Almost. I mean, this is me.
“I saved your damn life,” I said, folding my arms. “You owe me a drink. Lucky Pete’s, at eight.”
She shook her head, looking at her feet. “I don’t go to bars.”
Who doesn’t go to bars?!
“Eight,” I said firmly, and just stared her down. The Bull stare has been known to make women spontaneously drop their panties.
But she didn’t melt like she was supposed to. She sighed, almost like she was annoyed. And her eyes were going everywhere except on my face, as if she was afraid to look at me. But when we did lock eyes, I caught just a glimpse of the need inside her and goddamn, it was bubbling hot like lava.
Finally, she nodded. “Eight,” she muttered and turned away again. This time, I let her leave. I watched her climb the fence, which was a whole epic movie of denim stretching tight over perfect, rounded ass and breasts bobbing under her tight blouse. My cock had been hard for her ever since I’d first seen her. Now it was swelling almost painfully against my thigh. Damn!
“What’s your name?” I called after her as she headed for the stairs.
She looked back at me, just a quick glance—but when our eyes met, they locked and neither of us could look away. She was wide-eyed and almost panting. Helpless. “Lily,” she mumbled. And then she was gone, almost running up the stairs.
I swept my hat off my head and stared at the spot where I’d last seen her. I’m very seldom lost for words, but that was one of those times. “Well, goddamn,” I said at last.
Lily
I barreled up out of the stairwell and hurried over to Francisco. My mind was whirling with what had just happened. I felt almost drunk with it, overwhelmed with sensation, and that’s a bad way to go into this kind of a meeting. I let the sun blast the memories from my mind and tried to focus. Later. I’d think about the whole thing later.
By now, the rodeo was getting started. There was a lot of shouting from an over-enthusiastic announcer and cowboys on horseback were rounding up cows. I surreptitiously checked, but none of the cowboys were Bull.
I slumped down in the empty seat beside Francisco. He took one look at me and said, straight-faced, “You look hot.”
If I was some svelte beauty, it might have been flirting. But he was right—I did look hot. The run through the arena and up all those steps had left me red-faced and sweating, my hair sticking to my forehead. And...okay, yes, getting up close and personal with Bull had reduced me to a hot mess, too.
I gave Francisco a glower, grabbed the soda out of his hand and took three big glugs. “There,” I panted. “Better now.”
It’s a mark of how well we get on that I dared to do something like that. The Gallegos put the fear of God into most people and Francisco answers directly to Isabella, the head of the whole cartel. But after two years, I counted him as a friend. We’d even been out for drinks a few times—I mean, not in that way: he’s pushing fifty. But he was friendly and paid on time and didn’t give me a lot of sexist crap about being a woman, so I liked him. Plus, meeting with him was one of the few bits of actual social contact I had.
He grabbed the soda back off me and blinked at me from behind his huge, gold-rimmed sunglasses. “You got the stuff?”
I slapped the package of fake IDs onto his lap, concealed within the latest Sports Illustrated. It was part of our routine that I picked up an issue for him each time we met.
He didn’t even bother to check them, just passed me a Vogue with my money inside. That was kind of a running thing, too, because he’d done it the first time we’d ever traded, having heard on our phone calls that I was a woman. He’d kept it up ever since, despite the fact that I’m about as far from a fashion model as it’s possible to be and the last time I’d bought any new clothes was...yep, I literally can’t remember. No one who does business with me cares what I look like and no one I see socially—
Well, I don’t see anyone socially.
The crowd whooped and cheered because some cowboy had just roped a horse. I craned my neck to look...but it still wasn’t Bull. And then I caught myself and flushed, embarrassed that I’d looked.
“You stayin’?” asked Francisco. “They got chuck wagon racing and chute dogging coming up.”
Part of me was tempted. Somewhere in that mess of sweat and rope and action there was a hulking cowboy with the bluest eyes I’d ever seen. A cowboy who, against all logic, had actually asked me out for a drink...
