Dynomite: A Stepbrother Cowboy Romance (21 page)

He had an excellent ride, marking out immediately, in fine form. He qualified easily, staying on the animal past the eight second mark, his fringes whipping, in total control. Almost the entire time.

He passed eight seconds, and then I lost my fucking mind. I tore my pristine white hat off my head and waved it madly, like I was signaling an airplane to land. I mean, I waved that damned hat higher and wider than any buckle bunny up in the VIP grandstand. I think I might’ve even been screaming. I don’t know—it was so hard to hear anything over the howl of the crowd.

He looked at me. Dyno looked directly the fuck at me. Then
he
lost it.

All expression of concentration vanished from his face. All the intensity just dropped. Suddenly he had
no
expression—merely pure, utter shock painted across his face in broad strokes. One kick from the horse and Dyno went flying.

His hat went one direction, he went the other. The pickup man had to leap across Dyno’s catapulting body. Sequoia, with his cartoony painted face and haystack wig, went racing to Dyno’s side. The crowd was on its feet, raving their support of Dyno.

Dyno jumped to his feet, brushing off Sequoia’s help. His glare was fixed on me.

And I mean
glare
. He looked at me as though I’d just killed his pet canary.

He brushed off his thighs, his ass, with pride. He set his shoulders and stalked to the gate, but he never took his eyes off me. I shrunk like a popped balloon, my hand that held my hat slowly lowering to the ground.

DYNO

I
t struck the
terror of God into me, seeing that woman again.

After I was bucked, I looked around for her. Wasn’t sure if I was going to talk to her or what. I’d made my ride and got a score of eighty-four. I was more than pleased after seven years away from the sport. But I had to find April Pleasure.

She was nowhere to be fucking found. I was being swamped by friends I never knew I had congratulating me on my ride. Who
were
all these fucks? I recalled only a handful of them from the old days. The rest were all new.

Of course I’d seen her take her turn in the arena. Sequoia had kept me updated on her over the years. As much as I pretended I never wanted to hear her name again, Sequoia would drop little bombs, tiny tidbits about her doings. He’d tell me in person the few times we were in Last Chance together, or he’d text me. The first few years, information was sparse. Sequoia was in Iraq at first, then Afghanistan. He was hardly in a place to receive gossip about his hometown, being in some situations almost as hairy as mine.

But I managed to hear about her becoming rodeo queen the second I joined the navy. She’d seemed so uncertain about her status when I’d left, I was shocked to hear this. I thought after everything that’d happened, she’d run from the rodeo like it was a spouting volcano.

But she’d become queen, and gathered her flock around her, and started running all Hardscrabble business. She expanded Hardscrabble lands and increased the headcount. I wasn’t surprised by any of this. She was a tough cookie, an arm-jerker.

I also wasn’t surprised when Sequoia told me she’d hooked up with Mason Simon. That stupid twatwaffle was perfect for her. I’d seen him at cocktail parties around Cliff’s house. He always had a sweater flung over his shoulders and talked about opera. Once, he talked about a movie he was producing from his Sun Valley, Idaho spread. Something to do with Robert Redford. My fucking ass. The guy was a phony through and through, and ideal for April Pleasure.

While looking for April, I actually saw Mason Simon up in the VIP box. Maybe it was my imagination, but he locked eyes with me, and it wasn’t pretty. For a guy who pretended to care about fracking and the environment, it was plain to see he was a nasty customer. Remember, I’d been killing other human beings with my unit for years by that time. I’d had to cut off insurgents’ fingers and pieces of their scalp just to DNA them. Kill-or-capture was my middle name. We logged ten, maybe twenty kills a night sometimes. But one look in this crazy fucker’s eyes, and I knew he was just as mean as a crazed Palestinian gunman. Maybe because he had more to lose.

