Rockin' Rodeo Series Collection Books 1-3

by Vicki Tharp

  “Baby, that’s not a nice word,” Levi said.

  “Fuckity, fuck, fuck.”

  “They’re sponges at this age,” Olivia said. “You’ve got a watch your language.”

  Levi’s expression laid flat on his face. “Clearly.”

  “Marsh,” a stockman called out. “You trying to get your contract canceled?”

  “I’ve got to go.” Olivia kissed Clementine on her soft cheek and said to the little girl, “Be good.”

  When she walked away again, Levi called out, but he didn’t chase after her. “What am I supposed to do? I’ve got to ride.”

  Olivia turned, walking backward down the aisle. “You do what everyone else in her life has done. You deal.”

  2

  You deal. Olivia’s words rattled around Levi’s brain. He didn’t know what kind of sick joke Olivia was playing but he’d deal with her after his run.

  Levi tried to put Clementine down and have her walk with him while he led Chunk. But herding a hundred feral cats would have been easier. She darted after everything that caught her eye.

  After the second time he took something filthy from her hand, Levi decided to change things up.

  “All right, Pix,” Levi said, shortening pixie for a nickname. It seemed to suit her since she was as light as a fairy and nearly as dainty. How the hell could anyone believe that a man his size could father a kid so tiny? If she even was his kid. Seriously, he’d been careful to the point of obsession.

  He picked her up and swung her into his saddle, her frilly pink dress floated down to her knees, her pint-size pink cowgirl boots hitting her mid-shin. She giggled and laughed and held on tight to the horn.

  Chunk turned his head around and sniffed the tip of her boot. Clementine wiggled in the saddle and slapped her hand on the cantle behind her. “Giddy up, horsey.”

  Chunk stared at Levi with his big brown eyes as if to say, “Really?”

  Levi clucked to him and started walking again. Clementine squealed and laughed as Levi clamped a hand around her ankle to make sure she didn’t slip off. What the hell was he going to do with her when he had to compete?

  Beneath the stands, the concourse was thick with horses and competitors coming and going, the din of the echoing voices making it difficult to hear. He had to keep glancing over at Clementine to make sure the loud noises didn’t scare or upset her, but the grin that balled up her cheeks told him that she was dealing with the situation much better than he was.

  From atop his horse, she gave anyone who passed by a little princess wave, the kind the teen girls gave when circling the arena after being crowned rodeo princess. Had the kid ever met a stranger?

  “Hey, Levi.” Ian Murphy called out to him from his perch on top of the chutes. The rodeo photographer raised his ever-present camera and snapped a shot of Clementine on Chunk. “You’re starting to date them a little young, aren’t you?”

  Levi couldn’t help but chuckle. “You got a minute?” If Levi didn’t hurry, he’d miss his go-round.

  Ian climbed off the rails and dropped to the ground, capping his lens. “For you, buddy, anything.”

  Chunk halted when Levi stop walking. He tossed his reins over his horse’s head and lifted Clementine from the saddle. “I need you to watch her until I’m finished riding. Her name is Clementine.”

  Ian gave him a funny look, somewhere between incredulity and oh-hell-no.

  “I can explain,” Levi said, then realized he was essentially in the dark as well. As soon as he caught up with Olivia, he’d drag the information out of her if he had to. “Actually, I can’t. At least not yet.”

  Squatting down, he told Clementine, “I need you to stay with my friend, Ian. I’ll be back real soon, and then we’ll get something to eat. Okay?”

  Clementine nodded. “Otay.” She reached up and took hold of Ian’s pinkie finger.

  Ian turned green around the gills. “This isn’t funny, man.”

  “You’re telling me.”

  “I don’t know anything about taking care of kids.”

  “You think I do?”

  “What if she needs her diaper changed?” Panic crept into Ian’s voice.

  Levi didn’t even know if she wore diapers. The fact he’d never thought to ask screamed at how bad he was at taking care of little humans.

  To Clementine, he asked, “Do you wear diapers?”

  She shook her head and pulled up the hem of her dress, exposing her matching pink panties. “I wears big girl panties.”

