Page 6 of Wild and Wrangled

I kept walking.

Chapter 4

Cam

I both hated and loved how easy it was for me to take Dusty’s hand and run out of the Devil’s Boot—into its dirt parking lot with my wedding dress floating and rustling around me. It was cold as shit, but I didn’t really notice.

When Dusty looked back at me as we ran toward his Bronco, he had a lopsided smile on his face, and it reminded me so much of the boy I used to know, how much I missed him when I let myself think about him.

I pushed the thought down as we made it to his truck. He opened the door for me and asked, “You’re sure?” I wasn’t. But instead of answering, I grabbed on to the front of the door and hoisted myself up into the cab—like I’d done a million times before. Dusty helped me gather my dress and make sure all of it was inside the truck. “No offense, but this dress is fucking ridiculous,” he said.

“I know,” I said with a breath that turned into a laugh. After Dusty shut the door, he made his way to the driver’s side and hopped in.

“Any requests?” he asked as the Bronco roared to life.

I shook my head. “Just drive.”

Dusty gave me that tilted smile again, and I couldn’t help but smile back. My heart was beating in my ears; I could feel the blood pumping through my veins. My whole body felt alive, as if it had been dormant before.

He started driving and flipped on the radio. Charlie Rich started flowing through the speakers. We didn’t talk, but it wasn’t uncomfortable. Normally, when faced with silence, my head felt loud. It had felt loud all day.

But right now, it was blissfully quiet.

I looked over at Dusty one more time—one of his wrists was hanging over the steering wheel and the other was tapping along to the music—before I leaned my head against the cool glass of the window and watched Wyoming roll by.

—

“Ash,” Dusty said softly a little while later. I lifted my head from the window, slightly disoriented. The landscape around me was no longer moving—we were parked somewhere. “You fell asleep. Feel okay?”

“Yeah,” I said groggily. “Where are we?”

“I thought you might like a change of clothes,” he said. “We’re at a gas station about an hour outside of Meadowlark.”

“Clothes from a gas station?” I said, arching a brow at him. My voice didn’t hold much weight, though, because my dress was starting to dig at me in all the wrong places.

Dusty looked amused. “Sorry. Nordstroms are in short supply around here.”

I sighed and pushed my door open. The full skirt of my dress started to tumble out of the truck. God, this thing wasbig and gaudy and awful. My mother picked it out—she had chosen every detail about today. The church (not for me), the florals (expensive), the food (I hate fish), the music (boring), and of course, the groom—well, I mostly picked that, but it was my parents who influenced the choice. I thought that if I married someone in their circle, I’d get some validation from them. Being their daughter didn’t get me any, but I thought Graham Rawlins might.

Rutherford Ashwood (or Ford, if you were his friend—I wasn’t) was the heir to the oldest and largest bank west of the Missouri River. His grandparents—old money, like Vanderbilt and Rothschild adjacent—came out west with the gold rush and established Basin Bank. If you lived in the West and had any sort of money, it was at Basin.

Enter Sherman Rawlins, owner of Rawlins Associates—one of the largest hedge funds in the country—and Graham’s father. Yeah,thatGraham. The one who left me at the altar a few hours ago because he just “couldn’t do it.”

I shook all the thoughts about my family and Graham and my failed wedding out of my head. Not now.

Once I was out of the truck and on the ground, I went to pull my dress up, worried it might get dirty, but then I remembered I wasn’t walking down the aisle. I was walking into a random gas station off the side of a Wyoming highway that looked like it was the same age as the mountains surroundingit.

I let the dress drop and drag through the mud, slush, and gravel as I walked. Well, stumbled. The heels my mother had picked out to go with this dress were stilettos that probably cost as much as some cars and were not making this journey easy.

The gas station was small. It looked like it had been painted mint green a few decades ago. Out front, there were handwritten signs for homemade beef jerky and five-dollar cigarettes. There were only two fuel pumps, and I wasn’t convinced that they worked.

Dusty fell into step beside me—not too close, not too far away. Silence hung between us again, but this time, there wasn’t music to fill it—just ten years of space and time. Good thing I was an expert at pushing down my feelings or else the weight of this moment—any moment or memory with Dusty—could crush me.

A bell rang on the rickety door as Dusty opened it for me. The middle-aged man at the checkout counter did a double take at the two of us—me in my wedding dress and Dusty in his normal attire—faded jeans, black T-shirt that was cropped a little, just enough to give me a glimpse of his abdomen every time he moved, black cowboy boots, black leather jacket. I looked over at him just as he pushed a hand through his blond waves.

I looked away immediately.

“Hey, Stan,” Dusty said. How did he know this guy? We were far out of town.

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