Amanda didn’t know what she expected from Brady.
Okay, maybe she did. Maybe she thought her announcement—more of an invitation, really—would inspire a little enthusiasm. Maybe not cartwheels. But a smile, possibly. Something to show he’d heard what she said and wasn’t standing there, trying not to laugh at her. Or actively repulsed.
It had occurred to her that a person who’d never really been kissed before should probably figure out whether or not she’d done it right before leaping into offers of sex, but caution was Old Amanda’s game. New Amanda was all about leaping in first and seeing what happened.
Old Amanda had gone into her shower to hide from that kiss. New Amanda had come out wanting more.
Tonight, Brady stared down at her with an expression she couldn’t decode. For what felt like a lifetime to Amanda. Maybe several lifetimes, and while he wasn’t laughing at her, he wasn’t jumping for joy either.
She wanted to say something. Make it into a joke, maybe. Do something—anything—to divert attention from the fact she’d asked him to have sex with her.
But having thrown that out there, she couldn’t make her vocal cords produce a single other sound. Not one.
A thousand lifetimes later, Brady simply turned on his heel and walked away, back into the Friday night football crowd. A crowd that was kicking it up even more than usual, because it was homecoming weekend.
Amanda was tempted to feel slighted.
Maybe a whole lot more than simply slighted.
But when she emerged from beneath the stands, she got swept up in the crowd, and the marching band, and it got inside her ribs. It made her feel like dancing when she should have felt more like curling up in the fetal position somewhere.
She should have felt deflated. But all she could think about was that look on his face. That gorgeous, incredulous face of his. And he hadn’t said anything, but all she could seem to feel was exhilaration. And before she knew it, Kat found her standing at the fence at one end of the field, clapping along and cheering her heart out.
“You really don’t look like someone who’s done with the small-town experience,” Kat said over the noise and music, grinning widely.
“When did I say I was done with it?” Amanda thought of those lifetimes beneath the bleachers, nothing but Brady’s gaze on hers, far better than any touch. Far more intense. “I want to expand it a little bit, that’s all. Complicate it. Change it up.”
“I can’t tell if that means you want to move to California, dye your hair purple, or truly live dangerously and bring a microwave dinner to the next potluck.”
“I want to complicate my life,” Amanda said dryly. “Not end it.”
“Some people think complicating their life means going to a different service at the same church on a Sunday,” Kat said loftily.
“I’m a twenty-two-year-old woman,” Amanda said, gesturing grandly with one arm, like the homecoming queen she’d never been.
Kat laughed. “Thank you. I’m aware. As I am also a twenty-two-year-old woman. One who’s known you since birth.”
“You’re a twenty-two-year-old woman who’s actually been in a relationship. You’re in one now. I’m not. And everything I’ve read and watched or even heard about in passing tells me that as a twenty-two-year-old single woman, I should be out there.” She gestured at the crowd again, though she didn’t quite mean out there on the football field. “Living it up.”
“You’re talking about sex.”
“I’m talking about one-night stands, Kat. Morning-afters. Walks of shame and awkward silences when you run into last night’s hookup in the grocery store line. These things, I’m told, are the spice of life.”
“Told by who?”
“The internet, mostly.”
“Shame and awkwardness have never appealed to me, personally,” Kat said. Diplomatically, for her.
“That’s the thing, isn’t it? We don’t know if they’re more appealing than they sound. Because we’ve never actually experienced any of them ourselves.”
Kat made a face. “I haven’t experienced being set on fire. Or a root canal. But I feel pretty sure I wouldn’t enjoy either one.”
Amanda shrugged. “You always seem to think that making out with Brandon is fun. Why wouldn’t making out—and more—in general also be fun?”
“Brandon has been deployed so long, I can’t really remember making out with him. Or even what he looks like in real life.”
Amanda bumped her shoulder against her friend’s. “You remember.”
Kat smiled, and neither one of them mentioned that her smile was more and more brittle these days. “The difference is that I’ve known Brandon since we were kids. We got together in the seventh grade. I don’t get the impression you’re actually talking about a relationship.”
Amanda thought about brooding, overwhelming, gloriously too-much-for-her-to-handle Brady Everett. She remembered his mouth on hers. She hadn’t slept well since he’d left her apartment that afternoon. It was like he’d flipped a switch in her, and her body was still in the grip of a brand-new, breathtaking electrical current. Even now.
