5. Zack
5
ZACK
Zack:
Polish up those cowboy boots, sugar. We’re going on a road trip.
Hannah:
Where to?
Zack:
I found us a rodeo. It’s two hours from here, so we’ll leave early. I’ll pick you up at eight.
Hannah:
Two hours? I’ll bring a book.
I leaned against the tail of my truck as Hannah proceeded to slather every inch of her exposed skin with sunblock. She was wearing a short-sleeve t-shirt, and even with the neckline that came right up to the base of her throat, it was more skin than I was used to seeing from her and my dick was having thoughts about that. Between the sharp sunlight and whatever was in that sunblock, her skin sparkled like one of those dumbass vampires.
“I feel obligated to warn you, darlin’,” I said. “It might cause a ruckus, me being here.”
Hannah’s pale eyebrows rose a fraction.
I grinned. “I’m kind of a big deal on the rodeo circuit. And since buckle bunnies have been deprived of my company for the past ten months, they might be a hair feral.”
She scrunched up her nose. “Buckle bunnies?”
“Rodeo champions take home a belt buckle, and bunnies take home the prize underneath.” I canted my hips for emphasis and of course her eyes went there. I smirked. “It’s a time-honored tradition.”
She glanced around the half-full lot. No one was paying us any mind as they ambled about, greeting friends and heading into the fairgrounds. She looked back at me dubiously.
“Just wait,” I assured her. “Buckle bunnies don’t tend to be early risers. They’ll show up eventually, and when they do, I’m counting on you for protection.”
She stared at me for a beat, then heaved a sigh as she slipped her bare, sunblocked arms into some shapeless brown sweater thing, which made no fucking sense in this world and also made my dick sad. And that made no sense, either, because there was no shortage of bare arms and bare ankles right here in this very parking lot, some of them even attached to attractive women, but no. My dick didn’t care about any of those . Apparently they had to be Hannah’s bare arms and bare ankles to be of any interest.
“All right,” Hannah said at last. “I’m no use in a physical altercation, but I think I could hurt someone’s feelings if I put my mind to it.”
I burst out laughing. “Hannah Bell, I know you could.”
When her cheeks pinked up a bit, I shook my head and took her by the hand. This woman. She had no inkling that I’d only been teasing—teasing being my preferred method of flirting. I had expected her to giggle and tease me back, but no. This confounding woman continued to do the last thing I expected of anyone.
She took me seriously.
It wasn’t what I had wanted. But damn if it didn’t feel like exactly what I needed.
It was mid-morning, and the rodeo was still slowly coming to life. We had driven two hours south, which was about ten degrees warmer than Aspen Springs. Seventy-two and sunny, perfect rodeo weather. It was going to be a good day.
“What do we do first?” Hannah asked.
“Barrel racing starts in an hour,” I said. “Until then, we wander around and enjoy ourselves.”
“Well,” she said. “All right.”
She dropped my hand. That was fine. I barely even noticed. When was the last time I had held hands with a girl, anyway? Eleventh grade, maybe? It had to be, because that was also the last time I’d had a real girlfriend, the kind where handholding was something we did without thinking much about it. Shit, that was over a decade ago. A decade ago, and now Hannah for thirty seconds?—
“What’s mutton busting?” Hannah asked. She stood by the sheep pen, frowning at the sign that advertised mutton busting at ten a.m. “It’s not…people don’t punch sheep, do they?”
I chuckled. “No, nothing like that. It’s a kiddie event. Five-year-olds ride the sheep for as long as they can hold on.”
She looked downright horrified. “That doesn’t sound better.”
“They wear helmets, sugar. No one’s putting a bunch of babies on an animal without proper protection.”
“Did you ever do it?”
“Hell, yeah, I did.” I smiled, remembering. “It was the closest I could get to the real thing. Mom wasn’t thrilled about it, so one day I hopped right onto a neighbor’s ewe to show her I could do it. The ewe wasn’t too pleased about that and took off. Mom hollered, Mrs. Anderson hollered, but there wasn’t anything they could do to help me. It was about twenty minutes before the ewe decided I wasn’t worth the trouble and stopped to eat some grass. By the time I slid off, my arms were numb. Mom figured there was no point in saying no after that, and at least the rodeo would have some safety precautions, and I’d only be expected to hang on for a minute.”
Hannah looked at me like she was imagining it, her lips curved into a wry smile. “Five years old, and already a wild, wild cowboy.”
“Damn right,” I agreed.
