by Elle Thorpe
BUCK YOU!
BUCK COWBOYS (#2)
ELLE THORPE
WWW.ELLETHORPE.COM
Copyright © 2020 by Elle Thorpe
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
#2
For Thomas,
As you get older, remember that it’s okay to be the nice guy. Not every girl wants a bad boy. Some girls want a Dominic.
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Epilogue
Sneak Peek at Talk Dirty, Cowboy. Available now!
Also by ELLE THORPE
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Prologue
SUMMER
I knew pain. There’d been spills off my bike when I was a kid. Or the time I broke my arm after I jumped off the barn roof. And there’d definitely been injuries from being stupid enough to climb onto the back of a bull and try to ride him for eight seconds.
But those had been few and far between. And oddly minor, for how dangerous the sport I loved was.
I heard what the fans said about me on the circuit. That I somehow drew ‘easy’ bulls because my dad was Kai ‘Frost’ Hunt, four times WBRA champion. But anyone with half a brain and a lick of bull riding knowledge knew nobody wanted an easy bull, anyway. Nobody wanted one who didn’t kick or spin or try his damn best to get you off his back. You wanted the bulls that had you digging your heels in, every muscle in your body working to keep you on so you didn’t end up mincemeat beneath his hooves. Those were the bulls that got you big scores. Those were the bulls that won you championship buckles.
But that left the whispers of the other riders. Those hurt more than the fans, and they were none too subtle.
She doesn’t belong here. This ain’t no girly competition.
The judges go easy on her because she’s a woman.
The judges score her higher because she’s Frost’s daughter.
Nobody ever said it to my face, but I heard it all anyway. I heard it in the way they frowned, or in their annoyed hat toss when my score rocketed up the leaderboard. I heard it in the way I wasn’t just one of the guys, who liked to drink beer at the bar after work, like I was back home.
Their rejection was a different sort of pain altogether, but one I’d dealt with my entire life and could no longer afford to care about. I’d had to learn to lock it up, and shove it deep inside, where it was barely even a pinprick.
Because I was going to be the first woman on the WBRA circuit.
I was going to win the whole damn thing, take home the check, and add a shiny championship belt buckle to my collection. No matter what it took.
Until I wasn’t.
Until I was thrown off that bull at the Masonville Invitational, landed awkwardly, and heard the pop of my shoulder dislocating.
Until the acute agony of muscle tearing ripped through me.
Until the bull’s hooves slammed down and shattered the bone so bad it pierced through my skin.
A new pain like nothing I’d ever experienced before splintered through my entire body. It radiated from my shoulder in a blinding rush that took out all other senses.
I lost the screaming of the crowd and the smell of the dirt beneath my broken body. My mouth filled with blood, but I didn’t taste it. When my vision flickered, it was almost a welcome relief.
I needed to get up and run. I needed to get out from beneath the bull’s hooves that pounded into my flesh, vicious and unforgiving.
But the worst of the pain came from my head, and the knowledge that with one ride, my career was over before it had even truly begun.
Nobody came back from this sort of injury.
So when the darkness tried to take me, I let it.
Because there was no pain worse than that.
1
DOMINIC
Maria Kaur. 44 Eastbridge Ave.
My gaze traced the letters of her name, running silently over each line and curve. Eastbridge Ave wasn’t that far from here. Just on the other side of town. That couldn’t be right.
You sure? I typed back.
Wouldn’t have told you if I wasn’t.
“Dom!”
I snapped my head up at my father’s shout and guiltily shoved my phone back in my pocket. “Yeah? What’s up?”
“You just gonna stand there texting your girlfriends or do you want to come and actually do some work? You know that thing I pay you to do?”
I jogged across the yard to our barn where Dad had lined up buckets of feed for the animals. I got busy scooping pellets from a bag and distributing it evenly, just like I’d done a million other times over the years. “Sorry,” I muttered, feeling like a naughty kid who’d tried to shirk his responsibilities. “Won’t happen again.”
My dad shot a glance at me. “Why do you look like you’ve seen a ghost? It wasn’t that big a deal. I’m just bustin’ your balls. This place will be yours soon enough, and then you can set whatever hours you want. You’re almost never late, anyway.”
I nodded distractedly. I could only remember a handful of times, ever, that I’d been even two minutes late for work. It wasn’t in my nature. My dad expected me to be here at six each morning, so I was here at five ‘til. Unlike my two younger brothers, who were still probably in bed and would roll up for work at whatever time they deemed it worthy.
