In Bed With My Ex's Brother-in-Law novel · Chapter 3 of 32

Chapter 3: The Sale Barn

Coy bids Jessup money against her, but no one can rope the grulla except Shiloh, who buys her lead mare back in front of the whole sale barn and gets summoned to Sunday supper.

I read Kacey's line twice.

Then I handed the phone back and sat down on the couch beside him, because my knees had stopped holding me up.

"They're selling them," I said. "She's selling my mother's horses at a town sale like culls."

"She can't sell what we buy first."

"With what? You told me yourself. Nineteen wolves and a creek."

He reached past me for his wallet on the coffee table.

"Calf account," he said. "Eleven thousand. That's the whole ranch until we ship in November."

"Rance."

"You said your price was the mares. I said done."

The Riverton sale barn smelled like diesel, popcorn and frightened stock.

On Saturday it was full of humans.

Ranchers in feed caps. Kids with sno-cones. A few horse traders from Utah with their arms folded.

None of them knew what a wolf smelled like.

Every horse in the back pens did.

Rance got as far as the parking lot.

The second he stepped out of the truck, a pen of sale colts sixty yards off started climbing the rails.

He got back in.

"I'll be right here," he said. He wrote BRIDGER RANCH on a check and signed it, and left the amount blank. "Don't let them see you shake."

"I don't shake."

"Then don't let them see you not shaking."

I got a buyer number at the window and sat on the second row of bleachers, right by the ring.

My mares came in at two o'clock.

They came in as one lot, roped head to tail, the grulla in front.

She saw me and her ears went straight up.

Then the whole sale barn changed.

I smelled him before I saw him.

Coy Jessup walked down the bleacher steps in his white hat with a bidder card tucked in his hatband.

He didn't sit at the top, where he could have.

He came all the way down to the rail of the ring and leaned on it.

All fourteen mares hit the far wall together.

The grulla reared, came down on the mare behind her, and the whole string tangled and went to pieces.

A ring man got kicked into the gate.

The humans in the bleachers gasped and stood up.

"Rank as snakes," somebody behind me said. "Look at that gray one."

"That's a killer-buyer horse right there."

Coy looked over his shoulder at me and smiled.

He knew exactly what he was doing.

Every time those mares came apart in front of a crowd, the price dropped.

And the man in the back row in the stained Carhartt bought horses by the pound for the plant in Mexico.

The auctioneer pushed his mic away and talked to his ring men.

"Split the gray off. Sell her by herself. Nobody's taking her with the others."

Two ring men went at the grulla with ropes.

She went straight up the pipe panel and came down striking.

The ropes went everywhere but on her.

"Pass her out," the auctioneer said. "We'll run her through as a no-sale and let the meat man have her after."

I was over the rail before I thought about it.

"Ma'am," the auctioneer said. "Ma'am, you can't be in there."

I didn't look at him.

I looked at her.

She was blowing so hard her nostrils showed red inside, and her eyes were all white rim.

Coy was still at the rail, ten feet away.

I could feel his wolf leaning on her from there. Pushing. Enjoying it.

I put my back between him and her.

Then I let my own wolf come up, just a little.

My wolf is small and she's quiet. She doesn't push. She sits down.

The grulla's head came down an inch.

I held out my hand flat, low, the way my mother taught me in the Red Desert when I was six.

"Hey, mama," I said. "Hey, old girl. It's just me."

She walked across that ring to me with her rope dragging.

She put her whole forehead against my chest and sighed so hard her ribs moved.

The sale barn went dead quiet.

Then an old rancher in the front row started clapping.

Then half the bleachers did.

"Well, I'll be," the auctioneer said into his mic. "Folks, I guess we've got ourselves a broke mare after all. Who'll start me at a thousand?"

"One thousand," I said.

"Two," said Coy.

He didn't even lift his card.

"Three," I said.

"Four."

We went up in thousands. Five. Six. Seven.

The crowd started to mutter.

"She came to the girl," the old rancher said, loud enough to carry. "Let the girl have her horse, son."

"Eight," said Coy.

"Nine," I said.

I had two thousand left.

Coy looked at me a long time.

Then he looked around at the bleachers, at all those town faces staring at him.

He smiled and put his card back in his hatband.

"Let her have it," he said. "Charity."

"Sold, nine thousand, to the young lady standing in my ring."

I led the grulla out the back gate with her head against my hip.

Behind me, the auctioneer called the other thirteen mares.

Coy bought every one of them.

He paid two thousand apiece, Jessup money, and he never stopped looking at me while he did it.

I loaded the grulla in the trailer by myself.

Rance stood at the far end of the lot with his hat pulled low, so she wouldn't smell him and panic.

When I came around the trailer, Coy was leaning on the Bridger truck.

He'd parked himself right between me and Rance.

"Thirteen out of fourteen," he said. "You always were bad at arithmetic, Shi."

"Get off the truck."

"Mother wants you to know something." He pushed himself upright. "Custom says the bride's family sits at the Jessup table every Sunday until the mark moon."

Rance came across the gravel slowly.

His eyes were gold all the way through.

Coy saw it and didn't move.

"Sunday supper, six o'clock," Coy said. "That includes Kacey's brother. And it includes my brother-in-law's girl."

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