ALTHOUGH THE FOOD tonight was delicious, Diablo was pretty sure that he had gotten the short stick by participating in the second season of The Closed Circuit, as opposed to the first.
Whereas golden boy AJ had slipped in while things were fast and loose and made out like a bandit, Diablo was dealing with the fact that the showrunners had learned a thing or two from their previous mistakes.
For example, during AJ’s season, the contestants’ social excursion had taken place at an actual bar. It had been a particularly popular episode because the drama had been high and the sexual tension between AJ and Lil palpable, but the lighting bad enough that it had also become somewhat of a meme.
For the second season the show had decided to host a well-lit cookout. With assigned seating.
Having been assigned to the same campfire as Dillon Oliver, quality food notwithstanding, he would have much preferred a dimly lit bar with stale food, an out-of-date jukebox and weak drinks.
At least then they would’ve gotten to pick their own seat.
The Closed Circuit caravan had stopped for the night at a campground located between New Orleans and Miami, and in the group picnic area, the greenies had created one of the largest sets for the show that Diablo had seen.
This season they had a real budget, and it was clear they weren’t pulling any punches when it came to spending it.
In the picnic area, lit up like it was an LA set, were three enormous chuck wagon replicas, each one laden with heaping piles of food. Dishes were laid out on every available surface, from ledges and stands, to the wooden prop-leaf tables that jutted out from the wagons. Each dish was served in some form of speckled blue tin, from plates to bowls to pitchers—with the exception of what awaited them in gleaming cast-iron pans and stew pots.
Large tin percolators full of what Diablo assumed would be stiff black coffee rested beside piles of folded red-and-white gingham napkins, which themselves were piled next to Mason jars filled with silverware and striped paper straws.
Fanning out in front of each of the chuck wagons were small campfires, the bulk of them set up with five rustic folding stools each. At the largest fire, however, there were just three stools.
The whole thing looked more like a Southern bride’s chic cowboy wedding reception than the place where a bunch of bull riders were going to tuck into some chow for the night, but it was clear enough that the latter was what The Closed Circuit was going for.
Like AJ and Lil’s rousing evening at the honky tonk during the first season, Diablo assumed that each of the intimate fireside chats would be filmed from excellent angles and broadcast for the delight of the fans.
Judging from the enormous silver buckets filled with ice and plenty of beer, it didn’t take a lot to guess the variable the showrunners considered essential for excellent televisual drama.
Diablo, however, did not intend to be the one to provide that drama.
Not only because he was riding as a representative of CityBoyz, but also because he was the type of man who liked to keep his mistakes private, would he take it easy for the evening.
Drinking with Sierra was one thing. Drinking with his competition an entirely different one.
He didn’t trust them and he had no interest in them, with the exception of Julio. There was no reason to relax in their company.
When all the contestants were tidily organized at their assigned fires, they were encouraged to eat and drink to their fill, and to just go ahead and forget the cameras were even rolling.
Tonight everybody was friends, and anything could be edited later, if necessary.
Diablo would buy that as soon as he did oceanfront property in Dallas.
The bulk of the contestants appeared happy to do just that, though, including Dillon, who jumped into one of the lines around the chuck wagons and shortly thereafter returned with a mountain of food on his plate. Another second later he was cracking open a cold one with exaggerated enjoyment.
Like the other contestants in the lower twenty-two, Dillon ate and drank as if his masculinity was measured by how fast and much he consumed, and by how many beers he could knock back before losing control. It wasn’t surprising they should behave so. It wasn’t that far off from what went on in the arena. Whoever held on the longest and looked the best doing it took home the prize.
Whatever they were doing, these were men who wanted the world to know they were the best at it.
They just didn’t realize there was a difference between showing and telling. Jostling for your place at the front of the food line was telling. Standing secure knowing that you had everything you needed to eat was showing.
Diablo and Tio Julio followed behind the rest of the cowboys at a more sedate, self-respecting pace, rounding out the end of the line at the same chuck wagon, filling their plates without hurry before making their slow way to the fire where Dillon was already gorging himself.
With Sierra’s message fresh in his mind, Diablo would have much preferred to eat alone in his rig rather than share a meal with Dillon. Or, better still, he’d like to share another private meal with Sierra.
He hadn’t expected her message earlier. He’d expected it even less than he had that moment when she had baldly admitted that she wanted to kiss him.
It astounded him that she somehow managed to meet every expectation of what a rodeo queen was supposed to be and yet she could still be surprising.