After barrel racing, we grabbed lunch. There were a few women who glanced my way with recognition in their eyes, and I was quick to pull Hannah in front of me like a shield. Not out of necessity, but because I liked it. Only one of those women seemed to take it as a challenge. She tossed her hair with a smile that suggested we had seen each other naked and reached for my bicep, but Hannah shifted against me, blocking her hand.
“No, thank you,” she said firmly.
The woman paused and looked at me with confusion in her eyes. She looked familiar, and I tried to recall when I had last passed through this town, but for the life of me, I couldn’t remember her name. I shrugged.
Her gaze dipped to Hannah’s, and whatever she saw there had her backing right on out of my personal space. I grinned. I couldn’t see Hannah’s face, but I had the feeling I knew the expression.
“You might as well hold my hand.” I twined our fingers together as I pulled her along to the bronc event. “Safer that way.”
“You realize you could just tell them no?”
“Of course I realize that. I also realize that I like it better when you tell them no.”
She scrunched her nose at me. “You just want me to do your dirty work.”
But she didn’t let go of my hand.
“You’re going to love this,” I told Hannah as we took front-row seats in the arena.
She settled onto the hard plastic seat with a swish of her skirt. “You might be biased. This is your event, so of course you think it’s the best one.”
“It is the best one,” I insisted. “Rodeo events are micro-tests of real-life cowboy skills. So you’ve got the roping tests and the riding tests. Roping events test a cowboy’s relationship with a well-trained horse. It’s about how well they do a job together. Bronc riding is different. It’s a test of how well you can ride when a horse wants nothing to do with you. It’s not about controlling the animal. It’s about instinct. It’s about the ride.” I stared out at the empty arena. I could almost feel the sweat on my neck, taste the adrenaline in my mouth. “But that’s not why I think you’ll love it.”
She pushed up her glasses. “Then why?”
“Eight seconds.” The memory of her twitching while I raced to get dressed made me grin. “It’s a timed event. I have a feeling these eight seconds are going to make you lose your mind, sugar.”
The way she looked at me, I knew she was remembering, too. It was an odd thing to share a memory with someone, to know what was on her mind, and know that she knew the same thing was on mine. It felt like the space between us dissolved, even though neither of us moved.
“We’ll see,” she said, but she didn’t say it like she doubted it. She said it like she hoped for it.
At the ding, the first pair sprung out of the chute. The horse, Badlands Betty, didn’t waste a millisecond before throwing out her hind legs. Betty was a fantastic ride. She bucked hard and true and rarely changed direction. Before every buck, she went airborne, bounding forward with all four hooves off the ground, before landing on her front legs and shooting her back legs higher than her rider’s head.
At second four, Hannah moved to the edge of her seat.
At second six, she brought her hands to her cheeks.
At seven-point-six, she covered her mouth and let out a muffled shriek.
When the buzzer sounded at eight seconds, she didn’t move, didn’t holler or clap like the rest of us. She stayed just as she was, her hands on her face, for another ten seconds or so, then slowly let her breath out in a big whoosh and lowered her hands to her lap.
“My goodness,” she whispered. “My goodness.”
I grinned. Yep, my fussy librarian had lost her damn mind, all right.
My grin faded slowly as it hit me hard how much I loved this. The rodeo. The cheers, the smells, the excitement and energy of it all. But most of all, I loved the ride.
And that was the thing I couldn’t have anymore.
“Do you miss it?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “I miss it.”
She chewed her lip, thinking. “Are you…done for good? Your leg won’t ever heal well enough for you to bronc ride again?”
“It’s not only my leg,” I said. “I don’t know if my leg will ever heal enough for me to be a top bronc rider again, but that’s not what forced me out. It’s the conglomerate of issues, I guess. I fractured my spine, too. That actually healed the fastest, but there’s a big risk of breaking my back even worse. And then there’s my spleen. I don’t have one anymore. I took a hoof to the chest and it ruptured my spleen. Doctors had to take it out. That means I’m more likely to get an infection, and if I get an infection, I’m more likely to die.” I held up my wrist. “That’s what this bracelet is for. So if I end up injured, the doctors know what to look out for.”
She looked out at the arena, where the next rider was bucked off the horse in under five seconds. “And you’re fairly likely to get injured bronc riding, I suppose.”
I cracked a smile. “It’s pretty common, in my experience. I’ve had my fair share of surgeries even before the big one. Without a spleen, every surgery has a high risk of infection.” I looked down at my leg. “I nearly lost my leg from infection this time around. I’m not interested in losing limbs or dying of sepsis in a hospital bed.”
Her head tilted. “Wasn’t that always the risk with bronc riding?”
“Maybe. I never thought of it that way though. To me, it was all or nothing.”
