Chapter 14
FOURTEEN
WEST
Sparkle, Sparkle
“Thirteen missed calls. Four messages.” Dustan hikes his eyebrows. “One declaration of love. One thrown coffee. Now that’s some serious shit, my boy.” He whistles from his place on the temporary fencing we’ve erected at the back of Dallas’s produce store across town in Cloakton.
I roll my neck, watching my new tame bull—a different one than last week’s training effort—munch away at his trough. “Yeah. Well. She threw me out, didn’t she.”
“And now she wants you back.” Dustan tosses me my phone. “So?”
“So what?”
“When are you going to see her?” He eyes me expectantly.
I stare back at him, exasperated. “Didn’t you hear me, kid? She. Threw. Me. Out. After a perfect—it doesn’t matter. Get back on the bull.”
“He’s eating. And you aren’t flirting. You know it’s no fun when you don’t flirt.”
I shake my head. “You’ve got no chance.”
“I know. That’s why we call it flirting. It’s safe, see?” Dustan grins and slides off the rail, approaching the bull side-on.
“Jesus.” I straightened. “Do you have a fucking death wish? I didn’t mean right now—”
“Yeah, yeah.” Dustan runs his hand along the bull’s side. The damn thing lets him.
I stare.
“The hell is he doing?” Dallas clambers over the railing, hanging by one hand as he takes in the sight before us. “Do I need to prep an ambulance? Get your girl in here with a stretcher?”
I wince at the reminder of Winnie’s profession. The mere mention of her wrecks me. “Nah. We seem to be good, for now.” Maybe I should get one on standby. Dustan seems to have a death wish on more than one front today, poking the proverbial bull as well as the actual one right in front of him.
Actually he’s kind of petting the damn thing like it’s his favorite toy.
“He’s not your friend, kid.” Dallas whistles softly, gaining Dustan’s attention. “Get your ass over here.”
Dustan comes reluctantly, crossing the gravel-and-sawdust cordoned-off section of the yard. “He’s pretty.” His eyes glow with the sort of addiction that I know well. I’ve seen it on more than one rider, but the one that I know best turned out to be the rider who won everything.
I stalk away while Dallas and Dustan talk softly, providing background noise for my crises. My forearm braces against a stack of worn tires that pile higher than me as I rest my forehead against them.
“He’s wearing you down, huh?” Dallas’s voice at my back should startle me, but he doesn’t.
I shake my head and stretch. “Nah. Not him.” I hold Dallas’s gaze but then turn to watch Dustan. Thankfully the little fucker has his ass planted back on the rail, where he should be, eating the sandwich I packed for him like I’m his mother.
“So it’s her, then.”
I stiffen. “Nothing I can’t handle.”
Dallas cackles. “That’s fuckin’ obvious. You’re out here pining like you’re a lost puppy. Go home or go to her. Get your shit sorted.”
Changing tack is the best way to get the old man off my ass. Not that he’s old. Maybe he has a handful of years on me. “How’s your girl back in Valiant Peak? After the dire wolf catastrophe at the house, I never thought you’d leave.”
Dallas says nothing, and I know I’ve dug up a gold mine of distraction-worthy material.
“What was her name? Eva? Evelyn?”
“Aveline. Who you won’t be talking about.” He fixes me with a hard eye. “You worry about sorting your own damn backyard, you hear me?”
I hold up my hands out front, the palms spread wide open. “I got it. You gonna help me get that kid ready for the invitational? We’ve got, what, two weeks to go?”
“One week.” Dallas is back to his regular two-word answers.
“Shit.” I hadn’t realized we’d come that close. Cord would be hightailing it to get the arena ready. I hadn’t been back to Valiant Peak in so long that I wondered if anything had changed. Or maybe nothing at all. “I’ll take Dustan up and get him on the list, then.”
Dallas folds his arms, muscles bulging out damn near everywhere. “Yeah, you do that. Sort your shit out with Cordell while you’re up there. Otherwise you’re gonna have more problems than a dirty rider on the night. You understand me?”
My jaw locks in place. “Yeah. I understand you.”
“And get your butt to your girl.”
“Yeah, yeah. We’ll get her. She’s not going anywhere.”
“Isn’t she?” Dallas cocks his head to one side. “Didn’t you say she’s dating some doctor at the hospital?”
I frown. “No. I didn’t.”
Dallas shrugs. “Well, then.” He walks away like he’s just solved world peace.
But my head tells me that nothing’s been settled.
Nothing at all.
