Page 56 of Love Me Back
Famous last words.
We were twenty feet from where I knew the brush opened up, and Grayson would be waiting, when a shot rang out, hitting a tree in front of us.
Thunder reared back, and the force of his mane being ripped from my hands tossed me backwards onto the ground. I expected him to run, but instead he stayed by my side.
Standing up, I brushed off what I could, then reached for Thunder when another shot rang out. This time the horse only sidestepped. As if he had been expecting it.
He nudged me with his nose until I was at his belly. Then he did something that made my eyes bulge. He dropped his front legs to his knees and snorted.
“What are you doing? Get up!” I hissed. “This is not the time to take a break!”
He nudged me again, swinging his nose to his back and up.
“Oh no! Not a chance in hell. Are you insane?”
Thunder stood up and nudged me again before dropping to his knees once more.
“I can’t do this,” I whined as I grabbed onto his mane and swung a leg over his big body. I was barely seated when Thunder stood and launched himself forward.
I tucked my head against his neck like I had seen in movies and tried to squeeze my knees together as hard as I could. My arms wrapped around his neck, and I held on with everything I had as Thunder ran through the brush as if the hounds of hell were chasing us.
I tried to ignore the surrounding sounds—the cracking of branches as he stomped over them. Gunshots ricocheted off the trees around us, the sound echoing in the dense forest. At least whoever was shooting at us wasn’t trying to kill us. Well, not trying to kill Thunder at least.
Pretty sure I would be considered collateral damage. Minutes felt like hours until we finally broke free of the brush into theclearing. Hudson had done what I asked and moved everyone back, but Thunder didn’t care where they were. He never stopped moving.
I heard Grayson and the others shouting my name and Thunder’s, but he didn’t pause. He ran as if his life depended on it. And maybe it did. Right then, all I could concentrate on was my own life and surviving the ride from hell.
Chapter Twenty-One
Grayson
“I don’t like this.”
“You’ve said that.”
“Well, I’m saying it again, Carl.”
I sat on the tailgate of the ranch pickup truck with Carl as I watched Jessie ride off on a horse with my brother Hudson. I wanted to be the man who took her for her first ride. Only I couldn’t fucking ride a horse because I couldn’t fucking walk.
My knuckles turned white as I gripped the truck, knowing there were a thousand ways this could go wrong. Jessie didn’t know how to ride a horse. Thunder could be an asshole when he felt like it. My brothers said he was too much like his owner, and maybe he was, but we understood each other.
We had no idea who had let him out or who had shot at me. Nav had cleared half my hands, Carl being one of them. And thank God, because aside from my siblings, Carl was who I trusted the most on this ranch.
Carl was young, only twenty-five, but he was a hard worker, and he was honest and loyal. He worked here because he loved the ranch and the animals. He wasn’t looking to get rich; he was simple, like us.
Most people wouldn’t call us simple, but we were. They saw the huge barns, the horses and cattle, and assumed we were tycoons. And on paper, we were. But part of that was because we lived a simple life.
Our extravagance was for our animals, not for us. We all lived in the ranch house my great-grandfather built. It was over a hundred years old. Sure, we’d made some changes, added some modern touches, but nothing that would have anyone whowalked inside think we were showing off.
We might have grown up with money, but our parents taught us to work hard for what we wanted. Nothing was given to us.
Including this land.
I might run this ranch, but it wasn’t mine. It belonged to Pops. Had since his father passed away. It would have gone to my mother first, but my parents were gone. So, when Pops died, the ranch and the hardware store would be split among the six of us.
“What’s taking so long?” I asked out loud to no one in particular. Nobody who was in that field with me could answer the question because none of us could see inside the dense forest.
There weren’t many trees in Nebraska. Not like I’d seen in pictures of other areas. Most of the landscape was flat from centuries of farming. But we had these small parcels that often got overlooked.
