Buck You! (Buck Cowboys Book 2)

by Elle Thorpe

  “We should go,” Summer said quietly.

  The man took a step closer. “I wasn’t asking. Move.”

  He wasn’t playing.

  I took Summer’s hand, holding it tightly in mine, and tugged her toward the road. “Just do what he says,” I muttered to her.

  I kept my body between her and the gun, and with a tiny bit of nudging from me, I got her moving. A tremble rolled through her body, and I squeezed her hand.

  “It’ll be fine,” I assured her. Though I really had no idea if it would be.

  It took some time for us to walk up to the house, neither Summer nor I moving particularly quickly. I was in no rush to be surrounded by a group of men who had already proven to have no morals.

  And I sure as hell was in no rush to confront my brother. With every step, I blamed him for this. He’d played me. Like a complete fool, desperate to know his own flesh and blood, I’d fallen for it. Had that night at the bar been all a hoax? Had he already known by then that the Hunts had bulls of worth and that I was an easy ticket in? Or had it been more of a crime of opportunity? He’d seen Grave Digger at my birthday party, and I’d opened my big mouth and confided in his dollar value. Had he then called up his friends and got them to bring a truck down?

  They were the questions that had plagued me all day, only quieting when Summer was in my arms. At the door to the farmhouse, I stopped and looked to the older man.

  “Well, go on in.”

  I pushed at the door, but it didn’t budge.

  “Give it a bit, you pansy. It sticks.”

  I ground my teeth. Was this who I was related to? One man who had played me for a fool and taken advantage of me, and another who thought nothing of stealing and holding a gun on people. I gave the door a harder push, stumbling a step or two when it gave and crashed back against the wall.

  Summer jumped at the sudden crack of noise.

  The man just sniggered.

  “What the fuck is going on?” A new guy hammered down the stairs, rubbing sleep from his eyes. He was bare-chested, a beer gut hanging over a pair of sleep shorts.

  I recognized him as the guy who’d held the cattle prod that afternoon. The one who’d flicked off Felix’s hat and given him a hard time about not wanting to ride Grave Digger.

  More bodies thundered down the stairs at the commotion, and eventually, Felix’s dark head appeared. He stretched his arms over his head, casually walking down the stairs, until his gaze clashed with mine.

  His eyes widened, and he pushed his way to the front of the group. “Dominic?” His gaze darted to the left. “Summer? What the fuck?”

  I didn’t answer him. I couldn’t. Not without spewing out the hate that had been building in me all day.

  “Found my great-nephew out on the road, watching the place.” The older guy turned to Felix. “What we going to do about that, kid?”

  Felix’s gaze darted to the older man’s gun. “How about you start by lowering that fucking gun? Jesus, Frank! What are you doing?”

  The older man tapped the barrel on the scuffed-up floor. “What am I doing? I’m making sure you’ll have a paycheck this week!”

  Felix ran a hand through his hair and turned to me. “Dom, I swear, I had nothing to do with this.”

  I choked on a laugh. “Wow. I’ll just add ‘bad liar’ to your list of qualities then, will I?”

  The pudgy guy thumped a fist into the wall. “Shut the fuck up! Has anyone realized that these two would have called the sheriff? Instead of standing here while you all have a family fucking reunion, do you think maybe we should be moving the stock?”

  The older man peered at Summer and me. “That true? You call the sheriff?”

  I shook my head. “No.”

  The pudgy guy laughed. “Bullshit. What the hell were you doing outside then?”

  “We were just looking for an opportunity to take our cattle back,” Summer spoke up. “We’ve been out there all day. Don’t you think the sheriff would be here by now if we’d called them? We don’t want any trouble. We just want what’s ours. Give us back our bulls, and we’ll go on like nothing ever happened.”

  The older man stooped so he was eye to eye with Summer and leered at her. “So pretty. But so stupid.” He nodded to Beer Belly. “Go get the animals down to the back pasture. That’ll buy us some time.”

