“It’s the last weekend of September, Uncle Brady,” Becca said over breakfast a week or so later, staring at Brady as if he’d transformed before her very eyes from her uncle into a fire-breathing dragon. Or a clown. “This is Cold River. In the Longhorn Valley, Colorado, right here in these United States. All of this taken together can only mean one thing.”
“Come on now, Denver,” Ty drawled in a chiding sort of way.
Ty was kicked back in his normal place at the big kitchen table in the ranch house, holding a sleeping Jack against his chest. He had one hand on his son’s back. And yet he managed to look as smirky as he ever did.
“Do the math, college boy,” Gray chimed in gruffly, though there was a hint of a curve in the corner of his stern mouth.
Because it wasn’t a morning at Cold River Ranch unless his brothers were riding him.
Brady closed his laptop with a decisive click and made himself smile. “This might come as a shock, but none of that actually helps. I still don’t know what it is you all think I should be excited about this weekend. That October’s coming?”
“Uncle Brady.” Becca said that like she despaired of him, and when he only stared back at her, she sighed even louder. “Homecoming and the Harvest Festival, of course. It’s always the last weekend in September.”
Brady loved his niece, often more than he loved his annoying brothers, so all he did was smile at her. “Of course. Silly me. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“Seems to me you’d have better recall,” Ty drawled over the top of Jack’s head, his dark eyes merry. Or malicious. With Ty, there wasn’t much difference. “You were on the homecoming court two years running, as I remember it. I would have thought you’d slap that right on the top of your resume.”
“Sure,” Brady agreed. “Because in the corporate world, what really matters is whether or not you went to a dance in high school.”
“It’s not just a dance,” Abby piped in from next to Gray, sounding deadly serious—though she bit back her own smile. “Don’t you remember? It’s an entire week of celebrations, though most of those are in the high school. On game day, which I know you remember because you won every homecoming game you played, there’s a little parade through town. Leading straight into the Longhorn Valley Harvest Festival all weekend. Becca isn’t wrong. These are staples of life here in Cold River.”
“I do love me a festival,” Hannah drawled, from her spot next to Ty where she could keep a hand on him and on Jack, if she liked. And she often liked.
Brady looked around the table at the various grinning members of his family. He couldn’t decide if this was an elaborate practical joke or if they had all woken up this morning significantly more interested in meaningless nonsense than they ever had been before.
“Um. Great.” He would have preferred to study his stock portfolio, but he tried to do the opposite of things Amos would have done. That meant concentrating on the things that were important to others. The image of his father scribbling away at his ever-changing will right here at this repurposed table would haunt him forever. “I can’t say I have any personal feelings about festivals one way or the other.”
“The Harvest Festival is the last big town event before winter,” Abby told him. Bart was in a sling across her chest, only the top of his head and his chubby legs showing. “All the shops stay open, and people come in from out of town to have themselves a little fall getaway. The Grand Hotel does a booming business, the restaurants tell themselves lies about how they’ll make it through the low season, and the high school kids have the homecoming dance. If we’re lucky, it doesn’t snow for at least a few more weeks. If we’re not, well, we get an early winter wonderland and do the whole thing anyway.”
“This is the first time in years that you’ve been home on homecoming weekend,” Becca said. Intensely.
“That is … true,” Brady agreed.
“I already told the school you’ll be in the parade.”
“The what?” Brady rubbed a hand over his face, wondering why it was only around his family—and if he was honest, a certain other member of the wider Cold River community, though this was certainly not the time to think about Amanda Kittredge—that he felt so sucker punched all the time. He didn’t like the sensation. “I’m not a parade kind of person.”
“Becca is on the student council homecoming committee this year,” Abby said mildly, kissing the top of the baby’s head. Almost as if she was telling Bart that information.
“I haven’t been much of a parade person historically,” Brady corrected himself without missing a beat. He smiled at his niece. “But I’d be happy to change that for you. I need to stay on top as favorite uncle.”
Next to him, Ty hooted. “Favorite uncle? You lost that crown a long time ago, son.”
