Military Romance Collection: Contemporary Soldier Alpha Male Romance (16 page)

6

“And this is our Miracle Baby,” Ada said, introducing her brother in law to the pride and joy of the ranch. The colt had grown quickly, becoming a strong young horse with an uncanny resemblance to Bad Ass, his sire. That bucking bronco was almost solely responsible for the ranch’s reputation for producing A-1 stock; they’d had to sell him in a desperate move to keep the ranch from being seized for back taxes.  “He’s a real sweetheart.”

“Aren’t you worried that he’ll get too soft from all the love you give him?” Matthew asked. Ada seemed to have absolutely no fear of the horses; she had no problem rubbing the noses and scratching their foreheads – even on those horses she’d told Matthew were prone to biting.

“Freddie says don’t sweat it. Horses are smart. These guys are being raised to understand that their job is to buck people off. It’s in their bloodline.”

“Really?” Matthew was fascinated. “You can breed them to buck?”

“Generations of ranchers worked on breeding the bucking out of their horses,” Charlie said. “They wanted docile horses that were easy to work with and ride. The horses that couldn’t settle down…”

“A good snip will take care of that attitude,” Ada said with a grin. “And you’re taking that wildness out of the bloodline, as an added bonus.”

Both men winced. Ada laughed. “Well, that’s how it happened!”

“Long story short,” Charlie said. “The bucking’s been bred out, but it can be bred back in.  Bad Ass’ tendencies pass down to his son, and if we can hook him up with a mare that has the same propensity to buck, their offspring should exhibit all the same traits.”

“I didn’t realize it worked like that,” Matthew said.

“It’s not an exact science,” Ada said. “You do what should work, but there are no guarantees. Temperament is a hard thing to breed for.  Put two ornery horses together and you might still wind up with a horse that wouldn’t kick if you shoved a hornet’s nest up its hindquarters.”

Charlie laughed. “Now there’s a visual!”

“Luckily, there’s always someone who wants to buy a good looking, good tempered horse,” Ada said. She turned toward her husband. “I think you should take a drive on over to Jenn’s place and see if she’d be interested in Stardrop’s oldest. That little boy doesn’t have any grass in his ass, as far as I can tell, and I’d like to get that debt cleared up.”

Matthew looked at Charlie, puzzled.

“Don’t worry,” Charlie said. “This will all make sense eventually. Meanwhile, would you like to go for a ride?”

Matthew had the truck window rolled down, resting his arm on the frame and breathing in the hot country air. “You never realize how good outside smells,” he said.

“If you can do that on a ranch,” Charlie shot back, “I’m not sure how much stock I need to be putting in your sense of smell.” He laughed.

“Well, there’s shit and then there’s shit,” Matthew said. “Yes, you’ve got the horses doing their thing.  But that’s nothing compared to what it’s like when the people in the tier above you stops up their toilet and lets the damn thing overflow all over the place. You wouldn’t believe how nasty people can be.”

“I’m glad you’re out of there.”

“Yeah, me too.” Matthew sighed. “Now it’s a matter of trying to figure out what happens next. I’ve pretty much fucked up my life completely.” He shook his head. “It was so stupid. I don’t know how I thought Amy would never find out.”

“Have you two talked at all?” Charlie said.

“She’s talked,” Matthew said. “There wasn’t really any space for me to get a word in edgewise.”  He didn’t tell his brother the worst part of what his ex-wife had had to say; apparently, she’d decided that the marriage wasn’t worth saving even before she discovered Matthew had gambled their joint savings away. She’d called him a complete failure, a man who couldn’t perform in the boardroom or the bedroom.

“Time might change things,” Charlie suggested.

“Not this,” Matthew said. “I really got Amy where it hurt her the most – right in the wallet. After that, she’s never going to forgive me.” He squinted his eyes against the Texas sun. “Besides, I’m sure she started looking for my replacement the minute I was locked up.”

“The right one’s out there for you,” Charlie said. “Now you’re free to find her.”

“That’s the last thing on my mind anyway,” Matthew said. “I don’t have anything to offer anybody.” He shook his head. “Even if I found a girl, she’d bail as soon as she found out I’d spent time inside.”

“You don’t know that,” Charlie said.

Matthew gave him a side-eye. “I do know that. And you know it too. Imagine this hypothetical woman telling her parents about me. ‘Oh, he’s so great!’ ‘Well, what does he do, dear?’ ‘Well, he just got out of lock up.’” Matthew shook his head. “That’s going to go over real well.”

Charlie shrugged. “You weren’t in there for murder.”

“Not a murderer is a pretty low bar, bro.”

Charlie laughed. “We’ve got to work with what we’ve got here.”  He shook his head. “Seriously, you’re a great guy. You’re smart and you have a good heart. So you went down the wrong track one time? People get messed up with gambling.” He looked at his brother. “This is a thing that happens. People move past it.”

