“Luke’s always been like family, Shelby, and you know it,” Daddy said, stabbing another sausage link with his fork and bringing it to his plate. “Now granted, sometimes he’s been the black sheep of the family, but we don’t turn our backs on family, regardless of color.”
“What the hell does that even mean?” I snapped.
“It means you need to hush up and let me eat my breakfast in peace. I swear, you’re getting to be just like your mother.” He cut the link in two with the side of the fork and stuck half in his mouth. When he chewed, his mustache wiggled. When I was a little girl I thought it was cute. Now it just annoyed the heck out of me.
Daddy wiggled the fork at me again. “I swear, that woman could give me heartburn before breakfast just by looking at me. Don’t you try to do the same.”
“You gonna run Shelby off, too, Daddy?” Cody asked, grinning, cutting his eyes at Daddy. He was referring to the day fifteen years ago when Mama came home to find her bags packed and sitting outside the front gates of the ranch with Daddy standing there with his shotgun cradled in his arm. He had found out Mama was sleeping with a cowboy in town and that was all she wrote. Me and Cody stood inside the gate watching with tears in our eyes.
Mama didn’t bother to deny it or place blame. She’d been caught fair and square, and she knew Daddy was not a man prone to forgiveness after he’d been cheated on. I admired Daddy’s restraint. He just told her to pick up her bags and git. When he was a younger man he would have tracked her and the cowboy down and gutted them both like a deer.
“You hush, too,” Daddy snapped at Cody, though he was trying not to grin beneath the mustache that covered his lips.
“But Daddy, Luke Daniels ain’t nothing but trouble,” I said again, sitting back and crossing my arms over my breasts. I was starting to feel like a lousy lawyer arguing a losing case. My only argument against Luke Daniels was that he was “nothing but trouble” because that’s all I could say about him without riling Daddy up to the point of violence.
There were lots more things I could say about Luke, but I never would, not to Daddy, the man who still treated me like I was his virginal little girl. In his mind, I was still as chaste as mountain snow. He’d shit in his hat if he knew how many boys I had slept with in high school and while I was away at college. His little girl was no slut, but she hadn’t been a virgin since the day she turned sixteen. Luke Daniels saw to that.
I hadn’t seen Luke since the day I left for college six years ago, but I expected that he hadn’t changed much. Too good-looking for his own good, more muscles than brains, didn’t give a rat’s patoot about anything or anybody other than riding bulls and having a good time. And by good time I meant that he would drink anything you put in front of him and screw anything that moved and some things that didn’t. Cody always said Luke was stubborn as a mule and hung like a horse. I knew from personal experience that points were true.
Fuckin’ hell… it annoyed me to no end that the mention of Luke Daniels’ name could make my nipples hard. My waterworks were going, too, like somebody had turned on the faucet down there. I could feel hot moisture pooling in the cotton panties between my legs. Try as I might, it seemed I only despised Luke from the neck up, because from the neck down, it was party time.
“Why do you hate Luke so much, Shelby?” Cody asked, giving me a sideways glance. He picked up another biscuit and swirled it around the gravy left on his plate. He popped the entire biscuit into his mouth and chewed slowly while giving me a knowing smile.
“I just do,” I said, growling at him. “That boy’s been nothing but trouble since the day he was born.” Daddy was watching us from the other end from beneath his bushy eyebrows.
“You keep saying that Luke ain’t nothing but trouble,” Cody said, glancing at Daddy but talking to me. “What’d Luke ever do to you to make you hate him so much?”
“He never did anything to me,” I snapped. “Just shut up and eat your damn biscuit.”
Anyone listening would have thought that we were little kids the way we argued, even though I was twenty-four and just home with a degree in agriculture from Texas A&M, and Cody was a twenty-eight-year-old cowboy who helped daddy run the ranch.
I glared at Cody. He knew why I hated Luke Daniels, and he knew better than to say anything in front of Daddy. Daddy might have shot Luke with both barrels of his old shotgun if he knew what happened between us. Cody knew that, too, which was why he would never say anything.
Cody just rolled his dark eyes and shook his head. Cody looked more like Mama than Daddy. He had jet black hair that hung in his steel blue eyes and sharp Cherokee features. He was big and tall and rugged and had never started a fight, but was always ready to finish one if somebody was picking on me or Luke. His skin was the color of dark honey, year-round.
