The loneliness was worth it, but it still hurt.
“Tell them I said hello.” He forced himself to sound happy. “And I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
“They say hello themselves. I love you, son. Take care of yourself around those dangerous animals you ride.”
He laughed. “Those dangerous animals make me a lot of money.” Before she could comment on that, he said, “I love you too. Good-bye.”
Adriano stayed on the bench a moment longer, watching the cowboys assemble the chutes. They groaned as they set the fence panels into place, the metal tubes clanging as they met. A bull sent up a bellow from somewhere outside the covered arena.
The air was filled with the scent of dust and cattle and manure and heat, the same as the arenas had smelled at home. No matter where he went, cattle—and bulls—were all much the same. Only this event was going to have more money at the end of it than any at home had had.
If he kept a clear head, kept his focus on the bull, he’d win some of that money. He needed to—the past two events he’d barely finished in the money. His focus had been hazy, his mind only half on his riding. The other half had been with Lil and their daughter.
He checked his e-mail again. Nothing.
He could call her—he wanted to call her. Wanted the bright brashness of her voice to fill the loneliness in him.
A dangerous urge, that. He ought to be thinking of how to win their bargain, how to prove that the baby was better off with him. Not wallowing in this useless longing for her.
Useless or not, it wasn’t leaving. It had been a constant companion these weeks away from her.
Slowly, he rose, waving to the workers in the arena as he walked past. He went outside to where the trailers were parked, found where Miguel was holding court under a pop-up tent, about a dozen Brazilians forming a circle around him.
“Adriano,” he called. “How are you?”
“Well enough.” Adriano took an empty seat and the soda someone handed him. He couldn’t complain—all of these men were in the same boat he was, a boat far from home.
“Are you coming back to the ranch after this?” Miguel asked.
Between events, Adriano had gone back to Miguel’s ranch these past two weeks. Easier to do that than haul all the way back to California. And he could train with his friends there.
Lil had still been answering his messages at that point, letting him know everything was all right.
Adriano checked his phone. Still nothing.
He sighed. “No, I need to go see Lil.” Everything was probably fine and she was simply pissed at him about something, but he had to find out. Even if he feared the wildfire of his response to her. Even if his riding suffered further because of it.
Miguel nodded. “How’s the baby?”
“Fine.” I think.
“These first pregnancies are always the worst,” Miguel said.
Many of the other men nodded. Adriano had told them about the baby and word had slowly been filtering through the rest of the bull riders. Most everyone had congratulated him, although there had been more than few raised eyebrows when he’d said who the mother was.
Crane, that asshole, had laughed in his grating way and said something about happy accidents and how Adriano had hit pay dirt. Adriano had pretended not to understand him. Again.
His phone buzzed in his pocket. He fished it out, checked his e-mail. Liliana. Finally.
He opened the message and read it. Just two words there. He frowned and read it again.
The meaning wasn’t entirely clear, but the intent behind those two words were: Lil was pissed. Extremely pissed.
Wonderful. That was going to be just wonderful for his concentration tonight. But at least she was okay.
He might not be though, once he finally made it back to her side.
The e-mail notification on Lil’s phone buzzed. Again.
She fished the phone out of her pocket and flicked it to mute, shoved it back and sat down hard on it. Stupid phone. It could be quiet for a while. She already knew exactly who was e-mailing her and what it would say. After her two-word reply to Adriano this morning, he was probably very, very pissed. But she was sick of him carping on her through e-mail.
Multiple times a day he sent those messages—nothing soft or sweet. Or even slightly human. Just demands that she eat properly, sleep enough, was she throwing up enough—morning sickness was a good thing, apparently—and similar dictates along those lines.
Never a call, never any indication that she was anything more than a baby incubator to him. It got depressing after a while. Which made her mad.
Putting her chin in her hands, she slumped in the folding chair, or tried to slump. Her belly made it hard since it seemed there was less and less room for her organs as the baby grew. She could only smush things together so far anymore.
She was watching Beau and Diego train a bull to enter the chute. Beau had ridden bulls too until a shoulder injury sent him into early retirement and back into Penny’s arms—Penny being one of the Moreno cousins and the ranch vet. Thank goodness he had, since Lil was able to hire Beau on to help with the bucking-bull operation.
And thank goodness Beau could take over these training tasks she couldn’t do anymore. This training ensured a bull was quiet and well mannered during transport, behind the chutes, and on the way to them.
And once that gate swung open, the bull had to become a demon.
Not that any of the training was going to be worth a damn if she couldn’t get this bull on the circuit. She’d very politely asked the committee if they’d reconsider the two bulls she’d offered them last week but hadn’t heard back yet. She’d even made certain the e-mail went to James White’s personal address, an old friend of her dad’s and a member of the committee. It stung her pride to make that personal appeal to him, but it wasn’t like pride hadn’t gotten her anywhere so far.
Look at her now, sitting on the sidelines instead of helping train her bull. She was about as useless as tits on a boar here. But it was better than sitting in the office, crunching numbers. The average person might think there wasn’t a lot of accounting to be done in a stock operation, but they’d be dead wrong.
“I’m heading out,” she called to Beau. “Is this it for today?”