Becca beamed, and Brady was no more immune to that smile than anyone else sitting at the old barn door that made their table. Because he remembered all too well the many years when the only smiling Becca had done had been forced. Faked. She’d been a kid who thought she had to act middle-aged. It could only be a good thing that Becca was interested in regular old teenage things. Because that meant she was doing what she was supposed to do, not what she thought she should do.
You could take a lesson from your niece, a voice in him commented.
But Brady was getting real good at ignoring those obnoxious little voices. Since they never said a thing he wanted to hear.
After breakfast was finished, the various members of the Everett clan launched themselves into the main part of their day. Abby and Hannah set off toward town with the kids and Becca in tow. Ty went off to tinker with one of the farm vehicles that had been acting up, because he had a way with machines and thought he could save them having to shell out cash for an expensive part.
Gray went into his office to make a few calls before they headed out into the fields, so Brady cracked his laptop open again. He’d taken an indefinite leave of absence from his firm, but he still liked to check in with his partners and keep a close eye on all the various financial balls he kept in the air.
He also liked to read the paper, out here in the hinterland, too far from town for anything like a daily paper delivery. He liked to remind himself there was more to the world than this ranch house, something he had fervently believed when he was growing up here. Or hoped, anyway. Now he knew it for sure. And he didn’t want to sink back down under the surface of that particular swamp again.
Some mornings, the act of reading a few headlines felt like a revolution.
When he glanced up sometime later, he found Gray standing there in the doorway that led into the living room. He was leaning against the doorjamb, studying Brady in that way he had. As if, by his reckoning, Brady was a different species.
“Counting your money?” Gray drawled.
Brady was almost certain he was kidding. That this was Gray’s version of joking around, as stone-faced as ever, but maybe with a little less gravel in his voice.
But it didn’t really matter when his joking around was in no way different from all the other times, when he wasn’t joking around at all and said much the same thing.
Or maybe, another little voice inside him needled him, you’ve been waiting for an opportunity to vent your spleen ever since you found it necessary to kiss Amanda Kittredge.
He was not thinking about that.
He was only thinking about that.
Either way, it was easy to scowl at his brother.
“You say that like it’s a bad thing to have money,” he said, employing his own drawl, in case it was a competition. “And I get it. I do. You’re nobly allergic to the idea of profit.”
“I make a profit.”
“I’m tired of having this argument with you.” Brady took his time standing up from his seat, because he really was determined not to have the same fight. Ten months in and he was exhausted by it. “But I should congratulate you, big brother. You might be the first rancher in history who has no interest in expanding his profit margins. What’s your secret? Can you see into the future? You know exactly how everything’s going to go, so no need to worry about it?”
“You’re tired of having this argument, yet here you are. Having this argument.”
“I sure am glad that one of us inherited Dad’s ability to act like a brick wall,” Brady said. “Particularly when no brick wall is needed.”
It was below the belt. He knew that. Then again, it was also true.
Gray stared at him, his face the grim stone that Brady was most familiar with. “Comparing me to Dad isn’t going to make me change my mind. About anything.”
“Because nothing could possibly make you change your mind, I know.” Brady shrugged. “You make up your mind, and it might as well be a brand-new mountain range. Immovable. Impassable. You’re perfectly happy to stand in exactly the same place for the next three hundred years, simply because you can. Or because you decided to once upon a time.”
“I came in here to thank you for agreeing to do that homecoming thing for Becca.” Gray’s dark eyes glittered, though his voice stayed calm. “But we both know you only did it as a personal favor to her. You may have grown up here, but you shrugged that off a long time ago. It’s not like you have a connection to Cold River. Or the high school. Or this ranch.”
“You have no idea what I have a connection to or don’t,” Brady replied, his voice harsher than necessary, but he couldn’t do anything about that. “Because you never ask.”
“I don’t have to ask. Your absence does all the talking for you.”
Brady understood, maybe for the first time in his life, why a person might do something like flip a table. Would that get through to Gray? Would it make a big enough statement?