I stood up and shook my head. “Nope,” I said. “You knock yourself out. I got air conditioning and artificial light to get back to.”
He shook his head and gave me a long-suffering look. “There’s a whole world out here you’re missing out on.”
“Yeah,” I told him. “But it’s not my world.”
Lily
When you do something enough, it becomes magnified in your mind until you know every detail. I know every swirl and loop of the stenciled paper on a passport just like you know every pothole on your commute to work.
Which is bad. Because, as I sat there at my desk, working away, it meant that my mind was free to think.
I squirmed inside when I remembered how I’d reacted to him. It was as if all the normal parts of my brain, the ones that let me escape New York and customize the bus and build a little forger empire here in Texas, all suddenly shut down. All I’d been left with was some primal, animal brain that I hadn’t even known was lurking underneath. And it, faced with Bull, had been reduced to a puddle of hormones. I’d stood there slack-jawed and helpless.
I’ve always been proud of my independence. When you’re on the run, being a woman on her own isn’t any kind of worthy feminist crusade, it’s simple survival fact. I didn’t need a man because I didn’t need anyone. And yet I’d just stayed there gaping up at him as that arrogant, cocky bastard had—somehow—talked me into a date. A date? I didn’t go on dates!
I couldn’t go on dates.
I’d made a decision, back in New York. A very simple decision which had kept people around me safe ever since. The decision had been that, live or die, I was on my own. No friends. No boyfriends. No connections of any kind.
No one my uncle could hurt.
And then, just because he was all—all—muscley and male, I’d somehow forgotten all that and turned into a weak-kneed idiot.
I’d looked him up on Facebook—it’s not hard to find a six foot-something rodeo rider nicknamed “Bull” in a small town. His last name was Rollins, but there was no mention of his real name—he always called himself Bull. Asshole. And when he wasn’t working with horses on a local ranch, he was a rodeo rider, getting paid to be thrown around by wild broncos. What kind of idiot would choose that for a career?
I was fairly sure he wanted to fuck me and that surprised me as much as it annoyed me. Surprise because—well, this is me, curvy and big, and with precious little in the way of feminine wiles even before I spent two years living as a hermit on a bus. And annoyed because his Facebook page was a non-stop stream of photos of him in bars—each time, with a different woman. It was a barely-disguised list of his conquests, the modern equivalent of notches on his bedpost. Me and Charlene, last night. Me and Kara, last night. If he slept with me, it would be me and Lily, last night, and then, just one mouse-scroll further down the page, would be the next one. Women, to him, seemed to be disposable playthings. He was just another cocky, irritating alpha male.
But the more I thought about it, the more the hot anger seemed to seep down through me and sort of...change.
Bastard. Arrogant bastard. I bet he wanted to fuck me right there, in the basement of the arena, with all those animals around. Down in the hay. Or on a table or something, pulling my jeans off and him shoving down his pants and grunting as he shoved his—
I was uncomfortably aware of how, the more annoyed I got, the more I found I was pressing my thighs together. I tried to focus on my work—I was cutting plastic with a craft knife, a precision job.
It’s just beca
use it’s been a while. And by a while I meant over two years, since well before I’d left New York. I mean, I hadn’t been completely idle—I had my vibrator and my imagination, but—
But suddenly, that didn’t seem like any kind of replacement for a hard, muscled body, so heavy on top of mine, his knees spreading my thighs….
The blade of the craft knife snapped, the tip of it pinging across the room. I’d been pressing too hard.
This is ridiculous. I should have been concentrating on real things that mattered, like the passports for Luka, the Russian arms dealer, and the next batch for the Mexican cartel, and those couple for the weed farmers in Canada. You know, normal stuff.
Rules were rules. Of course I wouldn’t go on the stupid date. I’d avoid ever going back to the arena. I’d never see him again. In a few days, I’d have forgotten all about him and everything would go back to normal. Everything would just carry on, just the same as it always had.
I found myself staring at my single bed.