  Beer Belly nodded, and the other guys followed him outside.

  Felix didn’t move. “Now what, Frank? You going to let Summer and Dominic go?”

  Frank tossed Felix the gun. “Nah, you can fix your own mess. Watch them until I get back. If the cops show up, get rid of them.”

  My eyes widened.

  So did Felix’s as he caught the gun. “What? How?”

  “You’re the one with the gun and the hostages. Work it out.” With a final glare, he stormed after his men. The door slammed shut behind him.

  Felix slumped back against the wall, then slowly slid down it until he was sitting. He put the gun on the dusty floorboards, but he didn’t look up.

  “What now, Felix?” I asked finally. “You gonna shoot us if we try to leave?”

  He dragged his gaze up to meet mine. It was full of regret. “No. You guys can go. Just wait ten minutes, and they’ll have moved down over the hill, so they won’t see you.”

  “They’re going to notice when they get back and we’re gone,” Summer pointed out.

  He shrugged, voice heavy and full of defeat. “That’s not your problem.”

  I went to the window and peered out from behind a grubby set of curtains. He was right. The men were herding the animals over the crest of the hill. Their shapes were already disappearing into the blackness of the night. A muscle in my jaw ticked. Priority number one was getting Summer out of here, and I was itching to rip the door open and storm out of here with her tucked safe against my chest. But I couldn’t walk out of here without knowing one thing.

  “Why?” I asked Felix.

  “Why what?”

  “Why would you do this? Are you desperate for money?”

  He shook his head. “Dom, I swear. This wasn’t my idea.”

  I laughed, the sound hard and bitter. “So you just happened to find out that Grave Digger was worth big money, and coincidentally, he was stolen the same night?”

  He shot to his feet, ripping at his hair. “I’m an idiot, okay? I fuck everything up! You have no idea, Dom. Your family is amazing. Your mom? I talked to her for ages. She asked me a million questions about who I was and what I liked. And you know, the whole time, she smiled at me with this motherly expression, like I was important, because I was your brother. You think anybody ever looked at me with that sort of interest before?”

  I blinked. “Our grandmother raised you.”

  He threw his hand up in the air. “Raised me? I was lucky if there was even food in the house. You think she ever really cared about where I was or what I was doing? As soon as I did one wrong thing, she sent me out here, washed her hands of me. She never bothered sitting down with me to find out who I was. I was just a government check. She’d didn’t raise me. I raised myself. You should thank your lucky stars she let you go.”

  “But you said she regretted it…”

  “She did! She regretted that you could have been an additional hundred bucks on her paycheck each week.”

  It was like being slapped in the face with a cold, dead fish. “You didn’t tell me…”

  “Of course I didn’t tell you. I’ve been working for years to put all that behind me. You think I wanted to meet my brother, the only person in the entire fucking world who seemed actually interested in knowing me, just to tell him that our grandmother was as bad as our birth mother? Hell, she’s worse really. At least Maria knew she couldn’t be a mother.”

  Felix got up and paced the length of the room, his shoulders hunched, his fingers clenched into fists. “I came home from your party happy, Dom. I just wanted to tell someone. The guys here, they aren’t all bad. A couple of them have been real i
nterested in how I met you. So I was telling them all about it. About you. And Summer. And the amazing place you owned. I didn’t think…”

  My teeth sank into my bottom lip before letting it go, grazing the soft skin as it went. I barely noticed the sting. “You didn’t think they’d see a fifty-thousand-dollar payday?”

  Felix didn’t say anything.

  “This isn’t the first time they’ve stolen, is it?”

  Felix sighed. “I had no proof. I’m not part of Frank’s inner circle. Sometimes I wake up in the mornings and we have new stock. I asked once, when I first got here, and got a backhand across the face for my trouble. Then he threatened to send me back to Wyoming. So I stopped asking. Today is the first day I’ve known for sure.” He turned to Summer. “I’m so sorry. I honestly never meant for this to happen.”

