8

Every time he saw her, she was prettier. Or it hit him harder.

Ty didn’t know what kind of black magic that was, but it worked on him. She worked for him and through him, laying down tracks of fire and need, a whole lot like she was the kind of whiskey he’d used to reserve for the nights he either won big money or nothing at all.

He didn’t know what to think about the possibility that he’d been applying whiskey to his problems since he’d left the hospital when maybe, without knowing it, he’d been substituting whiskey for everything he couldn’t remember about Hannah. One of his physical therapists had gone on and on about what was stored in the body. Trauma. Pain. Memory.

Why not a whole marriage?

He’d driven her up to the lookout point on the hill, which in his time had always been pretty crowded after dark. But at this time of day, it was deserted. For once, Ty wanted to avoid an audience.

Because he didn’t know what to think about any of this. That pulse in his temples didn’t hurt, exactly, but it didn’t go away either. He couldn’t imagine what look he had on his face. He could see the expression Hannah had on hers, and that was painful enough.

“I don’t know why you want me to tell you something when you’re not going to remember any of it,” she was saying again, and his finger itched to touch her. But he didn’t. “I could make up a complete fairy tale. I could tell you anything at all, and you wouldn’t know the difference.”

“Tell me anyway.” He had liked holding her hand back there in town. More than he was comfortable admitting to himself. Was that muscle memory? Or did he want it to be, because it was better than not remembering? Because he was getting sick and tired of the things he couldn’t remember. “You can start by telling me why, if we’ve been married this whole time, it took you more than a year after my accident to come clue me in.”

Her eyes went cool. “I was unavoidably detained.”

“What does that mean? Prison?”

She let out a short laugh. “Not the way you mean.”

There was something about the way she held herself, then, too still and too ready, as if she expected him to push her to answer. It made him stop. Because he wasn’t sure he wanted to know whatever it was he could see lurking there in her blue gaze. Maybe he needed to get his head around the fact he was married—married, for the love of all that was holy—before he focused on why she’d abandoned it. Him.

“We can circle back on that,” he said when all she did was wait to see what he would do. And he couldn’t tell if that had been a test, much less if he’d passed it. “Start at the beginning.”

Something had changed. Ty had left the ranch, driving too fast on his way back into town, the way he always did. Relentlessly reckless, the high school principal had called him back in the day, and Ty couldn’t argue with that assessment. Back then, he’d seen it as a badge of honor. He’d basically made recklessness his own personal brand.

But he hadn’t liked not finding Hannah where he expected her to be, and he was sure the girl at the front desk of the bed-and-breakfast was going to spread that tidbit of gossip far and wide. He didn’t care. Because when Ty had found Hannah in the coffeehouse, everything inside him … crystallized.

He’d been fuzzy and out of focus for eighteen months, but looking at Hannah sitting on a couch in the coffee shop Gray’s wife Abby managed—surrounded by his past and hints of those roots he’d always hated so much—suddenly everything was clear again.

A truth he’d kept to himself was that Ty had been coming back home to Cold River even before he’d gotten the news that Amos had died. He’d been in a bad way. The only thing he’d ever known how to do was the rodeo, and sure, he’d known he was too old and pushing his limits when he’d hit thirty a few years back. But he hadn’t had anything resembling a back-up plan. Getting stomped the way he had ended the debate. He was out.

He’d put off the decision to return to the ranch as long as he could, especially after Amos’s unsolicited appearance in the hospital had reminded him exactly what sort of tender encouragement he could expect from his dear old dad. But then Amos had thoughtfully kicked the bucket, almost literally, and there Ty was. Stuck on the ranch again, where he’d never belonged.

And for the first time in his life, without Amos to fight against.

Ty was pretty sure that Gray and Brady grieved their father on some level. Or the father Amos had never been and now never would be, maybe. But not Ty. He didn’t miss his father at all. What he missed was the constant antagonism. The sure knowledge he’d always had that whatever he did, however reckless he got, Amos would always be the worst-behaved Everett around.

Amos had alienated the entire valley. He’d chased away every woman who had ever been foolish enough to take a chance on him. He’d done the same with his own sons, except Gray—but then, Gray was good at disappearing right there in plain sight. He carried on doing what needed to get done, no matter what storms were raging on Cold River Ranch.

Ty had been fighting against his father his whole life. But now Amos was gone.

And Ty had become him. His brothers certainly thought so. Because he’d encouraged them to think it, sure. But hearing it from Brady today had stung a lot worse than it used to.

Because Hannah said she was his. And it was like a switch was thrown inside him when Ty had walked into Cold River Coffee and seen her sitting there.

Mine, that greedy thing in him had asserted. Again.

Maybe it didn’t make sense. Maybe he would never remember what had happened between them. But she said she was married to him, and the one thing Amos had never managed to do—famously—was hold on to a wife.

Ty could start proving he was nothing like the man right here, right now.

He wanted to flash his usual grin at her, high up above the land he’d been trying to escape for most of his life, but he couldn’t quite get there. “I’d help you out, darlin’. But I don’t know the story.”

