"Twenty-three," Taggart told her later.
But right then she couldn't see him behind the hats. She could hear his voice, though, easy and confident over the sounds of boots on wooden flooring and the clink and rattle of the rowels of twenty-odd pairs of spurs. It was a sound Felicity recognized all too well.
She'd have looked around for Becky, but she knew where the little girl was—right beside her. She had been since Felicity had arrived ten minutes before.
"What are they doing?" she asked as she watched them show Taggart their spurs.
"He's seeing if they're too sharp," Becky said. "You don't want to hurt the bull. You just want 'em to grip with. And he's gotta make sure they got the right kind of spurs, too."
"Right kind?" A spur wasn't simply a spur?
"They got big dull rowels on 'em, see?" Becky pointed to a pair that one young cowboy had in his hand. "Not little ones like bareback riders use. Bronc riders use little ones, too. An' the rowels spin free on theirs, too, 'cause they gotta mark their horses out."
There was obviously a whole specialized vocabulary here that Felicity didn't have a clue about.
"I see," she said, and was determined she was going to before the day was out.
She shouldn't really be spending a whole day on one parent. She'd spent an hour with Lonnie Gilliam's dad in the hardware store. She'd spent another with Sylvie Sorensen's mom, who cut hair. She'd spent at most four hours with Damon Kerrigan's parents, who were wilderness outfitters, watching them prepare for a week-long expedition, taping them packing gear, buying food, going over safety regulations, tying flies and discussing topographical maps.
Surely she'd get enough of Taggart Jones on tape in an hour or two to satisfy the needs of the classroom documentary. Of course she would. But she wouldn't satisfy herself.
Besides, it was Saturday. Her day off. She could do what she liked—even if it happened to be watching one of her student's fathers teach cowboys how to ride a bull.
There were plenty of chairs, but no desks in the classroom. There was also a large-screen television and a barrel sort of contraption braced by two long poles and upholstered with foam padding and a carpet remnant. The poles rested on the ends of a pair of tables. Felicity looked at it warily. It was clearly a nonmechanical surrogate bull.
This was how he taught bull riding? She took a seat at the back of the room and waited until the cowboys had finished milling, the spurs had all been checked, and things were starting to settle down. When the men sat down, she glimpsed Taggart in the corner of the room.
He was examining a braided rope one of the cowboys had handed him. He said something, and in reply the man lifted his left hand. Taggart shook his head. The cowboy grimaced, then shrugged.
"What's the matter?" Felicity asked Becky, needing an interpreter already.
"He musta had a right-handed bull rope," Becky said matter-of-factly. "An' he rides left-handed."
Felicity stared at her, nonplussed. She'd heard of cowboys telling tall tales. But, "a right-handed bull rope"?
She heard a laugh behind her and turned to see Noah. "When you grip the rope, you want the braid working away from the way your hand will turn so it will flex, but not give, see?" He borrowed a rope from one of the cowboys standing nearby and demonstrated. "It's easier not to get hung up, and it gives you better traction and grip."
Felicity looked skeptical, but she took the rope when he handed it to her, then let him wrap it around her fingers the way she would hold it if she were on the back of a bull.
"Turn your hand," Noah said. She did. It slipped. "Now the other." He wrapped it the same way. "Turn," he commanded. She did, and saw at once what he meant. She looked at him with wide eyes.
"Lots of guys ride a bull for the first time at one of the schools. They learn, just like you have, from the ground up."
Felicity figured that most of them would be learning from the bull down before long. She knew she would be! It would have been a treat to simply sit back and watch, but she knew she had to justify her presence, so she got out her video camera.
"Are you teaching today, too?" she asked Noah. He dropped into the chair beside her and stretched his long legs out, crossing his boots at the ankles.
"No. We alternate weeks usually. I shoot the video for Taggart while he works with his guys, and he shoots for me while I work with the bronc riders. When we give schools on the road, though, we usually try to go together at least some of the time. Although lately, with Tess being so far along, Taggart's been going alone and so have I. That way one of us is always home."
