Buck You! (Buck Cowboys Book 2)

by Elle Thorpe

  She was. Her pussy glistened in the early morning light, and her legs trembled with anticipation.

  I gripped her hip, lining myself up at her entrance. “Hold on tight, Summer. Gonna do this hard and fast.”

  Her groan of impatience had me thrusting inside her in one full stroke.

  “Oh!” Her fingers curled over the edge of the countertop, gripping it hard while I pulled out, then slammed home.

  She pushed back again, encouraging me, the little noises of pleasure telling me this position turned her on as much as it did me.

  She felt so good. I fucked her fast and hard, the complete opposite of how I’d had her last night, but that was what we’d needed then. What we needed now was something entirely different. I reached around and low between her legs to touch her clit, and she went off like a firecracker. She slammed her ass back against me, taking me deeper than she had last night, and moaning my name as I filled her.

  “Dom! Don’t stop.”

  There was no way that I could, even if I wanted to. I drove into her, over and over, holding her hip with one hand and tickling her clit with the other. My palm itched to slap her ass, knowing it would send her over the edge.

  “Dom,” she panted. “More.”

  Fuck. I had no idea which way to take her. Not wanting to slap her without at least a discussion, I changed routes. I took my fingers from her clit, still slick with her arousal, and let my fingers drift back to her ass. I glanced them over the star of her rear end and waited for her reaction.

  The sound she made was deep and guttural, as if I’d hit a switch inside her that took her to the next level. She panted out her breath, so I did it again, pressing at this new button.

  “Dom!” she screamed out.

  Her orgasm came so quick and hard it almost took me by surprise. Her walls clamped down on me, sending me spinning into my orgasm. She was so tight. So hot. And her core pulsed around me, drawing out every last drop of my pleasure.

  She slumped down over the countertop, and we both stayed like that for a long moment, both of us reeling from the aftereffects of mind-blowing sex.

  We might have stayed like that for hours, just content with how thoroughly we’d made each other come.

  But the pounding on my front door brought an abrupt end to all good feelings.

  “Quit screwing like porn stars and get out here,” Preston’s voice yelled through the door. “We’ve got a massive fucking problem.”

  “What do you mean the bulls are all gone?” Frost roared, voice full of anger.

  It was so unlike him that I actually took a step back in surprise.

  Summer stepped in front of me and put her hands up, trying to placate her father. “We mean exactly what Dom just said. When Preston got up this morning, the gates were all open, and the bulls were gone. He came and got us. Now I’m telling you. I’ve already called the sheriff.”

  I couldn’t blame the guy for being upset. It wasn’t even eight on a Sunday morning, and the man had been enjoying a coffee in his living room, still dressed in the sweatpants and T-shirt he must have worn to bed.

  Frost strode to the front door where his boots were and shoved one on his foot. “How the hell can they all just be gone? We would have heard trucks!”

  I answered that one. “My guess is they came in on foot and let them out into the back pastures and took them from there. We haven’t checked the fences yet, but I’ll bet you anything they used that little access road out by the south pasture.”

  “Motherfuckers! What did the sheriff say?”

  Summer cringed. “That they’ll be out tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow? Whoever the hell has my bulls will be long gone by tomorrow.”

  I grimaced. I’d already come to the same conclusion.

  Summer tried to be the voice of calm, concise explanation. “You know the sheriff’s department here is tiny, Dad. There was a hit-and-run last night—”

  “Was anyone hurt? Is it connected?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know the details. But they’re tied up with that. Theft is low on their priority list right now.”

  Frost finally got his other boot on, and Summer and I followed him outside. He looked exactly like we had twenty minutes earlier. All the bull pens were open, not an animal in sight.

  Hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of animals gone like they’d evaporated into thin air.

  The trainees had all wandered out with the commotion, as had my mom and Addie. Frost swore low under his breath, stormed into the office only to return a moment later with every set of keys from the pegboard inside.