He’d stopped them in his RV because he didn’t believe in stumbling into things when it came to physical intimacy. To his way of thinking, sex wasn’t sex without clear acknowledgment of desire, absolute permission and knowledge of what was being gotten into on both, or all, parts.
He wasn’t interested in sweeping a woman away. He was interested in blowing the mind of the woman he wanted.
“Awful quiet over there, college boy,” Dillon said, breaking into Diablo’s pleasant thoughts with a classic lack of style and grace.
Diablo slowly lifted his face from where he had been staring absently into the flames to look Dillon in the eye, as usual taking too long about the whole thing, before waiting yet another beat to say, “What can I say? Guess I just keep my own counsel.”
Dillon frowned in response, having been out-cowboyed after only one move.
Dillon talked too much to lay claim to the strong, silent cowboy archetype—having now established a pattern in the group of being a shit-stirrer—so he’d clearly decided to just go ahead and dig in on being an aggressive ass.
After a moment, Dillon smirked, saying, “And here I thought lawyers were known for always having something smart to say.” Clearly, he was feeling clever tonight.
Taking a bite of his food and chewing it slowly before responding, Diablo said lazily, “The best lawyers let the dumbasses do the talking. Why waste your breath when self-incrimination is so much easier?”
It was really too bad that Dillon had managed to hold on to his spot in the top three.
Everything would have been so much more pleasant for Diablo had Dillon been relegated after the first round.
Even more outclassed in their exchange than he was in the arena, however, Dillon didn’t know when to quit. Narrowing his eyes at Diablo, he took a bite of the biscuit in his hand before redirecting his attitude toward Julio.
“And what about you, old man? What do you think about lawyers? You ever meet with one yourself, or’d you just swim the rio, Tio?”
Diablo bristled at the insult on the other man’s behalf, but held back from getting involved.
Julio had made it more than clear the last time that he needed no assistance in dealing with the likes of Dillon Oliver.
And, indeed, Julio’s indeterminate grunt could have been considered a response—if someone wanted to stretch the definition of the word.
When Julio then took a bite of food and started chewing, as if the matter was settled, Diablo had to hold back his laugh.
“What’s that, hombre? I didn’t catch it,” Dillon said, leaning forward to add, “You ever hire a lawyer, is what I asked,” before sitting back again and making a dismissive noise in the back of his throat. “Of course you’ve never hired a lawyer. You guys never do it the right way.”
Sitting across the fire from Julio, rather than to his left, as Dillon was, Diablo was the only one who saw the older man’s eyes narrow slightly.
Keeping his voice even, Julio cracked a small smile, offering a nod in Diablo’s direction as he said, “My father told me that everyone needs a good attorney and a good mechanic at least once in their life.”
Dillon sneered with a scoff. “An honest man doesn’t need a lawyer.”
Smiling with his teeth while his stare remained hard, Diablo said, “Then you must have made the acquaintance of one a time or two?”
“You suggesting I’m a liar?” Dillon’s volume rose as he spoke, his body tensing, though he remained seated.
Happy to facilitate the other man’s apparently endless drive to reveal himself, Diablo’s grin widened.
And that was when Sierra decided to stop by their fire.
Like a teenager, Diablo’s throat dried as she settled in beside Julio, a new, much more welcome kind of tension replacing the fireside conflict.
For the picnic, she had dressed like the rodeo-queen version of Mary Ann from Gilligan’s Island, her gingham Western shirt and blue jeans as all-American as the apple pie that awaited them for dessert.
He had never been one to go for the girl-next-door thing, but as was often turning out to be the case when Sierra was involved, he was suddenly open to reconsidering. She was a breath of fresh air, blowing away the building anger at their campfire, and he thought she knew as much.
“And how are our top three faring with the fare?” she said brightly, making flirty eye contact with each of the three men, landing on Diablo last and lingering only long enough to make sure he knew she meant it, then moving cheerfully on without giving any of them a chance to answer. “Are y’all ready for the next show?”
Dillon was quick to respond; his antagonistic greaser persona disappeared and, in its place, an oozing cowboy on the prowl. “Every shot to upset the order at the top is a positive in my mind,” he said with a grin. “When you’re good enough, a little competition doesn’t scare you.”
Hackles rising in his neck as he watched Dillon lay it on for Sierra, Diablo said, “Good to see such confidence in third place.”
Eyes darting like lightning back to Diablo, Dillon glared. “Like I said, when you’re a professional a little stiff competition at your heels only makes you stronger. But don’t worry if you’re feeling shaky in your spot, lawman. The pace of this level of competition takes some getting used to.”
