Dynomite: A Stepbrother Cowboy Romance (25 page)

She was standing at the dresser messing with her hair. She’d put on a jewel green, form-hugging dress. I’d only seen her this dolled up at the cocktail party she’d thrown for me, and she looked good in heels. They shaped her calves. I was still lounging in bed as it would take me a quarter of the time it took her to ready myself. Man, I was reveling in the luxury of having what you might call a “girlfriend.” This looker was mine, all mine. I just couldn’t tell the world yet for fear of being branded a deviant.

From the start, she sounded hesitant. “Well. It’s Mason’s party, and I don’t think he’ll take too kindly to you. On the other hand, he can’t say a damned thing because you’re a beloved rodeo star who’s currently first in the bareback standings. He’s not gonna open his mouth if we’re sitting at the same table together.”

“Not holding hands.”

April swiveled around to give me that pitiful sorrowful look—the look you’d give to a kid who had to go to bed early. “I think it’s best if we break everyone in slowly. Our parents are coming back next week and we’ll have our hands full just telling them. Hoping they don’t have a heart attack.”

I raised myself on an elbow. “Or we could
not
tell them. We’re fucking adults, April. We’re not high school seniors giving each other head behind the barn anymore.”

She giggled and went back to her hair. “It wasn’t the barn. It was in the loader bucket, right after you told me where to find Bull Gravy.”

That memory filled me with all kinds of gooey warmth. “Who’s still standing there proudly,” I reminded her. April had told school officials that some hoods from Buddy Hackett High had placed the statue on her property to get her in trouble. She mentioned that it looked sort of good there, her father being a rancher, that Cliff would be willing to buy it from the school. Eventually they agreed for an outrageous sum. With that dough they bought a new statue more fitting for molding the minds of youngsters, something without a giant hard-on. I even forget what it was, maybe a giant bunny. Or a turkey—aren’t they supposed to be stupid?

“Oh yes,” April agreed. “He’s standing upright at attention overlooking your corral.”

She called it “your corral,” but the truth was miles away from that. She had a plan to approach Marcus about buying five percent of the ranch from him. That would put Marcus into a minority shareholder position, and she could theoretically be free of his influence forever. The truth was much more complicated of course. Marcus was still blood, like it or not, and he’d be sticking his worthless opinions over everything till the cows came home. But April had a nest egg, was thinking about the future, and had a level head. I liked that about her. I’d gladly contribute my paltry circuit winnings.

I guess that meant that I was planning a concrete, secure future with her. I was, I really was. Deep down inside. There were quite a few hurdles to overcome first. The biggest and most immediate was our parents. As predicted, they were never divorcing. They were good for each other. But they might get a little freaked out at the idea of their kids dancing the mattress jig. This was a close-knit community, but that was a bit too close for comfort.

Still, we had no fucking choice but to forge ahead. I was too old and experienced to tolerate a bunch of drama that had more twists than a pretzel factory. That might be okay for high schoolers or teens. But I’d been to hell and back since then. I was only vaguely the same person. I killed my enemies while they slept. I hunted down nuclear weapons that’d fallen into bad hands. I rode in high-speed assault boats in the Indian Ocean. I had more guts than you could hang on a fence. I’d come too far to fuck around with a few people’s senses of propriety. You just don’t rile the wagon master.

I got out of bed and went to stand behind April. Of course when I put my hands on her shoulders, my dick got hard. That was a given. I didn’t plan to mess her up, though. She was too perfectly coiffed for that. “You’ve got more curves than a barrel of snakes,” I purred against her neck. I knew this made her shiver, and I was right. She hunched her shoulders up and shined a smile at our reflection in the mirror.

“Now, you stop that, Mister Dynomite. I’ve got my hair perfectly scrunched. And I may have broken up with Mason but he wants to introduce me to some big cattleman from the Central Valley. I don’t want to look all rode hard and put away wet.”

