Lil’s face was priceless.
She’d turned beet red and looked deeply insulted that he wanted to get to know her better. It was the cutest thing he’d seen since D’s cousin had had a baby.
“What’s your favorite color?” He couldn’t help himself.
She sputtered, “Whatever color it takes to get you back into your position.”
AJ looked back over his shoulder. The cows were contentedly following along, possibly even in a tighter bunch now that they had two strong leads to follow.
“They’re fine. What do you hate?”
Lil raised an eyebrow. “Hate?”
AJ nodded. “My mom says dislikes say more about a person than anything else.”
The corners of her mouth tugged up into a smile and she said, “Tomatoes.”
He pulled back on his reins. “What? Nobody hates tomatoes.”
Lil let out a full-throated laugh, and the sound of it partially soothed the fact that she didn’t like tomatoes. Who didn’t like tomatoes?
“Careful what you ask for...” she admonished.
“That’s for sure. I had no idea I was riding with a monster.”
She snorted, offering, “You could just go back and watch the rear.”
“You won’t get rid of me that easy.”
She snapped her fingers. “Darn.”
AJ laughed, “It was all a ruse, then.”
“Not at all. I really don’t like tomatoes.”
His shoulders slumped. “Fine.”
“Cheer up, buddy.”
He brightened. “What about pico de gallo?” Hope beat in his chest.
She shook her head. “Not even pico.”
Hope died.
She wasn’t perfect. Neither was he. He could live with a tomato hater. “To each his own,” he finally said.
She gave him a shrewd look. “Had to come to terms with that one, didn’t you?”
He nodded solemnly. “Nobody’s perfect.”
She laughed again. The sound was bright in the early sunlight. Behind them, the cows mooed. She’d taken a serious beating and come back up laughing. He had to admire that.
He asked, “How do you feel today?”
She thought for a moment before she said, “Stiff. Sore.” Then she grinned and leaned in to add, “Good enough to get through the rest of the day.”
He hadn’t been worried. He knew her well enough already to know she wouldn’t quit.
She had literal smudges of dirt on her face, but the fine bones of her face, her round nose, and heavily lashed almond-shaped eyes, steadfastly declared her resilience.
As he stared, he noted that her body resisted the rhythm of the horse in a way it hadn’t yesterday. She was favoring her left side and her neck was as rigid as a tree trunk. She was making up for her upper body’s stiffness with the strength and flexibility of her legs, which were, fortunately, more than up to the task. They were surprisingly long for her lack of height, and perfectly formed. She held the reins with her hands, but he could see that it was her legs and seat that were guiding the horse.
Clearing his throat, he said, “We don’t need first. We both have enough points that we can afford a second place. You shouldn’t push it after yesterday.”
She threw him a look that said exactly what she thought about that, and he couldn’t say it didn’t turn him on. She went all in, or not at all, just like he did.
She said, “It’ll take a few more falls before I’m ready to ‘take a second place,’ thank you very much.”
AJ laughed. She’d actually said ‘thank you very much.’ Because he couldn’t help himself, he said, “Well, there’s no need to push it,” when he’d always pushed it. “We’re almost done with the competition and your top spot is secure. No use killing yourself. When all is said and done you’re going back to your ranch and never going to bring any of this up again.” The sentence echoed back at him hollowly.
Regardless of who won, when all was said and done, they’d both return to their respective homes. She would be happier to do that than be recognized as the first world-class female bull rider, and he would end up back in Houston, his belt buckle hung up on the wall, ready to dive into coaching. It was a fitting, if anticlimactic, end for a retired champion bull rider.
“More use killing you for suggesting such a thing,” she retorted, unaware of the undercurrents sweeping through him.
“Have you ever been to Houston?” he asked, changing the subject.
She shook her head. “Outside the qualifier, no.”
“You should come with me sometime. The food is delicious.”
“I heard it’s a bit dangerous.”
“No more dangerous than climbing on top of three thousand pounds of animal that doesn’t want you to be there.”
“Bulls don’t have guns.”
“Bulls don’t need them. Houston gets a bad rap—it’s a great place.”
“Says the man who started bull riding as an at-risk youth?”
AJ snorted. “I wasn’t an ‘at-risk’ youth. I was just angry. My parents were both college professors.”
Lil looked taken aback. “Professors? I thought you were some kind of reformed troublemaker.”
Her comment earned a full-blown laugh. “Not me. That’s Diablo.”
“Diablo?”
“You’ll meet him.”
“Oh, I will?”
AJ ignored her arched eyebrow, saying, “He and I were both in the first cohort. Diablo was there by order of a judge. I was by my mom.”
Lil chuckled to herself. “Because you were an angry twelve-year-old? Your mom was hard-core.”
“No, she—” AJ stopped with a frown. He didn’t generally get this deep into how he got into bull riding.