“Relationships are great if it happens that way,” Amanda said with the great confidence of a person who had only ever had a deep relationship with her horse. “But what I’m talking about is experience.”
“Terrific,” Kat replied. She turned her head and regarded Amanda so steadily, it made Amanda’s stomach twist. “But you know that kind of experience is a surefire way to end up wishing you had less, right?”
Amanda leaned over and kissed her best and oldest friend on her cheek, grinning when Kat batted her away.
“I know,” she said, her voice hidden beneath the sound of the crowd so only Kat could hear her. “I really do. That’s what I want.”
She was still thinking about experience and regret and wishes later that night, curled up in her apartment while the usual Friday night party in the Coyote raged on below. Weekend nights were major nights for tips, she’d learned, and that meant the older, more seasoned bartenders covered the shifts. Brand-new girls like Amanda were relegated to the off-hours.
Amanda didn’t mind. If it weren’t for the pounding music from the jukebox below, the raucous sound of drunken laughter, and the way her windows rattled slightly every time the heavy outdoor slammed, she would have called it an idyllic evening.
She was coming up on a month of living on her own, the best spontaneous decision she’d ever made. And she still couldn’t quite believe she’d pulled it off. That she got to call this apartment home and newly experience this little town she would have said she already knew too well. Even if she did have to pay attention when she got into the car because if she wasn’t careful, she’d drive halfway to the Bar K without thinking.
Amanda tucked her feet beneath her, resting her book on the wide arm of her chair. It was already cooling down considerably at night, so she’d pulled on heavy socks. And she was contemplating wrapping herself in the quilt her mother had brought by on one of her visits.
You’re giving me Grandma’s quilt? she’d asked in surprise, when she’d opened the door to find Ellie there with the quilt in question in her arms. Instead of on the bed in what had once been Riley and Connor’s room in the big house, and now had become a guest room.
Why not your grandmother’s quilt? Ellie had asked coolly.
Because it’s yours.
Ellie had smiled, though even that was reserved. Distant and untouchable, just like her.
Amanda, she’d said briskly. It’s a quilt. Anything else attached to it is your own nostalgia. Memories. You get to decide how much weight they have.
Maybe that was her mother’s typically roundabout way of saying it was their secret that she was quietly outfitting her daughter with all the things Amanda hadn’t taken with her when she’d left. Ellie wasn’t the type for a grand gesture, after all. She preferred quiet acts of rebellion instead.
Amanda had waited her whole life to have secrets. Her brothers all had their share. That was obvious in all the silences and sideways glances. But Amanda’s life had always been the family’s open book. Everyone got to read along. Everyone had a say.
But now she had her own space, her own home. And best of all, her own secrets at last.
She had a new job, though she couldn’t say she liked bartending in the Coyote, exactly. It was more that she liked the challenge of it. The funny feeling she got low in her belly at the rough clientele. The things she now knew about folks she’d known all her life, but not in the context of their late-night adventures on the wrong side of the river.
She’d kissed Brady Everett. And it had been far, far better than even her wildest imaginings. Then she’d gone ahead and asked him for everything else she wanted. It almost didn’t matter what happened next.
Almost, she thought, wriggling a little in her chair as all those Brady-specific sensations wound around and around inside.
Maybe it wasn’t surprising that when she took herself off to bed some time later, with the brand-new earplugs she’d bought to combat the late-night revelry below, she dreamed of dark green eyes. Quarterback shoulders. And that brooding, intense look he’d trained on her beneath the homecoming bleachers, as if she was as much of a problem to him as he was to her.
God help her, but she wanted to be his problem.
“If you had it to do over again, would you do it all the same way?” Amanda asked Abby the next day.
They were sitting together in the back office of Cold River Coffee, recapping what had already happened over the course of a long Saturday during the Harvest Festival. And also taking a break from said festival. The coffeehouse had been jumping since opening, and this was the first time Abby had come in to work a full shift since she’d had the baby.
“That wasn’t really a shift.” Abby gazed down at Bart, currently sound asleep in the little bassinet she brought with her. “It was more of a test run. I wanted to see if it was even possible to work with him around. That’s why I scheduled you for the same time.”
