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Chapter 3
The pretty blondewith the sweet southern drawl left. She didn't try to get my number, didn't make me any offers - she just left. Watching her walk away, I couldn't help but appreciate the nice curve of her ass and the dirt stains on her rump. I'd really like to see what she looked like with those jeans on the floor of my hotel room. Damn, the things I'd let her do to me.
But she wasn't making this easy. I was supposed to buy her a beer, she'd fawn all over me, and it wouldn't take long before I'd forget my craptastic ride. That was how this always worked in the past. A woman like that? Yeah. That was exactly how I liked them: real. Unfortunately, she was real enough to walk right away from my attempt to get her interest, but it sounded like I might get another chance.
I wasn't drunk enough to think she'd been serious when she said she'd meet me on the rail. Nah, that was clearly a brush off. What she didn't realize was how easy she'd just made it to find her again. I just had to narrow this down. She said she'd been at the event, but she wasn't with the drill team, so what had she been riding bareback to get...
My eyes flicked back to the bar where J.D. had been making a scene earlier. Damn, I was an idiot. Didn't take much to put those things together. A girl with a boy's name, the marks on her jeans to prove she'd been riding something hard, and no makeup? No wonder she didn't seem impressed with who I was. She was my competition.
The problem was that the feeling wasn't mutual. All around me were women who smelled like cheap perfume, had more plaster on their faces than I did in my house, and whose only interest was the bragging rights they'd get if they got me in bed. Oh, sure, I'd let 'em. Hell, I'd probably ask them. I wasn't that dumb, but it wasn't like I wanted to talk to them.
Her? Yeah, that short little chat wasn't going to be enough. That pretty little blonde had just given me something to work for, and I was definitely up to the challenge. About the only thing I'd figured out was that she was from Missouri. Wouldn't be hard to check that against the list of riders. And her name was Cody. Now I wanted to know if she was really riding bulls, why she'd gotten into it, and what made her tick.
When I'd seen her lean over the bar, yeah, I'd been checking out her ass. It was a pretty nice one, after all. When she'd ordered a beer and not some fruity drink? I was buying before my brain even caught up. Then she'd just walked away. She hadn't tried to play tough. She hadn't gone for another guy. She'd just walked away, and I sure as hell wasn't used to that.
"Drinking alone?"
The sultry voice warned me that I wouldn't be impressed before I even looked. Craning my head back proved I was right. The muffin top peeking out of her too-tight jeans wasn't hidden by the painted-on tank she wore. If she'd gone up a size or two, her figure would've been smokin'. Instead, she just looked real squished. Oh, she had some damned nice tits, but I wasn't interested. My eyes flicked back to the door on their own, and I debated which line would make the girl give up.
Before I could come up with something, another beer plopped down across from me. "The guys you are looking for are over there," Renato said, pointing at the bar. "My friend here had a bad day, and I'm taken." He ended with a wink, taking the sting out of the refusal.
"Oh," she breathed, but went exactly where he'd pointed.
"Buckle bunnies," Renato teased. "Didn't look like you were into that one."
"I'm not."
He huffed out a laugh. "Did look like you were into the blonde, though. Guess there's a first time for everything."
I wasn't keeping up. "What?"
"Ty McBride getting turned down. When was the last time that happened?"
I scoffed at his bad sense of humor. "Never. Sometimes they just want me to work for it. Where's Hannah, anyway?"
He grinned. "She didn't even make it till my ride. Fell asleep in my truck, so I took her back to the hotel and tucked her in."
"Sounds like the baby's kicking her ass."
He shrugged. "Pretty sure nothing does that. Now about this blonde. You really just let her walk out?"
Damn it. He wasn't going to let me off easy. Renato and I had been friends awhile, since well before he met Hannah. Ok, since I was a rookie myself. Long enough for him to know exactly how I felt about chasing girls, at any rate. My best answer was to tilt the Budweiser up and take a nice pull from it before changing the subject a bit.
"You hear there's a girl riding?" I asked.
"Yep. Tanner was talking about it earlier. Sounds like she broke her nose and just barely hung on for a full eight. Why?"
I tilted my head at the exit. "Because I think she just left, but her nose wasn't broken."
"Girl who rode today took a set of horns to the face." Renato lifted his hands. "Just sayin'. If your shiny new toy is trying to claim she's a bull rider, she might be full of it."
"No..." I kept trying to put all the pieces together in my mind. "She didn't say she was riding. Her jeans did. She said she was just another unimportant thing at this event."
He leaned back and scooped his bottle from the table. "A girl trying to ride bulls? Shit, Ty. Women don't have the arm strength for this. I'll be surprised if a girl lasts the weekend. She probably got her points at the bar on one of those mechanical things set to kindergarten mode."
But I didn't think so. The way she'd barely met my eyes? That sly little smile when I'd mentioned who I was? No, this girl had to be the real thing. I couldn't explain why, but I was sure of it. Renato's attitude also explained so much.
"What if she's for real?" I asked.
For a moment, he didn't answer. Renato was Brazilian. For years, he'd been harassed by the riders for being a Mexican, told to go home, and all of the basic shit we threw out at each other. He'd taken it better than most, but did have a swift right hand - for flipping the bird. Before his English was good enough to tell us off, he'd found a very clear method to make sure we all understood. It was part of the reason I'd always liked him.
"What are you getting at, Ty?" he asked.
"Well, after the crap we gave you, just imagine being a very small, very pretty, very talented girl trying to prove she's here to ride, not get ridden."