Lil watched him expectantly and he wondered what he was going to tell her. That his dad had died and it had been AJ’s fault, but that it’d happened when he still hated his dad for breaking their family apart? It was a part of his story he didn’t share with people, but the words were on the tip of his tongue.
Rather than let them out, he said, “She knew I needed a big outlet. My dad had died and I had a lot of anger.”
“I’m so sorry.” Her low voice went even huskier with empathy and the growling thing inside of him found the effect was strangely soothing.
He smiled. “The bulls worked. I was hooked right away. Fortunately, I had a knack for it and that’s all it took. Drive, knack, practice, and the rest is history.” He was proud of how he muscled the story back to its normal track of general positivity, emphasizing that anyone could do what he had done.
Lil said, “I’m sorry your dad died.”
He shrugged. “It was a long time ago.”
“Hard for a kid.” She was a terrier, even when she didn’t realize it.
He looked away. “Hard for anyone.”
“And Diablo?”
“He was a delinquent and the judge was a redneck.”
Lil snorted. “That sounds like a country song.”
“He’s a lawyer now.”
“Fancy.”
“He thinks so.”
“What did your dad teach?” she asked.
She was good, keeping him off balance by jumping around.
“He taught Chicano Literature at the University of Houston.”
Lil whistled. “Really fancy.”
“He thought so, too. Thought so so much that he couldn’t fathom why my mom would leave her position teaching Spanish there to go take a leadership position at a community college.” The words poured out from his mouth, unplanned and far too revealing.
Lil’s eyebrows drew together. “Her job sounds fantastic, though.”
“It is,” AJ agreed. “It’s perfect for her. It didn’t fit his sense of pedigree, though.”
“And so he divorced her?” As usual, Lil’s expression and voice gave her away. She didn’t approve.
He appreciated not having to play guessing games.
“No,” he said. “She divorced him after he decided to soothe his bruised ego and thinning hair by having an affair with a graduate student.”
They rode a few yards in silence before she spoke again. “That’s so cliché.”
It wasn’t what AJ had been expecting and it broke the tension in his chest. “I said as much to him. At a high volume.”
“I would’ve been angry, too.”
She didn’t say she was sorry for something she had nothing to do with. She didn’t pat him on the head. She didn’t brush him off as a temperamental kid.
He surprised himself by saying, “It got worse.”
“How so?”
He looked away, eyes scanning the horizon. “One night I got mad enough to tell him what I thought.”
She winced and he sensed it was empathy, rather than mere sympathy. Somehow it wasn’t hard to imagine her in a similar position, shouting things she’d later regret. The thought made him feel less alone, even though he imagined she was the kind of person who came back and apologized once she’d cooled down. He’d never quite gotten that down.
He said, “I stormed out of the house at the same time as a storm rolled in. He came out after me. I stomped through the rain and blew off steam for a few hours. He got caught in a flash flood and died. So then in addition to being angry about what he’d done, I was angry about what I’d done. I carried it with me everywhere I went.”
Again, Lil let the words sink in before she spoke. Yet again, when she finally said something, it wasn’t what he was expecting. “Bulls make sense, then. Smart woman, your mom.”
AJ shook his head and laughed, feeling somehow lighter than he had before. “You really take the whole cowboy thing to the next level.”
“I don’t take any ‘thing’ anywhere.”
“That’s why it works so well.”
She threw her arms up. “This is what I get for helping people.”
“No. This is what you get for your grandma helping people. You wouldn’t even be here if she hadn’t signed you up.”
She looked like she wanted to shake her fist at him, but decided to smile and shrug instead. “Same thing.”
“Is it?” he poked.
She frowned. “I owe that woman everything.”
“I have a feeling she doesn’t see it that way.”
Lil looked away this time. “I’m guessing she didn’t plan on burying her daughter or raising her granddaughter. People look forward to retirement.”
“Not all people. If she’s anything like you—” and he thought she might be “—I suspect that she didn’t.”
“I was a handful,” she said.
One side of his mouth quirked up and his eyes dropped to her saddle. “I know.”
She blushed and his grin stretched wider. Every reaction was all up-front with her.
“You’re impossible,” she said. It was a refrain he loved the sound of.
He grinned. “You want to do it again?”
Her blush was hot enough he feared she might spontaneously combust.
“You’re a shameless man,” she hissed.
He shrugged, laughter in his voice when he answered, “So long as I’m your only man, it doesn’t matter.”
“Very evolved of you.”
“I think so.” He patted his thigh and said cordially, “Care to come ride on my lap over here?”
“Excuse me?” She was incredulous, as if he were really inviting her to sit on his lap while they traveled at a steady trot, surrounded by cows.
So of course he said, “I invite you to slide your sassy ass across my lap and rest your head on my shoulder.”
