“He was.” I turned my hat in my hands. “I had my first title at twenty-two. Second one at twenty-five. Third at twenty-seven. Every one of them loud and fast and over by morning. I’d move on to the next town, next ride. Nobody in the passenger seat.”
“Is it how you thought it would be?” I realized she didn’t know anything about the rodeo and what I meant when I told her I’d won titles. She didn’t know about the fame and money. She just wanted to know my story.
“At twenty-two, it was everything. Now, it’s starting to feel like a very long road to nowhere.”
She was quiet for a long moment, missing nothing in my tone. The expression on my face. “What do you want? Now?”
Nobody asked me that. Not Carl, not Lucinda, not the reporters who’d been interviewing me for a decade. They asked about the next ride and the next title and the busted shoulder and the comeback. Nobody asked what I wanted.
“Something that stays in one place. Something that’s mine.” I looked at her. “Carl’s got forty acres adjacent to the south pasture. Good water. Good land.”
“You’d ranch.”
“I’d stay. That’s the part that matters.”
She looked at me for a long moment missing nothing, and I looked back, and the creek moved between its banks and the morning was warm around us.
“Now tell me your story, Jamie. What man didn’t appreciate you?” I kept my voice easy, though my chest tightened just thinking about it. “Who was he?”
I actually wanted to know his name. I wanted to find him and show him how a real man treated a woman.
She picked up a small rock and turned it between her fingers.
“My last relationship.” She set the rock down. “His name was Charles. He wasn’t a very nice man after I got to know him. He liked the idea of a quiet, polite librarian, but he didn’t like the reality of me.”
My jaw went tight with anger as I read between the lines. He hadn’t liked her sass or her curves. Some men were fucking idiots. “How long did it last?”
That made her smile, a small self-deprecating thing, and I frowned. What the hell had she had to endure? “Just a few months. Then Paige happened.”
“Did she come to your rescue?”
“More like slapped me silly until I rescued myself.”
“He was an idiot.”
“He really was.”
“A blind, fucking stupid idiot.”
That made her smile bigger, and happier.
I looked at her in the dappled shade from the pines. The swell of her breasts, the curve of her hip. The mouth I wanted tokiss again. The way she sat with her feet in the water like she’d been coming to this creek her whole life.
“For what it’s worth, I’m real glad I don’t have to get on a bull right now.”
“What?” She looked at me, her guard dropping another inch as she tried to figure out what I meant.
“You were mine the second you walked into my cabin. Thinking about having you underneath me would get me thrown in about two seconds flat.”
The color that climbed her face this time was slow, and she bit her lip, but the laugh came out anyway.
“That’s—” she started.
“True,” I said.
“Completely insane is what it is.”
“That, too.”
