Buck You! (Buck Cowboys #2) - Elle Thorpe Page 0,1

business was these bulls. We had cattle out in fenced-off fields at the back of our property, but it was summer, and they’d be just fine munching on the grass until it started getting cold again. Unlike our buckers, who needed constant specialized feed and vitamins to keep them in prime condition for rodeos. A sick bull didn’t kick. And no cowboy wanted to ride an animal that just stood there in the ring like a limp biscuit.

Dad and I split up with me silently vowing to put everything else out of my head and do the job I was paid to do, but every pen I went to, my phone buzzed in my pocket, reminding me of what I’d started. I tried to ignore it, but eventually, curiosity got the better of me.

Checking to make sure my dad wasn’t around, I pulled the phone out. Julian’s messages lit it up and I scanned over each of them, until one caught my eye.

Dude, I’m sitting out the front of her house and I think she has a family. A husband. Maybe a couple of kids? I think you have a whole family over here you have no idea about. You want me to look into it some more?

My throat closed up. No.

No? What are you going to do, then?

I watched my dad from across the yard. He was a good guy, and I was so lucky to have been raised by him. He’d taught me everything I knew about bulls and riding and ranching. Despite the fact I wasn’t his biological child, and my two younger brothers were, it was me he wanted to pass the ranch on to when he retired, just like his father had passed it on to him.

He had no idea I’d opened a can of worms by searching for my birth parents.

Now, there was only one way to close it. I had to know. It had been eating away at the corners of my mind for the best part of a decade. I had to make it stop before it drove me completely insane.

Don’t do anything. I’m going over there. I need to talk to her.

After feeding my father some sort of bullshit excuse about needing to run into town for supplies, I drove my truck across our little country town and turned down Eastbridge Avenue with my heart hammering. The properties at this end of town weren’t like ours. My family lived in an older-style farmhouse that had been renovated from the original my great-grandfather had built a hundred years ago. I’d moved out to one of the newer cabins on the property once I’d turned eighteen and needed some space, but the hundreds of acres of land that surrounded the dwellings were all ours.

Here, the properties were smaller. Subdivides from what was once a property like ours, probably sold off during a year where the rain didn’t come as expected, or cattle prices bottomed out. When those things happened, you could either tough it out to hope for a better go next year. Or you could sell up to a developer, who would turn your property into a suburban neighborhood, just like the one I drove through now.

I parked my truck out the front of a modest-sized house, with a neatly tended yard, and just gaped at it.

If things had been different, this was where I might have grown up. Without a horse or a cow in sight.

I could barely comprehend that thought. Who the hell was I without bull riding and farmwork? I’d always thought those things were in my blood, my soul. But staring up at my birth mother’s house, I realized they weren’t.

They were just things taught to me.

My soul didn’t know the dirt and hard work and sunrise starts.

Right now, my soul didn’t know anything.

“Get out of the fuckin’ car, Dom,” I muttered to myself. Dad would be expecting me back soon. But nerves and excitement had me gripping the steering wheel too tight, my fingernails pressing into the leather cover.

The front door opened, and a small dark-haired woman strode out into the early morning sunshine, blissfully unaware that I was about to throw a curveball in what seemed like a pretty nice life. She jiggled the handle once, making sure the door was locked, and then hoisted a purse strap over her shoulder.

My entire body locked up, frozen at the sight of her face. She was younger than I’d expected. She didn’t really appear all that much older