“Yep. One last trip into the chute for this boy, then he’s done. You got big plans for tonight?”
“Ha. Bea and I are going to get together and watch TV.”
Beau smiled. “Sounds pretty tame for you.”
It was. Staying in wasn’t how Lil used to spend her Friday nights. Raising hell at the Stampede was how she preferred to do things. But considering the size of her belly—which had strangely swelled to the size of a basketball over the past two weeks—and the fact she couldn’t drink, going to a bar was out. Instead, she was playing sad single mom at home, accompanied by her spinster cousin. Woe was her.
“See you Monday,” she called to them both. “Have a good weekend.”
Once she was at the house, she ate a frozen dinner—but one packed with veggies—choked down a prenatal vitamin, and ignored the e-mail pop-ups on her phone with a force that impressed even herself.
When Bea finally arrived, Lil was ready to climb the walls. “What do you want to do?” she demanded the instant Bea walked through the door.
“What can you do?” Bea tossed down her purse, took one of the mugs of tea Lil had made.
“God, you sound like Adriano. I’m not an invalid, you know.” She wasn’t certain if she was directing that solely at Bea or at one pigheaded bull rider who was hundreds of miles away.
“Things are going that well?” Bea took a smug sip from her mug.
“Things are going terribly. You should see the messages he sends me. He’s trying to rule my life remotely.”
“Rule your life?” Bea raised an eyebrow, that disloyal thing. “Maybe you’re being a bit melodramatic?”
“No. Look at this.” Lil called up a particularly irritating one from
yesterday.
“‘What are you eating?’” she read off, doing her best imitation of whiny Adriano. “‘You have to keep track so you know if you’re taking in enough iron. Are you avoiding soy? Make sure you don’t drink more than one cup of coffee. What’s your weight today? How much sleep did you get last night?’” She raised her eyebrows. “Do you see?”
“Maybe he’s just trying to show his concern.” But her cousin’s mouth was pinched up with distaste. Good old Bea, always playing devil’s advocate.
“How would you appreciate something like this?” Lil countered. She was guessing Bea would be just as pissed as she was.
“Okay, so it is pretty off-putting,” Bea admitted. Point: Lil. “What did you reply?”
“Get bent.” Just two little words, but it covered pretty much everything she wanted Adriano Silva to do with himself and his overbearing e-mails. He’d take it as ammunition in his fight to take the baby, but she didn’t care at this point. His controlling nature was all the ammunition she needed in her fight to keep the baby with her.
Now it was Bea’s turn to raise her eyebrows. “Does that really translate to Portuguese?”
“If he doesn’t understand what it means, I’ll show him when he gets back.” Whenever that might be. There’d been no mention of his return in any of his sucky messages. Not that she’d been obsessing over it, a tingle running through her when she thought of seeing him again. Not at all. That was relationship-type stuff.
“When is he coming back?”
“I don’t know. He hasn’t said.” Which didn’t bode well for any future co-parenting. Was he going to disappear into Brazil with her daughter and never say when she was coming back?
Somehow Lil didn’t really think so, but sometimes, when she was really pissed at him—usually after getting one of his e-mails—she liked to pretend she believed it. The pretense made her anger seem more justified.
Of course, Lil could pick up the phone, call one of the lawyers the family had on retainer. Simply pass the entire situation off to a legal team.
But she hadn’t. Because she just had to make things harder for herself.
“Huh.” Bea tilted her head, assumed her “concerned scientist” look. “Was he like this in Vegas? You usually don’t go for the emotionally unavailable control freak type.”
“No, he… he laughed then.” Not a ton, but she distinctly remembered him laughing. “And he talked to me—not just demanded a food log.”
He’d treated her like a person then, a person he was fiercely attracted to, and not an incubator he was trying to tweak to bake the most perfect baby.
“Huh.” Bea chewed on that. “Huh.”
Not a great contribution. “Did you know they call him Slick Eddie on the circuit?”
“Who told you that?”
“Beau.” Lil had wormed that out of Beau one day while they were watching one of Adriano’s rides on YouTube. To see the bull he’d been riding, not him of course.
Bea wrinkled her nose. “Eddie? That’s not even his name.”
“I guess it’s the closest nickname to Adriano. I agree, it’s ridiculous,” Lil said at Bea’s look. “But when I asked Beau why they called him slick, he said it was because Adriano wasn’t slick at all. That he planned out every aspect of his rides, trained harder than anyone else, studied more videos—Beau said he was a machine.”
A machine who wanted to take her baby back to Brazil to raise on his own. Good luck with that, Silva.
“Maybe they should have nicknamed him Terminator instead,” Bea said.
“Too confusing. That’s already the name of a bull.”
Her cousin shook her head. “Okay, fine, so you’ve been impregnated by the Terminator. What now?”
The ten-million-dollar question. “I don’t know,” Lil confessed. “I did tell him to get bent, but really, I can’t just push him out of my life. Or rather, I don’t want to.” She sighed.
Her brothers would be pretty happy if she did push Adriano out, but somehow she couldn’t summon the will to do it. She still had this crazy dream that they might be able to work it all out amicably, that he would agree to her custody arrangement with a smile. That they wouldn’t be fighting over this baby for the next eighteen years.
