Page 35 of Hidden Memories

The memory of me telling her to stay away yesterday plays like a broken record as I tighten Chispa’s girth. I give him a reassuring pat. Maybe it was a bit much to be so forward. I showed my colors there. But she knows what she did. I was nothing but a game for her, but I’m not playing anymore.

She seemed ready to be friendly, as if the years evaporated the weight of what we had, and my grudge sure as hell showed her it isn’t the case for me. Normally, I’d be so much cooler, but I never was able to control myself around that woman, and clearly, I still can’t.

Which is why it’s better we stay away from each other. I don’t want anyone picking up on anything, and there’s plenty of tension to taste in the air between us. I have no interest in explaining how I nearly got a record for her. I was young and dumb. Nobody around here needs to know about that.

I barely register Enzo calling my name as he enters his mare’s stall.

“You good?” he asks, leading his sleek bay mare, Estrella, out of her stall and tying her onto an O-ring. “You’re staring at that saddle like it insulted you.”

I force a laugh, though it comes out hollow. “Yeah, just thinking.”

“Thinking or brooding?” his sharp eyes narrow behind his glasses.

I hesitate. Enzo isn’t just my brother; he’s also one of the few people I trust inside and out. But even with him, dredging up the history I have with Kat feels like reopening an old wound that hasn’t healed properly. Plus, there’s the fact that I was ready to marry a woman my family didn’t even know about. I’m the wild child, but even they would be surprised by what happened back then.

There are plenty of details I’m not proud to talk about, and if you can’t tell the truth, it isn’t worth talking at all.

I check Chispa’s bridle one more time to avoid meeting Enzo’s gaze and change the subject. “Where the hell is Rio?”

Just then, Enzo’s double rushes in with a saddle in his hands. “Fucking conference calls. Sorry.”

Enzo deadpans, “You should make some more free time for yourself. That’s why we have managers.”

“Yeah, well, maybe if I got a genius fiancée to do half my work I could step down from thefront, too.”

“She doesn’t do half my work. She makes my work easier.”

“Same difference.”

My twin brothers jointly own a tech company specializing in what I can only explain as spyware. It cracks through encrypted sites on the dark web. I don’t exactly understand what they do, mostly because I haven’t bothered, but they’re modern-day superheroes, though you wouldn’t know it by the way they still sometimes bicker like little boys.

Enzo doesn’t argue this time around, simply deciding to move on.

“I only have forty minutes in me this morning,” he says. “Ava and I are planning our trip to Bali, and if I don’t get a say in it, she’ll be booking us to sleep in hammocks on the beach. I’m too old for that shit.”

Rio teases, “That has nothing to do with age,hermano. You’re just delicate.”

“Says the man who wears silk boxers.”

Rio expertly gets a saddle on Fuego like the cowboy he is under those starched shirts. For as different as we are, we’re all the same. Just four boys from a dusty, poor ranch in New Mexico.

Enzo doesn’t have to prove his mettle. Like the rest of us, he paid his dues sleeping out on freezing-cold nights when the cattle were out to pasture and my dad couldn’t afford enough hands that winter. It toughened us all up, so I don’t begrudge Enzo his comforts, nor Ava her wanderlust. That girl went through enough shit for a lifetime.

A few creature comforts and working in the city don’t change who we are or how proud I am of it. I’m proud of the man I am now as much as then.

Even though I wasn’t enough for Paul Castellanos.

I wasn’t enough for Kat.

I told her I’d do everything in my power to take care of her for the rest of her life but?—

Shit. Here I am, getting sucked into the past again.

I mount Chispa and walk him to the edge of the barn. The rhythmic sway of the horse’s gait grounds me but just makes me wonder if she came to Monarch Hills, would my old boy Hector remember her, too? Would he remember the way she’d run her fingers down either side of his spine, or her apples? He went wild for her green apples. So did I. I worked hard to give up on Kat but I never gave up on those Granny Smiths.

They still remind me of her but I’m as addicted to them as I am to my grudge.

I wait for my brothers to join me when my phone buzzes in my pocket. I pull it out.

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