Page 50 of The Wildest Ride

As the sun sank below the horizon line, darker blue beginning to chase away the gorgeous canvas of purples, pinks, and orange, she pulled out her phone.

The bus was due in twenty minutes and she still had to get ready.

The whole thing was ridiculous. She didn’t even go out with her friends, let alone a bunch of cowboys she barely knew.

Lil knew a recipe for disaster when she approached one, and that was even without tossing AJ and alcohol into the mix. In fact, in that mix, there was only one thing she could control, and that meant that, in addition to being miserable, it was going to be a very dry night for her.

Despite riding rough stock rodeo, in general, Lil would pick safe over sorry any day of the week. It wasn’t an accident that she didn’t have a past full of regrets and foolish behavior.

And now, more than ever, she had more pressing reasons to stay sober. The primary of those being the way her mind kept swinging back to the earthshaking kiss she’d shared with AJ every time she let her guard down.

She’d never had a kiss like that in her life—a connection with another human so powerful that it overwhelmed her sense of time and place.

It was the kind of kiss that complicated things. It was the kind of kiss that made things charged where they should be grounded, clouded and unstable where they should be clear and balanced. In fact, it was a lot like alcohol itself. All the more reason to be on guard, then, when they were on their way to a bar.

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Ardmore’s honky-tonk was more of a dive bar, but fill any place with over two dozen cowboys and it was more than halfway there. Toss in a few cameras and drinks—on the show’s tab—and it was a regular hoedown.

AJ’s elbows rested on the bar. A half-drunk beer sat on a coaster in front of him. Of-age greenies milled about, taking photos, quotes, and making suggestions to impressionable, more than half-drunk young men.

A camerawoman hollered, “Do a line dance!” and one of the boys going home from the bullpens thought either the suggestion or the suggester was delightful, so he sashayed over to the jukebox and whistled for the others from his RV to join him.

After some debate, Garth Brooks and a fiddle filled the room with his urgent need to make a long distance phone call and the crew of five cowboys cleared the floor to dance.

AJ watched it all with a half smile on his face. He’d give them credit—the youngsters could move their hips pretty well for a bunch of white boys. As with everything else, though, he could stroll over and show them how it was really done. It just wouldn’t be nice to embarrass them on TV.

The cameras were eating it up without the added drama anyway. AJ was beginning to find the Closed Circuit’s relentless and obvious pursuit of viewership almost endearing. Though nobody had ever tried to call it so, reality TV wasn’t subtle.

AJ finished his beer as the boys finished their dance.

Across the bar, Hank DeRoy held court in a shadowed corner booth with a group of cowboys.

The man never lacked for lackeys. Year after year, the faces changed, but the personalities didn’t. To a certain kind of man, Hank was a king.

Gaze sliding away from Hank and his cadre of clowns, AJ scanned the bar for Lil’s long braid and undercut for the third time since sidling up to bar—which he had done for the express purpose of looking for her there. The second-place rider had disappeared as soon as they got off the bus and hadn’t been seen since.

And that wasn’t being a good sport to AJ’s mind. He wanted to gloat.

Throughout the bar, cowboys played pool, shot darts and sat around drinking in small clusters. While it wasn’t his normal nigh-out scene, all in all, it wasn’t a bad way to spend an evening.

There was a distinct dearth in the way of female company, but that was the trouble with being in the middle of nowhere—the pickings were slim, tanned, and tough, or taken.

The sliver that remained were looking for husbands in the wrong place.

The bar door swung open on that depressing thought, framing a small silhouette.

The tension AJ didn’t know he’d been holding dissolved.

Lil made her way to the bar, choosing a stool at the far end, half-hidden in the shadows.

AJ finished off his beer, stood up, and walked over to her, stopping short of her, a strange tightness in his throat at the sight. For the first time since their kiss at the qualifier, she’d worn her hair down and loose, her glossy black curls tumbling in a riot from beneath her hat. Adding to the gut punch of it all, she’d lined her thunderstorm eyes in black, and colored her full lips red, making them impossible to ignore.

The memory of sparking gray eyes and small callused hands wrapping around his neck to pull him deeper into a kiss pushed its way to the forefront of his mind, and fast on its heels, the memory of her scent, sweet and rich as bourbon infused with vanilla.

“Now where’ve you been?” he asked, only after collecting himself, unable to ignore the satiny texture of her smooth brown skin in the neon bar lighting.

Face pleasantly bland, Lil shrugged. “Just pissin’ in the wind.”

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