She stalked off to put on more makeup, but not before I slapped her ass. That was how we were together. She was my pride and joy, my reason for getting up in the morning, the sunshine of my life. We’d already wasted enough years denying ourselves, our own natures. Our love for each other.

I knew I’d have to get used to these society functions. Both as Cliff Pleasure’s lead cow boss and as a rodeo star, I had get used to being a figure in the community. So April and I went to the fucking country club and perused the silent auction items without me once tapping her on the behind. Olivia came up to us with a strange look on her face. She’d found a new fancy man to support her, some local appliance store magnate twice her age. She only seemed to care about a man’s wallet, not about whether she sincerely liked him.

“
Aprilllll
,” Olivia said with wide, frightened eyes.

“What?” laughed April.

“Are you two guys
together
, or what?”

April put her hand on her chest. “What makes you say
that
?” It was obvious April hadn’t told her former best friend about us, and I was somewhat miffed.

“Because of the way you look at each other. Anyone can tell. You’re a couple, aren’t you?”

“Anyone can tell?” I echoed. That meant that Mason Simon, sitting at a table with a white tablecloth and a glamorous tennis star named Carla, could tell. That meant Marcus Seaver, more slippery than a pocketful of pudding, could tell. Anyone could tell?

“Well,
sure
,” said Olivia. “You’re laughing and chatting and standing way too close together for siblings.”

“We
are
siblings,” I started to say, but April cut me off.

“It’s true, Olivia. And we’re not ashamed of it. We’re just not ready to announce it to the world. We’re waiting for our parents to get back from Europe.”

“Oh, your secret is safe with me.”

Somehow I doubted that. I doubted that very fucking much. Olivia wasn’t the most trustworthy soul on the planet. There were a lot of nooses in her family tree.

I wrote down a bid for a cruise to Puerto Vallarta. Mason Simon saw me—he was bidding on some asinine gold-plated revolver—and sidled over to me, all spy-like.

“I want you to know there are no hard feelings.”

I played dumb. “Why should there be hard feelings?”

How quick his friendly face switched to one of bitter anger. “You know. April Pleasure. If she wants to find more satisfaction in your filthy bed, fine with me. But her dad hired me as CEO for a reason. And I’m not going anywhere.”

I hadn’t really thought of that. Not only was I up against that deviant Marcus Seaver, I had Hardscrabble’s CEO to contend with. I’d managed to make some formidable enemies in Last Chance in the few months I’d spent there.

I said something lame like “didn’t expect you to go anywhere” before ambling off like I didn’t care. But later I went back to the cruise bid sheet and saw he’d immediately outbid me by like a hundred dollars. I found out what time the bids closed and made a note to be back then to raise my bid too.

I saw Marcus talking to April so I steered clear. No sense in dredging up shitty memories of regrettable events. Or risk me belting him one in the fucking nose. But the more I saw of pervy ol’ Marc, the more those memories riled me. I knew if I kept running into him, there’d be a showdown. I had too much bad blood with too many people in Last Chance to ever avoid a fucking showdown, that was for sure. And the more involved I became with April, the more it pissed me off that fucking Marcus owned the majority of April’s family ranch.

But even if I wanted to tell him to fuck off and die, I was distracted by another unfortunate event.

A ruckus was coming from over by the bathrooms. Everyone turned their attention there, and I cleaved through the crowd to get to the source of the yelling.

Intuitively I knew it was Sequoia. He’d been riding for a fall ever since I’d returned from overseas—and probably before. Believe it or not, but being a rodeo clown was a rough business. In our circuit, clowns still protected fallen riders by distracting bulls, exposing themselves to huge risks. But no one appreciated the job or gave Sequoia recognition, maybe because he was still forced to wear clownish makeup and attire.

He was clearly crapulous, and had been for some time. He even clutched a bottle of bum wine, some Thunderbird or some such crap, I can’t remember. A couple of dudes in cowboy hats were trying to wrest the bottle from him, and he was shouting,

“I’m a bullfighter! Bullfighters have a long and noble tradition in the rodeo!”