“What do you mean?”
“I…” I swallowed. “I didn’t plan on getting maimed. Bronc riding…it’s the sort of thing that takes everything you have to give. Anyone who ended their career wounded, I figured they just weren’t trying hard enough. It should have killed them. It should have killed me. I never considered I’d make it out alive.” Which meant I’d never considered what I’d do with the rest of my life. What the hell was supposed to get me out of bed every day? I’d never had a Plan B.
“You never wanted to? Make it out alive, I mean?”
I looked at her, mildly shocked that she’d even ask me that. No one else would have. But then, no one else would have wanted to hear my answer, either. I had the notion she wanted to hear it, without any preconceived idea of who I should be or how I should feel. She wanted to know what was inside me, and she would patiently sit there forever, as long as it took, for me to tell her.
It felt like a hug, the way she looked at me. Like something I wanted to burrow into.
I blew out a breath. “No,” I said. “No, I never wanted to.”
And she nodded, like that made sense.
I knew a couple of the cowboys in the bronc riding competition, so we headed to the back to say hello. I knew some of the horses, too, and I gave them each a pat as I introduced them to Hannah.
“They don’t bite?” she asked nervously as I stroked the white blaze on Cactus’s dark face.
“Not if you don’t give them a reason to. Despite how it looks in the arena, these horses aren’t wild. They were trained for this. Starting when they’re two or three years old, they learn to wear the surcingle and a dummy weight. Bucking feels natural to them and they get rewarded for that because after they buck a few times, the dummy falls off. These horses are athletes. They know their job.”
Hannah gave his cheek a tentative pat and he snuffled her. She laughed. “And their job is to buck off the rider?”
“Their job is to buck off the rider,” I agreed. “It’s the rider’s job to stay on. The score is a result of how long and how well they do that together. Both the horse and rider earn scores on a scale of zero to fifty, for a combined score up to one hundred. For the cowboy, they’re judged on control and technique. The horse, though…” I grinned. “The horse earns points for bad behavior. The meaner the bronc, the higher the score.”
“Is Cactus mean?” she asked, rubbing his cheek. “He doesn’t seem mean.”
“He’s not so mean anymore. We had a few rides together a couple years back, when he was younger, stronger, and meaner.” I gave him an affectionate tickle under his jaw. “We had some good times together, didn’t we, boy?”
“You remember a horse from an eight-second ride a couple years ago?”
“Every horse. Every ride.”
She looked at me for a long moment, her expression soft. “Well, how about that. The wild, wild cowboy is sentimental.”
I laughed and took her elbow to move her along to the next horse. “Cowboying is a hard, dirty life. You need sentiment to spruce it up a bit. Now, this here is Barracuda. I rode him, too. Most of the horses you see here today have been around awhile. They don’t do the big, hard competitions anymore. Eventually they’ll retire, hopefully to a pasture or training facility.”
I moseyed over to a brown-and-white Paint mare and rubbed her nose. “Hey, pretty girl.”
Hannah took notice of the name on the stall and served me a look. “Navajo Princess? Really?”
“The whole cowboy-versus-Native lore still runs deep here. They probably meant it as a compliment.” I paused, considering. The Hales had arrived in Aspen Springs, dirty and penniless, a decade after it had been taken from the Arapaho tribe who had lived there for ten thousand years. We might not have done it ourselves, but we sure had benefitted from it. There wasn’t a speck of land in this country that didn’t have a similar history. That was the kind of debt that could never be fully repaid, but the very least we could do was stop romanticizing it. “I can see how it wouldn’t be taken as such, though.”
We moved on to a bay I didn’t know, but gave him pets too, just to be fair about it. Horses had a tendency to notice injustice and not take kindly to it. There was something about the look in his eye that struck me, so I checked his name and looked up his stats on my phone.
“He’s a young one. If he proves himself, he’ll work his way up to the bigger rodeos. Same sire as Hurricane Red.”
“Hurricane Red?” Hannah looked at me quizzically.
“My last ride.” I rubbed his brother’s nose. “He’d clear a solid three feet of air before every buck. We won that round, you know.”
Hannah pushed her glasses up, blinking at me. “How? How could you win after—” She stopped abruptly.
“After he stomped me?” I supplied with a smirk. “I stayed on for all eight seconds. Whatever happens after the buzzer sounds doesn’t count.”
“Is Hurricane Red here?” she asked, looking around like he might materialize out of thin air.
I hooted. “You wouldn’t find Hurricane Red in a small rodeo like this, honey. They save him for the big rides. He’ll go down in history as one of the greatest broncs of all times, you mark my words.”
