Banks’ eyes came to mine. “Even you?”
I nodded once. “I’ve never been a buckle bunny before, or a rodeo girlfriend, but I’m ready and willing to serve you in any way you might need me for exactly the next three weeks.”
I held my hand out as if encompassing my body in all its glory.
Banks’ eyes went from my face and practically swept over my body in the most delicious of caresses. I had no clue if I needed to protect myself from it.
But holy shit, was the man divine.
When he let his eyes drag down my body, I felt like he’d swept a hand down it instead.
My breasts plumped up, and I felt my nipples tighten—which for sure didn’t go unnoticed by him.
“I’ll find plenty of ways to put you to use,” he teased.
I shivered, loving the sound of that.
“You know,” Desi said. “It’s really weird having y’all talking to each other so civilly. Like for real, I like it.”
I liked it, too.
I liked it even more that I was allowed to openly find him attractive without having to try to cover it up by hatred.
Chapter 11
A human fart is louder than a rodeo announcer. Ask me how I know.
-Banks to Ace
Banks
I wasn’t really sure how we ended up where we were at, but I kind of liked the results.
When the suggestion was made over breakfast a few weeks ago, I’d been torn.
I mean, I was a grown ass man. I didn’t need, nor want, a woman following me around twenty-four seven.
Then again, if that woman was Candy Ray Sunshine, then sweet baby Jesus, I was down.
“You have your own motor coach?” she asked as she stared in awe at the travel trailer.
“A motor coach is a motorized vehicle. This is a travel trailer. I have to pull it with my truck,” I explained, pointing out, what I thought, was the obvious.
She blinked, then shrugged. “Same thing. You have your own travel trailer?”
My lips twitched at her emphasis on travel trailer.
“Yes,” I said. “I have my own travel trailer.”
She opened the door up and walked right inside, staring in awe at everything that was in there.
“Why don’t you live in here while you’re home?” she asked curiously. “You could be in here and free up one of the bedrooms for everybody else.”
What she said was true.
I’d been considering it a lot now that my brothers were married.
There was only so much of them having sex that I could handle, that was for sure. But, like when we’d first moved back and moved into the trailer, I’d chosen to stay.
We’d always been a tight-knit family. We’d also always been together—minus Georgia, of course. Though Georgia had always been there.
Being away in the military had been hard on me. I’d gone from having three siblings always there, always up in my business, to no one in a blink of an eye.
So, when I got back, that was something that I’d craved—the closeness.
“I’ve considered it,” I admitted. “But we’ve always been close. Leaving seems like a copout.”
“Hmm,” she said. “It’s really nice, though. Like… way nicer than anything that I’ve ever seen before, and I’ve seen some nice ones with all the houses my father has done for people. There was this one guy that lived on a million acres. He moved out early so he could watch over the construction—so things went exactly how he wanted—and he had this motor coach. Jesus, it was more opulent than our house. It had marble floors. Chandeliers. I would say it was only a step down from this one.”
I took in the travel trailer through her eyes.
“I bought it off a guy,” I said. “He was passing through town when the axle underneath of it broke. He’d run over a cow, and that was the result.” I looked at the bed and grinned. “The bed was completely demolished when I bought it. Everything from here backwards was fucked. Ace and I met him on the road, and he was looking at it in disgust. I offered him a grand and he sold it to me on the spot. Sent the title and everything to me in the mail a week later.”
She shook her head.
“How long did it take you to fix it? How much?” she asked.
“Couple grand. And it took me about a week to fix it. Put a new axle under it. Changed up the paneling in the back. Right as rain a week later.” I pointed to the bedroom door that was closed. “I got a little imaginative in there since nobody could see it from the outside.”
She pushed through the door with cautious steps, then burst out laughing.
“You have a king-sized bed in here!” she said.
“Yep,” I agreed. “And that’s it.”
That was the only thing that could fit once I was through with fixing it.
The only other option I would’ve had would’ve been a smaller bed with about half a foot of walking room.
What was the fucking point?
So, I’d just tossed a king-sized mattress in there and had called it good.
“I assume,” she said, turning around and once again surveying the rest of the trailer. “It’s so small in there because you have so much shit out here. Do these walls pop out?”
I nodded. “They do. This one and this one go out.” I pointed at the edges. “But the back no longer pops out thanks to not really knowing how to fix that part that was broken. Not that I can really tell.”
Her lips twitched.
“Where will I be sleeping?” She looked around for a couch, but the RV didn’t have one.
“Umm,” I hesitated. “The bed.”
She frowned.
“It’s big enough for both of us,” I told her.
I wasn’t sure who I was trying to convince, though. Her or me.
“We’ll grab a hotel room if you want,” I offered.
She shook her head. “I don’t want a hotel room.”
I felt something inside of me shift.
“Banks,” she said.
