Their Ex's Redrock Dawn (Texas Alpha Biker) (8 page)

Maybe his quick and sure reactions were from being ex-military. It wasn’t long ago he’d been eating sand and making life-and-death decisions every hour. To say he was hyper-alert was an understatement.

“How did you know?” she sobbed.

“Ex-military thing,” he grumbled. “Come on, I’m taking you to the truck, baby.”

“’kay,” she whimpered into his neck; she was shaking and it took him a while to calm her down, while she sat in the passenger side of the truck. Two vehicles pulled past them, with the drivers slowing to ask if they needed help. One knew Carly, and Zeb asked them if they could call a tow truck.

“I’m going to push your car out of the way, baby. Sit tight,” he told her.

What he did first, though, was look under her car. The puddle he saw of pinkish liquid made him cuss.

Just then a tow truck showed up; quick in a small town. He let the guy talk to Carly, but as the tow truck driver was hooking Carly’s car up, Zeb said, “Don’t try to fix it. Just drop it and I’ll be by in the morning. I want to look it over.”

“Sure,” the tow truck driver said.

Zeb gave him his cell number and he went back to Carly, carrying her suitcases.

“You know they are going to wonder.” Carly sniffled. “About you and me being together. It’s a small town.”

Zeb grabbed her hand across the seat and lifted her knuckles to his lips to kiss. “The first words out of my mouth is, let them damn well wonder,” he said, but then he edited it. “But it’s your small town.”

“I don’t care if anyone knows,” she whispered. “But I know you want to wait.”

“It’s best,” he said against her knuckles, and he was thinking it was becoming vitally important.

“I’ll pass a rumor around that you are a new WTSF badass. That should hold everyone’s tongue, but get ladies flocking to you to introduce you to their assets.”

Zeb chuckled, at a not-appropriate chuckling moment, but she was too cute. Then he sobered ... he’d nearly lost her. That was
not
happening again. “I’ve got the best assets right here, and what is a WTSF badass?”

Her gaze grew heated with his comment on her voluptuous assets, as she said, “All the men at WTSF are badasses. It’s known around.”

“I might fit in,” he muttered. “Right now, we’ll take your things to my motel room.”

“I like that I don’t have to ask to stay with you,” she murmured. “You saved my life, Zeb.”

“That’s in my job description from now on, sweetness.”

––––––––

T
hey didn’t make it to the motel because Carly got a call from her boss. Then Zeb had to tell her—

“Tula is in that beauty contest, Carly. I followed her into town because she’s following the beauty contest circuit.”

“The contest my boss just demanded I go oversee the preparations for
to
-day,” Carly exclaimed. Zeb nodded, glancing at her as he drove. “I’m judging it too, damn it,” she muttered.

“I know, baby,” Zeb muttered back. “I’d picked that up.”

“Just great,” Carly whispered, tugging on the end of her ponytail. “I have to judge
your
wife.”

“Ex-wife as fast as I can make it,” Zeb growled.

Carly’s worried gaze looked at him. “They’re both likely there where we’re going, Zeb.”

All he could do was sneer so he wouldn’t cuss sharply and scare her. “Yeah,” he uttered.

But he had a plan by the time they pulled into the back of the fairgrounds.

“So if they can hide and cheat, we can hide and cheat,” Carly said, repeating the important part of his plan.

He nodded. “And when in trouble of maybe being caught, fucking lie.”

“Okay,” she said. “I’d be happy to lie to my asshole, but I sure hope I won’t see him.”

“You said he should be at the rodeo side, not over on this side.”

“Yes, this side is where Tula’s at,” Carly reminded him. 

He hooked her neck and pulled her in for a quick kiss. “Get in, get it done, and get out, sweetness. I’ll be around.”

She patted his chest. “Okay, baby.”

He gave her a heated look. “I like that as much as ‘honey.’”

Carly walked toward the auditorium with a glance back to see Zeb’s big body moving off toward the rodeo rings. Well, he wouldn’t want his freaking wife to see him, she supposed, so he was going off to what? Spy on Rick? She didn’t know what she thought he’d be doing, while she did her job. Maybe she was just still shaking from that car thing, but she felt wrung tight.

