18

It was every bit as bad as Brady had anticipated.

Worse.

He’d never seen a look like that on his best friend’s face. And certainly not aimed at him. Riley stood there, disgust and betrayal all over him as he scowled down at Brady. At Brady sprawled out on the floor, laid out but good.

It didn’t occur to him to put up a fight.

All Brady could muster the energy to do was check to see if his nose was broken. It wasn’t, though it hurt. And he could feel his eye getting puffy. He figured he’d have a shiner for the foreseeable future.

He couldn’t help thinking he was getting off easy.

“Are you out of your mind?” Amanda yelled. She shoved at Riley’s arm. “You just punched your best friend in the face!”

“Why were you kissing him?” Riley shouted right back. “How long have you been sneaking around with him? Is that why you moved out of Mom and Dad’s house?”

The look he threw at Brady then was homicidal.

“No,” Brady said, and took a moment to make sure none of his teeth were loose. Brady hadn’t expected he’d ever find himself in a position to confirm that yes, his possibly former best friend had a punch like a sledgehammer, as rumored. “I had nothing to do with that.”

“You don’t have the right to ask either one of us those questions,” Amanda snapped. She shoved at her brother again. Riley didn’t move, but that didn’t stop her. If anything, she went harder. “None of this is your business, Riley. When I want your advice about my romantic life, you’ll know. Because I’ll ask. Which will never happen, because it’s not like you are in any position to be handing out advice, are you?”

“You have a romantic life?” Riley practically bellowed it. “With him?”

“For all you know, I have a romantic life with every single man in town!” Amanda threw at him. Not helping, to Brady’s mind. He stood. Carefully. “It’s still not your business.”

“You’re my little sister. Of course it’s my business. And you’re lucky all I did was hit him.” Riley slid another filthy look Brady’s way, making Brady all the happier about getting to his feet. “What do you think Zack’s going to do?”

“Hopefully follow the law, which is his job,” Amanda snapped. “And I think you’ll find that means he can’t be throwing random men in jail because he finds them kissing his sister.”

“Then he can put me in jail for killing the random man myself,” Riley growled. “Like a fox in a henhouse.”

“I’m not a hen, you Neanderthal.”

Brady checked out his jaw, because his whole face hurt, but wasn’t foolish enough to take his eyes off his best friend.

“There’s no point fighting about this,” he managed to say. “It’s over.”

“You’re damn right it’s over,” Riley snarled back at him. “I don’t know why I didn’t expect something like this. Of course you betrayed me. I trust someone, boom. They betray me. I should have known.”

“News flash, Riley,” Amanda snapped, clearly not as rocked straight through by that as Brady was. He felt it like a mortal blow. She looked like she might stop shoving and start swinging. “This isn’t about you. If you want to talk about your broken heart and the mess of your marriage, I would be delighted. But this isn’t the time. You’ve had years to talk about it.”

If possible, Riley’s scowl deepened. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Then don’t talk about how betrayed you are. Go fix it. Or don’t, I don’t really care. But what you don’t get to do is come barging in here, whaling on people.”

Brady had never seen Amanda so fierce. And if he wasn’t mistaken, protective. Of him.

He couldn’t really take it in. He was too busy reeling from what had happened between them, even before Riley had appeared. And Riley glaring at him like he would hate Brady forever didn’t help.

Brady was almost grateful for the pulse of pain that radiated out from the point of impact. Almost.

“I never meant to betray you,” Brady said, very formally, to Riley. “I know you won’t believe this, but it … just happened.”

“She’s my baby sister,” Riley seethed at him, pushing against Amanda’s grip like he was chomping at the bit to take another swing. And Brady would have to let him, wouldn’t he? “You changed her diaper, man!”

Amanda made a frustrated noise. “I’m going to put you both in diapers in a minute.

Brady accepted the fury and betrayal on his best friend’s face. He nodded and didn’t offer up any further excuses or arguments. What was there to say? He’d known better, and he’d done it anyway.

He took one last look at Amanda, even more beautiful now lit up with indignation. Even more perfectly her, if that were possible, and everything in him was a deep, hard ache. But he’d made his choice before Riley had come in swinging. He wasn’t going to change it now.

If he thought about it, getting punched in the face was a small price to pay for tasting her. He couldn’t regret it.