Ah, to be a selfish teenager. It must have been nice.
Like I could talk. I shot another glance at my father, and my chest panged with what I’d done. I was just as selfish as my brothers. In a much worse way. Nobody’s life would change dramatically if they were thirty minutes late to work every second day.
But what I’d done could change everything. Not just for me, but for my parents…and for the woman I didn’t know, but whose address now burned a hole in my phone.
Maria Kaur. 44 Eastbridge Ave.
Was Kaur a married name? Or would that have been my surname if she’d decided to keep me? Pain ricocheted through my chest, until I realized my dad was staring at me, waiting for me to say something.
“Sorry, what?” I tried to focus on him.
“I was just saying I talked to Frost last night.”
“Summer’s dad? How is she?” I was suddenly a whole lot more interested than I had been a minute ago. Like a man dying in the desert, I lapped up information about Summer Hunt as if it were water.
I always had. I hadn’t heard from her in almost a year, not since the night of her accident, but it hadn’t stopped me thinking about her. Constantly. Even though that wasn’t my right.
Dad picked u
p a handful of feed, letting it run through his fingers and back into the bucket. “Physically? She’s not riding anymore. I know that much. Sounds like she’s given up trying. She’s moving to the city.”
I dropped my shovel, cringing as it clattered to the ground. “You’re kidding? She was talking about it last time I was out there, but it’s been over a year. I just assumed she’d changed her mind.” And by changed her mind, I meant come to her senses. Summer Hunt was as country as I was. I couldn’t picture her living in a city any more than I could picture myself renting an apartment in New York and suddenly wearing suits instead of jeans.
I shuddered at the thought of a stuffy, white, button-down shirt and an ugly patterned tie that would choke me.
Dad picked up my shovel and handed it back to me. “Apparently not. Frost is cut up about it. Disappointed she won’t make the pros now but stressed out of his head about finding someone to take her job, too. His other daughters aren’t interested. Neither of them ride.”
“She’s always done a lot out there. Big shoes to fill.”
Dad and I both went back to work in companionable silence, distributing feed buckets to each of our bulls, and I used the manual work to push Summer and her future plans out of my head. Like I’d had to do so many other times, I reminded myself she wasn’t my concern. She’d made that pretty clear with her radio silence.
It was better if I just concentrated on my own fuckin’ business. And my business was these bulls. We had cattle out in fenced-off fields at the back of our property, but it was summer, and they’d be just fine munching on the grass until it started getting cold again. Unlike our buckers, who needed constant specialized feed and vitamins to keep them in prime condition for rodeos. A sick bull didn’t kick. And no cowboy wanted to ride an animal that just stood there in the ring like a limp biscuit.
Dad and I split up with me silently vowing to put everything else out of my head and do the job I was paid to do, but every pen I went to, my phone buzzed in my pocket, reminding me of what I’d started. I tried to ignore it, but eventually, curiosity got the better of me.
Checking to make sure my dad wasn’t around, I pulled the phone out. Julian’s messages lit it up and I scanned over each of them, until one caught my eye.
Dude, I’m sitting out the front of her house and I think she has a family. A husband. Maybe a couple of kids? I think you have a whole family over here you have no idea about. You want me to look into it some more?
My throat closed up. No.
No? What are you going to do, then?
I watched my dad from across the yard. He was a good guy, and I was so lucky to have been raised by him. He’d taught me everything I knew about bulls and riding and ranching. Despite the fact I wasn’t his biological child, and my two younger brothers were, it was me he wanted to pass the ranch on to when he retired, just like his father had passed it on to him.
He had no idea I’d opened a can of worms by searching for my birth parents.
Now, there was only one way to close it. I had to know. It had been eating away at the corners of my mind for the best part of a decade. I had to make it stop before it drove me completely insane.
Don’t do anything. I’m going over there. I need to talk to her.
After feeding my father some sort of bullshit excuse about needing to run into town for supplies, I drove my truck across our little country town and turned down Eastbridge Avenue with my heart hammering. The properties at this end of town weren’t like ours. My family lived in an older-style farmhouse that had been renovated from the original my great-grandfather had built a hundred years ago. I’d moved out to one of the newer cabins on the property once I’d turned eighteen and needed some space, but the hundreds of acres of land that surrounded the dwellings were all ours.
Here, the properties were smaller. Subdivides from what was once a property like ours, probably sold off during a year where the rain didn’t come as expected, or cattle prices bottomed out. When those things happened, you could either tough it out to hope for a better go next year. Or you could sell up to a developer, who would turn your property into a suburban neighborhood, just like the one I drove through now.
