Diamonds and Dust (Lonesome Point, Texas) (24 page)

At that moment, Lonesome Point looked like a place anyone would be lucky to call home, but Reece knew better. She knew this town was a shit hole like every other back asswards town that pock-marked the desert from here to the border of Mexico.

If she had anywhere else to go, she would be on her way there right now. She hadn’t been home in nearly twelve years and that’s the way she liked it. If fate had been on her side, she would be in a casino in Vegas with her rodeo friends right now, not shuffling down a Lonesome Point sidewalk with everything she owned stuffed into the duffel bag on her shoulder, wondering how the hell she was going to get to her family’s ranch in a town with no taxi service.

“Fuck me very much,” Reece muttered, running a hand gingerly through her ratted blond curls, careful not to touch the dent on the side of her head where her latest bull had tried to make sure he was her last.

She’d taken a pain pill fifteen minutes ago, but it had yet to kick in and her head throbbed like a thumb with a splinter shoved under the nail. Fifteen hours wedged in a Greyhound Bus had done nothing good for her skull fracture and the rest of her ached like she’d been run over by a stampede. Every old injury and long-healed break had woken up to haunt her with the ghosts of rodeos past.

Reece had known from day one that injuries were a part of professional bull riding. But back when she was eighteen and full of piss and vinegar and determined to show every dumb cowboy who thought a “little girl” could never make it on the pro circuit what she was made of, she’d never imagined that she’d be facing down her thirtieth birthday feeling like she was a hundred years old.

Every inch of her body hurt, every organ felt bruised, and even the thought of climbing the tree next to her old bedroom to break in to her family’s ranch house was so exhausting she was tempted to sit her ass down on the curb and let the snow numb her to sleep.

The fact that her mom and dad—especially her dad—were out of town until January second was the main reason she’d come back to Lonesome Point to lick her wounds and sort out her next move. But now she almost wished someone was at home. The weak part of her liked the idea of calling her mama to come pick her up, of Patty fussing over her and helping her put clean flannel sheets on her old bed. But her mama didn’t go anywhere without her daddy and even years apart hadn’t dulled Reece’s contempt for that man.

Dale Hearst was an asshole. Reece knew that for a fact, no matter how many times her little sister, Tulsi, insisted his heart had grown ten sizes in the past five months. Dale’s near-death experience last summer may have made him a changed man, but he couldn’t change the past or fix all the things he’d broken. Reece didn’t care how many voice messages he left begging her to give him a chance to make things better between them; she wasn’t going down that road. She didn’t need Dale and he didn’t need her. Not really.

He had sweet, loyal Tulsi. Tulsi, who had proven once again that she had zero self-preservation instincts by bailing on the business she’d worked years to build and running off to marry the prick who’d knocked her up and left her seven years ago. If Reece had any energy to spare worrying about anyone except herself, she’d be scared as hell for her little sis. It was a rare man who could be trusted with all the power and money in a relationship and there was no way to know what a man was made of in the six weeks Tulsi had waited before saying “I do” to Pike Sherman.

It didn’t matter that Tulsi and Pike had grown up together. Pike and Reece had grown up together, too, and she’d watched him fuck his way through half the girls in their senior class before she left town a few weeks before graduation. Pike had been an arrogant son-of-a-bitch back then and she doubted he had changed that much. Reece wouldn’t be surprised to hear the bastard was cheating on Tulsi before their first year of marriage was finished, but there was no point trying to talk sense into her sister now.

Reece knew better than to waste energy shutting the barn door after the horses were out. She would just have to be there to answer the phone when Tulsi eventually called crying and, in the meantime, keep making excuses to avoid joining her sister for happy family holidays on her husband’s ranch.

The thought made her lip curl. Happy family holidays. It sounded like about as much fun as another skull fracture.

With a sigh, Reece let her duffel strap slide off her arm and the bag drop to the sidewalk with a thud. She lifted her face to the snow and closed her eyes, concentrating on the feel of the crystals melting on her warm cheeks, trying to clear her head and decide what to do next.

But her thoughts continued to churn and tangle. Since the accident last week, she’d had a hard time focusing. Combine that with dizzy spells that hit without warning, sending her staggering, clutching for the nearest wall, and she had a recipe for making sure she wasn’t driving anywhere. Reece was fine with taking risks with her own life, but she wasn’t about to get behind the wheel of a car in her present condition.

