by Cat Johnson
For one, the damn bull kept sitting back on his haunches, leaning against the end of the chute. Mustang was familiar with this little trick from his other matchup against Ballbreaker, but it didn’t make it any less annoying or easier to deal with now. It was hard to get settled on a bony back that sloped to the rear.
Then there was the left-hand versus right-hand delivery issue. When the gate opened to Ballbreaker’s left, would the bull start to spin left? Or did he always go right, no matter what?
Mustang drew in a deep breath. How the hell could he know what this bull was thinking? If Ballbreaker was thinking anything at all besides how to get the rider off his back.
He wound the bull rope tightly around his left hand twice and then wove it between his fingers, trying not to think about how that method was often referred to as the “suicide wrap” because it sometimes didn’t release when the rider fell off. At the moment, Mustang was more concerned about staying on than falling off.
About as settled as he was going to get, he figured delaying wasn’t helping any. Even though Ballbreaker was still all bunched up in the back of the chute, Mustang nodded for the gate to open and they were off.
He needn’t have worried about the left verses right-hand delivery, because Ballbreaker didn’t spin to the left or to the right. Instead, the bull ran out into the arena and made one giant leap high into the air. Landing hard, Ballbreaker let his head drop low while his legs kicked straight out behind. Mustang felt the bull’s incredible power as he twisted beneath him, every snap and turn intended to dislodge the rider.
Mustang concentrated on keeping his free arm raised and his weight centered as Ballbreaker changed it up and started spinning left in the direction of Mustang’s riding hand.
With the amazing way things sometimes seemed to move in slow motion, Mustang heard the eight-second buzzer, reached down and effortlessly unwrapped the rope from around his left hand. Freed, he jumped to the ground.
He ran for the rails after landing on his feet in a perfect dismount. He hopped up, grabbed the top and waited in relative safety as the bullfighters worked to chase Ballbreaker out of the arena toward the stock pens in back.
Still in awe at how easy the ride had been, Mustang jumped down once the arena was clear, landing with a puff of dust beneath his feet. With his ungloved hand, he pulled his mouthguard out and stashed it in a pocket, grinning the entire time over his great ride.
One of the bullfighters retrieved the bull rope from the ground and walked over to return it to him. Saying thanks, Mustang reached for it with his gloved, left hand.
Frowning, the bullfighter stared down at Mustang’s extended limb. “Hey, your arm looks kinda funny. You better have Doc Tandy look it over.”
Glancing down, Mustang had to agree. It looked like he’d swallowed a tennis ball and it had gotten stuck in his arm. “I will. Thanks, man.”
He grabbed the rope with his right hand and headed behind the chutes, wondering what the hell could have happened to his muscle during a damn near-perfect ride.
The first indication something was wrong was the stone-faced sports medicine team that surrounded him, followed closely by the worried expression on Slade’s face as he walked up behind them and joined the group staring at Mustang’s arm.
Oh yeah, and then there was the fact his limb was rapidly blowing up like a balloon. It was starting to look a lot like Popeye’s famed forearm, without the anchor tattoo.
The idea that maybe he should consider getting a tattoo skidded into his mind from out of nowhere. That errant thought was quelled as his stomach began to feel a little queasy.
“Sit down, Mustang.” Doc Tandy put a hand on Mustang’s shoulder.
“I don’t need to sit down. I’m fine. I just pulled a muscle in my arm is all.”
Someone slid the nearest chair beneath his ass and he was pushed down into it in spite of his protest. Doc Tandy whipped out a penlight and shined it into Mustang’s eyes.
“What are you doing? I didn’t hit my head.” He squinted at the doctor until an assistant came at his shirtsleeve with a scissor. Then all his attention was on her. She slipped the metal blades under the rolled sleeve just below his elbow and he heard the material give way with a tear. “Hey. You cut my shirt.”
Doc Tandy shook his head. “Mustang, I’m a hell of a lot more concerned about your arm than your sleeve. You can buy a new shirt.”
