Sexting the Cowboy (Forbidden Silver Foxes #5)

Chapter 1 Annie

ANNIE

The first thing that happens when I turn off the highway is that the world goes coppery brown.

Dust pours up under my tires and rolls across the hood like a tide I can’t outrun.

It freckles the windshield even with the wipers going, and by the time I snake past a line of pickups and trailers toward the back gate of the Sandy Fairgrounds, I can taste grit on my tongue.

It mixes with saliva into a filmy paste.

Utah, a month before autumn. Warm enough to not need a jacket, unless the wintry mood strikes, and all hell breaks loose. But the forecast says we’re in a continuation of summer, not due for a preview of an actual season quite yet.

Welcome to the Old West Fest—A Month of Rodeo, Rides, and Recklessness!—the banner at the main entrance announces in fat, cheerful letters when I pull in. They might as well have hung a sign that says: Annie Pearl’s Penance. Thirty Days. No Early Release.

I ease my SUV into the slot marked Medic beside a white canopy held together by faith and duct tape.

Thankfully, I get to park away from the crowd, so I don’t have to wade through a sea of humanity to get here.

A sagging red cross banner flaps the entry.

Two industrial fans at the entrance push the same hot air from one side of the tent to the other.

Small favors, I suppose.

Past them, the grandstands rise with bleachers already peppered by people staking their spots.

To the left, a Ferris wheel turns slow as a second hand.

To the right, chutes clang, and the ground vibrates with the kind of bellow you feel in your bones.

The midway stretches out past where I can see, the scent of fried goodness mixing with horse and bull stench.

I let my forehead drop to the steering wheel for exactly one breath. In, out. Then I sit up and smooth my face. I signed the contract. I cashed the deposit. I’m here.

“Ready?” Jaden asks, already unbuckled, a clipboard balanced on one knee.

He’s impossible not to like—clean-shaven, kind mahogany eyes, ball cap shoved backward over his shaved head, with warm brown skin and a smile that somehow survives long shifts and ugly scenes.

He’s thirty-two and organized to a degree that borders on spiritual practice.

If the world ends, I want him in charge of triage.

“I’m breathing,” I say, which is as close as I’m willing to get to honesty this second.

He grins. “Big day for the lungs.”

“Don’t get smart,” I mutter, but my mouth twitches.

We climb out. Heat slaps me, the kind that leaches moisture from your skin. I’ve lived in Utah since childhood, but my body has never adjusted. I still slather myself with lotion twice a day. Dust finds my scrub collar, my eyelashes, the creases of my knuckles.

One day, I’ll leave this town.

But not today.

The fairground is a moving picture—kids in boots galloping toward the midway with snow cones already melting down their fists, mothers dragging wagons full of coolers, men in pearl snap shirts shouldering saddles like they weigh nothing.

A kettle corn stand roars to life, the smell of sugar and oil so thick it nearly turns my stomach.

On the loudspeakers, the announcer clears his throat, hits a long “Y’all,” and then starts reading off sponsors in a drawl polished to a sheen.

I hated rodeos long before I had a reason to, but now the reasons have a name.

I slam the door a little too hard and pop the back hatch.

We unload in practiced silence. The hard-sided trauma cases, a soft cooler that will be full of meds in fifteen minutes and water two minutes after that because everyone will forget to drink, my portable ultrasound that cost more than my car, IV poles, and a roll of duct tape because tents and chaos both require tape.

Inside, the medic tent is bare bones. Three cots line the left wall, vinyl shining under the washed-out light.

A folding table hunkers at the back. Someone left a plastic tote of supplies for us—Ace wraps, a few bottles of ibuprofen, a box of Band-Aids meant for paper cuts and scrapes.

I don’t trust any of it, so I set my own cases on the table and get to work.

I clip a red sharps container to a pole; it snaps home with satisfying certainty.

Jaden angles the fans so they cross-breeze the cots and scrawls a sign with a thick black marker: FREE WATER · FREE SHADE · FREE SMILES with a lopsided smiley face. He tapes it over a stack of paper cups. “Cots prepped?”

“Do it. Hang two one-liter bags—saline and LR. Spike the lines. Keep the clamps on.”

“Copy.”

It still makes me happy when he answers like that.

He moves like an efficiency tutorial: clean, quick, calm.