Laughing, she said, “You wish.”
He grinned. “Sure do.”
She sucked in a breath, but he saw the tension in her body relax as her exhale morphed into a laugh. If she wouldn’t take the ride, he’d just have to keep her laughing as much as he could until they were done with the challenge.
“Gran always says you can wish in one hand and spit in the other and see which one fills up first.”
“That a dare?”
Her eyebrows shot up. “What? No! How’d you get to that?”
Rather than answer, he commented, “Your gran’s version is a lot cleaner than my grandpa’s.”
She ran it through a couple times in her head before it hit her—he could virtually see the wheels turning, as well as the ah-ha.
A chuckle escaped her lips and she tried to disguise it by looking back at the cattle, but it didn’t work, and never would, because he somehow knew that she’d never be able to hide herself from him.
She had snagged his attention, sharpened it, intensified it in a way unlike any he could recall experiencing—more like the way he felt about rodeo than women.
“So that’s a no on the ride?” he verified.
He was being ridiculous. He knew it, and would stop the second it started to make her uncomfortable. For now, though, whether she realized it or not, it made her forget how much they still had left to do.
“Are you always like this with women?” she asked, playing the part of the exasperated woman perfectly.
He paused, initially for dramatic effect, but in that brief space, he realized he couldn’t remember this kind of ease with any other woman.
When he answered, his face was thoughtful, his answer devoid of facade or charm. “No.”
Lil rolled her eyes. “Now you’re going to tell me it’s because I’m so special.”
He shook his head and said, “Nope,” even though it was true. She was. Perpetual grin returning, he said, “It’s because the women came after me.”
Tone effortfully casual, she said, “You’re ridiculous, but not lying. The way they go after you is over-the-top.”
She emphasized over-the-top as if she were worried he was going to miss the fact that she was calling him that, but he didn’t care. He was more interested in the thread of jealousy woven through her words. That she’d noticed—and been bothered by—the buckle bunnies that forever followed him made him feel all warm and fuzzy inside.
“If I really wanted to get over-the-top, I’d pull the evergreen buckle bunny move of bribing security so I could sneak into your room, take off all my clothes, slip into your sheets, and wait for you to find me. How’s that sound?”
“Stalker-ish.”
AJ laughed, “I thought so, too. Didn’t sleep with that one.”
“I should hope not. If you did, anything that happened after would be your own damn fault.”
“Agreed. Any more sage advice, oh experienced one?”
She turned as bright red as the tomatoes she shunned. Recovering herself, she rolled her eyes and said, “How about you getting back into position so we can finish this thing.”
“I like it when you talk dirty to me, Liliana,” he said before checking on the cows over his shoulder, and adding, “Seems like we’re finishing just fine with me where I am, so I’ll kindly pass on your offer.”
“Impossible.”
“To stay mad at me, you mean?”
“Something like that,” she muttered.
“So what do you do when you’re not breaking the rodeo?” he asked casually.
Lil’s laugh bubbled out like she couldn’t help herself. “Run a ranch.”
“The ‘all work and no play’ type, then?”
Lil’s eyebrows drew together. “I know how to have a good time.”
“Is that so? All it seems I’ve heard about is work and more work. What do you do for fun?”
Lil thought for a moment before replying, “I ride my horse.”
“Alone?”
She nodded.
“Do you ever go out?”
“You mean to bars and the like?”
“And the like,” he said dryly.
She shook her head. She explained, “I’ve lost people to drugs and alcohol. A bar’s not typically my scene.”
“That doesn’t have to keep you from going out,” he pointed out.
“Bars are the only place to go out in Muskogee.”
“You don’t have longtime girlfriends you drink wine with? You strike me as the kind who’d have two best friends she’s known since childhood.”
“How’d you come by that?” she asked with a laugh.
“You’re covered in that homegrown country girl thing. Usually comes with the territory.”
Lil laughed, shaking her head. “Well, I don’t. A combo of not having many neighbors and not having much in common with my fellow homegrown country girls. They were more interested in winning crowns than buckles. Our paths didn’t cross much.”
“But you did go to school, though?”
Lil rolled her eyes. “Rather than take offense, I’ll just write that question off as city-boy rudeness...”
AJ laughed. “So why no lifelong school friends?”
“I do have two friends now, you know. Good ones. I just haven’t known them since back in school. Back then, I suspect my lack of friends was due to the same reason that your own best friend is from CityBoyz.”
“Rodeo,” he said.
He knew it even as he realized he’d known before he ever asked her the question in the first place.
Rodeo, real passion for it, didn’t leave much room for friends—especially non-rodeo friends. To be close, people had to be willing to travel long dusty roads at your side, or be comfortable with your absence. Middle schoolers and high schoolers weren’t particularly known for being comfortable with anything, let alone the complications of long-distance friendships.