“I’m past the gambling part, anyway,” Matthew said. “You’re never going to see me bet again.”

“I gamble enough for the both of us,” Charlie said.

“What are you talking about?” Matthew’s little brother had become very conservative with his money since taking over the ranch. It was odd to see him spend any money on himself. Even a purchase as minor as a soda or a pack of gum would be put off; Charlie would rather have those funds available for the ranch instead. “You’re not a gambler.”

“I’m the ultimate gambler,” Charlie said with a laugh. “I’m a farmer. Every day I go out there to work, hoping against hope that a whole bunch of things are going to go my way. I need the horses to stay healthy. I need them to have just the right kind of nasty attitude the show runners are looking for. I need them to be smart enough and tough enough to dump some really skilled cowboys flat on their ass. And I need them to be flashy enough that the crowd loves watching them do it.”

“You’ve got to have those Facebook fans,” Matthew said. He’d been astonished to learn that Bad Ass now had his own social media platform; more than a thousand people had signed up to read his latest status updates.

“You do,” Charlie said. “It’s ridiculous. You’ve got to appeal to this small group of people who are so passionate about rodeo. We need people who are willing to shell out real money to spend their Friday nights watching the show.” He shook his head. “In this economy, that’s tough.”

“And even then, even if we’ve got all the fans we need?” Charlie continued. “There’s no guarantee that it’ll be one of our horses that captures their hearts. Or cleans up prize wise. Further down the road, that impacts how much we’ll be able to get from the horses we breed – and that’s assuming everything goes perfect from that end.” He sighed. “Yeah. I’d say I’m a gambler.”

“I never really thought about it that way before,” Matthew said. He looked over at his brother and smiled. “Maybe you’d better start going to meetings with me.”

“They don’t have Farmer’s Anonymous, you know why?” Charlie said.

“Why’s that?”

“Because everybody already knows we’re crazy.” Charlie laughed and turned the truck onto a narrow gravel road. “You can’t hide that kind of information from the world.”

The fields on either side of the gravel road were full of horses. Matthew counted at least thirty five before they’d gone five minutes.

“It looks like this lady already has plenty of horses,” Matthew said. “Why is she going to be interested in one more?”

“A lot of these aren’t hers,” Charlie explained. “She boards a lot of horses for Houston parents who want to make sure their little darlings can go riding whenever they want.”

“Well, that’s a pretty sweet racket,” Matthew said. “If you’ve got the barn and the land already, the costs of maintaining a horse must be pretty minimal.”

Charlie nodded. “She does the riding lesson thing, and coaching too. Not for the kids, for the horses. Some of the people she works with have gone pretty far – we’re talking national recognition.”

Matthew whistled. “So why does she want a bucking bronco?”

Charlie shook his head. “She doesn’t. We’ve agreed to trade failure for failure,” he explained. “Just before you were released, we wound up taking HoneyBee off of her hands.”

Matthew’s eyebrow went up. HoneyBee had already begun to make a name for herself in the local rodeo circuit. In the past three weekends, she’d been ridden exactly zero times. “You got her from here? I thought she was one of Bad Ass’ kids.”

“Nope. Jenn tried to break her to be a saddle horse, but that wasn’t happening,” Charlie said. “And we were kind of strapped for cash. So Ada worked out a deal where we’ll be giving Jenn a colt that’ll work out for her needs in exchange for the deal she gave us on HoneyBee.”

“That wife of yours is a smart cookie,” Matthew said. He grinned. “What in the world does she see in you?”

“I ask myself that every day,” Charlie said. “It’s one thing to be lucky with the horses. But when you’re lucky enough to find a good woman, then you know you’ve been truly blessed.”

7

Ada looked up from her reading and frowned. It was amazing how much information there was available on breeding horses, especially when compared to the resources she could find on human fertility.

She’d been married to Charlie for almost a year now.  If you counted the time the couple had been dating before that, it was slightly more than thirteen months.  Surely she should have become pregnant by now.

Ada desperately wanted children. The ranch was the perfect place to raise a large brood of children, and Charlie would be a wonderful father. Part of the reason Ada had been so eager to get married quickly was the fact that she wanted to get started raising kids right away – at 24, she wasn’t getting any younger.

It certainly wasn’t for lack of trying. She and Charlie had a very active sex life. They’d make love almost every night, and, if he wasn’t headed out the door too early for one of the endless ranch chores, in the morning as well. Charlie enjoyed making love to her, and she loved being with him.

But every month brought disappointing news. Charlie told her not to stress out over it. “It’ll happen when it’s meant to happen,” he’d said, kissing the top of her head gently. “You can’t force something like that into being.”

