“It’s fine.” It was a job that she was going to be taking a break from in the next year. After she’d saved enough money to get herself on the road with the rodeo. After she’d found the right horse, and done all the work she needed to do in order to not...humiliate herself barrel racing.

Wyatt was a rodeo legend. A bull rider who’d won the championships four times.

Jamie wanted to make her own mark in the rodeo. Oh, she knew barrel racing didn’t command quite the enthusiasm from the crowd the bulls did. But she wanted to succeed on her own. On her own merit.

She wanted to get out and do things on her own. She needed to.

She’d been in Gold Valley all this time. The most distance she’d gotten from her family was working at a Western-themed store in town called The Gunslinger. Otherwise, she lived on the ranch, worked on the ranch.

Her life revolved around it. Around them.

She knew that her father and brothers all felt like they took care of her. Right down to Wyatt being completely and utterly disapproving of her taking a job with Gabe Dalton. He’d been on her about it ever since Gabe had approached her about the job a few months earlier, which was ridiculous. He’d given them plenty of time to sort out schedules. Really, it had been overly planned. Which seemed to make Wyatt even more obnoxious.

As if Gabe was planning to seduce her or something.

As if he could.

Hell, she’d grown up in a house full of men just like him, and those men had brought their friends around. Had brought other rodeo cowboys around.

They smelled. They left the toilet seat up. They hit on everything that moved. She’d spent her life picking around men’s underwear in the clothing baskets, had been rinsing whiskers out of the sink with great distaste since she was ten.

Between her father and her older brothers, men had been pretty thoroughly demystified.

Body odor, constant swearing, jockstraps, asshole behavior...

Gabe was watching her while she mused, his lips tipped up slightly as if he could read her mind.

“Does Wyatt give you a lot of freedom?”

She snorted, the action loosening some of the tension in her chest. “Wyatt doesn’t give me anything. I work at our family ranch. Otherwise, I do what I want.”

Cowboys were not her type. Not at all. She supposed that in order for them to be interesting at all, their behavior had to seem romantic.

And to her, it just wasn’t. But then, Jamie wasn’t a romantic. She was a practical kind of girl. She was well aware of the way the world worked, well aware of the way cowboys worked.

Her desire to get back into riding had nothing to do with cowboys, as a matter of fact. She was always much less interested in a man on the horse than she was in the horse he was riding.