Whirlwind (The Champions 1)

“Lexie,” he said, slowing his pace, “I hope you won’t hold what happened today against me. I should’ve told you up front that I was working for Tolman.”

“Then why didn’t you?” She kept on walking. “Di

dn’t Brock Tolman tell you how much my family hates him?”

“Not exactly. But I had a pretty good idea of how things stood.”

She stopped and turned to face him. “So was it your idea or your boss’s to have that drunk come on to me so you could rush to my rescue?”

“What?”

It was all Lexie could do to keep from slapping that innocent look off his face. “Don’t play dumb with me. I saw you on the midway, paying the man off. You paid him extra for getting his nose busted. So whose idea was it?”

He hesitated, a faint smile playing around his mouth. Did he think this was funny?

“Do you have any idea how scared I was?” she demanded.

“He wouldn’t have hurt you. He wasn’t even drunk, just splashed with some cheap whiskey.”

Lexie’s simmering anger boiled over. “I didn’t know that. I thought I was about to be raped, or maybe worse. I was getting ready to fight for my life when that brute stumbled into the fence.”

He exhaled, shaking his head. “All right. It was a stupid idea that got out of hand. I just wanted to meet you and pass on my boss’s offer to buy your bull. I figured if I’d come to your rescue, you’d be more inclined to listen.”

“It was more than a stupid idea. It was a low-down, dirty trick.”

“Agreed.” His expression relaxed into a charming grin. “So now that we’ve got that out of the way, I’m hoping you’ll let me buy you a beer and apologize.”

The man had cojones. She had to give him that. But turning him down would be the greatest pleasure she’d had all day.

“My foreman’s waiting for me,” she said. “We’ve got four bulls to load and drive home. I need to go now. But even if I had time to spare, I wouldn’t drink with you if you were the last man on earth!”

“Copy that.” He laughed. “But this game isn’t over. I’ll be seeing you around, Miss Lexie Champion. You and that bull of yours.”

Lexie pretended not to hear him as she strode away. But her cheeks were burning. Shane Tully’s brassy self-confidence riled her. He was cocky and arrogant—everything she disliked in a man. But the attraction was there, like a deep, sensual tingling beneath her skin. That attraction made her feel weak and vulnerable when she wanted to be strong—like her sister Tess, who could handle any crisis and stand up to any man.

But never mind. The rodeo was over. She was going home. And if she encountered Shane again on the PBR circuit, all she had to do was ignore him. That would be easy enough—wouldn’t it?

CHAPTER THREE

BY THE TIME THE DARKNESS PALED ABOVE THE DESERT HILLS, THE journey was nearly over. Lexie was at the wheel now, with Ruben asleep in the back seat. Driving south along the two-lane ribbon of highway, she watched the morning light steal over the Sonoran Desert, casting the armies of tall saguaro into long shadows and turning the barbed spines of teddy bear cholla to glistening silver. Here and there, stands of ironwood, mesquite, and paloverde dotted the landscape with clumps of bright olive green.

The flowering season was at an end. The brilliant hues of blooming cactus, the golden riot of brittlebush, and the orange blaze of mallows and poppies had faded. Here and there, spikes of ocotillo still sported drooping red flags, but otherwise, the colors of the southwest Arizona desert had softened into muted shades of green and gray, with stretches of mountain—bare rocks looking like broken chunks of chocolate—jutting out of the landscape.

Lexie yawned and twisted the kinks out of her neck. She was tempted to stop and get out of the truck to stretch her cramped legs, but Ruben was sleeping soundly, and the ranch was less than an hour away—nestled in a grassy mountain meadowland between the boundaries of federal wilderness and the Tohono O’odham reservation.

The ranch had been in Lexie’s family since her great-grandfather’s generation. In the old days they’d run ten thousand head of Hereford cattle in the canyons, foothills, and open desert below, paying money to the Bureau of Land Management for grazing permits. But those prosperous times had passed as the government canceled the grazing leases and converted the desert to protected wilderness, leaving only privately owned ranchland for the Champions and other cattle-raising families.

With less than seven hundred acres available for grazing, it had been Lexie’s father, Bert Champion, who’d come up with the idea of bucking stock. He’d used some of the cash from selling off his herd to buy a pair of retired bucking bulls, half brothers, with a pedigree going back to the great Oscar, and a dozen heifers from the White Park British line. Learning the business through trial and error, breeding the best animals, raising the calves, choosing the most promising two-year-old buckers, and training them for rodeo work had taken, literally, years. All the hard work, money, patience, and hope were just beginning to pay off. The tragedy was that Bert wouldn’t be here to see it. And neither would his only son, Jack. Only Bert’s daughters were left to carry on the legacy.

With the sun coming up behind her, Lexie took the hard-packed dirt road that cut off the highway to the left, toward the pass that overlooked the ranch. The spot was more than familiar. Every school day for years, she, her sisters, and her brother had waited there for the bus into Ajo. They’d waited again after school for someone from the ranch to pick them up. It was an easy drive in a pickup or SUV. But towing a long trailer, loaded with animals, up the narrow, winding road and down the other side was something else again.

She slowed the truck to a crawl over the washboard surface, mindful of the precious cargo behind her. A sudden bump or lurch could be enough to injure a bull’s leg. There was another approach to the ranch, a graded road that cut across the reservation to the east, but since it added two hours to the time from Kingman, Lexie had chosen the more direct route.

“Want me to drive?” Ruben had awakened and was sitting up in back.

“No, I can make it home. It’s not much farther.”

“Fine.” Ruben was a man of few words. He’d come to work for the Champions seventeen years ago, when Lexie was a little girl. Widowed now, he was an elder in his tribe. He had two married daughters living on the reservation, but his home, for years, had been a small converted trailer on the ranch. His needs were simple, his loyalties beyond question.