"You're good friends." That was abundantly clear.
Noah nodded. "We went down the road together for a lot of years. You know whether you can depend on a guy when you spend that much time with him. Taggart's as good as they come."
There was a quiet certainty in his tone that told Felicity as much as his words about his opinion of the man who was now moving to the front of the room. She picked up the video camera, and, as he began to talk, she began to shoot.
More went into riding a bull than Felicity had ever thought. Taggart didn't simply talk about the care of the equipment—glove, rope, resin, bell, spurs, boots—he showed by his very meticulous preparation that this was serious business. Twenty-three hats nodded at every point he made, everything he said.
Felicity listened intently, which she was sure he was aware of, though he gave no sign. Everyone was aware of her. Taggart had even fielded a few teasing remarks about her presence.
"Gonna get the pretty lady on one of them critters, Taggart?" one brash young cowboy asked.
"Ain't one of those bulls gonna buck her off," laughed another, even more brash.
Taggart's gaze leveled on him with the precision of a battery of guns taking aim. The cowboy flushed and looked quickly away. "Sorry, ma'am," he said to Felicity. "No disrespect intended."
Felicity, who had heard plenty of far more disrespectful things on California beaches, gave him a small nod.
Taggart, point made, nodded, too, then turned his attention to the videos. "Watch these guys. These are guys who do things the way they ought to be done."
Then, with each ride, he stopped the tape and pointed out the correct position. "See here how he's movin' up and forward when the bull does? See the way he's bent into the thrust? And now—" he moved the video forward a few frames "—look at the way he's movin' back to meet the kick."
The hats nodded.
"The mechanics are the same for everybody," he went on. "That's the physics of riding. Gravity and balance and the weight of the body in motion. But style, well, that's different. That depends on each guy personally, his build, height, flexibility, aggressiveness." He grinned. "That's what makes me, me. It's what makes Tuff, Tuff—and Ty, Ty. But the mechanics don't change—and that's what we're gonna be working on here."
He got on the makeshift bull and showed them each move in slow motion. "Build muscle memory," he told them. "Practice. Over and over. Break it down into single tiny movements and work on each one."
Felicity watched, entranced, as he showed them how. She understood exactly what he was telling them about muscle memory. It was what Dirk had trained his fingers to do. He'd played passages over and over, broken pieces down into manageable bits and committed them to the memory of his fingers—exactly the same way Taggart did with bull riding.
"Right, then. Ready to get on and put some of this theory to work?" Taggart asked them at last.
There was a general eager murmur of assent, a scraping and shoving back of chairs, and a jostling toward the door as the hats stampeded toward the bucking chutes. Felicity stood up, too.
Taggart crossed the room and came toward her. "Seen enough?"
She smiled. "Not nearly. I'm fascinated."
He rolled his eyes. But he didn't object when Felicity followed him and Noah and Becky out to the arena. The cowboys had gathered by the chutes. Felicity hadn't taken the time to go up close when she arrived. Now, for the first ti
me, she came within arm's length of a snorting, glaring bull.
It didn't matter that he was on the other side of a metal fence gate. It didn't matter that he was in the chute and she wasn't. She could sense his power, his irritation, his desire to make roadkill out of the cowboy who would settle onto his back.
She stopped where she was.
Noah laughed. "Want to ride?"
"Not on your life." She looked doubtfully at the young men who were clustered around the chutes, wondering at their sanity.
"He's a nice one," Becky told her.
"Nice?"
"We rank them," Noah explained. "He's an easy ride."
He didn't look easy to Felicity. "If you say so."
Becky hopped up and down. "Are you gonna ride, Daddy?"
Felicity looked at Taggart, horrified. She hadn't even thought of that. Now she remembered his black eye and scraped cheek. He'd broken ribs before, Becky had told her. And dislocated his thumb. And got kicked in the knee. And had a groin pull. Some men had died. She knew that, too. She looked at him.