  “You can’t show your panties in public,” Levi said.

  “But they’s pwetty.” Clementine raised her dress again to show him. Then she turned so Ian could see. “Pink is for pwincesses.”

  Ian glanced away, sweat breaking out on his forehead even as he tried to suppress his amusement, but a grin slipped free. “You heard her. Pink is for pwincesses.” Ian purposely mangled the pronunciation. “You can’t argue with that logic.”

  “Give me twenty minutes. Thirty tops. And I’ll come back and find you.”

  “Don’t leave me hanging, man.”

  “I promise I’ll be right back.” That is if he couldn’t find a deep, dark hole to climb into. Somehow, someway, someone had made a huge mistake.

  He’d get this sorted.

  He had to.

  As he waited his turn, his brain started putting the pieces together. If Olivia thought Clementine was his kid, it didn’t take much mental calculation by a rocket scientist, or even a simple, homegrown steer wrestler to figure out Mae was the kid’s mother. Now that the initial shock had worn off and his brain had kind of kicked back in, that was the only reasonable conclusion.

  Which might explain why Olivia thought he was such an asshole, dead-beat dad. Well her ire needed to be pointed at the kid’s real father, not him.

  Knowing Mae, there was no telling how many lies she’d fed Olivia. Quite a few, from the looks of it.

  Anger replaced his lingering grief over Mae’s death. How could Mae do that to him? More importantly, how could she lie to an innocent child?

  Levi’s ride finished in a blur, his increasing anger pushing him harder. Chunk was on the steer in minimal strides, and Levi had his hands around the horns, taking them to the ground in record time. In fact, his personal best.

  But he couldn’t take any pleasure in it, not when fury fueled him.

  Cooter walked over leading his horse. He clapped Levi on the shoulder. “Damn fine run, son.”

  Shaking the man’s hand, Levi forced enthusiasm into his voice. “Couldn’t do it without a good hazer.”

  “Ain’t nothin’.” Then Cooter focused on Levi, and the congratulatory smile slipped off the old codger’s face. “Still having woman problems?”

  Levi pulled his reins from around Chunk’s neck. “Yeah, and I think they just doubled.”

  * * *

  Back at her motel room later that night, Olivia finished the peanut butter sandwich she’d made for dinner. It was about time to check on Levi and Clementine and see how they’d fared for the evening.

  While she was still pissed at Randy for taking advantage of the local stop on the rodeo’s tour to dump Clementine on her, she had to keep in mind that Randy had lasted almost a year—months longer than she’d expected.

  After Mae had died, Olivia had bet Randy wouldn’t last a day, but he’d surprised her. Today, she’d put Levi to the test. She’d have to see if Levi would make it past the twenty-four-hour mark before he cried uncle as well.

  A knock came at her motel room door. She brushed the time-worn, paper-thin curtains aside and peeked out. Rusty Dennard. Good guy. Smart guy. Crappy rodeo cowboy.

  Olivia released the door chain, flipped the lock, and opened the door. “Hey, Rusty.”

  “Evening, ma’am.” Rusty had his best cowboy hat in his hand. He only wore it out to the bars, though he didn’t smell like he’d been drinking. “Sorry to be bothering you so late.”

  “It’s not that late, and you’re almost ten year
s older than I am. You don’t have to call me ma’am.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Rusty’s smile turned apologetic. “Sorry, ma’am.”

  Olivia waved him off. “It’s fine. I don’t mind. I just didn’t want you feeling obligated.”

  “I appreciate that, ma’am.”

  “You can’t help yourself. Can you?”

  His toothy grin spread, the tips of his lips turning up. “No, ma’am.”

  Opening the door wider, Olivia stepped back and invited him in. Rusty kicked the dirt off his boots against the door sill and stepped over the threshold, a few early-season mosquitoes following him in.

  Rusty took the chair at the small table in front of the window, and Olivia sat across from him on the bed. She really needed to check on Clementine. She made a get-on-with-it gesture with her hand. “What can I do for you, Rusty? “

  “I’m done. With the rodeo. With bronc riding. As much as I wanted to be like my daddy, I don’t have what it takes to be a champion. Besides, it’s hard to live up to a ghost.”