“And it went great. Everyone loves him already. He’s better than ordering coffee. Everyone cooed at him instead.”
Abby laughed. “Maybe a regular cup of coffee. Not those monstrously sweet things you like to drink. People are pretty clear they want their fix.”
“I like sugar.” Amanda grinned. “But I meant … all of this. Getting married. Bart. The whole Gray situation.”
Abby regarded her steadily for a moment, the way she always did, because she listened. Really listened, instead of ranting on about her opinions or what everyone else ought to do, like Amanda’s brothers.
“What’s funny to me is that we’ve been married for almost a year now,” Abby said, one hand on the sleeping infant’s deliciously round belly. “We already have a son. We’re as happy as I know how to be, if currently sleep-deprived. And yet the only thing anybody remembers is that I mooned around after Gray for a thousand years.”
“So you would change it.”
“The mooning? Or the marriage?”
“Any of it.” Amanda busied herself with a sudden, intense study of her fingernails. Which were not beautifully manicured to a high shine like Hannah’s. Amanda’s nails were cut short, because as much as it turned out she might like to make an entrance upon occasion, the rest of the time she had to work. Her hands had to do things. “What if instead of mooning around after him, you’d dated other people instead?”
Again, a long look from Abby. “Is there someone you want to date?”
“I’ve never been on a date in my life.” Amanda forced her lips to curve, though it wasn’t exactly a smile. “Only closely chaperoned dances in high school. Because who would dare ask me out? They would have to contend with the brother death squad. It’s easier all around to … not.”
“I would have told you that all I wanted was to go on a date,” Abby said. “That was true. I did. My problem was that I was only ever interested in one person, which would have made going on dates with other people challenging.”
“Everybody knew how you felt about Gray. That’s why you never went out with anyone else.”
“Also no one asked,” Abby said dryly. “My friends would tell you things could have happened if I were looking, but I really only ever saw Gray. So I’m lucky it all worked out the way it did. Because otherwise, I was right on track to becoming Cold River’s very own vestal virgin.”
“I don’t want to be a virgin,” Amanda blurted out, from the very depths of her soul. Because the back office had always been a safe space for such confessions. “Vestal or otherwise.”
“I can’t blame you there,” Abby said in her typically calm, matter-of-fact way. “I’m not going to lie to you and pretend that sex isn’t amazing, because it is.” She concentrated on the bassinet a little more fiercely than before, but Amanda could see the faint color in her cheeks. “Do you have someone in mind to help you out with that?”
That last question was slightly more deliberately bland than the rest, and Amanda smiled, because that was the big sister coming out in Abby. It made Amanda feel safe. Protected. But that didn’t mean Amanda planned to announce she’d kissed her older boss’s even older brother-in-law. She was starting a new life. She didn’t want to end it before it got good.
“Not really,” she lied.
She reminded herself she was a woman with secrets now. That meant she couldn’t go sharing them with anyone, or they wouldn’t be secrets any longer. And that, too, made her feel somehow safe and sultry at once.
Abby nodded sagely. “You must have too many prospects to count.”
“I think some people have prospects, and then other people are me,” Amanda said quietly. Matter-of-factly, because she might have been making grand gestures at the football game, but she’d also been thinking about this for a long time. Or she never would have moved off the ranch. “And if I don’t make my own prospects, it’s never going to happen. It’s not only my brothers who treat me like a child. Everybody does. I don’t want to be the town’s vestal virgin, or even a legendary spinster like Miss Patrick, but both those things are infinitely preferable to being treated like a kid. Forever.”
“I understand that.” The baby made a small sound, and Abby moved her hand in a soft circle on her son’s chubby belly. His mouth moved, but he stilled. “And I know a lot of people have a lot of strong opinions about what you should do. Or not do. But it doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks. I know it feels like it does, but in the end, the only opinion that really matters is yours.”
“You don’t regret anything, then?”
“I don’t.” Abby got a dreamy sort of look on her face. “But I was terrified to tell Gray how inexperienced I was. I thought it was embarrassing. Or that I would do the wrong thing. And it was fine.” Her eyes danced, then. “It was so much more than fine, I don’t have the words to describe it.”
