Tangled in Texas

by Kari Lynn Dell

  Oh. My. She’d started Delon’s appointment with a quick exam to see how his knee had tolerated the new exercise regimen, and finding no increase in pain or swelling, had sent him off to the gym with an aide to supervise today’s workout. Finished, he had his heel propped high on the weight rack, fingers wrapped around his foot, damn near doing the splits. The position pulled his sweatpants snug across his thighs and butt. Then he pivoted his upper body to reach down for his ankle and his audience gave a collective sigh.

  Tori’s mind jumped back to the first time she’d witnessed his impressive flexibility. Her palms tingled with the memory of curving around that perfect butt and…

  She shook out her hands but couldn’t look away. Seriously unprofessional, Tori. But she’d challenge anyone who appreciated the male form to wrap their fingers around one of those hard, muscled thighs and not notice exactly how much man was attached to it.

  “He goes through the exact same routine every time,” the other therapist said, a note of awe in her voice as he swung upright and stretched both arms behind him, his gray Aggies T-shirt molding to his chest and shoulders. “It’s like a dance.”

  Choreographed to whatever beat came through the buds stuffed in his ears, loud enough to render him oblivious to his audience.

  “Maybe we should tuck dollar bills in his waistband,” Tori suggested dryly.

  The other women broke into shocked giggles, then scattered as Delon straightened and turned toward the window. Tori sidestepped the herd and went out to interrupt Delon and ruin everyone’s fun. She waved at him to follow her from the gym back to one of the treatment rooms, where they could speak privately, trying to ignore her body’s little hum of interest as he brushed past her in the doorway.

  Her phone buzzed as he settled onto the treatment table. She pulled it out, checked the number, and gave an apologetic grimace. “Mind if I take this?”

  “Go ahead.”

  If only the mechanic on the other end was so obliging. “Next Wednesday’s the soonest we can fit you in.”

  “I can’t rope with a tractor stalled in the middle of my arena. I’ll pay extra for someone to come today.”

  “No can do. Want me to put you on the schedule for next week?”

  “I’ll make a few more calls and let you know.” Tori sighed, frustrated, as she hung up. She’d already tried half the repair shops in the Panhandle. No one was interested in working overtime on a Friday. On the bright side, she now had a valid reason to call Shawnee and cancel their practice session. She turned her attention back to Delon. “Sorry. Now, we need to talk about your MRI—”

  “What kind?”

  She blinked. “Of MRI?”

  “Tractor,” he said.

  “Uh, red. Old.”

  “Make? Model? Gas or diesel engine?”

  She scrunched her face, trying to recall what the real estate agent had called it. “An International B-something, burns gas, came with the place. It’s been running kind of rough. Last night it died and wouldn’t start again.”

  “How big is it?”

  “This tall.” Tori held up a hand, palm down.

  Delon gave a slow, thoughtful nod. “I can get it fixed.”

  She stared at him for a couple of beats, comprehension slow to dawn. “Oh. I never thought…your shop does tractors?”

  “Not usually, but that’s a simple engine. Won’t be cheap to get it done today, though.”

  “Whatever. I just want to get this over with.”

  His eyebrows rose. “This?”

  “Long story.” She pulled out one of her cards to scribble her address and cell phone number on the back. “Tell the mechanic that the tractor’s in the indoor arena. I won’t be home until around six.”

  He tucked the card in the pocket of his T-shirt. “Is it okay if I start working out on my spur board at home?”

  She had to take a moment to picture what he had in mind. “Stationary, or the kind that bucks and spins?”

  “Stationary.”

  She considered the potential for injury—virtually none at this point in his recovery—and nodded. “That’s fine. What about the MRI?”

  “I’d rather hold off until I see how the spur board goes.”

  In other words, he had to see what his knee could do. Or couldn’t. And that was for the best. For now, she would focus on preparing Delon’s body to accommodate his new limitations. But before they could really move forward, he had to accept that he was never going be the same. Then he might be ready to let her try to make him better, even if “better” also meant “different.”

  “Go for it,” she said, handing him a pair of ice packs. “You can report back at your Tuesday appointment and we’ll decide about the MRI.”