While he works, I lay out meds in neat rows—acetaminophen, ibuprofen, ketorolac, ondansetron, a locked box of what I hope we won’t need—and tape triage sheets to clipboards: name, event, mechanism, vitals, interventions, disposition.

I print a heat-illness algorithm and tape it where it’ll be in my eyeline when my brain wants to sprint, then tape the Spanish version beside it.

I put the ultrasound in the shade and plug the battery in even though I charged it last night, because the only sure thing about batteries is that they lie.

The ritual steadies me. It’s the only thing that will get me through this month.

Outside, the festival wakes up for real.

Vendors flip their signs to OPEN. The Ferris wheel speeds up a fraction.

A kid in a stitched-up straw hat drags a rope through the dirt and hums, tangled in the kind of happiness that only lives in summer.

The animal smell is a layered thing—warm hide, hay, shit—and it moves on the wind in pockets, rolling over the midways and dipping under the grandstands.

A bull slams a horn into a panel, and the metal sings.

Every clatter yanks a string inside me I wish I’d cut years ago.

“Hey,” Jaden says, soft. “Water?”

I realize I’ve been holding my breath and let it out slow. “Yeah. Thanks.”

“Tell me again,” he says, eyes still on the crowd. “We’re doing the whole month?”

“Whole month.” I make myself keep my tone neutral. “Thursday through Sunday rodeos. Weekday events are concerts and reenactments. We’re on call the entire time.”

He whistles. “Your aunt still think you should’ve stuck to pediatrics?”

“My aunt thinks I should’ve moved to Seattle and married a dentist,” I say. “But she also thinks apple cider vinegar cures everything and that my name would look nicer if it started with Mrs., so…”

He snorts. “I, for one, am thrilled you chose us over the Seattle dentist.”

Us is the clinic—a narrow, hopeful space in a strip mall in Sandy with a lobby I painted myself and a plant I’ve kept alive against its will.

I opened six months ago with too much faith and too little capital, then ran headfirst into every predictable problem.

The margins for small private practices are razor-thin.

Insurance contracts move like glaciers until they don’t, then they smack you with denials.

The month I actually thought I’d close, this rodeo coordinator called, waving money I couldn’t ignore.

I closed the clinic temporarily—I hope—and flipped the voicemail to the emergency message.

Only one appointment had to be postponed.

A Pap smear that could wait until I got back.

My patient told me to bring her some kettle corn and to try to have fun.

I smiled and told her I’d do my best, and I felt like a liar in both directions.

“Meredith from the committee is supposed to check in on us soon,” Jaden says, tapping his watch. “You want me to charm her out of extra ice?”

“Please. Also, ask about radios. The ambulance service is staged at the main gate, one ALS and one BLS, but if production is on a different channel we need to be able to hear them swear when something goes sideways.”

He salutes and disappears into the heat.

I put my empty cup in the trash and turn back to the table.

I lay out exam gloves in stacks by size.

I set the otoscope where I won’t knock it off because I always knock it off.

I tuck a secret stash of smiley stickers under the edge of the table because three-year-olds who throw up on my shoes deserve something for the indignity of existing in this heat.

A teenage barrel racer limps in just as I’m wondering if we’ll sit in a hot box all afternoon doing nothing. Her braid swings when she sits on the end cot and tries not to cry. “I rolled it,” she says, and points at an ankle that’s ballooning.

“Let’s take a look.” I ask questions while I palpate—where’s the pain, any numbness, can you bear weight.

She can’t without cussing, which answers that.

I stabilize, tape, brace, lecture gently, and tell her she’s done for today.

She glares at me like I broke her on purpose.

Her mother thanks me with both hands and mouths sorry as she steers her child out.

I’ve been the bad guy before. It’s part of the job. “Better mad now than busted forever.”

A ranch hand shows up next with a thumb he jammed catching a gate. I tape him in a figure eight and send him to the bleachers with instructions not to be a hero.

Then a little boy wanders in wide-eyed, cheeks the color of boiled shrimp, damp hair stuck to his temple.

His mother fans him with a program. I sit him on a cot with an ice pack tucked under each armpit, drip water into his mouth with patience, and feel the tight coil in my chest ease as his skin cools and his smile returns.

I slap a sticker on his shirt, and he looks at it like it’s a treasure.