But he refused to become Amos, no matter how seductive it seemed while he was in a temper. There were some slippery slopes a man couldn’t climb back up.
“My absence?” he demanded. “I’ve been right here, busting my ass next to yours, for the past ten months. You might have to revise your story, Gray. And then what? What will the excuse be?”
“The ranch is not here to fuel your get-rich-quick schemes,” Gray said, all granite and disapproval.
That was how he always sounded when he was talking to Brady, and Brady hated the fact that it still got to him. With the exception of his college scholarship, he’d given up on getting Amos’s approval early. But here he was, still wishing he could turn Gray around. And it ate at him that he cared.
“Is this what it’s going to be like forever?” Gray was still a wall standing there in the door. “Do I have to worry that if you come up with bad hand at a poker table one night, you’ll gamble the ranch away?”
Brady did not make his hands into fists. Or use them. “Why would I bet the ranch?”
“Why would you do anything?” Gray pushed away from the doorjamb and moved farther into the kitchen, swiping up his Stetson from the counter. “This has been illuminating, as always. But if you don’t mind, I thought maybe we could work on the land we still have. Until you sell it out from under me.”
“If I wanted to play poker, Gray,” Brady said, trying to keep his temper out of his voice, and failing, “I would cash in with some of that actual money you hate so much. Because I don’t need the ranch to get rich. I’m good.”
“I’m happy for you.”
Gray headed out the door without a backward glance. Brady shouldn’t have been surprised. That was Gray. And if this had been any other part of his life, any business meeting in the normal course of events, he would have shrugged it off. Because he would never have tolerated a corporate contact who treated him that way.
But this wasn’t business. It was his family.
He could admit he was more frayed around the edges than usual today.
How could he possibly have let that happen with Amanda? And not merely let that happen. Who was he kidding? He was the one who’d made it happen. She was so innocent, she had legitimately asked him up to her apartment for coffee. She’d actually gone ahead and made them coffee.
He was the one who’d made the moves.
Brady was thoroughly disgusted with himself.
The result was, he couldn’t seem to put his usual effort and energy into pretending he was less bothered by his brothers than he was. Well. Ty stirred the pot when the mood took him, because he found it all entertaining. It was Gray who drove Brady around the bend.
Brady was following him out into the yard before he had time to think it through.
Out in the yard, the sun was starting to contemplate its duties over to the east. The sky was bluing its way out of the night, kicking off the heavy fall shadows and the frosty temperature.
Maybe Brady had finally had enough.
“You don’t want to talk about diversification, fine,” he said to his brother’s back. He didn’t yell. He didn’t have to yell. “You don’t want to talk about any ideas I have. You demanded that I promise you a year, and I’m delivering that, but you don’t want to give me anything in return.”
Gray turned slowly. The sun poked over the eastern ridge in earnest as he faced Brady, making him look like some kind of holy relic. “I’m giving you room and board.”
“I own one-third of this land and that house. I’m giving myself room and board, Gray. And in case you missed it, I’m the one who put my life on hold.”
“You want to do this? Fine. I’m tired of hearing about how you had to walk away from your great life. I’m tired of hearing about all your sacrifices.”
“Why? You want to hang up on that cross all by yourself?”
“This should be your life,” Gray thundered. “This is my life. It looks like it’s Ty’s life these days too. It was good enough for generations of Everetts, and it’s good enough for us. Why is nothing good enough for you?”
Brady was aware the sounds from over by the garage had stopped. If he turned his head, he was sure he would see Ty over there, listening in on this latest confrontation. But he stayed focused on Gray.
“It’s not a question of whether or not it’s good enough for me. It’s a question of that sacrifice you don’t want to hear about. This is your life, like you said. There’s no sacrifice for you to be here, is there? And Ty’s rodeo career is over. Looks like the ranch is a good solution for him too. Out of the three of us, I’m the only one who gave up something to spend this year here.”
“Well, shoot,” came Ty’s drawl. Inevitably. “And here I am without my violin.”
