Amanda’s new apartment was small, smelled forlorn, and had fallen far short of her standards of cleanliness when she’d taken possession of it. Someone had swept it. Maybe.
The first thing she did was clean the place. When she was done, the wood floors gleamed. And the windows, initially grimy with years’ worth of buildup and a great many other things she didn’t want to identify, sparkled as they let the late-summer light pour in.
With all the light dancing everywhere, and the smell of lemons and elbow grease instead of sadness and neglect, the apartment no longer felt cramped. It felt cozy. A place that could actually be a home.
Even if it was lodged there on top of the most notorious building in the whole of the Longhorn Valley.
The Coyote owed at least part of its disreputable reputation to its location, down by the river but across from the town proper. Back in the gold rush days, the Coyote had been one of a number of buildings that constituted the town’s red-light district. When a few concerned citizens—the historical record suggested they were less hopped up on righteousness than looking to avoid paying off their debts—set fire to the infamous bordello next door, the rest of the buildings on this side of the river burned down with it. But the Coyote stood tall.
The building remained empty until the early 1900s, when it was finally sold and repaired. It had existed as a watering hole of one sort or another ever since. These days, its location provided its clientele with the same privacy this side of the river always had. Visitors could drive in from out of town and turn down the riverside road before anyone saw them. Residents could show up for a dark night of debauchery without necessarily advertising their intentions up and down the length of Main Street.
Amanda liked being a part of so much history, especially because it was all so scandalous. She particularly liked the fact that anyone lucky enough to be living in the apartments above the bar had views of the river, the bridge that crossed it, and the whole of pretty little Cold River nestled there outside her windows. From the two church steeples to the Grand Hotel, with the mountains rising up behind like an embrace. Or a warning. As this was Colorado and those were the Rockies, usually both at once.
She loved it.
When Amanda had left her parents’ house, she’d taken nothing with her she couldn’t fit into her tiny hatchback. But by the end of her first week in her new apartment, she’d assembled a delightfully ragtag assortment of furniture that didn’t go together at all and yet somehow worked together beautifully, thanks to friends and the local flea market.
By the time Connor showed up to drive her out to Sunday dinner the following week—obviously so he could spy on her new place and report back—she was proud of the whole thing. She’d done it. She’d moved out. She had a key on her keychain that unlocked a door to a space that was only hers.
Not a hand-me-down. Not up for debate. Not something she had to share whether she wanted to or not. Hers.
Amanda really didn’t see that getting old any time soon.
“Wow,” Connor said, leaning against one of her beautifully clean walls just inside the door. With a typically jerky sort of expression on his face. “Really, monkey? You look like you’re living in a garage sale.”
“I don’t recall asking for your opinion.” Amanda shoved him back out into the hall. She slammed her door shut behind her, then locked it. Her door. Her lock. “And you want to know why? Because I’ve seen where you live. It looks like a hunting magazine threw up all over your cabin.”
“If you mean, it looks like a man lives there, sure.”
“You’re not invited into my home, Connor. Ever.”
He treated her to an eye roll. “Okay.”
“Anything that works on vampires should work on annoying brothers too.”
“Should I be concerned that you’re talking about vampires?” He stopped at the top of the metal staircase out back, then stuck his face much too close to hers. “Are you on drugs?”
“I’m not on drugs.” Her throat actually hurt, then, from not screaming at him. “But I’m taking my own car.”
Because she wouldn’t put it past any of them to “accidentally” strand her on the Bar K when she had to be at work, claiming they couldn’t possibly make the thirty-minute drive into town for whatever reason. And then ignoring her protests, the way they liked to do.
“Your stubbornness is going to get you in trouble,” Zack growled at her over her mother’s mashed potatoes a little while later, more sheriff than big brother.
“Has yours?” she replied sweetly.
He glared. She smiled.
Amanda enjoyed confounding her brothers, who all acted like her wanting a life was a deep, personal betrayal. For once, she enjoyed not giving in because it was easier, or to smooth things over.
But she was honest enough to admit to herself when she was out of their clutches, away from their commentary, and driving too fast on the county road toward town that she probably would have caved already if it hadn’t been for Miss Martina Patrick, the first and foremost of Cold River’s small but notable spinster population.
