The Last Rodeo, page 1
The most important two words for this Wrangler’s Creek rodeo cowboy? I do...
Lucian Granger isn’t winning any Mr. Cowboy Congeniality awards. Known in his small Texas town as “Lucifer” thanks to his surly nature and knack for scaring people away from getting too close, the handsome rancher has no trouble ignoring the gossip. But when he’s in danger of losing the land he’s put his blood, sweat and tears into maintaining, Lucian sets out to prove he’s a changed man—by claiming he’s about to settle down with his invaluable assistant, Karlee O’Malley.
Their pending nuptials may be just for show, but from the moment they kiss, the proverbial fireworks start going off in his head—and in his heart. Before long, the man who’s usually as emotional as a brick wall is tired of pretending and wants to share a real future with Karlee. With his world suddenly turned upside down, Lucian will risk losing the business and the ranch if it means holding on to the one woman worth becoming a better man for.
Praise for USA TODAY
bestselling author Delores Fossen
“Overall, this romance is a little sweet and a little salty—and a lot sexy!”
—RT Book Reviews on Texas-Sized Trouble
“Always a Lawman…includes plenty of thrills, romance, suspense and a hot cowboy/lawman hero.”
—RT Book Reviews
“This is much more than a romance.”
—RT Book Reviews on Branded as Trouble
“Nicky and Garret have sizzling chemistry!”
—RT Book Reviews on No Getting Over a Cowboy
“Clear off space on your keeper shelf, Fossen has arrived.”
—New York Times bestselling author Lori Wilde
“Delores Fossen takes you on a wild Texas ride with a hot cowboy.”
—New York Times bestselling author B.J. Daniels
“You will be sold!”
—RT Book Reviews on Blame It on the Cowboy
“Both Roman and Mila are complex characters. There is so much more to them than you might catch on the first look.”
—Books & Spoons Reviews on Branded as Trouble
Also available from Delores Fossen
and HQN Books
A Wrangler’s Creek Novel
Lone Star Cowboy (ebook novella)
Those Texas Nights
One Good Cowboy (ebook novella)
No Getting Over a Cowboy
Just Like a Cowboy (ebook novella)
Branded as Trouble
Cowboy Dreaming (ebook novella)
Texas-Sized Trouble
Cowboy Heartbreaker (ebook novella)
Lone Star Blues
Cowboy Blues (ebook novella)
The McCord Brothers
What Happens on the Ranch (ebook novella)
Texas on My Mind
Cowboy Trouble (ebook novella)
Lone Star Nights
Cowboy Underneath It All (ebook novella)
Blame It on the Cowboy
To see the complete list of titles available from Delores Fossen, please visit www.deloresfossen.com.
DELORES
FOSSEN
The Last Rodeo
Table of Contents
The Last Rodeo
Cowboy Blues
Excerpt from Cowboy Above the Law by Delores Fossen
The Last Rodeo
Contents
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER ONE
BE A COWBOY, they said. It’ll be fun, they said.
Lucian Granger was doubting that fun part right about now.
One second his butt was firmly anchored in the saddle, and his hand was gripped on the thick braided rein. The next second, no part of him was touching anything but air.
The bronc gelding orchestrated the hardest buck in the history of hard bucks and sent Lucian flying. Even though Lucian had been thrown before, it’d never been this hard or this high and with this kind of force behind it. His life did indeed flash before his eyes, and Lucian was pissed off that he could possibly die from a horse with no balls.
Hell’s Texas Bells. What kind of cowboy did that make him?
Lucian instantly got the answer to that question. It made him a hurt cowboy, that’s what.
First his tailbone collided with the rock-hard ground in the corral, sending up a cloud of dust. Then his shoulder hit, the jolt of it slamming all the way to his eye sockets and rattling his teeth. Every part of his body went to full-throttle pain, and his breath was still somewhere on the back of the ball-less Appaloosa named Outlaw. The horse was now smirking at Lucian with a “guess we know who won that round, don’t we?”
If the horse had actually had balls, Lucian would have removed them there on the spot.
“Boss man, that was only four seconds,” Skeeter Muldoon called out to Lucian. The ranch hand was holding a stopwatch while perched atop the corral fence. “You gotta stay in the saddle a mite longer if you’re gonna win a bronc-riding buckle in the rodeo.”
Skeeter was the oldest hand they had on the Granger Ranch and was as reliable as they came, but Lucian considered neutering him, too, for pointing out the obvious.
“You all right?” he heard his brother Dylan ask.
It was a simple enough question, but Lucian figured Dylan was laughing his butt off. Lucian would have been doing the same had their positions been reversed. It was their form of brotherly affection.
“I’ll live,” Lucian assured him, but when he tried to sit up, he wasn’t 100 percent certain that was true. The pain shot through him again, and that’s when he realized he’d dislocated his shoulder.
Shit.