“If you want to round up a good, old-fashioned Wild West posse of Kittredge boys to hunt me down, you know where to find me,” Brady told Riley. Who growled back at him. “I’m not going to hide from you.”

He cut his gaze to Amanda. But he couldn’t think of anything to say. Or he could, but he couldn’t bring himself to say it. All he could do was hold her gaze for another long, wrenching moment, basking in all that emotion-soaked gold.

Then he made himself leave.

He staggered out into the cold sunshine, the frigid breeze from the mountains cutting into him. He stood there a moment, unsteady on his feet, and wanted to blame the hit he’d taken.

But it wasn’t Riley’s fist that had knocked him off balance. If anything, getting sucker punched had cleared his head. At last.

It’s only you, she’d said.

Brady couldn’t let himself believe that. He couldn’t really let himself dwell on it. Or it would hurt him a whole lot more than the thudding pulse of pain in one side of his face.

He climbed into his truck, thinking he really should have hidden it again if he didn’t want someone driving by and seeing it. The way he assumed Riley must have. Had he wanted someone to discover him with Amanda? Had he wanted to make sure he couldn’t give in to temptation?

That a part of him still wanted to get out of his truck and go back inside—even if Riley jumped him again—well. That was the problem, wasn’t it?

It didn’t matter what he wanted. What mattered—finally, and too late—was what he did.

Or didn’t do.

Brady meant to head out to the ranch and throw himself into work—where he could sweat out all this poison and emotion, he was sure—but he didn’t. He drove over the hill and hated how beautiful the valley was today, with the sky so blue and the mountains so tall, the way they always were. He hated that his life could feel like this, broken irreparably and ugly straight through, but he’d never know it from the view.

That was what he loved about this land. It didn’t care what happened to the men and women who broke themselves all over it. It didn’t care if they lived or died.

At the moment, Brady felt almost … desperate. Like he didn’t care much either.

Instead of heading back to Cold River Ranch, he headed out toward the rock where he’d taken Amanda. Once he made it through the fields and down to the river, he grabbed an old T-shirt he’d tossed in the back seat and forgotten about. He dunked it in the surging water of the cold river, then held it to his eye as he sat there.

“Ouch,” he muttered. Freaking Riley.

Not that he blamed his friend.

No matter how much the side of his face throbbed.

He sat there for a long time, reapplying the cold water to his face. He waited and waited, but the riot inside him didn’t ease.

If anything, it got worse. Darker, thicker, and more painful.

At some point, he accepted the fact that he might just have to live with this. With what he’d done and the fallout from it. That this was simply … how things would be now.

Riley hated him. Brady had done that all by himself. And Amanda might think she loved him now, but he knew that would turn around. She would end up hating him too. She would meet that nice guy and wish she hadn’t thrown her innocence away. He would be her big regret.

The inevitability of that shouldn’t have stung as much as it did. Almost worse than his eye.

But he could see it as if it had already happened. He could see her, round and pregnant and glowing—with another man’s baby. He could see her pretending she hardly knew him.

He could see himself dancing at her wedding, all right, with one of the elderly widows who always liked a handsome young dance partner—all while avoiding making eye contact with the bride or any of her family.

It made him feel vaguely ill.

But then, that was nothing new. After all, he was the kid who’d made his own mother leave. Bettina had stuck it out through Gray and Ty, but Brady was the one who’d turned the tide. He was the bridge too far, the straw that broke the camel’s back, whatever you wanted to call it.

He deserved to be alone, he’d always thought, and he’d tried to be. He’d never seen Amanda coming.

But thanks to her, Brady was right on track to making himself into Amos, once and for all.

What he couldn’t get away from was the idea that this had all been a self-fulfilling prophecy from the start. He’d meant what he told Amanda. The more he thought about his brothers and their demons and the way they’d fought their way to a kind of happiness none of them had ever seen play out on the ranch, it was hard not to read Amos’s response to his youngest as deliberate condemnation.

The more he thought about it, the more Brady was convinced Amos had known the truth about him all along. And soon everyone else in the Longhorn Valley would too.

Word would get out. It likely already had. And Brady knew better than to think that folks would take his side in this. He wasn’t even on his side. The whole town would choose, and it wouldn’t be the city slicker, college-educated Everett boy, who should have known better than to put his hands on that sweet little Kittredge girl.

He’d known that going in too.