She flushed. And even that was pretty. “You met me at the rodeo.”

“I figured that part out already, Hannah.”

“You had quite a reputation. I heard about you a long time before I actually met you. I was warned off repeatedly, in fact. By pretty much everybody, their mothers, and three-quarters of the livestock too.”

That sounded about right to Ty. What he could remember about the women he’d known was enjoying them. Thoroughly.

“Where did we meet?”

Hannah settled back against the passenger seat, turning her body to face his. He mirrored her. “Bozeman, Montana. Two years ago in May. I was competing for the Miss Rodeo Forever crown, and I wanted nothing to do with you.”

“Why not? I’m sure I was charming. I’m always charming.”

He didn’t question how he knew that was true.

“Rodeo queens don’t date. And even if we did, I wouldn’t date you. You took entirely too much pride in your bad reputation.”

Ty shrugged. “No point having a bad reputation otherwise.”

“So you made sure to tell me.”

He felt his mouth curve in one corner. “Glad to know I’m still me, no matter what I can remember.”

Hannah made a sound that was somewhere between a sigh and a laugh. Or maybe the idea she might laugh about any of this was wishful thinking on his part.

“I can only tell you what I remember. And what you told me. You said that everything changed.” And he could see the vulnerability in her eyes, then. “You said you looked up from your life, there I was, and nothing was ever the same.”

Ty couldn’t speak. He felt as if the wind had been knocked out of him. He felt greedy and guilty, and there was too much stuff inside of him, like dirt kicked up in a rodeo ring. He was afraid he might choke on it.

“It was the same for me,” she said quietly. “But I didn’t know what was happening at first. I told myself I disliked you. I wanted to, anyway. You would try to talk to me and I hated it. But you were in my head way too much when I didn’t see you for a while. And when I won Miss Rodeo Forever and traveled around with the rodeo the way you did, I looked forward to you trying.”

“How exactly did I try?”

She shifted her shoulder against the back of her seat, curling into it. “First, you would stop me and say hello. Then comment on how I replied.”

“Did your replies need commentary? Maybe I thought we had a collaborative situation going on.”

“You sure wanted it to be. And there was always a critique. Though you usually couched it as more of a suggestion for the future. Not that you minded that I was ever-so-slightly abrupt, but you wouldn’t want me to find myself in a situation down the line where someone less open-minded than you was tempted to take offense.”

Ty blinked. Not at what she said, but the way she said it in a spot-on imitation of his laziest drawl.

She smiled. Faintly. “You were generally more positive about my horseback-riding skills.”

“I do admire a woman with skills.”

“When you say things like that, it’s hard to believe that you really can’t remember all the other times you said the same thing. The exact same thing.”

“That must be weird,” Ty allowed. “But I bet it’s a whole lot weirder to have somebody sit and tell you what you said and what you did. To them. Like they’re talking about someone else.”

“We don’t have to talk about this at all. We can stop right now.”

“I’m not the one who’s reluctant to hear this story.” He considered her as she sat there, one knee pulled up on the bench seat. “You ready to tell me why?”

The color in her cheeks deepened. But she didn’t answer his question.

“I didn’t think so,” Ty said.

Hannah swallowed and kept going. “You talked to me a little here, a little there. I tried to make it clear that I wanted nothing to do with you. But that was a lie. I did. And pretty soon I stopped pretending I found you irritating. And you started asking me for a date.”

“You keep telling me rodeo queens don’t date.”

He knew they didn’t. At least, not out in the open. There was no actual rule Ty was aware of that decreed the girls couldn’t date, or have boyfriends when everyone knew they did, but any outward, visible signs of attachment were frowned upon.

Suddenly he wondered if that was why that voice in him had told him he couldn’t touch her—not in public. Not her. Not rodeo royalty who belonged to the sport while she wore her crown, never to a man.

That pulse in his temples hurt. His heart walloped him. Did that count as a memory?

He studied her, blond and pretty and obviously something to him, or why would he keep having these reactions? Maybe the memories didn’t matter. He focused on her story instead. “You made an exception for me?”

“It was my last year of queening. And my reputation was absolutely spotless. I took a lot of pride in that. Winning Miss Rodeo Forever once was an unbelievable honor to me. It was what I’d worked for since I was small. But I was the first girl to ever win the crown two years running. I was grateful. I was proud. I was humbled.”

“Hannah.” Ty’s voice was low in the scant space between them. And probably more amused than it should have been. “Are you trying to tell me I came along and compromised your virtue? Or your crown?”

Her cheeks flushed brighter, fascinating him. “We had to keep it a secret. Not only from everyone involved with the rodeo, but specifically from my mother. She traveled with me as my chaperone. And she didn’t waffle about whether or not she disliked you. She straight up hated the sight of you.”

Ty took that in. “I’m not surprised to hear I have that effect on mothers. I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“I’m not sure you should. I’d never lied to my mother before in my whole life. About anything. But I did for you.”