She had people in her life now, though.
“So you work and ride your horse?”
“And sign up for harebrained rodeo contests in my spare time.”
“The simple life.”
She laughed, “Yeah. It’s the simple life, alright. Riding bulls by night and chasing cows by day.”
AJ grinned. “What more could you ask for?”
“What more, indeed. And you. Do you go out?”
AJ’s grin stretched further. “Of course. I go out all the time.”
“’Cause you don’t have a real job?”
“I had a real job, once. The pay sucked.”
Lil snorted. “And what was that?”
“I was an EMT.”
Her mouth dropped open.
Dryly, he said, “Rather than take offense, I’ll just write that face off as country girl rudeness.”
Lil closed her mouth, but still managed to convey complete shock. “When did you have time for that?”
“Right after high school. Only way my mom would sign off on me going pro instead of going to college.”
“Technically, you didn’t need her permission. You were eighteen.”
He laughed, “My mom’s a badass, though, remember? My going into pro rodeo didn’t fit with the gentleman scholar image she had for me.”
“But that would have never worked for you. Your dad did that.”
Her words slipped through his shields like small fish through a loose net, and he wondered if she saw through him as clearly as he through her.
He nodded. “He did.”
Lil gave a little sigh. “But she’s still a college professor, so what can you expect?”
“Exactly. EMT training was as good a compromise as I was going to get, so I took the deal.”
“She suggested it?”
“She did.” He looked into her eyes and grinned. “Looking back, I’m sure she chose emergency response because she wanted to scare me away from rodeo.”
Lil’s answering grin brought a light to her gray eyes. “Didn’t work.”
“It certainly did not. But it got me through those lean early years as a pro—before the prize money really started flowing in. And it turns out emergency training comes in handy at the rodeo.”
“I can imagine,” she laughed. Gesturing to the pasture around them, she added, “And on the range, too.”
He tipped his hat to her in agreement. “And on the range.” Using her segue as a way to check in, he asked, “How’re you feeling after the fall, by the way?” He was worried about the possibility of concussion.
“Good.”
“Good. You should take it easy after the challenge. A hot bath would be best, but a shower in the RV will have to do.”
“Bossy.”
“I’m a professional.”
“Are you? Don’t you have to keep up some kind of license for that?”
He raised an eyebrow. “And what if I do?”
Once again, she looked shocked. “Do you?”
“Your country girl rudeness is showing again.”
She flipped him off and he smiled.
“I told you it comes in handy,” he said. “I once saved a man’s leg, resetting it after a bronc stomped him. Stopped a lot of blood flow over the years. Kept young fools from riding with concussions, that kind of thing.” He said the last bit looking her over, and she stared coolly back, eyebrow lifted.
Behind them the cows mooed.
She ignored him, asking instead, “Will you go back to it when this is over?”
He hated every version of the “what are you going to do next?” question, even coming from her. It was hard to say exactly what you were going to do with the rest of your life when you’d climbed your personal Everest by thirty-six. “No. You’ve got to get off on the job for it to last. I was happy to say goodbye.”
“Why?”
He shrugged. “There’s a lot of stuff you can’t save and I was already in love—with rodeo. Leaving emergency response was like coming home from a long stint away—and I never even stopped rodeo.”
“Good skills to have, though,” she said.
He nodded. “Good skills to have. You never know when the next emergency is going to show up.”
As if his words had conjured the moment, the cows erupted in frantic mooing. A knot formed in the left flank of the herd, while several cows from the front and right flank broke into a trot, stretching and elongating the herd block like pizza dough. Looking around to see what had startled them, he saw a strange moving dust mote on the horizon. As he watched it, it grew larger, coalescing into the shape of the camera van.
“Ah shit, camera crew startled them.” Lil’s curse wasn’t panicked, merely resigned, and it calmed AJ. She began to nose her horse toward the knot of cows, but AJ maneuvered to block her.
“Let me do it,” he said.
“You don’t know what to do.”
“Tell me.”
“Takes too long to explain,” she said testily.
He didn’t have to say anything for her to sense that he would not be moved.
She heaved a frustrated sigh. “Fine. Go check out the bunch. You’ve got a set of skills, so assess the situation and determine which one to use: rope, tie, wrestle, or herd.”
He moved as soon as she was done speaking, guiding his horse toward the bunch. Lil turned her horse the opposite direction and began to pick up speed.
What’s she doing? he wondered. He figured she’d hold tight where she was, but as she surged ahead of the scattering cows, he realized she was recapturing the lead. She looked like something from a movie, her hair whipping and coming undone in the wind behind her as she rode. But as much as he wanted to, he couldn’t afford to spend any more time watching her in action—he had his own mess to untangle.