Page 25 of Wild, Wild Cowboy

But it wasn’t fine, was it? If everything was fine, we wouldn’t have been having that conversation the morning after sex. She didn’t think she was fine. She thought there was something wrong with her. Thatshewas a problem.

The only problem I could see was that somewhere in bumfuck Nevada was a man who needed his balls shoved down his throat, and I wanted to make that right.

But instead of putting my fist down his throat, I was going to stick my hand in a drain clogged with horse feces, horse hair, and who knew what else but my guess was bubble gum and dip because there wasalwaysbubble gum and dip, and clean it out.

Fuck that guy, and fuck Adam and Brax, too.

I made it over to the training barn late afternoon. From the smell of it, cleaning it out was going to suck. Since there was no way I was going to stick my bare arm in that death trap, I headed to the supply cabinet in the tack room to grab a pair of breeding gloves.

Before James had come to Lodestar Ranch as the head trainer, the cabinet was a disaster. Expired medicine, unraveled leg wraps, sticky bottles of fly spray were shoved on shelves without any real order. Hell, even opening the door was a hazard, as something was likely to fall out. But a month or so after her arrival, things started shifting into place at Lodestar. James had a system for everything.

And right now, her system was telling me that we were out of breeding gloves.

Because right there on the shelf where the breeding gloves belonged was a note taped to an empty box, telling Adam to order more.

I slammed the cabinet door shut with a metallic clang that reverberated through the tack room.

Fucking Adam.

I found him in the old barn we used for hay and feed storage, tidying up with the old push broom. Whistling. Adam had been a grumpy, non-whistling asshole before James came into his life. Normally I’d take his whistling as a good thing because it meant my oldest brother was finally happy again. Right now, I took his happiness as a personal affront. People who forgot to order breeding gloves didn’t deserve happiness. Fuck his whistling ass.

Adam paused with his back to me, leaned his weight against the broom handle, and surveyed the barn with the air of a man proud of his work.

So I kicked that broom right out from under him.

“Hey!” He fell forward but caught himself before hitting the ground. Dammit. “What the hell, Zack?”

“You didn’t order breeding gloves, jackass.”

“Breeding gloves? Sure I did. I…” His voice trailed off as he tilted his head, eyes sliding to the left, remembering. “Oh. Shit.”

“Yeah. Shit is exactly what I’m going to have to put my bare hand into, thanks to you.”

“I’m sorry. James put that note there a month ago when she opened the last box. I meant to order more, but I got sidetracked by something or other. I didn’t think we’d go through them so fast.” He looked sincerely apologetic, but I wasn’t having it.

“That’s the thing about breeding gloves,” I said, my voice dripping with sarcasm. “See, they’re calledbreedinggloves because they protect you when you need to stick your arm into a pregnant mare, but because they’re disposable gloves that goup to your elbow, they’re actually used for all kinds of nasty barn chores. Like cleaning out floor drains.”

Adam’s eyes narrowed. “Yeah. I know. Unlike you, I didn’t get out of chores by running away to the rodeo. I’ve worked on this ranch damn near every day of my life, and I’ve been running it for the last four years. So don’t fucking lecture me on how to do my damn job.”

“How about you do your damn job so I don’t have to fucking lecture you?” I smirked, standing with my arms spread wide, all but daring him to throw the first punch.

He gave me a long, calculating look like he was actually considering it. But then he shook his head and turned away. “You’ve been a real ornery son of a bitch ever since that horse stomped you, you know that?”

I laughed. Then I shoved him into a hay bale.

It didn’t take him long to recover. With a string of curses, he grabbed a flake of hay by the twine and smacked me in the head with it. I wrestled him down to the ground with every intention of making him eat that fucking hay, when I felt myself hauled off him.

“What the hell is going on here?” Brax demanded, keeping his arms between me and Adam to hold us back from each other.

“He didn’t order breeding gloves!” I shouted, still mad enough to consider fratricide a viable outcome.

Brax caught on immediately to the significance of that. “Dammit?—”

“Like you never screw up?” Adam asked me. “I do the work of three people around here. You didn’t even show up today until after noon.”

“Shut up, both of you,” Brax snapped. “It’s not worth fighting over. Zack, tie a garbage bag around your arm. You won’t have as much movement with your fingers, but you should still beable to get the job done. And, Adam. For fuck’s sake. You can’t hit him. You need to be gentle. He’s still—ooof!”

His words ended on a shout as I dropped my shoulder to his ribs and used his body as a battering ram to push both my asshole brothers into the hay. We all fell together in a heap of kicking limbs and curse words.

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