The Wildest Ride--A Novel

by Marcella Bell

  They were from different worlds, and soon they would both return to them.

  Finally, Lil made her selection: a spirited blue roan filly, not quite grown into her prettiness but just bursting with potential. She led the young horse away, speaking low and quiet in her ear the whole time.

  AJ chose in far less time than Lil, but not quite as quickly as Hank, picking out a chestnut colt that looked near seasoned already and played well with others in the field. He led him back to their paddock and bunk, adjoined like the two of them would be for the next week until it came time to say goodbye at the auction.

  For this challenge, the Closed Circuit had made regular 4-H kids out of the final three, which, while making sense on one level—the audience for rodeo was often the same pond from which 4-H drew—was a novel experience in the sport.

  Three days later, however, the novelty was wearing off.

  Acting as a nonstop nursemaid to an untrained colt was proving to be more challenging than the previous real-cowboy-life simulation challenges had been, and by a long shot. While on the surface this task was easier, in truth it was an endurance form of torture.

  To pass for readiness, each animal was required to be paddock ready, trained on lead, walking, trotting, and cantering, as well as shoed and shined. For appearance, the yearlings would be judged on their muscular conditioning and coat.

  It sounded easy, a simple recipe of good diet, exercise, and training, even if he was a bit new with the animals—but it turned out to be far more than that.

  He was monitoring his colt’s diet, but anytime he took the animal out for a bit of free time, the foolish thing tried to taste anything that looked vaguely plant-ish and came back covered in burs and mud, with the occasional tuft of fur missing.

  Then there was training, which he’d learned could only occur in fifteen-to twenty-minute intervals, in order to lessen the risk of lameness. Depending upon how intense the activity was—because God forbid the delicate creatures walk uphill for too long—the colt might need to be rested for the whole rest of the day. AJ had learned that the hard way, losing an entire day of training and having to reorganize the whole week’s schedule to accommodate.

  And now, on day five of seven, for reasons completely unknown to him, his shiny, shoed, toned, and honed little boy, ready for the ring in nearly every way, was off his feed.

  He didn’t know what to do.

  The day before, he’d tried to tempt the little guy, whom he’d temporarily named Bullet, with all his favorite treats, heedless of the risk the extra calories might have to his sale if it encouraged him to eat.

  It hadn’t worked.

  After that, he’d tried to trick him, distracting him with training and silly sounds in order that he might eat absentmindedly.

  It didn’t work.

  Today, he was knocking on Lil’s door, the cameras rolling.

  Lil answered, fresh faced, smiling, her eyes unguarded, posture easier and more open than he’d ever seen before.

  While he’d been up all night with a picky eater, she was glowing, pretty hair pulled back into a curly ponytail, having clearly had a long, sweet night of beauty sleep.

  Horse sitting agreed with her. He shouldn’t be surprised. Hadn’t she said her horse was her favorite person to hang out with?

  “AJ.”

  He liked the way her tone warmed when she said his name, transforming the raspy kick into the sweet comfort of a hot toddy, particularly soothing in the face of her aggressive and obvious wellness.

  “My horse won’t eat.” Normally, he wouldn’t be so blunt, easing into the thing with a little conversation before running her down with his needs, but a night with no sleep, following multiple nights with poor sleep, coupled with a hungry yearling, and he didn’t have time for niceties. His horse needed help and he knew she was honorable enough to give it, no matter how close they were in the competition.

  Lil frowned, her familiar seriousness returning to her visage.

  “Where’s he at now?”

  That she’d remembered he’d chosen a colt said something about her attention to horses.

  Noting the signs of horse madness on her, he smiled, tucking the detail away as he led her through his bunk, the bed obviously unslept in, and into the connecting stall.

  Inside, Bullet stood against the far wall of the stall, half-hidden in shadows.

  Immediately, Lil started making babbling soothing noises and the horse’s ears began to twitch.

  Not long after, the colt had made its way to Lil and was sniffing at the oat mix she held in her hand.

  Soon, the horse was eating, albeit right next to Lil, chestnut flank pressed against her thigh, while AJ watched in amazement as she accomplished in minutes what he hadn’t been able to do all night.

  “How’d you do it?” he asked.

  “I didn’t do anything,” she replied. “He’s just lonely.” She said it matter-of-factly, like she’d heard it directly from the horse’s mouth, when there’d been not a real word exchanged.

  “Oh,” he said lamely. What she said made sense, though.

  They’d been instructed to keep the colts separate, scheduling the round pens individually and using the pastures, treadmills, and lead machines on a rotating basis. AJ’d been good about following the rule but hadn’t otherwise thought about the colt’s company.

  Reading his thoughts, Lil said, “It’s a big adjustment to go from being wild and free, playing with your friends and nuzzling your mother, to settling down and getting to the work of life. A horse can get lonely.”

  If she weren’t talking about his charge, and the situation hadn’t had genuine consequences, he might have laughed at her complete earnestness. She was unselfconscious in her methods, whether they were the little twist she added to steer wrestling, or her consideration for a horse’s emotional life, and he admired that about her.

  “I guess I’ll be spending more time with him, then.”

