Page 7

Chapter Five

Sarah

I don’t know what to expect today at the Expo. I’m being given a behind-the-scenes look at the rodeo, and I can’t say that I ever really fantasized about having one. But here we are.

My heart feels bruised from everything that happened this morning. From having to quit my job, showing Dallas my apartment, and facing the reality that I’m leaving it. We parked my car there, so that it would look like I’m home. Part of Dallas’s plan to keep Chris from realizing what’s happening.

I hate that he’s forcing me out. I hate that the little life I built for myself is being absolutely demolished by the hovering specter of Christopher Murphy. I know that he’s small.

I know he doesn’t matter.

I know that he’s the worst sort of person .

Someone who doesn’t deserve loyalty, who doesn’t deserve to be at the forefront of anyone’s thoughts.

I know that, and yet he has the power to make me afraid.

I don’t focus on that, though. Instead, I focus on my surroundings.

It’s an organized chaos, animals and rodeo officials everywhere.

Everything is a lot more regimented than I could’ve ever imagined.

The riders are randomly assigned the animals that they have for the events, so there’s a coordination effort that happens in back offices, I certainly never imagined.

There are judges, the bull fighters, who I usually think of as rodeo clowns.

There are men on hand to help open the gates, to get all the animals where they need to be.

Dallas gives me an overview of everything, and for a little while, I’m taken out of my life. Out of all of my issues. It’s amazing, if I’m honest.

There’s a refreshment tent in the back, serving meals, barbecue mainly, and beer on tap.

Again, I remind Dallas that I can’t drink yet.

He laughs and gets us a couple of waters and two plates of barbecue goodness- brisket, potato salad, and baked beans.

“I don’t drink before events,” he says, holding up the water.

“Hey! Dodge.”

We both turn at the sound of someone calling out to Dallas. There’s a tall, handsome man with dark hair heading our direction, a blonde woman at his side.

“Sarah,” Dallas says. “This is Colt. He’s another one of the bull riders. And this is Stella, she’s a barrel racer.”

Stella is beautiful. Athletic and compact, with bright blue eyes and freckles scattered across her nose.

The strange flood of possessiveness that I feel, standing next to Dallas, is not entirely unfamiliar to me.

It reminds me of being a kid, whenever a new foster sibling would come into the family, or when Dallas and I would get moved to a new house, and I felt the need to make sure that all the other kids knew that even if he was nice to them, they weren’t special to him. Not like I was.

It's such a weird, childish feeling, and yet mixed with something that doesn’t feel childish at all, that I don’t want to look at too closely.

“This is Sarah,” he says. “I… I knew her back when we were kids.”

He doesn’t introduce me as his foster sister. I guess I’m not, currently. But it’s still noticeable that he edits out the truth of our relationship, and I’m curious about why, but I also can’t ask right now.

“Nice to meet you,” says Stella, who is as bright and lovely as her beautiful face suggests, and I am irritated by it.

“You here for the event?”

“She’s coming back to Gold Valley with me,” Dallas says, and again he offers no real explanation, though this time I’m relieved.

“Oh, Gold Valley,” says Stella. “I’ve been there a couple of times. It’s really pretty.”

“Yeah, it’s fine,” Colt says. “Boring.”

“It’s not boring,” Dallas says.

“That isn’t what you thought in high school.

Anyway, maybe it’s because I grew up there.

Spent my whole childhood in that place,” Colt says, turning a chair around backwards and sitting straddling it, looking at me with a smile that I’m sure most women consider charming.

He’s extremely handsome, in every way that one might measure that metric.

His jaw is square, his dark eyes are compelling.

He’s got the kind of easy smile that transforms his entire face from a brooding intensity to the brilliance of the sun .

But he just doesn’t do anything for me. In general, no one does.

That’s another thing that’s been taken from me.

Because touch has become weaponized. And all these years later, I haven’t figured out a way to make it not something that just reminds me of violations of trust. Anyway, I’ve never wanted to get close enough to a man to try and work through it. I don’t mean physically. Emotionally.

That’s one reason Dallas has always been so important to me. Touching him has never felt scary.

I look between Colt and Stella, and I wonder if there’s something romantic between the two of them, though it doesn’t seem so.

And now that I’m not being weird and possessive about Dallas, I can’t see any special connection between him and Stella either.

She’s not gazing at him with any sort of admiration.