Brady gave him a one-fingered salute without looking in his direction. He kept his gaze trained on Gray. And kept going, since he’d started.
“I don’t want a violin. I don’t need any sympathy. I could have said no, and believe me, I know it.” He shook his head. “But just once, Gray, it would be nice if you would acknowledge that you’re asking more of me than you’re asking of anyone else. Including yourself.”
He watched something flicker on his oldest brother’s face. He braced himself, because a year ago, Gray would not have accepted that. He would have laughed in Brady’s face with that call to violence in his dark eyes.
But today, he only studied Brady for another too-long moment.
“Okay,” he said. Eventually. “I acknowledge that you had to give up your life in Denver for the family. Is that really it, Brady? That’s what you need?”
“I can go find that violin,” Ty offered from the garage. “It’s no trouble.”
This time, Brady glared in his direction too.
“If you two wanted to go to college, you could have,” he said quietly. But intensely enough one of Ty’s rodeo horses over in the corral nickered quietly.
Predictably, both Gray and Ty let out big laughs at that.
“That’s a hard pass from me, baby brother,” Ty said when he was done howling. “I barely made it through high school. I’m about as good behind the desk as you are on the back of a bull.”
“I thought about college for maybe three seconds,” Gray added darkly. “But what I know is land and cattle. And I don’t need to sit in the classroom for that.”
“Then stop giving me a hard time because I did go.” Brady belted that out like jab.
Over by the garage, Ty looked to the ground. But Gray kept his gaze steady.
“I don’t mind that you went to college,” he said. “You were always smart like that. It made sense for you to go. What I mind is that you never seem to connect the life you live now with what gave it to you.”
“You mean my hard work?”
“I mean, this land. The cattle. The ranch, Brady. It supports all of us, you included. You treat it like a weight around your neck, dragging you down with every step.” His jaw tightened. “It isn’t just Dad’s folly or the family legacy. It’s our future. All the book learning in the world, and you can’t get that through your head.”
“I’m not the one the land drags down, Gray,” Brady objected. “You spent a decade here, trapped.”
“I might have been trapped in my circumstances,” Gray conceded. “But never by the ranch. The ranch is what saved me. You’ll forgive me if I can’t handle the level of disrespect you throw at it day and night.”
Back in the days when he’d been so good at keeping his cool, back before he’d put his mouth on little Amanda Kittredge and knocked his whole world sideways and spinning, Brady would not have gone toe-to-toe with Gray. He would have sucked it up the way he always did. He and Gray had skirmishes, but Brady always backed down rather than take it too far.
Right now was a great time to do just that.
But he’d already messed up his life. Sooner or later, Riley would find out, and it would all get worse. So why not make it universal?
“I don’t disrespect the ranch,” he threw at Gray instead of biting his tongue. “If I did, I certainly wouldn’t have spent the better part of a year working it, would I? I wouldn’t have come back at all, not even for holidays while Dad was alive.”
“I’d believe that you respected something about this place if you’d done anything to help before I asked it of you,” Gray retorted. “Dad had to die for you to remember where you came from. I figure soon as your year’s up, you’ll forget again as fast as you can. You already did it once. Why not again?”
“I never forgot a thing.” Brady didn’t shout. Not exactly, but he could hear his own voice echo back at him. “It’s not my fault Dad didn’t care that I got my degree in a useful subject. Just like it’s not my fault that I went out there and made money for the express purpose of sinking it into the ranch, and he wouldn’t take it.”
For a moment, it seemed like the rising sun was making all that noise. Racketing around, tangled up in all those old, bright resentments Brady would have sworn he’d long since stopped carrying around.
But one moment led into the next, and he realized the noise was in him. His head, his chest.
And the astounded look on Gray’s face didn’t help.
“What are you talking about? Ty sent home some of his winnings from time to time. But you—” Gray shook his head. “Never a penny. Dad was terrible about paying off its debts, but he recorded every cent that ever came in.”
“He wouldn’t take it.”
It never changed, the kick of that. The bitterness. If he listened closely, he could still hear the old man’s drunk cackle.