I turned so that I was facing her fully.
“This won’t look right if we don’t do it right.”
I frowned, unsure of what she meant.
“We have to play the part,” she continued.
“Play the part…”
“We have to make it look good,” she urged.
That was when I understood.
Sleeping in the same bed would make this whole ruse of us being together seem real.
Well fuck me sideways but I was down.
I wanted it.
I would use anything in my arsenal to get her where I wanted her.
The thing was, I just didn’t want to scare her.
I didn’t want to move too fast.
I didn’t want to do something she wasn’t willing to do.
“Are you sure?” I asked.
“Sleeping in a hotel room would be counterintuitive.” She nodded in confirmation.
And I realized, right then and there, that this was going to be much, much better than I ever thought it would.
Candy Ray Sunshine would finally be mine.
It was only a matter of time.
Chapter 12
Do you remember when you didn’t need eight hours of sleep a night to function and you could walk up stairs without your knees creaking?
-Candy to Banks
Candy
Once we decided to stay together in the travel trailer, things got a lot less awkward.
He showed me where I could hang my clothes, and also what drawers weren’t already in use—which, might I add, were all but one.
Apparently, all the man needed was one single drawer for his socks and underwear, and that was it.
The rest was all for me.
And I used it.
I unpacked almost all of my stuff while he was busy getting registered for his events.
It only occurred to me when I heard loud, boist
erous laughing that this was part of my job description over the next two weeks—going with him.
I stiffened as I heard the women’s laughter right outside the camper, then looked down at my shoeless feet.
I wiggled my toes, staring at my socks that I’d had on with my tennis shoes and jeans earlier, and then back up at my tennis shoes.
My socks were long and wearing the long socks with the shorts I’d changed into shortly after Banks had left wasn’t something I planned on doing.
But then I spotted my boots halfway across the room and grinned.
Hopping to the edge on my butt, then farther off the bed that I had to sit on to utilize the drawers next to the bed, I made a mad dash for my boots.
After shoving my feet into the well-worn beauties, I practically snatched the keys off the table and ran out the door.
Once I ensured that it was locked, I hightailed it to where I could hear the loudest of the women’s laughter.
I kept my eyes peeled for my target, though, eyes scanning the area like a well-trained soldier.
The area itself was huge.
Quite a few RVs had arrived while I’d been inside unpacking, and now it resembled an RV park rather than the large parking lot that it was.
Sidestepping the massive tangle of electrical cords, I made my way onto the dirt that surrounded the arena and came to a stop.
The women’s laughter was coming from a group of ladies crowded around a taco truck.
After ascertaining that my man—errrrm, target—wasn’t in the middle of the group of ladies, I kept walking, finding the main stage where Banks said he was going to register with ease.
“Umm,” I said to the man that was behind the table. “Have you seen Banks Valentine?”
The man rolled his eyes. “You and every other lady on this planet. What, can’t you be original?”
I winced.
Obviously, I wasn’t the only one to ask about him today.
Fuck.
Ignoring the man’s scowling face, I turned around, put my hands on my hips, and tried to guess where he would go.
“Where are the bulls kept?” I asked the man over my shoulder.
The man gestured to a cordoned off section of the fairgrounds, and I said, “Thanks.”
Marching that way, I sidestepped a massive pile of horse shit and kept walking.
It was only as I was rounding the corner to where I could see the bulls were kept—all of them in their own pens—that I found him.
He was easy to find.
He stood almost a half head taller than any man or woman that surrounded him.
He was leaning against the fence, ignoring those around him, and staring at a bull—one that looked like it was foaming at the mouth. The bull also looked like it could bowl right through the erected fencing that was made to contain him.
There were women chatting behind Banks, close but not actually touching, and I half wondered if Banks realized they were even there.
He did.
When one of the women touched his shoulder, he shook her off and kept staring at the bull.
I picked up the pace and hurried in his direction, making my way through the crowd and not stopping until I was right on top of the three women that weren’t touching, but weren’t moving away either.
They turned when they saw me approach, and I could tell that they thought I was lacking the moment they saw me.
I was wearing a black scoop-necked t-shirt that was on just this side of too big, a pair of cut-off jean shorts that used to be my favorite pants. But the pants eventually had holes worn in the inside of my thighs, and I couldn’t stomach throwing them away. Hence the cutting them so short that they might as well of been booty shorts and wearing them while I worked inside.
Then there were my boots.
I was fairly sure that they had actual chicken shit on them, but they were cute and comfy.
Not like the fancy, rhinestone ones almost every girl standing there was wearing.
“Who are you?” the first girl, the one in the smallest miniskirt I’d ever seen, asked.
I ignored her, and both of her friends, and pushed between them.
They parted almost as if they couldn’t believe that I was getting into their space, giving me a direct line to Banks’ back.
