20. Zack
20
ZACK
I t turned out that stealing a horse from a slaughter processing plant was ridiculously easy.
No one paid any attention to us as I entered the horse pen. Hurricane Red was the only one who kicked up any fuss. Having just been released from a long twenty-four hours spent cooped up in a loud, smelly, bumpy truck, he had absolutely no interest in going back through that shipping container. I had a feeling he knew another truck was waiting for him on the other side and he wanted no part of that. Hurricane Red had always been too smart for his own good.
With him acting out, tossing his head high to keep it out of my reach, it took me a while to slip the halter over his nose and ears. But I finally managed it and brought his face close to mine so we were eyeball to eyeball. “I’m trying to save your hide. Show a little gratitude, would you?”
Hurricane Red snorted, and swear to god, it sounded like a curse word. I’d found myself on his back three times and I remembered each one. The first time had been a winning ride for me. The second time, he’d bucked me off in a heartbreaking 7.3 seconds. And the last one…well, let’s call that a draw.
I knew he remembered that last ride, too. That’s why he was here, in this fucking feedlot waiting for someone to brand him with an S for slaughter. He was here because he remembered our last ride so well that he refused to go out there again.
So, yeah, I knew he remembered that ride. But I didn’t think he remembered me . But maybe there was something that felt familiar to him, something good that made him willing to take a chance on me, because his nostrils flared and he lowered his head.
Maybe he trusted me. Or maybe he took note of the horse laying down on its side, preternaturally still, in the adjacent pen. Maybe he caught the scent of death.
Whatever it was, he let me lead him back through the shipping container and practically jogged into the horse trailer attached to my truck.
Hannah was behind the wheel, engine running, and the second I was in the passenger seat, she hit the gas without waiting for me to buckle up.
“You make a damn fine getaway driver,” I said as I got myself situated.
“I didn’t want anyone to try to stop us. I would have had to run them over.” Her eyes darted up to the rearview mirror, her shoulders bunched around her ears, checking to see if anyone was following us.
I chuckled. “Run them over?”
Her lips flattened into a grim line. “Run. Them. Over.”
And that’s when I realized she had seen the dead horse, too.
Hannah plugged her phone into the dashboard and typed in Jeremiah’s address. I winced when the directions popped up on the screen. Mercy River Ranch was a seven-hour drive from here. Of course, Aspen Springs was still fourteen hours away, barring traffic and accidents, so Hurricane Red was in for another long road trip, whether he liked it or not. It was better than slaughter.
Kind of hard to explain that to a horse, though.
The map told us we’d pull into Mercy River sometime early evening. Hannah called her brother to let him know. He pretended like it was brand-new information, even though we all knew he was tracking her through her phone. Still, he sounded really excited to see her, so I’d refrain from forming an opinion until I’d actually met the guy.
With Hannah driving, I pushed my seat as far back as I could to stretch my tight muscles and took the opportunity to get some work done on the charity rodeo. Everything was coming together. Brax had emailed me copies of the various permits we needed last night, and now I pulled them up on my phone and spent some time looking over them to make sure I understood what they all meant. I didn’t actually understand most of it, but Brax had included very thorough notes, so that helped.
“Permits are in order,” I told Hannah, still scrolling through the information on my phone. “I also just got the contract for the porta potties, too. I forwarded it to my dad.” I made a note to follow up on that later. Paperwork wasn’t Dad’s friend.
“That’s great. Thank you.”
She gave me a quick smile before gluing her gaze to the windshield again. Hannah wasn’t one-hundred-percent comfortable driving my truck with the trailer attached, I had noticed on our drive out to Shelby, and she was even less so now that there was a real live horse in that trailer. But she hadn’t complained once, and I knew that if I offered to drive the whole way, she would refuse.
Maybe I should have felt guilty about that, because it was my fucking broken body that made her so determined to do her share, after all. But I didn’t. Not even a little bit. She was doing perfectly fine. Being scared didn’t make her incompetent, and I wasn’t one bit worried that she would get us to Mercy River Ranch safely and all in one piece. Even if it meant white-knuckling the steering wheel the whole way there.
But that was the thing about her, I realized.
Driving this trailer. Wearing clothes she had grown up believing were sinful. Wrangling a wild cowboy into sex lessons. Hell, I couldn’t imagine the amount of courage it had taken for her to run away from the sick bastard who had married her, leave her family behind, and start a new life in a world that must have seemed like something out of science fiction to her.