He was looking at her.
"Ah, go on. Ride," Noah said, grinning. "You know you want to."
Still Taggart hesitated.
"We'll pick up the pieces." Noah winked at Becky and Felicity. "Just kidding."
Becky giggled.
Felicity looked at Taggart, her eyes wide and worried.
Taggart looked back. Something passed between them—something Felicity couldn't quite define. Challenge? Determination? Daring? Pride?
Taggart nodded his head. "All right," he said. "I will."
* * *
Five
« ^ »
Taggart never rode bulls in his schools.
It distracted his students from what they were there for even though they thought it was cool. It distracted him. He was there to teach them what to do, not show off. He'd already proved what he needed to prove.
Hadn't he?
Apparently—if the gnawing in his gut and the nibbling at the edges of his concentration were anything to go by—he hadn't. Not quite.
Besides, distraction seemed to be the name of the game where Felicity Albright was concerned. Taggart hadn't been single-mindedly focused on the job at hand since he'd known she was coming to watch.
He'd be moving bulls or putting together his videos or going over his notes, and the next thing he knew he'd be thinking about Felicity's gentle smile or the way she ran her fingers through her hair. His fingers itched to do it, too.
Don't think about it, he told himself. Don't think about her.
It shouldn't have been hard. He was a whiz at mind control, at focus, at seeing only what needed to be seen and doing exactly what he needed to do. If he'd controlled his attention two years ago in Vegas the way he was controlling it around Felicity Albright, he'd have been a cow pie on the Thomas and Mack Arena floor instead of the world champion bull rider of the year.
He had focus, all right. And right now, every bit of it was on her! He'd been aware of her every movement since she opened the door to the classroom that morning. He'd done his damnedest to ignore her, barely letting his gaze light on her when she came in with Becky on her heels like a faithful herd dog.
She didn't matter to him, he assured himself; she didn't have spurs for him to check or a bull rope to look over. She wasn't the issue he needed to concentrate on. Still, he was aware of her; it felt almost as if the very air pressure in the room had altered the moment she'd come in.
He was a professional, for heaven's sake. He was being paid good money to teach twenty-three guys everything he could about bull riding in two short days. If he spent twelve or thirteen hours with them each day he would barely scratch the surface even if he—and they—focused every minute.
Why the hell had he said he'd ride a bull?
Because he was thinking not with his head, but with that gender-specific equipment tucked away in his Wranglers. Damn it.
"C'mon," he said, raising his voice now. "Let's get moving!"
He got a cup of coffee from the urn on the small card table outside the arena. Then, cup in hand, he climbed over the fence and headed toward the chutes where Mace Nichols and Jed McCall, Tuck's uncle, were running in the bulls.
Out of the corner of his eye he could see Felicity sitting at the top of the small set of bleachers he and Noah had built last summer. Becky sat with her. Noah, who was supposed to be on the platform next to the bleachers manning the video camera, was in fact sitting on Felicity's other side, chatting. Taggart watched as she leaned toward Noah and nodded at some comment he made. He said something else and they both laughed, then looked in his direction. Irritated, Taggart jerked his gaze away.
He climbed up on the chute gate and began talking to his students. Most had ridden bulls before; some were just there for a refresher course—a "tune-up," Noah called it. But there were three complete rookies, guys who hadn't so much as touched a bull.
"Gotta start somewhere," Taggart said, giving them a grin of encouragement. They all looked white-faced with apprehension.
He went over the fundamentals slowly and carefully. How to resin the rope and glove, how to put the rope on the bull, how to hook it under, then pull it up tight, how to make the wrap tight and secure around your hand. He fitted them with protective vests, which wouldn't save them from all injuries—in bull riding, he reminded them, it wasn't a matter of if you get hurt, it was when—but they could save a life. He knew cases where they had, and other sadder cases where they could have, if only the cowboy had been wearing one.