Maybe some part of him had always known he’d end up here. On the land and of it, but connected to nothing and no one. The only difference between him and his father was the booze.

And Lord knew he could remedy that any time he chose.

Was this what had happened to Amos? Had he tried to be a good man once? Because Brady understood now, the great gulf between the things a man told himself about who he was and the reality of his actions, and how that could get into a person’s bones. How it could warp them. He understood how much easier it would be to dive headfirst into the slick embrace of alcohol.

Getting drunk and mean with it meant Amos had never had to face this … emptiness. If he drank enough, the drinking caused its own problems, and the real problems never needed to be addressed. They could fester there. They could sink in deep.

Maybe it had been easier for Amos to give in. To allow himself to go dark and stay dark, because the light hurt too much.

Of all the things Brady might have imagined the year anniversary of his father’s death might kick up in him, it wasn’t this. It wasn’t … sympathy.

It sat strangely on him. Like another blow to the face.

Brady made his way back to his truck. Then he wheeled around and headed for the ranch. He was stiff and cold, and he saw he’d been sitting out there a long, long time. The day was still bright around him, but there were clouds up over the mountains, hinting at the storms to come. He rubbed a hand over his heart as he drove, trying to piece together all the strands of the heavy things that sat on him.

But all he felt was the weight.

When he got back to the ranch house, it looked like Abby was home, but Gray and Ty were still out in the fields. And maybe it made him a coward—or more of one—but the longer Brady could put off discussing the state of his face and how he’d come by a fist print there, the better. He parked in the yard, then headed for the entrance on the back of the house that led directly to his room.

To Amos’s room. Where Brady had marinated for almost a year, and had turned out to be no better than the man he’d been so sure he’d done everything to avoid becoming.

He wasn’t hiding, he assured himself as he went inside and got his first decent look at his face in his bathroom mirror. He winced, because it looked like what it was. A very hard, very deliberate blow. Ouch.

“I’m not hiding from anything,” he muttered as he turned away from the mirror. “I’m waiting.”

Because there was no need to dive headfirst into something he knew was going to be unpleasant, like his family’s reaction to his face. And their further reactions when they found out about Amanda, the way he knew they would.

Amanda might tell them herself, for all he knew. The mood she’d been in, she might do anything.

That should probably not have made him smile.

He cracked open his laptop and immersed himself in the financial world he’d left behind him in Denver. He’d always been good at numbers, and he still was. And more, he knew exactly who to contact to start putting the wheels in motion for his diversification project. He thought it would pay off in spades, but even if he was wrong—and he hadn’t been wrong about a money-making venture in quite some time—the beauty of it was, he would preserve the land.

That was the lesson of all of this, wasn’t it? No matter what happened, an Everett preserved the land.

No matter what he sacrificed. No matter what he lost. No matter what he gave up along the way, none of that mattered as much as the land. That view he’d hated and loved in equal measure when he’d come over the hill today.

Whatever else Brady was, he’d finally come to understand that above all else, he was an Everett.

That probably should have felt like more of a victory.

Instead, what he felt was that same heaviness, so he ignored it and started reaching out to colleagues and friends.

When the commotion started in the main part of the house, he ignored that too. There were a lot of people living in and around this house these days, and no need for him to go sticking his nose in every time he heard a noise.

But the second time he heard a particular voice, he couldn’t ignore it. Because it sounded a whole lot like Amanda.

Even though that should have been impossible. Hadn’t Riley locked her up by now? Built her a tower and thrown away the key, or something equally dramatic?

He slid his laptop off to the side, then headed out of the back room. But Becca was there in the hallway again.

“Why are you lurking out here?”

She gasped. “What happened to your face?”

“I walked into a door. And that still doesn’t tell me what you’re doing back here, clearly up to no good.”

Becca looked wounded. “I was looking for you.”

“You could have knocked.” He wanted to look away from her dark, too-clever gaze, but didn’t.

“Why is Amanda Kittredge here?”

“She’s your neighbor, Becca.”

“She didn’t come by with brownies or a pot roast, Uncle Brady. She came to see you.”

“That’s ridiculous,” he muttered.

But Becca was studying him, that considering look on her face that he both recognized and intensely disliked.

“Is Amanda the girl you were talking to the other night? When you lied?” And she reminded him a little too much of her father just then. “Twice?”