“You married him, though,” Amanda said. “I think maybe the protocol is different if it’s more of a casual thing.”
Some part of her expected Abby to clutch at the pearls she wasn’t wearing. Instead, she smiled. “In my head, I wanted to be the sort of person who had a great many casual things. Instead, I read about them. But it’s not as hard as you think it is to talk about stuff. Especially if you know the person. Not that I experienced the alternative, of course.”
Amanda tried to imagine sitting around having an in-depth discussion with Brady about the intricacies of sex. Or even about that kiss, rather than simply blundering in and out of moments that left her spinning for days. She felt herself ignite at the notion, and it was a wildfire this time. It was a slow, steady, calamitous burn that unfurled from the deepest part of her and sent licks of flame dancing along her limbs.
She hoped Abby couldn’t see it all over her.
“I know what it’s like to have everyone think of you one way when you want so desperately to be thought of in a different way altogether,” Abby said in her same quiet way, no hint of judgment in her voice. “What I found out is that, sure, there are always going to be people who can’t let go of whatever image they had of you. But most people in Cold River want you to be happy. Whatever that looks like.”
“I believe you,” Amanda said after a moment, when she thought she could speak without giving away that fire inside of her. But her cheeks were still too hot when she lifted her gaze to Abby’s. “My trouble is, there are four particular citizens of Cold River who do not want me happy. They want me in a box. And if that box holds me exactly like this for the rest of my life, they will be delighted.”
“Too bad it’s not up to them.” Abby’s gaze was steady. “I don’t think there’s ever anything wrong with asking for what you want, Amanda. I wish I had, and a whole lot sooner.”
“Unless, of course, you don’t get it,” Amanda said, thinking of that unreadable, too-intense look Brady had fixed on her. There in her apartment, and beneath the bleachers at the football game last night too.
She tried not to shiver.
“Sure,” Abby replied, with a small smile. “But what if you do?”
When the baby started fussing, Amanda shooed Abby out the door with him. Then she spent the next few hours handling the coffeehouse paperwork and the usual backlog of calls. Anything that made a dent. She meant to leave, but she got sucked back into the late-afternoon rush, made even more crowded than usual thanks to the Harvest Festival still going on outside.
By the time she actually left, dusk had already settled in. She pushed her way out the back door of the coffeehouse, smiling as she heard the music and sounds of general merriment floating over the back of the brick buildings that fronted onto Main Street. She figured she might as well go home, shower off a day of coffee, and then come back into town on foot so she could enjoy the live bands at the Broken Wheel. Or maybe do a little shopping in the boutiques that would stay open tonight until late.
She was congratulating herself on the perfect evening ahead of her as she made her way out to her car, parked in the lot behind the coffee shop.
Until a shadow detached itself from a nearby tree.
Her stomach dropped. Her heart kicked up.
Then it all got worse, or better, because it was Brady.
He looked like part of the night itself. Dark hat, a Henley and jeans, all of it forcing her to pay too much attention to that chest of his that she’d felt beneath her fingers. She didn’t know how she was supposed to handle herself.
There had been twenty-two years of imagining—and now she knew. She knew what his mouth tasted like, and how it moved on hers. And it was nothing like fairy tales or Disney movies. It was raw and physical, wet and hot. Under the bleachers, surrounded by so much noise, she’d forgotten that. A little.
She’d lost it in all that commotion.
But now they were all by themselves in the dark. Everyone they knew and everything in Cold River was on the other side of the stout row of brick buildings, standing there, cheek by cheek, like a wall. And Amanda had known this from the start. She could never go back.
She could never be a girl who didn’t know those things. His taste. His touch. The scrape of his cheek against her jaw. The precise scent of the exact place where his neck met his shoulder.
Amanda had no idea how she was supposed to just … talk to him.
For a moment there, with only the far-off stars as witness, she panicked. She wondered if she’d lost her voice altogether.
“Is this your new game?” Brady growled at her. “You wander around asking random men to teach you about sex?”
He sounded so outraged, so thoroughly disgruntled, that the panic in her eased a little. Or shifted until it joined up with the heat within her, then bloomed into something new.
She felt an ache low in her belly, and what she would have called fear if it hadn’t felt so much like flying.
“I wouldn’t call you random, Brady,” she said. With a bit of a drawl. “You did change my diapers, after all.”
