by Roxie Noir
She looks up at me again.
“I swear to God I’m not asking you to quit,” she says, her voice low.
I just laugh.
“I just broke every bone in one leg, and now there’s so much metal in it that I’m barely human,” I say. “I fractured four vertebrae, and it’s a miracle I’m not paralyzed. My ribcage is pretty much made out of bendy straws by now because I’ve broken ribs hard enough to puncture lungs twice now. I can tell when it’s gonna rain because my left arm tells me, both my ankles hurt when it’s cold, my right shoulder freezes sometimes because I tore the cartilage once, and I’ve chipped five teeth.”
When I say it all out loud, it’s pretty compelling.
“I didn’t even know about half those,” Mae says.
“This way I get to go out on top,” I say. “Blaze of glory and all that.”
That’s all true, but it’s not the real reason.
The truth is, after Daffodil broke my ribcage, I started just assuming I’d die in the arena, and I realized I didn’t mind. Better to burn out than fade away. Half the rodeo guys I know who make it to sixty are in bad shape, so I started figuring I just wouldn’t make it that long.
Then I met Mae, and when they put me on a stretcher and loaded me into an ambulance, I realized that if I were dead I’d never see her again.
It’s pretty simple, really.
“We should head back,” Mae says.
“Stay here,” I say. “I like pretending we’re a normal couple who don’t have to sneak around.”
Mae laughs.
“That’s your own fault for living with your parents when you’re twenty-five,” she says.
“I got special circumstances,” I say, and kiss the top of her head. “And I only got to wake up next to you once, and you weren’t at your best.”
“I was such a bitch,” Mae says. “I’m sorry. I’m not a morning person. I’m not.”
“Stay here and I’ll pretend to know more constellations,” I say.
She rolls over onto her back and looks out the window.
“Okay,” she says. “What’s that one?”
“Orion,” I say.
It’s not Orion. I don’t know what it is, but Mae’s in my arms again and neither of us really care what the constellations are. After an hour we shut down the space heaters and get ready for bed, then crawl under the covers and curl up together. I try not to kick her with my cast.
In the morning, it’s freezing, so we have sex under the blankets before we go back to the house.
ESPN hires me. When I tell Mae, she yelps with delight and then shouts, “I knew they would!” Later that month, she goes to Carnivale in Brazil for a week and shoots colorful samba dancers. I get my cast off while she’s there and start physical therapy.
In March, I finally visit New York. We see the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building and a whole lot of the inside of Mae’s bedroom.
In April, ESPN sends me to San Antonio for a while and she joins me there. We visit the Alamo, tire each other out in the hotel room, and afterwards, still in bed, Mae grabs her laptop and we start looking at apartments in other cities.
I’m sitting in a folding chair in front of a box, eating cereal, when my phone buzzes. It’s a selfie of Mae, in front of the “Welcome to Colorful Colorado!” sign.
Me: Stop taking selfies and drive faster.
Mae: Just for that, I’m stopping for more coffee.
Me: You were stopping for more coffee anyway.
Mae: Busted.
I pace around the house. I feel like I should be cleaning and decorating and getting something ready, but there’s nothing. There’s a small pile of boxes in the living room, but the biggest one is the wardrobe box full of new suits for my job.
For years, everything I needed I pretty much fit into my truck, but now that it’s in an actual building, it looks tiny.
I’m still staring at it when the moving truck pulls up outside. It’s been almost a month since I saw Mae, and just like always, I start grinning like an idiot the second I see her.
She hops out of the cab of the truck, blond hair flying, and I wrap her in my arms before she even gets the door closed.
“I made it,” she says, and she’s already laughing.
“Welcome home,” I say, and kiss her. She wraps both her hands around my neck and presses herself against me, her tongue licking my bottom lick, and I’m hard in no time at all. My hand’s under her shirt and on the skin of her lower back and she bites my bottom lip when I pull away from her.
Already, we’re those neighbors.
I reach out and shut the truck door.
“Want to see the inside?” I ask.
“Of course,” she says.
I open the door for her and watch her face as she steps through. Mae hasn’t seen the place in person yet, and it turns out that I can ride a one-ton animal for eight seconds, but choosing an apartment for the two of us to live in is nerve-wracking as all hell.
She walks through the kitchen, then the living room, checks out both bathrooms. When she comes back to where I’m standing, she looks relieved.
“You were worried?” I tease her.
“Jackson, the last place you lived was called the jizz trailer,” she says.
“Only because you named it that,” I say.
She grins and shrugs, then slides her arms around me.
“One more question,” she says.
I bend down and pick her up. She yelps and throws her arms around my neck.
“Bedroom’s this way,” I say.
Epilogue: Mae
One Year Later
I wake up with a jolt when the car stops. It’s totally dark, wherever we are, and I try to surreptitiously wipe my mouth because I think I was drooling in my sleep.