Hannah Bell was damn good at doing the thing that scared her.
And more than anything, I wanted to be the man standing next to her while she did them. Protecting her if necessary, but mostly I just wanted to support her.
“Did I tell you the high school equestrian drill team agreed to perform?” Hannah asked. When I shook my head, she continued, “I meant to, but forgot with the whole Hurricane Red debacle. I talked to their coach Friday. It’s all worked out. They’ll do a show at four, right before the closing ceremonies.”
“Great. I’ll add it to the schedule.” Since we were keeping things small and only working with one arena, none of the events could overlap. We also needed time between each event to clean the ring, if necessary, and get set up. “Which reminds me, I reached out to some rodeo buddies about entering the roping competition. Their names will draw a bigger crowd. They said they’d be happy to come.”
“That’s great!” She was so excited she took one hand off the steering wheel to slap against her thigh like she was giving me a one-handed round of applause. I laughed. “Thank you again for doing this. To be honest, I thought it was a long shot when I walked into the Painted Cat that night. I mean, you don’t even use the library. I was prepared to bribe and beg, but you didn’t make me do any of that. I don’t know why you said yes, but I’m so glad you did. I don’t know how I would have gotten this done without you.”
I shrugged even as I internally basked in her praise. “It’s a rodeo. Of course I said yes.”
I said yes to most everything people asked of me. Crappy ranch chores, favors small and large, a ride home. So asking me to help with a rodeo…I missed rodeo something fierce, and it was hard as hell watching cowboys ride out a bucking bronc, knowing that would never be me again. But I didn’t love it less for that ache. Of course I said yes.
The truth was, just about anyone could have asked me to help put on a rodeo, and I would have said yes.
The other truth was that Hannah Bell could have asked me to stand on my head, fully nude, and sing all the lyrics to The Cowboy in Me in the middle of Aspen Springs, and I would have done it.
The map did not lie. We turned off the highway onto a long gravel drive shortly after dusk. But Hannah did not relax. If anything, she got more nervous.
“I feel obligated to warn you. Jeremiah is…” She chewed her lip. “Well, he’s a big old teddy bear, really.” She paused. “A grizzly teddy bear.”
I smirked. “I’m not concerned, duchess.”
She gave me a dubious look that clearly stated, you should be .
“All right.” I chuckled. “Tell me about him, then.”
“Well, we grew up the same way. At the compound. He was banished at fourteen. The elders said he had sinned, and he could come back when he had repented. But they didn’t even tell him what sin he had committed. They just dropped him on the outskirts of a town two hours away and left him there to fend for himself.” Her voice pitched high with indignation. “He wasn’t the only one, either. There were so many boys they sent away. Every year, they banished a handful more.”
My forehead wrinkled. “Why would they do that?” It didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. In a rural community like that, with heavily dictated male and female roles, wouldn’t they need able male bodies for farming?
“I’ve thought about it a lot since I left. You know, they never sent away girls. And I think…that’s it. All the men had multiple wives. At least three, but sometimes even more. But the birthrate doesn’t change across history unless you do something to make it change. It’s always a pretty close fifty-fifty split of male and female babies. There weren’t enough women to go around, not when men expected to have three of them apiece.”
I felt sick. Fucking hell. “How did he survive?”
“The town where they dropped him…It’s common enough that there are now community organizations there to set up Lost Boys—that’s what they call them, the kids who were banished—with foster families and group homes. He joined the army at seventeen.”
“And now he’s at Mercy River?”
She nodded. “He went in on the land with some of his squadron when the land was still cheap. It was their retirement plan. The cattle operation came with the land, but it wasn’t enough to make a living from. So, they kept that going, but it’s also a guest ranch. Not really one of those dude ranches set up for families. More like…recuperation.”
“Like a resort or a spa?”
She laughed. “I dare you to say that to his face.” Her nose scrunched. “On second thought, please don’t. I’m growing rather fond of your face and I don’t think it will fare well.”
“That so? In that case, darlin’, I’ll do my best to take care of it for you.”
Her mouth pursed like she was going to say something sharp and sarcastic, but we pulled up to the ranch house, where a man was leaning against a porch pillar, and instead she said, “There he is.”
There he was, all right. A grizzly bear of a man, with a shotgun in one hand.