Dance with the devil and what do you get? Shin splints. Violet hobbled of out the arena gate toward the rodeo office muttering silent curses. Every step was like a knife in her arches and shot fire up her legs, despite the fistful of ibuprofen she’d washed down with her half-gallon mug of coffee. And there’d been thousands of steps. Saturday night’s performance might’ve been perfect, but Sunday morning slack was the equivalent of pushing a rope uphill through a patch of prickly pear cactus. No matter how she tried, Violet couldn’t get the damn thing moving.
To top it off, her dad was sick. Her mother said it was something he ate and he’d be fine as soon as the medicine took hold. He just didn’t dare get too far from the bathroom in the meantime, which left Violet to deal with the stock, the committee, the contestants, the judges, and Cole, and she was not in the mood. Her eyeballs felt like she’d fallen and scraped them on the sidewalk and her head throbbed, each beat of her heart a steel-tipped hammer blow to the inside of her skull.
Imagine how much worse it would’ve been if Joe had stayed.
Her face burned at the fresh slap of humiliation. The man had kissed her like she was water and he’d been crawling across the desert for a week, and he’d been as turned on as she was. Hard to hide that not-so-small detail when she was plastered up against him. Then bam! He pushed her off and walked away. What the fuck? Or not, as the case may be.
Violet repeated the curse out loud as she stumbled over a beer bottle tossed in the grass behind the bleachers. Jerk slob littering assholes. She’d like to smack them upside the head with their own trash, along with the moron who was supposed to be opening the chute for the timed events. By rule, the job was not supposed to change hands for the entire length of the rodeo, but this gate man had staggered in still drunk from the night before. She’d had a dozen ropers, five committee members, and three judges arguing about who would replace him.
Slack had started eventually—fifteen minutes late—then screeched to halt again when a hinge broke on the chute gate. A local welder was now attempting to repair the damage while agitated ropers paced and bitched about how they had to hurry up and get to the afternoon performance at another rodeo down the road. Well, they’d just have to hold their horses, literally and figuratively. She was doing the best she could, and now that the drunk had staggered away to sleep it off, she was doing it one man short.
And despite what he’d said about seeing her in the morning, Joe had yet to show his face. Figured. Just when she thought she could count on him, he left her wanting in every way possible. She hustled around the back of the stock pens and into the ramshackle rodeo office. Cole was there alone, rooting through a portable file box filled with Iris’s paperwork.
“What are you doing?” Violet demanded, jerking the box away from him. “Mom will have your hide if you mess those up.”
Cole swiped a sleeve across his sweaty face. “One of the steers is coughing. Just dusty hay I think, but the judges want him pulled. They need the numbers for the extras to draw a replacement.”
Great. Now the ropers would have something else to bitch about.
“Where’s Mom?” Violet asked, flipping through the file box to find the folder with the morning’s draw sheets.
“She ran over to check on your dad. And Beni’s being a pain, too.”
Of course. With a kid’s perfect sense of timing, Beni had been impossible from the moment he popped out of bed. He wanted pancakes. No, waffles. No, French toast. With juice. Or maybe milk. Then he was full after three whole bites. Then he started whining about being bored. He was tired of this game. He wanted his other game, the one she couldn’t find. He wanted to be home. He wanted his daddy. Violet would have gladly handed him over except whoops!, Delon was probably still handcuffed to a bed in Omaha if Stacy Lyn had had her way with him. Men. Not one of ’em Violet wouldn’t trade for a good horse and a foot massage.
She found the team roping draw sheet and held it out to Cole. He lifted his hands, backing away. “You can take it down there.”
“I need to go get Beni.” And grab another handful of ibuprofen while she was at it.
Cole’s face went stubborn. “I’m almost twenty minutes late graining the horses.”
Lord knew she didn’t dare suggest the horses could wait another ten minutes. Cole already looked like he might hyperventilate. “Get Hank to do it.”
“He took off last night with some girl. Where’s Joe?” Cole looked around like maybe Joe was hiding behind one of the dusty cobwebs in the corner of the office.
“Sleeping, I assume.” Violet shoved the draw sheet at Cole. “It’ll take you two minutes to drop this down at the roping chutes.”
Cole shook his head. “They’ll all start yakking at me and I hate that.”
Violet stomped her foot in sheer frustration, then paid the price as pain shot clear to her hip. “Gawd! You are such a butthead.”
But the words only bounced off Cole’s retreating back.
Her mother hustled into the space he’d vacated, Beni in tow. “Did they get the roping chute fixed yet?”
“I’m going to check right now.” She fluttered the piece of paper in her hand. “And take this draw sheet down there, while I’m at it.”
“I want to stay in the trailer and play my big video game,” Beni whined. “It’s boring in here.”
Violet scooped Beni up to prop him on her hip like when he was a toddler. Sheesh. He must’ve gained ten pounds in the last month. “How ‘bout you help me take this draw sheet to the roping chutes, then we’ll go get a snack. What sounds good?”
“Popcorn!”
At nine-thirty in the morning, when he hadn’t finished his breakfast? Oh, what the hell? She’d be Mom of the Year some other day. “Can do.”
She gave him a squeeze and a smacking kiss, then continued on her way, albeit more slowly. Packing the extra weight did nothing for the pain in her shins. Praise the Lord, though, the welder was dragging his equipment out of the arena and they were back in business. At this rate, they might get this slack run off before Joe got around to crawling out of bed.
She gave the draw sheet to the judges and watched to be sure the next few tie-down ropers got out of the box without the chute gate falling off. Then she gathered up Beni and swung by her trailer, where she popped a bag of microwave popcorn, grabbed a Coke—if she was gonna be the worst mom ever, might as well do it right—and deposited him back at the office while she went to see what else had gone to hell in her brief absence.
An eternity later, she trudged back to the office to get her kid, her stomach rumbling. Cowboys strolled past with horses trailing along behind, ropes slung over their saddle horns. Engines rumbled as the slack contestants rolled out and those slated for the afternoon performance began to trickle in. Violet had, at most, an hour to grab lunch and put her feet up before it all started over again.
She rounded the last corner to the office and there was Joe, sitting on a bench outside the rodeo office with…Beni? They were bent over Joe’s phone and Beni was showing him something—either the latest version of Angry Birds or another of the porn sites he’d stumbled across despite every parental control she’d put in place on her phone. Lord only knew with Beni. Joe took the phone, poked at the screen a few times, typed something in, then handed it back.
Beni’s face lit up. “Whoa. That is awesome.”
Then Joe spotted her and sprang to his feet with a tentative smile. “It’s educational, I swear.”
He was wearing his cowboy hat, one of those threadbare chopped up T-shirts, wrinkled jeans, and running shoes, and looked as if his night had been even worse than hers. In other words, he was perfect.
Right there, right then, Violet’s previously undented heart cracked wide open. She felt it, the same as when she broke her arm. She had that same instant to think, Oh crap, this is gonna hurt, and wonder if she could somehow eject from her own body before the pain blinded her. But it was too late. She’d fallen head over heels, and just like when that damn Shetland pony took a hard right and threw her into the fence, this was not going to end well.
Joe wasn’t ever going to stay in Texas. Not for her. Not for the world. When his three rodeos were done, he’d hightail it straight back to Oregon and the only true love in his life—that damn High Lonesome Ranch. There was nothing Violet could do or say to stop him. She could only try to limit the damage.