There was nothing soft about him, but the word that floated across her mind looking at him was beautiful. His smooth, even skin, a rich golden brown tone, lighter than hers and underlaid with terra cotta. And he’d remembered her purse.
This late in the day, his face was all five-o’clock scruff and shadowed planes in low lighting and she fought the urge to run her fingers along his jawline.
The look in his dark gaze shifted, becoming arresting, capturing her own and holding her in place, promising that he would hold her to it, if she decided to probe the secret places her eyes were begging to explore.
For a moment she hesitated. They stood outside the second-place RV—Winnie, as he insisted on calling it—the sounds of the caravan dying down around them. Cowboys were bedding down, lights going off, blinds drawing closed all around them, but they remained where they were.
“It’s late and we’ve got a show tomorrow. Better get to sleep,” she said, wishing she’d said a million other things but that.
He nodded, but neither of them moved.
And then she was kissing him again, pulling him toward her until their lips met with the urgent need of a drowning person gasping for air.
She reached her arms around his neck, and his palms came to her hips to lift her. She wrapped her legs around his waist as the déjà vu of their lips connecting threatened to overwhelm her.
Just like at the qualifier, they became a world unto themselves, with Lil only dimly aware of the fact that in the process of lifting her he’d also carried them up the three steps to her door, opened it, and carried them inside.
How he squeezed them through the door with such ease, she’d never know, but he set her down gently once they were inside before turning to close and lock the door.
Because they’d kissed again and because she wanted to again, all she could think of to say after kicking her boots off was, “You got my purse.”
With a chuckle, he nodded. “I did.”
Something simultaneously melted and clicked in her chest, though she’d have been hard-pressed to explain the kind of mechanism that behaved that way in the human body.
“Thank you.”
Stepping closer to run his fingertips along the edge of her cheek, he said, “Thanks for playing with me.”
Shivers followed the path of his fingers, her skin tightening in response, breaths turning short. “I’m not usually one for games.”
“I could take or leave them. I was more interested in playing with you.” His words were suggestive and the look in his eyes said he meant them to be.
Lil’s pulse leaped in her throat, a stuttering and fluttery beat gone erratic in the face of the man before her.
The appreciation in his gaze would have been enough to carry her away, her desire to reach into the unknown stronger than it had ever been before, even if he hadn’t been AJ Garza, the only other man besides her granddad that she’d admired in her whole life. But he was. It was AJ Garza looking at her like that.
Unable to tolerate any distance between them, she closed the space, bringing their bodies flush against one another as she lifted onto her tiptoes, face tilted toward his.
He was happy to oblige, smoothly capturing her lips, drawing her closer, lending his strength so that she could lean more fully into their embrace, trusting he would hold both of them steady.
She didn’t realize he was guiding them to the bed until gravity shifted around her as he drew her down on top of him.
Never breaking contact, for which she was grateful for, he rolled them around, so that he enveloped her with his body and his warmth, bathing her senses in him.
Even then, it wasn’t enough. She wanted more of him, wanted him closer, though he had already come closer than she let anyone get.
When his hands came to the top of her jeans, she wiggled her hips impatiently. He made quick work of them, rolling the tight denim down and over her hips with practiced ease. A barrage of sensations followed: the kiss of air on skin, the caress of his calloused hand along the bare skin of her inner thigh, the sound of her long sigh rippling through the quiet of the RV.
“You ready for this?” he asked. His eyes were fixed on hers, hungry in a way that sent a tremor through her body. She nodded, ready in a way that she had never been, and the light that lit in his eyes was possessive and triumphant all at once.
He covered her again, his body radiating heat and strength as his hands came to her breasts beneath her shirt.
She moaned on contact, the sound a loud outburst that had her clamping a hand over her mouth. The RVs were remarkably soundproof, but there was only so much they could do.
Above her, AJ laughed quietly, leaning down to press a kiss behind her ear while his brilliant fingers found her nipples to the sound of her gasp.
She was breaking down into a jumble of sensations and impressions, no longer a woman, but a series of simultaneous occurring phenomena that all had to do with AJ: What AJ was doing with his hands, what AJ was doing with his mouth—was it possible to press even closer to AJ?
Finally impatient with the barrier of her shirt, in a smooth motion he pulled it open, freeing all the snaps with ease.
Feasting on the sight of her breasts, his eyes turned wolfish, and heat flooded Lil’s upper body, turning her skin deep dusky rose.
“You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen, Lil.”
For the briefest moment doubt flashed across her mind, gone nearly as quickly as it had entered: Was it true? AJ was a worldwide rodeo star, it stood to reason he had had his pick of some of the most beautiful women the globe had to offer.
AJ’s palm running downward along her side, the pad of his thumb brushing the side of her breast as he trailed over her ribs and lower, shook her mind free of thoughts of AJ and other women, drawing Lil immediately back into the present.
She hadn’t known the side of her ribs could be such a delicious place to be touched.
Reaching between them, AJ began to unbuckle the massive silver thing that rested at the top of his jeans, just one of his many, and Lil held back a snort. She was so used to seeing his buckles that she was beginning to think of world championships as commonplace. She’d certainly come up in the world.
