Cowboy Crazy

chapter 10



Lane sat back as the waitress in the tight Cuervo T-shirt and denim short-shorts slid two more shots across the table. “On the house,” she said with a flirty little curtsy. “Just let me know if you need anything, Mr. Carrigan.” She winked and walked away, twitching her tight little behind.

The glasses skidded on the moisture glossing the table. One almost landed in Sarah’s lap, but she caught it deftly and downed it in one easy motion.

“So,” she said. “Let me tell you everything.”

“Everything?” He grinned. “You’re giving me whiplash.”

She arched an eyebrow. “The kiss was good, buddy, but I’m not buying you a monkey.”

He laughed. “Not that Whiplash. Emotional whiplash.”

“You’re right.” She sighed, staring down into the empty shot glass. “I’m running hot and cold tonight. Part of it’s Mike.”

“Bad memories?”

“Like I said, it’s not what you think,” she said. “He’s my sister’s ex. Knocked her up, made a big deal out of ‘doing the right thing’ and marrying her, and then last year he walked out. Said he’d married too young and needed to have a good time.”

“Oh.” Maybe he’d misjudged her. She had every reason to hate that guy. But what was her sister’s ex-husband doing here in Wyoming?

“How…”

He didn’t even have to finish the question. It was like she couldn’t wait to tell him. “I’m from here. Well, near here.” The words tangled on her tongue. The tequila was talking, but she didn’t seem to care. Stiff, stuck-up Sarah was gone. He could almost believe she was from Humboldt.

“I thought you were from New York or something.”

“That’s what you’re supposed to think.” She sighed. “For God’s sake, don’t tell Eric. He thinks I’m just like him. Like you. To the manor born. But I’m—I’m actually from Two Shot.”

She said it like she was admitting to mass murder. Now it was his turn to look away as he tried to figure out how to respond. He kind of wanted to laugh, but that would obviously hurt her. She was confiding in him, letting him into her life as surely as she had when she’d kissed him. And it was becoming more and more obvious that letting people in wasn’t easy for her.

She was watching his face, her eyes flicking up to his to gauge his expression.

“You sure don’t seem like a small-town girl,” he finally said.

“Thank you.”

“That’s not necessarily a compliment.”

“I know.”

The waitress set down a pitcher of beer and two plastic cups, shooting Lane a sexy little smile. Sarah grabbed the pitcher and started pouring. She’d filled the cup halfway with foam before Lane took the pitcher from her and finished the job, holding the cup at an angle so the beer poured smooth and clear.

“I hated it, Lane.” Sarah took the cup from him and sipped. “You think Two Shot’s so great, but I couldn’t have spent my whole life there.”

“I wish I had.”

“I know. You call it your hometown. But you never—I mean, I’m from there, and I never saw you there. We would have known each other.”

She stopped short of accusing him of lying, but he could see the doubt in her eyes.

“I wasn’t there much,” he explained. “It was as close to being home as anything I had, but I spent most of my time in boarding schools back East.”

“Boarding schools?”

“Exeter.”

She drew back and scanned his face like she was looking for the stuck-up preppie hidden under his cowboy facade. “You’re kidding.”

Apparently she couldn’t even imagine him at a swanky school. He should probably be insulted, but as far as he was concerned that was a good thing.

“I hated it,” he said. “I might not have spent much time at the ranch, but it was home. My real home. The two weeks a year we spent on the ranch were the best times of my life.” He took her hand and laced her fingers in his own. “The prep schools were my dad’s idea. He wanted nothing more than to leave the ranch behind.” He flashed her a questioning look. “Kind of like you.”

“What I’m leaving behind isn’t twenty thousand acres and a family empire. We didn’t even have a home—just a series of trailers and apartments. We had a ranch for a while, but…”

He could almost see the shield going up. The light in her eyes dimmed and she swallowed, turning her attention to their interlaced fingers, staring at them as if they were so absorbing she couldn’t possibly continue the conversation.

“The ranch?” he prodded gently.

“We lost it. So there’s nothing in Two Shot for me but a bunch of bad memories.”

She dropped his hand and straightened in her chair. Obviously, talking about Two Shot was not the way to win her over.

“I suppose I shouldn’t claim it as my hometown,” he said. “I didn’t actually grow up there.”

“That’s okay.” She sipped her beer and rolled her eyes. “You can have it. I don’t mind. And I’m sure they’d be happy to put up a sign for you at the city limits. You know, Home of Rodeo Champion Lane Carrigan. Something like that.”

“That’s not what I want,” he said. “I just want to belong there.”

The minute the words were out, he wanted to take them back. How pathetic was that? He’d just given away far more than he’d intended. She was probably picturing him as a kid, slouching around the campus at his prep school, friendless and homesick for a place he’d never really lived.

