Gray and Ty had given him land, and leave to do with it as he pleased.
Amanda had given him her virginity.
Brady should have been happy. Or content, at the very least. All of a sudden, he had everything he’d ever wanted and more than he’d dreamed possible.
Too bad it all sat a little funny.
Maybe he really was his own worst enemy.
He preferred to blame his dead father, or try to get into it with the old man’s ghost. He’d much rather rail against his overbearing older brothers. Get a little bourbon in him, and he might even shout at the coming winter or throw stones at the moon.
But that all seemed a little foolish now.
October came in with an early snowstorm, then a fickle return to summerlike temperatures. Everybody roamed around muttering about the mountains, and out in the fields, ranchers took the warning for what it was and started getting ready for the inevitable winter.
Brady did too.
He sat with his brothers in the evenings, maps of their property spread out before them across the dining room table where Becca and Abby sometimes gathered to do projects of one sort or another. He could have used the table in the kitchen, but he hated that thing. He refused to plan good things on the same refashioned barn door where his father had spent so many nights encoding his nastiness into that will of his.
“What kind of terrain do llamas prefer?” Gray asked one night as he looked over Brady’s shoulder at the best, current map of Everett land, not precisely smirking.
“Llamas like to be close to the house, I hear,” Ty replied, deadpan, from his other side.
“Keep it up,” Brady drawled. “You might look out the window one morning and find a herd of them spitting at you.”
He still had no particular interest in llamas, though part of him wanted to get a few for the sheer pleasure of messing with Gray. But that would be childish. That was the trouble with what Gray had done. Brady had what he’d always said he wanted. Now he had to figure out which of the many ideas Gray had shot down to run with—and it had to be the one that would work.
Because this was Brady’s one shot to prove himself.
To any lingering ghosts as well as to his brothers.
And maybe to himself too.
But October hunkered down over Cold River, veering between winter and summer, making Brady feel better about how torn he felt. On every topic.
He’d made himself a lot of promises where Amanda was concerned. That night in her apartment had been a sweet, impossible madness, and part of him wanted to vow up and down that he would never do anything like that again.
Once was enough. Once was completing the bargain they’d made. Anything beyond that one time was … dangerous.
He assured himself he wasn’t foolish enough to go back for more. He’d never been much for repeats anyway. Why start now?
“Really?” Amanda asked the next night he appeared at her door well after the bar closed, though her eyes gleamed. “I thought I already got my education.”
“Education is a never-ending process, Amanda.” Brady backed her inside and kicked the door shut behind them. “It can take whole lifetimes.”
“We better get started.” Amanda wrapped her arms around his neck, arching her body into his in a way that made them both sigh a little. “After all, you’re very old. You could die any time.”
He made her pay for that. Repeatedly.
For a while then, as the October weather waffled between snowstorms and callbacks to summer, but got colder every night—a lot like Brady, really—life was okay. More than okay. There was finally harmony between the Everett brothers. It wasn’t as if they stopped poking at one another, but it all felt different when Brady knew they were taking him seriously at the same time. Or giving him space to fail spectacularly, anyway, which amounted to about the same thing.
He scoped out various parcels of land he might claim as his, trying to figure out which one he liked best. He started going back over the variety of different business plans he’d come up with over the years, trying to decide what would be the best tactic to take, now that he’d been here almost a full year and he was looking at diversification from the inside instead of from down in Denver.
One night, there was another big storm rattling around outside like October was trying to remind them all how intense the winters could get here. The family stayed in, gathered in the living room with a fire dancing in the grate and enough bright light to beat back the encroaching dark.
It was getting harder to remember how grim this house had been when Brady was growing up. Gray was pushing those memories back by the simple, revolutionary act of living here with his family and not being miserable.
Brady probably wouldn’t have believed it if he didn’t see it right there before his own eyes.
Baby Bart liked to be held, so Gray had him in the crook of his arm tonight while he watched the news. Abby and Becca sat on one of the couches together, fussing over a crochet pattern while trying to work out where they’d gone wrong in an afghan the two of them were making.
Ty and Hannah had taken Jack back out to their bunkhouse after dinner, because they liked to keep him to a strict bedtime—storm or no storm.
Mommy and Daddy like their evenings toddler-free, Hannah had said once, with that big laugh of hers. And before your mind gets all dirty, we also like to talk to each other in big, old grown-up words every now and again.
Whether they were talking to each other or communicating in other, more physical ways, that, too, was a far cry from the evenings Brady recalled when their father would shout at his current woman until she broke down and sobbed. Or started throwing things back at him. Or worse.