That meant no rental car—not that it mattered since the closest car rental facility was an hour away and no doubt was closed at ten o’clock on Christmas Eve. Lonesome Point had no bus system, no taxi service, and Reece hadn’t talked to any of her old friends who lived in the area since high school. That left her with two options: walking the thirty miles to the ranch in the snow, or hitching a ride. But at this hour she’d be lucky to cross paths with even one car headed down the narrow country road toward the Hearst ranch and no matter how stubborn she was she wasn’t sure her battered body was up to that kind of hike.

She was still standing with her eyes closed and her head spinning, letting the snow soak slowly through her padded flannel jacket, when she heard a burst of laughter from down the street. She opened her eyes to see a man in a cowboy hat and a woman in a stupidly short skirt, wearing reindeer ears perched crookedly on her head, stagger down the steps of the Blue Saloon Hotel.

“Merry Christmas, Clint,” the woman called over her shoulder, her words slurred. “We love you! See you on New Year’s Eve!”

Reece snatched her duffel off the ground and hurried down the sidewalk toward the saloon. She didn’t want to hitch a ride with a couple of wasted douchebags, but maybe there were other people in the saloon who were in better shape than the man fumbling with his keys as he tried to open the door to his truck.

“You should get a room,” Reece called out on her way past the cowboy and the woman giggling as she kissed his neck. “You’re in no condition to drive, man.”

“Screw you, bitch,” the woman called out, giving Reece the middle finger with so much enthusiasm that she staggered and nearly fell.

“Yeah. Screw you, too,” Reece mumbled to herself as she plodded up the steps to the saloon. “Hope you flip over in a ditch.”

The people of Lonesome Point, as fucking charming as ever. A drunk driver had nearly killed Reece’s niece last summer, but assholes always assumed the rules didn’t apply to them. Thankfully, however, Drunk Cowboy seemed more reasonable than his girlfriend. Reece heard him saying a room sounded like a good idea, followed by an in-depth description of what he was going to do to Reindeer Antler’s pussy when he got her there.

Reece hurried her pace up the steps, desperate to be spared further gory details. As she pushed through the swinging doors to the saloon, she was greeted by a blast of heat streaming down from the unit above the door. Almost immediately, her flannel coat began to feel uncomfortably warm. She set her duffel down at the closest end of the gleaming bar and stripped off her jacket, letting her eyes skim the darkened room.

In the far corner, near the jukebox wrapped in Christmas lights, sat three cowboys old enough to be her grandfather sharing a bottle of whiskey. They all looked three sheets to the wind and about a minute away from falling asleep in their chairs, so no shot of finding a ride there. Her gaze flicked to a young couple with their heads bent together at a table by the stage, but their trendy clothes made Reece suspect they were out-of-towners and probably staying at the hotel. There was another, older couple in matching denim jackets parked at the center of the bar, chatting up the bartender, but judging by the volume of their laughter, they were loaded, too. Reece was about to shrug her coat back on and start looking elsewhere for a ride when she saw the man in the black sweater at the far end of the bar.

He was sitting in the shadows and had his gaze trained on the half-empty beer in front of him, but even in the dim light, with nothing more than a profile to go by, Reece could tell he was damned good-looking. The faint streaks of gray that threaded through his black hair at his temples made her peg him near forty, but his broad shoulders and muscled chest left no doubt there was a powerful man beneath that sweater. With half his body hidden behind the bar she couldn’t tell exactly how tall he was, but he was clearly a big guy, the kind who could throw back a few beers and still be fine to drive a woman home.

The kind who might even enjoy driving a woman crazy
after
he’d driven her home…

The thought made Reece’s lips twist in her first genuine smile in days. It had been way too long since she’d scratched that particular itch. And if there was anything that could keep her mind off the misery of being back in Lonesome Point and the even more miserable reasons she’d been forced to come home, it was a hot night with a brooding stranger.

She didn’t need to see the guy’s eyes to know he was the broody sort. His strong jaw was clenched, his brow furrowed, and as Reece hitched her pack back on her shoulder and sauntered across the room, she could practically feel the “dark and tortured” vibes pouring off of him. Something had this big guy down, but Reece wasn’t the kind to lend a sympathetic ear. Let other women fuss and coo over his wounded soul; she preferred to keep things physical.