As usual, Dillon’s magnificent wit filled Diablo with the urge to yawn.
But instead, he said lazily, “You’re right about that. I definitely didn’t expect to increase my lead so much and so quickly. And how ’bout you, Tio?” he said, respect entering his voice only when he turned to Julio. “Did you expect to leave the rest of us in the dust so quick?”
“Just happy to prove that age comes before beauty,” Julio said with a smile of friendly deflection. He had a way of ending conversations without seeming to that Diablo found impressive.
Diablo had prosecuted a number of people who could have learned a few things from Julio.
“Well, let it be a lesson to all of rodeo,” Sierra said, “because you get out there and prove that getting old isn’t for sissies every darn time!”
Smiling in her direction, Tio Julio said, “My back certainly agrees.” And everyone around the fire—Diablo, Sierra and the filming crew that followed her around—laughed at the rodeo humor, except for Dillon.
With the shared joke, the last of the aggression that had lingered in the air around their fire dissipated, replaced with an energy of friendly banter and competition—at least for everyone outside Dillon.
And Diablo was present enough to the situation to know that it wasn’t by chance that it had happened.
It was Sierra’s doing.
He was grateful, even as he was once again a little disappointed in the missed opportunity to just get the Dillon situation dealt with once and for all. Dillon was the kind of problem that should be nipped in the bud quickly—a boil best lanced quickly—otherwise he’d only fester.
It was obvious to Diablo that Dillon wouldn’t let up on either Julio or himself until one of three things happened: he took the number-one spot, he got his ass beat or somebody got seriously hurt.
Option two was obviously the best solution for everyone involved.
It really would have been nice to simply take care of things and be done with it.
The cameras had caught and recorded every inflammatory word the man had uttered. Diablo and Julio were sure to have garnered the sympathy of the bulk of the audience.
But it had been sweet of Sierra to jump in and keep things from going in a direction that might not have reflected well on him, and he sensed that that had been her intention from the moment she’d joined their little group.
He was here to make CityBoyz look good, and she seemed earnest in her effort to support him in that.
Despite the immense artifice of her life, what made her a champion was actually her authenticity. She genuinely loved rodeo. She cared about nurturing the next generation of athletes and fans.
“So what do y’all get up to when not chasing around big shiny buckles?” she asked, transitioning their conversation into personality-quiz territory rather than anything touchy, further cementing Diablo’s assessment that she’d come to their fire with a peacekeeping agenda, rather than the drama-stirring angle the producers might prefer.
Dillon, as usual, rushed in to answer her first. “Seeing as how my mother was paralyzed from the waist down just two weeks after I won my first professional prize, my career has been tied to her and my sister from the beginning. It’s always been a tough act to juggle everything—training and competing in rodeo, being a father figure to my sister and running the homestead—but I manage. Mama enjoys the views, but can’t help run the small farm I bought with my prize money, and my sister works hard, but I’m putting her through college so I want her to focus on that. That just leaves me and just a few seasonals to keep the farm running, as well as to get all my training done. Fortunately, there’s some crossover between training for rodeo and running a farm, but that means chasing buckles is the free time and the rest of it is the work.” The last he said with a smarmy chuckle, and a look-at-my-big-heart grin, which he aimed at Sierra, causing reflux to rise up in Diablo’s throat.
That the fool even thought he had a chance with a woman like Sierra was just further evidence of his mental density. Dillon looked at her and saw a pretty pair of tits beneath a shiny hat and crown. Dillon thought that he had common ground with Sierra simply because both of their lives revolved around rodeo.
The man had no sense of the contradictions and conflicts embedded and inherent in her participation as the daughter of Cuban immigrants in a sport that emphasized down-home American values and blue-eyed American beauties.
But none of that kept the idiot from trying.
Tio Julio gave an easy shrug at the same time as he made a clucking noise in the back of his throat, loud enough to snap Diablo’s attention and glare away from Dillon, as well as to draw Sierra and the camera crew’s focus to him, and said, “Whether the arena is rodeo or everything else, I always do the same thing. Hold on and enjoy the ride.”
Unable to refrain from it in the face of such a perfectly scripted line for unscripted television, Sierra let out a warm and wistful sigh. “Now if that isn’t a nugget of rodeo gold, then I don’t know what is,” she said. “You heard it here around the fire, folks. Rodeo wisdom at its finest.”
