Rock Star Cowboys (McLendon Family 3)

by D. L. Roan

  She rolled out of bed and walked straight to the washer, throwing in Pa’s dirty clothes first. She always washed his on Saturdays so he was sure not to have a reason to stay home on Sundays and make her miss her afternoon at the creek.

  When her brother told her he wasn’t going into town, but heading down to Billings to pick up a load of fresh produce from the State Agricultural Fair instead, Breezy had bartered with everything she had to go with him.

  “Ford, please!” she begged when nothing else seemed to work. She didn’t have a lot to bargain with. There was no money, except the grocery money she’d snuck out of Pa’s pocket when he finally staggered in the night before and passed out. She already did all the cooking and cleaning. Too young to get a job, she’d offered once to babysit for the McLendons, but her pa had said no.

  “I’ll do whatever you want, just take me with you!”

  “Dammit, Breezy, all right! Shut the hell up already!” Ford snatched his ball cap from the kitchen counter and lit out the front door. She didn’t stop to think or grab anything to take with her, or even take a last minute tinkle before they left for the two hour trip. She was hot on Ford’s heels as he marched in a huff to his truck. “And don’t pull a disappearing act when we get down there.”

  “I won’t. I swear,” she promised, parting ways from her brother only far enough to hurry to the other side of Ford’s truck and hop into the passenger seat.

  “I mean it, Breezy,” her brother warned. “No going off by yourself to pet the farm animals or watch the pig races. I’m working. We drive up to Billings, load the truck and we leave. I’m not going to spend half the day looking for you. Got it?”

  “Got it.” The last thing on her mind was petting goats and watching pigs. She was a giddy wreck. Connor and Carson’s band was playing at the music festival there! Her usual excitement over seeing one or both of the McLendon twins had been stoked to an all new high. She-Was-Going-To-See-Them-Sing!

  As luck would have it, on that particular day, the only clean clothes she had left to wear were her best blue jeans and tank top. Her tennis shoes were a bit grungy and in dire need of new laces, but in a crazy twist of fate, her normally unruly hair looked amazing after she washed it in the heavy rainstorm they’d gotten the day before.

  “How long will it take you to load the truck?” She knew from her time at the creek the week before that Carson and Connor would be on stage at noon sharp. Breezy wanted more than anything to stay and watch the entire concert, but she’d settle for whatever few minutes she could get to hear them sing.

  “Don’t even think about it,” Ford snapped. The rusty driver’s door creaked as he shouldered it back open. “You’re not going. Not if you’re planning on—”

  “I won’t!” Breezy promised once more. “I wouldn’t cause you any trouble, Ford. You know I wouldn’t.”

  Ford gave her a dubious glare and closed the door again. “I don’t have time to be chasing you all over the fairgrounds,” he said as he turned the key in the ignition and the truck lurched forward. “As soon as I get back with this load, I have to unload and rotate the deli shipment before the store closes. You ain’t there when I get this truck loaded, you’re going to be hitching a ride back to Grassland. I ain’t waiting for you.”

  “I’ll be there,” Breezy assured him. She hadn’t lied. She wouldn’t cause Ford any trouble and her butt would be plastered to the passenger seat when the truck was loaded and he was ready to go, but that didn’t mean she was going to miss seeing the McLendon twins perform.

  They passed the Billings city limit sign at exactly eleven-twenty. She chewed her nails, her eyes darting back and forth between the road and the clock on the dash as Ford navigated the busy traffic entering and exiting the fairgrounds. Thirty minutes later Ford backed the truck up to the loading dock at the Agriplex’s farmer’s market. She had the door open and her feet pounding the pavement before her brother cut the engine.

  “Breezy, goddammit! Get back here!” She ignored her brother’s furious curse. He’d told her she had fifteen minutes. Connor and Carson would be on stage in five. She had just enough time to get to the bleachers on the other side of the fairgrounds, listen to them sing at least one song and get back before he was ready to go.