Miss Patrick was the cautionary tale Amanda and her friends had told one another while they were growing up, unlike the much younger Harriet Barnett, who had made more recent cat and life choices. Miss Patrick was the longest serving secretary in Cold River High’s history. And if the yearbooks Amanda’s friend Katrina Hastings had dug up in the town library when she’d been supposed to be working at the B&B were any indication, she grew more ferociously pursed-mouthed every year. She lived alone in a tiny house in town, not far from the high school that she referred to as the center of her existence, from which she delighted in calling in parking violations to the sheriff’s office. She had an indeterminate number of cats. She doted on the high school’s crotchety old principal, cared for her elderly mother, and deeply disapproved of all the students in the school—an enduring opinion she was never too shy to share with any of them. And their parents. And anyone else who didn’t run off before she could bend their ear about the sad state of American youth.
Every nightmare Amanda had ever had about finding herself an old, burned-out husk of a woman was about Miss Patrick and her infamous bitterness. About turning into Miss Patrick whether she liked it or not.
Perhaps sensing that Amanda was weakening in the face of so much brotherly disapproval, Kat rolled out the big guns while she helped Amanda arrange things in her apartment one night.
“You should absolutely move back home,” she said, innocently washing dishes that didn’t need to be washed while Amanda wrestled with shelf liners she didn’t think her kitchen cabinets needed. But her mother had pressed a roll of them on her as if it was the Holy Grail, so of course, Amanda was going to use them. Ellie was the type who would check. “Once you do, it should only take another few years for the early stages of Miss Patrick-ism begin to show.”
“You’re a terrible person.”
“You know what I mean. A sudden collection of cats and too-shiny purses. And also the uncontrollable need to make unsolicited comments and moral judgments about other women’s clothing. To them.”
“A terrible person, Kat, and a worse friend.”
“After that, it’s the kind of disease that picks up speed, but don’t worry. I think it’s painless. Next thing you know, you’ll start doing that thing with your mouth.”
Kat demonstrated, but she was laughing too hard to mimic Miss Patrick as perfectly as she usually did. And had been doing since they’d started high school.
Amanda tried not to laugh. “For all you know, Miss Patrick’s mouth came that way.”
Kat slapped the faucet off and wiped at her forehead, leaving a trail of bubbles behind. She looked up at Amanda, balanced there on the counter as she wrestled the unnecessary shelf liner into place.
She was still laughing, but her gaze was serious. “Miss Patrick isn’t something that just happens. No one’s born that mean, Amanda. It’s a choice. Just like this apartment is a choice.”
A choice Amanda knew her friend would make in a heartbeat if she could, and likely would, when her long-term boyfriend finally got back from the navy and made good on all his promises. She knew that was why Kat looked more sad than serious, even though she was still smiling.
“If you let other people dictate your life,” Kat asked softly, “how can you ever be sure you’re the one living it?”
Later that night, Amanda served drinks at the Coyote, found various ways to smile for tips while discouraging hands on her body, and found herself searching every dim corner for one particular broad-shouldered cowboy.
But Brady wasn’t there.
She shivered every time she thought about the conversation they’d had out behind the bar. Despite all the moving, cleaning, and nesting, she’d thought about it a lot. She’d waited her whole life for him to actually see her, and she could have sworn that he did—even if it was next to the garbage.
There was probably a message in that.
She was thinking happily about messages and Brady’s deliciously raspy drawl, when a couple of women she knew came in, draped more in laughter and cigarette smoke than clothes. They settled themselves at the bar, midway through a typically too-loud and inappropriate conversation. They did the same thing in the coffeehouse. Kathleen Gillespie and Tracie Jakes had been some years ahead of her in school and had always fancied themselves far too sophisticated to talk to younger girls like Amanda, but because this was Cold River, Amanda knew their stories anyway.
Amanda had always admired them. Because she cared too much about what other people thought, while doubting such concerns had ever plagued either one of the women sitting in front of her, both of them as dangerously pretty as they’d been when they were terrorizing the boys in high school.
Tracie narrowed her eyes at Amanda when she came to take their drink order. “You’re that little Kittredge girl.”
“I’m afraid so.”
“Your brothers let you work here? Really?”
A question Amanda had already gotten too often, and always in that same scandalized tone. She’d learned to smile innocently. “I didn’t actually ask them.”
“If you’re a Kittredge, you know Brady Everett,” Kathleen said from the stool beside her friend. If she personally recognized Amanda, she didn’t show it. She swiveled to peer into the rest of the dimly lit, crowded bar instead. “Has he been here yet tonight?”
