Ty didn’t know what to do with that. The concept of loving anything or anyone was hard enough to get his head around. He hardly understood it when it was his brother, content in a way Ty had never believed in. Not for any truthful, real people outside of Hollywood.
Real people weren’t happy, if they were honest. People wanted to be happy so they declared they were in love. But love was nothing but a claim trotted out so no one could see the darkness inside them. The demons, the despair. They posted carefully perfect pictures all over the internet and wrote glowing stories about their own wisdom and resilience. Growth and perseverance. They made a lot of noise about faith. They practiced their public faces and they learned how to get along. They went through the motions and they numbed themselves out however they could, in sacrament or in sin, whatever worked.
Anything to feel, but not too much. Anything to pretend it all mattered. Anything to connect with the darkness inside them, through piety or shame, and call it a journey.
But none of it was real. None of it was honest. And it had never been him.
“It was hard?” he asked. “It … hurt?”
Hannah’s gaze was steady. “You can love someone with everything you have and still not be right for them. That’s where we were, then. That’s what you told me.”
The pressure inside him doubled. Tripled, maybe. It felt like a kick to the gut with a concrete block.
Ty had never believed in love. Why would he? He’d never seen it.
Yet Hannah told him he’d loved her so much it had hurt. So much he’d decided it would be better to part than to hurt more. And it was clear she didn’t mean the kind of hurt he knew best. Not the loud, ugly, drunkenness Amos had used to batter them with. At the kitchen table and everywhere else. Day and night.
All in the name of Everett family tradition.
He tried to shake that off. “I told you I loved you but I wasn’t right for you.” The words felt weighted. Barbed. “I actually said that.”
“The last time I saw you that December. It was at an event after the last rodeo of the year in Nevada, and yes, that’s what you said. And we both very sensibly agreed we should take a break, get our heads on straight, move on.” Hannah’s mouth curved. “But that didn’t work.”
Somewhere between what might have been a memory and the growing certainty that their relationship was what she’d said it was—that he’d married her, and not at gunpoint or otherwise under duress—Ty realized he’d started to care far too much about where this story was going. Especially when he already knew the ending.
“You were going to be in Vegas for New Year’s Eve because you had a bunch of sponsorship events there,” she said. “And you asked me to meet you.”
“I thought we broke up.”
Hannah made a sound that he might have optimistically called a laugh, however small. Then she sat back, taking her hand away, and Ty wanted it back with a ferocious burst of need that should have knocked him over. Instead, he sat there and let it roar in him until his leg started to ache.
Not because it hurt, like the other one. But because he wanted her to touch him again.
“We weren’t any good at breaking up,” she said, and there was a softer note in her voice that … did things to him. He tried to ignore those things and concentrate on her. “We agreed to take some time, and then we talked anyway.”
Ty tried to imagine any part of the complicated relationship she was talking about. Love, for one thing. Then nobly deciding that love wasn’t enough, only to ignore all of that and keep right on going. He couldn’t reconcile anything she was saying with what he knew about how he behaved.
But then, he didn’t react to her the way he did to anyone else. He was messed up listening to this story, which should have been as relevant to him, personally, as any other story she could have told. About anyone. Even if he’d wanted to protest and claim this wasn’t him, that certainty in him, stronger by the moment, told him it was.
Or he wouldn’t care about this story or anyone in it, and he did.
“I told my mother I was going on a New Year’s trip with college friends,” Hannah said. “It wasn’t anything to do with my reign as Miss Rodeo Forever, so her presence wasn’t needed. There were no cowboys to ward off and no reputation to keep pristine with friends I’d studied agricultural communications with. She didn’t believe me, but what could she say?” She made a rueful noise. “By which I mean, she said a whole lot, but I went anyway.”
“You have a degree?”
“Rodeo queens have to have some education to win a crown, formal or otherwise. You know that. We have to answer any questions that come our way, whether it’s why we exist or whether we approve of the latest headline news. Or why the barrel-racing course is set up the way it is. Why steer wrestling is called bulldogging. Or if the animals are sad, which is an actual question I’ve been asked more than once.”
“Bulls are generally mad, not sad. And happy to let you know it.”
Hannah smiled. But she didn’t let the easy moment roll on too long. Her expression changed, and she continued her story. “You picked me up at the airport and took me back to your hotel room.”
Ty knew how much he’d changed already in the course of this conversation, because he didn’t make any kind of suggestive remark at that. He didn’t try to joke this away or make it matter less. He was too busy watching her, as tense as if he expected her to swing at him.
