Page 7 of The Brave and the Reckless (Bravetown #1)

ACE RYDER

THE LAWLESS COWBOY

Ace Ryder is an infamous bandit known for his silver tongue and his quick draw. With a heart as cold as the night, he robs banks with his gang of outlaws and vanishes into the shadows on his black steed before the sheriff can catch him.

Will you be brave enough to face him?

N OAH

“I call dibs,” Lucas announced from the tack room, where he’d just disappeared with Canyon’s saddle.

“You call dibs without knowing who it is?”

“Eh, better safe than sorry.” You could practically hear him shrug through the wall.

“If I’ve already hooked up with her, the dibs lapses.

If she’s from around here and I haven’t hooked up with her yet, she’s probably a drag anyway, but I got dibs just in case she isn’t.

And if she’s new, she has to be hot to play Annie, so I got dibs. ”

“That’s messed up.” I rolled my eyes and turned to Tornado, who huffed and shook his head. Clearly the horse agreed with me. “He’s messed up,” I repeated, voice lowered as I led him out of the stables .

“What’s messed up is that I gave you four years to pull Lindsey,” he called out. “I never invoked dibs. And now she’s off to sing on a cruise ship and neither of us got in her pants.”

“Lucas, Lindsey shot you down on your first day here.” I wasn’t going to point out that Lindsey was also on a cruise ship with her girlfriend who she’d been with since sophomore year in high school. He’d never had a chance.

“Send me a picture.”

“Not happening.”

Once outside, I mounted Tornado and directed him toward Bravetown’s Main Street. It had been a while since I’d taken him out this early in the day. He was the calmest horse I’d ever encountered but his ears still twitched with the break in routine.

Between all the useless yapping, Lucas had indirectly said something true though.

I’d known Lindsey for years even before doing the show, this town was small, and there weren’t that many candidates to replace her.

Certainly not with the short notice Lindsey had gotten to make her way down to Florida for her onboarding.

Maybe Tornado had every right to be twitchy.

We turned the corner to the large town square at the end of Main Street, where the artificial mesa formation jutted high into the sky behind the bank and the town hall– and I felt it .

The same way you feel a horse about to buck in the way its shoulders shift and its muscles tense.

The way the birds go into a frenzy before a thunderstorm.

The split second of thick air and anticipation before a catastrophe.

“… your picture on the website,” Renee was saying, fixing her red hair into her signature messy bun atop her head .

“Full costume, I’m assuming,” Esra replied.

I’d half-expected her to have run off already.

I hadn’t seen her at all since her on-stage introduction on Tuesday in a very inappropriate and very see-through shirt, and Sanny had texted me last night to ask if I’d heard from her.

All I could tell him was that there was a carton of almond milk with her name on it in the fridge.

“Yep. Full makeup, costume, everything. We’ll take a few group shots too.”

“Like a whole photoshoot? That sounds so cool. You know, I’ve seen those over-the-top shoots on Top Model with the sets and the costumes, but I never really thought I’d be in one.” Esra grinned and clapped her hands together.

The staff pictures were not Top Model . Probably no point in explaining that to a girl in skin-tight daisy-print leggings and a T-shirt that said “If you’re rich, I’m single” .

The harness clipped around her thighs and waist didn’t make that outfit any less ridiculous.

It just drove home the point that she had taken over from Lindsey.

“Shit,” I muttered. We were still two buildings away, but Tornado neighed his agreement loud enough to draw attention.

“Ah, here we go,” Renee said, turning to fully face me.

Esra’s gaze roamed over the horse, the corners of her mouth straightening out, posture clenching. Double shit. That wasn’t the look of the kind of rich girl who had gotten private horseback riding lessons all her life.

I dismounted a couple feet away from the two women. “Good morning, Renee. Esra.”

Esra’s chin jerked in my direction, eyes reluctantly tearing off Tornado and narrowing on me. “What are you doing here?”

“Oh good, you two already know each other.” Renee smiled. “Noah plays Ace Ryder. The bandit that kidnaps Annie. Noah, Esra will be our Annie this year.”

“So I have to share a horse with him ?”

“Yep.”

The chain of expletives running through my mind only remained unspoken because Renee started walking up the steps to the bank building. Meanwhile Esra was back to staring at Tornado like he might eat her. I wouldn’t even blame him.