“I guess boarding schools wouldn’t be a great place to grow up,” she said.

“Not really. But I could see where a small town might be tough too.”

She sighed. “There’s nothing there. No jobs. No money.” She sipped at her beer, then licked the foam mustache off her upper lip. “And poverty sucks.”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“No, you wouldn’t.” There was no bitterness in her voice; they were both just stating facts. “When you don’t have money, you don’t have options. You get trapped.”

“So how’d you get out?”

“Scholarschlip. I mean scholarship.” She slumped back in her chair and traced her finger down the side of her cup, revealing the golden liquid through the condensation. “I went to Vassar.”

“Well, they sure put a sheen on you.”

“Yeah, they did.”

“That was a compliment.”

She smiled, which was definitely an improvement over scowling into her beer.

“Thanks. But I’m still the same person underneath, you know? And places like this remind me of that.”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t be,” she said. “Telling Mike what I think of him felt really good.”

“You miss cutting loose.”

“I miss my old self. I watch every move these days. I have to test every word before I say it, make sure I’m still in character. I miss saying what I think, being myself. I miss being fun.”

***

Sarah felt like her thoughts were a runaway horse, breaking through fences and running for freedom. She’d never told anybody these things before, but somehow telling them to Lane felt right.

“It must have been hard—getting out,” he said.

“It was.”

“Bet you broke a lot of hearts.”

“No. I didn’t get attached to anyone. No boyfriends or anything. I didn’t want anybody to tempt me to stay.” She didn’t know why it suddenly felt so important to explain things to this man. Maybe it was because he straddled both worlds: her old world of cowboys and country and her new world, which consisted mostly of Carrigan Corp. these days. “I didn’t want to hurt anybody.”

“But you did.” His voice was surprisingly gentle. “You hurt yourself, hon. The person you used to be.”

“It’s no big deal. People change every day. It’s how you survive. I built a new image for myself, just like I’m building a new image for Carrigan.”

“So your life is like a publicity campaign. Everything planned out and calculated.”

She’d never thought of it that way before. He was right. She controlled every aspect of her life like she was producing a movie, and that meant she was faking it 24/7. There was a tension inside her that simmered just below the surface, a panicked, desperate feeling that needed an outlet. She’d been able to tamp it down until tonight, but somehow he’d opened a door to her true self. Maybe it was being here in the beer tent. Dressed like everyone else, she felt like one of the crowd, anonymous and strangely free.

Or maybe it was that kiss. Lane was watching her with those ice-blue Carrigan eyes, focusing on her face as if reading the thoughts behind her expression.

“Do you watch the bulls like that before you ride them?” she asked.

“Like what?”

“You look like you’re trying to figure out how hard I’ll buck. I’ll save you the trouble. I buck hard. So you can stop watching me like you’re going to break me or something.”

“I don’t want to break you.” He put his hand on hers. “I was trying to figure out how I could gentle you a little bit.”

She felt the hard shell around her heart crack like the candy coating on an M&M. Lane moved his thumb over the soft spot on her wrist and she felt suddenly vulnerable. Melts in his hand, not in his mouth, she thought. No, melts in his mouth, too. His mouth…

“What are you thinking, Sarah?”

She tossed her hair and looked away. “Thoughts.”

“What kind of thoughts?”

Crazy thoughts. Sexy thoughts. Leaning into him, she caught that masculine scent cologne companies could never quite manage to cram into a bottle. The light bounced off the sun-bleached streaks in his hair and sculpted his face, highlighting a scar that ran from his temple to the top of his right cheekbone. Without thinking, she reached up and traced a finger down the length of it. The band stopped playing just then and everything in the room seemed to freeze, as if time had been temporarily suspended. Lane’s gaze was expectant, his breathing slow. The moment was hushed, like something that mattered was about to happen.

“Let’s dance,” he said.

“Okay.” She flashed him a smile. “Let’s.”

***

The woman saying yes to a dance seemed like a completely different being from the woman Lane had been talking to a moment ago. He’d watched a riot of emotions play across her face as she went through some complicated process that evidently ended with a decision to trust him. Now she was smiling and bright-eyed as she cocked a hip and held out her hand.

“Can’t think of anything I’d rather do,” he said. Actually, he could think of a lot of things he’d rather do with Sarah, but he couldn’t do any of them in public. Dancing would have to do—for now. It was an excuse to touch her, and touching would help him figure her out. Sometimes before a ride, he’d lay a hand on a bull, feel the tension in its muscles and the blood pulsing through its veins. A skipping heart and twitching muscles told him the bull was nervous, maybe even scared. A steady heart told him it was ready for the ride. A scared animal bucked to shake you off, while a relaxed animal bucked for the joy of winning—and joy bucked better than fear.