  Her long ponytail swished across her back as she pushed through the crowd of people ambling along the main thoroughfares. Cutting through lines of thrill seekers waiting to ride any number of death-defying rides, and throngs of gamers all vying for the biggest prizes, Breezy was breathless when she reached the packed tower of metal bleachers. Two men wearing black t-shirts with the word Security written in big white letters across the front stopped her from entering one of the side gates.

  “Whoa-whoa-whoa, girl. Where’s your music pass?”

  “Music pass?” She didn’t have a music pass. She only had three minutes and a really angry brother.

  “You have to buy a ticket to watch the bands.” The first few notes of the National Anthem echoed from the stage she still couldn’t see as the crowd roared to their feet. “Up at the front gate!” the man yelled over the sound of a loud guitar she’d recognize anywhere. She was missing it!

  She tore away from the guards and sprinted along the fence that ran behind the bleachers. Darting in between two kids following their parents, she camouflaged herself with the crush of last minute concert goers rushing into the arena, tucking her chin and staring at her feet until they reached the gate. She held her breath until the crowd pushed her through the break in the bleachers and spit her out on the inside of the arena.

  She looked up and her stomach leapt into her throat. Green eyes wide as saucers, she took in the ginormous stage—a hundred feet tall—and all the lights that flashed around it. Even in the midday sun, they shone as bright as could be down onto the band. What seemed like hundreds, maybe even a thousand people packed the semi-circle around the front of the stage. Right in the middle of it all, stood Carson and Connor in all their masculine, musical glory.

  She stared slack-jawed as Carson bent over his guitar and ground out a solo verse of his electric version of the National Anthem. A few feet to his left, Connor stood in skin-tight blue jeans. His black Stetson sat at an angle on his head, revealing short locks of his golden hair at his temples. His plaid shirt hung partially open at the top, showing the deep groove between his chest muscles that had formed there sometime in the last year.

  Connor hugged the microphone stand and let out a slow and low note that went straight to her soul, breathing new life into words she’d heard at least a thousand times before. Lyrics she knew like the back of her hand, but wouldn’t have been able to sing like that had the good Lord himself sent angels down to pluck them from her mouth.

  She’d seen them perform at their high school football games and even snuck across their field and listened to them practice in their barn a few nights. This was different from all those times.

  Breezy tore her gaze from the stage long enough to take in the enormity of the crowd. People from all over Montana were there, standing and singing and cheering. Cheering for them!

  A sudden sense of pride swelled in her chest. It was a senseless emotion, because they weren’t anywhere near close to belonging to her, but in that moment she felt as though they did. All those people, all the men and women and kids, whistling and clapping as they finished the song, were seeing what she’d always seen.

  Unexpected tears prickled at her eyes as she stared back at the stage. The song ended and Breezy recognized the subtle signals the brothers sent each other to start the next one. A hand clamped around her arm and she blinked up at the security officer who’d stopped her at the side gate.

  Oh no! She twisted her skinny arm from his punishing grip and bolted from the arena. The dirt lanes between the rides weren’t as congested as they’d been before the music started. Everyone was in the arena watching Connor and Carson. Everyone except her.

  Weaving and darting through the thinned crowd, she found her way back t
o her brother’s loaded truck. Ford was leaning against the front fender with one foot propped on the tire and his arms crossed over his chest, waiting with an annoyed scowl on his face.

  “Twenty more seconds and I was leaving your butt here,” Ford scolded, unfolding his arms as he pushed away from the truck. She sprinted to the passenger side and flung open the door as her brother started the ten-year-old engine.

  “Yeah, well, I made it didn’t I?” she pointed out with cynical delight.

  She wished the rest of her day had been as lucky. Pa had been home when she and Ford pulled into the yard after their trip. She could tell he was up to no good when she saw his ominous glare as he sat on an overturned bucket beside the front stoop.

  Most of the time, when Pa was drunk, he would stumble into his room and collapse onto the bed, sounds of his snores bouncing off the bare walls of their trailer seconds later. Sometimes he would only make it as far as the sofa. It never mattered to her as long as he didn’t come into her room.