Buckle unfastened, he slipped his hand around to his back pocket and pulled out a flash of silver.
Confusion rippled across Lil’s face for a moment and he smiled reassuringly. “Protection. ‘A cowboy is always prepared.’”
His words stopped her in her tracks.
Noticing, he grinned. “It’s just something The Old Man used to drill into us.”
It sounded like it, like some kind of rodeo guidance counselor joke to remind young men to be safe. More than that, though, like an ice bucket, it reminded her of who she was and where she came from—who she had, or rather, not had, for a mother. And a father.
Abby Lane had been beautiful, impulsive, and about as responsible as a box of puppies for the entirety of her twenty years on earth. The greatest example of that behavior being Lil’s origin story, when, at sixteen, Abby Lane had gone to watch her father, Lil’s granddad, compete in his first ever PBRA rodeo. She came home pregnant and her grandad had missed the one shot he’d had at going pro in mainstream rodeo.
Lil was born thirty-seven weeks later, a whopping six and a half pounds and eighteen inches of screaming, hollering, girl child. Her mother had labored for thirty long hours and not once during the whole ordeal did she utter the name of Lil’s father—a feat all the more impressive for Abby Lane not being known for her ability to suffer in silence.
On this matter, however, she was resolute. Until the day she died, in fact, for all the world ever knew—and for all Lil knew—Abby Lane had been impregnated by the Holy Spirit. She had never been one to care about other people’s opinions about her life, and was even less so with a brand-new baby.
For t
hose first three months, Lil’s mother had been changed—in love, real love, with someone outside herself for the first time in her life. She didn’t begrudge her infant’s midnight cries or dirty diapers, instead reveling in the intensity of being another creature’s entire whole world. The glow of motherhood wore off, however, as Lil grew. By the time she was a damage-prone toddler, her mother was over parenting.
Eighteen and looking for some space away from her toddler, Abby picked up a job at the local grange, which happened to be right next door to the local tavern. Not long after she started coming home late.
According to Gran, the first time Abby Lane didn’t come home at all was the worst. After getting Lil down for bed, assuring her Mommy would be home later, her grandparents sat up all night by the phone. Abby Lane never called.
Instead, she came back after her next scheduled shift at the grange, buzzing and jumpy and full of news: she was in love. His name was Todd and he worked at the bar next door to the grange. He made her feel alive, and didn’t seem to mind that she brought another man’s child to the relationship. They were going to get married and buy a house and be a real family, once they got enough money, of course.
The next time, when she didn’t come home for a week, earning money was the excuse. They’d landed a job with a big paycheck—so big and intense that she’d lost weight by the time she got back. She said they put in eighty hours each and hadn’t had much time to eat and sleep, let alone enough time to call home to say when they’d be back.
Two days into her disappearance, though, Gran had called the grange to see if she’d shown up there. They let her know that Abby Lane hadn’t been employed with them for over a month. A detail she never shared with her parents.
When Granddad stopped by the tavern, the owner, Old George, a second cousin of Gran’s, said he’d fired Todd for stealing from the register.
When Abby finally came back home, Gran and Granddad put their foot down: if she wanted to step out with Todd, she wasn’t doing it under their roof.
Abby responded by saying she’d go somewhere else then, but when she angrily tried to push past Gran to collect Lil from the room where she napped, Granddad had held up an arm and uttered the words that haunted him until the day he died: “Abby Lane Island. You may be too old to take my orders, but you ain’t taking my granddaughter anywhere. You touch that girl in there and I’ll be laying my own hands on you.”
His voice had been dead calm, his eyes hard and black, and Abby knew he meant what he said.
Gran said the color left Abby’s face in that moment and that she gasped before spitting on the floor. Her whole life that detail had always stood out the most starkly to Lil. Abby Lane had spit on Gran and Granddad’s floor.
The detail that stuck with Gran and Granddad was that that was the last time they saw their daughter alive. After that, she’d turned on her heel, walked out the door, and hopped into the passenger seat of an old blue Chevy. They never saw the driver.
Two years later, on a warm Tuesday in May when Lil was four, the phone rang. Gran was in the garden with Lil. Granddad was away, somewhere between Muskogee and Amarillo, running a herd for their elderly neighbors.
Wrist-deep in fresh soil, and accompanied by Lil, who’d spent their garden time whipping up a prize-worthy batch of mud pies, Gran didn’t make it to the phone in time. That was another one of those details that had mattered more to Gran and Granddad than it did to Lil.
When Gran checked the call log, she said she saw it was a Tulsa number and that that was when she knew.
They didn’t have anybody in Tulsa and the farmhouse number was unlisted. The call could only be Abby.
But it wasn’t Abby. It was the Tulsa Police Department and they had a body that needed identification. Gran dropped the phone. Lil remembered it falling, an old cordless thing, the kind that felt like you were making a phone call with a brick. The floor tile that cracked on impact was still broken to this day—a tiny memorial in itself.
