Page 12 of Firefly Embers

I did my best not to stare at her heart-shaped ass as she walked through the stables toward where the horse she often rode was ready to be tacked up for the day, but the way her jeans curved over her hips and molded to her legs had me adjusting myself discreetly.

Even if my brain kept saying no, my cock kept saying yes, please.

As if she could feel my eyes boring a hole in her back, she looked over her shoulder at me, flicking her hair behind her as she winked.

I rolled my eyes, feigning indifference, but the truth was she could have worn a feed sack and I would have thought she was the most beautiful woman in the room.

Unfortunately for me, Ray knew how to press my buttons, and she loved watching me squirm.

Trailing behind her, her sister Isabella, Izzy for short, stopped to pat me on the shoulder in solidarity.

Izzy was everything Ray wasn’t. She was still stunning in her own right, but she was tall, lean, and vicious. She knew the dangerous game that Ray and I had been playing over the years and was highly team “fuck and move on” as she liked to call it.

I had been training Izzy for the greater part of five years now, after I retired from the rodeo circuit.

She was only fourteen months younger than Ray but had been spared the parenting nuances that came along with being the oldest. Ray had taken the brunt of those responsibilities, and it showed in her protectiveness over her siblings.

Izzy was wild, sometimes a little reckless, and it absolutely benefited her when she was competing, but sometimes I wondered if it translated into her personal life a little too much.

She was a champion barrel racer, having numerous buckles and sponsorships to her name. She had trained under another rodeo star previously, but when I’d opened my training business, she had gladly jumped ship to help me get my feet off the ground, and I was thankful to her for believing in me.

She was a natural on her horse, Oakley, and had the winning streak to prove it. She had been on the circuit at the same time as me but was young and still had quite a few years of racing left in her. She rode hard and played harder.

Eventually, that lifestyle would catch up with her, but I hoped that with enough influence from Ray, she wouldn’t end up broken like I had.

“When you’re done staring at my sister’s ass, I’d like to run through some drills in prep for December.”

For fuck’s sake, that girl had no filter. I was used to barrel racers being a little crazy, but Izzy took it to another level. She could pal around with the best of the guys and never blink an eye at their crudity.

Yep, today was about to be fucking fantastic.

Pops and I made quick work of tacking up Oakley for Izzy and Sunset, one of our more docile mares, for Ray.

She wasn’t here every day that Izzy came to train, but when she had a break in clients, she liked to come out and take one of the horses out on the trails for a while. She said it helped clear her head when she was stuck in a design rut to get out in nature. She claimed it helped calm her mind. Half the time, I assumed she came out here just to torture me.

After we got the horses tacked, Izzy led Oakley out to the dirt corral where I’d already set up her barrels for training. She didn’t need much coaching, but she liked to have an additional set of eyes on her stance the closer it got to competition time. She often dropped one of her shoulders on turn three and needed constant reminding to keep her core tight.

Instead of watching the younger Cortez sister, my eyes were glued to Ray as she placed her booted feet in the stirrups and mounted Sunset with ease. She had come a long way in her riding since the first time I’d gotten her on a horse, and a sense of pride flooded through me watching her trot off toward the trails.

“You two ever going to sort your shit out?” Pops grumbled from behind me, dusting the hay off his jeans from spreading it in the empty stalls.

“No shit to sort out,” I grumbled back.

It was the same old song and dance around here constantly. Everyone knew Ray and I were head over heels for each other, and they’d been pushing us together for years. Neither Ray nor I had ever crossed that line—well, except once, that neither of us has talked about since.

What if we did, and things didn’t work out? I’d lose the best friend I’d ever had, and I don’t know that I would survive that. Ray was my center, my true north. She had been there for me through thick and thin, and I couldn’t take a chance of losing her.

I looked over at Pops, who was shaking his head and chuckling lightly, muttering something about “stupid fuckin’ cowboys.”

“Have I ever told you the story of how your ma and I started datin’?” he asked. I could hear the hurt in his voice just mentioning Ma, and it gutted me, but the fact that he was bringing her up willingly had me listening intently.

“Only about fifty times,” I responded, not knowing where he was heading with this.

“Your mother…” He cleared his throat, emotion threatening to take over. “Your mother was my saving grace. She walked through hell to pull me from the rubble I called a life. She was kind. She was beautiful. And for some reason, she thought the sun rose and set with me, a rugged ass cowboy without a care in the world.”

I didn’t dare interrupt his reminiscing. It wasn’t often we talked about Ma since she’d passed. She was the glue that held our family together, and without her, we spent a lot of time picking up the pieces to put our lives back together. But here’s the thing—no matter how you piece something broken back together, it never quite fits the same again.

“She brought me back to life when all I could see was darkness. She saw something good in me that I couldn’t see myself. Your ma was the kind of woman who wouldn’t ever give up, no matter how many times I pushed her away.”