Page 92

He walks back behind the chutes, away from the lot and the highway, and starts unbuckling his rigging for tomorrow's short round.

The timed events load after saddle bronc. At the vet station outside the steer wrestling box, Laney runs her hands down the sorrel's left front leg from knee to pastern while Wade Ashcroft holds the lead rope. The owner leases the gelding to Slade for a percentage, and the sorrel stands for Laney as if he's been waiting all week for her.

"Cold and tight," she says, and straightens. "He's sound."

"Told you," Slade says.

"You told me in a text message shorter than a feed tag." She pulls off her gloves. "I prefer a medical history."

Wade turns a bronze chip over his knuckles and back again. He catches me watching and holds it up between two fingers so I can read the number stamped into the metal. Then he pockets it.

"I walk the rows between sections," he says. "Keeps my hands busy."

"Rider Watch," I say.

"That's what the placards call it." He hands Slade the lead rope. "Mostly it's cowboys who got tired of pretending they didn't see things."

Quinn Gallagher rides up on the bay gelding, already warmed up, his rope coiled on the horn. He nods to Slade. Then he nods to me, and it's the first time he's looked at me straight since the day agents walked Clint out through the roping string.

"I'm hazing for him today," Quinn says, unprompted. "My new partner's a kid out of Tularosa who can rope anything with legs. He's got the afternoon off."

"You're still here," I say.

"I roped with Clint for years. For a while, I figured that made his business mine." He gathers his reins. "It doesn't. What Clint did belongs to Clint, and I'm done putting my name beside his."

He rides toward the hazer's box. Wade and Laney walk off together toward the trailer rows, her shoulder bumping his arm with every stride.

Slade checks the sorrel's cinch, then checks it again. It's the saddle Brenda hauled down from Prescott, dark with years of oil, the seat worn to the shape of the man who's ridden it. He runs his palm along the swell before he lets go.

"Where will you be?" he asks.

"Wherever I want."

His eyes come to mine and stay there. "Where?"

"Top of the section over the timed-event end," I say. "Under the press box, out of the wind."

"Sit there."

"You'll find me wherever I sit."

"Sit there anyway."

He catches my chin between his thumb and two fingers and tips my face up to the angle he wants. His mouth comes down on mine hard and unhurried, in full view of the steer wrestlers lined up behind the box and the teenage girl who resets the barrier. He doesn't ask me to open for him. His thumb presses at the hinge of my jaw until my lips part, and then he takes my mouth slow and deep, his tongue stroking over mine with the patience he spends on a horse that hasn't decided to trust him yet.

Heat drops through me and settles low and heavy between my hips. My fingers fist in the cotton over his ribs. He lets me hold on, but he won't let me lead. When I push up onto my toes to take more, his other hand spreads across the small of my back and pins me flush against him, and he slows down to prove he can.

He tastes like salt and arena dust. His stubble scrapes my chin raw, and his teeth close on my lower lip in a slow drag that sends a pulse down my spine to the backs of my knees. A sound climbs out of my throat. I've made that sound in motel rooms behind a chained door. I've never made it in daylight with a grandstand at my back, and he swallows it as if he's owed.

He lets the kiss run long enough that the nearest bulldogger turns his back and becomes very interested in his horse's bridle.

When he lifts his head, my lips are stinging, and he leaves his thumb on my jaw a moment longer.

"Go on," he says.

I go, because he told me to and because I want to watch him ride more than I want to win the argument.

The top row under the press box is empty except for a family with a cooler and a toddler asleep across two laps. I sit on the warm aluminum with my bag at my feet and the folder inside it. The wind has dropped. Behind the chute, the steers shuffle and blow in their pens.