Amanda turned about seventeen different shades of red at the sound of his name, but neither woman was paying attention to her, both too busy scanning the crowd.
“No,” she managed to say, when they turned back to her. “I haven’t seen him around.”
Tracie and Kathleen looked at each other and laughed. As if they had deep, intimate, extremely personal knowledge of Brady. Something a whole lot more than a few words next to a dumpster.
Amanda couldn’t serve them their drinks and escape to the other end of the bar fast enough.
Wake up, idiot, she snapped at herself as she angrily wiped down a spill that didn’t need even half the attention she lavished on it. Whatever happened, it was only a Brady moment for you.
Because Brady might—might—have seen her as something other than a child for thirty strange seconds out there in the dark. But that certainly wasn’t the same as seeing her as an actual woman. No one seemed to be able to make that leap.
Tracie and Kathleen, on the other hand, had barely been girls when they’d been in high school. They’d always been like this, advanced beyond their years and ripe with all the feminine secrets no one had ever taught Amanda. If they were waiting around for Brady to turn up, why would he ever bother to look past them to someone like Amanda?
He wouldn’t. He won’t.
That was when she decided it was high time she found herself a man who didn’t know she was a Kittredge, didn’t know a single one of her brothers, or better yet, didn’t care.
Not to keep. Just to try. Because clearly, she needed to learn things. She needed to have as many experiences as she could while she could. She needed to try being more like Tracie and Kathleen and see where that got her. She needed to hurry up and throw herself into these things before she looked in the mirror one morning and saw Miss Patrick looking back at her.
She lifted a hand to her mouth to check for unconscious pursing and thankfully found her lips in their normal shape. Even so, she had the sinking sensation that it was already too late.
It’s only too late when you give up, her mother liked to say.
Amanda might not know what she was doing, exactly, but she wasn’t giving up. She refused to give up.
When she was done with her shift at eleven, there were still a few hours before closing, and Amanda decided there was no time like the present to keep turning over this new leaf. She dipped into the bathroom to freshen up and practice that sultry, knowing look she’d seen Tracie and Kathleen fling around earlier. They obviously knew what they were doing, since they were both currently giggling in the corner with two men Amanda vaguely recognized as paid hands from Cold River Ranch.
“There’s no reason you too can’t flirt with a paid hand,” she told her reflection brightly. “Or anyone else.”
She pulled her hair out of the ponytail she kept it in to work, tousled it, and then gave herself permission to flirt outrageously. With … whoever. It was only flirting, right? She could do that. She was sure she could do that. She’d always been a quick learner.
Amanda flung open the door, threw herself into the hall mid-pep talk, and then stopped dead.
Because Brady was standing there, blocking the door that opened into the main part of the bar. And taking up far too much of what air there was in this back hallway that led out to the dumpster of oddly charged moments.
Amanda tried to be surreptitious as she reached down and pinched herself viciously on the thigh. She needed to make sure she hadn’t tripped and smacked her head in the bathroom and was even now crumpled in a sticky corner, dreaming she could conjure up Brady Everett at will.
Ouch.
He was apparently real. And he looked edgy tonight in a way the knots in her belly told her was dangerous. Very, very dangerous.
His dark gaze dragged over her, and she could feel it like another sharp pinch. It was almost as if he were running rough hands from the low-cut T-shirt she wore down over her jeans, then back up to linger on her hair where it fell over her shoulders.
His mouth tightened, and he didn’t look pursed-mouthed. He looked grim.
And delicious.
Ridiculously delicious, in fact, all shoulders and that tall, lean body of his that he’d packed into nothing more exciting than a black T-shirt and jeans.
And yet looking at him was like surrendering to a roller coaster ride, only Amanda had no desire whatsoever to close her eyes.
He was a little too much cowboy tonight, which should have seemed a bit funny when he was the Everett brother who’d gone off to live in the city. But there wasn’t the faintest hint of city slicker around him. Especially with that pissed-off look on his face and the scowl he wore.
Which for reasons Amanda couldn’t begin to fathom, he was aiming straight at her.
“My shift is over,” she said, as if he’d asked.
She would have thought that was obvious. She’d gotten rid of her apron, let her hair down, and leaned in hard to her favorite lip gloss. But he was still scowling at her.