He muttered a curse. “This isn’t something that can happen. Ever.”
But her eyes were adjusting to the dark. She could see the tense, taut line of his jaw. And if she wasn’t mistaken, that particular glitter in his dark eyes that appeared to be wired directly to the slippery place between her legs.
“I’ve thought a lot about what I want,” she told him, venturing closer.
“God help us all.”
She ignored that. Virtuously. “That kiss was clarifying.”
“That kiss scared you half to death.”
“Only half.” She nodded at him. “And showing up in the dark like this doesn’t make you any less scary, by the way.”
She stopped by the hood of her car, maybe three feet away from where he stood. And she couldn’t help but imagine that he’d been leaning against that tree for hours. That he’d only straightened when she’d come out the back door of the coffeehouse. If that wasn’t what happened, she didn’t want to know.
“You think I don’t know what it’s like to be your age, but I do,” Brady said, low and dark. “I remember. You want to get out there and grab hold of everything the world has to offer, and you should.”
“I like to sing ‘Wide Open Spaces’ at the top of my lungs like the next girl,” Amanda replied. “But Colorado is filled with a whole lot of open space. And I like Cold River. Unlike some people, I didn’t race on out of here twenty seconds after graduating from high school. This is home. I like home.”
He made a dismissive noise. “It’s easy to think you love a place when you’ve never been anywhere else.”
“That’s why I made you an offer.” She kept her voice as bright as if she’d offered him a pastry, not herself. She remembered what Abby had said about talking things through. “I’ve been a virgin with no sexual experience for quite some time now. I like it fine. It’s comfortable. But how can I know whether or not I prefer abstinence if I don’t experiment a little? Just to make sure.”
Brady actually laughed. “You think you’re going to debate me into having sex with you?”
“It’s a rational argument.” She leaned against the hood of her car and grinned at him. “All I ever hear are claims that if I was a little more rational, I might actually get what I want.”
“And what happens if I say no?” Something changed, there beneath the tree that would have hidden them from view, had anyone been watching tonight. Though Amanda found she didn’t have it in her to care too much if they were. “Are you going to run out and find someone else?”
Her instinct was to respond from the gut with a sharp no. To tell him that she’d had any number of offers at the Coyote and hadn’t felt compelled to take anyone up on any of them.
But there was something else in her, kicking around, hot and bright and connected to that pulsing heat between her legs. She knew things about him now. And that meant she knew things about herself too.
A month ago, she would never have smirked the way she did then, or shifted her body so that it emphasized her curves.
“This is Cold River, Brady,” she drawled, watching his gaze move over her curves and take its time finding her eyes again. “There’s no shortage of cowboys.”
She didn’t see him move, but he must have. Because suddenly he was close enough to cup her cheek. And he held her there, though there was no tenderness in it. Or nothing so simple as tenderness. There was torment in his gaze and what looked like denial flattening his mouth.
But then his thumb moved, a small scrape over her cheekbone and she understood. That this was the truth. This pulsing, exultant sensation, like their own, secret heartbeat.
“I can’t have you wandering around the valley, propositioning cowboys anytime you feel like it,” he rumbled, his voice as much inside her chest as in her ears. “It might cause a riot.”
It was hard to focus on anything but the hypnotizing sweep of his callused thumb against her cheek, but Amanda tried. “Can’t you?”
“Your brother asked me to look out for you. I should have known it would mean something like this.”
“Poor Brady,” she murmured sadly, though there wasn’t a shred of sadness inside her. “Do you have to take one for the team?”
“You’re going to be the death of me, Amanda.”
“I hope not.” She tipped her head back, swaying closer to him. “If you died, I’d be right back where I started, wouldn’t I?”
He took possession of her other cheek, and then he held her there. A breath away from his mouth. From another kiss. From all those things that swirled inside of her, looking for a way out. Looking for him.
Amanda melted.
The entire Cold River High School marching band could have paraded around them, then, and she doubted she would have noticed. There was only him. Only Brady. His hands on her face and that hot gleam in his eyes.
“Let’s you and me get real clear about the rules,” he said, after a whole lifetime of that shuddering excitement.
“Why do you get to make the rules? This is my thing, not yours.”
