A few days later, Brady found himself in the Broken Wheel Saloon, surrounded by bottles of local Colorado IPAs, platters of cheeseburgers cooked to perfection, and his oldest friends.
There was a decent crowd there as dinner hours waned and tipped over toward more of a bar scene, with a local band tuning up to play a set. It was a gathering Brady would have enjoyed a lot more if he were only visiting Cold River, the way he’d thought he’d been a year ago when he’d come home for Amos’s funeral. Now, he’d stayed long enough to cause real trouble instead of the fun kind.
That made everything a whole lot less comfortable.
“Where have you been?” Riley asked from beside him, where he was kicked back in a chair, toying with his beer. “You haven’t been around in weeks.”
“It hasn’t been weeks.”
But even as he said it, Brady realized he didn’t know if it were true. October was galloping along and he wasn’t ready. He wasn’t prepared. He kept on spending more time with Amanda than he meant to, for one thing. And for another, Halloween was coming up fast.
And Halloween marked a full year since Amos’s death.
Brady would have said that anniversaries didn’t get to him. He couldn’t remember when his mother had left, for example, only that she had. But somehow, this particular year felt significant.
Maybe because he couldn’t quite kick his father’s ghost, no matter how he tried. He was beginning to think there was no need to look for Amos’s ghost, because the old man had taken up residence in him.
“Could be Brady found himself a lady at the Coyote,” Jensen said from across the table. “Maybe he’s gone and shacked up with her.”
Everyone laughed. And Brady had to laugh too, because that should have been hilarious. People didn’t shack up with folks they encountered in the dark, grim shadows of the Coyote. The Coyote was for furtive mistakes, beer-soaked regret, and enough whiskey to make it seem like trying it on all over again was a good idea.
“The only thing I’ve ever found in the Coyote is a headache,” Brady drawled, because everyone was waiting for his reaction. “I don’t take it home. I take a few aspirin.”
That got an even bigger laugh, and he was tempted to relax, but then the crowd on the other side of the table shifted. Brady was still laughing as he looked up. And saw Amanda standing there, previously hidden by the two women standing behind Jensen.
Worse, she was staring straight at him.
He felt an ugly twist in his gut. There was no reason for it. But telling himself that didn’t make it go away.
“You don’t pick up anything at the Coyote,” Jensen said, craning his head around to squint up at his little sister. “Right, Amanda?”
“She shouldn’t even touch the glasses,” Riley added from beside Brady. “I’ve seen who drinks from them.”
“Nothing but headaches,” Amanda said lightly, and she even smiled, but Brady knew her better by now.
He could see the hurt in her eyes. Worse, he could see she was trying to hide it.
It didn’t matter how many times he told himself he had no reason to feel guilty. That they weren’t a public thing. That of course he hadn’t announced he really had met someone in the Coyote.
Because it didn’t work. He felt like a jerk.
Amanda spun back to the other group standing there, on what passed for the Broken Wheel’s dance floor. He should have recognized them. And her.
Brady had to stay where he was, lounging in a chair with the remains of his dinner in front of him. He had to grin like he didn’t have a care in the world, while all the time he was reading the tension in Amanda’s spine. The particular way she stood. Brady couldn’t believe everyone else wasn’t able to see it as clearly as he could. It was blaring her irritation and bruised feelings to the entire saloon. More than that, to all of Cold River.
No one seemed to notice but him.
He told himself that was a good thing.
The conversation at the table turned to over-the-top lies about each man’s hunting prowess, a favorite local game that could last for hours. Especially when Matias started making up stories about all the elk he could take down with little more than mind control.
“I stared him down and told him to kneel,” he said, not cracking even the faintest smile as all around him, everyone hooted and about fell out of their chairs. “And he obliged.”
“A 400-class bull elk.” Jensen could barely speak he was laughing so hard. “Knelt.”
Matias shrugged. “It’s called prowess, friend.”
“It’s called fantasyland,” Jensen retorted.
“You don’t seem like yourself, is all,” Riley said from beside Brady.
Brady took that as an opportunity to stop looking for signs of Amanda’s mood on her freaking back. He turned toward his best friend instead.
“I can choose some land and diversify,” Brady said with a grin. He did not ask himself why he told Riley so easily when he had yet to tell Amanda, who he’d actually been spending more time with lately. He didn’t want to know the answer. “Gray gave me exactly what I want. Is there anything worse?”
Riley actually laughed. “It’s the only thing worse than not getting what you want.”
“Amen.”
Riley toyed with his beer some more. “Thing is, though, you do want it. You’ve always wanted to see what you could do if you didn’t have to be neck-deep in the usual Cold River cattle operation.”
Brady wished his friend were less supportive. Particularly when he’d be anything but supportive if he knew where Brady’s attention had been focused these past few weeks.
“I’ve already seen what I can do,” he said. “We won the state championship twice. I got a full ride to college, and the only way to keep my scholarship was to get straight A’s. So I did.”
“Yes, Brady. You’re like a god among us.”
