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She blinked. Jackson Thorpe could do his own stunts, but didn’t, so his best friend would have work?
“And where did your dad learn to ride so well?”
“Uncle T, mostly. He used to be a rodeo guy.”
The combination of the name and this bit of info tripped something in her memory. “What’s your uncle T’s last name?”
“Culhane.”
She stopped dead. Pie stopped immediately beside her. Jeremy looked surprised, but didn’t wobble in the saddle. “Your father’s best friend, your surrogate uncle, is Tucker Culhane?”
Jeremy gave her a rather puzzled look. “Don’t know what sur-gate means, but yeah.”
Tucker Culhane had been the biggest thing in rodeo for four years running, until he’d been pinned against a fence by a literal raging bull. He’d been hurt badly enough to retire from the circuit, although she’d seen he’d gotten back on his feet fairly soon, through what the article she’d read said was pure, stubborn Texas determination.
That had been, if her memory served, about a year beforeStonewallhad hit the air and almost instantaneously taken off. So he’d gone from riding bulls to doing stunts for Hollywood? She’d missed that part of his story.
After another half hour spent trying the boy aboard Pie at a trot, the most difficult gait to ride, she let him urge the pony into a slow, easy lope. By the time they’d made the first circuit of the corral, Jeremy whooped happily. Any instruction she gave, the boy followed, and Pie was always calm, so she felt confident in letting them off the lead. And when she finally did—with stern instructions about just how fast he could go—he whooped again.
She walked back to the fence, where his aunt was sitting on the top rail, watching.
“I cannot thank you enough,” the other woman said. “I was afraid we’d never see him happy again.”
“You’re more than welcome. It does me good to see him like this, too, even though I’ve only just met him.”
“You’re so good with him. Like you’ve done this before.”
“Not me. If you want to see the one who’s really good at this, you should see my mother. She’s done some riding therapy with kids. Nothing like a kid mired in grief seeing a woman who can’t walk, get in the saddle and go.”
Tris gave her a surprised look. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize.”
“No reason you should. She’s been a wheelchair user for a decade now, since a car accident damaged her spine.”
“But she still rides?”
“She does,” Nic said, always happy to express her pride in her mother. “Dad made some adaptations to her favorite saddle, a seat belt of sorts, and what she calls, with a laugh, tie-downs for her legs, since otherwise, they’d just flop around loose. And we worked with her horse until he understood all commands would be coming from hands, weight shifts, and voice from now on.”
“By we, do you mean you?” Tris said with a smile.
Nic smiled back, but refused to take all the credit. “It took both of us, because that horse adores her. And Dad did his part.” She nodded toward the side of the barn, where there was a setup of a long ramp with an easy slant up to a platform, and beside ita set of freestanding steps. With just enough room between for a horse to stand. “The steps were already there, for when I was too short to climb aboard, but the ramp is for her. Hand built.”
“He constructed that whole thing?”
Nic nodded.
“You know,” Tris said, with an approving nod in turn, “that’s what I love about Texans. See a problem, come up with a solution.”
Nic smiled widely. She liked this woman. Truly liked her. Enough to say teasingly, “It’s a good thing she wasn’t home when your brother was here yesterday. She probably would have been all over him like some rabid fan.”
“He’s very good with fans,” Tris said. “Believe me, he understands they’re why he is where he is.” She paused, frowned. “Or rather, was where he was.”
Her words reminded Nic of the article she’d read last night, when she was trying to get to sleep after an... interesting day. It seemed to her a weird quirk of the world, or of human nature, that suddenly, she kept seeing stories about him. She knew they had to have been there before, but he wasn’t on her radar before, so she hadn’t even noticed them. But now that his name had slammed into her brain, it seemed like they were everywhere.
The article had been speculating on the rumors running rampant. She remembered the lead line on the article vividly.
Rarely in Hollywood has anyone hit it as big and then vanished as fast as Jackson Thorpe.
She had almost stopped there, and before two days ago, before she’d met him in person, she would have. But now she didn’t seem to have the self-discipline to ignore the rest of the online piece.
