Text copyright ©2020 Lani Lynn Vale
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 permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Dedication
If you’re reading this, I want to thank you for picking up this book. I wouldn’t be able to do it without you.
Acknowledgments
Chase Ketron - Model
Golden Czermak - Photographer
My Brother’s Editor & Ink It Out Editing- My editors
Cover Me Darling - Cover Artist
My mom - Thank you for reading this book eight million two hundred times.
Kendra, Laura, Lisa, Penney, Kathy, Mindy, Barbara & Amanda—I don’t know what I would do without y’all. Thank you, my lovely betas, for loving my books as much as I do.
Table of Contents
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
Epilogue
Author’s Note:
What’s Next?
Other titles by Lani Lynn Vale:
The Freebirds
Boomtown
Highway Don’t Care
Another One Bites the Dust
Last Day of My Life
Texas Tornado
I Don’t Dance
The Heroes of The Dixie Wardens MC
Lights To My Siren
Halligan To My Axe
Kevlar To My Vest
Keys To My Cuffs
Life To My Flight
Charge To My Line
Counter To My Intelligence
Right To My Wrong
Code 11- KPD SWAT
Center Mass
Double Tap
Bang Switch
Execution Style
Charlie Foxtrot
Kill Shot
Coup De Grace
The Uncertain Saints
Whiskey Neat
Jack & Coke
Vodka On The Rocks
Bad Apple
Dirty Mother
Rusty Nail
The Kilgore Fire Series
Shock Advised
Flash Point
Oxygen Deprived
Controlled Burn
Put Out
I Like Big Dragons Series
I Like Big Dragons and I Cannot Lie
Dragons Need Love, Too
Oh, My Dragon
The Dixie Warden Rejects
Beard Mode
Fear the Beard
Son of a Beard
I’m Only Here for the Beard
The Beard Made Me Do It
Beard Up
For the Love of Beard
Law & Beard
There’s No Crying in Baseball
Pitch Please
Quit Your Pitchin’
Listen, Pitch
The Hail Raisers
Hail No
Go to Hail
Burn in Hail
What the Hail
The Hail You Say
Hail Mary
The Simple Man Series
Kinda Don’t Care
Maybe Don’t Wanna
Get You Some
Ain’t Doin’ It
Too Bad So Sad
Bear Bottom Guardians MC
Mess Me Up
Talkin’ Trash
How About No
My Bad
One Chance, Fancy
It Happens
Castiel and Turner
Snitches Get Stitches
F-Bomb
The Southern Gentleman Series
Kinda Don’t Care
Maybe Don’t Wanna
Get You Some
Ain’t Doin’ It
Too Bad So Sad
KPD Motorcycle Patrol
Hide Your Crazy
It Wasn’t Me
I’d Rather Not
Make Me
Sinners are Winners
If You Say So
SWAT 2.0
Just Kidding
Fries Before Guys
Maybe Swearing Will Help
Ask Me If I Care
May Contain Wine (5-12-20)
Joke’s on You (6-9-20)
Join the Club (7-14-20)
Any Day Now (8-11-20)
Say it Ain’t So (9-8-20)
Officially Over It (10-13-20)
Nobody Knows (11-3-20)
Depends Who’s Asking (12-8-20)
Valentine Boys
Herd That
Crazy Heifer
Chute Yeah
Get Bucked
Blurb
Don’t ever trust a bullfighter.
Those five words were words that Waylynn Molly Jennings lived by from the moment that her daddy, a bullfighter himself, said them to her to the moment one caught her eye.
From then on, she’s tried her best to stay away from them. In fact, she’s done even better. She’s stayed away from rodeos of all kinds.
But then she graduates college, can’t find a job, and has nowhere else to go but her dad’s RV camper following him around on the rodeo circuit.
Surely a couple of weeks while she finds a job won’t hurt anything… right?
Wrong.
She forgot about the one person that her dad had warned her about in the first place—Darby Valentine.
***
Darby Valentine is a bad boy. Darby Valentine is trouble. Darby Valentine is a god with his…
Okay. So there are a lot of things said about Darby Valentine, and most of it isn’t good.
Granted, he did a lot of crap in his younger days to warrant his bad reputation. However, he’d grown up a lot in the ten years that it’d been since he’d stepped back onto the straight and narrow.
He doesn’t deserve the bad rap anymore.
He also doesn’t deserve the crap that Waylynn Molly Jennings gives him each time she sees him.
The more crap she gives, the more appealing she seems.
And it doesn’t take long for Darby Valentine to prove to her he is exactly what she thinks he is—a cowboy with a bad attitude and a pension for getting exactly what he wants.
