Page 1 of The Cowboy's Downfall
Chapter One
Nix
Nixon McCray hadbeen trampled by bulls. He’d been robbed at knifepoint in the back alley of some honky-tonk off the interstate in Texas. He’d made his first—and last—bungee jump from a bridge over a reservoir in Central California because some rich, sissy college boys had bet him a thousand dollars he didn’t have the guts. He’d spent two years drifting around the American West, carrying only his toothbrush and two changes of clothes, playing the skinny cowboy version of Jack Reacher.
Yet Nix could think of nothing or no one he was more afraid of than his ex-wife. Peg—the reason he’d spent two years adrift—had a knack for making him feel as if he didn’t quite measure up. That it was his fault when the car she wanted didn’t come in the right color. Or that the house she had her heart set on was out of their reach. And that she’d had an affair.
“If you’d been here for me, this would never have happened.”
How she had tracked him to the Endeavour Ranch in Grand, Montana, he’d never know, but somehow, she’d gotten the phone number for the ranch bunkhouse landline. The unlisted number.
He caught himself nodding as she spoke, even though she couldn’t see him. She was somewhere in Switzerland, enjoying his life’s savings with the investment advisor she’d been sleeping with while he—Nix—worked the rodeo circuit.
He—again, Nix—didn’t care about the money. Switzerland was far enough away for him to consider it money well spent. He did care that even now, despite all that she’d done, she had enough power over him to make his heart burn with dread. They’d started dating when they were fourteen. Married at twenty. He’d had no other girlfriends. A few close encounters in parking lots after they’d split didn’t count. He’d been crazy for her, even though his mother and sisters had expressed reservations, and his dad had tried to tell him they were too young for marriage. Peg took it as a personal insult when his mother refused to give up the family ring that rightfully belonged to the McCray firstborn son. She’d been his whole world for closing in on two decades, and when she left him, he’d been lost.
But they’d been legally divorced for two years, and he’d assumed they were done. She didn’t feel the same way, apparently.
No surprise, there.
“That’s why I need you to talk to my parents and convince them it’s a bad idea for them to visit me,” Peggy Jones-McCray finished in her soft, Texas drawl, ending a monologue that he’d only half-heard because he’d learned to tune her out. He’d caught what was important, however.
Talk to her parents? No way in hell.
Lynette Jones was cut from the same cloth as her daughter—all sweet on the surface, but the steely determination of those early Texans who’d traipsed the Oregon Trail lurked underneath.
Victor Jones, meanwhile, was one of those twitchy, middle-aged men who’d been brow-beaten by the women governing his life to the point he couldn’t make his own decisions about what pants to wear anymore. Nix had been following in his father-in-law’s footsteps—letting his wife run his life because she knew best—until Peggy finally found a man more suited to the lifestyle she wanted.
She was waiting for his response. He was keenly aware that Handy, one of his bunkmates, eavesdropped with avid and undisguised interest. A youngster of twenty-some years, Handy sprawled in a chair at the common room’s round wooden table with a wide grin on his face. Everyone else was in the cookhouse, eating breakfast, but he’d answered the phone, and his nosiness overrode hunger.
Nix had never owned a cell phone. He disliked being chipped by the government so his every move could be tracked. Now, he saw the benefits of being able to lock himself in the bathroom so he could carry on a conversation in private. Sweat formed on the back of his neck. This conversation would be all over Grand even before it was finished.
“Your mama isn’t going to heed me,” he said to Peggy. “Besides, they’re in Abilene.” As in Abilene, Texas—a good seventeen-hour drive away. “I’m in—not in Abilene,” he finished lamely, on the off chance she only had his phone number, and not his actual, physical location.
“You’ll figure something out. You always do,” Peggy replied sweetly, with more confidence in him than he deserved. In the background, on her end, he heard a canned, robotic voice spit out an announcement over a loudspeaker in a language he didn’t know. German, perhaps. “Whoops, sorry Nix, that’s our train. I’ve got to run.”
And she hung up. He untangled the landline’s long, curly cord and returned the receiver to its hook on the wall.
“What’re you looking at?” he demanded of Handy, who still wore a grin.
Handy leaned hastily away and threw up his hands. “Nothing.”
A long shadow moved in the doorway. It was early September, still warm, and they’d left the door open to air out the bunkhouse. One of the Endeavour Ranch’s three owners filled its frame, much like a gunslinger about to enter a saloon.
While Nix’s ex-wife might tie his insides in knots, he viewed Ryan O’Connell with wary respect. Back in the old days, Ryan would be the loner who rode into town, shot the place up, then took over as sheriff and imposed law and order, all while obeying no rules but his own. Kind of the same way he ran the Endeavour. Nix wondered how much he’d overheard.
“Aren’t you supposed to be down at the fat pen, cutting steers?” Ryan said to Handy. He spoke in a hard, quiet voice that made grown men quake in their boots.
Handy was no exception. “Yessir.” He grabbed his hat off his knee, scrambled from his chair, and hit the ground running.
Ryan waited until he was out of earshot before addressing Nix, who was busy trying to think of how best to respond to questions about the phone call from his ex-wife, because whilenone of your businessmight be right, it wasn’t the wisest option. He liked his job.
Ryan didn’t believe in wasting words. “The Endeavour Ranch plans to offer a bull riding clinic for the kids at Custer County Grand High and we want you to run it,” he said. “Our boys are going to take part.”
The ranch ran a group home for misfit, teenaged boys who’d had more than one brush with the law. There’d been pushback from local parents after Ryan’s wife Elizabeth, a social worker, enrolled two of the boys in public school. The boys weren’t unredeemable—according to Elizabeth—but they weren’t role models for their peers, either.
Nix pieced the details together. “You want to sit boys with no impulse control on a few tons of dynamite? And you want me to light the fuses for them?” he said. “Do I understand you correctly?”
Ryan’s lips twitched. Could have been from humor. More likely a prelude to murder. “You understand me just fine. We might take it a step further. If we get enough interest, we can set the kids up in teams and turn this into a junior, PBR-style competition. It would be a great event for the Endeavour to add to the rodeo in February.”
