Mitch had used June for his own personal gain. Nothing but a show. And Travis had thought it was all real. Maybe he wasn’t as bright as he liked to think, because he sure as hell hadn’t seen any of this coming.
There had to be a way out of this situation, a way that didn’t involve him driving off into the sunset alone. Maybe he’d suck it up and pretend that he’d been drunk and stupid for the rest of the season. He could fake it until October, right? And then, maybe over the winter break, he and June could start to date.
If she’d still see him. He’d walked out, after all.
Well, sitting here and calling himself an asshole wasn’t going to fix anything. He didn’t see how he was going to get a whole lot of sleep tonight, but sitting out here in the cooling night air wasn’t helping his joints. No need to rub salt in the wound.
By the time he got his camper back to the campground, he was beyond miserable. He’d lost his girl—after only having her for one night. He’d lost one of his best friends. He couldn’t see how he was going to win enough to get to Vegas, and if he didn’t get to Vegas, he was going to spend the rest of his life at a desk at True West headquarters.
He’d barely gotten out of the cab to hook up the electricity when he heard a soft voice sneak up on him. “Hey.”
He froze. That couldn’t be her, could it? Just another one of his senses that couldn’t be trusted.
But there she was, shaking off the shadows she’d been standing in. “I’d like to talk to you. But only if you want.”
She really was here. “Are you alone? How’d you get here?”
“Mitch dropped me off. I’ll call them if I need to.”
“If you need to?”
“To see whether or not I need to go with them.”
This couldn’t be happening.
“So, can we talk?”
He looked at his camper. He was suddenly aware that the smell of Red and barf and everything might still be lingering.
“We could sit in my truck.”
She didn’t blink. “Okay.”
Yeah. The vision he’d been hoping to act out tonight, of tasting all of the confection that was June, was long gone. He’d settle for talking.
They climbed into the cab. “A white F-150?”
“It’s the only thing I managed to hold on to after the wreck. That and the camper.”
“What else did you lose?”
This was small talk, but at least it was talking. She was sitting a little over a foot from him, her warm scent slowly filling the cab. “The family farm. In Nebraska. Pawned off just about everything else. Even the buckles went.”
“Wow. Your family wasn’t able to help you out?”
Not such small talk after all. “Mom died when I was fifteen. Dad went a few years after that. He got to see me ride in the bigs, though, that first year.” Suddenly, his throat closed up. Mom and Dad would have loved June. She would have fit on the farm and appreciated the goodness of homemade biscuits and gravy.
“I’m sorry.” The silence got a little awkward as she inspected his truck. She even flipped open the glove compartment, letting the collection of ketchups and hot sauces loose. Cascading condiments didn’t seem to rattle her—neither did the pistol. She took it out, checked to see that the safety was on and put it back. “What do you do during the week? Between True West and riding?”
This had to be good, right? If she was going to tell him to go to hell, she’d just get it over with. “Travel. It takes me a long time to get from point A to point B. I have to stop a lot to walk and I like to see what’s around.” She probably wanted to know about his crappy desk job in the off-season, but he knew that the more he talked, the deeper the hole he’d be digging, so he said, “You?”
“I go where Mitch and Paulo go,” she snorted. “I don’t know how they pay for it—maybe Paulo is independently wealthy or something—but they sightsee. I’ve seen every state capital, every giant prairie dog, every huge ball of string and every Super 8 in thirty-seven states. It was fun for a while, but I’m looking forward to going home tomorrow.”
“Home is always good.” Another one of those things he didn’t have.
“Travis, look. I’m really sorry I put you in an awkward position. Nothing in the last twenty-four hours has been normal and it wasn’t fair of me to expect you to just get it without any ground rules.”
Awkward? Was that some sort of code word for him being an asshole? “You don’t have to apologize—”
“Yes, I do. I want to do better by you.”
His head was swimming. This whole thing seemed backward. He was the one that had overreacted. “Oh, sweetheart—”
“It’s just that spending all my time with Mitch and Paulo and being the girlfriend without benefits—I mean, I love those guys, I really do, but Paulo said more to you tonight than he’s ever said to me, and Mitch gives me nothing but a hard time about you. It seemed like such a good idea—we’d all watch each other’s backs—but keeping up the false front was...exhausting.” She turned to him. “Especially when you came to check on me. That meant a lot to me.”
He could hear the frustration rising in her voice, the same way it had the one and only time she’d walked into True West, and he’d pissed her off. “Hey,” he said, touching her face. “I don’t want to think about those two right now. I just want to think about you.”
She leaned into his fingers, eyes half-closed in a state of bliss. “Me?”
“You. I want to know about you.”
“Oh.” She pulled his hand away from her face, but she still held on to it, he noted with a smile. “Okay. About me. I only ever had one other serious boyfriend before you.”
Was he a boyfriend? But that seemed like a jerk question, so he went with a safer one. “Only one?” Didn’t seem right. Men should have been beating down her door.
“I was young—hormonal and in high school, you know.”
