Claiming The Cowboy Read online

  Chase awoke in his buddy’s RV, a night of whiskey his only indulgence, but it sat on his brain like a fat-ass rodeo clown. His mouth was pasty, his eyeballs charred. He didn’t remember falling asleep on the kitchenette bench, but he was relieved to be in the front of the vehicle. The back was bucking like a thousand-pound son-of-a-bitch, two different girls’ voices moaning. Loosely-hung colored bras and lines of white powder shifted all over the place, and it smelled like sweat and pussy.

  He loved rodeo. He also fucking hated it.

  Chase could have skipped town in any direction. He wasn’t yet prepared to tell his investors he had lost their new base, pissed away a hundred grand, and aimed to put the face of their brand back on a killer bull inside of twenty-four hours. To the north: Wyoming and Kansas City, too many days of travel when he itched to climb into the chute sooner than yesterday. Louisiana had a prospect east—small-time bulls, almost no payout. West Texas was filled with crazy bastards—Mexican bull riders who rode barefoot and wrapped the rope around their ankles—suicide runs. Not only did the coast seem the most logical choice, Corpus Christi happened to be Chase’s perfect storm on the professional circuit: Stalin’s Assassin, biggest payout of his career. He could pay back his investors and punish his body to boot.

  After the events of the past few weeks, it seemed only fitting to let a bull kick his ass.

  The life to which he had grown accustomed was diced into eight-second rides and one-day travels, town to town, tending equipment and sleeping off the previous day’s punishment. If time at home taught him anything, it was that he wasn’t cut out for things that stretched beyond a few days, much less a week, a year, a lifetime. When those things went away, the hurt rivaled anything he’d known in the arena. He couldn’t stomach being the Meier fuck-up the way his old man had predicted. A legacy of life-long anything—especially love—was admirable, inspiring, but Chase knew now that he had been wrong: his real risk was in doing something. His success was inside eight seconds, and he’d do well to stay in his arena.

  Chase stretched out the kinks and winced when they didn’t fully leave his bones. Had to be afternoon, by the sun’s angle through the darkened blinds. He grabbed his toothbrush and toothpaste from his bag and a bottled water on his way out. A few people milled outside—vets, trainers, handlers. He found a fold-out chair inside a healthy strip of shade and settled to brush the tar from his tongue.

  “Someone said I might find you here.”

  Chase scuttled out of his skin. The intrusion rocked his senses; the voice, her voice, rocked everything.

  “Jesus, Gretchen.” He settled the contents of his hand beneath the chair. Leaning forward, elbows on knees, he rubbed grit from his eyes, mostly to give him time to think. “The hell you doing here? Shouldn’t you be mayoring right now?”

  “I resigned.”

  Chase’s stomach dropped clear past his nuts. He sat up. “What? Why?”

  “I didn’t do anything illegal, but what I planned was unethical, and that’s almost the greater crime. To me, at least.”

  Gretchen took a few steps closer. He was glad his mouth still tasted like raw sewage. Kept him from giving in to the temptation to kiss her.

  “Doesn’t matter,” she said. “Emile Pickford refused to accept it.”

  “First smart thing I’ve heard from a Pickford in ages.”

  “Here’s the second.”

  She pulled a paper from her bag and handed it to him. Across the top, in old-fashioned script: Deed Record No. 17, Republic of Texas, Know All Men To Whom These Presents Shall Come. It was a copy, slightly skewed, with the corner ripped, but it had been certified with a date and illegible signature at the bottom. Stapled to the back was a legal document ceding all claim to the property, signed by Emile Pickford.

  “Emile Pickford recognizes that your ancestor, Oscar Pettigrew, was the rightful owner of the land that became 1100 South Main Street in Close Call. He wants you to have the property, free and clear. Says you bringing jobs and growth is the best reason of all to settle the feud. And he wants to talk to you about investing in the distillery.”

  “What about the zoning?”

  “I spoke to every single council member on the drive out here. As of today, they’re all in agreement to grant you a permanent exception to the zoning and allow alcohol sales. Paperwork is processing as we speak. Changing the rest of the block for future businesses will have to come at the next meeting.”

