“There isn’t any legal agreement that can’t be undone.”
“No.” Chase shot to his feet then instantly regretted it. Hot shards of pain sizzled through his skull. He gripped his forehead with the hand not holding the deed he needed weeks ago, not now. Fucking whiskey was doing a tap dance behind his eyes. “This isn’t law and politics. Out here, a person is only as good as the last choice he’s made. You don’t understand.”
“No, I guess I don’t. I’ve come all this way to tell you that you won, that you got everything you wanted, that you don’t have to put the distillery in some far-off town where no one knows you and your life grows apart from your family and your land.”
“You should have called.” His tone was jacked. He couldn’t help it. His lungs burned and squeezed out extra air behind his words. Rodeo was his territory, his space, and he didn’t appreciate her coming into it, telling him what he should do and how he should be.
“I did call.”
For all that he had raised his voice, she lowered hers. Rodeo was loud as all get out—rock music blaring when the gate opened, the roar of the crowd, the clonk of the cattle bell all you could hear in hyper-focus, stay-alive mode—so when something quiet and soft and meaningful came, Chase stopped breathing and took note.
“My cell got crushed by a bull last night.” Sounded fucking lame to his own ears, and he had forgotten it until now, but it was the truth. “I’ll leave a ticket for you at Will Call. Biggest, baddest bull on the circuit. Put a few cowboys on life support. Might be a good show.”
The opening bell to unshed tears distorted her face. “I know this is who you are, but it’s not who you’re waiting to be. Your ideas are amazing and successful, and you have a way with people that few others have, and I can’t stay here and watch you risk all of that for eight seconds that might throw it all away.”
A natural female reaction. A natural mayoral response.
“Right,” said Chase, “Because risk isn’t a political luxury.”
It felt good, satisfying, to grind back the words that she so often dispensed. She was a politician; he was a bull rider. Trying to see
past that was as much of a fool’s game as climbing into the chute blindfolded.
“No.” Through tears, she gave a weak smile, almost a reflex to steel her from the storm brewing in her eyes. In her vulnerability, all pretense stripped away, Gretchen had never looked more beautiful. “Because you are all the risk my heart will ever take.”
Her admission spun around him, as if he was heading down in the well during a ride—that spiraling vortex of a bull’s motion that suspended time. She was a turn-back bull that knocked the wind out and cracked every rib.
She left as she had come, almost like a phantom, here one minute, gone the next. He turned the deed over, studied the fancy words that now had a meaning greater than gravity. Nothing about falling in love with her was worth feeling like Stalin’s Assassin had his way, taken him down and out. Only one glory—the top score in the arena—was worth the risk.
“They’re ready for you, Chase,” said a rodeo runner who looked barely old enough to shave. Chase had publicity shots to take, sponsors’ egos to stroke, a mind to wrestle into a mental space where he wouldn’t be murdered, and a rodeo to win. Chase pictured Gretchen getting into her ridiculous Prius and following the rules all the way back to Close Call because one risk in a day, in a lifetime, for Gretchen de Havilland, was one too many. The image should have cleared him to be him, everything people expected Chase Meier to be.
It didn’t.
He fucking doubted himself from step one, a mental move likely to land him in a coma. Or worse.
Chase bit his mouth guard, hard enough to give his brain an aneurysm. Helmet on, caged mask in place, vest cinched for war, front lines.
On the other side of the iron cage, a hybrid: part genetically-modified Charbray, part demon; already otherworldly, so out of his goddamned mind his handlers barely wrestled him into the chute; something Chase loved to see. Energy dispensed on the equipment was energy not dispensed punishing him.
But the evening felt strange. The assembled crowd, full to the arena rim, was lethargic, eerily quiet. Behind the scenes, there was more disorder than usual—handlers losing their shit, no one where they were supposed to be, tempers raw. And the sunset as he’d entered the arena was ominous as hell—normal streaks of yellow and orange overpowered by gray—not of storm clouds but of a distant wildfire in Mexico. Even the air rushing past his cage into his nostrils had an acrid heaviness.
Bull riders, like any athlete, were suspicious, by nature. Chase attributed the hair standing up on his neck to the events of the afternoon. He turned to his assistant.
“Did you spot her?”
“Someone like you described? Wouldn’t be hard. She ain’t here, Chase.”
Somehow, that news made him feel better and worse, all at once. He pulled an angry inhale past his nostrils, purposely expanding its intensity all the way to the sacs in his lungs. Yancy once told him that breathing was half the battle during those eight seconds. Hold your breath, your muscles stiffen, brace, break in all kinds of ways, and you don’t become one with the animal, who’s doing his best to snort and breathe its way to total annihilation and revenge.
Gloves on, cinched and tied to hell, primed with friction and heat on the nearby rope, his trainer gave him two smacks atop his helmet. Chase climbed the outside of the cage and straddled the chute. The announcer dropped his name. Chase heard nothing but his breathing after that. His breathing and the bull’s.
And his own hesitation like a punch to his intestines.
Fuck.
Was what Gretchen did so wrong? She put the town first. The place they both loved so much. The place he longed to be, always, when he woke up in some pussy-smelling camper, wondering if his father was right.
Beneath him, between his boots, Stalin’s Assassin went insane.