“That means you should be going home. To bed.” In case she might have been tempted to imagine that was some kind of surly invitation, he kept going. “Don’t you have to work at Abby’s coffeehouse in the morning? You need your sleep.”
“I’m sorry, you’re going to have to catch me up.” Amanda tilted her head slightly to one side as she gazed up at him, trying to puzzle out that grim look he wore. “Since when have you given the slightest bit of thought to my schedule? Or even known that I had a schedule, for that matter? Or, while we’re on the subject, the fact that I even exist?”
He looked affronted. “I know you exist.”
“Right, right. Diapers, brothers, blah blah blah. That’s all been true for twenty-two years. Why am I now suddenly subject to dramatic silences in parking lots, and this … looming thing in the hallway of a bar?”
She thought for a moment a muscle in his jaw flexed, but the light back here was weak, and she was sure she was mistaken.
“There’s a door at the end of this hallway, leading out back,” Brady told her, his voice hard. “Out back, where there is also a private staircase that leads directly to your new apartment. There’s no need for you to walk back into the bar.”
“No need whatsoever. Other than the fact I want to, it’s none of your business, and I’ll go wherever I please.”
He smiled, then. “You can try.”
She was not mistaking the challenging way he looked at her.
Something simmered in his dark gaze. It filled the space between them, like a visible humming. Amanda could feel it sinking into her, making her heavy. Misshapen. Twisted into knots that made her ache, though she barely understood what they were.
She had felt it a few nights ago too. Out in the dark, when the very fact that she’d been dealing with the garbage and standing next to a dumpster should have ruined the whole moment. The most Brady moment of all Brady moments up to that point. The stuff of fantasies, even. That she should appear and he should be waiting there. And then get out of his truck. And then stand there, with only the stars as witness—
But her wishful thinking was out of control. She had already decided to stop the madness, hadn’t she? Crushes were crushes. They made fools out of people, but that was all. Like that depressing part of Love, Actually with the sad coworkers who couldn’t get it together. Or the way everyone in town had always known that poor, sweet Abby Douglas had mooned over Gray Everett for most of her life. That had worked out for Abby, eventually, but Amanda couldn’t think of much worse than being thought of as poor, sweet Amanda Kittredge. Being known as little Amanda Kittredge was bad enough. She didn’t want to moon. And she didn’t want to miss out on her life and find herself stuck up on a shelf like Harriet Barnett part two, then straight on into Miss Patrick’s domain of mean, pursed lips and the mockery of high school students.
Her brothers hadn’t restrained themselves from having social lives. Neither had Brady. Why should Amanda?
The more she thought about how overprotective they all were, particularly in contrast to even the least scandalous rumors she’d heard about them, the more filled with self-righteous indignation she became.
Brady made it all worse.
“I thought it was your brother Ty who got hit in the head,” she said coolly now. “But apparently head injuries are going around the family.”
“The door’s behind you.” His dark eyes glinted. “And you can turn around and walk through it without talking.”
Amanda wanted to scream, and almost did, loud and long and strictly for her own benefit, because no way would anyone inside the bar hear her over the music. But she didn’t. Her brothers could rant and rave about anything they liked, and at worst, it was called venting. If Amanda did it? She was out of control. Someone was bound to ask her, in some convoluted way or another, if it was that time of the month.
Jerks, all of them.
So she only crooked an eyebrow in her best approximation of her own enigmatic mother, folded her arms over her chest, and did not give in to the urge to let her temper get the best of her.
“No one’s asked you to speak, as I recall,” she said, and he wasn’t the only one who could toss out a cowboy drawl when necessary. “And yet here you are, shooting off your mouth like it’s your job. When guess what, Brady? It’s not your job. I am not your job.”
“You have three seconds to make a decision.” Brady’s voice was as implacable as that expression on his face. And something in her … fluttered. Amanda assured herself it was more temper, but it wasn’t. She knew full well, it wasn’t. “You can turn around and walk outside of your own volition. Or I can throw you over my shoulder and take you outside myself. I don’t care which.”
“You’ve lost your mind.”
“One.”
“Have you forgotten who you’re talking to? I have four big brothers already, Brady. None of them are you. And none of them would dare throw me over their shoulder. You won’t either.”
He looked bored. “Two.”
“You should also know that Riley taught me how to fight before I could walk. Just tossing that out there so you have all the facts.”