He didn’t have time for this. He had a meeting with a cattle buyer in an hour and appointments stacked up after that.
While Lucian was still sitting on the ground and fighting to drag in a decent breath, Dylan climbed over the corral fence and moseyed toward him. Emphasis on the moseying. Again, it was a sign of affection that Dylan wasn’t showing a whole bunch of concern.
Well, either it was affection or else Dylan was enjoying that Lucian had just had his butt busted—again.
When you were the big brother/boss, family and folks in their hometown of Wrangler’s Creek, Texas, liked taking you down a notch. That was especially true when those folks—or rather, some of them, anyway—called him Lucifer. Not behind his back, either. To his face.
Since he didn’t want to continue this dignity-reducing moment any longer, Lucian accepted Dylan’s hand when he extended it to help him get to his feet. But the dignity reduction only continued when the pain did a lightning strike through his shoulder.
Dylan sighed. “You dislocated it again.”
Lucian didn’t like the addition of the laid-back “again,” but then, there wasn’t anything he did like about this, so there was no use getting into specifics.
“Want me to get Miz Jordan for you?” Skeeter called out.
Jordan was not only Dylan’s wife, she was also a nurse, which meant that Lucian must have looked pretty damn bad for Skeeter to even suggest it. Mainly because Skeeter’s long-distance eyesight was so off that it was hard for him to see a barn door, much less Lucian’s grimace. Perhaps, though, Skeeter had heard the string of raw profanity grumbling from Lucian’s teeth-rattled mouth.
“Jordan’s not here,” Dylan informed him. “Want me to drive you to the hospital?”
Lucian would rather have his butt busted once more. “Get Karlee.”
But he soon realized that getting his assistant wasn’t necessary. Lucian spotted his assistant, Karlee O’Malley, walking toward the corral. No moseying speed for her. She was hurrying, and she had her hand cupped over her eyes to block out the glare from the morning sun. She was no doubt seeing him just fine and piecing together what’d happened.
“Did you dislocate your shoulder again?” she asked. Along with the accelerated speed, she also had some concern in her voice.
Even though Karlee was wearing dressy office clothes—heels, a slim gray skirt and top—she threw open the corral gate and traipsed through the dust and muck to make her way to him. She was frowning when she reached him and immediately started removing his protective vest, and then unbuttoning his shirt. Normally, that wouldn’t have been part of the job description of an assistant, but since Karlee had worked for him for nearly ten years, her list of duties were, well, pretty wide-ranging.
Thankfully, her skill set handled the wide range just fine.
Too bad she thought her talents would be put to better use because two weeks ago she’d given him her thirty days’ notice with the excuse that she wanted to start her own cattle brokerage business. That meant he had two more weeks to try to convince her to stay.
Once she had the buttons undone, Karlee eased off his shirt as quick and efficient as any hot-to-trot lover. She wasn’t his lover though. Never had been, never would be. Because that quick and efficient label didn’t only apply to shirt removal. It was the way Karlee handled everything else. No way would he risk losing her over a soured relationship. And that’s exactly what would happen.
All of his relationships soured.
Especially the one that had mattered most.
She examined his shoulder, and then looked up at him with those Irish-green eyes that could be either warm or cool depending on the situation. Right now, they were on the chillier end of the spectrum because she likely didn’t approve of the shoulder injury or how he was about to ask her to handle it.
“No hospital?” She didn’t wait for an answer because she knew it would be no. She huffed at his unspoken no. “This is risky, you know? Just because I did this for you once before and for my brothers too many times to count, it doesn’t mean it’s a smart thing. You need to see a doctor.”
“Just pop it back in,” Lucian growled.
Her eyes went from plain ordinary chill to an Arctic frost. Karlee frosted and frowned at him a few more seconds while she debated what to do.
“Hold him,” she said to Dylan, and Dylan hooked his arms around Lucian’s chest and waist. “What’s your safe word?” she asked, turning back to Lucian. “The one you use when you’re playing rough with your sweet things?”
What the hell did that have to do with this? But Lucian only managed to get out the “what” part of that before Karlee gave his arm a hard push, moving the shoulder back in place.
And causing him to curse every single word of profanity in his entire vocabulary. He added some new ones, too, though they came out so garbled that it was like cuss stew.
Once he got past the eye-watering, excruciating pain, Lucian realized the reason Karlee had asked about the safe word was to distract him. It had worked, and his shoulder was already starting to feel a little better. The sharp stabbing was now more like a sharp toothache.
“All fixed up now?” Dylan asked him. “I think you just wanted to feel a woman’s touch.” He didn’t wait around for Lucian to glare at him for that bad joke. Dylan gave them a wave and headed for the barn where he’d likely been going when he saw Lucian take the throw from the gelding.
Lucian tried to put his shirt back on, but after a couple of grunts from pain, Karlee helped with that, too, and then they started back toward the house. She also took hold of his wrist.
