the fence to our left. Of course they were bawling stupid shit like, “Bail! Bail out!” and the ever-witty “Fag!”
The fringes of Dyno’s chaps whipped to and fro. His hat bounced off his head around the six-second mark, but he stayed on him. The pro riders I knew vaguely from last year were whipping their hats around and yee-hawing, and even the rodeo queen was jumping up and down.
Eight seconds! He kept riding! Olivia and I clung to each other’s leatherette sleeves. We saw daylight, of course, between his ass and the horse. This gelding was a real rank animal, snorting like mad but sort of trashy, with no predictable pattern of behavior.
That made it even more miraculous that Dyno stayed on as long as he did. When he finally swung out the back door over the horse’s hindquarters and landed on his feet, he shook off the pickup man’s assistance with pride. He stalked with head held high back through the gate, and Olivia and I raced to be the first to greet him. Dyno already had fans, some wannabe buckle bunnies, and we had to get there first.
“I am so going to bang that cowboy,” Olivia panted, practically clawing me out of her way to get down the three stairs.
“You are so not ,” I snapped back. I won the upper hand, squeezing between Olivia and a rail, and I hurtled ahead like I was the one leaving the bucking chute.
“Why do you care?” was the last thing I heard Olivia say.
I was just in time to catch Dyno as he breezed past me. “Wait!” I called, lamely.
“Why?” he shot back. He even brushed off the bareback director, who presumably wanted to congratulate him on the ride, probably even offer him a starting position in the annual roundup.
“I don’t like how we left things,” I tried to say, but Dyno wasn’t interested.
He kept sailing straight ahead, not even stopping to take off his spurs. He didn’t look at me but held up a hand of protest against me. “You won’t see me around Hardscrabble, guaran-fucking-teed.”
“But— oh God! ”
We were out in the parking lot by now. As though he’d known what was occurring outside, Dyno had made a beeline directly for the fight. As I’d suspected, Lawson, Kemp, and their band were out there causing shit. Luckily Sequoia was nowhere to be found—I later found out Dyno had hidden him in the arena office until he could drive him home—but they were throwing rocks at Dyno’s Harley. Big rocks, too. Big enough to leave dents in the gas tank and fender.
Honestly? Lawson was eighteen years old and he was throwing rocks at someone’s ride?
I slapped my hands against my thighs. “Lawson! For God’s sake! I need you to—”
But my words caught in my throat as Dyno strode directly over to Lawson, the tallest football player. Before Dyno even reached him he had his hand up in a U-shaped vise, and he jammed it around Lawson’s throat.
I didn’t blame him. Lawson had pretty much goaded him to the point of intolerance.
But Dyno had no one to back him up, and I’d seen these idiots fight before. They fought unfairly, using implements, tools, whatever they happened to find lying around. And they ganged up, they sucker-punched, they piled on. Dyno had no one on his team.
The ball players spread out quickly like ants when Dyno attacked Lawson. Lawson even seemed kind of unprepared for it. He made an exaggerated face of shock that would have been funny under other circumstances. He clutched at Dyno’s horseshoe-like hand as Dyno ploughed him backward, up against a muscle car.
“Oh, wow ,” marveled Olivia. “Fight, fight! Are they fighting over me ?”
“Sort of,” I said. I actually liked to think they were fighting over me .
As Dyno pinioned Lawson against the car, it looked like he was saying something to him. What I would’ve paid to be a fly on that wall! But it was too dangerous to climb into the ring, especially since Kemp was now running toward the men hefting a bronc saddle over his head.
Shaping my hand into a