So when she bumped into all that was fine about Justice Walkinghorse—she didn’t just meet him, she ran right into him around a blind corner and she ended up against his chest. Wow. He was built as good as he looked. Every woman worth her salt in town watched Justice Walkinghorse. He was that fine. Unfortunately, he was that much younger than her, but a girl could look. Or feel, as she was doing, before Justice helped her step back without falling over.

“Carly, you all right?”

“Oh heck yeah, sorry about that, Justice,” she muttered, nervously. She noticed he was decked out officially in his marshal’s shirt with his jeans painted on him, and a wide-brimmed, light-colored cowboy hat. Her gaze stuck on the badge hanging off his belt in front of his hips.

“I wasn’t looking,” she offered, and she looked up under his hat at him.

She noticed he looked kind of disturbed, in a way men looked with etched and stony features. She was starting to think he was mad at her running into him.

But he clasped his warm hand on her arm, and he muttered, “Cheaters damn well bust my ass.”

Carly gasped inwardly, expecting Justice to hail retribution down on her for cheating with Zeb. Justice must have seen them together, and she cringed when he said, “Sweetheart, I hate to be the one to tell you this, but I cannot pretend I didn’t see what I damn well saw and I sure as hell am not pretending I don’t need to tell you about it.”

Carly was so certain that she knew what Justice was going to say that she got stuck working out his words, then it dawned on her. “Tell me about what?” she asked, half exclaiming.

Justice’s hand warmed up and down her arm as he tilted his head and leaned closer so the wide brim of his hat closed them in while his voice rumbled lowly. “You need anything, babe, anything at all, I’m here.”

Carly felt a very inappropriate shiver course through her at Justice’s intimate words, then she consoled herself over her reaction because it was
the
beautiful Justice Walkinghorse she was shivering about.

“I walked up on your husband, Carly, doing another woman in one of the fairground’s back offices. Fucking hate cheaters,” he finished on a male growl of anger.

Carly was so surprised she must have looked the part of stunned and devastated, because Justice hauled her up and into his arms. Whoa.

If she’d not just been in the best embraces God ever created with Zeb, she might be interested in how good it felt to be hugged by the younger and clearly rip-muscled Justice. She
so
wished she could at least brag about it around town, because every woman in town would be flaming jealous. They all knew Justice had been a one-woman man so far, and since he’d lost that girl he’d not set his whiskey-colored eyes on another young woman.

Carly was kind of overwhelmed, but she did remember Zeb telling her when in doubt to lie. She took a couple healthy sniffs of Justice’s unique evergreen scent, and maybe a tiny feel up his hard body with her softer one to remember when she was eighty, and then she disengaged gently from him and stepped back. With space, she realized that what Justice had revealed cut her deeply. How could she not know Rick was such a lowlife?

But to Justice, as calmly as she could, she said, “I have a private investigator trying to catch him so he can’t weasel out of claiming he’s not cheating on me, and I need you to keep it quiet that you told me about this.”

“So you know,” Justice uttered, then he looked deeper into her gaze as if he were pulling out information. “You’re hiding hurt, babe, and I get that. But you need backup, or just a beer with a man that appreciates your charms, you let me know.”

Wow, he appreciated her charms? First she knew of that. She blushed a little, and smiled up at him, softly saying, “Thanks, Justice.”

He lifted his chin to her. “Sweet as hell,” he muttered, then he stepped past her. “You got my number anytime you need anything, Carly.”

Carly watched Justice’s broad shoulders and jean-clad ass stride away as she took a few moments to center her thoughts.

“Damn bastard,” she muttered about her freaking husband screwing another woman, while he thought his wife was gone doing her job.

It just made her skin crawl every time she thought about the fact that she’d taken Rick back. She knew she’d been reeling from Cabe hooking up with Rusty Harper. No one in town had seen that one coming. So maybe she’d had a little of the “why could Rusty get Cabe when she couldn’t” going on. Then to feel like less of a chump for pining after Cabe, she’d let Rick convince her to try their marriage again. To her it had been a big, blaring sign saying, “See, I
can
get a guy, everybody!”