Ah. Serious meant sex. “Okay. No big deal.” He swallowed hard. Personal experience had told him that hormonal didn’t end with high school. “I really don’t have a number for you. I spent a few years trolling for bunnies at the bars.”
“I know. But not in the past three years, right?”
At least he had that going for him. “You are it. I like it like that.”
She laced his fingers with hers. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
The light from a streetlamp shone off her smile until it disappeared as she took a deep breath. “My father is in prison. Picked a fight at a bar in Sturgis—drunk, of course—and killed three men a few years ago.”
Whoa. Somehow, June had still turned out okay.
“I’m glad he’s locked up,” she said. Her voice had gotten quiet, which made her sound like a little girl. “He never took care of us. Never wanted me. Thought I couldn’t do anything. Told me so all the time.”
He could hear the lifetime of hurt behind her words, and suddenly realized how big of an ass he’d been that first night in the parking lot when he’d tried to keep her off the bulls. “When will he get out?
“Hopefully never.” She sniffed, sounding braver, but she had a tight grip on his hand. “Mom’s been sober almost a year now, but I don’t know if she could keep that going if Dad was home. We’re getting off welfare now, thanks to the money I’ve made so far. We’ll have heat this winter—I’ll be able to pay for it myself. You have no idea how huge that is to me.” She looked at their hands, fingers laced together. “I didn’t want anyone to know how poor we were. Not even Mitch knows about the welfare. I wanted to ride—but I needed the money.” She sounded so ashamed of that, as if the rest of them weren’t in it for the take-home, either. “That’s why I wouldn’t walk away, no matter how stupid some people thought I was being.”
He’d lost everything with no one to blame
except himself but he hadn’t needed to go on welfare. She was talking like she’d never had two dimes to rub together. It made him hurt for her in a new way. He didn’t have a lot to offer her, but he could make sure she never had to go on public assistance again.
“You’re a hell of a rider, June. No one can take that away from you—and if they try, I’ll beat the crap out of them.” That got him a good smile, the kind that went with the way she was stroking his fingers.
“If you come home with me tomorrow, you’ll see what I mean,” she said, brightening. “You can meet Joseph, my boss. Don’t worry,” she added. “He’s normally real nice to white people.”
Travis chewed on that for a while, but the silence wasn’t uncomfortable. “I think I’d like that.”
“Anything else?” she asked.
What other dirty little secrets did he have? On the whole, nothing too bad. “I smoked pot a few times. Didn’t really like it.”
She didn’t look surprised. But then, that did go with the buckle bunnies and the barbed wire tattoos. “I locked my parents out of the house—on more than one occasion—and then went out the back window to Uncle Dave’s, just to punish them for coming home drunk. The last time I did it, Mom lost a toe to hypothermia.”
Impressive. June with an axe to grind was not a woman to be taken lightly. No wonder she didn’t drink. Well, if she wanted him to not drink with her, he could do that. But that was getting off the topic of worst things he ever did. “I came real close to hitting my grandma because she wouldn’t stop calling me names. I complained so much that Dad put her in a home.”
Let’s see if she can top that one, he thought.
She snorted, and suddenly, he felt right again. He didn’t care how long they sat here, just as long as he could be with her and listen to her talk. All night wasn’t too long, as long as he was with June. “I busted my cousin Ian with his girlfriend in the back of his car and then told his mother—and his other girlfriend. He still gives me a hard time for that one.”
Oh, down the sex road. Well, better to get it all out there before he got busted the hard way. “I always used protection, and they ran all those tests when I was in the hospital. I’m clean and I don’t have any children. As far as I know.”
“Me, neither.” She cocked an eyebrow at him. “Joseph is going to try to scare you.”
“Your boss?”
“He owns the ranch. He’s my sponsor.” She got a sort of wicked grin on her face. “He and my uncle Dave ran things back in the day. If you think Mort was scared of Uncle Dave...”
The way she said “ran things” made it sound like she worked for Indian mobsters. “Gotcha.”
Another silence settled over them, but this was the best one yet. She was still in the truck and nothing he’d said or done had sent her away. “That’s it?”
“I think so. You?”
She sighed so deeply he could feel it. “Sometimes, I feel like I’m just a normal girl living a highly abnormal life. In real life, I’m a high school history teacher. But I ride bulls. I date a gay man. I work for Joseph. It’s enough to give a girl a complex. That’s why I appreciate you not bailing on me.”
“Me?” She did have this all backward. “I’ve been an asshole of the first-class order, and you’re still apologizing to me?”
“You can apologize, too.” He was beginning to understand that challenge with the built-in smile better now. “You’re kinda good at it.”
“I’m sorry I’m an asshole. I used to be good at this woman thing, but it’s been a long time. Still trying to get back in the saddle.”
Was she blushing? “We’re even, then. I’ll stop misleading you and you’ll stop being an asshole.”
He rubbed her fingers. “Deal.”
“So here’s what I’m thinking.”
“Yeah?”
She stretched. “I’m going to break up with Mitch.”
“Which Mitch?” He still couldn’t believe he’d been so wrong about, well, everything.