The overpriced bouquet of wild weeds I bought for Winnie rests heavy in my hands as I knock on her door for the third time.
I’ve come close to shouting and considered camping on her stoop for the day more than once in the last fifteen minutes.
That would be fine, except for the fact that I have one overexcited bull rider packed in the back seat of my truck, raring and ready for the drive out to Valiant Peak.
We just need two girls to accompany us… if I can convince them to come.
If they’re home.
I knock again, her name easy on my lips, when the door opens. And then I’m staring at more Winnie flesh than I expect to see before nine in the morning on a Tuesday.
The rest of her is covered in enough glitter and neon that she glows even without a black light handy.
My mouth dries. “How was your date?” I ask, prepared to trash the wildflowers that are really just nationally accredited weeds I could have picked in any out of town park and wrapped up myself.
Winnie tosses her head. That familiar glint of defiance sparkles in her eyes for a single second, but then exhaustion dulls her elfin features. “Sober. Come in.”
I shake my head. “I have a passenger in the truck. He’s… not half as patient as he thinks he is.” I pass the bouquet across the threshold to her.
Winnie takes my offering, her expression curious. “What are you doing here, West?”
Tension snaps across my shoulders. I resist rolling them—just. “I want to apologize. See if you have time to head up to the Invitational. I—”
“Didn’t call.” Her lips part. “You know I have work.”
“I know.”
“You don’t seem like the world’s most impulsive man.”
“I’m not.”
Her hip pops. She places weight on her knee, clutching the bunch of flowers that crush in her hands a little. “So you detoured here?”
Breath blows between my lips in a long exhale. “This is my apology for not staying when I should have.”
Winnie says nothing for a long moment. Long enough that I think I’m going to have to turn away and explain my multitude of shortcomings in excess to Dustan. My pet rodeo trainee is likely to chatter my ear off with relationship advice that I neither want nor need for the next 180 miles.
“You listened to me,” she says. “Even when you probably shouldn’t have.”
I peer at her, ignoring the backhanded compliment that she just passed to me while managing to insult herself at the same time. “Is that your version of an apology?”
She shrugs. “Maybe? I don’t even know.” She plops herself onto the doorstep at my feet, the flowers flouncing across her lap. Glitter drifts across their stems in a constant cascade.
I crouch on the lower step and brush my thumb across her cheek, gathering extra glitter that trickles over both of us. Dustan will be thrilled. “Your date didn’t go as planned?” It’s a loaded question, one I don’t expect her to answer. Hell, I half expect her to slap me.
The petals from one of the flowers are pulled apart one at a time. I watch her, mesmerized at how efficiently she dismembered the entire thing.
“Tom… he asked me to dance. Not with him, for him. I sassed him. Told him if I wasn’t on the stage, I wouldn’t go. That I refused to be his backup dancer.”
Something akin to pride warms my chest. “There’s my girl.”
Winnie’s head jerks, but she refuses to look up at me. “Don’t get cute, cowboy. Listen to the story first.”
“All right. I’m listening.”
I circle my fingers around her ankle, letting the pad of my thumb rest over her Achilles’ tendon, and stroke gently.
Her sharp inhale tells me I’ve discovered another sensitive spot on her body.
Maybe I should be possessive or jealous that she spent the night out with another man last night, but… I’m not.
Tom isn’t a threat to me, and if we’re over and that’s who she’s seeing, then we really are done.
But I don’t think that’s what I’m seeing from her.
Winnie moves on to killing another flower, though she peeks at me from beneath purple-painted eyelashes. “You don’t care that I danced with a guy all night?”
It’s nine in the morning. I don’t care if she parties with every person in the club. She’s still up. She didn’t drink. And something’s bothering her. The date didn’t go anything like she either hoped or expected.
I squeeze her ankle gently. “You’ve had a shitty ex break into your house this week, and we fought. Do I care that you hung out with another man? Kinda. Am I worried I’ll lose you to him? No.”
“Cocky, aren’t you,” she says softly, dropping a hand to run her fingers over the scars that populate the backs of my knuckles.
“Honest,” I counter. “Your brother knows that. I don’t do bullshit, Winnie.”
“I know.” Her hand stills. “I danced on the stage. I danced to every song. On a freaking pole. It was my idea.” She shrugs again, but her tone is sour.
I wait.
“And you know what? His music was great. The audience loved him. I got a load of applause. Thanks so much.” The tang of bitterness is in overdrive now.
I scoop an arm around her lower back. “Is Sally home?”