Brady was kicked back in the armchair by the fire with his laptop cracked open as he scanned through his business plans and proposals, aware that he was less creeped out by all this domesticity than he might have been before.
And creeped out wasn’t the right term. It was more that all this congenial quiet usually made him restless. Edgy. He’d never been one for settling down—possibly because he was always braced for the telltale sounds of his father in the next room, muttering over that will. Or pushing his chair back from the only table he couldn’t break when he flipped it, then swaggering drunkenly into the rest of the house to cause trouble and lasting damage.
“If you’re heading in a dude ranch direction,” Gray drawled when the newscast was over, “I know I promised I wouldn’t get in your face about whatever you choose to do, but you might want to give me a heads-up. So I can be prepared.”
“There’s nothing wrong with a dude ranch.” Brady smirked. “It brings in money and tourists all at once.”
It was deeply entertaining to watch Gray fight to keep his expression blank, if not entirely judgment-free. “That’s not the direction you’re heading, is it?”
“It’s not. Though I’m tempted to change my mind because you look so horrified at the thought.”
Over on the couch, Becca and Abby exchanged a glance and laughed.
“I don’t like random people on my land,” Gray said, not looking at his wife or daughter. “I’m old school that way.”
Brady laughed. “You’re old school in every way, brother.”
“Dad is so old school he doesn’t know there’s a new school,” Becca chimed in.
“Careful, Abby,” Gray warned his wife before she had a chance to join in too. Though his eyes gleamed as he gazed at her over the top of their baby’s head. “Be very, very careful.”
“I didn’t know Gray in school,” Abby said primly. “Any school, old or new.”
Becca turned her laugh on her stepmother. “Good save.”
It wasn’t until later, when Brady was back in the bedroom that felt more like a tomb these days, that he allowed himself to admit the moment had been … nice. Truly nice, the way he’d always imagined families were supposed to be. The way the Everett family never had been.
You should be past all this, he chided himself.
But maybe that was the trouble. There was no getting past anything when you were still living in the middle of it.
He sat and called Amanda. He told himself it was a habit he’d gotten into because the weather was so iffy this time of year. He tried not to question why he sometimes called her on clear nights too.
Though he hadn’t told her about the land. About what Gray and Ty had done. And he certainly hadn’t told her he was staying. He couldn’t have said why.
Nothing he did involving Amanda stood up to much scrutiny.
“I know, I know,” she said when she picked up. “It’s snowing out there, isn’t it?”
“The pass might be open. It’s not coming down that hard.” He thought about Gray and Abby out there in the warm, cozy living room. “But it would be real hard to defend a decision to drive into town on a night like this.”
She wasn’t working tonight. He could hear her moving around as she talked to him and found himself trying to imagine where she was in her apartment. He knew it far too well, now.
He chose not to examine why he wanted to picture her there. Or why it felt like another step toward an intimacy he would have sworn he didn’t want.
“That sounds perfectly sensible,” Amanda said. “Also, that sucks.”
“Yeah, it does.”
Later, he knew, the fact that no alarms rang in him when he talked to her like this, or at all, was going to bother him the most. Because that was what always kept him up at night, staring at the same ceiling Amos had scowled up at, all those years.
The problem was, it was too easy to be with Amanda.
Brady liked too many things about her. Her cheerful practicality. Her sudden silliness. And God help him, her endless physical appetite and commitment to feeding it made him heat up even all these miles away from her.
He’d spent his entire adult life keeping his interactions with women on a casual level. On the rare occasions that he dated a woman for more than a night here or there, he usually went to great lengths to make sure there were no misunderstandings.
Brady had always told his friends that he liked to manage expectations early and often.
But when it came to Amanda Kittredge and the way she lit up when she looked at him, he couldn’t bring himself to do it.
He understood it when he was actually, physically with her. When he was moving inside her, losing himself in the little cries she made. Or marveling at how easily and eagerly she learned every last thing he taught her.
Maybe his Amanda problem was as simple as the fact that he was the youngest of three brothers. He’d had hand-me-downs all his life. Brady couldn’t deny there was something in him that deeply liked that he’d finally found something that was only his.
He needed to tell her some hard truths on the phone, then, since he couldn’t seem to do it in person. He glared at the ceiling. It didn’t matter if it was awkward; he needed to set boundaries. Because there was something about the look she got on her face sometimes, so filled with wonder, that made him question exactly where her head was in all this.