  His temples throbbed, a push-back against what should be good news.

  “I already found a town that wants us.”

  “Tell them you’ve changed your mind. Close Call is your home.”

  “Is it? Because I sure didn’t recognize it the last time I was there.”

  Gretchen moved closer, tight jeans hugging her curves, dust kicking up a bit from some girly boots, nothing at all meant for real ranching. Nice touch—the view crippling, actually—but it wouldn’t work. He’d never see her as anything but power suits and heels sharp enough to stab him between the shoulder blades.

  She leaned against the post holding the awning above him. Used to be a food stand, some shit. She brought with her a thousand pounds of memories on her scent, still floral, still modestly powerful, enough to push back the smell of horse shit.

  “You were right. I did hold the information for insurance, in case I failed to persuade the others on the council that the distillery was a bad idea. I didn’t count on you changing my mind, and I certainly didn’t count on falling in love with you.”

  Heat rushed to his extremities. He felt as if he had climbed onto the back of a bull unprepared, without a proper grip, and the gate opened before he was ready.

  “I’m sorry, Chase. I want to make this right. Come home with me.”

  “It’s not that simple. I’ve signed contracts. Binding agreements. Paid entry fees.”

  “There isn’t any legal agreement that can’t be undone.”

  “No.” Chase shot to his feet then instantly regretted it. Hot shards of pain sizzled through his skull. He gripped his forehead with the hand not holding the deed he needed weeks ago, not now. Fucking whiskey was doing a tap dance behind his eyes. “This isn’t law and politics. Out here, a person is only as good as the last choice he’s made. You don’t understand.”

  “No, I guess I don’t. I’ve come all this way to tell you that you won, that you got everything you wanted, that you don’t have to put the distillery in some far-off town where no one knows you and your life grows apart from your family and your land.”

  “You should have called.” His tone was jacked. He couldn’t help it. His lungs burned and squeezed out extra air behind his words. Rodeo was his territory, his space, and he didn’t appreciate her coming into it, telling him what he should do and how he should be.

  “I did call.”

  For all that he had raised his voice, she lowered hers. Rodeo was loud as all get out—rock music blaring when the gate opened, the roar of the crowd, the clonk of the cattle bell all you could hear in hyper-focus, stay-alive mode—so when something quiet and soft and meaningful came, Chase stopped breathing and took note.

  “My cell got crushed by a bull last night.” Sounded fucking lame to his own ears, and he had forgotten it until now, but it was the truth. “I’ll leave a ticket for you at Will Call. Biggest, baddest bull on the circuit. Put a few cowboys on life support. Might be a good show.”

  The opening bell to unshed tears distorted her face. “I know this is who you are, but it’s not who you’re waiting to be. Your ideas are amazing and successful, and you have a way with people that few others have, and I can’t stay here and watch you risk all of that for eight seconds that might throw it all away.”

  A natural female reaction. A natural mayoral response.

  “Right,” said Chase, “Because risk isn’t a political luxury.”

  It felt good, satisfying, to grind back the words that she so often dispensed. She was a politician; he was a bull rider. Trying to see
past that was as much of a fool’s game as climbing into the chute blindfolded.

  “No.” Through tears, she gave a weak smile, almost a reflex to steel her from the storm brewing in her eyes. In her vulnerability, all pretense stripped away, Gretchen had never looked more beautiful. “Because you are all the risk my heart will ever take.”

  Her admission spun around him, as if he was heading down in the well during a ride—that spiraling vortex of a bull’s motion that suspended time. She was a turn-back bull that knocked the wind out and cracked every rib.

  She left as she had come, almost like a phantom, here one minute, gone the next. He turned the deed over, studied the fancy words that now had a meaning greater than gravity. Nothing about falling in love with her was worth feeling like Stalin’s Assassin had his way, taken him down and out. Only one glory—the top score in the arena—was worth the risk.