  He headed back to the gym to kick back on one of the mat tables to ice his knee and she retreated to her office, where she pecked through endless screens to enter notes on the computer. Stupid software. She finally clicked Done and hustled out to grab her next patient. As she reached the waiting room door, it opened and a man stuck his head in to glance around the gym. Around fifty, she guessed, longish ginger hair and eighties sideburns—shades of Kris Kristofferson back when he was seriously hot.

  “Hey,” he said to Delon. “I was hoping to catch you before you left.”

  Delon hesitated a beat too long, during which the man caught sight of Tori. His smile was easy and open. “Oh. Hi. You must be the new therapist.”

  “That’s me,” Tori said, watching Delon for a clue.

  He wiped his expression blank. “Tori, this is my dad, Merle Sanchez. Dad, this is Tori.”

  Merle strode forward, the smile broadening as he stuck out his hand. “Good to meet you.”

  Tori could only stare at him, mute, as he pumped her hand. This was Delon’s father? But he was so…

  “Whatcha doin’ in Amarillo, Dad?” Delon asked.

  “I delivered that old Mack we sold to Soderstroms and figured I could catch a ride home with you.”

  “Sure. I’m done here.” Delon grabbed his gym towel and swung his feet to the floor, much too eager to make himself—and his father—scarce. “I’ll see you Tuesday, Tori.”

  “Wait…Tori?” The combination of Delon’s obvious discomfort and hearing her name again lit a spark of recognition. Merle Sanchez’s eyes widened as his gaze jumped from Delon to her. “Are you the same Tori who was, um—”

  “Yes. Nice to meet you…” She cut a swift glance at his son. “Finally.”

  Then she dragged her next patient out of the waiting room and left Delon to do the explaining.

  Chapter 10

  Tori’s phone rang as she settled at her desk after ushering out her last patient of the morning. She looked at the number, her eyebrows climbing. Twice in a week?

  “Hey, Daddy. I hope you’re not calling to say you found a stray wolf for me to adopt.”

  “Why would I…oh! The cat.” He sounded vaguely nervous, which made all of her defensive antennae snap to attention. “No more pets. I, um, wondered if you were busy next Friday night.”

  Oh, hell. Whatever he wanted, it couldn’t be good if he sounded that uncertain. “Depends. What am I going to get roped into?”

  “The Buckaroo Ball. I agreed to be one of the hosts, but I need a date.”

  Tori squelched a groan. The Buckaroo Ball was one of the biggest fundraisers of the year, an excuse for the Panhandle’s most well-to-do to dress up, pay exorbitant prices for mediocre prime rib, and bid obscene amounts of money in the charity auction.

  And gawk at what the local gossip columns had called “the mysterious Miss—or should that be missing—Patterson.”

  “I’m sorry, Daddy, but I’d rather stay out of the public eye.”

  “I know, sugar, but I have a plan. We won’t mention your married name, and I’ll tell everyone you’re visting from out of
town. Which is true, since you live in Dumas. If you go all out with the hair and makeup and glitter, no one from work will even recognize a picture in the paper.” He paused a beat, then added, “I’d love to spend an evening with you. And it does benefit the Cowboy Crisis Fund.”

  Damn him for being almost as ruthless as her mother at exploiting her weaknesses. The crisis fund helped cowboys with medical expenses when their insurance fell short, or was nonexistent. A number of her patients in Wyoming had been beneficiaries, which was the only way they could afford therapy. It was one cause she was honor-bound to support.

  She blew out a silent, resigned sigh. “What time?”

  “I’ll pick you up at seven at the town house.”

  “Have the housekeeper ship up all the formal dresses I left in the closet at the ranch and it’s a date.” He might guilt her into attending the ball. He could not force her to go shopping.

  “Thanks, sugar. Love you.”

  “Love you too, Daddy.”

