Page 7 of The Cowboy's Redemption
“I had half a beer at the dance. I poured the rest of it out.”
“Where did you get the beer? Did you take it with you?”
This was where her memory grew hazy. “No. Someone gave it to me.”
“Who?”
Her headache increased. She lowered her eyes. She didn’t like where this conversation was headed. “I don’t know. I didn’t see them.”
“Did you open the bottle yourself?”
Had she? She didn’t think so. “I’m not sure.”
She no longer wanted to know what had happened last night. She could fill in the blanks easily enough. She’d been stupid and Levi had saved her. She should be grateful to him, but she was far too embarrassed.
“I have a headache. You’re asking too many questions.” She checked the hour on the clock. “Would you mind driving me back to the campground? I need to get to the stable and take care of my horses.”
He was quiet, as if trying to decide whether he was done with his interrogation. “Alright.”
She made a trip to the bathroom and tried not to look too closely at the pale face chastising her and her bad attitude in the mirror. She rinsed her mouth with a swig of mouthwash from a small plastic bottle standing next to the chipped sink.
He found her boots for her. The sun poked its sleepy head through the mountains and stared at them in surprise as they drove from the outskirts on one side of Bremner to the other. The trip took no more than five minutes, but already, the campground was stirring.
Levi pulled up a discreet distance from the campground, but not so far that she’d have more than a few minutes’ hike. Dana hopped out of the truck almost before it rolled to a stop.
“Thank you,” she said.
“Don’t take any more drinks from strangers.”
She slammed the truck door on him and his advice. She’d wanted one night to cut loose. To not be Lady Dana, the bull rider’s tragic widow. To not have all eyes on her. To be anonymous outside of the arena.
Look how that had ended for her.
She held her head high on the walk of shame to her camper, her head throbbing with every step, ignoring her neighbors’ curiosity. She was a grown woman. She could spend the night with whomever she pleased. Her mistakes weren’t their business.
And while she was grateful to Levi, they weren’t his business either.
Chapter Three
Levi
“This is whycowboys should stick to doing what cowboys do best and stay away from science,” Otto Hart complained. “I don’t need to explain anything. The results speak for themselves.”
Levi and Otto were sharing beer and shooting the breeze, watching the descending sun slowly cross paths with the moon as night opened its eyes. The ragged edges of the sky turned burgundy as red bled into endless miles of deep blue. Venus, the brightest pinpoint of light, appeared first, followed by Canopus.
Otto, a skinny old man well into his eighties, who personified the wordgrizzled, owned a large parcel of land smack in the middle of the Endeavour Ranch. Ryan O’Connell had been trying to buy it from him for a year and a half now, but Otto wouldn’t budge.
He’d built the one-room log cabin with his own hands when he was a young man. He and Levi relaxed in hand-bent willow rockers on the cabin’s wide porch, under the overhang of the hand-shingled roof. They had a good view of the mountains, the prairies, and the gravel road that saw little traffic. Warm wind stirred the grass and picked at their hair.
Otto’s horses, and the secondary subject of his complaint—Levi taking first place—grazed in a pasture nearby. If Levi were to hazard a guess, he’d say ten of the warmbloods were worth a minimum of fifty thousand dollars each. The stud was likely closer to a hundred. The remaining twenty or so in the herd could easily net twenty thousand or more.
What was stored in Otto’s head was the real moneymaker, however. And Otto cared nothing for money. His land, his horses, and his house… Those were his loves. He never haggled over money. If a buyer wanted to purchase his stock, they had to prove themselves worthy before he’d even consider their offer. He priced his horses high so that they’d be valued. He also had an intense dislike of Tennessee Walkers as a breed, and therefore nothing but disdain for Ryan, a hobbyist who raised them.
Levi’s specialty was cattle, which was why the Endeavour had hired him for their bull breeding program. He’d earned his master’s degree in animal genetics at Columbia University but dropped out of the PhD program in his second year. He’d missed Montana, and Grand in particular, and couldn’t see how that last piece of paper and a few extra letters after his name would contribute financially to his return, which was his goal. Already, he could name his price at any one of the stock contractors in the state. The Endeavour had met it, with a bonus thrown in, so Levi understood Otto’s position on value.
“All I’m saying is that you should find a way to record what you feed your stock, and the breeding characteristics you look for, along with your successes and failures, so that the knowledge doesn’t die with you.”
“What do I care if it does? I’ll be dead,” Otto countered. “My only concern is finding someone to look after the horses I got after I’m gone.”