While he talked, the bulls clanked against the metal railings, kicking and blowing. One of the new guys muttered under his breath. Taggart stopped to sip his coffee. A bull reared up, hooking his horns at a cowboy on the top rail. He scrambled out of the way.
"Some of 'em come right straight up," Taggart cautioned. "Don't be gettin' in there till you're ready to ride."
"Yes, sir." This particular cowboy looked as if he was ready to hit the trail.
Taggart smiled at him. "You ready?"
It was one of the novices. He shook his head.
"These bulls are a little too snuffy for a first-timer, anyway." Taggart ranked them according to how tough they were to ride. Mace and Jed had filled the chutes with number-two bulls, animals to challenge the better riders. "How 'bout another volunteer. Jason?"
A lean, tough kid from a ranch near Dillon, Jason Dix had been to one of his schools last year. He'd also competed in the Montana State High School Finals Rodeo in both bronc and bull-riding last summer. Jason scrambled over the railing to put his rope on the first bull. One of the other experienced cowboys dropped down into the arena to fish it out and pass it up to him. The new guys got out of the way.
One by one, they rode. Jason and three or four others lasted more than a few seconds. Some barely got out of the chute. Taggart cheered all of them on, regardless, watching intently, never once letting his gaze drift over to where Felicity sat.
"That it?" Mace asked when the last of the new guys had been dumped in the dust.
Taggart hesitated. "Run in Sunfish."
Mace raised his eyebrows. "Who's that good?"
"Me."
* * *
Felicity had watched all the other cowboys ride with a combination of nervousness and exhilaration. She felt no exhilaration now—only terror. She knew, of course, that Taggart Jones rode bulls. She knew he'd been champion of the world. He was, without question, a man who would be good at what he did.
But even though he was wearing a vest, even though he knew the risks he was taking, she still didn't want to look. He could get killed.
Of course, she didn't say that. Who would she say it to? Becky? His daughter sat next to her, bouncing up and down with excitement.
"He never rides bulls in his schools," she'd informed Felicity only moments before. "He must be doin' it for you!"
He didn't have to do it for her, Felicity wanted to tell him. Please God, that was the last thing s
he wanted him to do! She should have left. She had enough tape of Taggart Jones to more than suffice for the part he would have in the class's video. She could leave now.
If she could make her feet work. If her legs would hold her. They felt like jelly. Felicity stayed where she was. She tried to look away, but a heretofore untapped morbid fascination gripped her as Taggart braced himself above the bull's back, his booted feet on the rails on either side of the chute, and prepared to lower himself down.
Felicity swallowed, her mouth as parched as Death Valley. Her fingers clutched the video camera in a death grip.
"Aren'tcha gonna tape him?" Becky asked. "You oughta tape him."
Felicity's hands shook. She'd taped other cowboys—most of whom had barely got out of the chute, one or two who'd made it through a kick and a thrust and spin. "I've got quite a lot on tape," she told Becky.
"Not like my dad."
No, not Taggart. Felicity sucked in a breath. Maybe Becky was right. It might help. Maybe if she watched him through the viewfinder it would seem like nothing more frightening than a car chase on television. She picked up the camera and pressed her eye against the viewfinder. Her finger found the zoom, and she closed in on him. She saw him, feet still braced, pull up on the rope once, test it, then haul it tighter yet. Then he pulled his glove out of his belt and tugged it on. Then he rubbed his gloved hand up and down the rope before beginning to wrap his hand.
The rails were in the way, so Felicity couldn't see his hands. She didn't care. She watched his face, the tight look of concentration that came over him as he settled down and shoved himself forward into his hand, the flat press of his lips and the bunch of his jaw. The mike picked up the mutters of half a dozen chattering cowboys. Taggart didn't make a sound. He shifted, centered, stilled, then nodded his head.
The gate swung open and the bull exploded into the arena.
The Cowboy and the Kid Page 7