Chapter 20 #2
Now the announcer's voice cuts through the noise, calling the bull riding round, and the crowd responds with the roar that belongs to the Finals, bigger and louder than anywhere else on the circuit.
I climb the chute panel and settle onto Freight Train's back, and the bull shifts beneath me, close to a ton of animal that wants one thing: me on the ground.
I wrap the rope and pull it tight. The familiar compression of my hand inside the braid settles against my palm, rosin gripping, flat of the rope seated where it belongs.
The bull's muscles bunch and roll under my thighs, heat radiating through my jeans, the animal's breath sawing loud enough to drown out the crowd.
Months ago, I climbed into chutes with a death wish. Tonight I climb in with a ring in my bag and a woman in the stands and the kind of purpose that makes a bull feel like a manageable problem.
I nod.
The gate swings open, and Freight Train comes out spinning left with enough force to snap my neck if I'm not ready.
His back end kicks high enough to clear the panel tops, and the arena tilts, sky and dirt trading places in my peripheral vision.
The opening seconds are the test, the moment the bull establishes his pattern and the rider matches it or eats dirt.
I match it. My hips roll with the spin, my free arm counters the torque, and my spurs find the rhythm of his shoulders.
Sweat runs down my spine. The impact travels through my tailbone, up my vertebrae, rattles my teeth.
The bull drops his head and reverses direction, and I stay with him, adjusting mid-turn, my core absorbing the snap like a whip crack I catch in my ribs.
The count climbs. Four seconds. Five. Each one a small war. The bull bucks straight into the air at the end, and I lean back and let the rope do the work, trusting the physics of a system I've refined over half my life. My shoulder screams. My grip holds.
The buzzer sounds. I release the rope, dismount clean, and hit the dirt on my feet. Dust in my lungs. Blood thumping in my ears. The bullfighters move between me and Freight Train, and the bull trots toward the exit chute with the satisfied energy of an animal who gave everything he had.
The score lights up, high enough for the championship.
The crowd goes off. I tip my hat toward the stands, and my eyes find Kenna. She's on her feet, her face lit with the ferocity of a woman who refuses to let the people she loves fight alone.
The championship is mine, but so is the moment after it, and the moment after it is hers. I shove my gear bag at the nearest bullfighter and tell him to hold it. I wave her down. She shakes her head, confused, pointing at herself. I wave again.
She climbs over the railing. A security guard starts toward her, and I catch his eye and shake my head.
She crosses the arena floor. Her boots leave prints in the dirt, and the crowd is watching now, cameras swinging, the announcer going quiet because he can feel the shift.
She stops in front of me. "What are you doing?"
"Something I should have done weeks ago."
"In the middle of the arena? In front of all these people?"
"I wanted witnesses."
"For what?"
I pull the velvet box from the gear bag the bullfighter handed me and drop to one knee in the arena dirt, the same dirt that exists in every rodeo venue on this circuit, the same sand that held Grant at Las Cruces and Tyler at Fort Worth and every rider who ever gave this sport everything they had.
The arena holds its breath.
"Kenna Corbin." I say her full name because the next question I ask might change it.
"You walked onto my circuit with a fake name and a grudge and the sharpest tongue I've ever had the misfortune to fall in love with.
You lied to me about who you were, tore my investigation open from the inside, and then turned around and saved it.
You're smarter than me, braver than me, and more stubborn than any bull I've ever ridden, and I've ridden some truly terrible bulls. "
She's staring at me with her hands at her sides and her eyes bright and her composure cracking at the seams.
"I'm a beat-up bull rider who's too stubborn to quit and too in love with you to care about anything else. Marry me."
Her mouth works but nothing comes out for a beat.
"You're proposing in an arena."
"I'm proposing in our arena."
"Sentiment, Holloway? From you?"
"From me. For you. Get used to it."
Her eyes are wet. She's smiling, and the smile is the unguarded one I love seeing on her.
"You didn't even finish the question."
"I said marry me. That's the question."
"Technically, that's a command."
"Kenna."
"Yes."
"Yes?"
"Yes, you impossible, reckless, infuriating man. Yes."
I open the box. My hands are steady because they've been trained by bulls and rope and years of trusting the mechanics when the adrenaline says otherwise. The ring slides onto her finger like it was built for the space, and her breath catches when she looks down at it.
