Roses and Rodeo (Rough and Ready)

by Cheyenne McCray

  “How was your trip?” he asked before she could respond.

  “Crowded. Full flight.” She walked into the kitchen the phone pressed to her ear. “Other than that it was fine. How was yours?”

  “Let’s see…” He sounded like he was counting things off on his fingers as he spoke in his low drawl. “First there was the year-old twins with their mother in the seats beside me and the poor kids had twin ear infections and let everyone know about it. Then there was the woman’s five-year-old son sitting behind me kicking my seat and singing “I’m sexy and I know it,” while his two older brothers fought the entire trip. All in all it just reminded me of my brothers and me when we were young.”

  The way he said it in an amused tone made the parts about the kids behind him sound comical and she found herself laughing. “I have to say your trip was far more eventful than mine.”

  “Are you home?” he asked.

  “Just walked through the door about five minutes ago.” She headed into the kitchen and grabbed a bottled water out of the fridge. She held the phone between her shoulder and her ear as she cracked open the bottle then held the phone in her hand again. “I’m ready for a little relaxation but I have laundry to take care of and the house needs a good cleaning.”

  “Just managed to get out of Sky Harbor,” he said, “I’m headed north now. Or I’m trying to. This Phoenix traffic sucks sometimes.”

  “It does.” She took a long drink of water then set it on the countertop. She wandered out of the kitchen and plopped onto the couch beside her backpack that contained her laptop, causing it to bounce and almost fall onto the floor. She caught it before it fell and pushed it back to safety. “When’s the next competition?”

  “So you are interested.” Satisfaction was in his voice.

  “Just being polite,” she said but smiled.

  “Since you asked, the next one I’m headed to is in Montana next weekend,” he said. “Then in two weeks the Cowboy Capital competition in Prescott, my stomping grounds.” He paused. “I can send you tickets to the Prescott event.”

  “You really think I’m going to hop on a plane to go see you get beat up by a bull?”

  “Yeah.” His voice was low and sexy and her belly flip-flopped. “I’d like you to be there.”

  She put her feet up on the coffee table and wiggled her toes. “I’ll think about it.”

  “What’s your email address?” he asked.

  She thought a moment. She liked talking with him, liked the way he made her feel. “If I give it to you,” she said, “it doesn’t mean I’m saying yes to dating you or going to Prescott.”

  “You bet,” he said but she heard a touch of triumph.

  She took a deep breath then gave him her email address.

  “Got it.” There was a grin in his voice. “I have a great memory for numbers and this one I won’t be forgetting.”

  She almost groaned as she thought about what she was doing. She was letting Creed in. But if she was honest with herself, she liked it. She liked talking with him, had enjoyed being around him.

  They stayed on the phone while he drove to his family’s ranch. He was easy to talk with and somehow she ended up talking with him the entire two hours it took him to get from Phoenix to Kirkland. Spending that time with him on the phone made her feel as if she’d known him far longer than less than twenty-four hours.

  “Pullin’ up to my folks place,” he said. “I enjoyed talking with you, Danica.”

  “I kinda did, too.” She realized her ear was sore from talking so long and shifted the phone to the other side. “That still doesn’t mean I’m going to Prescott.”

  He laughed. “We’ll see.”

  When she disconnected the call she shook her head. When Kelsey found out about this she definitely would not hear the end of it.

  Something genuine and nice about Creed drew Danica and she knew she was about to get herself in trouble. Not only was he a man who faced danger for fun, but he also was on the circuit and on the road all of the time.

  “Not a good recipe for a relationship,” she said aloud and shook her head but she was still smiling when she set to work cleaning her townhouse.

  She was just about finished cleaning when her phone rang again. She dug it out of her pocket and looked at the caller ID screen. Barry Hobbes.

  With a mental groan she connected the call. “Hi, Barry.”

  “Hi, babe.”

  A flash of irritation went through her. I’m not your babe. “What’s up?” she asked.

  He sounded put out as he said, “Why didn’t you respond to my last text messages?”

  “My phone died and I forgot the charger. I wasn’t able to get a charge until I got home.” Okay, so it was a lie, but a good one. “What’s going on?”

  “I have two tickets to join Ambassador Baxter in his box at the ballet Friday night,” he said. “I’d like you to go.”

  When she’d first started dating Barry, she hadn’t really paid much attention to how he threw around names of those he considered important and influential, and flaunted his connections, but it had become increasingly annoying.

  “Sorry.” She mentally ran through excuses. Bathing a cat would be more fun than going with Barry to the ballet. “I’ve got something going on Friday night. In fact, the whole weekend is packed.”

  “What do you have going on?” he asked in a tone that told her he didn’t believe her.

  Clip my toenails, floss my teeth, and clean the toilets, any number of things that would be more exciting than spending time with you.

  “A big project for work is going to take some overtime.” Stretching the truth was better than spending another minute with Barry since he couldn’t seem to take a hint. She added, “Missing a couple of days at work has put me behind.”

  “What were you doing in Las Vegas this weekend?” he asked, sounding perturbed.