She’d done it for all the wrong reasons, so she wasn’t guiltless in her marriage woes. But she really hadn’t gotten married without believing it would work that first time. The second time ... not so much. Maybe she’d been curious to see what Rick would do, or likely it had been a way to have a man and not just be that dumped single gal. Either way, she hadn’t really been into it the second time around.

In fact, just that weekend she had decided she needed to change that attitude, and she was trying to give her marriage a real effort. But Rick had shut her down and wouldn’t go out with her or notice how provocatively she had dressed.

Carly got tears in her eyes and brushed at them angrily. “He wasn’t paying attention to me, because he was all tied up with Tula,” she muttered, saying Tula’s name like it was a nasty word. And it
was
.

She was going to show them, though. She didn’t need Rick, and skanky Tula could have his rotten ass. In fact—

“If this hadn’t happened and I had met Zeb while still thinking I was in a real marriage, I would have been in big trouble.”

Carly started walking again, thinking the one thing she’d not realized her entire life, because it hadn’t happened before, which was when you met a man that was good for you—you just
knew
it. Right in your gut. No doubts. It was an amazing feeling, and she had it for Zeb.

She was pretty sure Zeb had it for her. So people might find it strange how it all went down, but that didn’t matter because they hadn’t had that “he’s
the
one” feeling before. It was powerful.

Feeling so much better after the trashy news about Rick, Carly put a swing in her hips as she went toward the fairgrounds amphitheater. When she was walking down the inclined aisle past audience chairs toward the judges’ table, Carly saw freaking Cabe Santos sitting at the table along with two other judges; one was the mayor and the other the fairgrounds director.

Nobody at work had told her Cabe was going to be another judge for the pageant. Of course, Vincent and Cabe were so wrapped up in their new ladies that when they were around they were distracted. Carly took a deep breath—then she realized seeing Cabe away from work in this atmosphere wasn’t so bad. They’d been friends for years. She also realized she’d not been feeling bad over losing a chance with Cabe as much as she’d felt horrible her marriage wasn’t working. Cabe had told her once it was a waste to pine over someone that wasn’t into you, like he’d done with his wife.

Carly saw that without even realizing it, since Cabe said it, she’d let go of her fanciful crush on him. If some guy wasn’t into her, they just weren’t into her, and she sure didn’t need to
try
to make them into her. Not when if she’d just wait long enough, and be open enough, the guy that was totally
in
to her as much as she was into him would come along.

So walking up to Cabe knowing she was over the moon into Zeb wasn’t really hard at all.

But seeing freaking Tula Littlebird Andersen up close was.

––––––––

Z
eb watched Rick Shaw watching Carly. Then Zeb watched Shaw watching Carly and Tula interact for the few moments they had to, while rehearsing the timing of the upcoming pageant. The two reasons he knew it was Shaw was one, he’d seen a photo at Carly’s house, and two, Shaw was hiding and acting supremely nervous when the two women were facing each other.

Zeb’s vantage point was above in the scaffolding. Maybe the reason he’d picked that strategic spot was his sniper training, but he could see all he needed to see from where he crouched.

And Tula couldn’t see him.

First he watched Shaw, while Shaw nervously paced behind the edge of the curtain where Carly or Tula on the far side of the stage couldn’t see him. Shaw kept digging his hand through his hair as if very agitated while he glared at Carly. Carly was oblivious of his nasty looks, while sitting at the judging table further out in the audience.

Zeb pondered that glare, because it was an aggravated and hateful look where Carly couldn’t see it. Shaw took out his cell phone and he punched some letters, and then he stalked out the rear of the backstage area. Zeb got up on silent feet, and he walked as far as he could on the scaffolding to see where Shaw was going.

Right out the stage door.

Zeb was going to climb down and follow Shaw when Tula came out on the stage. He stopped and looked at her. He hadn’t seen her in a year and a half, not counting when she was being deep-throated by that tree when he’d first finally found her, because then he really hadn’t been able to see her.

She was a beautiful woman, and he could see the changes in her that twenty-one months had brought. She’d let her straight black hair grow out, and he was amazed to see her breasts had to be at least a size and a half larger than what he was used to. He’d totally missed that, blinded by rage when he’d first seen her against that tree with Shaw’s tongue down her throat.