Then I'm on my feet and she's against me before the moment finishes landing.
I get one hand in her hair and the other on the small of her back, pulling her flush against me, and the crowd erupts but I'm not listening to the crowd.
I'm kissing her in the dirt, in front of cameras and riders and thousands of strangers who came to watch bull riding and got a proposal as an added attraction.
She tastes like adrenaline and the cheap beer she snuck behind the chutes and the future I stopped being afraid to want.
She pulls back, laughing, her hands on my face, tears tracking through the dust on her cheeks.
"You proposed in the dirt."
"Best surface in the world."
"You're insane."
"You said yes. What does that make you?"
"The woman who's going to marry a cowboy who proposes in rodeo arenas and thinks that's romantic."
"Is it?"
She kisses me again. "It's the most romantic thing anyone has ever done. Tell anyone I said that and I'll deny it."
The announcer leans into his microphone. "Ladies and gentlemen, your Southwest Circuit Champion Bull Rider, Colt Holloway, and his fiancée, Kenna Corbin."
The roar rolls through the Thomas & Mack like thunder through a canyon, and I hold her as we stand in the arena dirt and feel the ring on her finger catch the overhead lights.
Kenna heads back to the stands to grab her notebook and her hat, and I let the crowd and the cameras swallow the moment while my gaze drifts past the celebration to the edges of the competitor area where the Finals carry a different weight.
Behind the chutes, Slade Carrick leans against a panel, watching with the still, contained expression he wears like armor. He was at Las Cruces. He pulled Grant from the arena. He's carried that silence for months.
Our eyes meet. He holds the contact, then gives a single nod, the kind of acknowledgment one man offers another when words would cost too much.
Then he turns and walks toward the exit, moving through the crowd with the fluid invisibility of someone practiced at not being noticed. He's out the door before anyone can ask the questions he's not ready to answer.
Whatever Slade is carrying is bigger than witness guilt. The circuit isn't done revealing its secrets.
At the bar overlooking the competitor area, Wade sits alone with a whiskey. He lifts the glass toward me when our eyes meet. The gesture is loose and unsteady, and it tells me everything about where he is right now.
The man who drove his truck into a storage yard as my backup with clear eyes and steady hands has been dissolving since, undone by the divorce, the scandal, the revelations about the circuit he devoted his career to, new reasons to avoid sobriety stacked on top of the old ones.
A competitor bumps Wade's elbow passing behind him, and the shift is instant.
His shoulders square, his free hand closes into a fist on the bar top, and the look he turns on the guy has enough menace in it to clear a radius.
The competitor backs off with both palms raised.
Wade watches him go, then uncurls his fist one finger at a time and goes back to his whiskey like nothing happened.
But I saw the speed of the change, the violence coiled under the drunk, and it worries me more than the drinking does.
The woman pouring doesn't bother asking if he's had enough. She already knows the answer.
He needs help, the kind I'm not equipped to give and that he's not ready to accept. I hold his gaze and make a mental note to check on him tomorrow, knowing he'll tell me he's fine and I'll know he's lying.
The circuit grinds down the men who ride it. Wade is proof. So was Grant. I'm still cataloging the damage when a voice behind me cuts through the noise.
"Holloway."
I turn. Dax is standing at the edge of the competitor area with dust on his jeans and a fresh bruise forming along his jaw from his bareback ride. He scored well for his first Finals, and the competitive fire hasn't dimmed.
"Congratulations," he says, the word polite and thin. "I hear you're marrying my sister."
"She said yes."
"She would." His eyes cut to Kenna across the competitor area and back to me, and there's a flicker of something protective in the look that I recognize because I wear it every time another man stands too close to her.
He's sizing me up the way I'd size up anyone who put a ring on someone I loved.
The difference is I don't need his approval, and we both know it.
He's got Kenna's same sharp, assessing look, but where hers carries warmth alongside the blade, his carries the flat, cold weight of someone who's been angry for a long time and stopped pretending otherwise.
"The trial is over," he says. "Merrick's convicted. But Merrick didn't act alone."
"I know."
"Thornton is dead. But the smuggling corridor is still there. The infrastructure doesn't disappear because you convict one man. Somebody is still running cargo in those livestock transports, and nobody is looking at the people above Merrick."
"Torres has a task force—"