  Her gaze wavered. She crossed the room and took my hand again, looking up at me as if I had the answers.

  I didn’t. I had nothing. Felix talked the talk, but I had no idea whether I believed him or not. And my heart hurt too much to even try to work it out.

  “We’re going,” Summer told him. But then her gaze softened a little. “The sheriff will be here by dawn. Maybe you shouldn’t be.”

  She pulled me toward the door, yanking it open.

  I glanced back over my shoulder at my brother.

  Then followed my girl, leaving Felix behind.

  31

  DOMINIC

  Summer and I hustled down the long drive and the road back to the truck. She got behind the wheel, and I jumped in the passenger side, closing it behind me. She immediately reached over and hit the central-locking button that slammed all the locks down.

  “What do you want to do?” I asked her.

  “Get the fuck out of here?” She started up the engine. “I don’t want to call the others out here to try to get the animals back. Not when these guys have guns. Call the sheriff again. Tell them where they’re moving the cattle.” She bit her lip, pulling out onto the road, her reluctance clear as day. “Then I guess we just hope like hell they’re still there in the morning. I’m not hanging around anymore, waiting to get shot. No bull is worth that.”

  But I wasn’t entirely sure she believed that. She looked like she wanted to drive the truck straight through the property and yell for Digger and the other bulls to just jump on the back. If they’d been capable of doing that, I think she might have tried. Giving up wasn’t in her nature, and this was killing her, I could see it.

  But she was right. We couldn’t keep hanging around, not after what had happened. I patted my pockets, but they were empty. A quick rummage of the center console left me empty-handed as well, so I fumbled around the floor, searching for my phone. I finally found it, kicked beneath the seat. I sat back up, brushing it off. It must have fallen out of my pocket when Summer and I had been having sex.

  God, that felt like a whole lifetime ago now.

  I hit the ‘home’ button on my phone, and the screen lit up. “Whoa.”

  Summer took her eyes off the road just long enough to glance over at me. “What?”

  “I have about twenty missed calls from my mom, and more from your parents’ home line.” I pressed the ‘call’ button beside a little photo of my mom and put the phone up to my ear. “I thought they would have gone to bed hours ago.”

  “Dom?” Mom spluttered into the phone when she answered. “Oh, thank God.”

  The pure fear in her voice startled me. All my guards went up instantly. “What’s wrong? Didn’t Frost tell you we were camping out for the night? I’m fine.”

  “No, no. It’s not that. I need you to come back.”

  I frowned. “We’re on our way. But why?”

  “It’s your father. We need to go back to Wyoming. Dom, he had another heart attack.”

  Fear sliced through me, deep and cutting. It loosened my fingers, and I had to catch myself to keep my phone from sliding through my grasp. “What?” I croaked.

  “I don’t know how bad it is yet. Spencer was just on the phone. He and Theo called an ambulance, and they took him straight to Jackson Hole for surgery. I need to get back there. Please come home. I need you to come with me. If he… If he dies—” A quiet sob echoed down the line.

  I nodded, even though she couldn’t see me. My mother was one of the toughest women I knew. She’d moved halfway around the world, from Australia to Wyoming, in order to be with my father. There were countless stories of her watching my father start his bull riding career and then taking over the ranch. She’d had to learn how to deal with snow, and cattle, and living in a small town. And she’d done it all with a smile on her face because she loved my dad more than life itself.

  I didn’t know that she would survive it if something happened to him now. They were only in their fifties. This couldn’t be happening. Not yet. Not now, when they still had all their best years to live out together.

  “Of course I’m coming,” I told her. I glanced over at Summer, and my heart cracked. I didn’t want to leave her. Not when she was in the middle of a family crisis of her own.

  “Dom? What is it?” she asked quietly.

  “My father had another heart attack.”

  Her shocked intake of breath made her chest rise sharply. But then she refocused on the road and put her foot down a little harder. “Tell your mom to book your flights. We’ll meet them at the airport.”

