Page 25 of Risking it for the Cowboy

He ignored the fraternal chest-bumping. As a little kid, T.R. hadn’t stood a chance in Tyler’s much older headlocks. But he wasn’t a kid anymore. You’re not a kid anymore, though…

“Funny, old man,” T.R. quipped.

Tyler snorted. “Your choice.”

“Get the boxing gloves. I could use a chance to punch something legally.” He jumped down, checked his phone again—6:38—rummaged through his tool drawer again, shoving it shut and storming to his shop door, rolling it all the way open. “Jayce! D’you take my twenty-one millimeter again?”

“Yeah! Sorry, boss!” the wrangler replied, hoisting up one of the bales on the pulley from the back of the truck. “It’s at my workstation!”

T.R. stormed out and around the building to Jayce’s workstation as sweat rolled in a rivulet between his bare shoulder blades, digging his heels in instead of leaving well enough alone.

He found his wrench with the chipped wrought iron. His granddad’s tools. A man who’d understood him and had gifted his tools to him when his hands had gotten too shaky with age to use anymore. T.R. liked the feel of them in his palms, liked channeling his granddad’s patient energy through them with each engine he rebuilt.

He marched back to his shop and hoisted himself up the tractor as if a jungle gym and fit the socket over the bolt, cranking, his body torquing with each hoist to loosen the lug nut.

“I’ll go get the gloves, then,” Tyler said.

“Yeah, you do that because I mean—” T.R. cranked the nut. “Why should I—” His body torqued again as he grunted. “Give a shit—”

“Why should you?” Tyler quipped, and a glance down showed his cuz leaning on the wall, ankle slung over the other as if enjoying the show, as music and air compressor and flatbed buzzed together.

“She don’t want me—” He cranked it again.

“Nope.”

T.R. threw his weight into it. “Lied—didn’t call.”

“Yup.”

He glared at the humored tone in Tyler’s voice. Bastard had gotten him talking.

Tyler snorted and shook his head, turning to leave. “You need a good lay, man.”

“I need Charlize Bradford. I need to enter that competition.”

“You needed her to choose you.”

Shit, it hurt when the hammer hit the nail head and he was the nail. Because the truth felt awful.

“She tumbled with me for a night and sent me packing the next morning.” He shrugged. “No biggie. Ain’t like I’ve never done the same. I ain’t a monk like you.”

Joke was on him though. His equipment wouldn’t work without thinking of her. He might as well don a cowl and pick up a bible.

“You were that bad you only got one night?”

T.R. yanked his mechanic rag out and whipped it at Tyler who dodged it, chuckling. Finally. The bastard had been a monolith ever since Heart had left. Still, Tyler cooled.

“Her ex showed up early with her daughter. She just … like a switch, flipped off. Just like that.” He snapped for effect, slowing, dissecting that morning for the millionth time. “Does she still want him? She definitely didn’t want me to meet him, or him me, like I was some dirty secret, which ain’t no surprise.” He’d grown used to being his parents’ dirty secret.

He’d thought he was immune to the hurt. But then why had she divorced the guy? The news report had been scant on details. Tyler stood silently gauging him.

“Why’re you looking at me like I grew another head?”

Tyler had that lawyer look where his vision narrowed at nothing in particular while those Ivy League brain cells fired like NASCAR pistons. “Sounds like she’s scared of him.”

Scared? T.R., getting ready to fix the lug wrench on the nut, paused. She had drained of color that morning, but he’d … what if he’d read it wrong? What if she wasn’t worried so much about her daughter coming home, but rather, of her ex’s reaction? Why had she divorced him?

“Did you meet the guy?” Tyler asked.