Page 126 of The Wildest Ride

“It’s too late.” She didn’t mean to say the words out loud, but they were true. It was too late. It was all too little, too late. AJ was too old to learn new tricks and she was too old to discover a father she’d never known.

It wasn’t worth it. She couldn’t do it.

She knew it with the same cool clarity with which she spoke. “I’m sorry. I must’ve been mistaken. That can’t be right. I just wanted to ask you about this week’s challenge.” Her words were brittle, but she was proud of them. She was holding it together remarkably well.

Body rigid as if stung, The Old Man caught his breath, but simply nodded.

Still pale, AJ took a step toward her, but she shook her head.

If he touched her, she’d fall apart, and that was something she couldn’t afford, not with all of the cameras in the room trained on her, not surrounded by people.

She needed air. That was what she needed. The camera was going to love this, the ratings too, she thought, strangely removed from the fact that her most private moment had been the stuff of good TV. She’d given them enough. Her hopes, her dreams, her heart—all of it for the world to see and she needed some freaking air. They could give her that.

And if they couldn’t, she was going to take it anyway. She strode from the gym, posture daring anyone to try and follow her, the sound of her boots hitting the concrete floor echoing in the heavy silence she left in her wake.

They’d start talking again as soon as she was gone, she knew. Talking and generating copy and web content and editing the video for teaser trailers. The Closed Circuit couldn’t have done better if they’d scripted it.

Outside, she put her hands on her hips and paced. No one approached, and for that she was grateful. She wouldn’t have put it past the greenies to sidle up for video exclusives.

She was going to have to go back in there, back in there where it was too much with AJ and too late with her father. And she was going to, because the ranch was on the line, and because she was the first female rough stock champion of the PBRA, and because she was her gran and granddad’s granddaughter.

With a breath, she squared her shoulders and walked back inside.

Whatever else was going on, she had a challenge to win.

AJ’s challenge was a week of serving as a mentor and coach for a select group of interested CityBoyz candidates, all of whom eagerly awaited the return of the program after AJ’s sure win—never mind that Lil had been giving him a run for his money.

Each of the final three contestants had been assigned two mentees, and the goal was simple: get the greenhorn from never having ridden a horse, to lasting eight seconds on the mechanical bull known as Shirley.

“Shirley,” The Old Man explained, every word he spoke a painful and yearning dart in Lil’s flesh, “is old and slow, but don’t think that means she doesn’t still have tricks up her sleeve. Believe me, our old girl can still throw a pro.” He’d smiled as he said the last, his eyes lighting warmly on AJ and AJ returned the expression with open affection.

The fact that AJ had had him in his life, a volunteer father figure, while she and gran and granddad had mourned the absence of her mother alone all those years was bitter salt in an old wound.

As an experienced coach and mentor, and having gone through the program himself, AJ already had the advantage in the challenge, not to mention the fact that all the candidates hero-worshipped him and had a vested interest in his winning—it wasn’t fair that he got her father, too.

But of course he had her father, because CityBoyz was her father’s creation, his heart and soul offered to the world. Swirling between emotions too big to name and the vertigo of that, of knowing that now she wasn’t just trying to beat AJ, but her father as well, was threatening to unravel her.

That it was a father she’d never known somehow made it only worse. As did the fact that she’d met her father as an “enemy,” just as he, and his emissary in AJ, were a threat to everything she held dear.

Torn in two directions was a terrible place to start a challenge and it didn’t get easier.

Lil’s mentees, a fifteen-year-old named Carlos Jones and a seventeen-year-old by the name of George Barnes, both towered over Lil and, to their minds, that meant she couldn’t possibly know more than them about rodeo.

It’d taken three days of both of them getting thrown by Shirley multiple times to prove to them without a doubt that Lil, who had not been thrown once, had it—and, more importantly, that they did not—before they finally settled into listening to her. Even then, their attention was dicey, forever snagging on whatever it was that the great AJ Garza happened to be doing at any given moment—a fact she had little tolerance for no matter how much she could relate. They had two days left when they finally found their groove as a group, after Lil realized that teen boys weren’t all that different from goats, which was recalcitrant, wayward, overenergized, and far too clever for their own good.

But even then, loathe to admit that she wasn’t, Lil couldn’t really get her head in the game. She’d be working with Carlos on balance and hear AJ and then Carlos would be on the ground. She’d catch herself midsentence, trailing off in answering George’s questions about grip and positioning because her father had snagged her eye and she was as helpless as a little girl to do anything but watch him in fascination.

It was all just too much, and being so far from home, so far from the wide-open spaces where she could usually leave it, she just couldn’t seem to set any of it down and get the job done. It didn’t help that for the first time in her rodeo life, she also couldn’t channel it into the ride. Pouring her emotional turmoil into two struggling teen boys was a recipe for disaster of monumental proportions. They’d deserved better than that from her, and she’d been determined to give it to them—even if sometimes staving that catastrophe off was about all she could muster.

Of course, it hadn’t been enough—not for the boys and not to earn first draw.

Yes, both boys had made it, each one lasting the full eight seconds without being thrown or technically disqualified, but neither boy looked any good doing it. And that, and the fact that they’d tried to hide the embarrassment they felt even amongst all their triumph, felt worse than coming in third—especially after AJ’s mentees looked like young pros and Hank’s even seemed to have a decent grip on things. She’d let the boys down, maybe even turned them off rodeo. She certainly hadn’t proven the strength of her granddad’s training methods. She hadn’t really shown anything at all, and because of it, she’d lost out on her draw and she was going into the finale down valuable points. And through it all, she still hadn’t spoken to either AJ or Mr. Henry Bowman.

35

AJ hadn’t seen her since they’d arrived in Vegas. The greenies had informed him that Lil had gone immediately to her hotel room and not been seen since, and his stomach clenched. She’d kept herself removed from everyone ever since her scene with The Old Man.

The moment never lost its intensity, no matter how many times he recalled it. That The Old Man, the man he loved like a father, was Lil’s father, and he hadn’t known was mind-blowing.

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