She shakes her head. “School’s out on break. Lanie and Cord came to take her. Again. I actually don’t have work. And I finally got to see Lanie’s belly. She said sorry. Everyone’s fucking sorry.” Not a tear is in sight.
I know this version of Winnie. She can hold out for years on her own. This is Winnie Rand in survival mode. The girl I’m fast falling for. Or maybe I fell for her a long, long time ago, and now I’m seeing who she really is to me, away from Coyote Falls. Who I want us to be.
“You came home alone.” It’s a statement, not a question. I already know the answer.
“Did you want to open the door to Hottie Rock Star McNurse?”
“Fuck it.” I slap my thigh with my other hand, make her jump for shits and giggles, and suppress a grin at the end result anyway. “I knew I got his name wrong.”
Winnie stops shredding flowers like she’s a gothic glitter princess and glares at me. “You are not coming inside.”
“Nope. But you’re coming outside. Go. Shower and pack a bag, or don’t. But you’re heading north with me and Dustan.”
“Who’s Dustan?”
“The kid I’m entering in your brother’s rodeo.
” I take perverse pleasure in her overt shock as Winnie stares at me, her mouth hanging open.
I close it gently and rub my thumb across her jawline.
“It’s okay to need a rebound or two after all the shit that’s happened to you.
I’d just prefer if the rebound wasn’t me. ”
She leans toward me, her eyes sparkling. “You’re entering a rider in Cord’s rodeo.”
“Yeah?” I watch her warily.
“Does he know that you’re doing this?”
“Ah.” I release my hold on her, both jaw and ankle. “No. No, he doesn’t.”
Winnie cuddles her dismembered flowers and bounces on the step, standing to shower me in sparkles. “I have to see this. Hold these.”
Suddenly I’m holding headless flowers and I’m encrusted in glitter. “Winnie?”
She’s back in record time, scrubbed clean with only the random speckle glimmering in her hair. Her eyes are back to their own color, including her black eyelashes that I brush a thumb across to check.
On impulse I lean and kiss her. When she doesn’t pull away, I trace my tongue across her bottom lip and taste her sweet strawberry-and-chocolate flavor. “That’s not toothpaste, gorgeous.”
Winnie pants softly for me, less than decent even when she’s wearing jeans and a white tee that only enhances her full breasts, which I ache to cup and squeeze to hear her moan. I curse Dustan in my head for being in my truck, but I’ve made the younger man wait for us too long already.
“I had a jam donut for breakfast on the way home. So what?” Sassy Winnie is back and she’s sexy as fuck. “Hold this?” She throws her duffel bag at me and saunters toward my truck, stopping when she spies Dustan spread out across the back seat in his purple pants and lime-green shirt. “Ah, West?”
“Yeah?”
“I thought you said he was a rider, not freaking sideshow alley all on his own.”
“He mighta said the same thing a minute ago when you were covered in glitter and neon and wearing hotpants,” I lie. Dustan would have called her a queen. Hell, he still might. “Get in the truck.” I offer the command gently and kiss her again.
“Stop that,” Winnie murmurs, toying with the buttons on my shirt. “Are you going to drop me at Coyote?”
I stare down at her. “If you want.”
She licks her lips. “Where are you staying?”
I shrug. “I don’t know yet. With Dallas. Or maybe in the back of my pickup. I don’t have plans, Winnie. I haven’t for a while now.”
If I thought Winnie’s wide, pretty eyes can’t get any larger, I’m dead wrong.
“You’re drifting from place to place, but you keep getting drawn back to him, don’t you?” She’s still holding on to my shirt.
Breathing is damn hard around her. “I’ll let you know when I figure it out. Do you need to call out of work?”
Winnie shakes her head. “Sally’s on break so I took time off too.” She snorts when I raise an eyebrow. “I actually get those, you know. I just haven’t taken any in a while. Not since…”
She doesn’t have to say it. It’s a problem we share.
“Yeah, same,” I murmur, and kiss the top of her head.
A fist thumps the inside of the truck window. “Are you lovebirds coming or do I have to find another rerun of Friends to watch?”
I huff at Dustan’s not-so-subtle attempt and open the door for Winnie. She climbs into my truck, sends me a glance I can’t decipher over her shoulder, and introduces herself to my other passenger.
And I pray that we will all survive the trip up to Valiant Peak.
The burnt-out foreman, the untried rodeo rider, and the overtired paramedic/single mom. It feels like a joke.
I’m still trying to find the punch line as I head out of town with my ragtag crew to register my rider and find him a bull to befriend.