  Bullet headbutted her in the thigh, and she laughed at him before patting his neck, her smile entirely for him, the lucky little bastard.

  She wore a thin old T-shirt with her jeans and boots, the faded words I and rodeo separated by a big red heart. The T-shirt, combined with the ponytail, made her look about ten years younger, far too young for a man his age.

  Yet, despite the fact that she was nearly eight years younger than he was, she was an adult woman, well old enough to decide if she wanted the same thing he did.

  The bigger question, then, was was he sure about what he wanted?

  From the ages of twelve to thirty, there had been no question: the only thing he wanted was rodeo. For the last six years, though, and particularly since he’d retired, things had become more complicated. What did he want to do with the rest of his time? He’d exhausted himself running from the answer for so long, but looking at Lil, her attention back on the horse, snuggling and breathing deep, to its coltish delight, he was reminded once again that now those questions had an answer, at least a part of it, and she was right in front of him.

  Now he just needed to figure out if she would bolt if he told her, or stick around.

  Sensing his stare, she looked up, her cheeks heating, going dark with their blush. Straightening, she separated herself from the horse and brushed her palms off on her thighs.

  “I’d better get back. Little Beauty will be missing me by now.”

  “Little Beauty?” he asked, eyebrow lifting. They’d all been instructed not to name their horses. Clearly, he wasn’t the only renegade.

  Lil shrugged. “I had to call her something. It’s more of an adjective than a name, anyway.”

  He laughed, the sound of Bullet munching in the background bringing him a greater level of relief than he would have expected.

  “Thank you. I was worried about the little guy.”

  Looking away, she mumb
led, “Didn’t do much, ultimately.”

  He shook his head. “You cured him and more.” And if there hadn’t been cameras trained on them, he would have drawn her into a kiss to show her how much he really appreciated it.

  Hell, even with the cameras, he was tempted, but he knew she wouldn’t appreciate the audience.

  And it was a shame, really, because as he watched her leave, he reflected that she was a bottled ray of sunshine, and he was thirst starved for light.

  He didn’t see her again until the auction, and then only in passing, as the contestants were responsible for showing their charges for sale.

  The event passed in a blur, far more emotional than AJ had anticipated. For every other event of the Closed Circuit, he’d been able to maintain his normal level of rodeo professionalism, but this time he’d gone and gotten attached. The breeder who bought Bullet promised that AJ would be welcome to come visit the little colt whenever he wanted.

  And in a surprise upset, Lil had come in first place.

  While much of the evening hadn’t gone quite as predicted, with AJ’s colt going into a bidding war that seemed to have more to do with its trainer’s name than the colt itself, the fact that Lil beat out Hank, a legacy horseman, and by a long shot, was the most unexpected.

  In the end, it was Hank’s expertise that bit him in the butt, though.

  Thinking he’d score a little higher on appearance and raise his price, Hank had tried to sweat his colt before the sale, a cheap little trick to enhance muscle definition before a sale. It backfired for Hank when his horse came down with a cold, sinking his score.

  Lil, on the other hand, as she told Sierra from the top spot on the stage, just “looked for the yearling that looked most ready for the next stage of life. Bold and brave enough to venture far from mama with the curiosity to explore.” Playing with words and a wink, she added, “That’s a yearling that’s fit for sale.”

  The audience loved it, the pretty cowgirl who could ride like the best of the boys as well as she could nurture a filly out of the nest. None of them, though, he realized with a certainty he hadn’t felt about anything outside of rodeo, loved her more than he did.

  Now he just needed to figure out what to do about it.

  29

  Getting to Muskogee was a bit more complicated than traveling to Lexington.

  Fortunately, as the field was narrowed down to three, it’d taken only one rented bus to transport Lil, AJ, Hank, and Sierra, plus the full camera crew and greenies, from the Tulsa airport to Golden Acres, the massive ranch spread where the challenge inspired by Lil would take place.

  Just thinking about it made her groan.

  For Lil’s challenge, the true cowgirl of the bunch, the competitors were going to take on one of the most important aspects of ranch management: stock breeding.

  “Explain it to me again.” Sierra’s face did not look like she wanted Lil to explain it to her again, no matter what her words said.

  Lil sighed.

  Behind them, AJ laughed.

  Behind him, Hank continued to snore.

  He’d fallen asleep ten minutes into the hour-and-a-half drive to Golden Acres, his snores providing an orchestral soundtrack to their drive.

  Fifteen minutes in, Sierra had begun asking questions.

  “One of us will hold the steer, one of us will handle the bull, and one of us will collect the sample.”

  “But why?” She was aghast. Aghast, on Sierra, looked like a royal blue Western shirt, blue jeans, her embroidered white chaps and hat, and a cherry-red mouth opened in a wide O.

  Lil didn’t buy it for a second.

  They were down to the last two weeks of the circuit and Sierra spent more time with the producers than anyone else in the van. Lil was willing to bet that there wasn’t a thing about the whole production that Sierra didn’t know the why of.

  But calling her out wasn’t the way to win the game, so Lil put on her best exasperated cowboy impression, calling to mind every time her gran had brought another barn cat indoors, and said, “Where else do you think little bulls and broncs come from? The stork?”