I’d rather put myself out of my own misery than take a penny from a jumped-up egghead like you, Amos had said. A man deserves to lose a ranch if the only way he can keep it is by taking charity from a son so ungrateful, he put it in his rearview mirror and left it in the dust.
“That doesn’t make sense.” Gray adjusted his hat on his head, shooting a look over toward Ty, then back to Brady. “Obviously Dad took a distinct pleasure in being mean, but this isn’t family stuff. This is money.”
“My money,” Brady said from between clenched teeth. “And like everything that has to do with me, he preferred to ignore it.”
“Maybe he didn’t understand—” Ty began.
“He understood. I sent him checks. And he returned each and every one of them, ripped up into little pieces.”
It was gratifying on some level to watch his older brothers stare at each other as if they’d never heard of such a thing. As if they couldn’t imagine it.
“Brady,” Gray began.
“Maybe it’s time you ask yourself not just what Dad did to you, but what he did to me,” Brady suggested. “Ty, you could ask yourself why it was that Dad watched every single one of your rides, could quote your stats, and even went so far as to visit you in the hospital after your accident. All of which would surely take a whole lot more effort than attending a Cold River High football game. But he never attended one of mine.”
He shot his gaze back to Gray. “You were here, Gray. And I get it, you had a lot of stuff going on. Cristina, Becca as a baby, I understand. But you sat here, night after night, and watched him scribble down names into that will of his. Scratching them out, writing them back in. You listened while he told us what each and every person he bothered to mention had done to him. And he was terrible to the two of you, everybody knows that. But me? He acted like I didn’t exist.”
Brady found he didn’t have a lot to say after that, and even less he wanted to hear.
He stalked off to his truck, slammed his way into it, and spent the rest of his day taking out his aggression whaling on fence posts. And when the day was done, he didn’t stick around for the usual Everett family dinner. He showered in the room he’d taken in the main house because it had a private entrance—and because, maybe foolishly, he’d imagined that staying in the main house would make him feel more connected to his family, even if the room was tainted with Amos’s ghost—and he headed back into town.
Not to the Coyote. That would have been his normal preference, given the mood he was in. But in the week or so since he’d made the vast mistake of kissing Amanda, his preferences had shifted.
Because he couldn’t possibly go back to the Coyote while she was working there. And given that Harry didn’t exactly post his staffing information on the front door of the place, it meant Brady was out of luck unless he wanted to take his chances. Or start sticking his head in, spotting Amanda, and running away like a pathetic kid.
He’d been opting for the Broken Wheel Saloon instead. But all the reasons the Broken Wheel would have been a far more appropriate place for Amanda to work made it less satisfying for Brady. The Broken Wheel was a family place. Folks brought their kids in for dinner, and it was only after 8 p.m. or so that things shifted over into more of a nighttime scene. But even that lacked the edges and surefire entertainment of a night at the Coyote.
The Broken Wheel Saloon, right there on Main Street, was not a place a man went for a palate-cleansing hookup. Not unless he wanted all the gossipy old ladies in town to be plotting out wedding announcements and baby showers before dawn.
He shuddered at the thought.
Tonight, Brady got himself a beer from Tessa Winthrop behind the bar and ambled over to the table where Riley was sitting with Connor, Jensen, and a bunch of other friends and neighbors. Including Matias Trujillo, who wasn’t too long back from the service—and was also Riley’s ex-brother-in-law.
How do you handle that? Brady had asked, back when he’d first come home. Isn’t it awkward?
Everything is awkward in a small town, Riley had said darkly. It’s just a question of degrees.
Brady reminded himself of that as the Kittredge brothers gazed back at him. He got to marinate in his own form of awkwardness, tinged with the knowledge that if they had any idea he’d had his hands on their baby sister, they’d kill him right here on the saloon floor.
“Guess what?” he asked.
“Is this a knock-knock joke?” Jensen asked in a drawl. “I’m a firefighter. I don’t wait for someone to open the door; I kick it down.”
“I’m a marine,” Matias replied. “I’ll take your kick and raise it a battalion or two.”