This time, when he tilted his bottle up, he didn't stop with a sip. The third time his Adam's apple bobbed, I knew he was honestly thinking about it. When he finally paused for a breath, I lifted a hand, signaling a waitress to bring us another round.
"You think I'm right, don't ya?" I pressed.
He huffed, but nodded his head. "No way a girl could do this. She'd have to start when she was little and be strong as hell. Bulls would throw her around too easy."
Something she said popped in my head. "Her dad wanted a son. He got her. What if she's worked just as hard for this as the rest of us, but being a woman made it harder?"
Renato opened his mouth to answer, then closed it. A second later, the waitress appeared, dropping a bottle before each of us. Unfortunately, Renato was a lot faster with his cash than I was - or fortunately, depending on the perspective, I supposed. Too bad I hated owing him one. The bastard knew it, too.
"How do you think the guys would take it?" I asked him again, refusing to give up.
He just waved me down. "Not good. Why do you care? If she can ride, then let her ride. If she can't, then let her break. Pretty damned sure I'm not her mama."
But that just didn't feel right. Something about the way Cody acted convinced me I'd just figured out why she'd walked away, and it was because she was trying real hard to not get noticed. The guys would never take a girl rider seriously, and most would do their best to make sure she gave up fast. But how to stop it? If Renato didn't even care, then the others would be ten times worse, so I decided to double down.
"What if it was Hannah?"
His beer thunked down on the table a little too hard. "Hannah is not riding bulls. She's pregnant."
"I mean before she got knocked up. What if she'd been riding bulls before you met her? How would you feel about the guys giving her shit?"
"You're assuming she'd be any good? Because she'd suck. The girl can barely walk. Staying on the back of a bull?" He winked to prove he was joking.
But I wasn't. "I'm serious, man. You were in love with that girl from the moment you saw her. Would it have been any different if she'd been trying to make history as the first woman in the PBR?"
His smile faded. Slowly, he licked his lips, then nodded, actually listening to me for once. "She says she never used to cry. You know that? Until she got pregnant, she swears she used to be strong enough not to cry." Holding the neck of his beer, he spun it in a pool of condensation. "But when we met, she was always crying. I hated it, and I hated that I couldn't stop it. You have no idea what it's like to see your girl crying and know you can't do a damned thing to make it better."
"Well, ya sorta did." I was probably the only person who knew their whole story, but he'd jumped to her rescue without hesitation.
"Yeah," he agreed. "Yeah, and if this girl rider is serious, I'll make jokes, but the nice ones. Deal?"
"Still don't know if my blonde is the rider yet, bud."
"True. But either way. If she rides serious, I'll treat her serious, how's that?"
I lifted my beer, saluting him. "Sounds like a plan. Keep this up, and you should move to Canada. Never knew you Mexicans were quite this nice."
"Fuck off!" But he was laughing again. "I don't even speak Spanish!"
"Least you finally learned how to speak English. Why'd you move to Texas anyway? Much better in Alberta."
"Snows in Alberta. Texas feels more like home."
Renato lifted his hand for another round, but I waved him off. "I'm done. Gonna head back to the hotel."
He checked his watch, making a production of it. "Already? Not even midnight and you haven't found a friend."
I knew what he was getting at, but I wasn't going to let him get under my skin. "Is that what we're calling them now?"
"You always take someone with you. Did your pretty blonde carry your dick out the door with her?"
This time, I got the chance to answer him with a middle finger. As I pushed through the milling bodies, I could hear him laughing, but I wasn't. That girl had really gotten to me, and I couldn't figure out why. I also couldn't shake it. Was it just because I thought she might be a bull rider? Not really.
Mostly, it was the guarded way she tried to keep me at arms’ length. A few times she'd smiled like she was honestly flattered, and when I'd called her pretty, I swore that had been a blush, but she didn't look like she believed it. That made me wonder what she did believe and why a girl like that was drinking alone in a place like this.
After every event, most of the riders found the closest bar. That was where the fans would congregate, and it made it so much easier to find some buckle bunny to spend a few hours with. There was nothing like a woman's body to make us forget how bad ours hurt. No one made it through a full weekend without getting dropped, stepped on, or banged up, at the very least. All too often, we woke up in an ambulance. Waking up beside a stranger was so much nicer, and if she got to be too high-maintenance, we could just find a better one for the next night. When the whole thing was over, we packed up and left, never needing to worry about pissing her off or buying flowers.
I wasn't the only one. Austin, Jake, and even Emilio were all known womanizers. Now, guys like Wes? He was saving himself for marriage or something stupid like that. Brody? There wasn't a woman on earth desperate enough to go home with him. So why was I walking to my truck all by myself?
Because I'd seen fear deep down in those blue eyes of hers, and I had no intention of screwing this up before I had the chance to learn all about her. If I took home a buckle bunny, I was pretty sure she'd hear about it. I figured I could last a few nights on my own. Hell, I might even ride better if I did some sleeping. If nothing else, I could call it an experiment, right?
Those all sounded like real good excuses if anyone asked. The truth was so much simpler. Not a single woman in there had anything on that girl with a boy's name. I had a funny feeling that when she looked at me, she didn't see dollar signs or ways to get her claws in me. She saw me, the idiot with really bad jokes. Those few short sentences were the closest thing I'd had to an honest conversation with a woman in years. And I wanted to see her smile - honestly smile, not the polite one she pasted on so easily. I wanted that smile to be for me, to know how those pink lips tasted, and to hear her breathe out my name. I wanted her, and none of these women came close. Tonight, I'd already had my share of disappointment. I really didn't need any more.
Hopefully, I'd get the chance to see her tomorrow, and this time, I'd make sure she didn't walk away.
