Page 1 of Untaming the Cowboy
APPLE
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1
LUCAS
“Down, Stanley! Get down!”
Gunfire ripped through the night. Dirt and ash exploded from the ground with every impact. Lucas dove behind a broken wall, coughing as dust clogged his throat. The air reeked of sweat, smoke, and something burning that wasn’t just fuel.
“Stanley! Hel?—”
The world spun as Lucas pivoted. Ramirez lay crumpled on the ground nearby, crimson seeping through his fatigues. Lucas belly-crawled toward him, his hands raw against the rocky earth, bullets whistling just above his helmet. When he finally reached his friend, Lucas curled his body over Ramirez as a human shield.
“Stay with me, numbnuts. I got you.”
Ramirez’s eyes fluttered. His mouth worked, but only released a dark bubble of blood. Lucas clamped his palms against the wound, fingers quivering, screaming until his throat burned for someone to help. The only response came from the battlefield itself—the snap-crack of gunfire, the earth-shaking boom of distant explosions.
“Don’t you leave me, brother. You hear me? Not like this. Not?—”
Ramirez went slack beneath his hands. The firefight faded to a whisper, desert haze dissolving into mist. The grit of sand coating Lucas’s skin turned to cool droplets. He blinked down, and suddenly his arms cradled nothing. When he raised his head, she materialized through sheets of rain.
Stacie.
She stood there barefoot on wet ground, white dress clinging to her frame, and her belly swollen with another man’s child. Rain had darkened her blonde hair to honey, plastered it to her cheeks.The pity in her eyes was exactly as Lucas remembered from the night she’d pressed his ring back into his palm.
“Luc . . .” Her mouth formed his name, but the sound drowned in the downpour. Her image flickered like a static. A voice thunder boomed overhead, “You made it home, Marine. But you lost the only thing worth fighting for.”
Luc reached for her?—
Then the world exploded in blinding white.
Luc bolted upright fighting, his throat raw from a half-swallowed scream. Sweat-soaked sheets twisted around his legs like restraints. Darkness pressed against his eyes while phantom smoke filled his lungs. He scrubbed his face with trembling hands, willing his heart to stop hammering against his ribs.
Seven days. He’d gone seven days without the nightmare—without seeing Ramirez’s face, without the hot, sticky blood pooling between his fingers as he’d knelt beside his friend. They’d been separated from their unit after the landmine hit. He could still hear his own voice promising,I’m not leaving you, as the sand beneath them turned crimson. His CO had physically pulled him away from the body.
Spencer, his counselor at Silver Creek Ranch, called it post-traumatic stress and survivor’s guilt, but Luc knew the truth. He’d watched a man he’d trained beside since basic die on foreign soil, and every night, sleep made him watch it again.
Then there was Stacie—the woman who’d crushed his dream of returning home to a family. Instead, he’d come back to an excuse, to someone who couldn’t understand a military life. She hadn’t waited for him; she’d moved on, engaged, and carrying another man’s child. Spencer said her reappearance in his nightmares was his subconscious mind’s way of processing unresolved emotional pain.
No, Luc didn’t buy that. He wanted Stacie to feel what he’d felt, to know what it was to wake up hollow, haunted, heart split in two. Her showing up in his dreams wasn’t healing. It was punishment, and maybe that was the part of him that still wasn’t ready to let go.
Five years ago, when everything finally caught up to him—the loss, the guilt, the heartbreak—Luc hadn’t known what to do with himself. Just a country boy who’d run out of places to hide from his own mind. It was Chad, his younger brother, and a fellow soldier who told him about Silver Creek, a healing ranch for veterans trying to find solid ground again. Luc hadn’t hesitated. He’d gone, broken and half-willing to be fixed. Somewhere between the dirt, the silence, and the horses, he’d found pieces of peace he didn’t think existed anymore.
Luc rolled over, and grabbed his phone from the bedside table. He tapped the screen twice causing it to light up.3:45 AM. Fifteen minutes early, as usual. His body had kept military time long after leaving the service. He swung his legs over the edge of the mattress, his feet finding the cold wood at the exact moment Wynn’s muzzle nudged his calf. The Australian Shepherd’s tail thumped once against the floorboards. Luc scratched behind his ears, then moved through his morningritual: a splash of water to the face, teeth brushed, running clothes laid out the night before.
Five minutes later, he stepped outside, sneakers laced and earbuds in place. Wynn’s nails tap-tapped behind him across the wooden porch. Darkness still claimed the sky, but the first trace of light brushed the horizon. The morning air carried just enough chill to clear his mind without biting at his skin, fresh with moisture that settled heavy on everything it touched. Across the field, wisps of ground fog veiled the distant fences in gauzy white.
Luc swiped his phone awake, starting the same playlist as he always did. BigXthaPlug’s “Hell At Night” bled through his earbuds, the bass rolling through his chest. These songs about broken hearts and survival—he couldn’t explain why he kept returning them—but they resonated with whatever pieces of himself that still refused sleep. Morgan Wallen’s “I’m the Problem” followed, the melody drifting through the morning chill while Wynn trotted ahead, his tail swinging in rhythm with each step along the dirt road.
Spencer had called his heartbreak playlist “counterproductive to healing.” “It’s like picking at a scab,” he’d said. Luc disagreed. He called it catharsis. Every track was a wound he didn’t have words for—the knife-twist of Stacie’s betrayal, the hollow echo where promises used to live, and that shameful hope that somewhere, she felt even a fraction of his pain.
Two miles in, “Over and Over” rolled through his headphones, Tim McGraw’s drawl bleeding into Nelly’s flow. The chorus hit, that blend of country drawl and hip-hop beat echoing through his head, matching the rhythm of his heart’s pace. Wynn loped beside him, pink tongue hanging, his shadow stretching across grass that sparkled silver in the half-light. Dawn was just breaking, painting the ridge in watercolorstrokes of amber and rose. Luc gulped the morning chill into his lungs and lengthened his stride until his muscles screamed louder than the memories. With each thump of the beat, Luc’s legs burned, a sensation he chased rather than avoided. He pretended this ritual was release, but the truth sat heavy in his chest: he was just tending to his pain like a garden, watering it daily, afraid of what might grow in its place if he ever let it die.
When he returned from his run, Luc headed to the house for a quick washup and a change of clothes. After a cup of coffee, he stepped back outside to face the day’s work. Wynn bolted ahead toward the stables, barking once to announce him.
The barn met him with the warm scent of hay, grain, and leather oil. Horses stirred in their stalls, hooves shifting, tails flicking, the low rhythm of their breathing filling the space. Blaze poked his head out, snorted, and nudged Luc’s shoulder as if to say he was late. The stallion’s coat gleamed blue-black in the dawn light, muscles rippling beneath skin that caught every glint of morning.