“I marched in your parade, Becca. Surely that should buy me fewer questions.”

Becca rolled her eyes, but she stepped aside. And Brady moved past her, aware that he was walking like his bones might give way. Like he’d been on a bender. It annoyed him.

He moved faster, out into the living room where, sure enough, Amanda was standing in that archway that connected the big room to the kitchen.

Amanda.

Looking stubborn and furious and so beautiful it made his ribs feel a little precarious inside his chest.

She was saying something to whoever was still in the kitchen, hidden by the wall, but stopped when she saw him.

“Brady…,” she breathed, and his curse was that he loved the way she said his name. It got into him like heat. It warmed him up and made that weight ease a little too—and that was a problem. She was a problem. “Your face…”

He glared at her. “You shouldn’t be here. And I’m fine.”

“You’re not fine. Your face is swollen and you already have a black eye.” Her hands twitched, as if she’d started to reach for him and then thought better of it, and Brady didn’t know why that hurt even worse than the rest. “It’s probably going to turn colors before it’s done.”

“I said I’m fine.”

It had been hard enough to do this once already today. Almost impossible, before Riley had turned up swinging. He didn’t think he could go through it again.

Why couldn’t she understand that he was trying to do the right thing here?

Brady opened his mouth to ask her that, when he remembered they weren’t alone this time. Because Abby moved from deeper in the kitchen to stand behind Amanda, a dumbstruck look on her face and Bart strapped to her front. She was cradling the baby’s head with one hand, but she didn’t take that scandalized gaze off Brady.

“What on earth is going on?” she asked.

“I told you he had a girl,” Becca said from behind him, sounding far too satisfied.

He decided she’d won herself a spot as his least favorite niece, then and there. But he couldn’t tell her that, because Abby was still staring at him. The same way Riley had earlier.

Like the monster Brady had always suspected he was.

He wasn’t going to fight it anymore. What would be the point? He lifted his chin and met his sister-in-law’s appalled gaze.

“Are you…? Are you and Amanda…? No, that’s impossible. Tell me that’s impossible.”

It was like a nightmare. A nightmare he’d had quite a few times over the past month. Because it wasn’t enough that Abby was here, looking at him like he’d killed someone. Worse, everyone else crowded in right behind her.

Gray, clearly straight from the fields. Ty right behind him. And a split second later, Hannah too. She was toting Jack, all kitted out in a Halloween costume that made him look like the cutest bear cub Brady had ever seen.

“Hey, Amanda—” Hannah began happily, but then stopped when the tension in the room got to her.

Or when she got a good look at Amanda’s reddened eyes and Brady’s busted-up face. It was hard to tell.

For a long moment, no one said a word. Even Jack and the baby were quiet.

They all stared.

Brady stared back, but he couldn’t bring himself to care about his family’s reaction the way he probably should have. Not when Amanda was there, with curls in her hair and swollen eyes and all that hurt and hope in her expression that told him she hadn’t gotten around to hating him yet.

He wanted this part to be over.

He wanted to fast-forward straight into getting his Amos on.

“Take a good look,” he growled, his chin still lifted. “Amanda and I had a thing. It’s over. Riley took exception and punched me in the face. That brings everyone up to speed. No need to discuss it further.”

There was another long beat of silence.

Then everyone reacted all at once.

Ty laughed. Because of course he did. Hannah didn’t actually laugh out loud, but she didn’t look particularly scandalized either. Gray looked like a thundercloud, as ever.

But Abby, on the other hand, still looked stunned.

And worse, horrified.

Amanda was staring at all of them, then turning to look at him, back and forth like she couldn’t decide who she was angriest with. Becca stayed where she was, standing in the entrance to the hallway behind him, her hands over her mouth and her eyes wide.

Brady had the deeply ungallant and cowardly thought that if he really wanted, he could dive out one of the front windows and be done with this. He could ride off into the fields and let the land have its say as fall rolled in hard behind him and swallowed him whole.

If Amanda hadn’t been here, he might have.

But she was, and he couldn’t leave her to deal with the fallout on her own, so he stood there. And took it.

Because he always took it. Because Gray brooded, Ty laughed, and it never much mattered what Brady felt about anything.

He’d been sick of that all year. Today, he found it intolerable.

He was working his way up to announcing that, no matter how disappointed Gray and Abby looked, when Amanda jumped in.