Slade squatted down in front of Mustang’s chair. “You okay, man?”
“Besides the fact I need a new shirt? Yeah. Why?” Why was everyone acting like there was something wrong with him?
“Because your face is as white as the bed sheets in the trailer. Besides that, I know you haven’t even looked up at your score yet because if you had you’d be bragging to me about it.”
“Sure I looked.” Didn’t he see his score on the monitor? He must have.
“Oh yeah? What was it?” Slade pursed his lips and waited.
Mustang frowned, damned if he could remember what it had been, if he had seen it to begin with.
“He’s getting shocky from the break.” The doctor spoke directly to Slade as if Mustang wasn’t there.
“Break? What break? Nothing’s broke.” Mustang started to stand up and was promptly pushed back down by more than one hand.
The doctor’s face appeared in front of him right next to Slade’s. “Your arm’s broke.”
Mustang shook his head. “No, it’s not. It doesn’t even hurt.”
“It will when that adrenaline wears off. Adrenaline is a powerful drug, son.” The doctor probed at the swollen forearm.
It hadn’t hurt before, but it sure as hell was starting to now that the doc was messing with it. Mustang wiped the moisture from his forehead with the shirtsleeve on his good arm, wondering why he was sweating when he felt so cold. “It’s fine. I just strained a muscle or something. Right, doc?”
The doctor’s head swayed slowly back and forth. “No, Mustang. I’m afraid not. It’s broken for sure. We need to get you to the hospital for X-rays to see how bad, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it needed surgery.”
Broken. Surgery. The words hit Mustang like a sledgehammer blow to the head. “My arm can’t be broken. I didn’t even hit the ground. You can’t break a bone just from riding.”
Chase Reese must have wandered over at some point, but Mustang didn’t notice until he started talking. “You sure can. I saw it happen to a guy while I was riding in the college rodeo.”
Mustang frowned, finding it harder than it should have been to focus on what Chase was saying. “You went to college?”
“Yup. I even graduated.” Chase grinned.
“Huh.” For some reason Mustang found that fact particularly amazing, more so even than the possibility he’d gotten hurt without falling off the bull. The throbbing in his arm began to increase and he found he was having trouble comprehending much of anything.
Chase continued. “Anyway, the bull bucked so hard, it snapped this guy’s arm. He didn’t even notice until the ride was over.”
Mustang glanced down at his own sleeveless limb again. The strange lump in the middle of his forearm was less obvious now that the whole thing had blown up to a good three times its normal size.
“Okay. Maybe it is a slight break. We’ll go to the hospital. The doc will set it right quick, then I’ll be back in competition in a few weeks.”
Doc Tandy shook his head once more. Mustang was starting to get pretty tired of that. “You’re out for at least three, maybe four months.”
Chase nodded vigorously. “Yup. That’s about how long that other guy was out when it happened to him. He missed the whole end of the season.”
Mustang resisted the urge to punch the young rider in the face for that news. Four months. That would take him out of competition until the fall. He’d have barely two months to ride before the finals and the end of the season.
“Nah, I won’t be out that long. I heal real fast. Right, Slade? I’ll be back in eight
weeks. Tops.” Somehow, Mustang thought counting his time off the circuit in weeks rather than months would make it sound like less. He’d been wrong.
Slade shook his head. “Mustang, you’ll heal, but it’ll take some time. You should be grateful it’s not worse. Listen to the doc. Don’t push it.”
Easy for Slade to be calm. It wasn’t his damn career or paycheck on the line. Maybe Slade was just afraid of a little competition for the world title.
Everyone seemed to be siding against him, even the doctor.
“You’ll be healthy enough to do plenty of other things while your arm’s mending. But you can’t get on a bull, not in competition and not at home, before it’s totally healed.”
The rules on the pro circuit said the doctor’s decision was final. If he said a rider couldn’t compete, that was it.