Gran had taken the trip alone. Granddad wasn’t due back for a week and there wasn’t time to wait. She had dropped Lil off with their old neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Parker, who plied her with sweets and distraction for the whole time Gran was gone. Lil couldn’t eat caramel to this day because it reminded her of that visit. The Parkers had done their best to spoil the little girl who had no idea her mother was dead. Along with the sweets, they let her stay up until the sugar and unusual routine left her in an exhausted pile on their living room floor.
Gran was back the next day, changed in a way that even a four-year-old could see.
Abby Lane was gone, a drug overdose in a lonely motel. Lonely because when the owners had broken into the room with the police, the only sign of the man she’d checked in with was the second rig next to her body on the bed.
For Lil, the story wasn’t merely the tragedy of their family cannon. It was a cautionary tale to avoid the same mistakes—the biggest of which being taking up with fly-by-night rodeo cowboys who dallied so casually they were always prepared.
“Stop.” The command in her voice, enough to overwhelm the embarrassment and shame hidden beneath it, was assured and abrupt. AJ froze immediately.
Pulling back, he searched her face. “Everything okay?” he asked.
Lil nodded, then shook her head, then blew out a frustrated breath and a sigh. Then she tried again. This time the words poured out. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have let this get this far. We have to stop. This is crazy.” She sat up to scoot away from him, palms up. “You’re—” she broke off. “You’re AJ Garza.” Even just his name was a silken temptation in her mouth, as good to say in this intimate space as every daydream she’d ever had had suggested. No. That wasn’t true. In truth, none of her daydreams had ever come anywhere near so good as the real thing. But it wasn’t right. “We’re enemies,” she said, once again borrowing his friend’s word. “We have to remember we’re enemies.”
The smile he’d been wearing as she spoke slid into a frown. “We don’t have to be,” he said.
But Lil shook her head sadly. “We do. You need to win just as badly as me. And I—” She gestured to her state of undress, realizing he still had his clothes on. “I don’t do this kind of thing with rodeo cowboys.”
The words were stiff and awkward; her face was ruby toned to go along with them. Every ounce of ease that had existed between them was sucked out of the air in an instant.
For a moment, AJ was quiet, his ragged breathing slowly returning to normal. Then he slid off the bed.
Standing, he looked away from her while he adjusted his clothing.
Then he turned to her, a smile planted firmly in place, and nodded. “You’re right. I was just thinking that myself at the beginning of the night. You know what they say about the best laid plans...” As usual, there was laughter in his voice, but the fact that it was forced, put on like he was on camera, curdled Lil’s stomach.
“I’d better get going,” he said, voice low. “We’ve got a show tomorrow.”
And after waiting for Lil’s nod in response, he turned and left, closing the door on his way out.
16
The caravan pulled into the OKC arena parking lot exactly on schedule at 11:00 a.m. AJ at its head, followed by Lil, Hank, and finally the remaining bullpens. Security closed a barricade around them as soon as they parked, which struck AJ as overkill until he stepped outside.
Hundreds of young girls stood behind what appeared to be a hastily set up rope line at the far end of the parking lot. The pitch and volume of their screeching reached him, lancing through his mild hangover, even at that distance.
Tapping the first greenie that walked by on the shoulder, he said, “Excuse me. Can you tell me what that’s all about?”
The redheaded young man stuttered in response, “Y-yes, Mr. Garza.”
AJ wondered if it was somewhere in their training manual that they ha
d to stutter when they spoke to him. “So...?” he asked, pointing to the young women.
As if he’d asked for the first time, understanding lit up the greenie’s face and he said, “Oh, that! That’s because of Lil Sorrow!”
AJ’s right eye twitched.
The kid didn’t notice. His eagerness to talk about Lil Sorrow melted away all traces of intimidation, as well as any basic ability to read his audience. “Lil Sorrow’s feature got picked up by StoryLaunch and went viral, and long story short, the Closed Circuit is trending worldwide!” The kid gushed. That was the only word for it.
AJ’s head hurt, but not as much as his body ached for the woman that wouldn’t leave him alone, even when she wasn’t around. And now, apparently, it wasn’t enough that she was the bright new star of rodeo, she had to go and become a worldwide phenomenon. She was going to be the death of him. “When’d it go out?” he asked the greenie.
“Yesterday!”
Even content about Lil wasted no time climbing to the top.
“What’s it called?” he asked, recognizing he’d get more from the source than the kid in front of him at this point.
The kid blushed a little. “Rodeo’s Triple Crown Princess.”
AJ brought his fingers to his temples and rubbed. “Thanks.”
The kid nodded and darted off, the cacophony of young women in the background creating a strange soundtrack for his run.
AJ pulled his phone out of his pocket and pulled the article up.
The headline read “Rodeo’s Triple Crown Princess: rodeo’s first female rough stock champion is lean, mean, and coming for her man.”
The lead image was a close-up of Lil’s face, her head angled toward the bottom right of the frame, a mischievous grin aimed at something outside of the shot.
A piece of wheat stuck out from between her sharp teeth, the hungry glint in her eyes reminding him of the way she’d looked at him outside of Winnie the night before.
The Wildest Ride--A Novel Page 15
