Maisey Yates – Good Time Cowboy (страница 6)

LINDY’S COMPUTER MADE its special email chiming sound and she bent down to look.

Wyatt Dodge.

Her heart slammed against her sternum like a hammer going down on iron.

She braced herself. She didn’t know for what, except that obviously if he was actually emailing her now after making a big deal out of the fact that he didn’t need to email her, he was being an ass. That much she was certain of.

She clicked. Surprisingly, it was a comprehensive commentary on the brochures that she had sent.

“Leave it to you to be on topic when I expect you to be an asshole.” She muttered to herself as she straightened, then she turned and startled when she saw her brother Dane’s form filling the doorway.

“Talking to yourself?”

“I wasn’t talking to you.” She thought about pulling him in for a hug. Then didn’t. They weren’t really a hugging kind of family. Sometimes she wished they were. But she didn’t know how to change it now. “I didn’t think I was going to see you until September.”

“I was heading up from Red Bluff, going to an event in George, Washington. This is a little out of my way, but I figured that I would stop in for a bit.”

It was difficult to believe sometimes that Dane was her little brother. He towered over her by at least a foot. Broad-shouldered, rugged and with the kind of smile that made women weak in the knees. She was proud of him. And always a little bit nervous about just how he used his good looks and charm.

He was a bull rider.

All adrenaline, here and now and no thought for the future. Constantly living for the action, never worrying about the reaction.

But she loved him.

They’d had it rough growing up. Their dad had been in their lives only intermittently until he’d finally left for good, their mom making it impossible for them to have a relationship with him. Not—she supposed—that he’d tried that hard to change it.

They’d grown up in a single-wide trailer, a small space for three people, and yet Lindy had always felt like there were walls between them. Their mom was a proud woman. So proud she could hardly bend down to give her children a hug.

Distance. That was what she and Dane had both learned, and learned well. To rely on no one but themselves.

“How long are you going to be here?” she asked.

“The rodeo starts in two days. So really, I need to get out of here tomorrow. I don’t want to hassle with the traffic. Lots of people are going to be coming in on the highway.”

“This is one of the big ones, isn’t it?”

“Yep,” he said.

“Do you have any breaks after this?”

“I’ve got a few small events down South, just things to build up points. But there’s some downtime in July, before the big stuff. Sisters, Pendleton and Vegas.”

“I have a feeling that Wyatt is going to ask if you want to do some things over our Fourth of July event that we’re planning. I don’t actually know if he’s going to have you ride bulls.”

“Well, I’m not going to barrel race,” Dane said, as if that was the most ridiculous thing in the entire world.

“I’d pay to see that,” she said.

“It’s for girls,” he said.

“Right,” Lindy shot back, crossing her arms. “And mostly, you’re afraid that you’d get beaten.”

“Hell yeah,” he said. “You need precision for that. A connection with your horse. Do you know what you need to ride bulls? Big balls and the subtlety of a blunt instrument.”

Lindy knew that you needed more than that, particularly to get where Dane had gotten in life. Where Damien had helped him get. She resisted asking about that. Asking about Damien. She knew that he was still around, managing various aspects of different riders’ careers. But not Dane’s.

The minute that Dane had found out about Damien’s infidelity, Dane had gone scorched-earth-no-survivors on his brother-in-law.

In fact, he had done what he could to break off Damien’s relationship with the professional association. He hadn’t been entirely successful, but she knew that he had convinced several riders to start working with outside PR people and refuse to work with Damien.

Whatever she thought about her brother’s day-to-day morality, he had come through for her in the end. The two of them against the world.

“So, basically you’re crashing on my couch overnight?” There would be no crashing on her couch. She lived in a gigantic house all by herself. There were more than enough bedrooms for Dane to have his pick.

In point of fact, she would be surprised if he ended up spending the night at her place. It was more likely that he would end up in the Gold Valley Saloon picking up a new conquest.

“That’s about the size of it,” he said.

“You know you’re always welcome.”

She sighed heavily, and then lifted her hands above her head, locking them together and flexing them backward, stretching herself upward from the center of her chest, drawing her shoulder blades down and trying to release some of the tension in her body.

“I think you’re doing too much,” Dane commented, following her out of her office and into the main dining room of Grassroots Winery.

Over the past couple of years Lindy had overhauled the facility and opened a satellite tasting room in the town of Copper Ridge.

The dining room—where they hosted lunches, weddings, parties and pretty much anything else—was a converted barn that had been on the property for years, now carefully crafted into a rustic and elegant setting.

They had a few guests, sitting and eating cheese platters while drinking wine flights and visiting.

The vast, wooden chandeliers that hung down at the center of the high, arched ceiling were blazing with a golden glow, bathing the room in soft lighting.

It was beautiful. Perfect.

Hers.

The kind of thing she never could have imagined when she was a girl growing up in a Gold Valley trailer park on the dying edge of town.

A place with more empty buildings than businesses.

Her former sister-in-law, turned sister by choice, Sabrina Donnelly was standing behind the counter scribbling on an order form.

She and Sabrina had always had a lot in common. From the moment they’d met, Lindy felt like she’d found the sister of her heart. While her former mother-in-law and father-in-law had given her a less than welcoming reception into the family, Sabrina had been warm and open.

Of course, that had been due in part to the fact that Sabrina had been estranged from her father—over something to do with Liam Donnelly.

Liam Donnelly who now, finally, some fourteen years later, was Sabrina’s husband.

“Hey, Sabrina,” Dane said.

Sabrina looked up, smiling. “Hi yourself.” Then, her eyes fell to Lindy, and Lindy must have been telegraphing something because Sabrina’s expression changed to one of concern. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.”

“She’s doing too much,” Dane said.

“I am not doing too much.”

She was doing things, yes. Making changes. But they were all good, and she was happy with them.

It was likely that if she looked taxed it was because her mind kept going over and over the fact that Wyatt had finally sent her an email after resolutely ignoring her emails. And that it was clearly connected to the conversation they’d had yesterday.

But there was nothing she could do about any of that. She had the exact amount of things to do that had to be done, and she had to deal with Wyatt Dodge.

All of that was regrettable in some form or another, but it was better than being impoverished. Better than being married to a man who was sleeping with other women behind her back.

All things considered, life was great.

It didn’t mean that her muscles weren’t tired and her neck wasn’t stiff, but still.

“I know that she is,” Sabrina said. “But, this looked like something might be going on in addition to that.”

“Nothing is going on,” she said.

Sabrina and Dane continued to stare at her.

“There isn’t,” she said, defensively. “I mean I’m navigating the Wyatt Dodge situation, but other than that...”