“You made it my thing, Amanda. Suck it up.” He waited until she inclined her head slightly. “No one knows. Ever. Not your friends, definitely not Abby, and never, ever your brothers. I’m going to need you to agree with me. Out loud.”
“I agree with you.” And she shuddered again at the sheer deliciousness of the situation. And the possibility that it was actually happening. That she was here in the dark making bargains with Brady Everett for sex. For sex. She was finally going to have sex. With him. She was glad he was holding her, because otherwise she might have fallen over. “Nobody knows but us.”
“And as long as this goes on, as long as it’s you and me, it’s only you and me.”
“I already told you I’m a virgin,” she said, laughing. “Do you really think you’re going to crack open that door and I’m going to come storming out like I’m on a mission to make up for lost time?”
“This isn’t a debate about expectations, little girl.” There was something dark and particularly, marvelously male about the way he said it. “We’re agreeing to terms.”
“I agree; no one else.” She couldn’t let that settle in her. It made her knees feel weak. “You have to agree that if you get all weird, you can’t just snap your fingers and be done with me. No ghosting. You have to actually talk about it. With me. Like I’m a grown adult woman and not your best friend’s little sister.”
“Except you are my best friend’s little sister.”
“I want you to teach me, Brady, not condescend to me. Do you think you can handle that?”
His mouth crooked up in one corner. “Do you?”
“I’ll need you to agree out loud, thank you.”
“I agree,” he said.
Then there was nothing but his hands on her face, the things they’d agreed to, and all that heat kicking around between them.
Oh my God, she shrieked inside. Is this actually happening?
“Okay,” Brady said after a long, drugged sort of moment. Or maybe only Amanda felt that way. Maybe he had conversations like this every day. “Okay, then. We have rules.”
Amanda was … jangly. Tangled up inside, filled with anticipation, and panic, and straight-up terror—all mixed up together with excitement and that trembling. She’d never wanted anything as much as this. She didn’t know if she could survive it.
But all Brady did, after a last, long look, was drop his hands. Then step back.
There was a roaring in her ears. “You have to be kidding me. That’s not it, is it?”
“It’s going to be hard to keep a secret if we’re making out behind the coffeehouse, Amanda. This is still Cold River.”
She blinked. “Is this what people mean when they talk about someone being a tease?”
He let out another one of those laughs, as if she’d punched him again.
“You’re killing me.” It sounded like he was talking through clenched teeth. “Get in the truck.”
She wasn’t following him. “The truck? You mean your truck?”
Then, before she could puzzle that out, he was advancing on her. She made an embarrassing squeaking sound as he got directly into her space, crowding her there against the side of her car. He hooked one arm around her back, then hauled her up against him, so every part of the front of her was pressed tightly against the front of him.
She was pretty sure she flatlined.
But when she didn’t actually die again, she felt everything.
Everything.
His hard chest against her breasts, which felt deliciously swollen tonight. His belly, flat and enticing, pressed tight against her. And that hard ridge even lower down that made her … dizzy.
“Yes,” he said, his mouth too close to hers, “my truck. You’re going to get in it. Your car is here, and anyone who sees it will imagine you’re out at the Harvest Festival, wandering around with everyone else. They certainly won’t expect you to be with me. I’m going find us a nice big space with your name on it, and then you and I are going to have a little lesson in attitude readjustment.”
She wiggled a little in his hold, but only so she could get closer. And then melt into him all over again. “Why do I need to adjust my attitude? It feels fine from this angle.”
He muttered another curse, and it took him a very long time to set her back down on her feet. Then he jerked his head toward his pickup, and Amanda had to order herself not to run around to the passenger side in what could only be called indecent haste.
Surely a lady would be less obvious.
But Amanda had never been much of a lady. She’d always smelled too much like her beloved horses for that.
She jumped into the truck, and found herself grinning like a fool when he slid in behind the steering wheel.
“You’re enjoying yourself, aren’t you?” He sounded disgruntled, but she was looking at him. She could see that smile he was trying to hide.
“I’ve always wanted a secret,” she told him, and then slid down on the bench seat, so no one could possibly see her. She rested her head on Brady’s hard thigh and looked up the wall of his perfect body, sighing happily, because this was happening. This was really happening. “I’m so glad it’s you.”