Suddenly I realized I didn’t want to talk to April anyway. What the fuck would I say? “Hey, thanks for being such a spineless wimp and failing to stand up for me to your fucking father”? “Hey, thanks for having me arrested for an assault I was actually trying to
prevent
”? I had since mended fences with Cliff. I guess he was impressed with my service record, my medals. He’d even offered me Javier’s old job at a giant pay raise while I figured out if I wanted to go work for a private security firm. I wanted to cowboy again, so I’d said sure, why not. But I would never mend fences with April Pleasure.

Mainly because she really
got
to me, if you know what I mean. I could take or leave Cliff, especially if he was in Europe not harassing anyone with his ideas for the range, the pastureland, the stock. He gave me Javier’s old house, even reassuring me that Marcus was no longer living on Hardscrabble property anywhere. He’d moved into Jan Murray’s old fucking house or some such shit closer to town. And Javier’s house had a different access road than April’s new Water Buffalo Lodge house, so theoretically I never had to see her.

Except at events like these. I wasn’t prepared for the thrilled shock that jolted my body when I watched her tear ass around the arena on that paint. Lord, she was fucking glorious. She hadn’t changed a bit. Her hair still floated like cotton candy. She’d maybe gotten curvier—her beautiful rack bounced fantastically as she rode. The muscles in her thighs worked that horse athletically, and I remembered she used to ride. Of course she rode, being the daughter of a cattleman. Once, seven years ago, she’d ridden out to my corral. She’d just sat there mounted, watching us work. My fellow vaqueros had made various lecherous remarks. Not me. I just worked, imagining she was watching
me
.

Well, now she was. It was definitely April Pleasure standing on that rail waving her fucking hat like she was welcoming a showboat to town. Who the fuck else was out there trying to keep a grip on a suitcase handle, risking having his head snap from his spine? No one but me. She was waving at
me
, smiling so widely it seemed she aimed to split her face in two.

Why? Didn’t she know I hated her? How could she not fucking know that?

That face haunted me for a few more days until I got the invitation.

My vaquero brought me the stupid invitation around five in the morning. He explained he’d seen a woman ride up, a strange enough occurrence out there in the middle of nowhere. She’d placed this envelope on my doorstep with a rock on top of it, then ridden off.

I’d taken it to the window with my cup of joe. I knew right away the blonde
chica
in question was April. It was a formal invitation, but obviously printed on a laser printer. Being in the forefront of the counter-insurgency world for so many years hadn’t even prepared me for the weird surprise printed on the invitation.

You are hereby invited to a reception

At Hardscrabble Ranch

The “Camp David of the West”

To Honor the return of combat veteran and war hero

David “Dynomite” Drummond

What. The. Fuck.

She’d arranged a party for me and hadn’t even told me?

Why the fuck would I want to be honored for work that was classified? For ops I wasn’t even allowed to discuss? Besides, I wasn’t even a “war hero,” per se. I hadn’t been in any theater where war had officially been declared. We operated underground, striking in the dead of night with infrared lasers and thermal optics. The
last
fucking thing I wanted to do was hang around these cowboys answering questions like “So. How’d that explosive blast leave you? Hard of hearing? Trouble seeing out of one eye? Traumatic brain injury much?”

What the fuck!
I’d already been riding to Palm Springs once a week for EMDR, an eye movement treatment for PTSD. I certainly didn’t need some moronic hicks asking insensitive, uneducated questions about an arena they couldn’t even
begin
understand. It was hard enough for me to be around people when I’d returned. I’d actually hid out in a Palm Springs hotel room for three, four months at first, before approaching Cliff for a job. I didn’t even talk to my own mother for weeks.

So, clutching the invitation like it was a grenade, I’d stormed to my bike and ridden off to Hardscrabble.

She was in her office, a whole wing unto itself jutting off the main house like a starfish arm. Maybe because I was accustomed to being stealthy, but I went around the patio, by the barrel cactus garden. The little rounded, spiky things were all laid out in a formal garden arrangement next to burbling, rocky desert springs. There was even a topiary maze out here where Lyndon B. Johnson was rumored to have once been lost.