Besides, most broken people couldn’t be fixed anyway, and it was a waste of energy, better spent screwing, to try.

“Merry Christmas Eve,” she drawled as she leaned against the bar a few stools down from Mr. Dark and Tortured, running her fingers along the brim of the cowboy hat sitting next to his drink. “Buy a girl a beer?”

The man looked up, revealing intelligent looking blue eyes beneath his dark brows and confirming that he was indeed damned fine to look at. His sharply sloped nose, high cheekbones, and full lips were grounded by a strong jaw that leant an earthiness to his features and the fine lines surrounding his eyes made Reece wonder what he looked like when he smiled. He was probably even more handsome, but he didn’t look like he was in the mood to hand out any grins tonight. He didn’t look particularly pleased to have had his solitude interrupted, either.

Reece was anticipating being told to buy her own damned beer, but after a long, silent beat, Broody turned to the bartender and lifted a hand.

“Whatever the lady wants,” he rumbled in a gravelly voice that made Reece’s skin prickle. “Add it to my tab.”

“I’ll have a Blue Moon, extra orange slice.” Reece smiled at the bartender as she slid onto the stool next to her tortured cowboy. “Thanks for the drink. You been here long?”

“About an hour,” the man replied, moving his hat to his other side and resuming his moody glaring into the amber liquid inside his pint glass. “I’m heading out soon.”

“I meant in Lonesome Point, not the bar,” Reece said. “You look like you’ve been around long enough to get sick of the small town bullshit.”

He stretched his neck from one side to the other but kept his attention fixed on the bar. “Small town, big city…bullshit’s all the same.”

Reece nodded, mulling that over while she thanked the bartender and squeezed her two orange slices into her beer. “I guess so, but there are more places to get away from it in the city. More places where nobody knows your name.”

“I don’t know your name.” Broody’s attention shifted her way as she took a long drink of the ice-cold beer.

She moaned softly in appreciation as the cold bubbles dulled the edges of her headache. She knew it was probably just the pain pill kicking in, but there was still something magical about an ice-cold beer.

“No, you don’t.” She grinned up at him as she wiped the foam from her upper lip with a sensuous sweep of her thumb, not missing the way the man’s eyes lingered on her mouth. “And why don’t we keep it that way? I won’t tell you my name and you won’t tell me yours. We can be each other’s place where nobody knows our name.”

Mr. Tortured nodded and the hint of a smile curved his full lips. “Sounds like a plan, Shortstack.”

Reece arched one brow. “Because I’m short and stacked?”

Adorably, the man blushed in response. “It was the first short person nickname that came to mind. Haven’t taken a good look at the other.”

“Well, go ahead,” Reece said, holding his gaze, relishing the tension beginning to thicken the air between them. “I don’t mind.”

After a moment, the man leaned closer, but his eyes didn’t waver from hers. “I don’t treat women that way.”

“Then how do you treat women?” Reece asked, shifting until her leg brushed his. “I’m curious.”

“Curiosity can be dangerous,” he said in a husky voice that made Reece’s nipples tighten and her next sip of beer go straight to her head. “What if I’m not a nice guy?”

“What if I’m not a nice girl?” Reece countered, setting her beer down and bringing her hand to rest on his thigh, relishing the rock hard muscles beneath the denim.

Oh yeah, this man definitely had what she was looking for, and then some.

“You don’t scare me, Broody,” she added, fingertips digging lightly into his thigh. “And I don’t need anyone to protect me from the big bad world. I’m made of tougher stuff than that.”

“I can tell,” he said, still holding her gaze. “Do you always come on this strong?”

Reece lifted one shoulder and let her smile go naughty at the edges. “It depends. I figured the bar would be closing soon and we didn’t have time for bullshit. So what do you say? You want to drive me home and then…stick around for a while?”

“How about we have another beer,” the man said as he grabbed the back of her stool and pulled her close with one easy flex of his arm, sending awareness sizzling up her spine and a heavy feeling spreading through her core. “I’d like to talk a little first, see if you’re capable of letting someone else steer a conversation before we think about anything more.”