He needed to get Sarah to trust him. Then they could get back to their game, and maybe there’d even be some… bucking.

The fiddler stepped down to cheers and backslaps, and the band swung into their next song, a limping but serviceable rendition of a George Strait ballad. Lane led Sarah to a dim corner of the dance floor and took her hand, pulling her toward him while he wrapped his good arm around her waist. He’d expected her to tense, but she melted into him like a stick of sweet butter, her curves conforming to his muscles, her head resting on his chest. He could feel her tension ebbing away as he held her and swayed, and when he looked down her eyes were closed.

A wave of tenderness swamped him and he wondered what was happening. He was an old-fashioned guy, and it was a natural impulse to want to protect women. But this was more than your standard manly protective urge. There was no threat here, no ex-boyfriend, no predatory Lothario or evil ex-husband. There was just this woman, this soft tender woman, who thought she had to be tough to survive. Who thought she had to cover up her true, generous, sweet nature in order to succeed.

He wanted to protect her from herself.

And the only way to do that was to make her feel safe. What was it she’d said about poverty? When you don’t have money, you don’t have options. He wondered when she’d learned that lesson and held her a little closer, lowering his head so his lips rested gently on her glossy hair. She smelled like peaches and flowers. He rested his cheek against her head and swayed with the music, closing his eyes as she relaxed into him.

When you trained horses, there was a point where the horse stopped fearing you and started to trust you. He’d learned to feel the subtle shift in energy as the change took place and the animal opened up its heart.

He felt that now.

When the music stopped, they stood still in the moment. Somehow, in the course of one song, everything had changed.

***

Sarah let Lane lead her through the crowd on the dance floor. They followed a serpentine path through the scattered chairs and tables, most of which were empty since the band had struck up a Chris LeDoux song that flooded the dance floor with swirling girls and stomping cowboys. When they stepped out of the bar, the lights of the rides and concession stands were out, leaving the rodeo grounds in shadow. The reflection of the moon floating in a silvery pillow of cloud was duplicated over and over in the empty windshields of parked cars.

Sarah jumped as a ghostly white blob shot out from the shadows.

“Willie.” Lane bent and picked up a dog, white and woolly. Someone had tied the hair up over its eyes with a pink bow.

“That’s your dog?” She stifled a laugh.

“Yeah.” He looked as sheepish as a too-tall cowboy with a sissy dog could possibly look. “One of the wives must’ve got hold of him. I don’t do bows.”

“No, I didn’t think you did.”

“Mind if we take him back to the trailer?”

The music from the beer tent, the muffled voices rising from the flap, the hum and thump of various engines and compressors around the rodeo grounds—all the sounds of the night seemed to pound in a steady rhythm that matched the beat of her heart. Lub-dub, lub-dub. It sounded faintly ominous, like the music from Jaws. She could take it as a warning, or she could see it as a challenge.

She’d always loved a challenge.

“Sure,” she said. “Why not?”

He hoisted Willie under his good arm and they strolled in silence back to the trailer. Unlocking the door, he set the dog inside and held out a hand to Sarah. She glanced up at the moon and felt suddenly adventurous, like her old self. Taking his hand, she climbed in after him.

She glanced around the snug, shipshape interior. There was a tiny breakfast nook with leather-padded benches on each side, but Lane had set his gear bag on one and Willie claimed the other, turning in tight circles before lying down.

“He parties all night with the ladies, then comes back here to sleep,” Lane said.

“Wonder where he learned that routine.” Sarah sat down on a foldout bed that doubled as a sofa. She felt surprisingly comfortable, considering she was in a very small space with a very large man. Maybe it was the dog. “He doesn’t seem like a cowboy kind of dog.”

“He’s not.” Lane shot the dog a scowl. “He turned up in the back lot at Fort Worth. I figured I’d pawn him off on some buckle bunny or something. Named him Willie as a joke. But nobody ever wanted him and now he won’t answer to anything else. Guess I’m paying for my sins.”

Lane lowered himself onto the bed beside her, which was understandable since he couldn’t stand fully upright in the small space. The moon cast a cool, soft light through a skylight, silvering his face to the tones of an old tintype and accentuating the timeless masculinity of his features. He looked like he’d just come in from playing cards with Wild Bill or chasing after Butch Cassidy. His eyes met hers and she realized she’d been staring.

“What?” he asked.

“I was wondering…”

“Wondering what?”

“Would you kiss me again?”

He reached for her and pulled her close—but not close enough. Leaning backward, she pulled him down on top of her and slid her lips over his jaw to whisper in his ear.

“When you kiss me, I remember who I really am.”