The Maverick Meets His Match (Hearts of Wyoming Book 2)(17)
Sheila shrugged. “At this time in my life, maybe I need a man for whom I’m the center of his world, and not some rodeo company. Not that your father wasn’t good to me. He was. And at that time, I was happy to raise our children and be his wife. But now, well, I’m happy to have a man who thinks I’m everything—and who wants to be the center of my world too.”
Mandy gulped and tried to process. “Does Tuck know?”
“Yes, dear. He…well, let’s just say he found out. I’d planned to tell you once we’d decided to marry, but…well, then your grandfather took a turn for the worse, and it seemed best to wait a bit. Now that we’ll be staying together in Greenville…”
Her mother and Harold shacking up in a hotel room. Mandy blocked that thought as Sheila stood, rubbing her hands over and under each other, hope in her eyes.
If Harold made her mother happy, who was she to interfere? “You deserve a good man, Mom. And Harold is one.”
A smile beamed across her mother’s face, creating a warm glow. There obviously was real love there. Who knew?
“Thank you, honey. That means a great deal to both of us. And you deserve a good man. Better than that tie-down roper Mitch Lockhart.”
Given Mitch had chosen her grandfather’s funeral to dump her because he needed “breathing room,” code for dating other women, she couldn’t disagree. He’d used her for sponsorship money, and she, if she was brutally honest, had used him for sex.
“Give Ty a chance, Mandy. You might be surprised.”
Her mother had no idea how wrong she was.
*
Walking around the outskirts of the arena, Ty looked out on the sizeable Greenville rodeo grounds and listened to the tinny sounds of work that permeated the early morning air. He’d flown his plane, a Cirrus Gold, down to Greenville, Colorado, so he could arrive early, before Mandy and the crew.
He wanted time to familiarize himself with the venue and meet with the committee members, seeing he was the new kid on the block. The large, round arena, built on cinderblocks, sat to the right, and to the left was a field of campers parked in haphazard fashion. Those campers were likely filled with sleeping cowboys and cowgirls ready to enter the night’s events.
Ty spotted the livestock trailers of the subcontractor, the Rustic Rodeo Company, in the distance. Given they were Colorado based, that didn’t come as a surprise. The owner, Stan Lassiter, had been the only person JM had mentioned as a potential buyer of Prescott, which could make for an interesting weekend.
The acrid scent of manure filled his nostrils as he strode on past the stable area filled with competitors’ roping and barrel horses, but with plenty of stalls left for the broncs. Mandy had said that often the horses were just pastured, but Greenville, apparently, was a first-class operation with its own barns. A few cowboys were about, feeding their horses and mucking out stalls. Ty touched the brim of his hat in acknowledgement and turned toward the arena and the chutes, where workers were hammering together the pipes that would secure the horses.
There was a lot more to putting on a rodeo than he’d imagined when he’d been a mere spectator. But the burden JM had placed on his shoulders wasn’t what was occupying his thoughts this morning, though it should have been.
Try as he might, he hadn’t been able to get JM’s provision and last evening’s ride with Mandy off his mind.
Last night they’d ended up in the exact same spot he’d left her years ago, and he wasn’t at all certain it was by accident. And if it wasn’t an accident, that meant she remembered. And if she remembered, it meant they had some unfinished business.
He’d never forgotten the image of her emerging naked from the creek, her long hair damp and clinging to her shoulders, a smile on her sweet face and desire in her green eyes. Her lissome seventeen-year-old body was wet with rivulets of water streaming down perfect white breasts, over rosy nipples, down her flat stomach to the apex of her legs and the damp curls that guarded her virtue. He’d been so turned on he’d frozen in place until she stopped before him…and begged him to make love to her.
Only then did the earlier morning conversation with her grandfather echo in the far reaches of his brain, telling him Mandy was off-limits and anymore encounters behind the barn or anywhere else would spell the end of Ty’s future.
He had jumped back on his horse and ridden like he was being chased by a herd of stampeding cattle, just as she had ridden away yesterday in the full-out panic of a person who knew that if she didn’t leave, they would do something they wanted to do but shouldn’t.
The more he thought about it, the more potential he saw to finish what they’d started ten years ago. However misguided JM’s matchmaking intentions, JM was giving Ty his blessing to have a relationship with his granddaughter. Marrying Mandy could mean six months of sex with a woman he’d always craved, and then walking away. Six months of a woman who, even at seventeen, could bring a man to his knees with a kiss. And no one would get hurt.
Ty entered the arena gates and headed down the cinderblock alley to the contestants’ entrance. He wore his Prescott T-shirt, informing people with a glance that he was with the show, and he passed a worker or two checking on the railings. He climbed the cement steps to the alley behind the metal-framed chutes. This was where JM always stood, watching over his livestock and the cowboys who rode, or tried to ride, them. This is where Ty would be tonight—not as a spectator but as one of the owners. He had to marvel at the change in his circumstances in just a few weeks.