Chasin' Eight (Rough Riders #11)(41)

“This ain’t gonna end well, is it?”

“No. Some douchebag photographer ignored the Private property warning and snapped pics of us getting naked and wild. The pictures were plastered all over the tabloids the next day. Granted, you couldn’t see his face, but you could see mine. He broke up with me immediately. Said being with me was too much work.”

Gemma winced.
“And don’t get me started on the Jake debacle. I had to leave California to get away from it.” When Gemma didn’t ask specifics, Ava knew the bad press had even made it to rural Wyoming.
“Do you love acting so much you’ll put up with that ugly part of the business to get to do what makes you happy?”

Ava sighed. “I thought I loved acting, but I’m not even sure of that anymore.” Why was it so easy to blurt this stuff out to a stranger? She smiled at Gemma. “Enough about that. What about you?”

“I love my life. I’m truly blessed. I’m married to the greatest man in the world, we have the rugrats we both always wanted,” she smiled softly, “and we get to raise them around family on the land we love.”

Footsteps pounded across the wooden planks and a dark-haired girl and a younger dark-haired boy burst into the bunkhouse. “Mama, come on. Daddy’s got the training bull out. Says he might need your help.”

Gemma stood. “All right. Tell him I’ll be right there. You comin’ to watch Chase practice?”

“I’ll be there in ten.” Ava ditched her sweaty yoga clothes and slipped on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. With her messenger-style camera bag, notebook, sunglasses and ball cap, she was good to go.
The wind blew like crazy, which lessened the sun’s blistering rays. Chalky dust covered her shoes and clothing. She’d arrived in time to see Chase get whipped off a piece of equipment that resembled a gymnastics vault—except a gymnastics vault didn’t spin and tilt.
Chase picked himself up off the thick gym mats.
“Five point nine,” Cash called out. “Better. Go again?”

“Yep.”

Ava moved next to Gemma and draped her arms over the top of the metal fence. “What’s going on?”

“Cash is workin’ Chase on the mechanical bull today. When a rider hasn’t been on a bull for a few weeks, it helps to regain the movement and sense of balance.”

“Is it like being on the real thing?”

“The guys talk about it bein’ similar. Guess the machine is smoother, even set on random intervals.”

She watched as Chase used the rope wrapped around the center of the machine to hoist himself up. “Why is Chase wearing a vest, chaps and spurs just for practice?”

“Because the weight and constriction of clothing needs to be constant. If he gets used to practicing without, it’ll change his balance and movement when he wears it during competition. They try to keep every practice session in line with the real thing.”

Cash popped in the DVD. “Let’s have a look-see.”

The rides were painful to watch. Not because of the reminder of physical pain, but because it looked as if Chase McKay had never ridden a bull.
After they watched all the short test rides, Cash inserted the disk with Chase’s winning rides, or at least the rides he’d managed to hang on for the full eight seconds.
He listened as Colby and Cash discussed everything, from the angle of his chin, to the height and position of his arm in the air, to his spurring technique, to his initial seat on the bull. Chase didn’t comment, or defend, as he might’ve done in the past, but listened.
Then they started the disk from the beginning again.