Just freaking do it, he ordered himself.
“Tell me about your day,” he said instead.
What?
“My day was a little weird, Brady. As a matter of fact.”
She didn’t know he was yelling at himself. She sounded the way she always did, sweet and right and funny, and he could never predict what his small-town girl might say next.
He could hear her sit down on her sofa. He could hear her breathe. Neither sound should have been comforting, for God’s sake. There was also the distant sound of the relentless music from the Coyote’s jukebox, and the funny thing was, Brady could hardly remember why he’d liked going there anymore. These days, if he made an appearance at all, he sat at a back table, brooded, and waited to see who he might have to kill if they strayed too close to Amanda.
He rubbed at his chest, irritably.
How could he miss Amanda when he saw her all the time?
“Do you remember the one and only Miss Martina Patrick?” she asked.
Brady laughed, despite himself, at the sheer randomness of that. “I don’t want to remember Miss Patrick. I started trying to forget her while I was still high school. I haven’t thought about her since, but now you mention it, why isn’t she retired?”
“Because she’s a whole thing and will never retire. My friend Kat does a killer impression of her dying in her office on school grounds, but part of me feels bad about that.”
“Is it funny? It’s hard to feel bad about something if it’s funny.”
“I think you’ll find that’s called a worrying lack of empathy.”
“Miss Patrick once made me stand outside in the rain because she didn’t like my ‘tone.’” But Brady laughed, because even such indignities were funny now. “I have all kinds of empathy. For other people.”
“Okay, sure, she can be harsh on students, but I’ve always assumed she’s very sad and very lonely. Nothing but cats and an aging mother.”
“And that enchanted gingerbread house in the woods with an oven she likes to push kids into.”
“Today she came into the coffeehouse,” Amanda said, her voice stern. Or trying to be stern. “I found that surprising all by itself, but the two kids who worked there assured me it wasn’t. Apparently she comes in sometimes in the afternoons, I’ve just never seen her before. I watched them serve her, then do their own impressions. And I felt bad.”
“Every kid who’s graduated from Cold River High in the past forty years does impressions of Miss Patrick.”
“Does that make it right?”
“Well, Amanda, it doesn’t make it wrong.”
He was still staring at the ceiling. But he caught himself grinning.
“I decided it was time to make up for my youthful callousness. I marched over to her table, plopped myself down, and gave her my friendliest smile.”
Brady could picture that smile. Vividly. He liked imagining it in the coffee shop a whole lot more than he liked seeing it in the Coyote, where none of those degenerates deserved it. “I’m sure she melted.”
Amanda laughed, and he liked the sound of it. He could feel it inside of him, kicking up a little fuss and making that grin on his face feel like it might be permanent.
Something else he could be pissed about later.
“She did not melt. She stared at me like I’d violated her.”
“That’s the Miss Patrick I remember.”
“She makes me anxious. I found myself nervous-talking about how I never really got to know her while I was a student, but it was so much fun that she came to the coffeehouse now, because the bond. Or something. I hope I didn’t really say bond, but I might have, it’s all a big blur. But do you know what she said?”
Brady tucked an arm behind his head, stopped critiquing his own inability to stop grinning, and surrendered to the reality. Which was that he even liked being on the phone with this woman. Talking about nonsense.
That was probably a clue he should pay attention to. Instead, he concentrated on her.
“‘Get thee behind me, Satan’?” he suggested.
Amanda laughed. “That was implied. She stared at me, for an uncomfortably long period of time, with that awful face she makes.”
“I knew it well, many years ago.”
“‘Miss Kittredge,’ she said, in exactly that tone.” And Amanda pulled off Miss Patrick’s chilly, unimpressed voice so perfectly that Brady found himself grinning like a fool again. “‘I am perfectly comfortable with my own company. In fact, I prefer it.’”
“Oh, ouch.”
“She said it exactly like that. Dripping with disdain.”
Brady hadn’t been kidding when he said he’d started forgetting about Miss Patrick while he’d still been in high school. He hadn’t given the woman a single thought in all the years since, and now he could picture her so vividly, she might as well have been standing in the corner of the room. Glaring at him, as always.
“I hope you thought better of your attempt to befriend her and ran away,” Brady said. “I can’t prove it, but I’m pretty sure she can turn people into stone.”
“I was stuck! I kept smiling at her, and in desperation I said something about how she was an inspiration. And it gets worse, Brady. She laughed.”