Chapter 1
Women will never know the dread of when your dick touches the inside of a toilet bowl.
-Text from Darby to Waylynn
Darby
“I’m not going to give you shit.”
I would’ve rolled my eyes had I not known it would just piss the woman off in front of me.
“Listen, Linda,” I said.
“My name isn’t Linda, jerk wad,” Not-Linda said. “It’s Kasey.”
I knew what her name was, but I couldn’t stop myself from saying things to piss her off. Seriously, doing it was just too much fun.
“Kasey,” I corrected myself, trying not to put too much sarcasm into my words. “I’m here to make the bank drop for you.”
“You’re going to have to allow me to check w
ith Candy or Desi, then,” Kasey snarled. “I don’t want you stealing it.”
I sighed.
“I’ve been a good boy for years now, Kasey,” I said. “You’re being much too dramatic.”
Kasey stiffened and turned away from me as if I’d just pissed in her cornflakes.
Then again, maybe I had at one point.
I’d been a dick in my younger years.
In fact, I was still a dick.
I just wasn’t a prick that did shit just to piss people off and fuck up peoples’ lives anymore.
Now, I just did what I wanted, tried not to piss people off in the process, and kept my nose clean.
Kasey had been a mistake.
A mistake I’d made when I was ‘asshole Darby’ and not ‘has his shit together Darby.’
Kasey and I had dated in high school. It’d gone south when I’d left, trying to leave my shitty past behind. And Kasey still hated that I’d let her go when I’d left.
Meaning, now that she worked for my sister-in-laws, Candy and Desi, I had to see her and deal with her crap a lot more often than I wanted to.
The woman who’d entered the store behind me, who’d been listening to the entire thing since she’d walked in, finally broke the silence of Kasey leaving.
“Is that your superpower?”
I turned and looked at the woman.
It wasn’t really a surprise to find Waylynn Jennings standing there.
I’d, of course, seen her enter the store.
What I hadn’t expected her to do was to actually talk to me.
“What?” I asked, confusion lacing my features.
“Pissing people off,” she said. “Is that your superpower?”
I rolled my eyes.
“You’re hilarious,” I found myself saying. “Why are you talking to me?”
I’d met Waylynn Jennings when I’d started working for the rodeo circuit as a bullfighter.
A bullfighter was the crazy man that chased the bulls around the rodeo ring when the bull riders either fell off the bull, or jumped off when they had completed their ride.
To keep the bull rider safe, the bullfighter would then catch the bull’s attention to ensure that the bull rider could make it out of the ring without harm.
That was where Waylynn’s father, Jude, came in.
Jude was a six-foot-four powerhouse that could run like the wind.
He’d taken me under his wing and shown me the ropes when I was just a kid looking to make a buck. And, after eight years of being a bullfighter, I finally could see the end on the horizon.
Originally, I’d taken the job as a bullfighter because it paid a pretty decent chunk of change.
Then I’d kept the job because it gave me money, worked well with my schedule at the Valentine Ranch, and I could pick and choose where I wanted to go and when I wanted to work. Which was a necessity when it came to going to college full-time.
Which led to how I’d first met Waylynn.
Jude Jennings had brought his daughter, Waylynn, with him to the first rodeo.
At the time, Waylynn hadn’t liked being there.
Her mother and Jude had recently divorced, and she’d been a bitter little bitch to anyone that showed her any kindness.
And me, who hadn’t really cared who she was at all, hadn’t shown her even the least bit of attention when she was around.
Which, in turn, pissed her off even more.
Now, eight years later, she still had a hard-on when it came to causing me trouble.
To make matters worse, she’d even started going to the same damn school as me. Attending the same damn classes.
Honestly, I wasn’t sure if she’d started the classes because of me, and wanted to piss me off even more, or because she genuinely wanted to be an architectural engineer.
Whatever the reason, to this day she still disliked every bone in my body.
And I thought she was the hottest thing I’d ever seen.
Even though I’d never act on the feelings she invoked in me.
“I’m talking to you because I know it annoys you,” she said.
I frowned.
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
Kasey came out of the back room, phone to her ear, and the bank bag in her hands.
She looked like she’d swallowed a lemon.
“Sure, fine,” Kasey said, holding out the bank bag to me. “Here.”
I took it, offered Kasey a smile, then turned around to walk out of the coffee store.
Kasey grumbled something under her breath as we left that sounded suspiciously like ‘fucking asshole,’ but I didn’t turn around to make sure.
“She’s sweet,” Waylynn said. “What did you do to her to piss her off?”