And she did.
“When we got there, you got down on one knee,” she said softly. “You told me you loved me and asked me to marry you. Right there and then.”
Ty added that to the list of things he shouldn’t have been able to imagine. And yet, it was somehow easier to picture than it had been before she’d come to town. He didn’t know if that made it better or worse.
“So.” He had to clear his throat. “We eloped?”
“Rodeo queens are single, never married,” Hannah replied in that same soft, quiet voice that he still marveled hadn’t knocked him flat. “But you’d thought it all through. You said we’d keep it to ourselves for the rest of my term. People might suspect, but suspicion wasn’t the same as an announcement, so we’d be fine. A lot of girls wander around with awfully close ‘cousins’ or ‘friends’ while they’re doing their thing, who magically turn into boyfriends when they’re done.”
“Please tell me I didn’t offer to be your cousin.”
Hannah’s eyes gleamed. “You said we could keep doing what we’d been doing. And then when we found moments to be together, we could be husband and wife instead of not enough of one thing, too much of another, and frustrated all the time. You knelt there before me, with a big smile on your face that doesn’t look a single thing like that grin you flash at the slightest provocation. And you told me that you could give me your mother’s ring, but it was likely cursed. So you bought me one instead.”
That went through Ty like a chill. Because he had his mother’s ring. Bettina had handed it to him with great drama one of the times he’d caught up to her in some far-flung city. I’ll never allow it to touch my flesh again, she’d said. But maybe you’ll get some use out of it. As if the diamond solitaire was a tool he could carry around with him and hang on a utility belt, instead of the emblem of a relationship he wouldn’t wish on his worst enemy.
“That sounds like me,” he heard himself say.
“So we did it,” Hannah told him, her eyes suspiciously bright. As if these were happy memories she was sharing with him. Good memories of this love story he’d starred in, that she’d held onto all this time.
It was another sucker punch.
“We got married in a chapel right there in Vegas. And the ceremony was sweet. Beautiful, if you want to know the truth. There were no expectations or eyes on us. There was no speculation or commentary. There was only you and me and this thing we had together, plus a minister who made us laugh. It was perfect.”
There was something humming in him, more powerful than any earthquake. He could feel it in that pulse in his temples. He could feel it in the weight that he couldn’t shift from his chest.
Because it didn’t matter how perfect it was. Not when it led here, to a truck on a mountain, a man who couldn’t remember, and a woman who’d been “detained” for a year and a half.
“And then what?” he managed to ask. “We kept it hidden?”
“For three months or so.”
Ty opened his mouth to ask why three months, and then got it. It was three months from New Year’s to March. And that fall he didn’t get up from.
“I expected it to be frustrating in a whole new way,” Hannah said, and there was that heat on her cheeks again. “And it was. It really was. But it was fun too, because we didn’t have a dirty secret anymore. We had the best secret. For a while, it was the best of both worlds. Like marriage with training wheels. We could try it on in bursts here and there. Ease into it and see how it fit before anyone knew about it. While it was still ours.”
“This is a pretty story,” Ty gritted out, aware that his voice was too thick.
He was giving himself away. He was messed up and he knew it. He could feel it, the way he’d wanted to feel something, anything—but this wasn’t compartmentalized or locked away.
He couldn’t control it.
Like your memory, something in him chimed in.
But that made it worse.
Ty focused on Hannah. “It can’t have been as magical as you’re making it sound. Or you wouldn’t be sitting here telling me about it, because I’d know.”
If his rough tone got to her, she didn’t show it.
“I didn’t say it was magical. It was a honeymoon.”
“Tell me what happened eighteen months ago that brought the honeymoon to a screeching halt,” he said. Even rougher.
She looked away, then, out toward the view and the world and all the things she knew about him that he didn’t. “We had a fight. A bad one. Then you lost your memory, and here we are.”
“Here we are?” Ty echoed. He let out a gruff sound that even he wouldn’t call a laugh. “I don’t know a lot about marriage. Until recently, I would’ve told you I’d never seen a good one. But I’m pretty sure that the sickness and health part is a key component to the whole deal. And getting trampled by a pissed-off bull falls pretty squarely into that category. Or am I missing something?”
Hannah was trembling slightly, but the look she leveled on him reminded him that she really was a rodeo queen. Pretty as a picture, but tough as nails beneath. Capable of mucking out stalls, riding someone else’s horse but never blaming it if it balked, explaining the history and relevance of the rodeo to anyone who inquired, handling more livestock, and doing it all looking as perfect as she did right now.