  “Dad.” Summer frowned. “What are you doing?”

  He tossed a set of keys to me. “Going to find my damn bulls. Addie, you’re with me. Summer, you go with Dom. Isabel, can you stay here and keep an eye on the place? If the sheriff shows up, call me?”

  My mom nodded. Her gaze met mine. I still needed to talk to her about keeping my father’s illness from me, but now wasn’t the time.

  “I’ll help,” Preston chimed in.

  The other trainees who lived on site all immediately put their hands up and said they’d give up their Sunday to search, too.

  Frost threw each of them keys, pairing everybody up and sending them in different directions. “Ask the neighbors. Stop in the town. Look for track marks. Fuck, I don’t care what sort of detective work you need to pull, do whatever you can think of. I can’t lose those animals. I’ve literally got nothing without them.”

  Addie chewed a thumbnail nervously, and Summer’s lips were drawn into a tight, thin line.

  I’d seen enough of the books to know why they were so worried. Despite the fact they’d turned down a pretty hefty payday when they’d been offered money for Grave Digger, the Hunts were not rolling in cash. All ranches took loss of stock into consideration. But not a loss like this. Not every animal they owned. This wasn’t the sort of thing that a business could come back from.

  It was the sort of thing that sent them straight into bankruptcy.

  Summer and I got in the truck I’d been driving and followed the convoy out onto the road. At the top of the driveway, we split into two directions, and then farther down we split again, until it was just me and Summer, alone on the road. She stared out the window silently while I drove with my foot down hard on the accelerator.

  “The Murphys have cameras,” I assured her.

  “We’re completely screwed if we don’t get those bulls back, Dom,” she said quietly, as if she hadn’t even heard me. “Even if we go through insurance, who knows how long it would take for that money to come through, and how much longer it would take again to buy new stock. It’s hard to find good buckers. We’d lose all the business we have booked for the next few months at a minimum. We’d have to let go of staff…” She shot a worried glance at me.

  I already knew it would be my job on the line if there was no business here to pay my wages. “I know.”

  She slammed the side of her fist into the padded part of her door. “Dammit! How the hell didn’t we hear anything? Were we so busy screwing that we didn’t notice people on the property? Fuck, they could have been right outside our door!”

  I reached across the center console and took her hand. “Hey, stop. My cabin isn’t exactly right on top of the training pens. None of the cabins are. Yeah, we might have heard a truck, but even if we’d been completely still and listening for a disturbance, we probably wouldn’t have heard men coming in on foot. And hell, Summer. If I heard footsteps outside my cabin, I would have just assumed it was one of the other guys. I would have never in a million years assumed there was someone outside trying to steal the bulls.”

  She leaned forward, as if urging the car to go faster as we drove past the sign on the Murphy’s fence. “This is my fault. I should have made Dad install cameras. And upgrade security.”

  “It’s not your fault.”

  She whipped her head around to stare at me. “You have security at your place, don�
�t you?”

  I almost didn’t want to answer her, but she already knew the answer. “Well, yeah, but our bulls are high-profile. Yours aren’t. Until this year, your dad hasn’t even put them in the local rodeos. They’ve purely been bred for the training school.”

  She shook her head. “Grave Digger is worth money, though. Good money. I should have thought of this. I’m the ranch manager! Dad relies on me.”

  “I didn’t think of it either, Sum. We’re in the middle of nowhere. You know every person in this town. The people around here trust each other with their lives. Trusting that they won’t steal their livelihoods is just a given.” I pulled to a stop out the front of the Murphys’ house and shot a worried glance at her. “This isn’t your fault.” I could see her piling all the blame on her own shoulders, the weight of it dragging her down.

  She sighed as we both got out of the truck, doors slamming behind us. “Did you believe me last night when I told you your dad’s heart attack wasn’t your fault?”

  I took her hand and squeezed it. “No,” I admitted. That guilt sat firmly on my shoulders. And it was completely different to what was going on here.