  “They’re ready for you, Chase,” said a rodeo runner who looked barely old enough to shave. Chase had publicity shots to take, sponsors’ egos to stroke, a mind to wrestle into a mental space where he wouldn’t be murdered, and a rodeo to win. Chase pictured Gretchen getting into her ridiculous Prius and following the rules all the way back to Close Call because one risk in a day, in a lifetime, for Gretchen de Havilland, was one too many. The image should have cleared him to be him, everything people expected Chase Meier to be.

  It didn’t.

  He fucking doubted himself from step one, a mental move likely to land him in a coma. Or worse.

  Chase bit his mouth guard, hard enough to give his brain an aneurysm. Helmet on, caged mask in place, vest cinched for war, front lines.

  On the other side of the iron cage, a hybrid: part genetically-modified Charbray, part demon; already otherworldly, so out of his goddamned mind his handlers barely wrestled him into the chute; something Chase loved to see. Energy dispensed on the equipment was energy not dispensed punishing him.

  But the evening felt strange. The assembled crowd, full to the arena rim, was lethargic, eerily quiet. Behind the scenes, there was more disorder than usual—handlers losing their shit, no one where they were supposed to be, tempers raw. And the sunset as he’d entered the arena was ominous as hell—normal streaks of yellow and orange overpowered by gray—not of storm clouds but of a distant wildfire in Mexico. Even the air rushing past his cage into his nostrils had an acrid heaviness.

  Bull riders, like any athlete, were suspicious, by nature. Chase attributed the hair standing up on his neck to the events of the afternoon. He turned to his assistant.

  “Did you spot her?”

  “Someone like you described? Wouldn’t be hard. She ain’t here, Chase.”

  Somehow, that news made him feel better and worse, all at once. He pulled an angry inhale past his nostrils, purposely expanding its intensity all the way to the sacs in his lungs. Yancy once told him that breathing was half the battle during those eight seconds. Hold your breath, your muscles stiffen, brace, break in all kinds of ways, and you don’t become one with the animal, who’s doing his best to snort and breathe its way to total annihilation and revenge.

  Gloves on, cinched and tied to hell, primed with friction and heat on the nearby rope, his trainer gave him two smacks atop his helmet. Chase climbed the outside of the cage and straddled the chute. The announcer dropped his name. Chase heard nothing but his breathing after that. His breathing and the bull’s.

  And his own hesitation like a punch to his intestines.

  Fuck.

  Was what Gretchen did so wrong? She put the town first. The place they both loved so much. The place he longed to be, always, when he woke up in some pussy-smelling camper, wondering if his father was right.

  Beneath him, between his boots, Stalin’s Assassin went insane.

  Fuck-fuck-fuck. He was going to get himself killed.

  “The fuck you waitin’ on, boy?” barked his trainer, his expression as intense as a drill sergeant.

  The inertia had already taken hold, the rote muscle memory of climbing atop a bull a thousand times, in training, in competition. Hands assisted him—his grip, his positioning, his chaps and number, one final tug on his vest, the only thing standing between him and an instant goring. He wanted to scream, clamber back up the gated steel box, but there were so many hands, so many voices, telling him what to do, what to remember. He had never been much of a praying man, much to his mother’s dismay, but he did a fair bit in the time it took him to suck in another fortifying inhale. Even added a deal to the mix.

  Keep me alive, and I’m done.

  His trainer barked in his ear. “Ready? Ready?”

  Chase clenched his molars, lowered himself so that the bull filled the space between his thighs, with a gap of mere inches. He flexed his fingers and curled them. Hard.

  And nodded.

  The chute opened.

  14

  July’s city council meeting progressed with an abundance of business. Events of the past two months seemed to shake out a new layer of growth problems Close Call had never faced. In addition to new corporate business and housing shortage concerns for potential new businesses and talk of a school bond to accommodate the influx of new students in the coming year, the debate for the remainder of the 1100 block of South Main looked to be an ever-present issue throughout the remainder of Gretchen’s tenure as mayor. She had hosted several town halls since approval of the zoning change to give the townspeople a voice. Time and time again, overwhelmingly so, when government opened itself to the creativity and varied experiences of its citizens, people rose to the occasion. Her job, she had learned, was not merely to put forth her agenda, the one that adhered to the platform on which she had run and the promises she had made, but the agenda dictated by the needs of her town. And, yes, quite often, that involved surprises. Maybe government needed surprises to keep officials on their toes, dancing in the right direction.