“What is the matter with you?” she demanded, and Brady was surprised to note that she was directing her ire toward the kitchen, not toward him. And her voice was loud and clear, no doubt honed from two months of shouting down the drunken masses at the Coyote. “That’s your brother. You’d treat a random stranger off the street better than this. Can’t you see he’s hurting?”

“Amanda,” Abby said, sounding … careful. Too careful. “I don’t think you understand—”

“Of course I understand, Abby. I’m in love with him.”

“Are you knocked up?” asked Ty, still laughing.

Or at least, until Hannah punched him in the arm, at which point he stopped laughing and scowled at his wife instead.

“No, I am not pregnant.” Amanda’s voice shook a little, but not with any kind of weakness. That was clear. “Not that there would be anything wrong with it if I were. Given that neither Brady nor I are children ourselves.”

Brady might have been amused at the way they all looked at one another then, like that was a confronting thought. If things had been different, that was. If he hadn’t actually defiled an innocent, the way they all thought he had. It was hard to work up any righteous indignation.

“I have to hand it to you,” Gray said, in that leathery, well-worn way of his that made Brady want to curl up inside and die. The way it always had. “I didn’t think that when you talked about diversification, you meant … the Kittredge family.”

Brady wanted to punch something, but he didn’t particularly want his knuckles to hurt as much as the side of his face did. “Very funny.”

“I’m not surprised Riley took a swing at you,” Gray continued, and there it was. That patented Gray Everett disapproval. “I’d have similarly murderous thoughts if some man ten years older was panting after Becca.”

Brady reconsidered taking that swing at his older brother, then, but he was already too much like Amos. That would make it even worse. He bit back the angry words that crowded his tongue, and if that was how it tasted to be so small a man, no wonder Amos had chased it down with whiskey.

But Amanda was glaring at Gray, and she didn’t appear similarly afflicted.

“You should be ashamed of yourself,” she snapped.

To Gray.

It shocked him and the rest of the Everett family into silence.

“Maybe instead of standing around, congratulating yourself on your own virtue, you could spend one second taking care of Brady,” she said, every word like a bullet. A hail of bullets.

Brady didn’t know where to look. At his brothers? At their astonished wives? Or at fearless, impetuous Amanda—who was standing up for him … again?

“My brothers treat me like a child,” she continued in the same fierce, furious tone. “They make me want to tear my hair out regularly, but when my older brother thought something was going on with me that shouldn’t have been, he took a swing at the problem. But not you, Gray.”

For the first time that Brady could recall, a person who was not Ty or Brady himself was actually looking at Gray in grave disappointment. It was certainly new. He hardly knew where to put it.

“You’d rather take a swing at Brady,” Amanda was saying, shaking her head. “Does that make you feel better about the fact that you could have stepped in years ago and helped instead? He’s been looking up to you his whole life. Would it kill you to be nice to him for a change?”

There was another stunned silence, and Brady thought that someday he might look back on this moment and find it amusing. He didn’t think he’d ever seen Gray look so … thunderstruck.

But at the moment, he didn’t really see how he’d ever find anything amusing again.

“Amanda,” he said in a low voice, as if her name didn’t hurt. When it did. “You need to tone it down, killer.”

The only sound from the kitchen was Ty, laughing again.

Amanda glared at him, then. Because she was apparently the only person in Cold River unfazed by Ty Everett, the rodeo star. “I’m glad you think it’s so funny. Meanwhile, your younger brother is so tied up in knots, he thinks that of all the people standing in this room, he’s the most like your father.”

“None of the people standing in this room are anything like Amos, Amanda,” Abby said then, and it was about the closest to a temper that Brady had ever seen on her.

“Grandpa always yelled a whole lot more,” Becca said from the hallway, her voice matter-of-fact, and wasn’t that another kick in the gut? “And he used way more bad words. Amanda just thinks you all should be nicer to Uncle Brady.” She sniffed. “I agree. You should.”

“I’m nice to everyone,” Ty drawled, but there was an arrested sort of light in his gaze. “It’s part of my charm. Ask around, peanut.”

“And while you’re at it, maybe you could all stop confusing Becca and me,” Amanda said, in a dangerous sort of tone.

