Page 61 of His Cowboy Heart

“I’ll take that as a yes even though we both know if I fucked you right now, you’d be screaming my name for all the world to hear in a matter of minutes.”

He was right but I wasn’t going to say so. “So the reason for choosing Wall Street?”

“When we were kids, West and I would go down to the video store to rent movies whenever we could. I don’t remember the name of the first one that planted the idea, but basically there was this main character who was dressed in this nice suit, people jumped to do his bidding, he had a gorgeous apartment, beautiful women on his arm—I chose to picture men on his arm, by the way—and an amazing car. He literally had it all. That’s what I wanted. I wanted people to step back to clear a path for me when I got to my office. I wanted to prove I was just as good as any other guy doing the same job. The second time I watched a movie with a similar character, I paid closer attention to what his job title was. Then I went to the library and began reading everything I could get my hands on. Once I figured out the kind of education I needed, I finished my GED and then got scholarships and worked my ass off at any job I could get. I became one of those guys in the movie but there was no happy ending in it for me. Even after the first heart attack, I couldn’t stop putting in long hours or taking big risks for my clients. I made millions but it wasn’t enough.”

“It was never going to be,” I suggested.

“No, it wasn’t. I didn’t even like the job… I just liked all the material things that came with it. It made me feel important. Like I mattered.”

I understood exactly what he was talking about. “So you ended up trying to find West?”

“Yeah. I was too afraid of what flying might do to my heart and I didn’t want to risk having a heart attack while I was behind the wheel and end up killing myself—or worse, killing someone else—so I took a bus back to Muddy Fork. Turned out most of my family had either left or died. My parents were both in prison and none of my brothers or siblings had stayed in Muddy Fork. Except one.”

“West.”

“When I saw him, I was sure he’d turn me away. I waited for him to blast me with all the rage and fury I deserved for how I’d treated him when we were younger. You know what he did?”

“Nothing,” I responded. “He didn’t lay a hand on you.”

“Actually, he did. He walked right up to me and hugged me so hard I was sure he was going to bust a rib. I began sobbing like a baby. I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed him. I kept telling him ‘sorry’ over and over again, but being the big brother he was, even if it was by sixty seconds, he told me there was nothing to be sorry for and he was glad I’d come home. He introduced me to his wife who happened to be a girl he’d briefly dated when we were in high school. I then met my niece and nephew who were…”

When Flynn paused, I smiled. “Twins,” I said.

“Yep. Obviously fraternal twins. West had ended up going to rehab after our folks and several relatives were imprisoned for dealing drugs. Since West was under eighteen, the judge gave him a choice. Juvie followed by prison when he turned eighteen or rehab and probation. Once he was clean, he married Jenny and worked on getting his GED followed by a bachelor’s degree. He’s a science teacher at the high school in Muddy Forks.”

“Wow,” I said. “Good for him. And good for you for having the guts to go back to that town.”

“The town had cleaned itself up pretty good. Anyway, luckily West didn’t have the defect, but being able to reconnect with him and learn how to play uncle—the answer, by the way, is to spoil the shit out of the little buggers and then play innocent when their parents scold you for spending too much money on their kids—meant the world to me. I ended up staying with them for a little while, but I knew Muddy Fork would never be home to me. That left me homeless, clueless, and scared to death of all the things I was going to miss when my heart gave out, which I’d convinced myself would happen despite the doctors telling me otherwise.”

I squeezed Flynn’s hand a little harder. While I could never relate to the terror of believing you could drop dead at any moment, just hearing Flynn—myFlynn, who was the strongest person I’d ever known, both physically and mentally—go through the experience made me wish a thousand times over that we’d somehow met earlier while we’d both been dealing with our fucked-up lives.

“So what did you do when you knew you couldn’t stay there for good?” I asked.

“Okay, this is another ‘promise you won’t laugh’ moment,” Flynn warned. “I thought about when I was really, really young—like seven or eight—and remembered this dream I’d had for the longest time. I wanted to be a cowboy.”

“So you became a cowboy,” I said with a smile. How many people would have taken a risk like that? I knew now that cowboys still existed, but I doubted there were many people who deliberately chose the career if they hadn’t been born into the life.

“I did. Problem was that being a cowboy without a horse didn’t really work. That was when I thought of Titan and Frank and the relationship they’d had. I knew that was what I needed in a horse. A best friend. I decided to take a chance and see if I could locate any horses that were descendants of Titan. Since Frank had bred Titan to dozens and dozens of mares, I figured there had to be papers proving the purity of his bloodline. I just had to find them. Since Walers aren’t your everyday breed, it ended up being harder than I thought. It took me months to find the organization that held the documents for all the registered Walers in the country. When I saw BJ’s picture in the registry, I knew I had to have him. Titan turned out to be his grandfather.

“BJ was only three, so he was the perfect age for me to train him like Frank had trained his horses. The guy who owned BJ was this big corporate guy who didn’t really care about him; he just liked telling people he owned a prize-winning stallion. All I had to do was offer the guy a ridiculously high amount to sell him to me. I had and still do have plenty of money saved up from my banking days, so it seemed like some kind of weird twist of fate to me.”

“He was meant to be yours.”

Flynn tightened his hold on me. He’d wrapped the sleeping bag around me, so between the warm material and the heat coming from his body, I’d never felt safer in my entire life.

“Fate’s been kind to me,” Flynn murmured as he nuzzled my neck. “She gave me exactly what I needed not once but twice.”

Flynn’s observation had my insides dancing with joy. I kept expecting to wake up only to realize I’d dreamed up everything about my relationship with Flynn.

“Frank’s property never got sold because he had no next of kin and the state had no interest in the place, so it’d been for sale for years. It was run down, and the house had been condemned, but the barn was in decent shape. I bought the place for a steal and moved BJ there. I spent nearly all my time with BJ, getting him to trust me and building up the kind of relationship Frank had had with Titan. Unfortunately, I made the mistake of offering my niece and nephew naming rights because BJ only had a registered show name that I can’t even remember off the top of my head. My niece, Alicia, was big into bananas at the time because of some character on a TV show she loved. My nephew, Alex, chose jammies because he loved wearing jammies.”

I couldn’t help but laugh at that. Thankfully, Flynn hadn’t made me promise not to when he’d begun his explanation. “Okay, I get all that, and it was really sweet of you to let them name him, but if you were going to use the initials to refer to him, wouldn’t JB be a little less… on the nose?”

Flynn responded by tickling me until I shouted, “Uncle!”

The scuffle had left me partially exposed. Flynn’s tickles turned to caresses and I could feel my dick hardening. I forced myself to lean back against him again. He quickly covered me up with the sleeping bag.

“To answer your question, I didn’t get to decide that. The kids began arguing over which name should come first, so it ended up being my brother who made the call. He used a coin, but the bastard never even bothered looking at the result after he flipped it. He said Alicia won the toss, so while the kids were telling BJ all about his new name, I confronted my brother about cheating. West simply shrugged and said that using the initials BJ might be a good way to break the ice with a guy so I’d get laid.”

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