“For me?” He didn’t know where the question from. Maybe the same place those memories that weren’t quite memories swirled around inside of him and made his head hurt enough to keep him on edge. “Or for you?”

She didn’t respond immediately. Ty could hear the breeze rustling through evergreens outside the windows. The far-off sound of the falls that poured out of the side of the mountain and tumbled toward the valley floor. But it was the steady kick of his heart that was deafening him.

He waited for her to answer him, but she was too busy frowning down at her jeans. “Did I make you lie, Hannah?”

She took her time lifting that fathomless blue gaze to his.

“No,” she said after a moment, as if it was a hard confession. “You didn’t make me lie. I did that all by myself.”

If that was a victory, it landed wrong. Ty ran a hand over his jaw, because he couldn’t shift that heavy weight off his chest, and pushed on.

“What you’re telling me is we snuck off when we could. Made our own trouble and pretended we didn’t know each other when we were in public again.” He shrugged. “That doesn’t strike me as anything too unusual.”

“We didn’t make as much trouble as you might imagine.” That flush on her cheeks changed shades again. He wanted to touch it, and had no idea how he managed to keep his hands to himself. “It took me a long time to let you kiss me.”

He’d been kidding when he’d mentioned her virtue before. Because what did Ty know about virtue? He doubted he’d encountered any. But the pieces suddenly slammed together.

“Hannah.” Every time he said her name, it tasted better. Especially this time. “Was I your first?”

“My mother raised me to believe that if I so much as looked too long at a boy on the street, it would be the end of me. I believed her.” Hannah let out a shuddery sort of breath that charged the air between them, but then straightened. “I’d never looked at another man. I’d certainly never kissed one. And you kind of liked that.”

Any doubts Ty might have had that he’d touched this woman, intimately, disappeared at that moment. Because the way she looked at him held too much heat. Depth. Knowledge. And more, he could feel his own body’s deep, enthusiastic response to the notion that he’d been the only one to do it.

He still liked that idea, it turned out. More than kind of liked it.

And the certainty felt good.

“There was no possible way I was ever going to have sex before marriage,” she told him, and he didn’t need to touch her face to see how bright she was burning. But he did anyway. The faintest brush of the back of his fingers against one cheek.

She was hot like fire and soft like satin, and the feel of her sank deep into him.

Like another dose of certainty.

It was as if he was waking up.

“You said you could respect that,” she said, but her voice was softer. Shakier. “But you had no intention of marrying anybody. You’d sworn your whole life you’d never marry anyone. I figured that was the end of the conversation.”

“And the end of us … not making trouble?”

“No. We still did our thing. But it got … frustrating.”

Ty wished he could reach over and pull her memories straight from her head as easily as he’d touched her face. He wished she could project them in front of her like some kind of movie screen. Because he had the feeling he would give almost anything to rewind through what she called frustration and linger there a while.

And the hotter her cheeks got, the more sure of that he became.

“You went home for Christmas that year.” Hannah looked out the front window. “You came here. And I was sure you would probably let things fade away. Because we talked and we talked, but it never went anywhere. We didn’t want the same things.” She pulled in a breath. “Or we didn’t want them in the same way, at the same time. You talked a lot about someday. But I didn’t want to gamble everything on someday. I was already risking my reputation as it was.”

“You sure wouldn’t want to throw more than a reputation after a rodeo cowboy,” Ty drawled. With more darkness than he’d known was in him. And barely managed to keep from calling her darlin’. “That never ends well.”

She took a breath. Then she shocked him by reaching over and putting her hand on his leg. He felt the heat. That same kick of certainty.

Mine, that voice belted out, and this time, without any further instructions about when and how.

He didn’t care if it was memory or not. It felt right.

“My reputation was my job,” Hannah said, her voice quiet and her gaze direct. “And I had to fund-raise to get that job in the first place. I went to UGA on a full academic scholarship, and that certainly didn’t include appropriate rodeo outfits. Or travel costs. When I talk about losing my reputation—and my crown—I’m not talking about my ideals. I’m talking about letting down good people who believed in me and gave me their hard-earned money to represent them in a sport they love. That mattered to me. It still matters to me.”

But all Ty could really focus on was how easily she kept her hand on him. There was nothing awkward about it. Nothing new. It was intimate, not necessarily sexual, as if she’d put her hand on him a thousand times before. It underscored everything she’d told him, because Ty’s mind might have decided to play tricks on him, but his body was the same instrument it had always been. He knew every inch of it, what it could do, and where it was weak.

He also knew his own physical familiarity with another person. He didn’t have to remember her when his body was doing it for him. He didn’t need the ache in his head to kick at him again.

Hannah was still talking to him, her hand on his leg and her gaze locked to his. “But when it came to that Christmas, and why it seemed over, it was because we’d been going around and around in circles. I couldn’t give you what you wanted. You couldn’t give me what I needed. No matter how much we loved each other.”

That was like a detonation. Ty’s ears rang from the blast of it. “We loved each other?”

Her smile about broke his heart. “Of course we loved each other. Or it wouldn’t have been so hard. And it wouldn’t have hurt the way it did.”