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The Sagebrush County Airport was only a short way out of town, but the girls did need to get there with plenty of time to check in and get through security. This fact, however, was completely lost on Alexis.
“I’m almost ready,” she shouted, the top half of her body buried underneath the bed. “I just can’t find my shoe—”
“Lex, I will buy you a new pair of shoes and ship them to you in LA,” Dani snapped. “But if you make me miss this flight, I swear to everything holy—”
“Maybe you should wait in the lobby, Dani,” Tami hustled into their room and quickly herded Dani out of it. “Kelsey and I will help Lex find her shoe and we’ll meet you out there in five minutes, tops.”
Dani glared, but still grabbed her suitcase and wheeled it toward the little motel lobby.
“God, she’s in a bad mood today...” Alexis’ voice chased her down the hallway.
Dani sank into a shabby vinyl chair in the dusty lobby of the Dusty Spur dropped her head into her hands. Her friends may be being mean about her bad mood, but that didn’t mean they were wrong. She’d been on the warpath since the moment Weston had dropped her off and they’d exchanged those sorry excuses for goodbyes.
She hadn’t said what she meant to say, and she definitely said all the things she shouldn’t have.
“Fuck,” Dani muttered.
The lobby doors swung open, but it wasn’t Dani’s friends. Instead, two young women with bedazzled jeans and blown-out blonde hair sauntered toward the reception desk, the taller of the two clutching an ice bucket in her pink manicured hands.
“No one is there,” Dani spoke up and the girls wheeled around.
“What?” said the smaller, ice bucket-less one.
Dani repeated herself and the twosome frowned.
“Dammit, the ice machine outside is broke,” one of them complained. “We were hoping—”
“Hey!” her friend cut her off. “You’re that girl Weston Stroh was out with the other night, aren’t you?”
Dani nodded carefully.
“You staying for the bull riding finals tonight?” asked the other one, eyeing Dani’s suitcase.
“No,” Dani said, trying to smile. “Weekend’s over, I’m afraid. Gotta get back to work.”
“Travel safe,” said the first girl, smiling brightly to Dani’s face but, when they’d almost reached the door, Dani heard her whisper, “Typical big city bitch. They come out here, chase cowboys like they’re some sort of tourist attraction, then love ‘em and leave ‘em.”
“Yeah,” her friend whispered back. “Bunch of buckle bunnies.”
The bells on the lobby door chimed merrily as the two girls exited, but Dani sat there, frozen in shock.
She wanted to race after the girls, tell them that they were wrong, she wasn’t like that. She wasn’t like Alexis, who’d just come on this trip to pick up cowboys, she was different.
But the girls were right.
She was a buckle bunny. She was exactly the kind of woman they thought she was: a heartless bitch from the city who only came out here to bed cowboys and throw them away.
“I’m not like that,” Dani announced to the empty room. The room did not reply.
Alexis, Kelsey, and Tami came bustling into the lobby a moment later, dragging suitcases and looking harried.
“Shuttle’s here, D,” Tami said. “They said it’s a ten minute ride to the county airport, so we should get there by six thirty. That should give us plenty of time to check in and get to our seven p.m. flight. The airport is small, so—”
“Bull riding finals are at seven p.m.,” Dani muttered, letting Tami drag her out of the lobby and load her onto the waiting shuttle.
“What?” Tami asked, hoisting Dani’s bag into the luggage rack at the front of the van. “What’d you say?”
“Nothing,” Dani said.
“She said that the bull riding finals are at seven p.m.,” Alexis announced, delighted to have overheard such a key piece of information.
“Dani,” Kelsey leaned toward her as the shuttle set off, bumping over potholes and bumps in the cracked country road. “Did things end okay with you and Weston? Is he coming to visit or—”
Dani shook her head, her chin quivering. “No, he’s not—” she began, but dissolved into tears before she could even find the right words to describe the heartbreaking scene back at the ranch.
As the van drove them to the Sagebrush County Airport, Dani reluctantly told her friends how the whole situation had unfolded.
“And you just left?” Kelsey stared at her, wide-eyed.
“What am I supposed to do, Kels?” Dani moaned. “He’s got a life here and I’ve got a life in Chicago—”
“Do you?” Alexis asked. Dani looked at her incredulously. “Think about it, D. Do you have a life in Chicago?”
Dani wanted to argue, but Alexis was right. Her cat was dead, her long-term boyfriend had given her up without a second thought and she was sputtering miserably at work. And her closest friends—Alexis, Kelsey, and Tami—all lived in different cities and only saw each other once a year. There was nothing for her in Chicago.
“I-I guess I don’t,” she admitted. “But I work in marketing, you guys. What could I possibly do in a town like Sagebrush? And Weston would never give up his ranch. So we’re stuck, I guess. We’re worlds apart and we just need to deal with it.”
“Dani,” Tami said cautiously. “Why didn’t you get that promotion at work?”
Dani glared at her. “How could you possibly bring that up at a time like this, Tami? Do you want to insult my hair while you’re at it?”
Tami waved her off. “No, no, just go with me for a sec. Seriously, why didn’t you get that promotion.”
Dani thought about it. She tried to make excuses for her failure to get promoted—glass ceiling, racial politics, favoritism—but the real reason was simple.
“My boss was disappointed that I couldn’t come up with a new marketing strategy for an energy drink,” she admitted. “We’d always been sponsoring extreme athletes, but Jim wanted us to think outside the typical X-games people and get creative—oh my god.”
Tami was smiling. “I think you just got my point.”
Dani definitely did. “Driver!” she shouted into the front seat. “How fast can you get me back to the Sagebrush Arena?”
“I reckon I can get you back there in about fifteen minutes, but that’s only if I turn around now—”
“Shit,” Dani cursed under her breath.
“—and your friends will miss their flight,” the driver finished.
“That’s okay!” Kelsey said. “This could be true love we’re talking about! How often do people find true love?”
“I dunno about true love, but I do know that the next flight out isn’t until next Friday,” the driver said.
“Sorry, Dani,” Kelsey said, making a quick one-eighty. “I’m not missing that flight.”
“Don’t worry about it, I’ve got a Plan B,” Dani announced, smiling.
Plan B wasn’t much of a plan, rather than an accelerated timeline. Dani practically threw her friends’ luggage onto the sidewalk, gave them all hasty hugs, then jumped back inside the van, slipping the driver a fifty-dollar bill.
“Get me there as fast as you can, okay?” Dani whispered.
“You got it, ma’am,” the driver told her, stepping on the gas and whipping the van away from the curb in a cloud of burning rubber.
“Good luck, Dani!” her friends shouted after her.
“Text us and let us know how it goes!” Tami shouted.
“I want to be your maid of honor!” That was Kelsey.
“Go get ‘em, cowgirl!” screamed Alexis.
Dani smiled. She was definitely gonna go get ‘em.