  Olivia didn’t know what to say. It wasn’t like they were friends, though he’d ridden plenty of No Bull stock over the years. “I’m sorry to hear that, but what does that have to do with me?”

  “I can’t hardly feed my wife and kid on what I make on the circuit. Hell, I can hardly feed myself. It’s time I got a real job and stopped chasing the dream my daddy had for me.” Rusty fiddled with the snakeskin band around the crown of his hat, then glanced back up at her, his gaze somehow both solemn yet determined. “This is me, asking for a job.”

  Before she could ask him any questions, his nervousness must have gotten the better of him because he started making a case for himself. “Look, I know you’ve been in a bind since...”

  “You can say it. Since Scottie Hines was arrested for assaulting Cora.”

  “I didn’t want to beat a dead horse.” He gave her a sorry-about-the-shitty-employee kind of shrug. “Thought you might need a new guy. I can haul the animals. I can do the logbooks. I can clean. I can feed. I’m good with animals. Good with a wrench. Hell, I’ll do anything you need. I know you already got guys who can do Scottie’s job. I’m not asking for that. I just need something steady. A paycheck my family can count on.”

  While Bob Forney and Jim Thomas were dependable, hard-working guys, part of the reason she was still on the road with the roughstock was that those men weren’t exactly Harvard material. To make matters worse, she really needed to get back to the ranch before the calves and foals were born.

  “Tell you what,” Olivia said, “why don’t you show up at the stockyard at six tomorrow morning? Starting wages. I pay on Fridays. No promises for anything permanent, but I’ll give you a shot.”

  Rusty let out a heavy breath. He glanced away and swallowed hard, and stuck out his hand for her to shake, his voice still rough when he said, “Thanks. I won’t let you down.”

  “No,” Olivia said, with confidence, “I don’t believe you will.”

  * * *

  Levi sat at the dinette in the shell camper on his pickup truck and nursed a beer that had gone warm while he’d put an over-tired three-year-old to sleep. Exactly, how had he ended up with a tiny human his bed?

  He had so many questions for Olivia, but she’d disappeared by the time he’d cooled Chunk down and had a chance go searching for her.

  Leaning against the back wall, he watched the little girl sleep. How the hell had everyone in this girl’s life failed her? How could her uncle dump her? Where were her grandparents? More importantly, where was Clementine’s real father?

  If Levi ever got his hands on the bastard who’d left her behind, the man might barely survive. Or at least, wish he hadn’t.

  Now that the kid was still for longer than one-point-five seconds, he could get a good, long look at her.

  She was thin. Too thin. Most three-year-olds he’d known had rolls of fat on their arms and legs. Her dress was too small, too worn, too threadbare and her little boots had left blisters on her pinched toes. After the long day they’d both had, he’d been too tired to tackle the much-needed bath and, good Lord, the tangles in her hair.

  He would never let his horse’s mane and tail get that knotted, much less a child’s.

  Someone knocked on his door. Clementine startled but didn’t wake. He turned the knob and pushed open the door from where he sat. With a truck camper, nothing was ever more than an arm’s length away.

  The rear leaf springs of his old truck creaked and groaned as Olivia stepped up into the camper, closing the door with a bang. Levi put a finger to his lips and pointed to Clementine.

  “Sorry,” she mouthed.

  Removing his feet from the seat across from him, he motioned for her to sit.

  She squeezed in and whispered, “How does a man your size fit in here? I barely fit.”

  “You’re not exactly height-challenged, for a woman.”

  “True, but you’re—”

  “Cramped. But it’s better than sleeping in my truck or sharing a motel room with three or four other guys to keep the cost down.”

  “Hey,” she said. “I get it. If I had an option besides a motel, I’d be doing that, too. Paying for an extra room every night is eating into my profits.”

  He gave her a non-committal smile. After the day he’d had, Olivia’s cost of doing business didn’t even ping on his radar. If that made him an uncaring bastard, he’d gladly take the moniker and have it tattooed in red on his forehead.

