Page 12 of Maverick (The Bull Riders #3)

Chapter Five

Maverick

The first thing I do in the morning is report Sean West to the rodeo commission. The second thing I do is get coffee and drive to Stella’s trailer.

My knuckles are bruised from where I laid him flat last night, and I don’t regret it. I would have killed that asshole if there hadn’t been a crowd. Men like that don’t deserve to draw breath. I don’t have patience for it.

If I’ve done one honorable thing in the past five years, it was maybe that.

Of course, that was the old me. Trailer park me.

I take a deep breath and sit there staring at Stella’s trailer, and I try to tell myself that this is purely about Frank. Because I have felt so much guilt over my inability to get that horse where I know he can go. At first, I just figured that had to die with Sadie.

That her dreams for him were over. But then…

I just can’t do it. I can’t leave him there languishing, which is why I’ve had someone working with him for a while, but Sadie always knew that we had to find a rider who was highly skilled.

Sadie was good, but she didn’t even think that it was her.

She didn’t think she was Olympics-bound.

She was more passionate about horses than she was about her own riding.

So maybe Stella would’ve always been the one. Except…

If Sadie were alive, we’d have kids by now. I would’ve quit the rodeo, even though I hadn’t won. I’d be home, living a whole different life.

Instead, I live by myself.

I want to believe that there’s no nefarious reason that I want Stella for this.

That it isn’t just because being near her makes me feel something. Something that was otherwise long gone.

That’s okay, right? That I just want to feel it.

That attraction. Desire. It’s like watching someone drink and imagining the alcohol sitting on my tongue.

Like getting a contact high from someone smoking a joint nearby.

It feels like enough. And I’m not sure that I should feel guilty about it.

Or maybe I should, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to stop.

Complicated. It’s too fucking complicated, and here I am.

I get out of the truck, both cups of coffee in hand, and make my way up to her trailer door. I knock with my elbow, and she jerks it open, wearing that waffle print shirt she was wearing the other morning, no bra underneath.

My eyes go straight to her nipples. But hell, they’re at eye level, because she’s up in the trailer, and I am just a man.

That makes me want to laugh. Because I haven’t felt like just a man in a long fucking time.

Mainly, I feel like a shell wandering around, like a ghost that can’t reach the life intended for him. I didn’t die that day, but in many ways I did.

All the possibilities, all the things I should’ve had, gone.

And so, much like a ghost, I might as well not be here. I might as well exist on a plane where I can’t touch anything, and nothing can touch me, because that’s how it feels most of the time.

But right now I’m staring at her tits, and I feel a whole lot more than I have for a long time.

I force myself to look up at her face. “Morning.”

“Yeah. Good morning.”

“You need help with anything?”

She shakes her head. “No. I just need to get Cloud Dancing loaded up, and get the trailer hitched to the truck.”

“You got it?”

She snorts. “Yes. I’ve been driving a horse trailer since I was sixteen.”

“Of course you have.”

“I need to get dressed.”

I wish she wouldn’t. I like what she’s wearing just fine.

“Can I get your horse for you while you do that?”

“If you really want to.” I do, mainly because I want to get the show on the road.

“I’ve got him,” I say.

I meander down to the stall with her name on it, and grab a lead rope, clipping it to the horse’s halter as I open up the door, and then take him out. “Come on. We’ve got a bit of the journey ahead. Though maybe not as long as the one you might’ve had.”

I realize I don’t know exactly where she lives at the moment. Something else I’ll have to ask her, I suppose. Or I don’t. Because it’s not like I have to know her to work with her. Or to enjoy the shape of her breasts.

So there’s that.

As soon as I get the horse loaded into the back of the trailer, she appears again, wearing a T-shirt and a pair of shorts, and this time my eyes are drawn to her bare legs. Usually, I see her in jeans. Well, this is going to be a long couple of months. And I kind of like it.

I give thanks for the fact that this girl is driving by herself. And then ask myself why I put myself in this position, because it’s actually so easy for me, with my deeply charismatic personality, to keep people away from me. And yet.

