LITMIR.BIZ

      1

      PRO BULL RIDER William Bonney Chisholm had a hard-on the size of Texas.

      He stood smack-dab in the middle of the kickoff dance for the Lost Gun Fair and Rodeo, a three-week-long event taking place at the fairgrounds on the outskirts of town. The band had started up. Couples two-stepped across the dance floor. The pungent scent of beer and livestock teased his nostrils. Cigarette smoke cluttered the air.

      Easy, bud. Easy.

      He shifted and damned himself for being such a sucker for the opposite sex. Blondes, in particular.

      He’d fallen hard and fast years back the first moment he’d set eyes on Tami Elder’s Malibu Barbie. Tami had taken riding lessons at the ranch where Billy and his two older brothers had grown up. They’d been taken in by rodeo star Pete Gunner after their crook of a father had died in a house fire. Since Billy’s mother had passed years before that and the Gunner spread was an all-male domain—home to the infamous Lost Boys, a crackerjack group of young riders trained and honed by pro bull rider Pete Gunner himself—the only female Billy had ever kept company with had been a paint horse by the name of Lula Bell.

      Until Tami had started coming out to the ranch every Sunday. He’d done his best, like any ten-year-old boy when faced with a cootie-carrying girl, to make her life a living hell. He’d shot spit wads while she’d rubbed down her horse and fired his water gun at her while she’d trotted around the corral.

      He’d hated her, and she’d hated him, and all had been right with his male-dominated world. Then one hot summer afternoon, everything had changed. That had been the summer he’d turned eleven and spied his oldest brother, Jesse, kissing Susie Alexander, the local rodeo queen.

      Kissing, of all things.

      Billy had been hurt, then he’d been mad, and then he’d glimpsed an actual tongue and he’d been damned interested. For a little while. Then he’d been mad again and he’d raced off to gather some chinaberries for his slingshot. To see how many shots it took to get his brother away from Miss Travis County.

      He’d been up in a nearby tree counting his berries when Tami had finished her riding lesson. She’d slid off the horse and wandered over to the tree, her doll case in hand, to play until her dad finished talking to the riding instructor. He’d meant to shoot off a few practice shots at her, but then her dad had called her over. He’d climbed down and had been about to stomp the daylights out of her Barbie when he’d realized that it wasn’t just any old Barbie.

      It was a naked one.

      Just like that, his belief system had done a complete one-eighty. One glance at all those interesting curves and that long blond hair and those deep blue eyes, and he’d started to wonder at the possibilities when it came to the real thing.

      Yep, he loved blondes.

      The trouble was, the pretty little thing standing near the bar was a brunette.

      His gaze swept from her long, wavy brown hair pulled back in a loose ponytail to the shiny tips of her black stilettos, and back up again. She looked nothing like the other buckle bunnies crowding the dance floor. No itty-bitty tank tops or scandalous Daisy Duke shorts. Instead, she wore a black skirt that accented her tiny waist and a sleeveless black blouse that fell softly against a modest pair of breasts. There was nothing voluptuous about her. Nothing outright sexy.

      Ah, but there was something about the way she stood there, her back so stiff and straight, her lips parted slightly as she sipped from a red plastic cup, that made his adrenaline pump that much faster.

      She was a yuppie through and through. Out of her element, given the three-inch heels and what he would be willing to bet was wine in her glass. Probably a big-city reporter who’d gotten stuck covering the local rodeo.

      He would have figured her for one of the big-time reporters who’d been in attendance to cover the “Where Are They Now?”

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