  Gretchen had assimilated to a new normal. She stopped filling her days quite so full. For short sprints, overwork was fine, even expected for woman who came at her job with an attorney’s attention to detail. Long term? She likened it to running a marathon backward in heels. Possible, but the potential for falling was too great. In her extra hours, she took in more Clint Eastwood flicks with her father, ate a jelly donut every morning, walked the streets of Close Call every evening with Lincoln—who insisted they scout out a prime location for the newly-proposed dog park—and laid out plans to run for state attorney general. Her visits to the cemetery became fewer, and the combine harvester that sat on her chest—the weight of what might have been—lifted, day by day, until she didn’t find it so hard to breathe anymore.

  Through the rumor mill, Gretchen heard Chase had become the first cowboy to take Stalin’s Assassin to a full eight-second count. She also heard he was on a plane bound for New York to do a photo shoot, on a cattle run somewhere in the panhandle, with an actress filming a western in Vancouver, and in Spain with his brother Nat and sister-in-law January. She couldn’t say how much of it was true. At least she hadn’t heard that he was broken. Had she heard that, she might have broken, too.

  The council concluded their last bit of new business. Gretchen thanked everyone for coming and announced that the PTA was selling refreshments in the hallway—one way to sustain attendance numbers that had spiked of late—effectively segueing into a motion to dismiss the meeting, when Yancy Roesen politely cleared his throat and leaned toward his microphone.

  “Madam Mayor, it seems you might have an outdated agenda,” he said. “Ms. Valentine, could you supply the mayor with the most recent new business?”

  Gretchen glanced down at her page. She had printed it from her phone moments before the meeting. How many more items could have been added? A quick glance at the clock in the back of the room told her the meeting was already running a half hour longer than usual.

  “Is it possible to table any new items for next month? We want to ensure everyone who was kind enough to attend tonight’s meeting makes it ho
me with some daylight left.”

  “Days are getting longer, mayor,” Bettye Lindsey chimed in.

  Ebba Howard added, “Few more minutes couldn’t hurt.”

  Not one person in attendance made a move toward the hallway. Not even her father, who was normally beating a path from the back row to sneak into the hallway and listen to the Texas Rangers radio broadcast. And Gretchen had it on solid rumor that Cake My Day had donated multi-flavored pinwheels of tortes to the bake sale.

  Gretchen felt out-of-body. If there was one thing about a small town, it was that the people were as predictable as ice cream cone drips in July. Something was afoot. Never was she more certain than when she saw Darcy’s exaggerated smile as she approached the council table, new sheet in hand. It was her assistant’s favorite reality-show television night, and Darcy wasn’t happy unless she got wind of a single, hot, and foreign dignitary coming to Houston. Gretchen glanced down to new business.

  The amended line simply read, “Proposal.”

  Non-specific. Great.

  “Councilman Roesen, can you elaborate on the nature of this proposal?” Gretchen said into her microphone.

  “I can’t, Madam Mayor, but I know someone who can.”

  No one stood.

  The main doors to the hall opened. Chase Meier entered.

  Gretchen stiffened. May have even stopped breathing.

  Chase came in dressed in a suit and tie, much as he had been the night of his presentation. He wore boots that matched a forgettable leather belt, no flying-saucer-sized buckle to speak of, and enough sweat on his forehead to blind the front row of ladies, whispering and tittering at the sight of him. He approached the microphone in front of Councilwoman Lindsey.

  “Um…” After a shaky start with no voice, he gave it a second go. “Permission to address the council?”

  “Permission granted.” Bettye Lindsey jumped all over that like a duck on a june bug, such that the entire room broke out in chuckles.