Then I look around. Behind us there are headlights winding down a road, and I look over at Jackson, who’s grinning at me.
“Is this Santa Barbara?” I ask, totally confused, because I was ninety-nine percent sure Santa Barbara was a city.
“Not exactly,” he says. “This is Big Sur.”
I have no idea what that is.
Jackson got a surprise break from his job when a rodeo in Albuquerque was canceled, and then a job of mine got pushed back, so we decided to go on a road trip to California.
I look at the clock on the dashboard. It’s 1:06 in the morning. I look at Jackson again.
“Are you kidnapping me?” I ask.
He leans over and kisses me.
“Are you ever going to get better at waking up?” he asks.
“Probably not,” I say.
“Come on,” he says.
We get out of the car, and I wrap my jacket around me. I can smell the ocean, and after a moment, I realize I can hear it, too.
Okay, so we’re on the coast.
Jackson grabs a blanket and a reusable shopping bag from the trunk of my car, then walks toward me. I’m trying really hard to wake up, but riding in a car at night puts me to sleep.
“C’mon,” he says. Then he kisses me and walks toward a staircase.
We head down. I was right: the ocean’s right here, almost invisible in the night, and in a few minutes we’re on the narrow strip of sand. The road above is totally invisible, and as my eyes adjust, I can see the rocky shoreline extending for miles in either direction, the blackness of the ocean ahead, the stars above.
I still don’t know what I’m doing on a strange beach at one o’clock in the morning, but Jackson’s spreading out a blanket on the sand and then we sit on it, staring out at the black water, his arms around me.
“You remember that first night in Vegas?” he asks.
“When I waited for you naked with cowboy boots and a hat?” I ask.
“Exactly,” he says. “And afterward we talked about how if we got into a car right then and drove we could make it to the ocean that night?”
I look over at him. Suddenly everything clicks into place, and I know exactly why I’m on
a beach at one in the morning, and why my boyfriend seemed oddly prepared for this excursion.
Now I’m awake and trying not to laugh from sheer delight.
“Yeah,” I say, and I think I’m grinning from ear to ear. “I remember when we talked about running away together for a night.”
“You could have talked me into it,” he says. “If you’d said, right there, let’s go to California together, I think I would have gone.”
I run my hand lightly over his right kneecap, the busted one.
“We hadn’t even seen much of each other in person, but we’d been talking nonstop, and you were all I could think about,” he goes on, his voice getting quiet. “And there was this moment when we were alone, and just talking, and I thought, this feels right, I think this is what it’s supposed to feel like.”
He puts one hand in his jacket pocket. My heart pounds, and Jackson looks at me.
Then he laughs.
“You figured this out already,” he says.
I just grin and shrug, and he leans over and kisses me.
“The night we had sex in the bucking chute, I was afraid I loved you,” he says.
He kisses me.
“And when we talked every night, and you sent me pictures of rats and postcards of trash barges, and every single time it was the highlight of my day, I thought I loved you.”
He kisses me again.
“And I knew I loved you that first night in Vegas, standing in front of that window and talking about running away, and I’ve thought about doing this ever since,” he says.
Finally, he pulls a box out of his pocket and opens it. Inside is a ring with a deep blue stone in the center.
“Marry me, Lula-Mae,” he says.
Suddenly I can’t talk around the lump in my throat, and I just nod and hold out my left hand.
“Yes,” I manage to squeak out, and then Jackson kisses me gently. When we pull apart, he rests his forehead against mine.
“I love you too,” I whisper.
He kisses me one more time, then reaches back into the bag he brought and comes out with a bottle of champagne, and I laugh.
“You thought of everything,” I say as he pops the cork.
Then he looks at the bottle, looks at me, and looks in the bag.
“Not everything,” he says. “I forgot glasses.”
He hands me the bottle.
“Ladies first,” he says.
I kiss him again and take it, still laughing. I lean against him, his arm around me, take a swig of champagne, and then hand it to Jackson. He kisses me before he takes it, drinks, and hands it back.
“You were drinking straight out of a bottle the first time I met you,” he says.
“It was a less classy bottle,” I say.
“Can I tell you something?” he asks.
“What?”
He takes a long drink.
“I absolutely would have done it with you,” he says, grinning. “There’s no question. I never could turn you down. It’s a good thing the police came.”
I laugh and take the bottle back. My ring clinks against the glass, and I look down at it, still sparkling in the dark.
“I found you again anyway,” I say. “It worked out.”
“There’s no one around,” he says, his voice lowering. “We could do it right now.”
I look around. He’s right.
I kiss Jackson hard, put one hand on his chest, grab his shirt and pull him against me.
“Are you ever gonna let me forget that?” I ask.
“Nope,” he says. “I’m still gonna ask you to do it when we’re eighty, Lula-Mae, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
For some reason, it takes me by surprise when he puts it that way, and I swallow.
“You promise?” I ask.
