AllFreeNovel
Share Us
CHAPTER NINE
MACK EASED HIS shoulders against the back of the car seat. Just about every muscle ached, either from his ride or from the fight. But it was a good pain, and Mack welcomed it. The lack of sleep was more of a problem right now, with a two-hour drive ahead of them to get back to Stormcloud. But he wouldn’t exchange a moment’s sleep for what he and Bindi had shared last night.
She’d been wild and even a bit naughty—which had caught him unawares, nothing like the good-girl image she projected—and he’d been a willing participant in her hunger to satiate them both.
Bindi had been the first to stir this morning, wakening him with a light kiss on the lips just as the sun touched the sky. “Thank you,” she murmured, and he wondered why there was sadness in her tone. And then she was up and dressed before he could stop her. He was slower, watching her out of the corner of his eye. She glared at him in a way that told him he needed to hurry. It seemed the bubble of intimacy they’d been cocooned in last night no longer surrounded them. A wall had gone up in Bindi’s eyes, her face closed and shuttered.
Sounds from the parking lot suggested there were other early risers about, as well. Time to get up and get moving, before they were discovered in their secret hideaway.
Bindi rolled up the swag as he finished getting dressed, and efficiently tied her hair back in a braid, looking neat and put-together once more, not at all like the untamed woman he’d been with last night.
He wondered if she was thinking about the man who’d accosted her last night. He needed to know more about that man, and what he’d meant when he said he wasn’t done with her. But her pale face and the way she strode over the dry grass toward his truck made him decide to leave the conversation for now. There would be plenty of time later.
They’d bought a hurried breakfast of a bacon and egg roll—which’d been damn delicious, especially seeing as how he missed dinner—and then Bindi had requested they head back to the station straight away. He was fine with that; he could check out the woodchopping and the blue-ribbon heifers another day. Bindi had said she’d shower and change when they got home, so he’d swapped his black shirt with the pearlescent buttons and silver thread work on the collar for a clean, black T-shirt, leaving his hat on the console between them. She was still wearing that loose top and tight jeans from yesterday. And now that he knew what resided beneath those jeans, he was even more enamored by them.
The cabin of his truck had been silent for the past fifteen minutes as he navigated through the outskirts of town and ended up on the flat highway back to Dimbulah.
Chancing a glance over at Bindi, he decided it was time to end this impasse that’d inexplicably grown between them.
“You didn’t watch me ride last night.” His statement was only half accusation.
She gave him a startled look, then narrowed her eyes. “Yes, I did,” she retorted. “But I left as soon as I saw you were okay.”
“Oh.” Okay then. He gave her space to explain why she’d left, but she remained stubbornly silent, staring at the dry floodplains through the windshield. “It wasn’t my best ride. I have to admit, I was a little rusty, but I thought I did a pretty good job of—”
“I’m sure you did an excellent job of staying on that stupid bull. The thing you didn’t do such a good job of was wearing a helmet.” She glared at him, her nose ring flashing nearly as brightly as her eyes.
What did she mean? He never wore a helmet. A true cowboy always stuck to his trusty hat.
“You sustained a serious head injury last time you rode. Or don’t you remember that?”
“Of course, I do,” he said, frowning as sudden understanding hit him. She was about to lecture him on taking care of himself, looking out for his own safety. Well, he wasn’t having that.
But before he could say anything, she went on, “Don’t you have any respect for your own life? Why don’t you wear a helmet?”
“Because it’s my choice not to,” he said breezily, trying to take the sting out of his tone.
“Why? Because that stupid hat makes you look cool? Is that it?”
That might be part of it. To be a true bull-rider, you needed to look the part. “I know what I’m doing,” he replied hotly. “I use my instincts. All of us riders know how to land, to protect ourselves.”
She snorted. “That may be true, except for the one time when it’s not.”
“That fall wasn’t my fault…”
She jumped in before he could explain. “I’m not saying it was your fault. I’m pretty sure none of those riders plan to fall off those big-ass bulls. But it happens all the time. It happened to you.” Her dark eyes fixed on him, full of hurt and incrimination.
She wasn’t grasping what he meant. “No.” He shook his head. “That’s not it. My bull rope was sabotaged. Someone sliced almost all the way through it. That fall wasn’t an accident. Someone meant for me to get hurt.”
His declaration seemed to stop her mid-breath, and she shut her mouth with a click of her teeth, frowning at him. “What?” she asked eventually. “You never mentioned this before. You think someone wanted to see you fall off?”
“Yes, I do,” he replied quietly. “And I even know who it was.”
Confusion flickered over her pretty face. “But why didn’t you report it? Surely the police…or the pro-riding organization who runs the rodeos…someone should do something about it.”
“Because I can’t prove it. Because I spent weeks in hospital recovering from my injuries and it wasn’t until I retrieved my personal belongings from that night that I saw what’d happened to my bull rope.” He held up a hand as she opened her mouth to argue. “Trust me, I tried. But no one believed me. They all thought the head trauma had made me paranoid. My gut feelings aren’t enough to form a case against the woman who did this.”
“Woman?” Her dark eyebrows flew up into her hairline. “What woman?”