  Tori scowled at her phone for a moment, then pushed it aside, tapping a finger on Delon’s file, open on her tablet. According to the clinic’s records, Delon still lived above the shop at Sanchez Trucking. More telling, instead of a wife or significant other, he’d listed his dad as his emergency contact. But Tori knew for a fact that Delon also had a son. She’d seen the kid propped on his daddy’s hip during a televised interview at the National Finals a couple of years ago. But who was the mother? Better question, where was the mother? Not in Delon’s medical file, that much she knew.

  Which was none of her business. Unless Delon broached the subject, she had no excuse to go poking around in his private affairs, but his professional life was out there for the world to see, and it was time she took a closer look.

  She unwrapped the deli sandwich she’d brought for lunch and popped the top on a Dr. Pepper before pulling up an Internet browser and typing in Delon Sanchez and bareback riding. She would start by studying his normal riding style, then move on to other successful bareback riders, looking for ways to adjust Delon’s mechanics to compensate for the limited motion in his knee. The search results scrolled onto her screen, and she jacked forward in her chair. At the top of the list, with over twenty thousand hits, was a video titled Delon Sanchez bad wreck.

  She hadn’t thought to look for footage of his injury. Tori’s lungs tightened as she clicked the Play button. The image was grainy, filmed at night on a cell phone camera with limited zoom capabilities, but she could see that the arena glistened under the lights, a lake of standing water pocked with mud.

  A gate swung open and the horse vaulted out, bucking high and hard, straight across the arena, water spraying from under his platter feet. Delon matched him jump for jump, spurs rolling clear up to the rigging, then snapping back to the horse’s neck before its front feet hit the ground. His upper body was tight, no wild flopping, no head bouncing off the horse’s rump. Precision. Control. Delon’s trademark. Until it all came undone.

  The bronc threw on the brakes at the fence and its hind legs skidded, then splayed, the momentum carrying its hindquarters up under its body. For an instant the horse hung there, nearly vertical. Tori sucked in a breath, sure it would flip onto its back and crush Delon. Then it toppled onto its side, splashing down like a breaching whale. When it scrambled up, Delon was still aboard, both hands clamped on the stiff handhold, but the rigging had slipped sideways.

  The horse bolted around the end of the arena with the pickup riders in hot pursuit. The rigging kept slipping, dropping Delon’s body closer to the pounding hooves with each stride. Tori’s hand curled, her fingers digging into the plastic armrest of her chair as the bucking horse thundered toward the fence with Delon hanging out on the side, his head dangerously exposed to the steel posts. The pickup man kicked hard, his horse straining to squeeze into the gap and push the bronc away from the fence. When Delon’s hand came loose from the rigging, he fell directly in the oncoming horse’s path.

  Tori flinched as the big brown gelding slammed into and over Delon. The pickup horse stumbled and went to its knees, sending the rider hurtling over its head. God only knew how the horse avoided crashing down on top of him. For an instant, there was utter silence. Then chaos, as cowboys and medics came running from every direction. Even though she knew the outcome, Tori held her breath as they clustered around Delon, easing him upright with no weight on his left leg.

  She gasped when she saw him crumple, and the medics sprang into frantic motion. Delon had stopped breathing. Only for a few moments, until the EMTs intubated him and inflated his punctured lung, but still. Even though Pepper had told her, she hadn’t truly comprehended…he’d stopped breathing. She was suddenly intensely aware of how that must feel. The panic. The helpless terror.

  She took a deep breath, appreciating how the oxygen flowed into her lungs on command. Then she frowned and tapped Pause. Wait just a damn minute. While she’d been focused on Delon, one of the bullfighters had sprinted to the aid of the fallen pickup man. That bullfighter was Joe Cassidy; everybody in rodeo knew him. And the pickup man who’d run Delon down—

  The pickup man wasn’t a man at all. It was Violet Jacobs.

  Chapter 11

  Delon braced himself for an interrogation on the drive back to Earnest, but his dad only said, “So that’s Tori.”

  “Yep.”

  Merle nodded. “Well, if she’s like the rest of her family, she’s good at her job.”

  “Seems to be.”

  And that was the sum total of the conversation.