Capable of sauntering back into his life when he didn’t know she’d left it, and sitting right here while he digested the news.
“I can’t imagine the confusion you’re feeling right now, Ty,” she said, and she didn’t raise her voice. But it wasn’t all that soft anymore either. “And I feel for you. But I would strongly caution you to tread carefully here. Because I remember what happened.”
“Like you said earlier, I have only your word for it. A perfect honeymoon. And then you’re gone.” He snapped his fingers. “Like it never happened.”
Hannah muttered something he didn’t catch, and then turned away.
“What’s that?” he asked, and he was too edgy. He was jacked up on too much adrenaline and all these weird emotions he couldn’t control or identify.
“I need some air,” she said, cool and precise, which only made him edgier.
She pushed her way out of the truck, jumping down and then walking out toward the fat boulder that marked the edge of the cliff.
Ty took his time following her. Not only because of the picture she made, standing there while the summer breeze picked up stray curls here and there and made them dance. When he got out of the truck, his bum leg felt stiff—as stiff as if he’d been overtraining, when he hadn’t been. Great. Maybe it would act up now, like he really was a four-hundred-year-old aged bull rider. Maybe his bones would alert him to every stray drop of rain.
Or, apparently, every emotionally intense moment.
He rubbed at his hip, then leaned back against the front of his truck. He let the breeze and the blue sky work on him a moment or two. Then a moment or two more, when it didn’t take.
“I’m not trying to give you a hard time,” he said when the edginess had smoothed out some. “I want to know what happened. That’s all.”
“Are you absolutely sure you want to push on something when you don’t know what’s waiting there on the other side?”
Maybe he hadn’t smoothed anything out after all, no matter how clear it was today.
“You keep asking me that, Hannah. And my answer is consistently the same. Yes, I want to know. Yes, I’m standing here, asking you to tell me all the gory details you think I can’t handle.”
“Maybe I’m the one who can’t handle it, Ty,” she bit out. She wiped angrily at her cheeks, but when she turned back around to face him, he couldn’t see any trace of tears. “Maybe you’re lucky that you can’t remember what happened. Because it was ugly. Obviously. Or you’re right, I would’ve been sitting next to your hospital bed, showing you pictures to remind you who I am. But I didn’t realize there was a problem with your memory until about a week ago.”
He let that sink in, and couldn’t tell what was rocking him anymore. At this point, an actual tectonic shift would feel like a gift. “What are you telling me? That you’d already left me before I went into the hospital?”
“I had no intention of leaving you,” Hannah said fiercely. And there was nothing quiet or cool about her voice now. She sounded as ragged as he did. “You told me to go. You demanded it. And I didn’t know you didn’t know who I was—or who you were—so when you said it, I assumed you meant what you said.”
“What could I possibly have said that could wipe out this whole big story?” he demanded, not particularly calm himself.
Hannah’s lips flattened. She crossed her arms, like she was holding herself. And when she opened her mouth again, it was to let out a string of profanity-laden curses and a series of nasty observations that Ty was fairly sure would make a convict blush.
It made something inside him curl up and die.
“My father was good for pretty much nothing.” His voice was barely audible to his own ears, but he couldn’t tell if that was because his head was pounding too loud, or if he could barely speak. “But while my grandfather was around, he took the time to pick up my father’s slack. You could say he dedicated himself to it. And if he taught me anything, it was how to speak respectfully to a lady.”
“Yeah. I wasn’t too happy about it either.”
Ty couldn’t take what she was saying and make it track. He couldn’t make it him. “I’ve never talked like that to a woman in my life.”
“Except you did.”
“This was in the hospital?” He raked a hand through his hair. “When I was out of my mind on painkillers?”
“I don’t know if you were out of your mind,” Hannah retorted, her voice hitching. “I don’t know what you went through because you didn’t tell me. You told me to leave. And I did. I figured when you felt better, you would call me, but you didn’t.”
“Because I didn’t know I should.”
But she didn’t seem to hear that, gritted out from between his teeth. “You find it easier to believe you could have a marriage you forgot about than that you could have sworn up a blue streak? I really don’t know how to take that.”
“Believe me, I know my way around a curse word. But I’ve never been the kind of man who could take a strip out of a woman. Or would.” Ty shook his head again. “Whether I was married to her or not.”
But he knew a man who could. And had.
He’d watched it play out in front of him every night of his childhood. He’d heard the things Amos had said to Ty’s mother, to his second wife, to any other woman who’d been foolish enough to try to get close to him. He’d said the same and worse to his own children. When it came to nastiness, Amos Everett knew no boundaries.