  AJ laughed out loud, and Sierra’s eyes flashed, but her silly smile held.

  When the moment was right, she let out a tinkle of laughter and flipped her hair over her shoulders. There were cameras on the bus.

  “I guess I never really thought about where they come from! Unlike you, I steer clear of bulls. Imagine what they would do to my nails.” She punctuated the sentence by bringing her hand to her mouth, the nails in question painted red, white, and blue and glossy.

  “You’ve been missing out, Sierra, I hear there’s big money—plenty for nail repair—in bull sperm,” AJ added from the back seat, the cadence of his voice doing things to Lil’s stomach that didn’t seem reasonable given that it’d been over a week since they’d truly had a moment alone and likely wouldn’t again for the remainder of the competition. She’d have thought her system would have settled down and accepted the inevitable by now.

  The Closed Circuit tour was nearly complete, now. Soon they would go back to their regular lives, Lil back to the ranch—which was closer now distance-wise than it had been in over a month—and AJ back to where it had all begun, Houston.

  The thought brought a heaviness to her chest that she couldn’t afford, not at this stage in the game and not with the scores so close. She and AJ had remained neck and neck throughout the competition, trading the number one spot back and forth like kids on a playground, but they couldn’t keep doing that much longer. Sooner rather than later, one of them would emerge the champion. One of them would walk away with enough money to save the thing they loved most in the world, and the other wouldn’t.

  She tried to comfort herself that, at $500,000, far larger than any INFR prize she’d ever gone for, the second-place prize wasn’t anything to sniff at—that it was plenty to make a huge dent toward either one of their goals.

  It just wasn’t enough.

  Not enough to keep a youth-based, high-risk, nonprofit in an expensive city up and running, and not enough to ensure she and Gran didn’t lose the ranch to a series of snowballing debts.

  And that didn’t even begin to touch the rest of it, all of the parts she would never be able to forget and didn’t know how in the world she would ever walk away from. Nothing could bring Houston closer to Muskogee.

  But none of that mattered at the moment, because if she didn’t get every ounce of it off her heart and out of mind, her gran was going to know the second she laid eyes on her when they reunited at Golden Acres. They hadn’t seen each other in over a month and it was the longest they’d spent apart outside of her trip abroad. But it wasn’t long enough to evade her grandmother’s sharp perceptions.

  Golden Acres was a stud operation, making their money, and very good money at that, in livestock insemination, and particularly that of Black Angus beef. And because stock was a rancher’s gold, and Lil was their resident rancher, the Closed Circuit had devised a challenge around stock and its insemination, one of the most important tasks on the ranch.

  And one of the most uncomfortable, because no matter how you sliced it, whether you used a portable stall and an electro-ejaculator, or a team and an artificial vagina, when it came right down to it, it was a bunch of humans getting involved in the private business of bulls.

  But for the next three days, and for three times a day, Lil, AJ, and Hank would be the ones to do it. Working as a team, each contestant would fill each role three times: managing the teaser, managing the bull, and catching the sperm. They’d be judged on how successful they encouraged mounting with the teaser, animal distress, and how much seminal fluid they collected. Their scores for each day would be added together and averaged, the same amount of points awarded to each cowboy as the base score. The following three days, they would work alone, with an electro-ejaculator and a stall. Onc
e again, they would be judged on the amount of fluid collected, the additional points added to their score and totaled.

  The final rankings, determining bulls and ride order for the grand finale, would be decided only after AJ’s back-home challenge was completed and all possible points totaled, but because this was her challenge, it represented her last best chance to amass real points. AJ would have the advantage on his home turf.

  “Never thought I’d say it’s cleaner making money at the rodeo!”

  Even Lil cracked a smile at Sierra’s joke, corny as it was. Rodeo had never been accused of cleanliness.

  “Don’t be so quick to write it off, Sierra. There’s drama and intrigue, as well,” AJ said.

  She lifted a brow, expression game, overbright and genuinely interested, likely because it was AJ who was speaking. “Oh really,” she purred, eyes alight.

  Lil had observed that Sierra’s... Sierraness...took on a layer of genuine feeling it lacked with everyone else when it came to AJ.

  But there was no more time to dwell on Sierra’s crush, or the mild sour taste it left in her mouth, because they had arrived at Golden Acres.

  The insemination orgy was about to begin.

  But before that, a reunion that was long overdue.

  Outside of the entrance at the ranch’s main office, Gran stood in her Sunday best, her arms stretched wide.

  Seeing her as she stepped off the bus, Lil let out a whoop and dashed across the asphalt to catch the older woman, smaller even than Lil, up in her arms and swing her around in a circle.

  The cameras ate it up.

  “Now, put me down, Lilian. You know I’m too old for all of that.”

  Lil obliged, too excited to see her gran to mind the fact she’d used her full name in front of her colleagues.

  “And just who might this ravishing woman be?” AJ asked, joining them, Texas heavy in his voice, his charm on full blast.

  Lil’s stomach did a one-eighty. She’d been so worried about keeping her feelings for AJ off her face when her grandma was around she’d completely forgotten about their inevitable meeting.