“Whoa.” He caught me and set me on my feet again. “Where are your keys?”
I had them in my hand already, so I instantly pulled them up in front of my face.
He plucked them from my hands and repeated the process of driving us around to the side of the chutes where we could pick the bull I’d just purchased up.
“Scooby?” the lady at the gate asked.
I blinked in confusion at her name for Ace.
“What?” I asked.
She snatched the paper from my hand, nodded her head, and handed the paper back to Ace.
Rude.
“Your name is Scooby?” I asked him.
A tick at the corner of his mouth made me think he was going to smile, but he turned his face away to stare at the bull they were urging down the chute with a cattle prod.
“No,” he said. “That’s Scooby.”
‘Scooby,’ better known as the bull that I had just spent a shit ton of my savings on, started padding at the earth again, then charged forward, slamming into the trailer so fast and hard that I gasped and prayed that he didn’t hurt anything.
“I hope I get my deposit back,” I breathed as the men shut the gates.
The bull slammed his large horned head up against the side of the trailer, and I visibly witnessed the metal bending.
“Jesus.”
“I think you can kiss that deposit goodbye,” Ace replied helpfully.
Yeah, I thought I could, too.Chapter 2I run entirely on caffeine, chocolate, and inappropriate thoughts about Ace Valentine.
-Codie’s secret thoughts
Ace
“She paid how much for Scooby?” my brother, Banks, asked.
“Fourteen grand,” I replied as I tore my wet shirt off over my shoulders.
“Is she fuckin’ crazy?” Banks asked no one in particular.
I shook my head.
“I think she didn’t realize what she was doing. I saw her face when Frank told her the price. She thought it was by the head, not by the pound,” I responded.
“Well, let’s hope she has more sense than that,” he muttered. “I’ll bet Old Man Spears is going to fucking love hearing how much she paid.”
I agreed. Somewhat.
I’d looked at Scooby for a long time, wanted him almost as much as my next breath, but there was no way I could pay what he’d be worth. I was still trying to get our ranch in the black even now, years after getting back to Kilgore.
We were getting there, but we weren’t there yet. Maybe in a few months, once our foals were born, we would be. However, until then, I couldn’t afford a fourteen-thousand-dollar bull despite knowing for certain that he would make it big if given the chance.
“Honestly, Spears took a risk with Shaggy two years ago, and look where that got him. Farm paid off, fancy horse trailer. Brand new house,” I told my brother.
“Heart attack,” Banks offered up as he walked to the kitchen door.
I snorted.
“That was likely due to his love for cheeseburgers that he had every fucking day for fifty years,” I said, following my brother to the door.
Banks opened it and walked out, leaving it for me to close, which I did.
However, I quickly opened it back up again and grabbed my phone off the counter in case my sister called.
I was supposed to be watching her kids tonight, and I wanted to make sure she could reach me in case she needed me earlier than she’d originally said.
She and her husband, Nico, were going out for a date, and I was to go over there somewhere around seven.
I’d tried to pass the duty off to Darby, my baby brother, but he’d had to work.
I wasn’t going to argue with that. I was just fuckin’ happy that he was making something of his life.
Darby was our problem brother. He was troubled and had been the one most affected by the death of our parents.
It’d taken Nico, a cop and SWAT officer for Kilgore Police Department, to straighten him out. And thank God he did. Darby had been caught up in some fucked up shit, and I despaired that he’d ever find his way out.
No matter what our family said to him, it hadn’t gotten through. Then one night, Darby decided to be a dumbass and throw an unopened Coke at Nico’s head.
Instead of pressing charges, Nico had brought him home, and scared the absolute shit out of him in the process.
It was Nico’s near death, though, that had Darby turning his life around.
Now he was in his final semester of college and working forty hours a week on top of that.
“What’s that goofy look on your face for?” Callum, my other brother and Banks’ twin, asked.
I flipped him off.
“I was thinking about asking Darby to watch Georgia’s kids today.” I grinned.
Callum snorted. “You know they’re fuckin’ crazy.”
I agreed. They were fucking crazy. They were cute, too.
“Anyway, what was this I heard about Scooby as I was walking up?” Callum asked, his arm flashing out to catch a horse that tried to slip out of the fence as we walked in.