I looked more like daddy; tall and thin, with strawberry-blond hair that I kept pulled back into a long ponytail at the base of my neck, blue eyes, and fair Irish complexion that refused to tan even in the hot Texas sun. I had to wear long sleeves and a floppy hat to keep from burning when I went outside.
Crazy that I had gotten a Masters in agriculture, I know. I planned to spend more time doing seed research in nice, air-conditioned labs than tromping around outside in the scorching Texas sun.
Cody was easygoing like Mama and I was a stick of dynamite ready to explode like Daddy was at my age. Time had mellowed him. I couldn’t imagine it doing the same to me.
Cody and Luke had been like brothers since the day Luke’s parents were killed in a car wreck out on Highway 9. Luke was two months younger than Cody, so Cody always treated him like a little brother.
Luke’s daddy was my Daddy’s best friend and lead ranch hand. Luke came to live with us when he was twelve and I was ten. We all grew up together, but Cody and Luke were thick as thieves. You never saw one without the other.
Luke never gave me a second glance until I started filling out my t-shirts and bikini tops, then, like most girls in Calloway County, it became my life’s mission to get Luke Daniels to notice me… to touch me.
He always called me “Lil Sis” up until the day I left for college. The only time he didn’t call me Little Sis was when he was taking my virginity in the barn on my sixteenth birthday.
Sometimes I wondered if Cody was really all right with what happened between me and Luke all those years ago. He had always been a protective big brother to us both, but when it came to Luke, he always seemed ready to give him a pass.
It made me sad sometimes that Cody hadn’t beaten the shit out Luke when he caught us in the barn that night, his best friend and his little sister fucking like rabbits in the hayloft. Cody hadn’t said a word. He just blinked at us for a moment, like he couldn’t believe his eyes, then went back down the ladder out of sight so me and Luke could finish what we were doing.
I guess Cody understood that Luke wasn’t forcing me to do anything I didn’t want to do, since I was the one on top, riding Luke like a rodeo cowgirl trotting around the arena on her prized stallion.
I was the one who had dragged Luke out to the barn while everyone else was enjoying my Sweet Sixteen birthday cake.
I was the one who begged Luke to pop my cherry.
I was the one who wanted him to be my first.
At the time, I wanted him to be my first, last, and only.
Maybe I still wanted that.
Maybe that was the problem.
Maybe that was why I was so damned afraid of seeing him again.
Luke
“I still think you should wait a few more days,” the doctor said, giving a disapproving shake of his head as he read over my chart for hopefully the last time. “You pop those stitches again and – “
“I know, doc,” I said, holding up my hands. “I could bleed out and die.”
He shot me a hard look over the top of his reading glasses. “Yes, without immediate medical attention, you could bleed out and die.”
“I understand, doc,” I said. “Don’t you worry. I plan to outlive you by a good thirty years just so I can say I told you so.”
I offered up the best smile I could muster. My side still hurt like a sumbitch, despite the pain meds and antibiotics they’d been pumping into me for over a week. It felt like somebody was sticking a hot branding iron into my gut, but I wasn’t gonna let him know that. I held up my right hand and said, “I promise to be careful. Scouts honor.”
“I seriously doubt you were ever a Scout,” he mumbled. He held out his hands and sighed like a man who was giving up. “All right then, you have been warned and I bear no responsibility for anything that happens to you once you walk out that door.”
“Agreed,” I said. “I am on my own. Got it.”
He closed my chart and tucked it under his arm. He took off the glasses and tucked them into the front pocket of his white coat. He asked, “Do you want me to prescribe pain meds to go with the antibiotics?”
“Don’t need pain meds, doc,” I lied. “I just need some clothes and directions to the elevator.”
I was sitting on the edge of the bed with my feet dangling, still wearing a flimsy hospital gown and nothing else. I’d been told that my bloody clothes had been cut off me by the EMTs and thrown away. The only things that survived were my bloodstained National Rodeo Association Championship belt and silver buckle (they knew I’d skin them alive if they hurt that belt) and my scuffed boots, which were sitting on the floor next to the bed with the belt tucked inside one of them. Far as I knew my old truck, along with everything I owned like clothes and a wallet that didn’t have more than a few dollars in it, was still sitting in the parking lot at the rodeo arena.