“Whatcha lookin’ at, Uncle Ry?” Junie swings her little legs. She’s the daughter of my older brother Sawyer’s girlfriend, Ava. “Is it my beautiful cowgirl boots? I’m sorry, but you can’t have them. Also, can I have some of that popcorn?”
Now I’m the one smiling as I set the bucket in her lap. “I got my own boots.”
I drop my beer in a nearby cupholder. Lifting my leg, I pull back my jeans just enough to show off the pair of Bellamy Brooks boots I’ve been wearing nonstop since Duke gave them to me for our birthday back in July. “Not as sparkly as yours, granted?—”
“Because ours are better.” That’s Ella, my four-year-old niece, who sits next to Junie. “It’s just a fact.”
Sawyer, Ella’s dad, holds up his hands. “Whoa whoa whoa. Them’s fightin’ words, you know. Auntie Mollie and Auntie Wheeler made Uncle Ry’s boots.”
Mollie, the wife of my older brother Cash, and her college roommate Wheeler—my twin brother Duke’s girlfriend and soon-to-be mother of their twins, whom they’ll welcome over the holidays—started a fashion boot company, Bellamy Brooks, in their college dorm room years ago.
Now their boots are featured in big-time magazines. They’ve made so much money they even hired Duke to help them design and manufacture a men’s collection.
“Hey.” Duke narrows his eyes at Sawyer. “You’re forgetting one very important member of the Bellamy Brooks operation.”
Cash rolls his eyes. He’s got his infant daughter, Daisy, strapped to his chest in a carrier. She’s conked out, a pair of baby headphones in pink covering her little ears.
He absently moves the knuckle of his first finger across her chubby cheek. “Dude, the entire population of Texas knows you got the job. You’ve told everyone and their mother about it.”
“Nothing wrong with that.” Wheeler brushes Duke’s hair out of his face as she peers into his eyes. “Shout it from the rooftops, baby. I’m proud of you.”
He puts a hand on her pregnant belly. “Blue, I’m proud of us.”
There’s a tiny spasm inside my breastbone. An electric shock. Digging my first two fingers into the spot, I rub it until the unpleasant feeling is gone.
I’m happy for Duke. Honestly. Even if he and Wheeler are the kind of cute together that borders on sickening. He’s always had a serious case of wanderlust, and it was pure kismet that he fell for a girl who dreams as big as he does.
He and Wheeler have been together for all of six months, but they’ve already visited a dozen new places. Maybe more. All thiswhile she’s been pregnant too. They had a little too much fun on their very first road trip back in the spring, and three weeks later, Wheeler got a positive result on a pregnancy test.
If the past year has taught me anything, it’s that my brothers move fast. All four of them have paired off with excellent women over the span of a little more than twelve months. We’ve had lots to celebrate: engagements, new jobs, new opportunities, weddings, babies.
But time in Hartsville moves slowly, which is more my speed. I’m not jealous of my brothers. I’ve made my choices, same as Cash and Wyatt and Sawyer and Duke made theirs. I’m okay with how the chips have fallen.
Yeah, I may have shut off parts of myself when my parents died. I was only fourteen, and I had to figure out a way to keep going somehow without falling apart.
Out here in cattle country, you do what you have to in order to survive.
Case in point: I was able to survive another big blow when our mentor, Garrett Luck—Mollie’s dad—passed suddenly last year. It was a shitty time, but my brothers and I were able to make some lemonade out of those lemons by working our fingers to the bone.
Work is what keeps me sane. I consider it an offshoot of the therapy I had when I was little. Being around animals helped me then. Definitely helps now.
Ava, Sawyer’s girlfriend and Junie’s mom, gently nudges me with her elbow as she nods at the arena. “Billie is gonna be so thrilled you came, Ryder. She’s been working hard. I think she has a real shot to win this thing.”
Dipping my hand into the popcorn perched on Junie’s lap, I wink at her. She winks back.
“I actually just saw Billie.”
Ava chuckles. “She asked you to be her good luck charm, didn’t she?”
I turn to her, leaning in so I can hear her above the growing noise of the crowd. “She sure did. Didn’t she just pick it up? Racing? I’m kinda surprised she’d want to be back in the saddle like this after working in her daddy’s office for so long.”
Billie is the Wallace Ranch’s in-house accountant. Her old man began her education in the ranch’s finances early, so it was no surprise that she ended up with a degree in accounting after she graduated high school.
As a former pro barrel racer, Ava’s been running the cloverleaf since she was a kid. It’s a rodeo sport where a rider on horseback runs a cloverleaf pattern around three barrels as quickly as possible. When Ava became head of the Wallace Ranch’s barrel racing training program last fall, Billie Wallace signed up for some lessons.
I’m not sure why Billie wants to race. She’s still young—twenty-four—but most barrel racers start when they’re really young, like Ava.
Here we are, though, about to watch Billie run her first official race at the Hart County Rodeo.