“No, I’m not giving you more of a woman’s touch. I’m checking your pulse in case what I just did ruptured a blood vessel,” she let him know. “If that happened, your pulse rate will change.”
Lucian figured she knew how to do that because she’d practically raised her three younger brothers. Being a big sister seemed to give her a special set of expertise like doctoring duties, ESP and a built-in lie detector. Those things were far superior to his big-brother talents.
As a big brother, he knew how to come up with bail money when needed. That was about it. Of course, being the oldest had also gotten him the title of head honcho/boss for Granger Enterprises after his parents had divorced and moved away from Wrangler’s Creek. That boss label included not only the ranch but the businesses, as well.
So yeah, there was that.
Too bad it came with so much pressure that sometimes Lucian felt as if it was eating him up on the inside. No way, though, would he ever admit that to anyone. Because it would be a sign of weakness. His father was weak. He wasn’t.
“When are you going to give up this wacky notion of winning a bronc-riding competition in the Wrangler’s Creek Charity Rodeo?” she asked.
“I’ll give up when I win.”
Though he was sure Karlee was skeptical that would ever happen. She had a reason for that skepticism, too. He’d been competing in the bronc-riding event since he was eighteen, which meant this next one would be his nineteenth try. Those same folks who called him Lucifer also called him a dumbass, hardheaded idiot when it came to the charity rodeo competition.
“Since I know you’re not going to want me to reschedule any of your meetings for today, I’ve already sent your agenda to your phone,” Karlee said, jumping right into business.
Lucian didn’t mind the shift in conversation. They’d already wasted enough time on his fall and the rodeo training.
“You have a meeting in forty-five minutes here at the ranch, but then you have to leave for Austin,” she went on. “Today and tomorrow, there’s a dinner, a lunch and five other meetings. Six if you want to deal personally with the issues with the new feed supplier.”
Lucian shook his head, but then winced when the motion tugged and pulled at his sore shoulder. “No dealing with a feed supplier. If it’s ranch business, continue to give it to Dylan.”
His brother had been running the majority of the ranch operations for a while now, and Lucian wanted to keep it that way. Well, unless the feed issue got worse, and then he’d step in—something that would likely piss off both Dylan and the suppliers. But Lucian didn’t put hurt feelings and stepped-on toes ahead of the bottom line.
And the bottom line was success.
Because failure was a sign of weakness.
“The painters start on the interior of your house in San Antonio tomorrow,” Karlee continued as they went in through the back of the house. “So, when you finish up in Austin, you probably shouldn’t go there because of the fumes. I’ll hang around if you want to come back here so we can get some work done. Oh, and I put a suit on your bed for you to pack—which I know you won’t do, but the dinner tomorrow night is business formal.”
Lucian didn’t know what the hell that meant, but he was certain of one thing. He wouldn’t be packing, or wearing, that suit.
He wasn’t sure he’d ever even bought a suit, which meant his mother, Regina, likely had. She was always trying to turn him into something he wasn’t. As the family CEO, she always thought he should dress like a guy who sat behind a desk. He did an ample amount of desk sitting, but he was still a cowboy. Besides, ties and suits were uncomfortable.
“I’ll make sure my boots don’t have cow shit on them,” Lucian grumbled. “That’ll be business formal enough.”
Karlee sighed and made a sound of resigned disagreement.
Lucian huffed and made a sound of “you’re wasting your sigh.”
“When you get back from this trip,” she went on, “I’ve arranged for some more interviews for my replacement. This time, I want you to actually interview them and not dismiss them because you don’t like something superficial about them.”
It wasn’t superficial if he got a bad vibe about them. And he’d gotten bad vibes about all six that Karlee had lined up to do the impossible—take her place.
When they went into his office, Lucian immediately saw the blinking lights on his landline, indicating there were multiple calls that had come through in the half hour he’d been out in the corral. He also checked his cell that he’d left on his desk for his ill-fated ride, and he saw the string of missed calls there, too.
“What’s all of this about?” Lucian asked, tipping his head to the lights. He got a reminder that head tipping hurt as much as head shaking. Shrugs were probably out, too. “This isn’t still about that city council stuff, is it?”
Karlee looked at the message screen of the landline. “Yes. It’s still about that stuff. Two of them, though, are from your mother.”
His mom had also left a voice mail on his cell. That didn’t necessarily mean there’d been an emergency. Regina had once left him six messages to ask if he remembered how much salt went into Aunt Kitty’s potato bread recipe. His mom had assumed he would know the answer because once when he’d been about ten or so, Aunt Kitty had baked some while visiting the ranch.
“I’m sure some of the calls on your cell will be from the city council, as well.” Karlee took out some ibuprofen from his desk and went to the bar to get him a bottle of water. “Along with the mayor, the historical society and the garden guild, you’ve managed to rile every single person in any position of authority in Wrangler’s Creek with that demand you sent them.”