  She squeezed my hand back. “Yeah, well, guess that’s just one more thing we have in common.”

  Mrs. Murphy came outside as we approached her door and ushered us inside. “Your mama already called me, Summer. I was just going to the office to get the footage from last night when you arrived. Come on in.”

  We followed her through the house, bypassing a living room full of framed photos of Mrs. Murphy’s three small kids. An abandoned game of Monopoly sat in the middle of the floor, the money and cards strewn haphazardly across the board. I wondered where the kids were, then realized that like most country kids, they were probably outside somewhere, helping their father. Weekends were often nonexistent if there was work to be done. The woman led us to a small room in the back that was mostly taken up by a large desk, covered in piles of paperwork. Mrs. Murphy moved some things to one side and then turned on her laptop.

  Summer tapped her thigh impatiently as we waited for it to boot up. I took her hand to get her to stop. I knew she wasn’t trying to be rude, she was just worried, but I didn’t want Mrs. Murphy to refuse to help us because of Summer’s impatience.

  Mrs. Murphy double-clicked a folder on her desktop, and then a few more, before she found the CCTV footage from last night. It was that awful dark grainy kind, slightly tinged green by the night vision.

  “There’s four cameras.” Mrs. Murphy pointed to the four-way split screen. “Home paddock, house, and two on the boundary fences. You’re probably most interested in this one.” She touched the bottom left-hand image. “It’s the camera on the fence on Dixons Road.”

  Summer leaned in, peering at the screen. “Our theory is someone took them out through the fence on our south boundary pasture, so yes, please. If your cameras caught anything on that road last night, that would be helpful.”

  Mrs. Murphy nodded. “I’ll start at dusk then.”

  “We were outside until midnight, and all bulls were accounted for then. Can you skip forward? It had to have happened sometime between midnight and six this morning.”

  Mrs. Murphy hit a key on her laptop, and the video footage zoomed up to three times the pace. It flew past the 12 a.m. timestamp and kept going. But the screen didn’t change. For the longest time, all it showed was a long stretch of fences, the Murphys’ pasture on one side of the road, and the Hunts’ on the other.

  The timer rolled on through one and 2 a.m. with nothing to show. When it hit three, I started thinking that this was a waste of time. It wasn’t going to show anything.

  “There!” Summer yelled. “Stop.”

  Mrs. Murphy hit the ‘play’ button, slowing the footage down to regular pace. The screen looked completely normal.

  “I don’t see anything,” I told Summer.

  But she had an eagle-eyed gaze on the screen. “Wait…there!”

  A black shadow crossed the screen. All three of us moved closer. In the next second, the black shadow was back moving around, and then there were more. A white truck lit up the screen as it rolled silently down the road.

  “Three guys,” I said, pointing out the obvious.

  “Three guys and all my damn bulls,” Summer ground out.

  It was impossible to make out any distinguishing features of the men. They wore black, or at least dark clothes, it was hard to tell. The grainy footage and the darkness of the night made it nearly impossible to see facial details. They herded the animals onto the back of the waiting truck, and when the last one was loaded, they hauled the ramp up and shut the back end.

  “Pause.” I indicated to the screen when Mrs. Murphy stopped the footage. “Plate number.”

  Summer grabbed a pen from the holder and started writing it down on a piece of scrap paper.

  “It might be fake or stolen,” Mrs. Murphy cautioned her.

  Summer’s pen flew over the paper, her messy scrawl getting down the number and letter combination. “I know. Or they might be that dumb. Either way, we need to give this to the sheriff so they can search it up and see who that truck is registered to.”

  “Don’t bother.” I pulled out my phone and brought up Julian’s number. “I got it.”

  She peered over at me. “You calling the sheriff?”

  “No, my friend Julian. You said yourself, this isn’t a priority to the sheriff right now. Julian is a whiz with computers. He’s the one who found my birth family for me.”

  “He can find out who the truck is registered to?”

