Page 5 of Promised to the Cowboy

Evie

“You’ve been folding that napkin so long, I’m expecting some kind of origami masterpiece.”

The voice comes from above me and to the left, belonging to the bartender. Broad as a barn door. Bar rag over one shoulder. The unhurried calm of a man who has seen every kind of person walk into his bar and long ago decided not to be impressed by any of them.

I know him. Or—I’ve seen him before. Four months ago, behind this same bar, pouring drinks on the night my whole life pivoted. He doesn’t know that. He doesn’t know me. But I remember his face and the name stitched on his shirt because I remember everything about that night, whether I want to or not.

I flatten the napkin against the table.

“No tricks,” I say. “Just thinking.”

“Uh-huh.” He sets a fresh ginger ale down. My third. No ice. I don’t remember telling him how I take it. “If you’re thinking, you’re thinking loud.”

The Honey Pot hasn’t changed since the last time I sat in it. Tin signs. A jukebox that only plays songs recorded before 1989. Same wobbly stools, same smell of spilled beer and seasoned wood. I chose the corner booth because corner booths have a view of the door, and I’m a woman who likes to see the door.

I’m not usually the stalling type. At twelve, I got on a fifteen-hundred-pound bull because my dad said I was too small. At seventeen, I set my own dislocated finger in the dirt behind the chutes because the nearest urgent care was an hour out, and I had another run. The knuckle still catches—I’m working it now, under the table, which means I’m stalling, and I know I’m stalling, and the knowing doesn’t help.

The turquoise ring on my right hand catches as I work the joint of my finger. It was my mother’s. Marlowe wore it every day of her life until the day she put it on my finger and told me a daughter should always own one thing that belonged to her mother.

“Emmett,” I say, before I can talk myself out of it.

He turns back, eyebrow up.

“I was here a few months back. After the Bigfork rodeo. You probably don’t remember—it was packed that night.”

He leans a hip against the booth. “Lot of rodeo folks came through. You were one of them?”

“Yeah. And I’m looking for a man who was here that same night. His friend is a bronc rider named Caleb.”

Emmett’s expression doesn’t change, but his dark eyes flicker for a second.

“Tall. Dark hair. Big through the shoulders.” I hesitate, then give him the detail that matters. “His eyes don’t match. One blue. One green.”

I wait. This is the part where he shrugs and says, “Sorry, I see a hundred faces a week,” and I get back in my truck and drive home with nothing but a blank napkin and a story I’ll have to figure out alone.

Emmett folds the rag once, precisely, the way you’d fold something to keep your hands busy. The jukebox changes tracks.

“You in some kind of trouble?” he asks.

“No.” It’s mostly true. “I just need to find him. This bar’s the only thing I’ve got—no last name, no number.”

Emmett studies me, like he’s deciding how much of somebody else’s business to hand over to a stranger. I have nothing to hide except the thing I’m hiding, and he can’t see that from across a table.

“That’d be Gabriel Sutton,” he says finally. “Youngest of three brothers. Stoneridge Ranch.” He pulls a pen from behind his ear and nods at my napkin. “You want to write it down?”

Gabriel Sutton. Four months, and I have a last name.

I flatten the napkin, and he recites an address from memory, calm as church. I write it in handwriting that’s bad to begin with, made worse by a hand that won’t cooperate.

“Are they good people?” I ask. “The Suttons?”

He nods. “Best in the canyon. Had a rough go, that family. More than one.” He doesn’t say what. “Gabriel—most troubled of the three. For whatever that’s worth to you.”

Most troubled of the three. I look at the napkin so Emmett can’t see my expression.

“You don’t know me.”

He almost smiles. Then, gently: “A man runs a bar long enough, he gets to be a fair hand at telling who’s about to do a hard thing and who’s about to talk themselves out of it.” He taps the table twice with one thick finger. “You don’t strike me as the second kind.”