Brady didn’t know what the danger was, precisely, but he could feel it ignite. As if she’d lit a match too close to him and the hairs on the back of his neck were standing up in protest. He started toward her, determined to contain the damage, at the very least.

Though he wasn’t sure, at this point, if he was protecting her from his family or if it was the other way around.

“I love Becca myself,” Amanda said. “But she’s your daughter, Gray. She’s an honest-to-God teenager. I’m not. You’re aware of that, right? If I recall correctly, I’m the same age Becca’s mother was when you married her.”

“Seriously, Dad,” Becca chimed in.

“Okay,” Gray said then, his voice stern and his eyes on Amanda. “You’ve said your piece.”

“I’m just getting started,” she replied hotly.

Brady reached her then and snaked an arm around her waist, pulling her up against him because he wasn’t entirely sure she wouldn’t launch herself across the room at one or both of his brothers. She was a Kittredge, after all. They weren’t afraid to swing first and ask questions later.

“What’s gotten into you, Amanda?” Abby asked quietly, then, one hand on little Bart in his carrier and another on Gray’s arm.

She looked a lot as if she was the one who’d gotten sucker punched. And by Amanda.

“I think it’s real clear what got into her, Abby,” Ty drawled. “He’s standing right there.”

That got him another punch from his wife.

Everyone started talking at once. At Brady, at Amanda, at one another. Amanda shook Brady’s arm off and stepped forward, obviously perfectly happy to dive straight into the fray.

But all Brady could think was how happy this would have made his father. How delighted Amos would have been to see them all at one another’s throats. And if he looked through the archway into the kitchen, he could see that damned table sitting there. The barn door they’d put into place because they were so tired of picking up the splinters every time Amos broke it.

If he squinted, he could see the old man sitting there the way he always had. A half-drunk bottle of whiskey at his elbow and that bitter scowl in place, muttering to himself—but loud enough to be heard—about who he was adding to his will and who he was crossing out. If he listened, he could hear the sound of the whiskey bottle thunking against the table top, and worse, the sound of Amos’s angry scribbling.

Amos would have loved to know that a year later, there was still all this animosity. He would have fed on it.

Brady made a decision then. He ignored all the sniping and headed for the door at the back of the kitchen.

“What a surprise,” Gray growled as he moved. “You talk a big game, Denver, but anytime it gets hard, you’re out the door.”

“Why would he stay here when you think so little of him?” Amanda demanded, surprising Brady once again with her fierceness. Like she would fight Gray all night if she had to. For him. And something shifted in him at that, but he didn’t stop. Neither did she. “I’m not at all surprised that he left for college and had no intention of coming back here. The only thing that surprises me is that he actually did come back anyway. And spent a year here because you asked him to.”

“I’m not going to have an argument with you,” Gray gritted out.

“What could you possibly argue? That when you call Brady names and say snide things you’re somehow supporting him?” Amanda made a noise. “Because you’re not.”

“She’s got you there, big brother,” Ty drawled, sounding like that laughter of his was brewing right beneath the surface.

“Like you’re any better,” Hannah said then, surprising Brady enough that he stopped by the door. And stared. Everyone else did too, if that astonished silence was any guide. “The two of you are relentless. It was clear to me the day I arrived here that Brady is a powerful man in his own right who locks it up around the two of you because you refuse to see it. And don’t think it’s not perfectly clear that you two letting him do what he likes with his diversification idea is because you think he’s going to fall on his face.” She smiled then, big and bright, which was Hannah at her most lethal. “Meanwhile, sugar, you know I love you, but there are other forms of success besides the rodeo and a herd of Angus.”

“Way to knife me in the back, Hannah Leigh.” Ty didn’t look angry, though there was an edge to his usually lazy voice. “You can’t resist a crowd, can you?”

“Never have,” Hannah said softly. “Never will.”

Brady couldn’t take any more of this. Next Abby would turn on Gray and that would mean the world was ending. He wanted no part of this. He pushed out through the door.

It took him two steps out the back to the woodpile, where he ignored the carefully stacked wood, most of which he’d put there himself, and grabbed the axe. Then he wheeled around and came back inside the kitchen.

“Whoa now, little brother,” Ty said, turning that edgy drawl on him. “No need to introduce a weapon. Everetts have always been capable of grievous bodily harm with their words alone.”

Brady ignored him. He ignored all of them and stalked directly toward that damn barn-door table.