“Three,” he said, a different light in his gaze that reminded her his eyes were that deep, dark green, and she wanted to stand her ground. She really did.
But he stood upright, then, shockingly fast when he’d been lazing there in the hallway as if he could lounge about like that until dawn.
Amanda understood in a searing split second that if he did what he’d said he would—and he looked like he couldn’t wait to toss her around like a bale of hay—something in her would … die, maybe. It would change her from whoever she was now into a woman Brady Everett carried out of a bar, kicking and screaming if necessary, and her problem wasn’t that she would be ashamed of that spectacle.
Her problem was that if he did that, she would know.
She would know what it was like to have his hands on her instead of only imagining it—and how could she possibly carry on with what she needed to do to kickstart this life of hers if she knew that?
Riley really had taught her to fight. But Zack had taught her strategy, and the most important lesson of all: when it was wiser to retreat.
Amanda turned on her heel and actually dove for the back door before Brady could take matters into his own hands. But that didn’t keep her from imagining that he had.
There was no getting those images out of her head.
When she burst out into the night, the chill of the September dark was a welcome slap. She wanted to press her hands to her cheeks to see if they felt as red against her palms as they did against the cold air, but she didn’t dare. She didn’t want to draw attention to the things her body was doing. Not when Brady was here to witness it.
The shoes she’d worn tonight were entirely too high, and much too ridiculous for rural Colorado. Her toes had gone numb about four minutes into her shift, and she was slightly worried she’d caused permanent nerve damage, but whatever, she was doing a thing.
A thing she deeply regretted when she lost her footing in the gravel out back.
She braced herself, fully expecting to go facedown. A humiliating end to an already mortifying encounter—
But instead, she felt a strong hand wrap around her elbow. And then hold her there in front of him, so even though she didn’t quite have her balance, he did.
The shirt she was wearing wasn’t another one of those tank tops that her brothers had found so appalling, but it was probably worse, because it was cut even lower. Harry preferred his girls to show some skin. Not to mention the push-up bra she’d never dared wear before, in case the unavoidable evidence that she had breasts caused her brothers to topple over instantly from a series of cardiac arrests. And then what would happen to the ranch?
Amanda had thought her brothers’ reactions were completely over-the-top when they’d come into the Coyote and tried to intimidate her and anyone unlucky enough to be standing near her.
Until now.
Because Brady’s hand was on her bare arm, and in order to keep her upright, he’d swung her around to face him. And that gaze of his glittered beneath the floodlights that poured over the both of them until suddenly, Amanda felt naked.
Completely and utterly naked.
Her lungs twisted themselves into some kind of ball, then lodged themselves in the back of her throat.
Right along with her heart.
“Maybe don’t wear shoes like that,” Brady bit out, seemingly without moving his mouth.
“What do you have against my shoes?”
“You’re going to break your neck in them. You almost did.”
“They’re not hiking boots, Brady. Their function is not to race up the side of a mountain like a goat. You’re supposed to stand around in them, looking impractical.” She almost said edible, but thought better of it at the last second and frowned at him instead. “How can a grown man not know this?”
“You’re not an impractical girl.”
“One, I’m not a girl. And I wouldn’t mind people calling me a girl, but they’re never doing it for good reasons. They’re doing it to keep me in my place, and guess what? I already know how old I am. I don’t need to be reminded of it every three seconds.”
“Was there a number two? Or just a long, annoying number one?”
She glared at him. “And two, you have no idea what kind of girl I am.”
“Pretty sure we’ve already covered this.”
“There are a lot of people I’ve known my entire life since we all live here in the great and glorious Longhorn Valley. We all went to Cold River High. We all shop in the same stores. We not only grew up together, our parents grew up together, and their parents before them. We can all sit around and play ‘pin the baby on the family tree’ until we go blue in the face.”
“That’s not a game anyone plays. Or is that what happens at all those baby showers?”
“You might think this means I know everything there is to know about every last person in this valley. I don’t. Why? Because knowing a collection of facts about a person isn’t the same thing as knowing them. I know a lot of facts about you, for example.” She started ticking things off on one hand. “High school quarterback who ran off to the city, turning his back on his family like so many do these days, and only came back when there was a will—”
“What are you doing, Amanda?”
It was the quiet way he asked it that got to her. It cut right through the indignation, and that was a shame. Because the self-righteousness had sure helped her feel puffed up and strong. Capable of dressing down Brady Everett to her heart’s content.
