It was the best Thanksgiving Brady had ever had.
Possibly because he’d never had so many thanks to give.
That Saturday, his family gathered to celebrate Abby and Gray’s first year of marriage. And this time, Amanda was by his side with his rings on her finger, right where she belonged.
“I’m proud of you,” Abby told her when she arrived, giving her a hug. “I’ve been meaning to tell you that all month.”
“That wasn’t an entrance,” Hannah drawled, grinning wide. “That was a whole stinking show!”
Amanda was flushed with happiness, there with the women who would be the sisters she’d never had, so Brady didn’t ask what that meant. Not then.
But later, stretched out in that bed above the Coyote, he learned all about what it meant to make an entrance, Hannah-style.
“I think you have it covered, baby,” he told her, his voice a little rough after all that making up for lost time they’d been doing. “When you walk in a room, there’s nobody else there as far as I’m concerned.”
Then he showed her what he meant.
Again.
Amanda worked that Sunday, but then went ahead and quit the Coyote the following week. “Not because you don’t like me working there. But because I don’t like working there enough to keep doing it.”
“Noted, killer,” he drawled.
Then he thanked her at some length, out in the woods. In the back of his pickup with a whole lot of blankets and nothing around for miles but the wind.
In furtherance of her education, of course.
Brady went with her to give her notice that first week of December and wasn’t surprised when Harry did nothing more than roll his eyes.
“Can’t say I’m shocked,” the grizzled old man said. “Though I thought it would be her brothers in here with her, telling her to quit. Not you.”
Brady shrugged. “Life is full of surprises.”
Harry cracked a smile. “Ain’t that the truth.” He shifted his gaze to Amanda. “You can have the apartment until the end of the year. But then I’m going to have to get a new bartender, and that apartment’s pretty much the only draw.”
“I understand,” Amanda assured him.
But later, she confessed that she really didn’t want to move back home with her parents.
“It was one thing before, when I didn’t know any better,” she said. “But now? It would feel like backsliding.”
Brady thought of that bedroom in the ranch house, empty of everything but Amos’s ghost. And agreed.
It only made him work that much harder on her barn. And the carriage house out back.
One cold December evening, when he’d come back into town to do some more work while Amanda had one of her movie nights with Kat, he looked up from his hammering to find all four Kittredge brothers there. Coming toward him.
“If this is a hazing ritual, is it okay we put it off?” He smiled lazily. “I’m meeting your sister in a little while, and you know how she gets when you rough me up. She likes my face pretty.”
They all glared at him in unison.
Until Riley grinned. “Idiot.”
Zack did not grin. “Amanda seems to think she’s moving home when her lease is up. I’m betting you have other ideas about where my baby sister should live.”
Brady reminded himself that he wasn’t afraid of these men he’d called friends his whole life. But there were four of them. And they were big.
Still, a man had to stand tall in his own space. “I do, indeed.”
“Let’s get to it, then,” Jensen said darkly. Then ruined it by laughing. “I don’t want to hear about your face, pretty or otherwise, ever again.”
“Amen,” Connor agreed.
Which was how, come Christmas Eve, he took his beautiful fiancée to the carriage house off the back of the barn that he and her brothers had fixed up. They’d made a sweet little home for two people just starting out, far away from meddling family members or too many small-town eyes.
Better yet, no one had gotten a black eye out of it.
“Brady…” Amanda turned in a circle in the cozy front room where he’d even put up a Christmas tree. “How did you do all this? It’s perfect.”
“How do you think?” He grinned at her. “Magic, obviously. And four big, strong elves. It’s Christmas Eve.”
Her eyes gleamed that gold he loved so much. She came into his arms and she tipped her head up, and he wished he’d known that it was possible to love like this. He wished he’d had the slightest idea.
Because he would have found her earlier, if he’d known. He would have moved heaven and earth.
“It’s Christmas Eve,” she said very solemnly. “That means it’s been the full year you promised Gray. What do you think? Are you going to stay?”
He dropped his head to hers and tasted her. Then pulled back to get another hit of that smile. “You couldn’t make me leave.”
Amanda’s smile got even bigger. “Every time I think we’ve hit the best Brady moment ever, there’s another one.”
“There always will be,” he promised her.
That night, they lay in bed in their first home together while the snow fell outside. They talked about getting married in the spring, because neither one of them wanted to wait.
“Ever again,” Amanda said, so vehemently it made him laugh.
They decided they’d do it down on that rock by the river that had always been Brady’s favorite place in the valley.
“Because,” Amanda said, propping herself up on his chest to gaze down at him, “that’s where it started, really.”
Someday, they would build there, Brady thought, and make his first refuge a part of their forever home.
But first they lost themselves in each other in the cozy little cottage behind the barn he’d tried to give her as a goodbye.
And that very same night—a year to the day Brady had promised his brother he’d give Cold River a chance, but had never expected he’d stay—they started planning their own family. Their own future.
It started with their wedding. That was absolutely not a shotgun wedding, because the Kittredge brothers—his brothers, now, by marriage—really would kill him for the disrespect after all that courting.
But it wasn’t the ceremony that Brady cared about, as beautiful as it was to see Amanda in her pretty dress, her hair like honey and the gold in her gaze all for him. Or how much fun it was to dance with her at her wedding the way he’d promised her he would.
Back when he’d truly believed he wouldn’t be the groom.
The marriage was what he was truly excited about.
It started with I do, and carried on forever, one kept promise after another. His successes and hers. Their failures and sorrows. Their joys. What they learned, what they threw aside, and who they became when they were together.
As time went on, Brady often had to stop to marvel at his good fortune. His life was brighter than he ever could have imagined in the darkness of his childhood. And thanks to that little Kittredge girl he’d first made his wife, then the mother of his babies, about as close to perfect as a man could get. It was far more than he deserved.
“You’re a good man,” Amanda would tell him as the years rolled on by, her eyes shining and her voice fierce. “You deserve everything.”
The more she believed in him, the less room there was inside him for ghosts.
Eventually, if he thought about his father and all the old man had missed out on, it made him sad. For a moment.
But only a moment.
Brady and his brothers were better husbands than Amos ever had been, because they worked at it. They were better fathers, and they did their level best to be better men. And their lives were filled with the love they gave and the love they got back.
And all the complicated, beautiful, maddening, and magical gifts love gave to them, they called family.
Because life went on until the land called them home. That was the Everett tradition.
But a man didn’t have to go to his place by the river broken and bitter, mean and alone. That was a choice.
Brady chose love.
Day after day, one season into the next, he chose love.
“Love chooses you right back,” Amanda liked to tell him, honey and gold.
Year after year, behind their locked door in a house more loud with laughter than pain, she was always more than happy to prove it.