Brady made a show of scratching his jaw. With his middle finger. “Every single person in my family has always hated bankers. So I decided I might as well become one, more or less, to see what all the fuss was about. To demystify them.”
“I didn’t realize there was anything mystifying about banking in the first place.”
“That’s where you’re wrong, Riley. Some people—my father, for example—always treated math like a list of suggestions. Suggestions he could shrug off whenever he didn’t like the answers. Folks treat finances the same way.”
“If you say so. Why are you lecturing me, again?”
“The fact of the matter is, I’m actually really good at almost anything I put my mind to.”
To his horror, he started thinking about Amanda again. More precisely, sex with Amanda. All those glorious hours he spent tucked away in that apartment of hers, teaching her every last thing he’d ever known about pleasure.
Then letting her practice on him.
His temperature rose two degrees. Instantly.
Riley was right next to him. Right there.
“I’m not going to deny that you’re good at things,” Riley said, shifting to look at Brady directly—the last thing Brady wanted. “It’s annoying, actually.”
“I’m delighted to hear that.”
His friend was clearly trying to say something serious, because he let that pass. “But being good at things isn’t the same as doing something because you love it.” Riley’s dark gaze met Brady’s for a moment, then dropped. “You’re the one who told me that. A long time ago.”
Brady remembered. It had been after Riley and Rae had broken up, and Riley was down in Denver, trying to figure out what to do with his life now that it was no longer the one he’d had planned.
The memory only made him feel that same mix of guilt and temper all over again. How was he in this mess? And why hadn’t he extricated himself already? What did he think was going to happen here?
“We’ve always been the same, you and me,” Riley said quietly. “You love this land. You let Amos chase you away. You let Gray make you feel bad about coming back. But now you finally have a chance to do what you’ve always wanted to do. What I can’t figure out is why you’re dragging your feet.”
Brady saw a flash of honey hair across the table. And the line of Amanda’s pretty neck that he’d had his mouth on. Repeatedly.
He needed to get it together. Now. “I don’t know.”
“Don’t you?” The corner of Riley’s mouth kicked up. “Both your brothers faced their demons and came out happier for it. You have to be wondering what happens if you don’t.”
“Hey. Kittredge. Mind your own business.” Brady laughed while he said that, but he wasn’t sure he was kidding. “You want to sit here and talk about your problems?”
“I deal with my problems,” Riley replied, something not quite a smile playing in the corner of his mouth. “I see my problems on the street all the time. There’s no need to talk about my problems, because they’re probably sitting at the next table, having a few beers.”
“I don’t know which is worse.”
This time, Riley really did smile. But there was nothing nice in it. “I do.”
Brady told himself he hadn’t been watching, or waiting, but he noticed the second Amanda detached herself from her group of friends and headed toward the back of the saloon in the direction of the bathrooms. He should have let her go. He should have used it as an opportunity not to follow her. Not to invite speculation.
Brady waited maybe three seconds, then excused himself.
It was ridiculous. It was lunacy, in fact. He was begging for trouble—
But it didn’t matter. The bathrooms of the saloon were in a small hallway in back, but the hallway then curved around toward the kitchen. A person could go around that corner and keep out of sight of anyone else who came back here.
Brady caught up to Amanda easily. Too easily. She had her hand on the door to the women’s room, but he helped himself to a sturdy grip on her elbow.
She jolted as she looked up at him, but she didn’t jerk away, so he propelled her farther along the hall. Then safely around the corner.
“Careful,” she said, glaring up at him when he backed her into the wall. “I wouldn’t want you to get a headache. I left my aspirin at home.”
“What did you want me to say?” And like that, any lie he might have been telling himself about how he hadn’t been primed for exactly this fight—since the moment he’d looked up and seen her—fled. “This is supposed to be a secret, remember?”
“I remember. Believe me, I remember.”
“That’s what we agreed, Amanda. Do we need to have a broader discussion about boundaries? Expectations?”
He knew they did. Why was he asking instead of telling her what she needed to know?
Because you think it will crush her, something in him said, very distinctly. And that will crush you.
“I don’t know,” she shot back at him. “Do we? Do you actually know what boundaries are?”
She wasn’t cringing, there with her back against the wall. Not his Amanda. She glared. And then she surged forward and thumped a finger into his chest.
Because she had absolutely no fear of him. Something he thought he should probably celebrate, but not now. Not right now.
“You’re the one who chased me back here, Brady. Why did you do that? Do you need me to break down how this thing between us works? You show up at my door. We pretend you don’t. Sometimes we talk on the phone, but we don’t admit that. And we certainly don’t act like we know each other as anything more than distant family friends when we see each other in public.” But the temper drained away somewhere in that last sentence. “That would be a disaster, obviously.”
Brady wanted to hold her, soothe her, make it better—and that only made him angry.
“Two of your brothers are out there tonight, Amanda. I was sitting at a table with them. Did you miss that?”
“I’m not afraid of them. I thought you weren’t either.”