  I shrugged as the dial tone rang in my ear, waiting for Julian to pick up. “No idea, but if he can, it’s going to be a whole lot quicker than waiting for the sheriff.”

  Mrs. Murphy’s eyes widened, and I was sure she was suddenly wondering what sort of guy I was to know someone who could hack into secure databases and did so just for the fun of it. It would probably be all over town by tomorrow that I ran with criminal masterminds. The gossip hotline around here did love to pick up any tiny tidbit of information and turn it into a viral sensation.

  Julian finally answered, his voice full of sleep. “Dom? What the fuck, man, it’s the middle of the night? You better be close to dying and ringing to tell me your last goodbyes. It’s frigging Sunday.”

  I’d forgotten it was two hours earlier in Wyoming. Shit. “Sorry, but listen, man. I need a favor. I have a license plate number and I need to know who owns it. Can you do that?”

  “Does a bear shit in the woods?”

  “I guess that’s a yes then?”

  Summer raised an eyebrow at me, and I nodded, confirming he could do it. I put the phone on speaker so both of us could hear the sounds of Julian stumbling out of bed and cursing as he tripped over things in the dark. His bedroom was always a complete disaster zone of computer cords and monitors and spare parts he never seemed to use, but swore he needed. I could totally picture him falling out of bed and having to pick his way to his desk.

  “Ow!” he yelped. “Fuck, Dom. Next time, can you pick a more reasonable hour. I can’t even see straight at this time of day.”

  Mrs. Murphy seemed turned off by the use of language and quietly stood to leave the room. “I’ll give you some privacy,” she told Summer, and the two of us thanked her profusely. She closed the door behind her.

  “Who’s that with you?” Julian asked.

  “It’s Summer.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “She’s my, ah…” I shot a glance at her. I could have just explained her away as my coworker. Or my friend. But her hair was still disheveled from the sex we’d had all night. We’d only bothered to pull on clothes when Preston had started banging on the door. Neither of us had bothered to brush our teeth or even grab a hat. Her brow furrowed from staring so hard at my phone, as if she could somehow see Julian working away at his computer if she looked at it hard enough.

  Even in the middle of all of this, with a grimace etched on her
face, she was still the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen.

  I tucked a stray strand of hair behind her ear. “She’s my girlfriend?” My voice changed pitch at the end of the sentence, turning it into a question.

  Summer’s head snapped up, and her gaze met mine.

  I raised an eyebrow.

  “You don’t sound real sure about that.” Julian chuckled amongst the clatter of his fingers racing over a keyboard.

  But a slow smile crept across Summer’s face, and though this wasn’t at all how I’d planned on asking her to be my partner, I was glad I’d given her something to smile about in the middle of a shitstorm.

  Say yes, I mouthed at her, wanting the two of us to have something private, even if Julian was still on the line. Please.

  It only took her a second to nod happily.

  My heart soared, and I grabbed the back of her neck, hauling her in for a kiss.

  “What is that noise? Are you two making out right now?”

  Summer and I pulled apart with a laugh that dissipated some of the tension in the air around us.

  “Yeah, sorry, J. But if she was your girlfriend, you’d want to kiss her all the time, too.” I linked my fingers between hers, desperate to keep a physical connection between us.

  “Good for you, bro. I’m happy for you. But I’m in the database, so you want to give me that plate number before anyone realizes I’m in here and sends national security to my door?”

  Summer quickly rattled the plate ID off, and Julian plugged it into his computer.

  “And done,” he announced a second later. “White truck, registered to Frank Alvarez at 1003 Grays Lane, Masonville, Georgia.”

  I grabbed the keys and my phone from the desk, and Summer and I took off for the front door. “That helps a lot. Thanks, bro. Talk soon, okay?”

  “Anytime. Bring that girlfriend of yours home soon. I want to meet her. She got a sister?”

  I chuckled. “She does, but that’s a whole different can of worms that you are not gonna be opening, my friend. Talk later.”