The dispatcher snickered before answering. “Heard it’s a bull.”
Smith shifted beside me. “Our first call is wrangling a bull?”
I grinned and put the lights on, zooming back to the far side of Auburn Hill. “Welcome to the country, Lieutenant.”
“Go over there by the oak trees and wave your arms in the air and make a bunch of noise. That’ll scare him over here to me,” I barked out instructions to Smith, grabbing a coil of rope out of the trunk of my cruiser. My 4-H skills from childhood were about to be tested.
Smith eyed the bull, snorting and pawing the ground, before taking in the knots I was creating with the rope. For a city boy, he caught on pretty quick.
“Shouldn’t we wait for Animal Control to hit him with a dart?”
It was a fair question, but what was the fun in that? Seemed like a tranquilizer dart was an unfair advantage over a wild animal. The least we could do was take him down fair and square.
I pushed him away and warmed up my shoulder. “You’ll soon learn Animal Control is asleep at the wheel most of the time. They’ll take forever to get here, so we’ll just keep them as our Plan B. Plan A is to rope that bad boy ourselves. Bain will protect Lucy in case the bull heads that way.” I tossed my head in Bain and Lucy’s direction.
When we’d pulled up, the pink stain on Lucy’s cheeks was a dead giveaway as to what they’d been doing out here in this remote pasture behind where Bain worked. He was the prison warden and husband to Lucy. He’d muttered something about never losing an opportunity when there was a babysitter as he folded up the picnic blanket and dodged the irritated bull. Lucy was surprisingly fast on her feet, cackling as she danced around. Apparently, this was a fun day away from her two kiddos—which made sense, given her friendship with my wild and ridiculous younger sister Amelia. The two of them were a few cards shy of a full deck. If I didn’t know better, I’d have sworn Danger was their middle name.
Smith shook his gorgeous head and scraped a hand across his square jaw. “All right. I’m up to give it a try.”
I tilted my head to the oak trees and gave him a look that said to hurry it up. He headed that direction and I noticed how nicely he filled out the backside of the uniform. The bull also took notice of him, for different reasons, which worked right into our plan. Smith got in position and put his arms out, waving them overhead and taunting the poor bull. The beast snorted heavily and pawed at the ground. When Smith lunged forward, the bull turned tail and stormed off in the other direction, toward me.
I tossed the lasso in the air and spun it around above my head. The bull came by and I leaped back, tossing the rope in the nick of time. The rope slid right off his back and settled on the ground. My heart rate thumped in my throat, threatening to cut off my airways. Jesus, the whites of the bull’s eyes were imprinted in my brain. What the hell was I thinking trying to rope a damn bull?
“Come on, Oakley,” Smith hollered at me across the field.
“You try roping a wild bull!” I hollered back, incensed over his impatience. Hell, even professional ropers at a rodeo sometimes need a few tries to get it right.
The bull came charging back my way, and I didn’t have time to chew out Smith’s ass for snapping at me. I twirled the lasso and told myself I’d get it this time. The beast came close and I could have sworn the ground shook beneath my boots. It huffed, and I felt the air on my skin. Tossing the lasso, I squeezed my eyes shut and jumped back, feeling the whoosh of air from the bull’s hulking body narrowly missing me.
A yank on the rope had my eyes flying back open. The lasso was around his neck, and if my knots held, I’d roped a freaking bull! Elation soon turned to panic as that beast kept right on running, now even more freaked out to have a rope around its neck. My hands ached from gripping the length so tight, my shoulders burning from the tension. I crouched down low, trying to stop the bull from running, but it was no use. A short female human was no competition for a male bull. He started to drag me across the dry scrub brush field, my heels digging in and leaving two skid marks across the earth.
Shouts followed me, but I couldn’t hear them over the pounding of my blood. It was me and the bull in an awkward dance toward death. My own, most likely. Whose stupid idea was it to rope a damn bull?
Strong arms came around me and the clean scent of soap that only men seemed to know about hit my awareness. My heels quit eating dirt and the burn in my forearms lessened.
“I got him, Captain,” came a low voice right in my ear.
I turned my head and saw that Lieutenant Wyatt Smith now held me in some weird hug, his own hands now holding the rope steady and our bodies pressed tightly together like two nestling spoons.
Lucy cheered from over by my cruiser. The bull stood still, only turning to look at us with one baleful eye. I wanted to tell him we had no intention of hurting him, but the rope around his neck probably contradicted anything I could say. We just had to get him back into the wild land outside of town where he couldn’t hurt any citizens.
Animal Control pulled up right as a tingle of awareness and something else I couldn’t identify shot straight between my thighs. My hands spasmed, and I let go
