3. Lily

3

Lily

I barreled up out of the stairwell and hurried over to Francisco. My mind was whirling with what had just happened. I felt almost drunk with it, overwhelmed with sensation, and that’s a bad way to go into this kind of a meeting. I let the sun blast the memories from my mind and tried to focus. Later. I’d think about the whole thing later.

By now, the rodeo was getting started. There was a lot of shouting from an over-enthusiastic announcer and cowboys on horseback were rounding up cows. I surreptitiously checked, but none of the cowboys were Bull.

I slumped down in the empty seat beside Francisco. He took one look at me and said, straight-faced, “You look hot.”

If I was some svelte beauty, it might have been flirting. But he was right—I did look hot. The run through the arena and up all those steps had left me red-faced and sweating, my hair sticking to my forehead. And...okay, yes, getting up close and personal with Bull had reduced me to a hot mess, too.

I gave Francisco a glower, grabbed the soda out of his hand and took three big glugs. “There,” I panted. “Better now.”

It’s a mark of how well we get on that I dared to do something like that. The Gallegos put the fear of God into most people and Francisco answers directly to Isabella, the head of the whole cartel. But after two years, I counted him as a friend. We’d even been out for drinks a few times—I mean, not in that way: he’s pushing fifty. But he was friendly and paid on time and didn’t give me a lot of sexist crap about being a woman, so I liked him. Plus, meeting with him was one of the few bits of actual social contact I had.

He grabbed the soda back off me and blinked at me from behind his huge, gold-rimmed sunglasses. “You got the stuff?”

I slapped the package of fake IDs onto his lap, concealed within the latest Sports Illustrated. It was part of our routine that I picked up an issue for him each time we met.

He didn’t even bother to check them, just passed me a Vogue with my money inside. That was kind of a running thing, too, because he’d done it the first time we’d ever traded, having heard on our phone calls that I was a woman. He’d kept it up ever since, despite the fact that I’m about as far from a fashion model as it’s possible to be and the last time I’d bought any new clothes was...yep, I literally can’t remember. No one who does business with me cares what I look like and no one I see socially—

Well, I don’t see anyone socially.

The crowd whooped and cheered because some cowboy had just roped a horse. I craned my neck to look...but it still wasn’t Bull. And then I caught myself and flushed, embarrassed that I’d looked.

“You stayin’?” asked Francisco. “They got chuck wagon racing and chute dogging coming up.”

Part of me was tempted. Somewhere in that mess of sweat and rope and action there was a hulking cowboy with the bluest eyes I’d ever seen. A cowboy who, against all logic, had actually asked me out for a drink...

I stood up and shook my head. “Nope,” I said. “You knock yourself out. I got air conditioning and artificial light to get back to.”

He shook his head and gave me a long-suffering look. “There’s a whole world out here you’re missing out on.”

“Yeah,” I told him. “But it’s not my world.”