Turn and Burn (Blacktop Cowboys 5)

“At age eleven?”

Tanna nodded. “She didn’t have much of a childhood, taking care of my grandfather and my uncle Manuel—who never married. They bought more land and started running cattle. Which is where my dad came in. They hired him as a ranch hand. That’s where he and mama met. He ended up taking over everything after my grandfather died. I never met my grandfather. My mama always said he worked himself to death.

“I always assumed my dad liked ranch life. So it shocked me and my brother, Garrett, when he sold off all the horses and cattle within two months of Mama’s death. We even had a good friend of his intervene, trying to get him to see how irrational he was acting in grief. But Dad told him to butt out. Then he just looked me and Garrett right in the eye and said he hated everything about living on a ranch. He had for quite some time, but my mother refused to consider selling or moving. Now that she was gone”—those beautiful brown eyes welled with tears—“he had no intention of keeping it.”

“So in addition to dealing with your mother’s death . . . you found out your father wasn’t the man you thought he was?”

Tanna pulled her hand from his and grabbed a paper napkin to blot her tears. “That’s a nice way of putting it. He told me and Garrett that we were spoiled brats and that it was coming to an end. I understand where he was coming from where I was concerned. I was a thirty-four-year-old woman who hadn’t left home. But the land succession should’ve gone to a blood relative descendant. Dad said since my mother had left everything to him, to do as he saw fit, we had no say in any decision he made. It was such an ugly situation.”

“Aw, darlin’, this is breaking my heart.”

“It broke mine too. And my spirit, which is how I ended up on a long losing streak on the circuit. Six months after we’d buried my mother, my father had rid himself of the ranch, married Mama’s best friend, Rosalie, and bought beachfront rental property in Florida.”

What a selfish ass**le. “Did you and your brother get anything?”

“He gave us each one hundred K.” Tanna’s eyes were burning with rage when she looked at him. “Not that I’m ungrateful or greedy, but that money was an insult. He sold the ranch for ten million dollars. Ten. Million. Dollars. And he couldn’t part with less than that amount for his only children?”

Fletch whistled.

“So in some ways, I lost both my parents that year. He never even called me after I got injured. It’s like that part of his life ended with my mom.”

Silence stretched between them.

When Fletch couldn’t stand it any longer, he stopped her restless fingers from ripping the napkin to shreds. He brought her hand to his mouth and placed a kiss in the center of her palm. “I’m so sorry for what you’ve gone through.”

“Thanks. As tired as I am of talking about it, that’s not the whole story. During that time I tried to maintain my standings but kept falling further and further down. I didn’t qualify for CRA World Finals. My sponsors understood. The breeders who owned the horse understood but they took Jezebel back to their stables. Which I found a relief. I was too embarrassed to tell anyone that I didn’t have a place to go, so I hid out in my horse trailer. That was a wake-up call. I realized just how spoiled I’d been.”

“I’ll bet your mother loved having you home to spoil.”

She smiled wistfully. “Maybe. By the time the new year started, I was rarin’ to go. But because I didn’t have a good showing the previous year, my sponsors cut my funds in half. So I had to curb the number of events and only entered ones with a decent purse and points. After months of limited winning, I decided to enter every event I could. I didn’t tell Jezebel’s owners and I stopped answering their calls.”

“Not smart.”

“Yeah, but I wasn’t pushing Jezebel too hard. I took extra precautions with her and had her checked out by a vet at least every two weeks. I sent those health reports on to the owners like I always did.” She took a breath. “Labor Day weekend I was scheduled to compete in Dallas at an outdoor venue. I’d drawn last, which I usually prefer. It sprinkled a little off and on. Nothin’ to be alarmed about. The other competitors said the dirt was fine. My turn rolled around and we shot out at a good clip. Made the first barrel and she didn’t feel slippery. On the second barrel . . . she spun out. We both went down. Hard. Jezebel landed on top of me, knocking the wind out of me. So it seemed like minutes that she was crushing me when in all actuality it was only seconds.

“Somehow my boot slipped out of the stirrup or I might’ve broken my tibia or fibula and cracked my femur instead of just ripping the shit outta the ligaments in my right knee and fracturing my ankle. I thought Jezebel was okay because it didn’t take her long to get up after the spill. Her body was a blur as she raced off. Then she made the most god-awful high-pitched cry I’ve ever heard. I freaked out, and tried to chase after her, but I crumpled into a heap. Somehow I forced myself to get up and walk.”

Fletch had read the online articles about what’d happened, but even knowing how it’d played out didn’t lessen the impact or the horror of what Tanna was about to say.

“Jezebel had kept goin’ after she got up, running out of the arena like she’d always been trained to. No one knows for sure if her initial injury happened in the arena or if she’d stumbled into a hole during her break for freedom and made it worse, but her hind leg snapped above the hock—as you know a compound fracture isn’t fixable. The only thing that did stop her was her reins got caught on a metal fissure in the pens behind the arena—which was just another freaky thing. She panicked even more when she couldn’t get free. She couldn’t rear up. She didn’t know what was goin’ on and I wasn’t around to calm her down.”