“The Heartbreak Kid Mitch. He went over the line tonight and I don’t want to be with a man who overreacts and treats his friends like that, drunk or not.”
“That’s believable.”
She shot him a sly grin. “After the little show you two put on? It’s very believable.”
Travis nodded. After all, he’d believed it, too.
June went on, “Tomorrow, I’ll call Cindy and cry on her shoulder a little bit.”
“Cindy?”
“The Preacher’s wife, Travis.”
He didn’t know that. “I knew that.”
“We all know the Preacher loves a little gossip. I’ll tell Cindy I’m going home for the next two weeks, and everyone will know it’s over by the time I show up in Rapid City.” She nodded to herself. “That way, I can sic the Preacher on Mitch, give him a chance to redeem himself for being a jerk—in public, anyway.”
“Then what?”
“You come home with me tomorrow after we pick up Jeff. We spend the week on the rez until you drive up for True West. I get a ride with my cousin, no one suspects a thing. We head for Denver, and you can decide what you want to do from there.”
“Me?”
“You. Look. It’s one thing to say my boss is intimidating or that my mother is a recovering alcoholic. It’s another to actually meet them. And that’s not including Joseph’s wife or son, or the rest of my family, or the rest of the tribe.”
“You think I’d bail?” Maybe he’d earned that. But that was because Mitch was someone he thought he knew. He didn’t have a whole lot of preconceived notions about her family. How bad could it be?
“It can be a lot. But it’s just like Jeff. At first glance, he seems like a— What did you call him? A hellhound?”
“Yeah. But he was trying to attack me.”
“I know. But that’s how my family and tribe are. If you can just get used to them, they’re not so weird. That’s something you have to decide for yourself. I don’t want to force you.”
He thought about it. The evil, Barb-like voice that had whispered that she was using him as the next rung in her ladder was quiet now. When he stripped the drama, the interruptions and the other bull riders out of the equation, it didn’t feel like she was using him. It felt like she was trusting him. He liked that feeling.
“June.” When she turned her face toward him, he leaned forward and kissed her. “I’d like to meet your family. I promise not to overreact.”
“That’s good.” She ran her hand down his beard. “They’d like to meet you, too.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
THEY HAD LEFT the highway a long time ago. He’d lost track of when because he was far too fascinated with how June had settled into the driver’s seat of his truck and made it her own. She looked good, one hand slowly twisting a strand of hair as she leaned against the door so she could keep an eye on him keeping an eye on her. The conversation had meandered from his humiliation of a desk job to her embarrassment at being “documented” by her professors, from hospice to prison visits. They’d long since fallen silent. That was okay. They didn’t need words.
He knew he should be preparing for what lay ahead, just like he would prepare for a bull ride, but he couldn’t keep his mind on anything but the best two days of his life. With no bulls and no bull riders around, everything complicated had gotten a whole lot easier. Just him and June, making love in the morning before they hit the road back to South Dakota. They took turns driving and stopped often so he could stay stretched out and Jeff could run. They ate at out-of-the-way diners and parked the camper early.
It was the sort of thing a guy could get used to real quick.
Still, when the truck left behind the crumbling blacktop for the gravel, he realized this was just the calm and they were getting close to the storm
. “Where are we?”
Jeff was pawing at the back window. “The edge of the rez. Also known as the America’s Real Pride Ranch.” She smiled at him, but he could see that she was tensing up, too. Both her hands were gripping the wheel with more force than the road demanded. “You remember everything?”
“Joseph is the big boss. He’s married to Leslie and their son is Robin—right?”
“Impressive. Anything else?”
“Your mom is shy, your cousin—what’s his name?”
“Ian.”
“Ian isn’t and I shouldn’t ask about Mort.”
“Probably not the best idea,” she agreed with an encouraging smile.
“We’re staying at Joseph’s house because, um— Shoot. I forgot.”
“Because the ranch house has a real guest room with a real bed. If we stayed with Mom, we’d have to sleep on the floor. She’d be embarrassed.”
“Embarrassing your mom is not on my to-do list today.”
“Good, babe. You’ll do fine.”
Lord, he hoped so, but as the truck broke through the trees, and she parked in front of a massive house that was dwarfed only by the enormous barn behind it, he suddenly realized that this was a whole lot more than eight seconds. He had to do this for the next three days—and then the four after that.
June didn’t seem to share his momentary panic. Instead, she took a deep breath, a serene smile on her face. If she was calm and happy to be here, then he could at least fake it, right? “You ready?”
No. The inner peace that he’d had during the last hour in the truck evaporated into nothing real quick. “Sure.”
“You’re cute when you’re lying.” She leaned over to run her fingers down the edge of his beard. Even though he was a little nervous, she managed to get the temperature of his blood moving up a notch. “Don’t be nervous. Joseph can sense fear.” Then she was out of the car and bounding up onto the porch, Jeff trotting at her heels the whole way.
A kid busted out of the house, arms and legs flailing as he threw himself off the porch. “Is this him? Is this the Travis Younkin?”
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