“Won’t see him anywhere no more,” a familiar voice cut in, and I turned to see Will Stevenson, another bronc rider. “How you been, Zack?”
“Hey, Will.” We did that half-handshake, half-hug thing and ended up clapping each other on the back. “They tell me I’m doing great, and they wouldn’t lie about that, would they? This is Hannah Bell. She’s putting on a charity rodeo for the Aspen Springs library. Thought I would take her to one so she could see what it was all about.”
Will smiled at her, though the look he sent me was quizzical. “Nice to meet you, Hannah. I’m Will. Zack and I have been through a lot of rodeos together.”
“What did you mean about not seeing Hurricane Red anymore?” I asked. “Did they retire him?” That would surprise me. He was at the top of his game and running me over hadn’t hurt him any.
Will shook his head. “Nah. He’s too young for that. But he’s out of the rodeo circuit now. That accident of yours wrecked his mind up good. He won’t get in the chute anymore. Can’t drag him, can’t force him, can’t bribe him. Word is, he’s going to auction.”
Auction .
The word hit me like a sucker punch.
I knew what auction meant for a horse like Hurricane Red. He’d been trained to buck any rider off his back and convincing him to try something new would be damn near impossible. He was gelded, so keeping him for stud wasn’t an option, either.
But he was a big warmblood, a cross between a Clydesdale and a quarter horse. There was a lot of meat on his bones.
Hurricane Red was going to slaughter.
When Hannah offered to drive us back, I didn’t protest. It had been a long day, and the thought of folding my aching body into the driver’s seat did not appeal. That was part of the healing process no one had warned me about. Lifting your foot back and forth between the gas and brake pedals, even just keeping constant pressure on the gas, used a shit ton of muscles from your abdomen all the way down to your toes. Driving fucking hurt.
With Hannah in the driver’s seat—looking fucking adorable and completely out of place, I might add—I pushed my seat back as far as it would go and took the opportunity to stretch my body and massage sore muscles. Hopefully it would be enough to keep me mobile tomorrow.
I tucked Hurricane Red to the back of my mind, even though I knew he was going to poke back out again at three a.m. We spent the two-hour drive talking about the rodeo for the library, what events we would include—barrel racing and mutton busting seemed to be her top priorities, but reining and roping events would be the headliners—and what permits and insurance we would need. Brax was handling that part of the rodeo, but I told Hannah I’d check in with him to make sure he had everything he needed to keep us out of trouble.
And then suddenly we were pulling into her driveway after what felt like maybe thirty minutes. I hustled out of the truck so I could open the driver’s door for her and help her down.
“You don’t have to walk me to my door,” she said.
“It feels good to move,” I countered, and it was true, but I would have seen her to the door even if I’d had to crawl on my hands and knees behind her. Not because I doubted her ability to make it the twenty feet from my truck to her porch, but because I had manners. Some traditions were worth keeping, even when they didn’t make a whole lot of rational sense. She could drive my truck anytime she wanted, but she sure as fuck wasn’t walking to her door alone.
She unlocked the door and stepped just past the threshold. A white ball of fluff made a beeline for her ankles. With a laugh, Hannah scooped Evie into her arms and plopped a kiss between her ears, then turned back to me. “Do you want to come in for coffee?”
I leaned against the doorframe, half in and half out, not entirely committed to either course of action. “It’s coming up on eight o’clock, darlin’. If I have coffee now, I’ll be wide awake until it’s time to feed the horses at dawn.”
Her glasses slid down a fraction. With her arms full of cat, she couldn’t do much about it besides scrunch her nose. I had the oddest inclination to take care of it for her, to slide my finger up the slope of her nose and gently place her glasses back where they belonged, but I crossed my arms instead. Fuck, those blue eyes would be the death of me.
“I assumed a man of your experience would understand that by coffee, I meant sex,” she said.
I stared at her. It shouldn’t have knocked the wind out of me like it did. I had been propositioned hundreds of times, but never quite like this. Never so bluntly and never without so much as a kiss to warm things up. Never by a prim little librarian so deeply buried in yards of extra clothing that I had no idea what I would find under there.
I was fucking charmed .
Charmed, and horny.
I hadn’t had sex since the accident. Hadn’t even made use of my own hand. Before Hurricane Red stomped all over my body, nine months without sex was as unthinkable as nine years. Hell, I had never gone even nine days . But to be honest, I hadn’t missed it. I’d missed wanting it. But the actual act itself? No interest at all.
Now, I was interested.
“Hell, yes, I want to come in for coffee, Hannah Bell.”