  Once in a while, when he drank whiskey, he’d get a spiteful, mean drunk on and belt Ford around. He’d never touched her, but he seemed to have it in for Ford lately. The last time it happened she’d hidden in her room. He and Ford had gone at it pretty hard that night. The trailer shook with each blow landed. She’d covered her ears, but the thudding sounds of bodies crashing into walls and furniture skidding across the broken laminate floors was something she could still hear when she closed her eyes and thought of that night.

  Pa had been gone the next morning when Ford came out of his room with a black eye and a nasty cut on his cheek. Breezy asked him what happened, but he’d ignored her. Feeling guilty that she hadn’t tried to help him, she offered him a makeshift icepack she’d made from a handful of snow and a leftover bread bag she’d pulled from the trash. Ford had brushed her off with a rumbled snarl and stormed out the door, not coming home until three days later.

  Their pa had that same whiskey look in his eyes now as he’d had that night—mean and full of hateful intentions.

  “Stay in the truck,” Ford instructed her before he shouldered his door open and slid out. Breezy pulled the handle on her door and shoved it open. She wasn’t about to let him stand up to Pa all alone again. “Breezy, I said stay in the truck!”

  “About time you got your lazy ass out here, girl.”

  Breezy froze where she stood, not paying any heed to the muddy water seeping into her shoe from the pothole she’d stepped in. Pa pushed to his feet. He pinned her with an unfocused stare, taking a single step forward before he staggered backwards two. “Someone needs to teach you some respect.”

  “You’re drunk,” Ford spat. “Go sleep it off.”

  Pa’s lip curled in disgust at Ford’s order, but he otherwise ignored him. She flinched when he raised his arm and pointed at her with the gnarly switch in his hand. “She left my clothes on the line. Rained all damn day. Now they’re all covered in mud!”

  Her veins flooded with the kind of adrenaline that came with sudden realization. She looked over to the wet and muddy clothes hanging haphazardly from the clothesline. Some lay on the ground a few feet away.

  She’d been so excited about going to Billings that she’d forgotten all about the laundry she’d left washed and already hung on the line. This was all her fault. She couldn’t let Ford get into a fight with Pa over something she’d done.

  A wet belch bubbled from their pa’s chest. The fist without the switch was closed around a half-empty whiskey bottle and came to rest over his chest as he turned his mean stare towards Ford.

  She saw something flash in his eyes, something she’d never seen before. He was pushing Ford for a fight, daring her brother to challenge him.

  “Ford, let’s just leave.” She pleaded with her brother. It was the only way she could see to keep him and their pa from hitting each other. “We can come back later, after he passes out.”

  “You let that girlfriend of yours boss you around like your smart-ass little sister does?” Cruel laughter, loud and vile, followed Pa’s taunting words. “Oh, that’s right. She left you for them McLendon boys.”

  Ford’s nostrils flared, his chest heaving with his efforts to breathe. Breezy’s eyes were drawn to the slight movement in Ford’s hands, his fingers curling into fists.

  Pa jerked and pumped his hips in a lewd gesture, giving Ford a sickening wink. “She didn’t have the right equipment, did she? Couldn’t give it up the ass the way you like it.”

  “Ford, please. Let’s just go!”

  “You leave here, boy, you better not come back,” Pa threatened.

  Breezy pulled at his arm, but Ford didn’t budge.

  “I’m not leaving,” her brother said. With a force so strong it left her teetering on her heels, he jerked his arm from her grasp and lunged.

  She would never forget the look on Pa’s face as Ford charged at him. Everything happened in slow motion. Every second stretched into minutes, into hours. The whites of Pa’s eyes shined bright with shock as Ford drove his shoulder into the older man’s stomach and hefted him off the ground, slamming him hard against the side of the trailer.

  Breezy stood frozen as she watched the scene unfold. Crunching sounds of breaking bones and deep agonizing groans did nothing to break her shocked trance. It took the coppery scent of blood to snap the spell she was under.

