Texas Outlaws: Jesse

Her gaze narrowed. “I’m not the one they’ll be after.”

“No, you’re just in charge of the town they’ll be invading. After all the craziness the last time I think you’re anxious to avoid another circus. Getting rid of me would certainly help.” The words came out edged with challenge, as if he dared her to dispute them.

He did.

She caught her bottom lip as if she wanted to argue, but then her mouth pulled tight. “If the only eyewitness to the fire is MIA, the reporters won’t have a reason to stick around. I really think it would be best for everyone.” Her gaze caught and held his. “Especially you.”

Ditto.

He sure as hell wasn’t up to the pain he’d gone through the first time. The show had originally aired a few months after he’d graduated high school, five years to the day of his father’s death. He’d been eighteen at the time and a damn sight more reckless.

He’d been ground zero in the middle of a training session with a young, jittery bull named Diamond Dust. A group of reporters had shown up, cameras blazing, and Diamond had gone berserk. More so than usual for a mean-as-all-get-out bucking bull. Jesse had hit the ground, and then the bull had hit him. Over and over, stomping and crushing until Jesse had suffered five broken ribs, a broken leg, a dislocated shoulder and a major concussion. Injuries that had landed him in a rehab facility for six months and nearly cost him everything.

Not that the same thing wouldn’t have happened eventually. He’d been on a fast road to trouble back then, ignoring the rules and riding careless and loose. The reporters had simply sped up the inevitable, because Jesse hadn’t been interested in a career back then so much as an escape.

From the guilt of watching his own father die and not doing a damned thing to stop it.

It wasn’t your fault. The man made his own choice.

That was what Pete Gunner had told him time and time again after the fire. Pete was the pro bull rider who’d taken in thirteen-year-old Jesse and his brothers and saved them from being split up into different foster homes after their father had died. Pete had been little more than a kid himself back then—barely twenty—and had just won his first PBR title. The last thing he’d needed was the weight of three orphans distracting him from his career, but he’d taken on the responsibility anyway. The man had been orphaned himself as a kid and so he’d known how hard it was to make it in the world. Cowboying had saved him and so he’d taught Jesse and his brothers how to rope and ride and hold their own in a rodeo arena. He’d turned them into tough cowboys. The best in the state, as a matter of fact. Even more, he’d given them a roof over their heads and food in their stomachs, and hope.

And when Diamond had nearly killed Jesse, it had been Pete who’d paid for the best orthopedic surgeons in the state. Pete was family—as much a brother to Jesse as Billy and Cole—and he was about to marry the woman of his dreams this Saturday.

That was the real reason Jesse had come back to this godforsaken town. And the reason he had no intention of leaving until the vows were spoken, the cake was cut and the happy couple left for two weeks in the Australian outback.

Then Jesse would pack up what little he had left here and head for Austin to make a real life. Far away from the memories. From her.

He stiffened against a sudden wiggle of regret. “Trust me, there’s nothing I’d like better than to haul ass out of here right now.”

“Good. Then we’re on the same page—”

“But I won’t,” he cut in. “I can’t.”

A knowing light gleamed in her eyes. “I’m sure Pete would understand.”

“I’m sure he would, but that’s beside the point.” Jesse shook his head. “I’m not missing his wedding.”

“But—”

“You’ll just have to figure out some other way to defuse the situation and keep the peace.”

And then he did what she’d done to him on that one night forever burned into his memory—he turned and walked away without so much as a goodbye.

2

WAIT A SECOND.

Wait just a friggin’ second.

That was what Gracie wanted to say. She’d envisioned this meeting about a zillion times on the way over, and this wasn’t the way it had played out. Where was the gratitude? The appreciation? The desperate embrace followed by one whopper of a kiss?

She ditched the last thought and focused on the righteous indignation that came with violating about ten different city ordinances on someone else’s behalf. Leaking private city business to civilians was an unforgivable sin and the memo from the production company had been marked strictly confidential.

But this was Jesse, and while she’d made it a point to avoid him for the past twelve years, she couldn’t in good conscience sit idly by and let him be broadsided by the news crew currently on its way to Lost Gun.