Jensen rolled his eyes. “You would.”
“The only girl I love has made a special homecoming request of me,” Brady announced, pulling out a chair and dropping into it. “And I do not have it in me to deny my niece a single thing her heart desires. Even if what it desires is my presence at that egregious homecoming parade.”
“The parade of faded glory.” Riley raised his beer bottle. “Good luck with that, brother.”
“I’m not your brother, praise the Lord.” Brady smiled blandly. “But I am your former quarterback and team captain, and I’m ordering you to do this with me.”
“You know that’s not a thing. It doesn’t last past the actual team.” Riley nodded toward Jensen and Matias. “If it did, Matias could order Jensen around to his heart’s content.”
“Don’t I already?” Mattias asked.
Jensen smirked. “You try.”
“It’s not a thing,” Riley insisted. “And also, no. I’ve avoided that parade for years. I see no reason to stop now.”
“No problem,” Brady drawled. “I’ll just tell my sixteen-year-old niece, the one who’s always idolized all of you, that each and every one of you is too afraid to walk down a street.”
And that was how, when Brady surrendered himself to the humiliation of walking in the hometown parade that weekend, he could at least take comfort in the fact that he had company.
Surly, furious company, sure. But company all the same.
Then they figured they might as well stay for the game, and Brady found himself looking around the stands at all the beaming, cheering parents. All the fathers who’d come out on this Friday night to watch their sons throw balls around. All the proud smiles and extra-loud shouts.
That was the funny thing about bitterness, wasn’t it? Poke at it, and it wasn’t bitter at all. It was nothing more than a wish for sweetness that was never fulfilled and sat there like an ache instead.
It occurred to him—while the marching band played, the crowd cheered, and Cold River High School looked like the setting of some perfect little American dream—that he’d figured out pretty early on that he was never going to get anything he wanted from Amos. It was why he’d spent so much time at the Kittredge house. It was why he’d played his heart out on the football field, killed himself in the classroom, and told himself the only thing he ever cared about was getting away. Even after he’d done it.
But he would have to have been made of stone like Gray not to understand, as he sat there as a grown man in the football bleachers, that the hollow thing inside him wasn’t because he looked down on any of this. He’d been telling himself that lie for so long that he’d stopped questioning it. It wasn’t that he hated this place. It was that he’d missed out on it.
Even when he’d been right here, doing it, he’d missed out on it.
If he didn’t belong in his own family—something his father had made abundantly clear—then how did he belong anywhere? All the lights of the big city and what he’d built down there was commotion, not connection.
He knew that too, though it was another thing he’d stopped looking at directly.
Brady had always considered himself a simple man. He liked the fuss of a high school football game, like anyone else. It was even better on the stands than it had been on the field, because there was no pressure. He didn’t miss quarterbacking.
What he missed was what he’d never had. The idea that his father could be up here, cheering him on. The idea that he could care enough about anything Brady did—about Brady himself—to show up.
If he squinted, he could almost see a version of his father here, like a phantom limb.
Brady knew plenty of folks down in the city who would be only too happy to tell him how stupid they thought it was to care about a high school football game. In or out of high school.
But it wasn’t the game that got people out. It was the community. The sense of being part of something bigger than their own lives. That by identifying themselves as a Cowboy like the boys on the field, they felt like one for a while. It was no more than a few fall nights every year, scattered in against the coming darkness, but it felt like a talisman.
Tonight, it felt like one more ache.
Brady shouted something about hitting the head to Matias, who nodded. Then he picked his way down through the crowd. He did his neighborly part, nodding and smiling, as he climbed down to the ground. Even as he waited in line for the facilities.
On his way back, he stopped for a moment down at the bottom of the stands, letting the memories of his time here wash over him. Down in Denver, high school seemed like it had happened to someone else. It still did, but now it also felt like a movie, maybe. One he’d watched recently, so he could pick up the nuances.
