Page 72 of The Wildest Ride

He winked. “Probably about as much as you.”

“Somehow I doubt that...”

“I’d be willing to bet I make a better girl than you,” he claimed boldly, ridiculously.

Laughing, she angled her head to the side and said, “Oh really? I used to wear pink, you know.”

Lips stretching he said, “Somehow, I doubt that...”

She smiled. “It’s true, though. It helped me stand out in the crowd.”

He’d never known a woman whose banter included rodeo strategy, but he found he loved it. He countered with, “Helps even more to actually compete.”

“They’ve got to let you first,” she shot back.

“They let women in all over the place now.”

She looked away. “It’s too late for me. I stopped wanting it.”

“But you used to?”

“A long time ago.”

He wasn’t so sure about that. He asked, “So why are you here now?”

She looked away, shame clouding her expression. “My granddad took out a reverse mortgage on our ranch and we don’t have the money to get it back. This was the only way we could think to come up with quick cash.”

“Excuse me?” He pressed his lips into a line. It was never a good idea to use rodeo for investment purposes. That he’d made a lifetime of doing so was beside the point.

Lil’s explanation was staccato and matter-of-fact. “My gran got the bright idea to sign me up for the circuit, certain I would take home the top prize and save the homestead.”

The story was absurd, something worthy of a soap opera. So absurd that for a moment, AJ didn’t say anything. He opened his mouth to try a few times, only to close it again and frown.

Finally, he said, “Your Gran kind of pimped you out.”

Lil looked like she didn’t know whether to be outraged or to laugh. She decided to laugh. A lot.

She laughed so hard, tears came to her eyes. Wiping them from the corners, she said, “She sure did, the wicked old woman.”

Her reasons for riding the circuit weren’t that far from his own, but the motivation for them couldn’t have been more distant. She would happily walk away when the whole thing was over because she didn’t really want to be there. She was a star rider who could walk away.

What that must be like...

That line of thinking brought a heavy feeling to the pit of his stomach and nothing good ever came out of that, so he changed the subject.

“So what’d you do when you quit rodeo?”

A bubble of laughter escaped her lips, and he felt his own quirk upward. He liked that she was as quick to laugh as she was to temper.

“You make it sound like I did it cold turkey. It wasn’t like that. I just decided not to pursue a professional career. I went to college on a rodeo scholarship, actually.”

AJ smiled. “My best friend did that. He’s a lawyer in Arizona, now. What did you study?”

“Nonprofit management,” she said. “Thought I would go into addiction recovery work.”

“But you didn’t?”

She shook her head. “I didn’t. Granddad died right after I graduated, so I stayed home and ran the ranch with Gran for a while. We were bleeding out, though, without the supplemental income from Granddad’s drives.”