Which I find kind of insane, because every time I look at him, I’m flooded with admiration.

Colt suddenly grimaces, and Dallas follows his gaze. “Oh, good, the bad guy has arrived.” Colt looks murderous. I don’t need to be a keen judge of people to read that.

“Who’s that?” I ask.

The hairs on the back of my neck stand up, and I tell myself not to be dramatic, because it’s not like there’s an actual bad guy roaming around the rodeo, but I don’t take accusations of men being bad lightly. For obvious reasons.

“Maverick Quinn,” Stella says, leaning forward.

She jerks her head back, and I follow the motion.

It’s like people part as this man walks into the food tent.

As if everyone knows better than to be in his way.

There’s a confident swagger to the way he walks, and a wall of unfriendliness.

I recognize it. The man is a walking red flag, but he’s also a walking tribute to trauma.

I can clock it from this far away. The rest of them don’t see it, but I do .

I can also see that he’s toxic. No doubt about it.

He’s wearing a black cowboy hat, a black shirt, and black jeans. He has a dark, heavy beard, and there’s a malice to the smile on his face that suggests he enjoys all that darkness. Playing in it, making others have to contend with it.

Stella shivers just slightly, and I realize that Colt and Dallas aren’t on her radar at all. For a reason.

I guess everybody has inclinations toward making a little bit of trauma in their lives, even if they don’t come by it naturally.

“I’ll be back in Gold Valley too,” Colt says. “If all goes well tonight.”

“In what way?” I ask.

“Well, we have to get high enough scores tonight to qualify for the championships. Or we don’t, and we have to keep going to try and scrape up enough points at some of the smaller events. But the ideal will be to finish out on top.”

Dallas laughed. “That’s always the idea.”

“I have to keep going,” says Stella. “Because mainly I’m just trying to win money. They don’t have a championship like that for barrel racing. It doesn’t get the same kind of attention.”

I frown. “That doesn’t seem fair.”

“Welcome to sports,” Stella says. “None of it’s fair. But that’s not why I do it. I do it because I love it.”

“So,” I say, looking around the tent. “If you all don’t compete for the rest of the year, that must make the rodeo boring in other cities.”

“That’s flattering,” Colt says. “But yeah. The best riders are out before the season is over. There’s no point tempting injury for points you don’t need.”

“Yeah. Better to go rest up before you try to go win big at the championship. ”

“Have you ever won before?” I ask.

Colt and Dallas laughed. “No. That’s a million-dollar pot all on its own,” Colt explains. “If I win that, I’m out. Retiring.”

“Liar,” says Stella. “If you were just here for the money, you would have been gone a long time ago because you really do have enough. You want the clout.”

Colt shrugs. “I suppose so. But I’d like to test that theory by winning the championship.”

“You have to compete with me,” Dallas says.

“You both have to compete with Maverick,” Stella points out.

“Plus, everybody that comes outside of this regional circuit,” Dallas says. “You get into the championships and you’re competing with global stars. It’s a lot harder.”

“And the bulls are meaner.” Colt grins at the prospect.

I don’t like the sound of that, but I realize that Dallas isn’t asking my permission to do his job. Nor should he. But it makes me nervous, knowing that he does something so dangerous. I’m also kind of in awe of him.

I don’t feel especially brave. I feel like I have a small life geared toward my safety, and that hasn’t even actually kept me safe. He’s out there. Wild. Brave.

“I have some pre-riding rituals I need to do,” Dallas says, looking a little bit sheepish.

“What?” I ask, amusement making me smile.

“I don’t usually have to explain it, because these two get it,” he says, gesturing to Colt and Stella.

“Yeah. I have some things I need to do, also,” Colt says. “You have to appease the gods.”

“The arena gods,” Stella says, hand on her heart. “You get a little bit superstitious. Because you win after you do a certain set of routines, and then you want to make sure you keep doing it.”

“And you never want to repeat something that you did before you had a ride that went badly, or before you got injured,” Colt says.

“Do you get injured?”

“I broke my jaw last year,” he says. “I got hit in the side of the face by the bull’s horn. I’m lucky he didn’t tear my face open. If he’d hit me with a sharp edge, I’d have gotten cut open from jaw to nose.”

I put my hand on my stomach. “That sounds horrible.”

“Yeah. But it’s great,” Colt says.

Dallas smiles. “I just need to take a few laps around, then… other things.”