And I started to get ready to go out.
Lily
I’d never been to Lucky Pete’s, but that didn’t mean I went in cold. I’ve met with Colombian drug lords in old train yards and Japanese mafia in theme parks. I never go in cold. I’d pieced together the interior of the place from photos on the web and knew all my exits in case of disaster. I debated whether to take my gun but eventually decided it was inappropriate for a date. So I took a Taser instead.
Imagine every cheesy Wild West saloon bar you’ve seen in a movie, recreated on a low budget and then filled with too many people who’ve had too much beer. The highlight of the place was the mechanical bull and the animatronic prospector (complete with pickaxe and long white beard) who stuck his head out of a barrel every few minutes and asked if anyone had seen his mule. That line probably got pretty tired, after you’d heard it four hundred times. I’d only been there ten minutes and I was ready to bury the pickaxe in the puppet’s head.
Where the hell was Bull? It was five past eight. Was this normal? Were guys always late for dates?
I was uncomfortably aware that I didn’t have a whole lot of experience to go on. My teenage years hadn’t been exactly normal.
I hadn’t known what to wear, so I’d put on a fresh blouse along with my jeans, added a little make-up and left it at that. Now, looking around at the other girls, I realized that maybe I should have spent less time checking the exits and more time looking at what people were wearing. Everyone else was in little skirts or shorts and strappy tops, with either towering heels or some quirky take on cowboy boots. I was showing about ten percent of the skin all the other girls were, and theirs was beautifully sun-kissed and smoothly tan.
I still couldn’t see him anywhere. I stalked over to the bar and asked for a beer. At least I could enjoy the one benefit of being out on the town. I don’t drink in the bus. I figure that if I start drinking out there on my own, things could get out of control very fast. And I’m kind of obsessive about staying in control.
When my beer came, I tipped the barmaid and said, in a low, slightly embarrassed voice, “I’m looking for Bull.”
She rolled her eyes.
“Not like that,” I said quickly, feeling my cheeks flush. “I’m just having a drink with him.”
She nodded towards a corner. “Join the line.”
I’d pretty much ignored the gaggle of girls over on that side of the bar because they seemed to be the loudest, most irritating bunch in the place. But now that I craned my neck, I could just see, amongst all the bare shoulders and perfectly-coiffed hair, a black cowboy hat. He was sitting down, hidden by his crowd of admirers. Well, of course he was.
I edged closer to the crowd. The girls had formed a solid wall of perfect, slender shoulders and trim little waists. Most of them were taller than me and even the ones who weren’t were lifted by towering heels.
He wasn’t even going to be able to see me.
Maybe that’s for the best. This whole thing had been crazy anyway. I knew I couldn’t start anything with him, so what the hell was I doing there? I’m fulfilling an obligation. He did save my life.
That’s what I told myself.
I edged my way through the crowd. A few of the girls turned and eyed me with disgust. They didn’t have to call me names: the disbelieving snorts were enough.
I’d been a hermit so long, I’d sort of forgotten what bitches women could be. I kept going, my face heating up. Then, as I broke through to the front of the crowd, I stopped and stared.
Bull’s chair was tilted back on two legs so that he could lean against the wall. He wasn’t topless now, of course, but the white shirt couldn’t hide the breadth of his chest or the thickness of his forearms. His long, denim-clad legs were stretched out, his boots resting on another chair, and two girls had perched their dainty behinds there, one on his calves and one just above his knees, as they giggled away at him. A third was just arriving with a fresh beer for him. A fourth was beside him, massaging his shoulders.
Now I began to see where all his arrogance came from. God, they just threw themselves at him! And why? Just because he was muscley and confident and had an enormous—
He looked up, saw me and grinned as if he was genuinely pleased to see me. And my idiot body reacted. My lungs point-blank refused to move any air and, as his eyes flicked down over my breasts and thighs, a wave of heat rolled down in their wake like thunder following lightning.
“Lily,” he said in that slow Texas drawl. He tipped his hat back just a little. “Come sit down.”
