Get Bucked (The Valentine Boys 4)

“You need to go to sleep,” she said softly. “You’re going to be tired as hell tomorrow.”

That was the truth.

Especially since I still had to get up and work tomorrow as well as shovel the goddamn stables at my brothers’ place all before they woke up.

Hiding from them was exhausting.

“Yeah,” I agreed. “I do.”

“I’ll stop talking,” she lied.

I didn’t want her to stop talking.

In fact, I wanted to keep talking to her. I’m not sure I wanted to examine that thought too closely.Chapter 9

If you want it tight, you should’ve brought a bigger dick.

-Text from Darby to GQ

Darby

“Thanks for the ride,” she said. “What time do you have to be at work today?”

I looked at my watch and said, “I teach my first class at twelve.”

She grinned. “Do you care if I watch?”

I shook my head. “No. Not really. Today is more of an intro day, anyway.”

My phone rang, and she paused, half in, half out of my truck, her eyes on me as I answered my phone.

“Ummm,” a hesitant voice said. “So I don’t know you, but I’ve heard of you. I got your name from a friend. I’m fifteen. And my dad got a horse off of some guy. Except he has no clue how to take care of a horse. In the meantime, it’s tied to a tree and I’m fairly sure that we’re going to kill it. I can see all of its ribs.”

I scrubbed my face.

“All you have to do is put out some water and some hay for him,” I said. “Do you have a back yard?”

“No,” he answered immediately. “We saved it from a glue factory, he said. But he really has no idea how to handle an animal, man. I need you to come get it. He barely remembers he has a kid.”

I scratched my head with blunt fingernails.

“I can’t just take the horse. It has to be given to me. By the owner,” I admitted.

“I’m a junior. My father’s the senior. Technically, I am John Handy,” he replied hopefully. “And I’ll dress all official and shit. You won’t even know that I’m not the owner. I swear.”

I rolled my eyes. “Where do you live, kid?”

After getting his address, I put the phone in my cup holder.

“I have to go get this horse,” I said. “You’ll be all right even though Gibson’s not here?”

I looked at the darkening sky and the woman that I was supposed to pick back up in two and a half hours anyway so that we could go grocery shopping after my class.

“How about you just go with me?” I suggested before she could reply.

Waylynn grinned at me.

“You took the words right out of my mouth,” she said. “Let’s go.”

So we did after she hopped back into my truck.

“I have to go by my brothers’ to get the trailer,” I said. “Fuck, if he’d called earlier, I would’ve grabbed it while I was there.”

“You go hook it up,” she suggested as we pulled into the drive of my brothers’ place. “I’ll go distract them if they come out to talk to you.”

I grinned at her and did just that.

And when Ace moseyed up, eyes hot and pissed, Waylynn walked up to him and distracted him in the short amount of time it took me to hitch up the trailer.

Just as I was done, Waylynn broke off from my brother and hauled ass toward the truck.

She jumped in the back seat just as Ace broke into a run to come after me.

But I was already all the way down the driveway before he’d even taken three steps in my direction.

“You’re gonna have to go drop this off by yourself,” I said. “I’ll get the horse up and you unhitch the trailer. Then we go to my class.”

She nodded once. “Sounds perfect.”

It wasn’t perfect at all.

Because when we got there, the horse was in much worse shape than I imagined.

I wasn’t sure what kind of state he’d been in when he got here, but he hadn’t done much better after arriving at his new home.

“Help me get this horse in here, kid,” I said to the young man that was all of five feet. “And let’s hustle.”

It was thirty full minutes later when my phone rang again, this time with someone that I did not want to speak to.

When I spoke to him, things always ended up not going in my favor.

“Hello?” I answered, out of breath from trying to catch a goddamn horse.

I was also sweaty as fuck and could seriously use a shower before I went to the college to teach a class, but the head teacher in charge knew who I was. Knew what she was getting. And a clean-shaven pretty boy teacher wasn’t it.

In fact, I’d told them more often than not that I’d be showing up to class in jeans and a t-shirt. I just hadn’t expected to actually be so dirty on my first day.