  With a sigh, Danica said, “I went to a bull riding event with Kelsey.”

  “Why the hell would you want to go to a rodeo?” He sounded condescending as he spoke and she wondered why she had ever thought he was a great guy. “I thought you left all that behind when you moved here.”

  Danica frowned. “No, I didn’t, Barry. I may be in a large city, but I’ll always be a country girl at heart.” She pushed her hand through her hair. “Got to go.” She glanced into the kitchen at the cold stove. “My dinner is almost finished.”

  “I’ll give you a call this weekend,” he said. “We can do something next week.” He made it sound that it was a foregone conclusion that she would go out with him.

  She gritted her teeth then took a deep breath before saying, “Goodbye, Barry.”

  In an irritated tone he said goodbye and disconnected the call.

  This time she did groan aloud. She’d told him not long ago that she wanted to be friends and that was it, but he kept calling. In Barry’s privileged life, he wasn’t accustomed to rejection and he wouldn’t leave her alone until she got it through his thick skull that she wasn’t interested in him anymore.

  Well, he was going to have to get used to her saying “no.” She broke up with him once. It looked like she’d have to sit down and have another talk with him sometime soon and do it again. She didn’t want to deal with that right now and she needed to do it in person.

  She went toward the kitchen to prepare dinner. Her thoughts turned back to Creed and she found herself smiling again, which was utterly crazy. She wasn’t going to date the man.

  But then, instead of going to the kitchen, she found herself stopping then digging her laptop out of her backpack and booting it up. Once she had connected to the Internet, she went to Google and typed in Creed McBride. Immediately a screen came up with the first page entirely filled with links to information about him. The top link was to his personal website.

  She clicked on the link, which greeted her with a photograph of Creed on the back of a bull. Creed gripped the bull rope while holding his free hand up as the bull kicked high wit
h its rear legs. Creed’s masculine grace and the ferocity of the bull were captured in the snapshot that was a fraction of a second in the life of a bull rider.

  The links included a page of upcoming competitions he would be going to; his biography; and a page filled with photographs. She perused his bio and learned about the rodeo championships he had won as a teenager, his experience, and the type of training he undertook that prepared him for his career in bull riding.

  His bio referenced his idol, seven-time world champion, Ty Murray, one of the greatest champions, if not the greatest, known to the sport of bull riding. Creed had studied Ty’s career and emulated him as he grew up. Creed credited his idol with being the inspiration for his success.

  The article mentioned some of his injuries that had either sidelined him or he had pushed past and continued to excel. Broken ribs, punctured lung, broken jaw… She winced as she read what she believed was not a full list of his injuries and she shook her head.

  She clicked on the photographs link and looked over the pictures of Creed riding bulls, and accepting awards.

  After she perused his website, she pulled up links to other sites and frowned as she saw him in photographs with different women and read an article in People magazine about the hottest cowboys and those who were considered to be the biggest womanizers, cowboys who liked to play the field, and she frowned. Creed was high on the list of cowboys who love ’em and leave ’em.

  “So Creed is a womanizer.” She frowned. “Not my kind of man.”

  She closed the lid to her laptop feeling somehow disheartened. Why should she feel that way when she hadn’t planned on seeing him again?

  With a sigh of frustration, she set her laptop on the coffee table and headed toward the kitchen to fix get herself something to eat and shove aside any thoughts of Creed McBride that might try to creep back in.

  Chapter 4

  A rainbow of color shimmered on the wall from the refracted light that shone through a crystal figurine of a stallion sitting on an end table. Danica had collected horse figurines since she was a little girl and she had likenesses of horses in porcelain, wood, glass, and crystal. Most of them had been gifts.

  She held her glass of wine as she stared at the rainbow that was starting to fade as the sun slowly moved in the sky and the light didn’t hit the crystal in the same way. She settled on her couch, set her wine glass on an end table, and opened her laptop.

  It had been a long but productive day at work and she was tired, but she wanted to check her email. Yesterday’s conversation with Creed and her subsequent research weighed on her mind and she tried to push it away. Why it had disappointed her so much to read that he was a womanizer, she wasn’t sure.

  Several emails greeted her including two SPAM messages, an email from her brother Zane’s wife, Jessie, and another from the youngest brother, Dillon, along with a note from Kelsey. And then her gaze rested on an email address that wasn’t familiar but she knew who it was at once: cowboybullrider99@gmail.com.

  Creed.

  She closed her eyes for a moment against the sudden excitement that filled her belly. She should just delete the mail without even reading it.

  Instead, she opened her eyes and clicked on the email. When she opened it she saw that there was an attachment along with a note from Creed.

  Danica,

  I enjoyed our conversation at the airport and on the phone. I hope you’ll consider going to the Prescott bull riding event coming up. I’ve attached a ticket to this email. I’d sure like to see you again and show you around my hometown.

  Creed

  Danica sighed. Just getting an email from him made her heart flutter and something to stir inside her. She shook her head to try to shake off the feelings, but it wasn’t easy. She was attracted to a man who’d left a trail of broken hearts behind him, as if the bulls he rode had stomped on them.