He had always, always found a lower place to go.
It made Ty physically sick to imagine he could have acted like that. Like the man he’d always hated most.
“Show me our marriage certificate,” he said, surprised on some level that he could still speak.
That sick feeling was so thick inside him he was uneasy with it. He couldn’t tell if it would take him out at the knees, or send him heaving into the bushes. Or worse, continue to sit there where it was, polluting him.
Reminding him that he was no better than the worst man he knew.
“Because now you want proof. Now that you made me tell you all my happy memories, but you don’t like the bad ones.”
“I believe you,” Ty said, and it was only when she released a breath with a big sound that he realized he hadn’t told her that. Not yet. He hadn’t clued her in to that certainty in him—or how it kept growing.
“Well,” Hannah said unevenly. “I’m happy to hear that, I guess.”
He rubbed his hands over his face, but that couldn’t rub the Amos stink off of him. Could anything? Or was he stuck with it forever, whether he wanted it or not?
He focused on her, aware that his own gaze was hard. And he couldn’t make his mouth curve any longer. But he focused on that certainty in him, because none of the things he’d ever been sure about—his horses, his abilities, his talent for sticking on a bull—had anything to do with Amos. Ty had only ever been sure about the things he’d learned and become despite Amos.
“I can’t imagine falling in love. And I always vowed I would never get married. But when I make a decision, I stick to it. Always have. If I looked up one day, saw you, and my life changed forever…” He shrugged, never taking his eyes from her. “I’d act on it. That’s who I am.”
She ran her tongue over her teeth, her arms still crossed. “So this is a game of trust, but verify.”
“I said I believed you, Hannah. I didn’t say I trusted you.”
“Of course not. Because why would anything with you be easy?”
“Because it’s not lost on me that you’re leaving out a critical part of this story. Are you going to lie to me about that? Are you going to look me in the face and pretend that’s not exactly what you’re doing?”
She swallowed again, and he could see the way her throat worked. Then she moved back toward the truck stiffly, telling him more about how she’d been gripping herself tight than he needed to know. Because it didn’t do him any good.
Ty kept his eyes trained on the view while she opened the passenger door. The sweet summer day made the valley so bright, he almost forgot he was staring down into his past. His roots, whether he liked it or not. Generations of Everetts before him, mixed in with the fields and the cattle. He heard Hannah rummage around inside the truck, then slam the door shut.
When she appeared in front of him again, she was holding a thick piece of paper in one hand.
“When we move from belief to trust, I’ll decide if I can trust you with the rest of the story,” she told him, her eyes dark and glittering. “If that ever happens.”
She offered him the paper in her hand. Ty took it.
And it was right there before him. Las Vegas. A chapel on the strip. His name and hers.
“Hannah Monroe,” he said. As if it were a prayer he’d memorized when he was a child, and he could recognize the sound. But he still didn’t know the words.
She searched his face. “Monroe isn’t my married name.”
Ty reeled at that. And understood that she’d known he would—that was why she’d only told him her first name.
“Everett,” he said, as if he’d never heard the name before. “You’re Hannah Everett.”
“That’s what you liked to call me. I was in the process of switching it all over legally. But we were taking our time, waiting for my reign to end.”
Ty handed her back the certificate, too carefully. He raked his hands through his hair again, but that didn’t help. He wasn’t sure anything would.
Hannah stood there before him, too pretty to have eyes so sad. There was all that fight in the way she raised her chin. And nothing but steel in the way she stood there before him. The way she’d walked him through the memories he’d lost.
The way she had yet to ask a single thing of him.
She was his wife. He had married her, loved her, and lost her, but she’d come back.
He couldn’t say the same about any of his father’s women. His mother in particular, who enjoyed nothing more than having a few cocktails and sharing the things Amos had said to her during their marriage. The things Ty had heard himself as a kid were bad enough. But Bettina liked to marinate in the specifically nasty things Amos had said to her in private.
It horrified Ty in ways he couldn’t articulate, down into his gut and his bones and his battered old soul, that he had ever said such things himself. Much less to Hannah.
For the first time, he understood what that doctor had been trying to tell him. There were some things it was better to forget. And sometimes the mind made that determination all on its own. He might not like it, but he got it.
“This fight you don’t want to talk about. How bad was it?”
Hannah’s chin inched higher. “It was bad.”
“You’re going to have to give me more than that,” Ty growled. “I would have sworn to you on a stack of Bibles that I wasn’t the kind of man who would say those things to a woman, but you tell me I did.”
