I am lying to a man who just pinned me against a door and then took me apart with his hands and his mouth and the weight of his body.
A man who carries my brother's death like a debt he can never repay. A man who probably won't forgive himself for not saving Grant, or me for using Grant's death to crawl into his bed and his investigation under a name that isn't mine.
I don't regret what just happened. My body is still humming with the aftermath, my skin still warm where his hands mapped it.
Colt's breathing deepens.
His arm tightens around me, reflexive, pulling me closer even in the drift toward sleep.
The AC unit cycles on with a rattle. A truck door slams somewhere in the parking lot. The motel room settles into the particular stillness of a place that holds too many strangers' secrets, and now it holds ours.
I close my eyes and let the warmth of him pull me under, and the last thought I have before sleep takes me is that I should be scared.
Instead, I press my face into the hollow of his shoulder and let the smell of cedar and sweat and spent adrenaline fill my lungs, and the guilt and the want curl together in my belly until I can't tell where one ends and the other begins.
6
COLT
The morning after is always the test.
The sex was easy, the way falling off a cliff is easy once gravity takes over. The hard part is the daylight, when two people who tore into each other repeatedly in the dark have to look across a motel room and figure out where that leaves them.
Kenna is already out of bed when I wake up. Her side is cold, the pillow dented, the sheets pulled roughly into place like she tried to erase herself from the scene. The bathroom door is open with steam still clinging to the mirror. Her bag is on the chair by the window, and through the gap in the curtains I can see her sitting on the concrete bench outside our door with a coffee and her notebook, already working. She didn't go far. She just put distance between us before I could get a read on her face.
She's a smart woman. Smarter than me, because I'm lying here with the taste of her still on my tongue and the scratch marks on my shoulders still stinging under the sheet, and the only coherent thought I can form is that I want to pull her back into this bed and keep her there until neither of us can walk.
I roll onto my back and stare at the ceiling. My body hasn't caught up to the fact that she's gone. The press of her thighslocked around my hips hasn't faded, the way her spine arched when I hit the right angle, the sound she made when she stopped fighting it and let go. That sound is going to haunt me through every stock pen and every chute on this circuit.
I need to get my head straight. Grant is dead. Merrick is free. The investigation needs a bull rider who can think, not one who's replaying the way a woman's body fit against his in a motel bed outside Albuquerque.
I drag myself into the shower, and the hot water hits the scratches on my back. I grin at the sting. After I shower, I grab my clothes, get dressed, pull on my boots, and grab my hat.
I step outside, and Kenna glances up from her notebook. The morning light catches the freckles across her nose, and for a second neither of us says anything. The bench, the coffee, the notebook. She looks like a woman who's been awake for a while, building walls out of work.
"I'm heading to the pens," I say. "Early rounds before the event."
"Give me ten minutes. I want to get into the press office early and pull payout records from the last two seasons before the event starts." She taps her pen against the notebook. "You do your thing at the pens, I'll do mine in the press box. We compare notes after."
"You eat anything?"
"I had coffee."
"Coffee's not food."
"It is if you drink enough of it." She looks back down at her notebook, dismissing me with a precision that shouldn't be as attractive as it is. "Go start the truck, Holloway. I'll be ready in ten."
She's ready in eight. I notice because I'm watching, and because she walks to the passenger side of my truck like shebelongs there, and the ease of that does something to my head I'm not going to examine right now.
The stock pens behind the Expo New Mexico arena are already loud with livestock. Bulls are being separated into holding pens while handlers run through the sorting chutes, the whole organic machinery of rodeo operations humming along the same way it has for as long as anyone can remember. Dust and manure and the sharp, musky bite of animal sweat hang in the air, and the morning sun turns everything gold and hazy.
I find a spot near the Thornton Livestock trailer and lean against the metal fencing like a man with nowhere particular to be. I pull my hat low, fold my arms, and watch.
Thornton runs six bulls on the Southwest Circuit right now, all hauled in a custom rig with the Thornton Livestock logo in faded red on the sides. Four handlers travel with the stock: two I've seen before, one who's been on the circuit for years, and a fourth I've never laid eyes on until today.
The new guy is young, early twenties at most. He's wiry and twitchy, with dark hair shoved under a ball cap that still has the sticker on the brim. He works the pens well enough, but his head swivels every thirty seconds like he's waiting for someone to put a hand on his shoulder and tell him it's over. He keeps glancing toward the Thornton trailer, toward the parking lot, toward any shadow that moves too fast.
I've seen that body language before, on Vic, Thornton's old bull handler. I'd watched Vic work the pens at a dozen events without thinking twice about him. After Grant told me Vic was the one drugging the animals, I looked back on every interaction and saw it: the same twitchy awareness of a man doing dirty work for people who scare him.
