Page 5 of Disarming The Rancher

“None so far. The threat was called in and, of course, we all thought it was a hoax. These things usually are,” she said like it was another day at the office.

“How often do you deal with threats?” He couldn’t wrap his mind around how awful that must be.

“It’s not too bad. Every once in a while you get a fan who’s a little too into me, but you just keep moving forward, you know?” She said the words like he would have an idea what it was like to be a singing sensation.

He threw his hands up and shrugged.

“I deal with poachers and the bad ones can be pretty dangerous. But I know what I’m dealing with and they’re on my turf,” he said. “I can’t imagine being on stage and looking out onto a crowd of strangers wondering who might have rigged a bomb underneath.”

“It’s not the best part about my job. Honestly, I can’t let it get inside my head or it would be game over. And there is so much I love about what I do,” she said. “Besides, as soon as the threat came through, we postponed my performances.”

“From what my mom says, you’ve made it. Bona fide country star.” His mother had been following Raleigh’s career ever since she left Lone Star Pass for Austin at eighteen.

Raleigh laughed and it was nice to see her smile. Her face lit up and a dozen campfires lit inside him at the sight.

“I wouldn’t say that exactly,” she quickly countered.

“Your fans say otherwise,” he said.

“I’m a Regional Wonder at best.” She laughed at her own joke and he couldn’t help but do the same. “Remind me not to tell you what that means later.”

“How long until its safe for you to get back on the road?” His mother would want to know all the details.

“We’ve canceled the next two weeks’ worth of shows, so we’ll see after that. This guy seems like the real deal. We have to give the feds time to track him down and arrest him. Get him off the streets,” she said. “He threatened me in particular.”

“Jerk,” he spit out. His protective instincts kicked into overdrive. This was Raleigh. They’d practically grown up under the same roof. It was natural for him to be enraged at the thought someone wanted to hurt her and not because he felt a pull of attraction toward her stronger than anything he’d ever experienced.

“My sentiments exactly.”

Raleigh had been caught off guard by Brax finding her. But it was good to see him despite the fact he’d annoyed her more than the others growing up, teasing her about her pigtails and freckles.

“Hey, I’m sorry to hear all this. You’ve worked hard for your success and some random jerk shouldn’t have the ability to take it away from you even for a few weeks.” Brax’s voice washed over her like Amaretto over vanilla ice cream.

She performed another mental headshake.

This was Brax Firebrand. The guy who’d teased and tormented her mercilessly growing up, when he bothered to notice her at all.

She crossed her legs and folded her arms. “You were a real brat when we were kids. You know that, right?”

He laughed.

“Yeah? So were you if memory serves. What did we use to call you?” He seemed to be searching his mind. “Oh, right the Red Streak.”

“I almost blocked that name completely from my thoughts,” she said with a chuckle. “But Red Devil seemed to be your personal favorite.”

“You had that minibike.” He snapped his fingers a couple of times. “You would steal my bandana and take off on that thing. You were such a squirt.”

“Me? You guys weren’t any better if memory serves.” Pretending to be offended didn’t last long. She broke into a smile. “Yeah, I was rotten when I wanted to be.”

“Resilient might be a better word,” he admitted. “Looking back, it couldn’t have been easy to be dumped into a world of eighteen boys.”

“Made me strong,” she mused. There was a whole lot of truth to that statement. Besides, the Firebrand boys, now men she noted, were respectable people. Not one got into serious trouble with school. Hardworking with a whole lot of testosterone; they were bound to bump heads based on the sheer number of them all living on one property.

“That’s one way to look at it.” Brax Firebrand was six-feet-one-inch of male hotness. His hair could best be described as dirty brown against eyes so blue they popped. Even as a teenager, he’d been shorter than the others and she’d overheard his cousins teasing him that he was the runt of the family. The other side of the Firebrand family could be real jerks when they wanted to be.

Raleigh blushed looking at the man he’d become. No runt here. He’d always been good-looking in that rugged outdoorsy way. Most of the time he’d had on a cowboy hat but she still remembered those honest blue eyes.

Then, there were his arms. A person shouldn’t have so many stacked muscles in one place. Butterflies got loose in her stomach just thinking about his touch when he’d pinned her up against the wall earlier.