Page 56 of The Wildest Ride

Feasting on the sight of her breasts, his eyes turned wolfish, and heat flooded Lil’s upper body, turning her skin deep dusky rose.

“You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen, Lil.”

For the briefest moment doubt flashed across her mind, gone nearly as quickly as it had entered: Was it true? AJ was a worldwide rodeo star, it stood to reason he had had his pick of some of the most beautiful women the globe had to offer.

AJ’s palm running downward along her side, the pad of his thumb brushing the side of her breast as he trailed over her ribs and lower, shook her mind free of thoughts of AJ and other women, drawing Lil immediately back into the present.

She hadn’t known the side of her ribs could be such a delicious place to be touched.

Reaching between them, AJ began to unbuckle the massive silver thing that rested at the top of his jeans, just one of his many, and Lil held back a snort. She was so used to seeing his buckles that she was beginning to think of world championships as commonplace. She’d certainly come up in the world.

Buckle unfastened, he slipped his hand around to his back pocket and pulled out a flash of silver.

Confusion rippled across Lil’s face for a moment and he smiled reassuringly. “Protection. ‘A cowboy is always prepared.’”

His words stopped her in her tracks.

Noticing, he grinned. “It’s just something The Old Man used to drill into us.”

It sounded like it, like some kind of rodeo guidance counselor joke to remind young men to be safe. More than that, though, like an ice bucket, it reminded her of who she was and where she came from—who she had, or rather,nothad, for a mother. And a father.

Abby Lane had been beautiful, impulsive, and about as responsible as a box of puppies for the entirety of her twenty years on earth. The greatest example of that behavior being Lil’s origin story, when, at sixteen, Abby Lane had gone to watch her father, Lil’s granddad, compete in his first ever PBRA rodeo. She came home pregnant and her grandad had missed the one shot he’d had at going pro in mainstream rodeo.

Lil was born thirty-seven weeks later, a whopping six and a half pounds and eighteen inches of screaming, hollering, girl child. Her mother had labored for thirty long hours and not once during the whole ordeal did she utter the name of Lil’s father—a feat all the more impressive for Abby Lane not being known for her ability to suffer in silence.

On this matter, however, she was resolute. Until the day she died, in fact, for all the world ever knew—and for all Lil knew—Abby Lane had been impregnated by the Holy Spirit. She had never been one to care about other people’s opinions about her life, and was even less so with a brand-new baby.

For those first three months, Lil’s mother had been changed—in love, real love, with someone outside herself for the first time in her life. She didn’t begrudge her infant’s midnight cries or dirty diapers, instead reveling in the intensity of being another creature’s entire whole world. The glow of motherhood wore off, however, as Lil grew. By the time she was a damage-prone toddler, her mother was over parenting.

Eighteen and looking for some space away from her toddler, Abby picked up a job at the local grange, which happened to be right next door to the local tavern. Not long after she started coming home late.

According to Gran, the first time Abby Lane didn’t come home at all was the worst. After getting Lil down for bed, assuring her Mommy would be home later, her grandparents sat up all night by the phone. Abby Lane never called.

Instead, she came back after her next scheduled shift at the grange, buzzing and jumpy and full of news: she was in love. His name was Todd and he worked at the bar next door to the grange. He made her feel alive, and didn’t seem to mind that she brought another man’s child to the relationship. They were going to get married and buy a house and be a real family, once they got enough money, of course.

The next time, when she didn’t come home for a week, earning money was the excuse. They’d landed a job with a big paycheck—so big and intense that she’d lost weight by the time she got back. She said they put in eighty hours each and hadn’t had much time to eat and sleep, let alone enough time to call home to say when they’d be back.

Two days into her disappearance, though, Gran had called the grange to see if she’d shown up there. They let her know that Abby Lane hadn’t been employed with them for over a month. A detail she never shared with her parents.

When Granddad stopped by the tavern, the owner, Old George, a second cousin of Gran’s, said he’d fired Todd for stealing from the register.

When Abby finally came back home, Gran and Granddad put their foot down: if she wanted to step out with Todd, she wasn’t doing it under their roof.

Abby responded by saying she’d go somewhere else then, but when she angrily tried to push past Gran to collect Lil from the room where she napped, Granddad had held up an arm and uttered the words that haunted him until the day he died: “Abby Lane Island. You may be too old to take my orders, but you ain’t taking my granddaughter anywhere. You touch that girl in there and I’ll be laying my own hands on you.”

His voice had been dead calm, his eyes hard and black, and Abby knew he meant what he said.

Gran said the color left Abby’s face in that moment and that she gasped before spitting on the floor. Her whole life that detail had always stood out the most starkly to Lil. Abby Lane had spit on Gran and Granddad’s floor.

The detail that stuck with Gran and Granddad was that that was the last time they saw their daughter alive. After that, she’d turned on her heel, walked out the door, and hopped into the passenger seat of an old blue Chevy. They never saw the driver.

Two years later, on a warm Tuesday in May when Lil was four, the phone rang. Gran was in the garden with Lil. Granddad was away, somewhere between Muskogee and Amarillo, running a herd for their elderly neighbors.

Wrist-deep in fresh soil, and accompanied by Lil, who’d spent their garden time whipping up a prize-worthy batch of mud pies, Gran didn’t make it to the phone in time. That was another one of those details that had mattered more to Gran and Granddad than it did to Lil.

When Gran checked the call log, she said she saw it was a Tulsa number and that that was when she knew.

They didn’t have anybody in Tulsa and the farmhouse number was unlisted. The call could only be Abby.

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