Page 90 of Sexting the Cowboy
Blaze leans across the table to shove a fistful of her terrible snack into his face. “We’ll tag team him. I’ll be mean. You’ll be nice. Levi will be the wall he bounces off when he tries to run.”
Levi huffs a small laugh that he tries to hide. “I can be nice too.”
“Yournicelooks like a very stern warning. Or like you’ll rip someone a new asshole. So, try harder.”
He rolls his eyes and swings his gaze to me. “I’m not mad at you. I’m not thrilled about the timing with Reno and everything. But I’m not mad.”
“Thank you,” I say, and my voice betrays me with a crack. “I didn’t—I hoped none of you would be, but this kind of thing is delicate and can jump out the gate wild.”
Blaze is still glowing. “I’m excited. You’ll have a baby. I will teach them everything. I will buy tiny boots. I’ll be the one who gets them inappropriately sticky and returns them. I’ve been waiting my whole life for this moment. Figured I’d have to wait until these guys had kids, but I get to do it now, and that’s the best news ever.”
“It’s not about your boot fixation,” Levi says, dry.
“It is exactly about that,” she says, delighted. Then she sobers a little and points a chip at me. “Also, she’s cool. I like Annie. Most of what I know is secondhand?—”
“Secondhand?” I latch onto the part of this conversation that isn’t about me being a fool. “From who?”
“Mac, Annie’s best friend,” she says, like it’s obvious. “She’s very chatty and adorable when she’s nervous, which is any time I exist within twenty feet of her.”
“Huh?”
“I get to know a woman when I hook up with her.”
I blink. Then my mouth catches up with my eyebrows. “You—and Mac?—”
“Yes, Dad,” she says, sighing. “Keep up.”
Levi scrubs his face with both hands. “This family needs a spreadsheet for us to keep up.”
Cash laughs into his fist.
“Annie seems great,” Blaze continues, unbothered. “Smart. Funny. Kind in a way that has a backbone. Mac’s obsessed. She said Annie’s the kind of person who’d give the last of her lunch to a stranger and then apologize for offering too late.”
“That tracks.” The lump in my throat gets weird, tight.
Levi clears his throat and leans on the counter with both hands again, still trying to do my thinking for me. “What about Ford?” he asks. “He built your current image on family and ladies’ man in equal parts. He’s going to have a stroke. And what about your career?”
“Ford is going to be upset. He’ll tell me I’m ruining the brand if I retire.” I let a grin show I mean no harm, even as I deliver the blow. “He can count himself lucky if I decide to ride professionally ever again.”
The three of them register that at the same time. Blaze sits up so fast the chip bag crackles. “Retirement?”
“It’s tempting me, I’ll be honest.” The word doesn’t scare me as much as it did yesterday. “I’m not announcing anything. Not tonight. But I’m…looking into it.”
Levi nods silently. Cash’s eyes go watery for a second and then he blinks it away, because he’s the one who will always want one more lap even when the ride is done. Blaze looks at all of us and gets big in the face, like she’s going to cry again, but then she swallows and claps once, hard.
“Okay. We can handle that. We can handle anything if we know you’re not going to die doing something stupid just so a crowd will clap.”
“Thanks for the confidence.”
“It’s earned.”
We sit in the hum for a minute. The trailer creaks, the AC breathes out another thin thread of cool, and my kids look back at me the way they did when they were small and I was about to tell them whether snow meant a day off or just wet socks. This time, I don’t have an answer wrapped in a laugh.
“Reno,” Cash says again, because that’s a loop in his brain he can’t stop running. “You think he’ll come around?”
“I think he’ll be mad for a long time. He’ll find every version of this that makes it about me stealing something from him. I think he’ll feel humiliated that it’s me instead of a stranger. And I think you’re going to have to remind him he’s not invincible when it comes to drinking.”
Levi nods once. “We will.”
