Was that a crack about his big accident in Lubbock? The memory made Dallas sweat. “I’ll sign a waiver if you want. I need to get outdoors, earn a few bucks. I can muck stalls, fill buckets, measure grain. Lift hay bales. Maybe I’m not ready to wrestle a bull, but...” He ran out of words.
Hadley knew what he really meant. “Your folks doing okay?”
Dallas shrugged. “Dad’s all right. I can tell Mom’s not feeling great.”
The very week Dallas had been tossed from that bull, his adoptive mother had landed in the hospital, and, especially after their talk earlier, Dallas wondered when she’d be back there again. “Sorry to hear that,” Hadley said. “I know you worry about them.”
Calvin Stern had tacked up his horse then walked off into the sun with the dun gelding. Dallas saw his gaze flick toward Hadley as if to say, Aren’t you coming?
With his sorrel between them, Hadley walked Dallas to the doors. “I’d ask you to ride with us, kind of a test drive, but we only have the two horses.”
Dallas waited. Was his brother weakening? Hadley had his own way of getting to his point.
In the barnyard, he swung into his saddle and, with Calvin mounted beside him, their horses shifted as if in some equine ballet. Hides quivering, they shook off flies, and Dallas felt like an outsider. He missed the camaraderie of his rodeo buddies. High in the sky, the summer sun blazed toward noon, and he could smell the grass from a nearby field. It wasn’t Vegas behind the chutes or Cody in the open-air ring, or even his imaginary rodeo, but it was still something Dallas yearned for as he turned toward his truck.
“Wait up. Don’t run off.” Hadley looked at Calvin. “Guess there’s enough work here—a change from last year. How does half-time sound for now? Assuming I can rustle up another horse.”
“It’ll be enough,” Dallas said, though Hadley’s tone had seemed grudging. “Thanks.”
As he drove off, he stopped the truck halfway down the drive to watch his brother and Calvin disappear over the pancake-flat land toward the horizon. He admired the easy way they rode at a slow lope, hands loose on the reins, and imagined himself on a horse again—or even better, the back of another ornery bull with murder on its brain, because Dallas had a score to settle there.
His nemesis, Greased Lightning, was still on the circuit, flinging other cowboys into the dirt with leaping twists and turns of the bull’s powerful body. Just like Dallas in Lubbock, where he’d pitted himself against the animal so perfectly named.
But the sport was his passion, the love of his life. So far. His stage fright aside, he relished the feel of muscle and bone under him, the smells of hide and hair and horn, hearing the roar of the crowd when he stayed glued to the beast’s back till the eight-second buzzer sounded.
Anxiety or not, Dallas couldn’t wait to show Greased Lightning who was boss.
For now, those hours as a temporary cowhand on the McMann ranch—money to send his folks—would do, and he looked forward to spending more time with his brother. They had a lot of catching up to do. Win-win.
But he wasn’t here only to recuperate or be with Hadley. Dallas couldn’t stop thinking about Lizzie. He hadn’t seen her since he’d asked her to dinner. Who did she think he was? An insensitive jerk trying again to take advantage? He could see how vulnerable she must be, how badly her husband’s betrayal had hurt her, how fiercely she loved her kids. And he couldn’t get the image of her out of his mind, the set of her shoulders yesterday as if she were waiting for another blow.
He knew what she wanted—to mend her reputation in her hometown, where everybody gossiped. She didn’t need a transient man in her life who couldn’t wait to ride bulls again. But maybe she did need something to occupy her time while her kids were away.
And that brought to mind the lie he’d told Ace.
What if...it wasn’t a lie? What if that imaginary rodeo could really happen?
With his mind made up, at the end of the driveway he turned his truck onto the road, then headed straight to the Bon Appetit in town, where he ordered take-out food for pickup later. He’d talk to Lizzie again, and dinner tonight would be a start, a chance to make his pitch about the rodeo he’d decided to make a reality.
The summer was short. They could spend a little time together, becoming business partners in addition to neighbors.
As long as no one got hurt, what could be the harm?
CHAPTER THREE
“I HOPE YOU didn’t send Harry off with a sour look on your face,” Elizabeth’s mother had said. At lunch earlier at the local café, Claudia Monroe’s words had killed Elizabeth’s appetite. At home now, in the near darkness after sunset, she didn’t bother to turn on any lamps. Since Bernice, her neighbor across Tumbleweed Street, couldn’t see in her windows, Elizabeth was enjoying a glass of blush wine to take the edge off.
The rest of her mother’s comments, which often seemed to focus on Elizabeth’s blame for the divorce, had shifted to include the kids. “I think it’s admirable that he’s taken the children for the summer.”
Elizabeth had massaged her aching temple as she tried to come up with a response. “He feels he lost too much time with them while we were dealing with lawyers.” Again, to Elizabeth’s discredit and Claudia’s disapproval, it was all Elizabeth’s fault because she’d thrown him out of the house.
“No wonder,” her mother had continued, brown eyes snapping. “Not many men would do what he has.”
Elizabeth couldn’t agree more, though her mother couldn’t mean the same thing she did. For a while, after she’d learned about his affair, Elizabeth and Harry had tried couples’ counseling, but she’d done most of the trying. And then last November she’d suffered another heartbreak. Losing the