Mustang had to change the doctor’s mind. “But I could—”
“Jeez, man. It’s your riding arm. You know the kind of beating that arm takes during a ride.” Slade’s gaze dropped pointedly to Mustang’s balloon-like limb.
“You can’t ride, Mustang. You’ll only snap it again worse and maybe next time we won’t be able to fix it. Do you want to be out for good? You ready to retire at twenty-something years old? Because that’s what’s gonna happen if you get on a bull with that arm before it’s ready.” Why did the doctor suddenly sound a lot like Mustang’s father when he’d lectured him as a child?
“I’ll ride right-handed.” Yeah. That was perfect.
“You can do that?” Chase’s eyes opened wide with wonder. The younger guys were so easy to impress.
“No, he can’t.” Slade sneered.
“I could try.”
Slade let out a sigh. “You’ll only get yourself hurt worse when you fall off. Christ, Mustang. Just take the damn time off. Give yourself a chance to heal. Come back healthy so you’ll still have a career to come back to.”
“This is bullshit, Slade. You know you’d be on a bull again next week if it was you, hurt or not.” As the pain shot through him with every beat of his pulse, Mustang found his temper growing shorter.
“No. Maybe that might have been true a few years ago when I was young and stupid, but not now.”
What had suddenly made Slade all mature and conservative? Probably dating Jenna. Mustang scowled. If love made a man a weak sissy, like the way Slade was acting now, then Mustang wanted nothing to do with it.
The doctor interrupted Mustang’s ponderings on love. “Listen to your friend, Mustang.”
He didn’t want to listen and he wasn’t considering Slade a friend now that he was siding against him. It was Mustang’s arm and his body. He knew it best.
Doc Tandy watched Mustang’s face throughout his silent protest. “Look, we really need to get you to the hospital for X-rays.”
He was about to agree, if only to get the damn X-rays to prove the old doctor wrong, when Chase spoke up, “Um, Slade. Security seems to have Jenna in custody.”
“What?” Slade’s head whipped around.
Mustang raised his eyes. Jenna was indeed in the midst of an argument with not one, but two security officers who’d dared to stop her while she was trying to get behind the chutes to where he sat.
She pointed at them now. “Look, he’s right there. I just want to make sure he’s okay.”
Slade let out a big sigh and stood up. “I better go straighten this out before someone ends up bloody or in jail.”
If he knew Jenna and her New York attitude at all, Mustang had a feeling it would be the guards who ended up bloody and Jenna in jail. Mustang grinned for the first time since getting the news Ballbreaker had broken is arm.
“Mustang. Hospital. Now.” The doctor delivered the order with clipped, stern words that left no room for argument.
Inexplicably giddy—maybe he was going into shock—Mustang nodded. “Okay, doc. Am I driving, or do you want to?”
Doc Tandy raised a brow. “Funny man. Let’s go.”
Chapter Two
“Umm…Miss Beckett?”
Sage glanced up from the glue-covered table she’d been trying to clean before any more little sticky fingers got into it. In front of her stood a trembling five-year-old. “Yes, June?”
“I…I…” The girl’s quivering turned into sobs. A closer look at the wet spot in the crotch of June’s pants revealed the cause.
Sage glanced up and caught the eye of Mrs. Ross. The teacher sat, picture book in hand, in the center of a circle of children.
“I’ll be right back,” Sage mouthed silently.
Mrs. Ross nodded and continued to read aloud to the group.
“Come on, sweetie. We can take care of that.” Taking the child by the shoulder, Sage steered her toward the door. She paused only momentarily on their trip to the girl’s bathroom to stop at her desk.
Sage grabbed a pair of tiny new panties from the bottom drawer. “We’ll take care of this and no one will know a thing. It’ll be our little secret. All right?”
The preschooler nodded, still shakily gasping for breath between sobs.
A few minutes later, Sage held the damp crotch of June’s jeans in front of the hot air blowing out of the electric hand dryer. The impatiently waiting June danced from foot to foot in her new undies.
Sage smiled indulgently. “Just another minute, honey.”