She wasn’t so sure. The information she was reading right now seemed to indicate that eating a diet rich in certain foods, specifically protein-packed things like beans, nuts and seeds, would make it easier for her to conceive. There was just one problem. Ada wasn’t particularly fond of beans. As for the nuts and seeds?

“Well,” she sighed. “I guess some cashews wouldn’t be too terrible.” Ada pushed the laptop away from her and stood up. There were nuts in the kitchen, and she could go for a snack.

As she went down the hallway, Ada had the strangest feeling that something was wrong. She knew she was alone in the house. Charlie had taken his brother off to talk to Jenn about that good-natured colt, and Freddie and Sean were both out working with the stock. Yet the house didn’t feel empty; there was something different about the way the silence sounded.

She shook her head. “Girl, you’re talking yourself into a nervous breakdown.”

“Well, we can’t have that, can we?” A deep voice came from behind Ada. She whirled on her heel to find herself looking up at the tallest Hispanic man she’d ever seen.

“Who are you?” Ada stammered. “What are you doing in my house?”  At that moment, she realized the tall guy was holding a gun in his hand. It wasn’t a very big gun – the barrel looked thinner than the intruder’s meaty fingers – but it was plenty big enough to scare Ada. “What’s this about?”

“Where’s your husband at?” the big guy growled.

“He’s not here,” Ada said.

The big guy rolled his eyes. “Really? You expect me to believe that?”

Ada’s mind raced. She wasn’t sure what would make this situation safer for her. If she convinced the intruder that Charlie was actually still on the ranch, maybe he’d hold off on doing anything foolish for fear of getting caught. On the other hand, if he knew Charlie really wasn’t here, maybe he’d leave to go find him.

“What do you want Charlie for anyway?” Ada asked. “He’s a rancher. He’s not messed up in whatever you’re upset about…” Ada’s eyes widened as she realized exactly who the intruder was. “Oh, my God!” she said. “You’re the guy from the bar.”

The big guy laughed. “Yeah, that’s me. The guy from the bar.” He gestured with the gun, scaring Ada as the end of the barrel pointed at her midriff. “That’s my claim to fame.  I’ve just spent the last year inside because of your husband.”

Ada snorted. “That wasn’t because of my husband.”

“I’m pretty sure it was, sweetheart.” The big guy tapped the side of his forehead. “Seeing as I was actually there and all, I kind of know this for sure.”

“I was actually there too,” Ada shot back. “Maybe you didn’t see me, but I was there.” It had actually been the first evening Ada had met the charming cowboy who later became her husband, but she didn’t feel that this was the right moment to bring that bit of relationship trivia up. “And I know that Charlie didn’t send you in there to beat that little guy up.” She shook her head. “You decided to do that on your own.”

“He didn’t have to stick his nose into something that wasn’t his business,” the big guy said. “No one else felt the need to interfere.”

“What was he supposed to do?” Ada asked. “Stand there and watch you kill somebody and do nothing about it?”

“Pretty much,” the big guy replied.

“That’s not how he’s made,” Ada said. “You’ve got the way you are, he’s got the way he is. You’re not going to change based on what he thinks you should be, are you?”

“I haven’t changed much so far,” the big guy said, “and plenty of people have had opinions about that.”

Ada nodded. “So you’re a strong guy. You’re going to do what you’re going to do.”

“Sounds about right.”

“Charlie’s the same way. You think people don’t give him hell about always leaping in to save people when they’re in danger?”  Ada shook her head. “This shit happens all the time. Fights, car accidents. He saved a little kid from a fire one time.”

“You’re shitting me,” the big guy said.

“I’m not. The hero thing? It’s what Charlie does.” Ada looked the big guy directly in the eyes. “If that interfered with what you had planned, I am so sorry. Sometimes he just can’t help himself.”

The big guy looked at Ada for a long, long time. He didn’t say anything. In the silence, Ada considered her options. If she screamed for help, there was a slim chance that Freddie or Sean would hear her up in the barn – but there was a better than slim chance that crying out like that might cause the big guy to shoot her.

She thought about running directly at the guy, pushing past him and speeding out of the house. It was an appealing option, but Ada wasn’t entirely sure it would work. The big guy was at least twice her size: he might just grab her as she was trying to escape, and then the situation, she was sure, would go from bad to worse.

The corner of the big guy’s mouth started to turn up. The curl deepened, growing into a grin. Then the big guy started to laugh. “I have to give you credit, little lady.”

“What’s that?” Ada asked.

“That had to be the prettiest line of bullshit I’ve ever heard,” he said. “And I know a lot of bullshitters.”

“Well,” Ada replied. “We are in Texas.”

The big guy laughed some more. “You’re funny. You got any tequila in this place?” His smile deepened. “We might as well enjoy a few drinks while we’re waiting for your husband to come home.”