Page 86 of Riding the Storm
“What would be easier?” she asks.
“Loving him,” I say, and my head snaps up to look at her. “I mean, for you. It’d be easier for you, loving your cowboy, if he’d stop resisting and try with the broncos.”
“You got him on one this weekend, did you not?”
“Yes. But he wasn’t really trying. He was pacifying me. To be honest, I don’t know if I’m getting anywhere with him. I might not be able to train the stubbornness out of him.”
“You won’t,” she agrees. “Not because you aren’t good at what you do. It took me a long time to realize that being a bull rider isn’t something Ry does. It’s who he is. I could no sooner tell the sky to stop being blue.”
“Yeah.”
She rinses the last plate and places it on the drying rack and turns to me. “But, Charli, I’ve been paying attention, and I think you might have made a bigger difference than you realize.”
“What’s that?”
She smiles as she cups my cheeks. “You’ve given him something worth living for.”
I open my mouth to tell her she’s mistaken, but before I can form the words, the back door swings open, and Chord and Bryce come walking in.
“I think we walked off enough dinner. Let’s have that cobbler,” Chord says.
Celia drops her hands and turns to her husband. “I’ll start the coffee.”
“Man, am I glad to see you two,” Cabe says as he jumps out of his truck and takes Charli’s suitcase. “I’ve had zero help for five days.”
“How is that different than every other day?” Charli asks as she hops into the back seat, letting me have shotgun.
Cabe climbs behind the wheel. “Ry and I have a routine. I muck, and he lays new bedding. He hauls feed, and I pump water. He turns out the horses, and I bring them back in.”
“Um, you do realize he doesn’t actually work for us, right? He’s only been helping because I forced him to.”
Cabe cuts his eyes to me. “Nah. Maybe in the beginning, but he enjoys it now. Right?”
“Yeah. Shoveling shit at five in the morning is a fucking blast,” I deadpan, glancing at Charli over my shoulder.
She has to bite her lip to keep from bursting out laughing, and damn if the sight doesn’t have me wishing I were the one sucking that lip between my teeth. It was torture as I slept on the couch last night, knowing she was curled up in my childhood bed. I liked having her tucked in next to me this week.
It did, however, give me time to think. Momma found me wide awake in the wee hours, so she made us each a mug of warm milk, and we had a conversation. She laid out her fears, and I laid out mine. Then I told her about a dream that’d been brewing inside me the last couple of years. One that I’d always shelved underSomeday. Now, I’m thinking that someday may be here.
Time to let go of one dream and move on to another.
And the truth of that doesn’t scare me like it used to. In fact,I think divine intervention might have landed me at Wildhaven Storm Ranch so I’d have the time and space to sort some things out.
“It’s a lot more fun when you have company. That’s for sure,” Cabe continues. “Now tell me all about Oklahoma. Axle said you almost got in a fight with some jackass rookie, and he wished you had stomped him.”
“Axle is just sore because that rookie bested him,” Charli says.
“He drew a cakewalk bull,” I quip.
“I don’t think any bull can be called a cakewalk. It looked just as brutal as the rest of them,” she notes.
I turn all the way around and glare at her. “It was practically a starter bull. It had less power than Axle’s, and it was predictable. The damn thing had a consistent bucking pattern. Any bull rider worth his salt could have ridden it, blindfolded.”
“If that’s the case, why did the judges score him so high? Don’t they take the bull’s performance into consideration?” she asks.
I huff out a breath. “They’re supposed to, but they don’t always get it right. Just like refs at a football game, they miss shit,” I say, then turn back to Cabe. “And as far as the fight goes, it was nothing. He just had too much alcohol and got mouthy. He apologized.”
“He did?” Charli asks, surprised.