This part I love. The work. The logic. Symptom, exam, plan. Even here, wrapped in noise and dust and the stink of risk, medicine makes sense of it all.

By the time Jaden returns—with ice, radios, and the satisfaction of a successful charm offensive—the sun has lifted to a mean angle.

The announcer is fully in his groove now, calling out sponsors and promising thrills, the sound swelling and falling in waves.

Eventually, that’ll be background noise, but for now, it’s hard not to pay attention.

“Production is on channel two,” Jaden reports. “Medical on three, grounds on one. The sheriff’s office brought in extras for the weekends. Meredith says if we need a golf cart, we can grab the one by the infield gate, but it squeals like a dying rabbit.”

“Copy.” I key the radio.

He slides a folded sheet of paper out of a folder and smirks. “You want to hear today’s talent roll, or shall I spare your delicate sensibilities?”

“My sensibilities are fine,” I say, then soften it because he doesn’t deserve the edge I reserve for everything rodeo. “Give me the highlights.”

He reads event by event, voice drifting into announcer cadence: saddle bronc, steer wrestling, tie-down roping, the junior mutton-busting heats that will end in tears and adorable belt buckles.

I make appropriate noises when he hits names that ring a bell with locals—famous in a radius defined by radio towers and bar gossip.

The ground shakes on another bellow from the pens. I can feel it in my molars.

I pretend I don’t.

“You sure you’re okay?” Jaden asks, not looking up. He’s been with me long enough to sense when I’m pretending.

“I’m fine.” The first person you have to convince is always yourself. I suck at that too. “It’s an easy day so far. Mostly sprains and bruises.”

“And you are emphatically not looking forward to bull riding,” he says, as if he can pluck the thought from my brain.

“Yep.” The word is sharper than it needs to be.

Jaden doesn’t flinch. He never flinches. It’s why he’s such a good nurse.

I’d rather think about that than what I’ve been actively avoiding thinking about since I signed the contract to work here.

Reno.

Reno Wyatt with his bad-boy grin and his stupid charm and the family name that serves as a brand.

Eight months of falling too fast and then six more after the accident of trying to hold a man together who didn’t want to be held.

Thanks to a bull he couldn’t handle, his left lower leg doesn’t have full sensation now.

Instead of turning to me or therapy or anything useful, he turned to whiskey.

I left because I didn’t want to drown in the bottle with him.

My phone buzzes in my scrub pocket. Mac flashes on the screen with three cactus emojis and a boot. You alive?

Define alive.

She sends me a GIF of a tumbleweed.

A pair of retirees in volunteer shirts poke their heads in. “Y’all need anything?”

“Extra ice if you can spare it,” I say. “And if anybody at the midway gets woozy, send them here instead of trying to revive them with funnel cake.”

“You got it,” the man says, and they scoot on their way.

We get one more patient before the light leans truly golden—a cowboy who caught his forearm on a burr in a rail and pretends it doesn’t need stitches.

It does. He sits on the cot and watches me irrigate, his jaw tight, his knuckles whiter than his undershirt.

I place tidy sutures, quick and neat. He thanks me and pulls his sleeve down like the repair is a secret.

Never let ’em see you bleed, I guess.

The grandstands are churning, spots filling with locals and tourists, a handful of influencers angling their phones at the sky.

The pre-show playlist slips from twang to modern pop-country and back.

The animal contractor’s crew moves like a choreography, arms waving, gates swinging, big bodies funneling where they need to go. Chaos, but relatively organized.

“Okay, the suspense is killing me,” Jaden says, flipping the roster sheet like a game-show reveal.

“Don’t,” I warn, but I’m smiling, and I hate that he can yank a smile out of me even when I know I won’t like the question. Doesn’t matter, though. That’s one of Jaden’s gifts.

He ignores me. He always ignores me when theatrics are available.

“Final event,” he intones. “Bull riding. Tonight’s lineup includes—” His finger slides down a column.

He pauses. His mouth opens. The showman drains out of him so fast I can feel the vacuum.

“Wait…the Wyatts? The family of your ex-boyfriend who crashed and burned so badly that you have barely looked at another man since?”

I put the answer in the simplest words possible, the only ones that will fit past the pinch in my chest. “Yes, those Wyatts.”