The True Cowboy of Sunset Ridge (Gold Valley #14)(38)

“So, the rodeo. How did you get started with that?”

Infinitely better than unspooling anything.

“My brother Jake started doing it. Eventually I followed him.”

Just like that. Nothing fancy or frilly, and definitely no more words than were necessary.

“So you... You’re close to him?”

“Not especially.”

“Right. Well. I mean, I know a little bit about your family because of...”

“Right. Because of Iris.”

“Yes.”

“Yeah, we’re a whole tragedy. And Jake and I left. Which I guess makes us interesting in context with the rest of the family, who stayed. But... It never seemed like home to me. Not after our parents died. You know, that was our house. The ranch house.”

She took a moment to process that. “It wasn’t Iris’s and her siblings’?”

“Our dad ranched too. That was what he did. Their dad was the police chief. That’s why Pansy, my cousin, is a police officer. She was following in her old man’s footsteps. But yeah, no. It was going to be ours. But... In the end Jake and I didn’t have any interest in it. Ryder was the one who raised all of us. He was the one who took care of us. And it just seemed easier to go our own way. Seemed better.”

“Do you love the rodeo?”

He frowned. “No. I don’t love it. But it gave me something to test myself against. You want to be needed. I don’t want to be needed. Not by anybody. You want to help people... I never did. I just wanted to check and see if I was still alive. And believe me, you know the answer to that question when an animal that weighs several thousand pounds flings you around like a rag doll. So yeah. That was more what my rodeo dreams were about. And you know... I didn’t want my parents’ life. They weren’t happy. So I threw myself into the circuit because it was like a party that didn’t end. Booze, women. Danger. Glory. Defeat. All that stuff... Reminds you that death hasn’t gotten you yet.”

“Oh.”

“Is that a little bit grim for you?”

“No,” she said, squeezing the steering wheel. She wondered what that was like. Living every day testing how alive you were.

Her own trauma had pushed her into a place where she’d clung. To the familiar. To stability. His had pushed him into just the opposite.

“You must feel every day,” she said.

“I guess so.”

“Do you know how many days I just didn’t feel?” she asked. “Days that I didn’t even realize went by? When I have a birth... That’s when I feel connected to the world. Connected to life. That rush... That rush isn’t like anything else. It’s amazing. And it reminds me of why I do what I do. It reminds me of why I’m here. But then I would go home to this... This guy. And I would go right back into this sort of numb space. Routine and... Not a good way. Because routine can be a good thing. But this wasn’t. This wasn’t good. This was something else... And I...” She shook her head. She guessed that she was going there. “If nothing else, meeting you...that reminded me I was alive.”

“Me too,” he said, his voice rough.

The baby began to cry, and she was sort of thankful for the interruption. Colt started trying to soothe her, bouncing the car seat gently.

“We need pacifiers. She’s probably hungry. We need diapers. I can’t fathom what she was thinking.” Then she immediately felt guilty. “Obviously she wasn’t thinking. I’m trying not to be judgmental.”

“Yeah. I have no right to be judgmental. But I feel it all the same.”

It wasn’t long after that they came to an intersection that took them over a bridge and toward the town of Tolowa. It was a much more cookie-cutter town than Gold Valley. A practical town, filled with big-box stores and chain restaurants. But she would have to make a note of it, because if she wanted to do more major shopping, it might need to be here. Though, she had a feeling major would be overstating it, still. But there did appear to be an outlet mall. So there was that.

When she saw the Fred Meyer, she went ahead and decided to pull in. She knew that store would have everything they needed for a baby. He took charge of getting the baby out of the car, and the two of them walked through the automatic doors and into the store. She grabbed the cart and walked away from the produce, imagining the farther away they got from the food, the closer they would be to baby items. The first aisle they stopped at was one with formula, bottles, diapers and pacifiers. “I imagine that clothes and things like that will be somewhere else. But, we need a lot of things from here.”

Every time she indicated they might need something, Colt put it in the cart. Sometimes two. By the time they had gotten through the aisle, she was pretty sure they’d bought almost everything, and most of it was completely unnecessary for the stage that the baby was at.

“How long do you think... How long do you think you’re going to have her?” she asked as he grabbed the biggest box of newborn diapers in the aisle.

“Don’t know.” His simple statement was punctuated by deeply normal grocery sounds. The beep of a scanner, music from fifteen years ago and a couple of little kids begging for a candy bar. It was so aggressively normal it added to the strangeness of it all.

“I just... It can’t be for very long.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “And you know that I don’t know. You know that I don’t know because you were standing there when Cheyenne brought her. You basically heard the whole thing. There was maybe the tiniest bit that you missed, and I can tell you, it wasn’t all that informative.”