“Of course,” he says. “I asked you to marry me so I could get old doin’ it with you.”
“I did already research wheelchair sex,” I say.
He kisses me again and pushes me backward until we’re lying on the blanket, side by side, and I slide my hand under his jacket and shirt, his warm skin under my fingers.
“Thanks for running away with me to see the ocean,” I whisper.
He kisses my forehead gently, and it’s sweet and sexy and protective all at once. Right now, on this beach by the dark ocean, everything feels like it’s exactly right.
“I’ll always run away with you, Lula-Mae,” he says. “You just say the word.”
I just kiss him again, and then again, until I feel like our bodies are melting together.
Then we do it right there on the beach.
The End
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They call me The Scorpion because I’m fast, lethal, and I pack plenty of heat.
The only thing more dangerous than doing my job is not doing my job. But for her?
Sign me the fuck up.
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Also by Roxie Noir
North Star Shifters: The Complete Series
Shifter Country Bears: The Complete Series
Shifter Country Wolves: The Complete Series
Or to read Copper Mesa Eagles, just turn the page!
About Roxie
I love writing sexy, alpha men and the headstrong women they fall for.
My weaknesses include: beards, whiskey, nice abs with treasure trails, sarcasm, cats, prowess in the kitchen, prowess in the bedroom, forearm tattoos, and gummi bears.
I live in California with my very own sexy, bearded, whiskey-loving husband and two hell-raising cats.
roxienoir
www.roxienoir.com
[email protected]
PREDATOR
Copper Mesa Eagles, Book 1
Roxie Noir
1. Seth
The noise started coming from under the hood not long after Seth turned off the main road, a steady thunkthunkthunkthunkthunk.
“Don’t do this to me, baby,” he said out loud. His words were lost in a swirl of heat and dust that came through the old truck’s windows. The air conditioning hadn’t worked in years, and the cab was so full of the fine red grit that it was hard to tell what color the upholstery had been originally.
As if in response, the engine coughed, and Seth grimaced.
“Come on,” he said, still talking to the car through the windshield. “Just a couple more miles and then you can die as much as you want.”
From under the hood came a noise that Seth could only describe as a death rattle, and the car conked out, a thin stream of black smoke rising from the right side of the hood.
“Shit,” muttered Seth, both hands gripping the steering wheel tightly as he maneuvered the enormous, old pickup to the dusty side of the road.
“Shit, shit, shit.”
Once he was on the shoulder, he hit the brakes and the truck came to a stop with a shudder.
At least that still works, he thought. The one thing that does.
Not that it really mattered anymore. Seth looked through the windshield at the long, flat expanse of Utah desert stretching in front of him. A busted truck could pretty much just roll forever out here and nothing would happen.
He sighed deeply and got out and reached into the back for an old piece of rebar that he’d gotten from a construction dumpster. He opened the truck and propped the hood up with the piece of scrap metal, since the wire that was supposed to keep the hood open had been missing for ten years at least.
Inside, the engine was greasy and dusty, black smoke rising from the left side. Seth sniffed carefully at the smoke, which smelled like a combo of burning oil and burnt rubber.
Not a good smell. Not that Seth was expecting a good smell, given that his only mode of transport had just crapped out on him in the middle of the desert. In a minute
, he’d take a look, but for now the engine was still too hot for him to touch, so he’d have to just wait it out.
He checked his phone. No signal, of course. He figured that when he didn’t show up on time, Brad would assume that his truck had finally kicked the bucket somewhere. After all, it threatened to every day and twice on Sunday.
It was a good thing that his boss was the only person in the town of Obsidian who seemed to like Seth. Then again, pretty much every other person had either turned Seth down for a job or fired him at some point, so Brad was also nearly the only person left who could be Seth’s boss.
It was a small mercy that not everyone blamed Seth for who his family had been. Just most of them.
He blew his hair out of his face again and leaned against the shady side of the truck, crossing his arms and waiting for the engine to cool.
In the distance, a cloud of red dust rose.
Seth raised his eyes and, for a moment, dared to get his hopes up. The dirt road wasn’t traveled much, and god knew that lots of the people in town would rather leave him there than pick him up. Good thing he had a couple gallons of water in the car and the willingness to walk the miles back home if it came to that, and he knew it probably would.
Oil and rubber weren’t supposed to burn, not even in a thirty-year-old pickup truck. He was gonna need parts and a ride back to the truck.
The column of dust got closer, and another pickup truck emerged. Seth didn’t recognize it, which was a little odd: in a town of a few hundred people, he’d gotten to know what everyone drove right fast, but this one didn’t register. It was green with a yellow stripe along the side but nothing else, like it had been repossessed from the Forest Service.
The driver was also driving very slowly, like they were unfamiliar with the terrain and nervous about the dirt road. That was weird, too — locals tended to drive hell for leather along the dirt roads, their big tires kicking up dust and gravel.