She’d thought having him around all the time, underfoot and demanding her attention, would be bad, but this was worse. He wasn’t even here, but he was still managing to infuriate her. That took real talent.
“Lil, I know you suggested that he move in and that you wanted to meet him halfway on the baby… but it sounds like you don’t really believe you can.”
She hadn’t revealed their bargain even to Bea, instead spinning some story about them “working things out.”
Adriano had said he would take care of her, but this was the worst possible version of that. If this was what he thought counted as caring and concerned, they were farther apart than he’d ever know.
“I do want to meet him halfway”—not entirely a lie—“but he wants things solely on his terms.”
Just as she wanted things solely on hers.
She ought to call the lawyers. Stop making things harder for herself. In fact, that’s exactly what she’d do come Monday morning.
“To be fair,” Bea said, putting on her devil’s advocate hat again, “you’ve never been a great one for compromise yourself.”
Her cousin had a point, but—“I’ve tried to talk to him, but he puts his spurs to me as if I were a bull he was trying to tame.”
Only a hint of an exaggeration there. Purely for effect, of course.
Bea sighed. “I’ve never met him, so I’ll have to take your word for it. I don’t want you to be unhappy, but I also don’t want you to have to raise this baby all on your own.”
“I won’t be alone. I have all of my family.” And Adriano had his family in Brazil, family as eager to meet this baby as hers was. And his mom, who might not be here too much longer…
Lil clenched her fist. She couldn’t let her guilt over that sway her. She had to focus on what was best for the baby.
Bea’s expression softened. “Of course we’ll all help any way that we can. We love you and we already love the baby.”
A lump formed in Lil’s throat. Bea really was sweet when she wanted to be.
“But we’re not the baby’s father,” she finished.
Her cousin could also cut right to the quick when she wanted to.
Point: Bea. And Adriano.
“Yeah. I know. Thanks for talking this out with me, but we’re not getting anywhere.” Lil blew out a resigned breath and fiddled with her phone. “That’s enough bitching about my situation. What do you want to watch tonight?”
“I don’t know. I don’t even really like TV.”
“And your favorite band is one I’ve probably never heard of,” Lil muttered.
“What?” Bea frowned in confusion.
“Never mind.” Hipsters never admitted they were hipsters. “So we’ll just sit here and be surly?” Which they’d kind of already been doing. Although Lil wanted to have fun, to forget for a few hours that her life was such a tangle.
Wallowing was all well and good, but she was ready to move past that. I’ll show you, Silva.
Which was silly, because he wasn’t even here, and he certainly wasn’t her boyfriend—but she still wanted to rub her disdain in his face.
“Do you have a better idea?” Bea asked.
Not exactly, but one might be forming. Lil tapped the screen of her phone as she pondered. “Before this pregnancy, I spent my Friday nights having fun.”
“Yeah, you also spent them drinking.” Bea did not sound like she was up for the kind of fun Lil had in mind.
“You don’t have to drink to have fun,” Lil said primly.
“Now you sound like some kind of after-school special.”
She had gotten that line from an after-school special. “I’m serious,” she insisted. “We can still dance and whoop it up, even if we’re not drinking.
”
The more Lil thought on it, the better it sounded. Meet some friends, take some turns around the dance floor, share stories—not even Adriano could object to that. The bar part might get him riled, but she wouldn’t be drinking. She could even be the designated driver.
“I don’t whoop it up,” Bea said sourly.
“No, but Penny does. Let’s call her. I bet you she’ll meet us at the Stampede.” In fact, Penny and Beau might already be on their way there. The dance hall held a special place in their hearts.
“Is this really such a good idea with your condition?” All matronly condescension. Cute, considering that Bea had never been pregnant herself.
“My condition? When did you turn into Adriano?”
That one hit. Bea grimaced, but she went for her phone anyway. “Okay, okay, I’ll call Penny.”
Yes. Dancing and laughing and hanging out would be the best cure for her this evening. She grabbed Bea and pulled her into a two-step in the middle of the kitchen.
“Lil, I’m on the phone!”
Lil only tightened her grip and hummed louder until Bea was laughing too hard to even breathe.
“Hello? Hello?” came from the phone. “Who is this? Bea?”
“Penny!” Lil yelled toward the phone. “We’re going to the Stampede! Be ready in twenty minutes.”
Bea was still laughing, tripping over her own feet. Lil spun her one last time, then let her cousin go to catch her own breath.
“See?” She was laughing almost as hard as Bea was. “You do whoop it up.”
“I guess I do.” Bea straightened. “But only when you force me to.”
“I’m going to tonight.” Lil grabbed her keys. “Let’s go honky-tonking!”
Just saying the words made her feel better than she had in weeks.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The ranch house was dark and silent when Adriano went through the front door.
It had been a long flight from Colorado, and all he wanted was some supper and to collapse into bed. And to make certain Lil was all right.
He flicked on the entry light and took a tentative step forward. Worry urged him on, but he remembered that last message of hers: Get bent. Lil might decide to demonstrate the exact meaning on him.
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