“There’s Dyno Drummond,” someone said. “He’s friends with this alkie.”

“Dyno, Dyno,” everyone chanted, eager to get rid of the Indian problem. “Take care of your friend. Get him out of here before the live auction starts.”

“No problem,” I assured them. “But he’s right. They don’t really call them clowns around here. He’s a bullfighter, sure enough. Sequoia, let me have that bottle.”

I was surprised he gave me the bottle readily. But he kept yelling at the sky in general. “You don’t know how hard it is to do the T-step inside the bull’s shoulder! I’ve been hooked dozens of times!”

“Dry up,” someone sneered.

“Get a room,” someone else said, reminding me that my own position in the community wasn’t totally cemented. Apparently some people weren’t above throwing out a leftover gay slur from high school.

“Come on.” I took Sequoia by the arm and steered him behind the bathroom building, closer to the golf pro shop. Here, not many people could watch us. I had no idea where April had gone. When I glanced back over to where she’d been standing with Marcus, they were both gone. I couldn’t do anything about it, as I needed to deal with the situation at hand.

“Look,” I said, putting the vile bottle down behind a garbage can. “You can’t keep doing this, Yazzie. You’ve got to sober up, like I did. It’s not that hard. If you want to get away from your fucking dad, away from the welfare line, you’ve got a good start. You’ve got your army money, your benefits, and now you’ve got the rodeo salary. You can get your own place.”

“Let’s get a place together,” Sequoia bawled in that drawling, shouting way of drunks. “We can get a dog. I want a dog, Dyno. Don’t you want a dog?”

“A dog sounds fine. What sort of dog you want?”

“I used to have a lab,” Sequoia drawled, his mouth askew. “He was hit by a tractor though. Scruffy was the best dog in the world. He used to sleep in my bed with his head on my pillow. He had his own language. A bone was called a ‘booya.’ Where’d that bottle go?”

“We polished it, remember?”

Sequoia looked blank. “Oh. We need to get a dog, Dyno.”

He was stuck on an endless loop where the same ideas kept replaying over and over. His long-term memory was shot, so he just kept talking about the dog. My mind started wandering, wondering how I could get him back to his house or at least somewhere safer nearby. There was a Days Inn down the block that I thought I remembered seeing. I’d have to duck out and take him there and miss the Puerto Vallarta bid closing.

All this shit was going through my head when a fresh ruckus arose fifty, sixty yards off, over by the pool.

A few men were rushing there, barking short little commands. The intuitive section of my brain was on high alert. I
knew
I heard a high-pitched feminine voice. And that voice was crying out for help.

“He wouldn’t always bring the ball back, but man, did Scruffy know how to fetch!” drawled Sequoia.

I shook him by the arm. “Hey.” I hoped to change the subject stuck on “rewind” in his brain. “Let’s go see what the uproar is all about. What do you say?”

But he’d moved onto the sobbing stage. “I’m just a fucking rodeo clown, let’s face it. I’ll die in the arena anyway!”

Getting fed up, I hauled him off by the arm. “Come on. Taking care of other people is a higher calling, Yazzie. When you take your mind off your own problems and help others, you’re automatically elevated. That’s what we learned in the service.”

“I learned nothing in the service. Nothing other than ‘every man for himself.’ The service just teaches you to be a selfish prick.”

“What’s up?” I asked a guy rushing by with a bolo tie around his neck.

“I think a woman’s in distress,” he said. “Some guy attacked her.”

I knew instantly what it was all about. I didn’t even drag my drunken friend with me this time.

APRIL

N
o good deed
goes unpunished.

It was obvious from the get-go that my stupid confidence in Olivia would turn around and bite me in the ass.

Almost as soon as she drifted off with another group of people, I felt the inquiring eyes on me. Dyno had vanished to bid on something—a new saddle, he’d said—so I didn’t know if he felt the stares too.