In Bed With My Ex's Brother-in-Law novel · Chapter 29 of 32

Chapter 29: Eight Seconds

"No," I said.

"You haven't heard..."

"I heard. Rance, there's not a bronc in any contractor's string that'll stand in a chute with you on top of it. They'll come over backward before you get your feet set."

"One will," he said. "If you get to him first."

Inside the stall, Kacey was singing to the white mare. Badly.

"You're thirty-three," I said.

"Thirty-three and bored."

"You haven't been on a bucking horse in six years."

"Seven by May." He turned my hand over in his. "I'm not asking you to like it. I'm asking you to pick my horse."

I picked him in March, in a muddy pen outside Riverton.

The stock contractor was a human with a cigar and forty head of bucking horses who'd heard about me from the sale barn.

"You want to gentle a bronc?" he said. "Lady, I pay good money for them to be rank."

"I don't want him gentle. I want him to stand in the chute. When the gate opens, he can do whatever he wants."

I walked his pens for an hour.

I picked a big blue roan gelding with a white snip and a mean eye.

He bucked like a storm and stood like a stone. He didn't hate people. He just loved his job.

Every Saturday from March to May I drove to Riverton and stood in that pen.

I taught him the smell of a wolf who keeps still.

Then I brought Rance, and taught him the rest.

How to come up on the chute slow, with his wolf flat on the ground.

How to lower himself down onto that roan's back.

How to sit there, and breathe, and wait for the horse to decide he was furniture.

The first time, the roan tried to climb out of the chute and Rance came off the top rail backward into the mud.

The tenth time, the roan cocked a hind foot and sighed.

The night before the rodeo, I drove to the trading post in Riverton.

I took the flour-tin envelope out of my coat. BRIDGER, 9,000.

The National Finals buckle was still in the glass case, with a price tag on a string.

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