June nodded and moved on to walking in circles as she waited. A minute to a preschooler might as well be an hour. Sage held the pants closer to the air dispenser and wished the fabric dry as the cell phone in her own pants pocket vibrated.
Just another day in the life and training of a student preschool teacher.
She managed to grab the phone one-handed and glanced at the caller ID. It was her sister, who should have known she’d be at work. Sage would call her back later when she didn’t literally have her hands full. She could only indulge one person at a time. Rosemary would have to wait her turn.
With another glance at June, who had just about run out of patience waiting for her pants to dry, Sage sighed. She held the garment up for another evaluation. The fabric felt damp but was dry enough the spot wouldn’t be noticeable. That would have to do because from the looks of her, June was ready to sprint back to the classroom in nothing but her T-shirt, sneakers and her little pink underwear.
“Good enough. Come here, sweetie.”
The child’s eyes lit up at the indication she’d soon be released from her tiled prison. Sage bent down and held the pants close to the floor. June braced herself with one tiny hand on each of Sage’s shoulders and stepped into the jeans. One quick tug up, a zip and a snap and she was dressed and ready to go, and go she did.
Sage laughed as the girl ran back into the classroom and took her spot in the story circle as if nothing had ever happened. If only adults could bounce back from things that quickly.
The large clock on the wall told Sage there was half an hour before parents would start arriving for afternoon pickup. Meanwhile, rapidly hardening globs of white glue waited to be scraped up, toys needed to be returned to their plastic bins and, since it was an unseasonably cool day, every one of the kids would need help donning and zipping their spring jackets as their rides home arrived.
At some point, she would also have to call her sister back or bear the wrath. Rosemary would never understand how busy Sage’s life could get. Her world and her problems could never equal Rosemary’s, according to Rosemary anyway.
While moving a stack of papers where the students had been practicing their letters, Sage remembered she had her own schoolwork to do for her college courses when she got home, followed by a date that evening.
A date. Sage’s stomach fluttered at the thought. She was meeting Jeremy after school for an early movie. She’d had no reason to say no when he’d asked. He was nice enough and she hadn’t been out socially in forever, as her married sister kept reminding her.
She hated first dates, not that she went on a whole lot of them. A dull feeling of dread rather
than anticipation engulfed her as she went back to tackling the messy table.
Sage finished cleaning the side she’d been working on before June’s accident and moved to the other side. It was still covered with the newspaper that had failed to protect the tabletop as well as they’d hoped it would. As she began folding the large sheets in an attempt to contain the mess, a single photo stopped her dead. It was splattered with glue and sprinkled with glitter, but she could still make out quite clearly the figure on the sports page. She knew who it would be about without even reading the caption. A glutton for punishment, she read it anyway.
Local bull rider Mustang Jackson’s hot streak continues as the tour heads for Trenton, New Jersey.
Sage let out a snort. Mustang hadn’t been back to his home town for more than a few days here and there since he’d graduated high school and started riding pro. Yet the town paper still called him a “local” and treated him like the prodigal son. Obviously this town loved him more than he loved this town.
What sucked most was that just the sight of his name had her heart racing. Scowling at her own foolish heart, Sage crumpled the papers. With an old butter knife and a renewed and perhaps bit-too-enthusiastic vigor, she attacked the mess and pushed all thoughts of Mustang aside.
***
Later that night, after an uninspiring but perfectly nice date, Sage hung her purse and jacket on the hook behind the kitchen door. She had every intention of grabbing a glass of water and heading directly to bed when she heard the sound of the television.
She found her grandmother in her usual chair in the living room. “Hey, Grams. What are you still doing up?”
Her grandmother’s eyes flew open wide behind her glasses as she clutched one hand to her heart. “Mija. You scared me nearly to death.”
“Sorry. I didn’t realize you were sleeping.” Or that anyone could sleep with the television on that loudly. Sage leaned down to plant a kiss on the cheek of the woman who’d raised her and her sister since their parents’ deaths in a car crash so many years ago.