Page 68 of The Wildest Ride

“Two fingers,” she said.

AJ’s smile returned. “Good. What’s your birthday?”

“October 26.”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-seven.” Her answers came fast and curt, which was reassuring since it was both like her and further sign that she wasn’t experiencing any obvious cognitive side effects.

“What’s your address?” he asked, getting a little trickier with the questions.

“1000 Bear Lane, Muskogee, Oklahoma 74447.”

She rattled off the numbers without thinking, so he threw her a harder one. “What’s thirty-six times seventy-two?”

“Seriously? I couldn’t tell you that before I hit my head.”

AJ responded with a withering look and said, “Guess we’re going back in without the cows.”

Lil glared at him silently for less time than it would have taken him to do the problem in his head and came back with, “Two-thousand, five-hundred and ninety-two. Happy?”

AJ shook his head and took out his phone. He opened the calculator and nodded only after he confirmed the answer, grinning at her outrage. “Good work. You pass.”

She snorted. “It wasn’t a bad fall.”

“Better safe than sorry.”

“This from a rodeo cowboy?” She lifted an eyebrow.

“A man can be complex, Lil.”

She laughed out loud. “Sure they can.”

That she could smile like that, coltish and free even when she’d been thrown from her horse and they’d been blown badly off course, struck him as powerfully as the beauty of it did.

“You sit,” he said. “I’ll set up camp.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Do you even know how to set up a camp?”

AJ mirrored her expression, “Didn’t know you had to own a ranch to go camping.”

“Who knows what you people get up to in the city...” Lil’s words echoed between them, laced with electricity, and he decided it was a good time to set up camp. Clearing her throat, she wiped her palms on the front of her jeans, and added, “We’ll set up camp together.”

And that was just what they did.

20

“Who taught you how to start a fire?” Lil’s voice was filled with a strange combination of respect and confusion.

The fire came to life and AJ smiled. “The Old Man. He forced us all out enough times that we learned how to camp.”

“Your dad?” she asked.

AJ shook his head in a firm negative. “No. Henry Bowman—the founder of CityBoyz.”

“The CityBoyz are the ‘us,’ then?”

AJ nodded, adding the rest of the smaller kindling to the fire. “D and I were part of the first group to go through the program. There’ve been eight more since.”

---