  “Ford! Stop!” Their pa lay on the ground, bloody and beaten and knocked out cold, but Ford kept swinging. He pummeled the old man’s face and head. Breezy could already see swelling begin to misshape his hardened features. Ford was going to kill him if she didn’t stop this.

  “Ford, please!” She darted into the fray and grabbed the back of her brother’s shirt, giving it a stiff yank. The threadbare material gave way, ripping apart in her hands and sending her flailing backwards into the muddy gravel.

  Jagged rocks sliced into her knees and palms as she crawled her way back to her brother, this time leaping onto his back. She ducked his jabbing elbows and dug in her heels, locking her arms around his middle and pulling with all her might until they rolled off their pa and onto the wet ground.

  “Get off me!” Ford struggled against her like a madman, elbowing and kicking his way free of her grip.

  “Ford, please!” He pushed her away and lunged for him again, but she grabbed his arm and pulled him back. “You’re killing him!”

  Her last words seemed to break through the dense fog of rage that saturated her brother’s awareness. Breathless, he sank to his haunches beside her. His hands shook as he held them out in front of him, flipping them over and back again. Smeared blood and scrapes covered every inch. She watched his face twist with regret and shame and he fell forward onto his knees, an anguished cry ripping its way from the depths of his soul.

  “Oh Ford! No!” She scrambled over to her brother’s side and wrapped herself around him. His arms banded around her waist, crushing her with a desperate strength that nearly robbed her of breath. He held onto her as if she were his only safe place in the world, sobbing with cries that shook her to the core. “Don’t cry, Ford. It’s going to be okay.”

  Breezy didn’t cry that day as she looked around at all the mud and blood and took in the rusty wasteland of broken dreams that surrounded them. As she held her brother’s head in her lap, running her fingers through his sweat-sodden hair and listening to his inconsolable sobs, she thought of her sunny days at the McLendon’s creek and the two rock star cowboys who lived in that world. That’s what the McLendon’s ranch was like, she decided, a special world where love and happiness grew amongst the wildflowers that blanketed the McLendon land. No bad things could ever touch her there.

  Chapter Three

  Over the next week, Breezy was careful to steer clear of their pa. He had a broken nose, two black eyes, two cracked ribs, one broken tooth, and had been so drunk he’d probably felt none of it.

  Two days in the hospital hadn’t done much to dry him out, but she could no longer see the whiskey mean in
his eyes. He’d barely made eye contact with her at all since one of her uncle’s farm hands had brought him home. He hadn’t said a word or even looked at her crosswise. He seemed almost dead inside. A small part of her felt sorry for him, but only a little. He’d all but begged Ford for a fight, saying all those terrible things he had no right to say.

  Ford was surprised when Pa didn’t press charges. Breezy wasn’t shocked at all. That would mean Ford would lose his jobs and then Pa would lose the roof over his head. Their momma may have been Uncle Dirk’s sister-in-law, but the one thing the Grunions hated more than a McLendon, was a Youngblood. They certainly wouldn’t let one live rent-free on their land. If Ford went to jail, she and Pa would be out on their butts before nightfall.

  Ford had told their pa that he wasn’t going to leave, but he had. He’d stayed with her while Pa was in the hospital, but the day he came home, Ford packed a bag before he left for work. Three days had passed since then. Breezy wasn’t worried. He’d left before. He just needed a few days to cool off and he’d be back.

  Her heart felt heavy in her chest as she navigated the narrow path through the woods. It was only Friday so she knew the McLendons wouldn’t be at the creek, but the negative energy inside the trailer had her itching for an excuse to escape for a little while. She’d hoped putting some distance between her and Pa would dispel some of the malaise that still hung in the air between them.

  It had rained again that morning, leaving behind the familiar rich scent that could only come from mixing the earth with the heavens. A few birds chirped and fluttered from limb to limb high up in the canopy that covered the forest floor.

  Twilight was approaching and she could pick out the faint twinkle of the night’s first fireflies. She paused to study one as it floated effortlessly above the ground in front of her. That’s when she heard it, the low rumbling of a familiar masculine voice.