  “You don’t want to hear about my problems,” she said. “Do you?”

  “Not particularly.” He spared her a thin chuckle. That was all he had the mental energy for. “I want to know how I ended up with a toddler in my trailer.”

  “Your daughter’s almost three, so technically, I’m not sure you can call her a toddler.”

  “Toddler. Kid. Call her what you want, but I can’t call her mine.”

  Olivia’s face turned pink, then red as anger burned and bordered on fury. “You are such a bastard, how—”

  Levi reached across the table and clapped a hand over Olivia’s mouth. Clementine whimpered in her sleep.

  In a whisper-shout, he said, “Would you keep your voice down? I got her to sleep not twenty minutes ago.”

  “Oomph,” she said from behind his hand.

  But before he could ask her if she was going to keep her voice down, she bit his finger. Hard. He snatched his hand back.

  “Ouch, motherfu—”

  “No cussing,” she said from behind a grin she couldn’t hide. “Little ears.”

  He sucked on the meat of his finger, and her eyes locked on for a bit too long, her tongue raking across her bottom lip. If she had been any other woman, he might have read it as a sign that she was interested. But this was Olivia. The woman who despised him. And if he had any doubt, he could look at the incisor indentations on his finger for proof.

  “Are you current on your shots, or am I going to have to have animal control put you in quarantine?”

  “Very funny.” She wasn’t laughing. “How’s it going?”

  She wasn’t asking about his injury. Ignoring her question, he hitched his thumb over his shoulder at the camper door. The thought of waking Clementine when their voices got raised—which would be inevitable with them—terrified him. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been that exhausted, and he’d only had the kid for a handful of hours.

  How did parents manage with their kids day in and day out?

  He had to seriously rethink the whole idea of having kids of his own someday because he might not be cut out to be a dad.

  Levi held the door open and followed Olivia out, catching a whiff of her as she passed. She smelled of cattle, and hay, and pine shavings, and hard work. Not roses or flowery perfume. It shouldn’t have turned him on, but that combination of scents on her hit him like some sort of Wild West aphrodisiac.

  He couldn’t let it go to his little head. This was Olivia, after all.

  Le
aving the door open a smidge in case Clementine woke up, Levi retrieved two fold-out chairs laying against his back bumper and wrestled them open.

  “Sit,” he said. It wasn’t a request.

  Olivia was slow to sit, but she sat.

  Levi placed the other chair directly in front of her and settled in. It was past time he got to the bottom of this. He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. “Start from the beginning.”

  “You were there, you should know.”

  Levi scrubbed his hands through his hair. “She. Is. Not. Mine.”

  “Yes,” Olivia said, matching his emphatic tone. “She. Is.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because Mae said so. Why would she lie?”

  “Because she always lies. You can believe me or not, but she never told me about Clementine. Hell, she never told me she was pregnant.”

  “What about the photos of Clementine she sent?”

  “She never sent any photos. If she was willing to lie to you about the photos and even that fact that she’d told me, what makes you think she wouldn’t lie about me being the father?”

  Olivia leaned back, her expression wary and contemplative. “She really never told you?”

  “No.” Levi allowed a huff of frustration to leak into his voice. “And it wouldn’t have mattered that she and I were no longer together. I wouldn’t have run off and left her to manage with a kid her own. If Clementine were my kid. Which she’s not.”

  “Clementine’s birthday is in two weeks. She’ll be three. Count back nine months from there.”

  Between the exhaustion and the beer, it took him a minute to count back. “That puts conception mid ‘72. We’d already broken up by then.”

  “July 1972. Unless she was lying about that trip you two took to—”

  Shit. “The Grand Canyon. She caught up with me right after the summer rodeo season had ended. She wanted to get back together. That weekend was a disaster. We learned there was a good reason why we’d broken it off.”

  “But you two had sex.”

  He couldn’t believe he was talking about his sex life with Mae’s cousin, the woman who’d probably give a steer extra rations if it gored him in the gut as he wrestled it to the ground.