I parked my truck out the front of a modest-sized house, with a neatly tended yard, and just gaped at it.
If things had been different, this was where I might have grown up. Without a horse or a cow in sight.
I could barely comprehend that thought. Who the hell was I without bull riding and farmwork? I’d always thought those things were in my blood, my soul. But staring up at my birth mother’s house, I realized they weren’t.
They were just things taught to me.
My soul didn’t know the dirt and hard work and sunrise starts.
Right now, my soul didn’t know anything.
“Get out of the fuckin’ car, Dom,” I muttered to myself. Dad would be expecting me back soon. But nerves and excitement had me gripping the steering wheel too tight, my fingernails pressing into the leather cover.
The front door opened, and a small dark-haired woman strode out into the early morning sunshine, blissfully unaware that I was about to throw a curveball in what seemed like a pretty nice life. She jiggled the handle once, making sure the door was locked, and then hoisted a purse strap over her shoulder.
My entire body locked up, frozen at the sight of her face. She was younger than I’d expected. She didn’t really appear all that much older than me, though the adoption records had said she was seventeen when I’d been born, which meant she was in her forties now.
She opened her car door, and I hurtled out of mine, running a few steps across her lawn.
She looked up and flinched.
Couldn’t blame her. I was a big guy, a complete stranger, running at her at full speed. I was probably lucky she hadn’t maced me.
“Sorry.” I dug my heels into the grass to stop myself. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”
Her eyes were the same deep brown mine were. Her skin the same tanned olive. “Can I help you with something?”
I had no idea why her casually polite words took me by surprise. What had I been expecting? Some sort of mother-child bond that immediately spelled out who I was, without even introducing myself?
Like it was ID, I pulled a business card from my wallet and passed it to her. “Uh, my name is Dominic West. I was adopted twenty-four years ago.”
I didn’t have to say any more. Maria’s eyes widened, the card and her purse slipping from her shoulder, crashing to the ground, and spilling the contents everywhere.
I lurched forward to help, kneeling to collect a tube of mascara that had tried to roll down the driveway.
Maria crouched to frantically shove things back into her purse, muttering something. When I held out the mascara, she snatched the little tube from my fingers.
Nausea swirled in my stomach, mixing the nerves and excitement all together. On autopilot, I held my hand out for her to shake. It’s what I’d been taught as a child when meeting someone new, and it was so ingrained in me now that I did it without thinking, despite the less-than-warm vibes this woman was putting out there. I tried to smile, but it was wobbly.
She glanced down at my hand, then back at the house again. Her frown deepened, lining her forehead with creases. “You can’t be here.”
Like it was suddenly made of cement, I dropped my hand and shoved it into my pocket. She was right. I’d gone about this all wrong, but I just knew I wouldn’t have come at all if I’d stopped to truly think about it. “I know, I’m sorry. Maybe we could meet somewhere, to talk? I can come into town on my lunch break…”
Maria shook her head, fingers clutching for the door handle again. It took her two tries to get it open. “No, I mean you can’t be here at all. I don’t know what you want from me, but I have a family now. A life. And they don’t know anything about you. Or your…please. Just leave.”
I blinked. “I know this is out of the blue, but maybe—”
She held a hand
up. “Stop. There’s no maybe. She told me you had a good home, with good people. Isn’t that enough?”
She? I just stared at her, with no idea how to answer that. Her words rang true. I had the best family I could have ever hoped for. My parents loved me fiercely, and I’d never wanted for anything.
But that didn’t stop there being a part of me who needed more. Something inside me had never felt quite whole, and that wasn’t something my parents or my brothers or my friends could fix.
“No, it’s not enough,” I said truthfully.
Irritation flashed in her eyes as she slid behind the wheel. “Well, it’s all I have to give. It was all I had then, and it’s all I have now. You need to leave.”
“No, I—”
“Leave before I call the police.”
I gaped at her, checking her expression to be sure she was for real.
She was. There was a dead seriousness in her eyes, and she clutched her cell phone like she’d use it as a weapon if she had to.
Pure, unbridled pain like I’d never felt before shattered through my chest, stealing my breath. This wasn’t how this was supposed to go. She was supposed to be happy to see me. She was supposed to stare up at me in wonder, and then smile and maybe wrap her arms around me, and say I was the image of my grandfather as a young man. She was supposed to take my hand, and introduce me to her family, and make coffee so we could talk and catch up on the twenty-four years we’d been apart.
