Get Bucked (The Valentine Boys 4)

That I had no problem with.

Five very frustrating minutes later, Darby was in his passenger seat slumped over, leaning against the door.

I wondered if I opened the door right now if he’d fall flat out on his face.

Then I decided, probably not, seeing as he was buckled in.

I sighed and thanked the bartender.

After paying Darby’s tab with his credit card, I left a semi-generous tip of twenty dollars for his trouble, then came back out to Darby’s truck.

It was an older model Chevy.

I’d bet my left hand it was freakin’ stick shift, too.

When I got into the truck, I found out that I was right.

“You know how long it’s been since I drove a five-speed?” I asked the man who was awake but still not talking.

Those beautiful blue eyes drifted over to me, and I felt my heart catch in my throat.

They looked so lonely and sad.

“It’s like riding a bike,” he informed me.

I doubted it.

But I started the truck anyway.

“It’s nearly impossible to make it die.” Darby kept right on talking. “Just give it more gas than you think you need to and you’ll be fine.”

He was right.

After a rocky start, I managed to get out of the parking lot and make my way to the Valentine place.

Only, as I turned onto the road that would lead me to their place, Darby started shaking his head.

“Can’t go home,” he told me. “I’ve decided to leave my family.”

Leave his family?

What?

“What?” I asked, sounding just as confused as I felt.

“I’m not going home,” he told me. “And, plus, you won’t be able to get home if you drop me off here. Go to your place. I’ll sleep in my truck.”

I didn’t bother to argue.

He sounded like he had his mind made up, and I had a feeling the reason he was at the bar in the first place was likely due to his family ‘troubles’ which were the reason he didn’t want to go home.

I drove us all the way to my house, which ended up being a whole lot farther than I’d realized.

My eyes were nearly crossing by the time that I pulled up in front of my door.

We parked in the yard since there wasn’t really a driveway. And the closer I parked to the front door meant the less far that I had to walk at going on two in the morning.

When I put the truck in park, Darby bailed out of the truck, moving a whole lot better than when me and the bartender had hauled him out to the truck earlier.

“Hey,” I said, hitting the light switch and plunging everything into darkness.

“Motherfucker,” Darby growled.

Then the sound of something hard landed on my porch.

Flicking my phone to flashlight, I shined it in his direction to find him lying, as if he didn’t have a care in the world, on my porch.

His hands were under his head, and his eyes were closed as if he was just taking a rest.

Instead of just having fallen there.

“Ummm,” I said. “I thought you were sleeping in the truck.”

He opened one eye into a slit.

“I had to pee,” he said. “I was going to go in your house to do it, but I might just go find a tree.”

I would not smile.

I was too tired to find him amusing.

“Do you need help up?” I wondered.

He rolled then, going to his hands and knees.

His back muscles rippled underneath his tight t-shirt, and I felt like my heart would start beating straight out of my chest.

Then he got up, one foot at a time, until he was standing but in a hunched over position.

“You okay?” I asked, concerned now.

“Yeah,” he wheezed. “I think I tweaked my back.”

I felt my heart stutter.

Hurting his back was bad.

Then again, I’d heard that he had problems with it since a bullfighting incident about a year ago.

See, Darby wasn’t invincible, even if he liked to pretend like he was.

My father and he had been in the ring with Banks, his brother, riding a bull.

His brother had been thrown off and had landed awkwardly. That awkward landing had thrown him onto the ground and had given the bull he’d been riding a chance to go after him.

If it hadn’t been for Darby, Banks would’ve been skewered.

As it was, he’d been grazed by the bull across his chest.

Darby, on the other hand, after getting the bull’s attention, hadn’t been able to run fast enough.

The bull had caught him in the back with a horn and had tossed him ten feet in the air.

He’d landed awkwardly straight on his back, and if it hadn’t been for my dad, he’d have gotten a lot more than that.

He’d suffered a spinal cord injury that had kept him out for a month and a half, and still to this day I could tell that his body wasn’t what it used to be.