Not because she cared about him.

Lust. That was all she’d ever felt for him. The breath-stealing, bone-melting, desperate lust of a hormone-driven sixteen-year-old. A girl who’d dreamed of a world beyond her desperately small town, a world filled with bright lights and big cities and a career in photojournalism.

She’d wanted out so bad back then. To the point that she’d been wild and reckless, eager to fill the humdrum days until her eighteenth birthday with whatever excitement she could find.

But then she’d received the special-delivery letter announcing that her older brother had been killed in the line of duty and she’d realized it was time to grow up, step up and start playing it safe right here in Lost Gun.

For her sister.

Charlotte Stone was ten years younger than Gracie. And while she’d been too young—four years old, to be exact—to remember the devastation when their parents had died in a tragic car accident, she’d been plenty old enough at nine to feel the earthquake caused by the death of their older brother. She’d morphed from a happy, outgoing little girl, into a needy, scared introvert who’d been terrified to let her older sister out of her sight.

Gracie had known then that she could never leave Lost Gun. Even more, she’d vowed not only to stay but to settle down, play it safe and make a real home for her sister.

She’d traded her beloved photography lessons for finance classes at the local junior college and ditched everything that was counterproductive to her new safe, settled life—from her favorite fat-filled French fries to Jesse Chisholm himself.

Especially Jesse.

He swiped a hand across his backside to dust off his jeans and her gaze snagged on the push-pull of soft faded denim. Her nerves started to hum and the air stalled in her lungs.

While time usually whittled away at people, making them worn around the edges, it had done the opposite with Jesse. The years had carved out thick muscles and a ripped bod. He looked even harder than she remembered, taller and more commanding. The fitted black-and-gray retro Western shirt framed broad shoulders and a narrow waist. Worn jeans topped with dusty brown leather chaps clung to trim hips and thighs and stretched the length of his long legs. Scuffed brown cowboy boots, the tips worn from one too many run-ins with a bull, completed the look of rodeo’s hottest hunk. The title had been held by local legend Pete Gunner up until he’d proposed to the love of his life just two short years ago. Since then Jesse had been burning up the rodeo circuit, determined to take the man’s place and gain even more notoriety for the Lost Boys, a local group of cowboy daredevils who were taking the rodeo circuit by storm, winning titles and charming fans all across the country.

Wild. Fearless. Careless.

He was all three and then some.

Her gaze shifted to the face hidden beneath the brim of a worn Stetson. While she couldn’t see his eyes thanks to the shadow, she knew they were a deep, mesmerizing violet framed by thick sable lashes. A few days’ growth of beard covered his jaw and crept down his neck. Dark brown hair brushed his collar and made her fingers itch to reach out and touch.

“If I were you, I’d stop staring and put my tongue back in my mouth before somebody stomps on it.”

The voice startled her, and she turned to see the ancient cowboy who came up beside her.

Eli McGinnis was an old-school wrangler in his late seventies with a head full of snow-white hair that had been slicked back with pomade. His handlebar mustache twitched and she knew he was smiling even though she couldn’t actually see the expression beneath the elaborate do on his top lip.

“You’d do well to stop droolin’, too,” he added. “We got enough mud puddles around here already. A few shit piles, too.”

“I wasn’t—”

“Drooling?” he cut in. “While I ain’t the brightest bulb in the tanning bed, I know drooling when I see it and, lemme tell ya, it ain’t attractive on a fine upstanding public servant like yourself. Then again, you ain’t actually the mayor yet, so I guess I should be talking to your uncle when it comes to serious public-health issues.”

“Uncle E.J. already left for Port Aransas. He and my aunt just bought a house there.” Her brow wrinkled as the impact of his words hit. “A public-health issue?” The notion killed the lingering image of Jesse and snagged her complete attention. “What health issue?” A dozen possibilities raced through her mind, from a city-wide epidemic of salmonella to a flesh-eating zombie virus.

Okay, so she spent her evenings watching a little too much cable TV since Charlie had moved into the dorms at the University of Texas last year. A girl had to have some fun.