Page 12 of The Brave and the Reckless (Bravetown #1)

I tapped my heels against Tornado’s sides and he tore off.

In the show, there’d be more gunfire behind us.

We raced to the other end of the town square, before a sharp 90-degree turn.

Esra squeaked into her mic. She got a few moments to collect herself, during which I pretended to fire at a group of barrels marked “gunpowder” in the town square.

Instead of a fake explosion of said barrels, we only got Austin’s voice on the headphones: “Boom.”

I dug my heels in and Tornado got up on his hind legs. His muscles rippled under us, all calm and precision. I just flexed my thighs to stay in my seat. The whole thing looked more impressive from the stands thanks to the fireworks and Tornado’s height.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,” Esra muttered. Maybe the trick wasn’t as unremarkable to someone who had never sat on a horse. She clenched up to the point of shrinking in front of me. Using my hold on her waist and my weight against her back, I pushed her forward, leveling our center of gravity.

We were back on the ground in an instant, but her breathy chant of fuck s didn’t stop until Tornado halted in front of the gray building that was Ace Ryder’s designated hideout.

“Great. Esra, exactly like that,” Renee’s voice crackled through the headphones, “Noah, you came in two seconds too late. Come back here and let’s go again. Austin, let’s make sure Esra’s microphone is set to intercom as soon as the horse begins to move.”

“What about the dismount?” I asked.

“Let me see you get the chase right first,” Renee replied.

We trotted back to the bank building, where we dismounted. Well, I dismounted, and then I had to lift Esra off the horse. I bit back any comment on how she should at least learn that much about horseback riding because her face had taken on the same shade of gray as the dust under my boots.

“You don’t have to hold on that tightly,” I said when she flexed her fingers, marked with deep red grooves. “You’re buckled in, remember?”

“Leave me alone, Young.” She glared at me. “Let’s just go again.”

I wasn’t entirely sure if that was still about her chocolate, or if I’d offended her some other way. But less talking, more working sounded great to me.

On the second go around, I grabbed her right on cue.

“You’ll have to run faster than that, gorgeous.”

“Let me go!” Esra started wriggling and kicking without hesitation this time, probably giving me a bruise or two on our way back to Tornado’s side. “Help!”

“Get on the damn horse, Annie Lou.”

“I’m not going anywhere with you, thief .” The way she spat that word was definitely about her chocolate. At least she didn’t see me smirk behind the bandana. This woman was turning me into a sadist.

“Have it your way, ma’am.” I set my jaw and hoisted her on to the horse. When I slotted in behind her, she whipped her head around, hair flicking me in the face, and glared over her shoulder. “Hold on tight. Don’t want anything to happen to a pretty little thing like you.”

“Pause and freeze,” Renee interrupted. “Amazing. I love the hostility. Esra, good improvising. I think thief works better than criminal . Noah, can you wrap your arm tighter around her waist, so we don’t see the left buckle?”

I shifted closer, my thighs framing Esra’s and my chest snug against her shoulder blades, just to brace my arm around the entirety of her waist.

“Stay like that.” Renee jogged backward while we stayed frozen in spot. At least, I stayed frozen because I had a modicum of patience. Esra huffed and whipped her hair around again. This time, I managed to duck.

Fine. She wanted to sulk over some chocolate? Two could play that game.

“At least you don’t reek of sweat,” I muttered into the narrow space between us.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” She shifted back, her elbow jabbing me in the arm, as if she hadn’t been the one to bring up the smell of her sweat a few days ago. “For your information, I shower every day.”

“Yeah, don’t worry, I noticed you hogging the bathroom for hours on end. I meant because of your dirty clothes…”

“That works.” Renee clapped her hands, clearly interrupting us on purpose. “Again! From the top. We’re not stopping until you’re ready to do all this in costume next week. You’ll get there quicker if you stop bickering like little schoolgirls.”

Austin cackled on the intercom, but both Esra and I remained quiet. We both obviously wanted to get this over with sooner rather than later.

“Have you actually tried talking to her?” Sanny laughed and dragged the paint roller up the wall.

Light blue that had faded to gray over the decades disappeared under a slick coat of white.

We’d only done one wall so far, but it already brightened up the entire hallway.

“Did you actually have a conversation about what you expect from a roommate? ”

“She should know that it’s a shared living space, so there’s—”

“Why should she know?” he cut me off.

“It’s common sense,” I replied as I traced around the door to my childhood bedroom with a paint brush.

“Sure. Common for you. I’d like to see you navigate a Friday-night dinner with my parents compared to her, and then see what Esra says about your common sense.”

“I think I’d manage. I have manners.”

“Oh, really?” He laughed and leaned on the paint roller, raising his brows at me. “Are you able to tell apart a salad knife from a butter knife?”

“That’s not common sense, that’s just rich-people nonsense.”

He hummed a non-committal note. Sinan had gone to college in Nashville and had started working in the park shortly after graduating.

Sure, when I’d met him, he’d been a bit clueless about living in a small town, but he’d already lived in a dorm for a few years then.

I didn’t actually know what he’d been like straight out of high school, silver spoon still in his mouth.

“If my mother invited you for dinner at seven, would you know to arrive half an hour earlier because it’s common in their circles to have an aperitif before dinner?” he asked.

“Are you just making shit up to make me feel like a small-town hick?”

“I wish I was.” I was saved from more quizzing on etiquette by the buzzing of his phone. Sanny wiped his hands off on his overalls before pulling his phone from his pocket. He flashed me the caller ID, the photo of a middle-aged version of his sister. “Speak of the devil. ”

Sinan clicked a button on his hearing aids and disappeared down the narrow stairs at the backend of the hallway.

His voice carried up from the kitchen, but with the call being in Turkish, I couldn’t make sense of anything but his tone.

He sounded like I did when approaching an agitated horse, both hands raised, every step toward it calculated.

I chuckled. His mother probably wouldn’t appreciate the comparison…

By the time he reappeared, his dark hair stood up high and had a couple of paint flecks in it.

“You good?” I asked.

“Yeah…” He plastered on a smile and shrugged, but just when he grabbed the paint roller to keep working, he turned on his heels.

“You know my parents have called me more often in the few months since Esra dropped out of med school than they did in the four years I’ve worked here. I actually counted in my phone log.”

“Shit. That sucks.”

“Yeah.” He pursed his lips, eyes narrowing on the paint bucket. There was something else he wasn’t saying, but I realized that I didn’t actually know enough about his family to figure that part out– and he clearly wasn’t ready to spill.

Sighing, I grabbed the beer bottles from the top of the folding ladder and held one out to him. “If it makes you feel any better, my parents haven’t called in years.”

Sinan blinked at the bottle in my hand, then up at me, and it took a moment, but he barked a chest-deep laugh. “Are you kidding? That’s dark.”

“Does it make you feel better though?”

“Yeah,” he chuckled, and took the beer. “Dark, man.”

I shrugged and dipped my brush back into the paint to cover up the pencil marks by my door that marked my height growing up.

My father had left me this place and not a cent to maintain it when I’d been way too young to take on the responsibility.

Almost a decade later, we were finally on track to get it back up and running.

Sanny had even offered to invest his trust fund, but friends and loans usually didn’t mix well.

Instead, we painted, and we refinished the floors, and we fixed the fences on the paddock.

By the time we opened for business, this place was going to look nothing like the miserable house I’d left.