That’s where you might say I snuck up on her. I went to the sliding glass door still wearing my chaps with my pistol in my holster. It didn’t occur to me I might look like a scary customer. I was so used to going around armed, I actually felt under-dressed.

There she was, her back to me. She was sitting at the same workstation area as seven years before, only with new furniture. I flashed on how once, while skulking around setting up another one of my infamous practical jokes, I’d stumbled upon a photo of the two of us on her computer. It was in her picture folder, so it wasn’t like it was hidden very well. We were standing at the board in Mr. Steele’s algebra class. It was a problem with a triangle, square units, and parabola that I solved before April, I remember. That seemed to piss her off, but maybe not, because she’d downloaded the photo from the school’s yearbook page, keeping it in her picture folder. Or maybe she wanted to make fun of me on Facebook. I wouldn’t know. Never signed up for Facebook.

I waved the invitation behind the glass, but her back was turned, so I’d have to speak. “Come in for a sec?”

Normally, it would’ve been hilarious how high she jumped. I swear, she leaped like a foot in the air while whipping her torso around to face me. I had no choice but to bust on in then, unsure if she’d recognized my voice. The sun was behind me, so I was probably just a cutout silhouette to her.

“
Dyno
?”

I cut to the chase, coming around the side of her desk so she could see my features. My angry, pissed-off features. “Yeah. About this. What gives you the fucking nerve to send out invitations to some shindig I haven’t even been informed of? And I’m the fucking star attraction? Did it ever occur to you I might not want to hang around you and your snobby society friends? Y’all aim to put me on display with my fucking dress whites like some kind of Ken doll so y’all can say ‘oh yeah, this here hero works shoveling shit and birthing calves for our operation’? Well, y’all can think again, Miss Squarepants. I’d rather have a defoliant enema than attend your fucking reception.”

Her little pouty mouth was open. She’d only matured, become lusher, riper. Standing this close to her actually made my dick harden, though I was spouting mean, angry words. I couldn’t help thinking how her mouth was at dick level. What the fuck was wrong with me? I was here to stand up for my dignity, to refuse to be put on a hypocritical society pedestal, not to get blown. Or maybe I
was
here to get blown. Both would be nice. Blowjobs had been few and far between overseas, and even scarcer since I’d been back, since I’d been holed up in a hotel.

“Dyno.” She exhaled all in a whoosh, like she’d been holding her breath. She held up her hands like I was arresting her. “I…I didn’t stop to think you might be offended. I…thought I was doing something nice. Helpful. Noble.”

I snorted. I threw the invitation on her desk, giving it a spin of the wrist for a flourish. “Yeah. Real noble. Let’s all put the injured combat vet on parade so we can show our friends what bleeding heart patriots we are. Except of course we only have to display him for four hours. Then we can put him back into his box where we don’t have to think about him again.”

“But I
do
want to think about you, Dyno! I want to think about you all the time! That’s why I came up with the party idea.”

I cocked a suspicious eye at her. “And just
why
do you want to think of me all the time? Ain’t you got that asswipe for a boyfriend?”

For the first time, a shadow came over her face. “Well, it
has
been seven years, Dyno. What’d you expect me to do? Sit around like an old maid waiting for a guy who doesn’t even like me?”

I couldn’t argue with that, so I changed the subject. “Well, I ain’t going to your stupid fucking party, so you can count me out.”

“Okay. Fine. I understand, I guess. I just thought you might want to meet some of the movers and shakers around Last Chance, people who’ve moved up since you’ve been gone. Could help with your rodeo career.”

That was true. It would help me to meet vendors, sponsors, judges. “Other rodeo men gonna be there?”

“Oh, yes! Richie Youngblood will be there. He’s your biggest bareback competitor. And Cody Champion is the up and coming bull rider from Twentynine Palms. Wait, what do you mean, ‘injured’? What happened to you? Sequoia never told me you were injured.”