When I got to him, I wrapped my arms around his middle, then squeezed him as tight as I possibly could, causing the air to whoosh out of him.
He tensed for all of three seconds before I saw him look down, and then slowly release his rigidness.
I was sure it was the multitude of bracelets—all shitty dollar store ones that a couple of little girls from church had given me for my last birthday that I still loved—that gave me away.
Otherwise he would’ve pushed me off just as easily as he’d done the other girls.
“You never came back,” I said, resting my head on Banks’ shoulder blade.
He squeezed my wrists, then turned, lifting his arm and wrapping it around me.
“I wanted to check out the bulls,” he said, his eyes glancing behind me for a few seconds before returning to look down into mine.
That was when I realized that all conversation around us just stopped.
I looked up, away from Banks’ powerful gaze, to see the women that I’d walked through to get to Banks staring, open-mouthed. The men were watching us just as curiously, but their gazes weren’t openly hostile like the women.
“What the fuck, man?” one of the closest ones said.
He was short, way shorter than me, and skinny to boot. I could probably bench press him. I picked up bigger bags of chicken feed than I was sure he weighed.
“What?” Banks asked, his hand curling around my hip.
Possessively.
I shivered openly, loving the way I felt in his arms, and surveyed the rest of them.
There were a lot.
Either this was a popular place to be, or one of the group was extremely popular—and I was guessing it was the latter more than the former. And that popular person happened to be the man who was holding me like I would run if he didn’t.
“I didn’t know you had a girl,” skinny man said.
Banks ran his hand up to cup me around the ribs, and I felt my nipples pebble.
His hands were so close, yet so far away.
“Yeah,” Banks said. “I do.”
He didn’t introduce them, and I knew that it wasn’t rudeness on his part.
It wasn’t that Banks didn’t want them to know who I was, he just didn’t really care.
“What’s your name, darlin’?” the bulky, steroid looking man asked.
Banks squeezed my hip and said, “Her name is Candy. Candy, this is Jude. Jude’s a bullfighter.”
I looked at him more interestingly now.
“The ones that pull the bulls away from the riders when they go down?” I asked curiously. “The rodeo clowns?”
Jude nodded.
I smiled.
“Banks’ brother, Darby, does that, too,” I said. “In fact, just last week I watched Darby slap a bull on the ass and then run for his life.”
Jude grinned. “I’m not quite as crazy as that motherfucker.”
I snickered, and Banks rolled his eyes, but he did chuckle at his brother’s expense.
“Darby is that,” I agreed, then turned to look back at Banks. “I’m hungry. Are you almost done lookin’?”
He trailed his fingers down my side again, and during his attentions, he caused my shirt to ride up and the skin of my hip to become exposed.
The moment his fingers encountered my flesh, he froze.
I did, too.
But only because he looked like he was scared and hopeful all at once.
I sighed, knowing that I needed to have another talk with him later tonight.
One that explained to the man that I really wanted him to do naughty things to me and that I wasn’t a fragile
flower. And I was no longer the scared teen that I once was. I’d done a whole lot of healing since the rape. I wasn’t traumatized any longer, either.
He tucked my shirt back down into place, and I knew that the talk really would have to be tonight.
I didn’t want him to freak out every time he touched me.
“I’m done now,” he said, his eyes shifting to my mouth, then back to my eyes. “What would you like? There’s barbeque and Chinese in town that I hear is good.”
I could practically hear the curious ears of the people around me.
I had a feeling that if we decided to have barbeque or Chinese, then there would be a whole lot of buckle bunnies and awe-inspired bull riders accompanying us.
I nodded once and smiled at the men. “Nice to meet you all.”
Banks guided me toward the path that would lead us to the campers again, and I snickered.
“I maybe should’ve said ‘nice to meet you, Jude’ seeing as he was the only one you introduced me to,” I told him through my laughter.
Banks snorted.
“I don’t really know any of them,” he admitted. “I know Jude because he saved my ass one time last year. The rest I just know are around. I don’t really socialize.”
I had a feeling.
“Okay,” I said. “But, just sayin’, there’s no way in hell I’m going to either Chinese or barbeque.”
With that, he burst out laughing.
And we went to neither place.
We ended up hitting a little mom and pop diner that was on the outskirts of town.
And, even though it was an out of the way place, we still managed to see quite a few cowboys on our way, and women that were dressed a little too scantily for my tastes.
“You’re never going to escape them,” I found myself saying when we were seated.
Banks shrugged. “No. But at least the ones here are ones that I can stand to be around.”
I looked at a particular woman with boobs up to her throat.
“What about her?” I jerked my chin in the woman’s direction.
Banks glanced her way, then returned his eyes to me.
“Okay, so maybe not the women,” he admitted. “But the men? For sure. I’ve ridden with a few of them for years.”
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