  Odd thoughts crossed her mind. Would her brothers approve of Creed? They just about ran off every boy she’d ever dated while she was growing up, and most of the men she’d dated as an adult didn’t stick around long. It wasn’t easy being the sister of four older and very overprotective brothers.

  What she needed was a real man who wouldn’t be intimidated by the four big men. Hell, she wouldn’t settle for less.

  Could Creed be that man?

  She groaned and thought about banging her head against her keyboard.

  Her phone rang and vibrated in her pocket. She dug it out and looked at the caller ID and her pulse beat a little faster when she saw that it was Creed.

  “Speak of the devil,” she murmured as she stared at the screen. She could send him straight to voice mail… “Chicken,” she muttered to herself then pressed the ON button and brought the phone to her ear.

  She took a deep breath. “Hi, Creed.”

  His voice was low with a husky quality to it. “Hey there.”

  “I got your email.” She put a positive note in her words. “Thank you for the ticket.”

  “You’re coming,” he said, his tone filled with certainty.

  “I didn’t say that.” Her hair slid over her shoulders as she shook her head. “I just said thank you.”

  “I want to see you again.” He had such a command to his words that it made her shiver.

  “I’m not into womanizers, Creed.” She didn’t want to mess around with either one of their hearts.

  “Who says I’m a womanizer?” He sounded almost amused.

  “People magazine for starters.”

  “You can’t believe everything you read.” He laughed. “So you’ve been looking me up on the internet.”

  The fact that he know knew she’d been interested enough in him to do some research made her cheeks warm a little. “You can’t tell me there’s not some truth in what the magazine reported.”

  “I’ll be honest with you, Danica.” His tone became more serious. “I’ve dated a lot of women but I wouldn’t call myself a womanizer. I don’t go out on a woman I’m dating. I just haven’t found the right woman to settle down with. I want to spend the rest of my life with a woman who fits me. A woman who’s my other half. So far I haven’t come close to finding her.”

  “I guess that’s fair enough.” She twirled a lock of hair around her finger. “You actually sound like a romantic.”

  “You could say at heart I am.” He still sounded serious. “I never set out to hurt anyone. I figure you can’t find the right woman if you don’t look hard enough.”

  “So you’re telling me that you don’t date women for just a good time?”

  He gave a soft laugh. “I’ve dated women who want an equally good time, women who make it clear that’s all they’re looking for. Is there a crime in that?”

  “I suppose not.” She’d done the same thing. She’d dated men for fun, and she’d left a few broken hearts behind herself.

  “Then say you’ll come to Prescott in August.” He lowered his tone. “I want you to be there.”

  “I’ll think about it.” She sank back into the cushions on her couch and crossed her legs at her ankles. “But no promises.”

  “I’ll take what I can get,” he said. “Maybes are yesses in disguise.”

  She tilted her head back on the couch. “So what’s a no?”

  He gave a low laugh. “A no is a yes in the making.”

  She smiled. “They should call you Cowboy Casanova.”

  “Nah,” he said. “That would mean I play the field, or go out on a woman I’m dating, and that’s as far from the truth as you can get.”

  “Okay, okay.” She shook her head but still laughed. “I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt when it comes to the womanizer thing. This time. Gossip magazines do tend to stretch the truth at times.”

  “Glad you’re seeing it my way,” he said then added, “The event I’m riding in next weekend is being televised if you’d like to watch.”

  “Are you kidding me?” She gave a huff. “It’s bad enough seeing cowboys getting trampled right
in front of you live. Watching close-ups of it isn’t my idea of fun.”

  “If you change your mind it’s on the sports network Saturday evening,” he said. Danica heard a young woman’s voice in the background but not what she was saying. “I’ve got to go.” He suddenly sounded distracted. “I’ll call you soon, Danica.”

  She found she was disappointed that their conversation was ending and mentally rolled her eyes at herself. “All right,” she said.

  His voice softened. “Have a good night.”

  “You, too,” she said before he disconnected the call.

  She looked up at the ceiling. What was she getting herself into?

  * * * * *

  Danica paced her living room and chewed her fingernail then looked once again at the text message from Creed on her phone.

  Wish you could be here tonight. I’ll be thinking of you.

  She shook her head. It had been a week since she’d first met Creed and he was about to ride a bull on national TV. He wanted her to watch and she was actually considering it.

  Okay, this was silly. She stopped pacing and grabbed the remote control off of the coffee table and clicked on the TV. She changed the channel to the sports network and saw that the bull riding event was just getting started.

  She sat on the edge of the couch, remote control in hand as she listened to the announcers and saw the first cowboy settling in to ride. It was a matchup of the fifteen best bulls and fifteen best bull riders.

  The announcers talked about the bulls and how these were scored as the toughest, rankest animals in the sport.

  As the announcers turned their attention to the rider and the bull he was on, they named the rider and the bull and talked about the match-up.

  The camera stayed on the first rider as he tightened the bull rope then secured his riding hand.

  Other cowboys stood on the bars of the chute, giving advice and helping the rider get ready. The rider gave a signal and then another cowboy on the other side of the gate yanked the gate open.