Page 9 of The Cowboy's Untamed Heart

“We miss you back there.” Barney jerked his thumb toward the chutes.

“I miss it, too,” Shane said, admitting it aloud for the first time.

“Ever think you’d go back?” Barney asked.

Every damned day. “No,” he said instead. He couldn’t compete at the level he had been at before the accident. He had too much pride to even try.

As Barney walked away, Shane pushed down the irritation. That part of his life was over. He was now in a new career and as a bull breeder. He needed to pay attention to what his animal athletes were doing in the area. He watched the first set of riders try to go eight seconds on the bulls.

At the end of the set, Sverre was still undefeated. That bull brought in five thousand dollars per event because of that statistic. Ingvar, Vidar, Balder and Torkel also gave good rides. Shane charged fifteen hundred for each of them per event. Multiply that by twenty-five events and that was a big chunk of money his family would be out every year if they didn’t get one of the new UPRC contracts.

Of course, they made good money in stud fees and selling champion bulls, but Shane liked going to the rodeo events. It made him feel that he was still part of the lifestyle.

Looking at his watch, Shane decided to call his father and see how things were going back on the ranch. He’d keep the news about the potential new contract to himself until he had official confirmation from the UPRC.

The phone rang forever. Shane rolled his eyes. It was a crapshoot if his father had left his phone in the truck, back at the farmhouse, or was now staring at it trying to figure out how to answer it.

“Yeah,” his father’s gruff voice snarled a second before it went to voicemail.

“Hey, Dad, what are you up to?”

“What the hell do you think I’m doing? Having a fucking picnic?”

“Are you?” he asked calmly, too used to his blustering to bat an eye.

“No, damn it. I’m at this freakin’ computer trying to find who we have scheduled for Ragnar this weekend.”

Shane clamped his hand over his face. “Don’t screw around with that spreadsheet.”

“I don’t even know what a spreadsheet is.”

And that was the problem.

“Didn’t Rick print you out the list?” Shane was going to knock his brother on the head if he hadn’t done that.

“I can’t find it, and he’s not answering his phone. He said he went into town for a feed run, but I think he’s out screwing around with Lainey.”

Probably.

“I don’t know why he doesn’t ask that girl to marry him,” his father said.

Shane was not going to get involved in that conversation, so he steered it back to the bull they were currently hiring out to stud. “Is there a problem with Ragnar?”

“No.”

“Then why are you looking up who Rick is bringing him to this weekend?”

“Because I want to know, damn it.”

Shane didn’t have access to the schedule from his phone. He’d have to get Rick to save it to the cloud when he got back from his nooner with Lainey Evans. “Do you have to know right now? I can make a few calls.” Shane would look like an idiot, but there were only three farms that they had been considering. He couldn’t remember off the top of his head who was set up for this weekend, though.

“No, I suppose it could wait until your brother gets home. But it pisses me off that I don’t have this information.”

“It pisses me off, too, Dad.” Shane was going to have Rick put it on the fridge from now on. “What’s Mom doing?”

“She’s at her finance meeting. She’s hoping to get them to raise the library’s budget so she can buy some more books.”

It was a little more complicated than that. His mother was the head librarian in their hometown of Charlo, Montana. She was curating a Western Plains Native American exhibit and was looking for funding for indigenous authors and artifacts from the Flathead Reservation. Normally, she’d be able to distract his father with another chore or something.

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