But here we are. I brought her into this part of my life, and there’s no turning back now. “Well, I’m ready,” she says.

“Great. You get hitched up, and you can follow me out.” I give her the address so that she can map it in case we lose each other, and then I get into my truck while she expertly gets her trailer hitched up.

And then we head out on the road. It’s summer, and things are dry as hell, but it’ll still be nice to get back home and be in that place where all my dreams died.

Well, some of my dreams are still there. Or maybe, just the dreams that I carry for Sadie.

Frank is one of them. “I’m doing this for you,” I say as I look out at the road.

A bird flies right in front of my car, dangerously close, as if to say: sure you are.

Yeah. That’s kind of her sense of humor, or at least, I like to think that it is.

Sometimes I can’t feel her at all. It’s a deep, dark black hole of nothing where her presence used to be, and I hate that.

Sometimes, though, it’s like there are little signs from her everywhere.

It just depends on my mood. I choose not to reflect on that too much as I continue on down the highway.

And the hours pass with only a couple of stops, where we fill up both on gas and road snacks.

We don’t really talk to each other. There’s a cursory acknowledgment of one another in the minute market, but otherwise, we just keep on going.

I’m thinking about all the things that I didn’t consider before extending her this offer, like the fact that I don’t have any idea what state the cottage is in.

It’s been sitting there mostly empty for a few years now.

I had a tenant a couple of summers ago, but I haven’t had one since, and even though it was clean then, I’m sure that it feels… Abandoned in the time since.

Oh well, I’ll sort it out.

I’m not generally impulsive. Not anymore. But here is where my impulsivity has led me, and now I have a guest.

I turn down the familiar drive that’s lined with aspens – gorgeous in the fall, all yellow leaves and natural splendor – and she turns in behind me.

I suddenly feel… Weird having her here. Because this is my life.

This is part of me. I don’t share myself with people.

Not with anybody. And now I have Stella coming to stay for a couple of months.

Oh well. Oh well. Apparently, this is what happens when I get captivated by a pair of tits. Even a pair that I don’t intend to ever touch.

It’s a dichotomy, these two things. Because some of it is about my wife’s memory. And somehow, some of it is about this woman who makes me feel things I haven’t felt since Sadie’s death.

Conflicting, and yet somehow… Of course. Because life really is like that. Annoying, cruel, unintentionally funny.

Painful. Ironic. Awful. I’m not quite done listing the faults that I see with fate when we pull up to the front of the house. It’s a pretty house. As pretty as it ever was.

Even back in those glory days. When this house was a symbol of something. Of a life that I thought I was actually going to get to have, instead of one that I imagined I was shut out of forever.

It stands there, a beacon to all of that, like it doesn’t know the woman who helped design it is dead.

The porch is just as wide and welcoming as it was beforehand, and I feel like that’s a little bit of a cosmic joke.

I don’t often think about it, not like this, not five years on, but right now the years feel compacted. Like it hasn’t been more than a day. Like I just closed the door on all that, and opened it to Stella being here, and maybe that’s why.

Maybe she’s why.

I decide to go up to the passenger side of the truck and open the door. “We can drive over to the barn. You can leave the trailer and get your horse settled.”

“Oh. Sure.”

I get inside, the redirect surprising even me, but apparently, I’m not quite ready to invite her into the house.

There’s a wedding portrait on the living room wall, surrounded by other photos of us, including engagement pictures she had to force me to agree to.

The kind of saccharine romantic series of pictures I’d have mercilessly mocked if anyone else did them, but now I hoard like a dragon does treasure.

Her knickknack shelf is there untouched.

I don’t know what I would even put in it.

I don’t have any knickknacks. What am I going to throw there?

An elk antler? I might as well leave her cups and vases, little wooden owls, and other signs that she was there.

But then, that’s the thing. It announces that a woman used to live there.

It invites conversation. It’s not that I want to keep her secret.

It’s not that I’m wedded to not telling Stella, but it feels weird.

Wrong, somehow, to open up that part of my life.

I’m just so used to having it closed. Because being the villain feels simple by comparison. To all the things that I actually am.