Ranks were up.
Quickdraw Slow Burn - #1
Two Shots Down - #2
Dead of Winter - #3
First Time Train Wreck - #4
Kiss Your Momma Goodbye - #5
They’d done it. They’d all done their job and kept the top three. They’d kept the team together.
Dead rolled his head back and sighed up into the air as the tension left his body. “Hooooly moly, I don’t know how I pulled that off.”
“Good job,” Quickdraw muttered, punching him in the bad arm.
“Ow!” Dead yelled, grabbing his shoulder.
“Buck up,” Quickdraw muttered as he jogged down the stairs of the podium.
“Why don’t you go strip down naked for the cameras again, you sell out,” Dead called, jogging after him.
“I’m hungry,” Cheyenne announced to the group as she followed them, hand gently grasping the crook of Two Shots’ arm. Damn, she was pretty all lit up with those dancing eyes and that heart-stopping smile.
“I’m starving,” Two Shots agreed. “Hey, over dinner we can show the boys their social media accounts.”
“I got social media?” Dead asked, walking backward to better glare at Cheyenne.
“Yeah,” Two Shots answered. “You’re probably half naked in the pics on there. Sell out.”
“Ha!” Quickdraw’s laugh bellowed down the alleyway.
“I need a winner’s beer and a ribeye,” Dead murmured.
Two Shots scrunched up his face. “How can you eat cows? It’s like eating your own people.”
“Only half my people since those dumbass commentators decided to out my lineage to the whole world. I’m half human, boys. I’m gonna eat all the steak I want to, and guess how many ounces of sleep I’m gonna lose over it?”
“Zero?” Quickdraw guessed.
“Zeroooo,” Dead howled up at the rafters. “Hey, we should come up with a cool herd name.”
“We aren’t a herd,” Two Shots grumbled. “Herds are unbreakable. We’re all still competing for number one bull.”
Quickdraw muttered, “It’s not a competition because you’re both beneath me.”
Dead said, “We could call our team the Moo Dudes. Wait, Cheyenne isn’t a dude so that doesn’t work.”
“Oh, my God, stop talking,” Two Shots said.
Dead’s eyes lit up, and Two Shots could practically see the lightbulb flicker above his head. “We could be the Moo Crew!”
“We could just cut his tongue out and he wouldn’t talk anymore,” Quickdraw pointed out.
Cheyenne jumped on Two’s back for a piggyback ride. “I like the Moo Crew!” She pulled her phone around his neck and started messing with Quickdraw’s Instagram account. She was hashtagging his pictures with #moocrew.
Two Shots hadn’t laughed this much in a long time. Quickdraw was going to be so pissed. All his pictures were shirtless. He was beginning to think Cheyenne was a marketing genius.
He didn’t know what tomorrow would bring when they all went back to their homes and their own lives. He didn’t know how the media would treat Cheyenne with all the rumors flying around back here. He didn’t know how long they would be able to hold the top three spots because that was the nature of this game. Ranks changed all the time. Longevity meant near perfect rides and never letting off the gas pedal. It meant never slipping up, and look at the three of them? Quickdraw was over there starting a fight with one of the bull riders he thought had looked at him funny. Dead had stopped to flirt with a barrel racer, who was looking at him like he’d lost his mind, which was possible. And Cheyenne was humming a song about a lovely bunch of coconuts in his ear as she squeezed around him like a little octopus.
They were definitely gonna fuck this up.
The question was, how long could they hold their little piece of happiness in the comradery they’d found?
Two weeks? A month? Didn’t matter. They couldn’t live for the future. They had to live for the here and now because, when it came down to it, tomorrow had never been promised. And for a bull shifter? Crap could hit the fan in an instant.
But tonight?
Tonight was a good night. They’d worked hard and not only earned money, but they had earned two more weeks being represented by the best bull shifter agent in existence. Okay, so she was the only one in existence, but that made him want to work even harder to keep them together.
Quickdraw’s fight started getting louder. The rider pushed him, and now his friends were starting to join the yelling match.
“Wait here,” he said, setting Cheyenne—his Cheyenne—on her feet.
“Where are you going?”
Two Shots looked at Dead who was already headed in the same direction.
“Maybe to get in a fight.”
She snorted behind him. “Typical. We still have interviews! This is against rule number seven.” She let off a very human, very cute growl. “At least protect your faces!”
“Anything you want,” he called over his shoulder.
Chapter Twenty
What could she even say to excuse their behavior?
Two Shots sat beside her with a split lip and a black eye.
Dead sat on his other side with a laceration on his cheek that would gush if he took the towel off it. His shoulder was all bruised and swollen, which all of the interviewers could see on account of he didn’t have a shirt on because he’d ripped it off like the Hulk when he went into the fight. Quickdraw wasn’t bleeding, but his knuckles were all swollen and bruised, and the left side of his face was swollen. He couldn’t even open his dang eye. And he was sitting at the end of the oversize folding table with his shit-covered boot on it.
They were all three glaring at the interviewers as Tommy, the organizer of the entire circuit, gave them a pep talk about speaking one at a time for the best audio for the cameras.
“Can we go yet?” Dead asked, massaging his shoulder.
“We haven’t even started,” Cheyenne reminded him. “And this was part of the contract. You can’t just duck out on interviews. This is part of marketing you.”
“I don’t want to market like this,” Dead complained. “Can’t you just take some shirtless pics of us and post them and we can call it a night?”
That was actually a good idea. She needed to start a merchandise shop. Hoodies with their names on them. Koozies, T-shirts, beer openers, coffee mugs. She frowned at the cow crap that had come off Quickdraw’s boot and was sitting in a grody little pile on the otherwise clean table. She could probably get him a sponsorship with a boot company. She squinted and tried to read the brand so she could call them after this.
As the first interviewer stood, she looked around at the others and joked, “Well, this is different from the way we usually do it with these guys, isn’t it?”
A few of the reporters chuckled.
“Yeah, usually they don’t even show up,” one of the reporters mumbled.
There was laughter, and the boys smirked remorselessly. Through the back door filed a sizable group of sponsors, contractors, and arena organizers. Crap.
“Your smile went stiff,” Two Shots whispered to her.