  Back at the shop, Delon walked straight to his bedroom closet and pulled out the gear bag he hadn’t touched since the night of the wreck. When he dragged the zipper open, the smell hit him—dust, rosin, leather, and the sweet antiseptic scent of the benzoin used to stiffen his glove. Aromas meant to be accompanied by banging chutes, the snorts of bucking horses, the strains of the national anthem. What Beni called the “bareback riders get ready” song because they were nearly always the first event of the rodeo.

  His riding glove could stand up on its own, like medieval armor formed to fit his hand. Traces of mud were still visible in the seams of the chaps folded at the bottom of the bag, but someone had taken the time to clean up his gear and stow it properly while he was flat on his back in the hospital. He slid his hand into the glove and flexed his fingers, feeling the bite of hardened leather. For the first time since he was thirteen, there were no calluses to protect his palm.

  He really had gone soft.

  He pulled the glove on and worked his hand into the stiff rawhide handle of the rigging. His blood rose instantly at the creak of rosin. For a moment he fought the urge. He should wait until he was sure he was alone. Then he hissed a curse. He was in the mood to kick the shit out of something and no one would pay any attention to him in the old, walled-off section of the shop.

  He shoved his feet into a pair of boots, caught up the cinch with the hand that wasn’t still stuck in the rigging, and headed out the back door. The flick of a switch lit a single row of fluorescent lights below. His mind reeled back over hundreds of hours, thousands upon thousands of spur strokes, and two half-grown boys with big dreams. His rodeo career had started here. Not in an arena, but this grimy, ill-lit corner of their father’s shop.

  The contraption that sat in the middle of the cramped space looked like a poor attempt to build a wooden doghouse—six feet long, wide at the bottom, with short straight sides and a top that slanted to a platform slightly wider than his butt. The front narrowed and sloped away from the body, forming the approximate shape of a horse’s neck and shoulders if it had its head down, bucking. They’d padded the seat and shoulders with foam and carpet remnants, then worn it to shreds with the pound and scrape of boot heels.

  Later they’d designed a fancier model with a pretty decent bucking motion using an electric motor and a flywheel off a junker truck, but once they’d mastere
d real live horses, it had been relegated to one of the sheds out back. This old board was all they needed to stay sharp and hone their personal styles: Gil flung back, his head slamming off the horse’s rump, his spur strokes free and wild. And Delon, shoulders cocked forward, his body tight and controlled, each stroke precise.

  Bareback riding was the X-games event of rodeo, the best rides straddling the razor-thin line between going big and crashing. The harder the horse bucked, the bigger the score. The cowboy was rewarded for opening up and taking chances, unless he teetered over that line and lost control. The judges wanted to see long, flashy spur strokes, but you’d better stay centered and your boot heels had better be planted in the horse’s neck before its front feet hit the ground on the next jump or they’d dock points.

  Delon damn near always beat the horse to the ground, his spur strokes dead even and snappy. Consistency was Delon’s hole card, but Gil was the one people had lined the fences to watch. Electric, unpredictable, but always worth the price of admission.

  Shaking off the memories, Delon checked the CD in the battered boom box on its shelf above the workbench. Guns N’ Roses. Perfect. His heart pounded to the beat as Axel howled the opening bars of “Welcome to the Jungle” through the forty-amp speakers Delon had wired into every corner of the room. He pulled his hand free and strapped his rigging onto the board, then propped one heel on the seat and reached for his ankle, his muscles only offering a mild protest as he touched his cheek to his knee. His body responded to the familiar routine, his brain kicking off a slide show of all the times and all the places he’d warmed up this way—from the Cow Palace in San Francisco to the coliseum on the boardwalk in Atlantic City, from Calgary to Houston, and hundreds of other rodeos in between.

  On this last Friday night in January, he should be in Fort Worth, or Rapid City, South Dakota, standing on the back of chutes inhaling the perfume of dirt and horse shit and rosin, the chute boss yelling that he’d be coming out of number six so get his rigging strapped on. Cowboys and contractors would be jostling past, thumping him on the back and yelling, “Go get ’im.” Then he’d be climbing over the back of a chute to ease down on a horse’s warm, hard back while it snorted and showed him the whites of its eyes.