I already know the answer.
CHAPTER FOUR
Dakota
I’m four Lone Stars in and I’m not drunk.
I want to be clear about that.
I’m not drunk. I’m not sloppy. I’m not making decisions I’ll regret in the morning with mascara on my pillow and a headache from hell.
I’m loose. There’s a massive difference there, and don’t let anyone tell you differently.
Loose is the place between sober and stupid where my mouth stops asking my brain for permission.
Loose is the thing my mother used to get on Crown and ginger ale at barbecues, and it made her funny, sharp, and a little bit mean, and people either loved it or got out of the way.
I got her mouth. That’s the thing nobody warns you about—you can lose a woman entirely, she can text you twenty-two words and vanish from your life, yet you still open your mouth and she comes out.
Four beers. A fire burning down to coals.
My sister beside me on the bench smelling like baby shampoo and exhaustion.
My father across the yard with his arm around a woman who isn’t my mother holding a baby.
And Spur at the fence.
Stillat that damn fence.
I went up to him an hour ago, threw my best pitch, asked him straight when it was going to stop—the avoiding, the Austin trips, the eight-year performance of a man pretending he doesn’t feel what his whole body is screaming.
He didn’t answer.
But he almost smiled. And I caught it. And I remember it in the place where I keep every scrap of evidence that Spur wants me, which is a place that’s eight years thick and growing.
So.
If he won’t come to me, I’ll go to him.
And if going to him doesn’t work, I’ll make it so he can’t walk away without the whole club watching.
My mother’s mouth. My father’s stubbornness. A combination that has never once in the history of my family produced anything resembling a good idea.
But here we are.
It starts with Thunder.
Thunder’s three whiskeys past useful and he’s telling a story about the mustang in the round pen.
The black one. Sixteen hands of don’t-fucking-touch-me that’s been on the compound for six weeks and hasn’t let a single human within twenty feet.
“That horse is the devil’s kind,” Thunder says. He’s leaning back in his chair with his arms crossed and the authority of a man who has never broken a horse in his life but has strong opinions about them. “I’m telling you. That thing’s gonna kill somebody.”
A few brothers laugh.
Bullseye says something about Thunder being scared of a horse that weighs less than his truck.
Thunder tells Bullseye to go stand in the pen himself if he’s so brave.
