said we could keep doing what we’d been doing. And then when we found moments to be together, we could be husband and wife instead of not enough of one thing, too much of another, and frustrated all the time. You knelt there before me, with a big smile on your face that doesn’t look a single thing like that grin you flash at the slightest provocation. And you told me that you could give me your mother’s ring, but it was likely cursed. So you bought me one instead.”
That went through Ty like a chill. Because he had his mother’s ring. Bettina had handed it to him with great drama one of the times he’d caught up to her in some far-flung city. I’ll never allow it to touch my flesh again, she’d said. But maybe you’ll get some use out of it. As if the diamond solitaire was a tool he could carry around with him and hang on a utility belt, instead of the emblem of a relationship he wouldn’t wish on his worst enemy.
“That sounds like me,” he heard himself say.
“So we did it,” Hannah told him, her eyes suspiciously bright. As if these were happy memories she was sharing with him. Good memories of this love story he’d starred in, that she’d held onto all this time.
It was another sucker punch.
“We got married in a chapel right there in Vegas. And the ceremony was sweet. Beautiful, if you want to know the truth. There were no expectations or eyes on us. There was no speculation or commentary. There was only you and me and this thing we had together, plus a minister who made us laugh. It was perfect.”
There was something humming in him, more powerful than any earthquake. He could feel it in that pulse in his temples. He could feel it in the weight that he couldn’t shift from his chest.
Because it didn’t matter how perfect it was. Not when it led here, to a truck on a mountain, a man who couldn’t remember, and a woman who’d been “detained” for a year and a half.
“And then what?” he managed to ask. “We kept it hidden?”
“For three months or so.”
Ty opened his mouth to ask why three months, and then got it. It was three months from New Year’s to March. And that fall he didn’t get up from.
“I expected it to be frustrating in a whole new way,” Hannah said, and there was that heat on her cheeks again. “And it was. It really was. But it was fun too, because we didn’t have a dirty secret anymore. We had the best secret. For a while, it was the best of both worlds. Like marriage with training wheels. We could try it on in bursts here and there. Ease into it and see how it fit before anyone knew about it. While it was still ours.”
“This is a pretty story,” Ty gritted out, aware that his voice was too thick.
He was giving himself away. He was messed up and he knew it. He could feel it, the way he’d wanted to feel something, anything—but this wasn’t compartmentalized or locked away.
He couldn’t control it.
Like your memory, something in him chimed in.
But that made it worse.
Ty focused on Hannah. “It can’t have been as magical as you’re making it sound. Or you wouldn’t be sitting here telling me about it, because I’d know.”
If his rough tone got to her, she didn’t show it.
“I didn’t say it was magical. It was a honeymoon.”
“Tell me what happened eighteen months ago that brought the honeymoon to a screeching halt,” he said. Even rougher.
She looked away, then, out toward the view and the world and all the things she knew about him that he didn’t. “We had a fight. A bad one. Then you lost your memory, and here we are.”
“Here we are?” Ty echoed. He let out a gruff sound that even he wouldn’t call a laugh. “I don’t know a lot about marriage. Until recently, I would’ve told you I’d never seen a good one. But I’m pretty sure that the sickness and health part is a key component to the whole deal. And getting trampled by a pissed-off bull falls pretty squarely into that category. Or am I missing something?”
Hannah was trembling slightly, but the look she leveled on him reminded him that she really was a rodeo queen. Pretty as a picture, but tough as nails beneath. Capable of mucking out stalls, riding someone else’s horse but never blaming it if it balked, explaining the history and relevance of the rodeo to anyone who inquired, handling more livestock, and doing it all looking as perfect as she did right now.
Capable of sauntering back into his life when he didn’t know she’d left it, and sitting right here while he digested the news.
“I can’t imagine the confusion you’re feeling right now, Ty,” she said, and she didn’t raise her voice. But it wasn’t all that soft anymore either. “And I feel for you. But I would strongly caution you to tread carefully here. Because I remember what happened.”
“Like you said earlier, I have only your word for it. A perfect honeymoon. And then you’re gone.” He snapped his fingers. “Like it never happened.”
Hannah muttered something he didn’t catch, and then turned away.
“What’s that?” he asked, and he was too edgy. He was jacked up on too much adrenaline and all these weird emotions he couldn’t control or identify.
“I need some air,” she said, cool and precise, which only made him edgier.
She pushed her way out of the truck, jumping down and then walking out toward the fat boulder that marked the edge of the cliff.
Ty took his time following her. Not only because of the picture she made, standing there while the summer breeze picked up stray curls here and there and made them dance. When he got out of the truck, his bum leg felt stiff—as stiff as if he’d been overtraining, when he hadn’t been. Great. Maybe it would act u
p now, like he really was a four-hundred-year-old aged bull rider. Maybe his bones would alert him to every stray drop of rain.
Or, apparently, every emotionally intense moment.
He rubbed at his hip, then leaned back against the front of his truck. He let the breeze and the blue sky work on him a moment or two. Then a moment or two more, when it didn’t take.
“I’m not trying to give you a hard time,” he said when the edginess had smoothed out some. “I want to know what happened. That’s all.”
“Are you absolutely sure you want to push on something when you don’t know what’s waiting there on the other side?”
Maybe he hadn’t smoothed anything out after all, no matter how clear it was today.
“You keep asking me that, Hannah. And my answer is consistently the same. Yes, I want to know. Yes, I’m standing here, asking you to tell me all the gory details you think I can’t handle.”
“Maybe I’m the one who can’t handle it, Ty,” she bit out. She wiped angrily at her cheeks, but when she turned back around to face him, he couldn’t see any trace of tears. “Maybe you’re lucky that you can’t remember what happened. Because it was ugly. Obviously. Or you’re right, I would’ve been sitting next to your hospital bed, showing you pictures to remind you who I am. But I didn’t realize there was a problem with your memory until about a week ago.”
He let that sink in, and couldn’t tell what was rocking him anymore. At this point, an actual tectonic shift would feel like a gift. “What are you telling me? That you’d already left me before I went into the hospital?”
“I had no intention of leaving you,” Hannah said fiercely. And there was nothing quiet or cool about her voice now. She sounded as ragged as he did. “You told me to go. You demanded it. And I didn’t know you didn’t know who I was—or who you were—so when you said it, I assumed you meant what you said.”
“What could I possibly have said that could wipe out this whole big story?” he demanded, not particularly calm himself.
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