Chapter Fourteen
Cody spent the remainder of his last American Extreme Bull Riders Tour with his very own buckle bunny, who theatrically programmed her number into his phone that very same night in Marietta. Skylar slept in his trailer and she cheered for him in the stands, and when he officially retired at the championship show in Fort Worth that October, hers was the only voice he could hear in all that cheering.
Hers was the only voice he wanted to hear.
And then he was done with bulls and all his endless injuries and ready for the ride of his life.
He started with a wedding, marrying Skylar in Montana with her family all around and his in awe, where it had all began.
“I love you,” he told her that night, when she was finally his wife, out beneath the stars.
“I know,” she replied, and then laughed when he nipped her chin. “I love you too, Cody. So much it hurts.”
It was the only way he ever wanted to hurt her.
They built a house that sprawled there on that California bluff where they’d sat in camp chairs in front of his Airstream, with a wide porch that they could sit on when the weather was right. They watched hundreds of sunsets right there, huddled together in the same chair, the way they had back then. They built a little ranch that turned into something bigger on some of that land, raising cattle and sheep and breeding a few prize bulls with that American Extreme star quality written all over them. Cody didn’t miss riding—he liked walking without pain too much and life without concussions—but he sure liked imagining Galen bulls tossing new bull riders straight off into the dirt.
He liked that a lot.
He put his sisters through college and let them come and live in the ranch’s guesthouse when they needed it, because being around all those Greys over the years made him rethink his definition of family and closeness and what that meant to everybody involved. So much so that when his mother finally left Todd, a few years after Kathleen graduated from Vanderbilt, he gave her his old Airstream and let her live in it on his property. In a private little grove near the sea, to let the Pacific help her heal.
In time Skylar gave him a son, a squalling little alien creature they both loved so much it should have terrified him. Sometimes Cody thought it did. And they named him after the men they’d lost, Charlie Galen and Thayer Sexton, because neither one of them believed in walking shrines, but their whole, sweet life was about second chances.
And little Charlie Thayer Galen was hope made real, and a yeller.
But he was as stubborn as his mama and as determined as his father, so Cody wasn’t entirely surprised when little Charlie, at all of six years old, demanded that he get to ride bulls like his daddy.
“Tell me this is a phase,” Skylar murmured as Charlie demonstrated what he’d learned from watching videos of Cody.
All over the living room furniture. Making his three-year-old brother Grey shriek with delight and chase around after him.
But Cody saw the jut of his son’s chin. And that faraway look in his green eyes. He recognized it, even in a six-year-old.
He grinned at his wife. Not exactly sheepishly, because he wasn’t the one who’d showed the kids his videos.
And Skylar shook her head, sitting there like she wasn’t his whole world, with their five-month-old daughter Cady snug in her arms and all that love all over her face.
That tried and tested love, as sweet as the day she’d swung open the door to her father’s house in Billings and changed them both forever. The kind of love that redeemed a dick like Cody and saved them both from their darker impulses of whiskey and grief and loneliness. Three kids and still so much laughter—that kind of love. The things she whispered to him in the dark when she moved over him in their bedroom with its sturdy lock on the door. The things he promised her when she was clenched tight around him, still calling him oh God.
All this love that was theirs, miraculous and impossible, hard and soft, as loud as it was quiet and spun out over all these years. The fights that ended in wild make-up sex and the other ones that ended with both of them feeling so fragile, only resolve and forgiveness and a little bit of bullheadedness got them through.
The roar of it. The endless dance, jolts and bumps and a header into the dirt, only to climb back up to their feet to do it all over again.
And again and again and again.
Cody looked at her beautiful face, more beautiful now that he knew her better than he knew himself sometimes and no more ghosts between them, and he wouldn’t change a thing.
“I guess I brought this on myself,” Skylar said, as if she knew what he was thinking, out here on their bluff so many miles away from everything, with only the sea and the stars she loved as witness. “I knew who I married.”
Cody caught each of his sons in one arm, lifting them off the floor to make them howl with glee, and he looked at his women. The wife he loved more than any other person alive, and the little girl he was already certain he’d happily kill for, if necessary.
This longest, best ride. His life.
“It will be fine, darlin’,” he promised her. And then he smiled, because he knew he’d make sure that it was, or die trying. “Trust me.”
The End