He wanted to punch a few holes in the wall. In case he needed reminders of whose son he was. “I’m not afraid of your brothers. The same way I’m not particularly afraid of elk or bears, but I wouldn’t lie down and let them trample me or eat me for dinner either.”
“I get it,” Amanda said, in a small voice that announced that she did not, in fact, get it. “Believe me, I get it. I’m fully aware this is what we agreed.” The way she looked at him made his chest hurt. “I guess I wasn’t prepared to watch you lie about it, that’s all.”
“I didn’t lie about anything. Directly.”
But as he said that, it dawned on him that he’d lied to Becca. And to Gray. Making this a third lie, and him a whole lot further down that slippery slope than he wanted to admit.
And Amanda knew it. How did she know it when he didn’t?
“Oh, come on,” she said, her eyes a bright gold while she looked straight through him. “Don’t lie to me, Brady.”
He was filled with things he didn’t understand. Frustration. Need. A kind of fear. A very deep panic. And threaded through all of it, holding it together and making it hurt all the more was that particular intensity that he’d only ever felt about this one woman.
He couldn’t name it.
He refused to name it.
Brady didn’t know how long they stood there like that, entirely too close in a tiny spit of a hallway, only steps away from where most of their friends and too many members of her family waited.
He didn’t know how long they stood like that, so close. So connected, though they were only almost touching.
It felt like a kiss, though his mouth wasn’t on hers. It was that deep. That all-consuming. It was ripe with all the things that passed between them, that swirled around them. Knowledge and acceptance, resignation and something else. Something far more permanent than he was prepared to admit.
“Amanda…”
“Careful, Brady,” she whispered, though her voice had a catch in it. “We’re in public. Someone might hear. Someone might know. You might have to mean it.”
Then she ducked under his arm and walked away, her back straight and tall.
He needed to let her go. He knew that.
But that didn’t prevent him from driving across the river later that night. Or from hiding his truck a ways up the hill, deep in the trees, then picking his way back down to her building.
It didn’t keep him from making her sob for him, or burying himself in her with a ferocity that bordered on sheer, dizzying panic.
He had to let her go.
Brady told himself that again and again as he watched her sleep hours later, curled up in a ball with her hands beneath her cheek, and a faint frown marring the perfection of her face.
He was betraying his friends. He was betraying himself. He was betraying her too, by making her sneak around. When any man in his right mind would be nothing but proud to let the whole world know he was with a woman like her.
You need to let her go, he growled at himself.
Because Amanda was the kind of woman a wise man married.
But Brady wasn’t the marrying kind.
That was the beginning and the end of everything.
A few days later, he saddled up his favorite horse and rode out to the land he’d finally claimed as his. He rode the perimeter, explored the acreage, imagining the things he could do with it. He camped, out there in the cold rush of fall, between snowstorms. And when he looked up at the brooding mountains that kept him company out there, he didn’t lie. He didn’t pretend the land wasn’t in him, deep.
Out there, there was nothing but wind and fields, and the Rockies standing tall, telling tales of endurance. Of stability. Of the profound beauty in simple survival.
He woke in the frigid mornings and coaxed the fire to life, then sat there as the sun poked its head over the eastern range. The rays of light danced over the valley, gilding all of it from field to cattle, river to ranch.
This land he’d been given at birth. This land he’d chosen now.
The cold sun made things clear. At last.
Amanda might not know her future, but Brady did. She was going to settle down. She was going to stay right here in Cold River, with that beautiful smile and those dreamy golden eyes, because this was where she belonged. The only reason she’d looked his way was because he’d decided years ago that he didn’t belong here too. That he was better off in the city.
She’d chosen him to educate her because he was never meant to be anything but a fling. And better still, one with an expiration date, because everyone knew Brady Everett was going to keep his year-long promise to his brother, then leave again.
But now everything was different. Because now he was staying.
Which meant he needed to cut her loose.
Because if he didn’t, if he held onto her when he knew better, sooner or later he was going to break her heart. Break her heart, crush her spirit, ruin her. He was already well on his way.
And if he knew all that and did it anyway? Then he really would be no better than his father.
He and his brothers all had a bit of Amos in them. They’d all been infected with that poison early on. But then, that was the Everett way. They lived out here, drowning in the elements, and it left them feral. More than a little mean. And very often horrifically drunk to boot. Accordingly, they often took it out on those closest to them. It was a tale as old as the pioneers who’d claimed these fields in the first place.
But he thought about what Riley had said in the Broken Wheel. That Gray and Ty had fought their demons and won.
Brady had every intention of doing the same thing.
He could live for the land like his ancestors always had, out here where loneliness was as much a part of the landscape as the snow in the mountains. He could find new ways to love, and he could love things that he couldn’t wound. The land would never love him back, and that meant he couldn’t poison it slowly, or bruise it, or destroy it. It would outlast him.
There was a freedom in that. A stark sort of joy.
He could do these things for Amanda, if not for himself. Brady vowed he would.
No matter how much it hurt.