After ten months back in town, he recognized a lot of the faces in the stands. He would have sworn up and down that familiarity was the sort of thing he wanted to get away from. But tonight, here in all the bright lights and noise of the homecoming football game, he could admit there was a part of him that liked it.
Home was home, after all. No matter how complicated.
When he caught a movement out of the corner of his eye, he turned his head, saw Amanda, and liked that even more.
The very fact of her, picking her way beneath the stands. She was laughing uproariously while she and her friend Kat linked their arms together and navigated their way beneath all those stamping feet. And it walloped him.
He had to check to see if he’d actually ended up on the ground.
Her friend veered off, heading for the bathrooms. Amanda kept walking, and only as she drew closer did she look up.
If she felt a similar wallop when she saw him, she didn’t show it. Her eyes sparkled. Her laughter turned into something else, some kind of too-hot smile, and he should have turned tail and run for it. He knew that.
Two of her brothers were sitting in the stands above him. He’d come with them. Her other two brothers were at large. Connor could be anywhere. Zack was almost certainly in this same crowd and could appear at any moment, flashing his badge.
Though his badge would be the least of Brady’s worries.
Brady needed to get away from her before anyone saw them. Before anyone saw her and that look on her face that was broadcasting the fact that they’d kissed.
But he couldn’t seem to move as she came closer.
“I’ve been looking for you,” she announced, reckless and careless as she rocked to a stop beside him.
They weren’t exactly hidden. Still, he could have backed up a step or two to put more space between them, and he didn’t do that either.
It was as if he wanted to be caught. As if he wanted to cause himself trouble. Maybe he really was like his father, in all his self-destructive glory.
What an unpleasant thought.
“I’m the last person you should be looking for,” he told her, his tone dark and oppressive, as if that could get the message through her thick head.
It did not.
He knew that because she swayed closer, one hand on one of the metal supports that kept the stands up, and the other out in front of her as if she planned to rest it on him.
Which would be as good as her signing his death warrant.
But he still didn’t move back.
He would never know why it suddenly occurred to her to be cautious. But instead of touching him, she let her hand drop.
It was a funny thing, how much he hated that. How much it turned out he wanted her hand on him, no matter the price.
Brady would have preferred not to know that about himself.
“I’ve come to a decision,” Amanda said, with the tone of someone sharing a delicious secret. “And involves you.”
“Does it involve you needing a ride to a nunnery?”
That smile of hers should have been illegal. “It does not.”
“It should.”
“It’s been a while since you came into the Coyote,” she said.
“Has it? I haven’t noticed. You shouldn’t have noticed either.”
Amanda rolled her eyes. “Okay. Whatever. I think you might be right. That is possibly not the best place to try to meet someone.”
Brady felt light-headed. “Meet someone? Why would you even…” He dragged a hand over his face. “You know what? This is not my business.”
“It is your business,” she said, and it was her earnestness that got to him. She looked like she could be talking to him about buying Girl Scout cookies, for God’s sake. “That’s the whole point, Brady. You can probably tell that I don’t know anything about … well, anything.”
That flush of hers was going to kill him. Maybe it did, because having actually died already was the only explanation for why he was still standing there, frozen solid, as if he couldn’t move. He should have been halfway back to the ranch by now.
“We’re not talking about that,” he gritted out. Clearly not dead. “We’re pretending that never happened.”
She wrinkled up her nose, like he was being silly. “I don’t want to forget about it.” And again, that smile. Little Amanda Kittredge was going to kill him with a smile. “Brady. I want it to be you.”
He was pretty sure he really did die, then. Of a heart attack that felt a lot like a sledgehammer to the chest.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He couldn’t have sounded as mean and forbidding as he wanted, because she moved closer. Then she pressed her fingertips so gently against his chest that he shouldn’t have been able to feel them at all.
But he did.
Like she was beaming light and sensation directly into all the places he ached.
“I want it to be you, Brady,” Amanda said, shining gold eyes and that impossible smile. “I want you to teach me everything there is to know.”
When he only stared back at her, possibly dead, that flush of hers deepened.
But it didn’t stop her. Amanda smiled wider. “About sex.”