And he glanced down at the one remaining space—his groin.
Ego. That’s what I’d been about to think. He had an enormous ego.
“Careful,” one girl muttered. “You might crush him.”
I hadn’t had any intention of sitting in his goddamn lap anyway, but that did it. I turned and pushed my way back through the crowd, head down. I’d done my part. I’d showed up. Fuck him and the horse-sized ego he rode in on, if he thought I was going to join his fan group and—
A hand grabbed my arm just as I reached the door. A big hand. The heat of it soaked through my thin blouse and throbbed into my skin.
Bull hauled me around to face him. I didn’t resist. “Now, that ain’t very sporting,” he told me. “You just got here.”
I glanced towards the crowd, confused. Why had he come after me? “Seems like you’ve got all the attention you need.”
He glanced over at the girls who were now staring at us, frowning. “I don’t care about them,” he said with an easy shrug. He squeezed my arm and I went squidgy inside. It was something to do with the strength of those fingers and the heat of his hand, soaking right into me.
I took another look at the girls. They were frowning and pouting, now. At me.
“I didn’t come here to get between you and your groupies,” I said.
He laughed—a big bass laugh that made heads turn. The sort of laugh you can only do when you’re completely unconcerned what anyone thinks—the sort it’d be impossible for me to do. He glanced over at the girls again and gave them a wave. They started to glare at him, too. I think I actually saw one stamp her foot.
He really didn’t give a shit what they thought, I realized. What anyone thought. He’d had fun with them and then—for some reason—he’d wanted to toy with me and so he’d dumped the whole lot of them.
And then, no doubt, the next girl would come along and he’d walk off with her.
“I’m outta here,” I told him, and turned to go.
He still had his hand on my arm. He didn’t grip me tight and pull me back, he just used his hand to guide me in an arc back towards him. “Hey, hey, hey,” he said, his tone changing. When I reluctantly looked him in the eye, he was frowning. “What’s the matter?”
The funny thing was, if I hadn’t already pegged him as a cocky, womanizing bastard, I would have believed he actually cared.
“Nothing,” I said. “This was a bad idea.” And I took a step bac
k.
And he took a step forward.
I looked up into those big blue eyes again. They really were like the Texas sky—when I looked into them, there was this impression of size, like I was in the middle of a desert, turning slowly to see the blueness that was all around me. It felt as if he was seeing me from every angle, even the bits of me I tried to hide.
It didn’t feel like he saw me as just another girl, when he did that.
“Stop it,” I muttered. I only realized afterwards that I’d said it out loud.
He let go of my arm, but didn’t move away. “Stop what?” he asked. He wasn’t smiling anymore but he didn’t look angry, either. He looked almost concerned. “Why are you so damn keen on running out on me?”
I swallowed and forced myself to lift my chin. I wasn’t going to look like I was scared of this. I mean, I wasn’t scared of this. Goddamnit!
I grabbed the back of a chair, pulled it out from under the table and sat down.
Immediately, he relaxed. That lazy smile came back. He dropped into the chair opposite me, leaning back with his arm resting on the back. For just a second there he’d seemed really worried that I’d leave. Why does he care? It wasn’t like he was short of women.
I glanced over again at the crowd of girls. Most of them were standing with their arms crossed, stares of pure death aimed right at me. If I ventured over there again, I was pretty sure I was going to get bludgeoned to death by ten pairs of heels. That’s ridiculous. They think I’ve stolen their man? Me?!
Bull grinned at me across the table—laidback and easy, not a care in the world. The polar opposite of myself. He didn’t seem to be in any hurry to make conversation. He was happy to just look at me and, the more he looked at me, the more antsy I got. I could feel his eyes sliding over every part of me: my cheeks, my neck, down my collarbone to my breasts. Down over my stomach to the little bit of leg he could see around the table. I could understand him drooling over one of those girls in the crowd, but a big girl like me?
Texas Kissing Page 2