The quietness was something else. And that look on his face, a wary sort of concern that made her want to … cry, maybe. Something.
“At the moment,” she said, annoyed that it felt so fraught when it shouldn’t, when it likely didn’t feel like much of anything to him, “I’m standing outside a bar I would rather be drinking in. Because it was that or find myself bodily removed by a person who, to the best of my knowledge, is not employed by Harry in any capacity. Certainly not as a bouncer.”
“Pretty sure you know that’s not what I mean.”
She felt cold, suddenly, and she hoped that meant that her cheeks were less red. But then she flushed all over again, because he was still gripping her arm.
There was nothing the least bit cold about Brady’s hand.
Amanda glanced down at the place where he touched her, where his strong fingers wrapped around her upper arm, and felt shy when she lifted her gaze to his again.
That dark, glinting thing in his eyes took her breath. Again. But he dropped his hand.
And she discovered how unsteady she could feel on her own two feet.
“I understand,” Brady said, and the shyness fell away, because he sounded much too friendly. Aggressively genial, even.
Amanda wanted to kill him. That was the same voice, overbright and pointedly helpful, that he’d used in the buffet line. Carefully calibrated to charm elderly women with hearing issues. Or misbehaving toddlers.
He even cracked a smile to go with it. “Everyone feels rebellious from time to time. I only have two older brothers, and I couldn’t wait to get away from them when I was eighteen. Put some distance between me and them. You know.”
“I’m not eighteen.”
He spread his hands open, another exaggerated show of how friendly he was that made her teeth hurt. “All I’m saying is that I get the need for independence. I support it.”
“I didn’t ask for your support. But thanks, I guess.”
“You want to be smart about it, Amanda. That’s all.”
“Maybe I don’t want to be smart. Maybe I’d like to take a big old swan dive into stupid, selfish behavior that turns into stories I’ll tell for the next two decades. Like every other person alive.”
“So, have a few adventures. Smartly.”
“Right. And when you were in your rebellious phase, did you sit around figuring out how you could do it smartly?”
He muttered something, raking a hand through his hair. Unlike some cowboys who only looked good from beneath a Stetson, Brady just … looked good. All the time.
It was so unfair.
“The Coyote is a rough dive of a bar, and you know it,” he said after a moment, dark and impatient. “I’m sure that’s why you decided to work here, since you’re such a rebel all of a sudden. But there’s a big difference between working behind the bar, with Harry sitting there two inches away from his shotgun, and frequenting the place as a patron.”
“Yes, the difference being that in one part of that scenario, I’m at work. And in the other, I’m enjoying a few drinks and who knows? Maybe making new friends.”
“You can make new friends in town. At the saloon.”
“I didn’t ask for your permission.” Amanda shook her head at him. “What’s gotten into you?”
“I’m concerned about you,” he said, but she thought he sounded strained. And something flashed over his face as he looked down at her. “You’re like a sister to me.”
Oddly enough, that was what flipped a switch in her. Of all the things he’d said. Of all the threats, the slights. That was what spun her too far. That she was like a sister to him.
Amanda surged forward and poked him right in the chest.
She didn’t know which one of them was more surprised, so she did it again.
“I’m not your sister, Brady. We’re not even friends. The only thing you know about me is who my brothers are. I can’t imagine why you think that means you can interfere in my life.”
There was that arrested look in his dark eyes. That faintly astonished expression on his face, too arrogant by half, that only made him look that much more gorgeously, insufferably male. And there was something like granite along the fine line of his jaw.
“Tough,” he said.
So she poked him once more, harder.
“Here’s an idea, Brady. You stay out of my life, and I’ll return the favor and stay out of yours.”
“Yeah,” he said, barely more than a mutter. “That’s not going to happen.”
He took the finger she was poking into his chest in one hand, and then he was too close. He was looking down at her, something dark and tense between them that made her breath catch.
For a moment he looked—for a moment she could have sworn he almost—
But instead, he dropped her finger. Worse, he stepped away.
Amanda had to work much too hard to keep herself from crying, then. Actually crying, whether from frustration or that ache, she didn’t know. But it was so ridiculous that it triggered another, blessed wave of temper.
And that was why she hauled off and punched Brady Everett in his insufferable, too-hard, wholly obnoxious chest.
Just the way Riley had taught her.