“I’m sorry.”
That made it worse.
“I can also stand here and tell you that I also know, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that I would never lift my hand to a woman. But I have to accept the possibility that I’m wrong about that too.” His stomach was a painful knot. “Is that what I did?”
The sickness in him threatened to burst out of him, but Ty swallowed it down. Because he couldn’t make sense of who he’d been, but he knew who he was.
The very least he could do while facing up to the damage he’d done was look the woman who’d suffered it in the eye.
“No,” Hannah burst out immediately. She looked appalled. “No, Ty, of course not. You didn’t hit me. That’s not who you are.”
“I’d like to agree with you,” he gritted out. “But I can’t.”
“A fight can be ugly without it being violent,” she said, her voice fierce again. “There’s a darkness in you. You know that. You never let it tip over into something worse.”
Her gaze searched his and she must not have liked what she saw, because she moved closer. And then, stunning him, she took his hands in hers.
“Hannah.” But he was touching her again, and it was better than he remembered. It was better than remembering. “I want to apologize for whatever I did that made you stay away for year and a half. But how can that mean anything when I don’t remember what it was?”
She smiled, even though he could see her tears now, tracking down her cheeks. “And I want to tell you it’s okay.”
But she didn’t.
Everything felt poised on the edge of shattering, or maybe that was only Ty. He couldn’t tell if the noise and riot inside him were trying to destroy him—or if this was what he needed to bring him back to himself.
Ty wanted to be whole. He wanted to be him. Even if that meant he had to reconcile himself to these things he couldn’t imagine himself saying or doing.
“Were you tired of keeping us a secret?” he asked.
Hannah looked startled, but she didn’t pull her hands away. “I wouldn’t say I was tired of it, because I knew why we were doing it and I knew it only had to go on like that through the summer. But it wasn’t ideal.”
“What did you do with that ring I gave you?”
Her gaze locked to his. She pulled one hand away and wiped at her face. When she met his gaze again, she smiled.
Ty watched, transfixed, as she dug beneath her T-shirt, and pulled a chain out from beneath. He’d seen the chain around her neck last night, but hadn’t paid attention to the fact he couldn’t see what was hanging from it.
He saw it now. A diamond ring.
His diamond ring. He didn’t have to remember giving it to her the first time to feel the rightness of it.
He’d spent so much of his life trying so hard not to be his father, but it turned out he’d become Amos anyway. In the most horrible of ways. But unlike Amos, Ty had a second chance. Maybe the bull kicking him to pieces was what he deserved. What he’d earned for giving into the darkness inside of him.
Whatever he couldn’t remember, he couldn’t care about that, because it had brought him Hannah.
She made him feel. She messed him up. He’d taken one look at her by the fence, making nice with his horses, and nothing had been the same.
Ty intended to make the most of his second chances.
He pulled her close. He felt the way she trembled, but she melted into him, and that heat in him tripled, like a hard kick. He let his greed and desire roll through him as he reached behind her to work the clasp of the chain, his hands a good deal less steady than he’d like.
She bent her head, giving him better access to her neck, and he almost felt like a kid again. Undone by the heat of her and the scent of her shampoo. There was something about the combination of that and whatever she rubbed into her skin that got to him. She smelled like rosemary, the way he’d wanted her to in the Broken Wheel last night. And that told him more about the kind of intimacy they’d shared than her story could have.
Because on some level, he recognized it. The scent shot through him—she blossomed her way into him—making him feel outsized things that had nothing to do with the simple undoing of the clasp of a necklace.
He let it all sink into him, through him, like memory. Then he let the ring fall off the end of the chain and into his palm.
Ty tucked the length of chain into his pocket, then he took her hand. He watched her eyes get even bluer than the sky.
“I can’t remember being your husband, Hannah. But I want you to be my wife.”
“That sounds like a good start,” she whispered.
But it felt like more than a good start to Ty. It felt something like profound as he slid that diamond ring onto her left hand and stood there a moment, admiring the way it caught the sun. And enjoying the way she did too.
“Ty…”
She was going to tell him more things he didn’t want to hear. And he resolved to listen, no matter what. It was the least of what he owed her.
But instead, her smile changed. “I believe that in moments like this, it’s traditional to kiss the bride.”
“I didn’t realize there was any part of this that was traditional.”
“That’s a good point.” She swayed closer, bracing herself against his chest. “I’ve got you covered, cowboy.”
Then she surged up onto her toes and kissed him.