After Julio’s redirection, their little tableau took on a warm glow, as if the exchange between Sierra and Julio had layered a Hallmark feeling over the scene, turning the situation from a powder keg ready to blow toward more family-friendly programming.
And, because in that moment there wasn’t a centralized space for him, and because the feeling was not a result of his intention and because no one had gone out of their way to include him in it, Dillon couldn’t let any of it stand.
“We all know what lawyer boy over here gets up to in his spare time. In fact, it’s a wonder he even has time to hobby around with rodeo at all,” he said, his voice acidic and overloud.
With an energy of reluctance, both Sierra and the camera crew turned to Dillon.
Without rising to Dillon’s bait, Diablo smiled easily, keeping his voice even and cordial, as opposed to just scathing and dry, and said, “It’s true that rodeo is more therapy than work for me. It takes a special kind of activity to balance out seeing the carriage of justice through, especially when it can be as thankless as it is in my line of work. As important as justice is, it doesn’t undo harm. Nothing can do that. So when I get out there, it’s not shiny buckles that I’m chasing down, but demons of the times I’ve lost and ghosts of all the work still yet to do.”
For a moment everyone around the campfire was simply silent. Sierra’s eyes sparkled in the dancing firelight, glistening, dark and wide, the expression in them not her typical show face, but wide and open and bleeding an emotion so complex he couldn’t name it.
Dillon was disgusted.
There was a glint of new respect in Julio’s eyes, mingled with a spark of laughter.
Though nothing about what Diablo had said had been false or exaggerated, and though he had not intended his words as a joke, Diablo found himself also fighting back the urge to laugh at their result himself.
He hadn’t meant to hand out truisms, but he had.
Everything in rodeo was always deeper than it looked, which was a fact that had been easier to forget with time and distance away from the sport than he would have liked to admit.
But that was a minor disappointment, particularly in the face of the fact that while they might not have had a fistfight with Dillon, he and Julio had done their part to put him in his place.
“I’ve been in rodeo a long time, lawman, but I’ve never met a cowboy like you,” Sierra said softly, pausing before adding, “When they say The Closed Circuit is a rodeo unlike any other, they aren’t lying!” The last she punctuated with a tasteful and perfectly tuned whoop, and the cameras turned to her, recentering as she segued into her next line, but Diablo’s ears were too busy replaying the first line to tune in.
I’ve been in rodeo a long time, lawman, but I’ve never met a cowboy like you.
Hidden in plain sight, folded right into her performance, she had been speaking to him.
And he knew she’d meant what she said.
No compliment had ever struck him quite like Sierra’s statement.
Getting involved with Sierra any further required a return to everything he hated about his early relationships—secrecy, sneaking around, shame—he knew that.
But he wanted her and he was a grown man.
He’d decided what he wanted a long time ago when it came to Sierra.
“Well, I suppose it’s about time that I let you three in on what your fellow contestants already know,” she said with a nod toward the other fires she had already visited. “Are you ready to find out what the first challenge of the rodeo unlike any other will be?” she asked, her voice bright and playful, the private bomb she’d dropped for him now just a warm echo in her eyes when they landed on him. “It’s easy to forget it amid the screams and screens of the arena, but everything in rodeo originated in the activities of a cowboy’s regular day’s work—and that’s what these Closed Circuit challenges are all about. We know you know how to get it done in the arena,” she said, her words slowing and deepening with the faintest hint of suggestion before her eyes met Diablo’s, “but we want to see if you can do it in the wild.”
Her words shot straight into him and rooted, as visceral and physical as if she had run a single manicured fingernail down his spine. Again, she spoke to him, brazen because they both knew what was really being said, but slyly, because she delivered the line to a crowd.
“Circumstances out there on the range can get pretty hairy, but everyone knows that necessity is the mother of invention, and that’s exactly where some of rodeo’s most popular events arise out from.
“It’s not enough for us to get you boys out there on the range if it’s all smooth sailing once you get there, though.” She paused here for dramatic flair, before continuing. “So for the second season, The Closed Circuit has kicked things up a notch. Rather than a sleepy overnight challenge, each one of you will have to make it through an obstacle course of simulated ranch emergencies—and the cowboy with the best time wins!”
Knowing the cameras were still rolling, and that the reaction shots were a particular favorite of the editors, Diablo held back from closing his eyes or sighing, but couldn’t manage much more than that as far as hiding how tired the idea made him.
And it was only the first challenge.
But then Sierra smiled, the firelight enhancing the glow that was all her own, her eyes locked on his and she said, “May the best man win.” And he knew he would go out there and try to be the man she was talking about.