  I relayed the message to my mother. But as I hung up, Summer and I lapsed into silence. Neither of us even bothered to put the radio on. The only sounds for the next couple of hours were the constant drone of the truck’s engine and roaring of my thoughts.

  I couldn’t lose my father. Not now. Not like this. Not when I’d just up and run across the country without even a proper goodbye. That couldn’t be the last time I’d see him.

  So at the airport, I pulled my beautiful girlfriend into my arms and held her tight. She stared up at me with those gorgeous deep brown eyes, tears glistening behind them.

  “I’ll come as soon as I can,” she promised.

  But I shook my head. “You can’t. You need to stay and train for the first round of qualifying.”

  She started to argue, but I wasn’t going to hear it. I just stared at her, and she knew. She knew I wasn’t going to be Austin. I would have loved for her to come with me to Wyoming. Fuck, I wanted it so bad it was eating me up inside. There was nothing more I needed than to have her hand in mine when I got to that hospital and had to face the fact that the man I’d called Dad for the past twenty-five years might not be with us anymore.

  She was the only thing that made the thought of even walking through those hospital doors bearable.

  But I needed her to chase her dreams more.

  I cupped her face and tilted it up to look at me.

  One tear spilled down her cheek, and I brushed it away with my thumb. “You’re Summer Hunt. When you go out there next weekend, you’re going to remember that. You’re going to show every person who ever doubted you exactly how good you are.”

  She nodded reluctantly.

  Through the overhead speakers, they called my flight for boarding.

  I wasn’t done. I’d never be done with this woman, and I needed her to know it. “I need you to remember something else.”

  She nodded.

  I stared deep in her eyes, so she’d know it with everything I had. “I love you. I love you so fucking much, Sum. You’re going to be amazing.”

  She let out a sob and launched herself into my arms, clinging on so tight I wasn’t sure she’d ever let me go.

  I didn’t want her to.

  But we both knew I had to go. And she had to stay.

  “I love you, too.” She gripped the sides of my face and repeated it fiercely, “I love you.”

  My heart soared at her words, and at the love that shone in her tear-filled eyes. I slammed my mouth down on hers, kissing her hard, gathering her to me, filling myself with as much of her as I could.

  I kissed
her with everything I had. I gave her enough to last until I could come back. I took as much as she could give, knowing I’d need it to get me through until I had her in my arms once more.

  “This isn’t goodbye, Sum,” I assured her. “You’re it for me. So even if I’m in Wyoming, and you’re here, you’re always my girl.”

  “Always,” she promised.

  I enveloped her in one last hug.

  Then I walked onto a plane. Leaving my heart behind me.

  32

  DOMINIC

  The minute we touched down in Wyoming, Mom called my brothers for an update on Dad’s condition. I held her hand while she talked, leading the way around the groups of people welcoming loved ones home, and got us to the taxi line. I hadn’t brought anything with me except my wallet and phone. Mom only had carry-on, so we weren’t slowed down by stopping at baggage claim.

  “Well?” I asked when she hung up.

  She got into the back seat of the taxi, scooting over to make room for me beside her. “He’s still in surgery.”

  “Shit.” I’d Googled the surgery times after having a heart attack, and it had said three to six hours. I just assumed that the worse the heart attack was, the longer the surgery would take. It had already been over three hours. So this wasn’t minor like the first one had been. Even without talking to a doctor, that seemed to be evident.

  My mom had cried off and on for the entire flight, but now she was dry-eyed, her gaze calm and focused as the buildings whizzed by outside. I wasn’t sure if that was a better or worse reaction than her tears.

  “You okay?” I asked her softly.

  She nodded. “I’m a bit embarrassed, actually. Sorry you had to see me like that.”

  “Your husband just had a heart attack, and you were stuck across the other side of the country, not knowing if he’s going to even make it through. Of course you’re going to be upset.”