Leaving Tornado tied to the hitching post by the building, I followed Renee to the bank.

“Noah, I’ve already talked Esra through the opening of the show on the way over.

Ace and the bandits causing chaos on Main Street, some of the stunts, all the townspeople fleeing into the buildings.

How Annie and her father run into the bank before you and the boys follow.

Then you all run out with the money and Annie as a hostage.

We’ll do some full runs with everyone next week.

For now, I just need the two of you to get the kidnapping right.

Esra is two inches shorter than Lindsey, so you’ll have to adjust, too. ”

I nodded but turned to Esra. “Do you know how to ride a horse?”

“Nope.”

“Seriously, Renee?”

“Oh, don’t worry,” Renee waved me off as if this wasn’t begging for catastrophe. “You just have to get her on the horse and buckle her in. ”

“Why am I buckled in exactly?” Esra asked.

“So you don’t fall off when the horse rears,” Renee replied.

“That horse? Rearing? Like… ?” She pointed down the street, and it took me a second to realize she meant to point toward the park entrance and the statue of Old Bob on a rearing horse. The color was draining from her face.

There probably wasn’t a person more ill-fitted for this job than this girl.

She wasn’t the first out-of-towner working here, not the first one from a big city either.

Heck, she wasn’t even the first person in her family to be employed here.

But you needed a certain rationality to make it work, and I could come up with a lot of words to describe Esra Taner, but rational wasn’t one of them.

She’d get herself thrown off the horse before even getting in the saddle.

“Just rewrite the show,” I said. “We’ll do it without Annie Lou. She’s clearly out of her depth.”

“Hey, you don’t get to decide my depth.” Esra glared at me. “I’ll get on the damn horse.”

“She’ll be fine,” Renee insisted with a nonchalant wave of her hand, like I had no reason to be concerned here, “let’s just give it a shot.

In the version we’ve done the last few years, Ace uses Annie as his human shield when he leaves the bank.

” Renee stepped from the bank doors down the stairs, holding her arms as if she was holding an invisible hostage at gunpoint.

She then jogged down the stairs, her voice growing louder as she went through the scene.

“When he fixes the bags of money to his horse, Annie runs off. Ace races after her and hauls her on to the horse as she’s running. ”

Esra opened her mouth, but Renee silenced her with a raised hand.

“I don’t think that’s realistic.” She jogged back over to us. “Not only because you don’t have the experience but because you are shorter, and those two inches Noah would have to bend down further could very well be the two inches that pull him off the horse.”

This time, I was about to speak because I wasn’t falling off any horse anytime soon, but Renee cut me off.

“What we’re going to do instead is Annie running off– not as far as we have done up until now– and you, Noah, will lift her on to the horse and then mount behind her.

The sheriff and his men follow, gunfire, explosions, and you ride off to the hideout. ”

“You want him to grab me and lift me on to the horse?”

“Yep. Let me go get Tornado in position.” Renee beamed.

“And here I thought I was in for a touch-starved summer,” Esra muttered under her breath.

She was a lawsuit waiting to happen.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “Nothing about the way I’ll touch you is going to fix that. It’s rough stunts. Hard work.”

“Maybe I like it hard and rough.”

I rubbed the bridge of my nose, willing myself not to dwell on that response in detail. “This job isn’t a joke.”

“Don’t worry. With that face, nobody will ever think you’re joking.”

“Excuse me?”

“No, not yet.” She twirled around, her glittering hair clips winking in the sun as she beelined toward the bank’s doors. “It’s empty! ”

“Yeah, it’s just a set for the show.”

“All right, all right.” Renee popped up next to us, and grabbed both of us by the elbow. “Ace brings Annie out, bandits run off. He’s holding a gun to her head to get her to the horse.”

“Gun?” Esra asked.

“Prop,” I replied.

“Down the stairs.” Renee kept directing us and I knew better than to be anything but a puppet in her hands.

“Ace turns, Annie runs.” Renee left me by Tornado’s side and pulled Esra further.

Squinting at the distance between us, she dug her heel into the ground and marked a deep groove.

“Run from Noah to this spot for me and pretend you’re in a long skirt, so no big leaps. ”

Esra had to run back and forth around two dozen times before Renee was happy with the distance. At least Esra didn’t question her. She just followed each command to run, faster, slower, glance back, faster again.