Then he swung the axe down, hard.

Because it was his turn to make a table into splinters, and he was going to do it right.

He chopped and he chopped, glad he’d spent so much time contributing to that woodpile out back. Because each time the blade met wood, it was satisfying. It was right.

And he said goodbye to Amos and his poison with every swing.

Enough of the lies. Enough of his nasty, insinuating stories about each and every one of them. Enough of Gray, the martyr. Ty, the drunk.

And Brady, the smart ass, unwanted kid.

Enough.

He was sweating like a wild man, the whole side of his face ached, and Brady didn’t care at all.

In fact, he wasn’t sure he’d ever felt more free.

Only when that old barn door was completely reduced to splinters that no one could ever put back together did he lay down the axe. And only then did he turn to face his family once again.

His family and Amanda. His beautiful, fierce, and innocent Amanda. She was covering her mouth with her hands. Tears flowed freely down her cheeks.

But still Brady looked at her and saw nothing but sunshine.

He understood, finally, the ache in his bones. The pressure in his chest. The panic and fear that had been riding him this whole time.

Brady was going to have to bronze that tank top. Because without it, he might never have truly seen her. And if he’d never seen her, none of this would have happened.

He couldn’t think of anything worse.

But this wasn’t the time to get into all that. Brady met Gray’s gaze. Then Ty’s. He looked at each one of his sisters-in-law, and then at Becca.

He made sure he had everyone’s attention.

“Dad has been dead for a year,” he said, and he’d meant to speak quietly, the way he always did around his brothers. But instead, he sounded a lot more like the other version of himself. The one who commanded board rooms and led high-powered meetings without thinking twice. “But he never really dies.”

Hannah had met this version of him before. She didn’t look as surprised as Abby and Becca did. He saw Gray and Ty exchange a longer look.

But Amanda only smiled.

“And he never goes anywhere.” Brady wiped his face with his sleeve, then nodded toward the pile of wood chips he’d made. “Because we all keep carrying him around. And every night we come into this house and we sit at that table where he spent years upon years scratching his poison into that will of his.”

He could still see Amos there. Maybe he always would. But Brady didn’t need to keep taking part in this sick little vigil.

“All the games he played, with all of us. All his schemes, all his lies.” Brady shook his head. “He poured them into that table and we eat off it. We keep it here like a monument to a dead man every one of us is afraid of becoming. I don’t want to become him. I’m afraid I already am him, if I’m honest. I’m staying on this ranch, and I guess that means I have to face up to what it means to be an Everett. I can handle that. But I’m not sitting down at that table ever again.”

Brady waited for someone to speak. But everyone was staring back at him, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to see if he could make sense of their various expressions.

“I want to start something new,” he said in the same tone, the one that sounded like he expected agreement and approval, which typically led straight to it. He’d always been a closer—everywhere but here. “We tried it Gray’s way. It’s kept this ranch going all this time. But the future can’t be surrendering to the past.”

Someone made a noise, though he didn’t look to see who. He forged ahead, words pouring out of him that he hadn’t known were in there.

“It can’t be pretending to get along until something happens, one tiny little thing, and then it’s back to name-calling and sandbagging one another. If we’re not Dad, we need to stop acting like him.”

“Agreed,” Ty said.

With remarkably little rodeo drawl.

“It’s not even the three of us anymore,” Brady said, looking around at all of them. The crowd they made, here at the end of this long, strange year. “It’s all of us. We’re all Everetts. We’re all a part of this land. We’ve all committed ourselves to it in one way or another. But we get to decide how we do that. And we get to decide what it takes from us in return.”

Gray was staring back at him, a look Brady couldn’t decipher on his face.

It took him another moment to understand it was respect. And still another moment to know that Amanda had been right about this too. Amos was the demon on all their backs. Gray had been more of a father to Brady than Amos ever had.

He’d never imagined that Gray might respect him in return. And he’d never understood fully, not until today, how deeply he’d craved it.

“This is a new dawn of a new day,” Brady said, and he believed it. He truly did. His brothers were already further along this road than he was, but it was going to take all of them to stay on course. It was going to take them all working together. It was going to take … a family. And for once, he found he liked that word. “The beginning of a brand new year. Dad is gone. I have to hope all that darkness is gone with him, for good. And I don’t know about you all, but I’m ready for some light.”