“What?” He was laughing, but he couldn’t imagine the eternally bitter school secretary succumbing to hilarity of any kind. “Miss Patrick? Are you sure she laughed? You can’t be remembering that right.”
“She laughed. At me, to be clear. Then she stopped laughing and got serious.” And Amanda’s voice got more serious too. “‘You think you pity me, Miss Kittredge,’ she said. ‘The truth is that you fear me. You don’t know, yet, that lives are choices we make or that I am perfectly content with mine.’”
Amanda didn’t laugh after she said that. Brady didn’t either. And suddenly the ceiling up above him seemed a lot closer. A lot lower.
“I told her I was delighted with my choices,” Amanda said, but she sounded different. Shaken, maybe. “That’s the exact word I used. Delighted. And all she did was laugh again, and then shoo me away.”
Suddenly Brady couldn’t get past the reality that he was stretched out on the bed that had once been his father’s. Staring at the bare and empty walls or the oppressive ceiling. And in the middle of an intense phone conversation with a woman he should never have been intimate with in the first place.
He sat up, ran a hand over his face, and told himself he was annoyed that she was telling him stories. That was why his chest felt so weird. “You can’t let a bitter old woman like that get in your head.”
“That’s what’s been bugging me all day,” Amanda replied. She made a sound that could have been a laugh or a sigh. “What if she’s not bitter at all?”
Brady shifted where he sat, ready to launch into his prepared speech. Because there was no time like the present to set appropriate boundaries. Or to keep ahead of any conversations about choosing which life to have or how to be content in it.
She was temporary and she needed to know that.
You need to know that, idiot, he growled at himself.
But as he opened his mouth to lay down the law, he caught a faint motion out of the corner of his eye. He looked over and found Becca standing there in the door he must have left cracked open.
Brady muttered that he had to go, then hung up. Like he was the teenager and Becca was a disapproving adult.
He stared at his niece, convinced he had guilt stamped all over his face. And the kick of temper he felt as he told himself there was no need for him to feel guilty about anything, even though he knew that was a lie, only made it worse.
“How long have you been standing there?” he asked.
Becca was looking at him much too shrewdly. “Who was that on the phone?”
“A friend.” He stood, tossing his phone to one side. “Do you need something?”
“You were talking to a girl, weren’t you?”
“What makes you think that?”
Becca studied him a moment. “It’s that look on your face. Almost … gentle.”
Brady tried not to openly scowl at his beloved niece. “Well, that’s about the most horrifying thing you’ve ever said to me. I was talking to my broker. And the last thing he is, especially about brokerage accounts, is gentle.”
Becca blinked. “And now you’re lying. Why are you lying?”
“Did you need something?” he asked again, ignoring her question.
“Abby is making a late-night apple crumble. She thought you might want some.” Becca sniffed. “But I’ll go tell her you’re too busy talking to girls and lying about it.”
She didn’t wait for him to respond. She pushed away from the door and stomped off down the hall.
There was no decent way to handle this situation. If he ran after her, issuing threats and shouting his head off, he would be protesting way too much. But if he said nothing, wasn’t he tacitly confirming her take on things?
Brady wanted to lock himself away until he got over this thing in him that kept putting Amanda in the middle of everything, when he knew better. Or he could jump in his truck and leave—though who was he kidding? If he got in his truck, snow or no snow, he’d end up at Amanda’s.
Instead, he made himself walk casually down the hall toward the kitchen. When he reached the main room, he found Gray was now standing, rocking the baby while he fussed. And Gray didn’t laugh when he looked at Brady, but that gaze of his sure did.
“I hear you have a girl.”
“I can’t wait to tell Riley Kittredge that Becca thinks he’s a girl,” Brady replied, sounding more flippant than he felt.
Another lie.
It made him feel dirty. Worse, it made him feel like his father.
There was no need for Amos’s ghost, because here Brady was, standing in this house making the same messes. Keeping it all nice and toxic.
He wanted to confess immediately.
But he didn’t.
It did the trick, because Gray returned his attention to the infant in his arms.
He should have been relieved. But when Brady looked over to the kitchen doorway, Becca was standing there, watching him. A speculative expression on her face.
Lives are choices we make, Miss Patrick said in his head, as chilly and disappointed in him as ever.
Lies were too.
He didn’t apologize to Becca either. Or confess.
Instead, he congratulated himself on dodging a bullet. And tried to drown anything else he might have been feeling—or hearing inside him, against his will—in too much sugar, butter, and cinnamon, the way God intended.