I grumbled something underneath my breath and took a left onto Main Street, the road that the bank was on, and started walking quickly.
It was a vain attempt at getting Waylynn to stop following me.
It didn’t work.
She just sped up.
“What was that?” she repeated, easily keeping pace at my side.
Thinking that it couldn’t hurt for her to know, I decided to tell her.
“We met when I first got back to Kilgore,” I said. “I was in a bad place. Did some bad shit. Fucked around. Kasey was with me for most of that time. When I finally got my ass back on the straight and narrow, Kasey had to go. I broke up with her, then left for college shortly after that.”
Waylynn hummed in understanding.
“So you pissed her off because she was in love with you and you broke up with her,” she guessed. “And now, you have to see her every day, and she’s still in love with you.”
I had no idea if that was the case or not.
I did know that she disliked me immensely, though.
“No idea,” I said as I made my way to the bank door. “But I don’t see her every day.”
When I opened it, I was unsurprised to find her still at my side.
She came to a stop beside me as I started to fill out a deposit receipt and then started counting the money that I would be depositing for Desi and Candy.
“That’s a lot of money,” Waylynn said. “I…”
“Hands in the air!”
I felt my heartbeat slow to an almost crawl and looked over my shoulder at the man that’d just entered through the bank’s front doors.
I felt like a fucking moron for not carrying today.
Normally I did.
I’d been doing it since I was old enough to hold a license to carry concealed.
And now, the one fucking time that I needed it, I didn’t have it on me.
I looked over at Waylynn as I raised my hands into the air, feeling helpless.
She didn’t have her hands in the air. She had one in her purse and the other one at the small of her back.
“Here,” she said, slapping a piece of cold metal onto the table I was standing in front of. “You can hold my purse gun.”
Then she pulled the biggest goddamn gun I’d ever seen right out of the waistband of her pants.
Knowing that she was about to engage the robber, I dropped my arms and picked up the ‘purse gun’ she’d handed me.
Then turned around just in time for the man to come stalking toward us.
“I said hands in the air!” the robber bellowed.
In answer, Waylynn flipped off the safety.
It was the loudest thing I’d ever heard in my life.
“Do you really want to see whose gun is bigger?” she asked. “Because mine is a 500 Win Mag. It’ll blow a hole in your chest the size of a watermelon.”
The man was stunned to stillness.
He gaped at Waylynn.
As did everyone else, me included.
“I’ll give you to the count of ten to get onto the floor before I shoot,” she said. “One. Two. Three…”
The robber threw his gun a
t Waylynn, which was when I realized that it was plastic.
It hit Waylynn in the face, then clattered to the floor and shattered into a million, tiny plastic pieces.
Waylynn didn’t bother shooting the moron, though.
Before anybody, even me, could react, she was tackling the man before he could make his escape.
She took him down in one well-placed tackle, doing better than eighty percent of the professional linemen for the Dallas Cowboys could’ve done.
“Holy shit,” I breathed, watching it all go down in a sort of distant surprise.
I bent down and picked up her gun that’d fallen to the floor, stuffed it in the back of my pants, then stepped on the man’s arm that he was about to use to nail a blow to the side of Waylynn’s head.
When he went to hit her with the other arm, I stepped down hard, feeling the audible crack of the man’s arm breaking.
He screamed bloody murder and Waylynn scrambled off of him.
I offered her my hand, which she promptly pushed away.
Standing on her own two feet, she smoothed her hands down her pants and stared at the now-crying robber.
A scattered and winded teller made her way over with a phone to her ear.
“The police are on their way,” she said breathlessly.
I nodded once and handed Waylynn back her hand cannon.
She took it, replaced it in the holster against her right kidney, then threw her shirt back over it.
When she was done with that, I handed her back her ‘purse gun,’ too.
With both safely stowed, I couldn’t help myself.
I had to see how I’d not seen the gun beforehand. I knew for a fact that I’d snuck a peek at her ass at one point during our walk to the bank.
I leaned backward, catching the attention of a man now standing and brushing his neatly-pressed pants off, and took a look at her ass.
I could see the barrel of the gun—now.
“How the hell…” I said. “I should’ve been able to see that.”
Waylynn snorted.
“Would you like to go out to dinner with me?” the nicely-dressed man asked.
Waylynn turned to study the man that’d just asked that.
Just about that time, the man on the ground pulled a knife and lunged at Waylynn.
I reacted first and kicked the knife out of his hand just about the same time that Waylynn pulled her gun back out.
The little spitfire aimed it at the bank robber’s face and said, “Don’t touch that knife!”
Get Bucked Page 1
