Finally the stupidly handsome boy in front of me lost his cocky grin, the frown on his brow chasing away his disarming dimples. “It’s dangerous, Nugget.”

I sighed at his use of my nickname again. I was never going to escape it. My dad had called me Nugget ever since I was a kid, because my hair was the distinct color of gold, and back then it had sat on top of my head in a riot of barely tamed curls. In the sun, it had looked like a, yep you guessed it, gold nugget. So Nugget had stuck.

It didn’t help that Branch’s dad and mine were best friends and business partners, so he’d always called me Nugget. I hadn’t even minded until middle school, when I started to grow boobs and Branch and his friends had started calling them chicken nuggets. I hated him and his gorgeous damn face.

“You need to leave,” he repeated like I hadn’t heard him the first three times.

I clenched my jaw. “And you need to get the hell outta my way.”

The atmosphere around us started to penetrate the red haze of my anger. The distinct scent of dust, sweat, and cow shit, so thick you could taste it on the air. The booming roar of the crowd and the slow drawl of the announcers were all drowned out by the snorts and grunts of the thousand pound beasts in the pens beside me. It was a symphony that I loved.

The rodeo. There was no other place like it.

I was born and raised at these events; took my first steps on this muck colored dirt. My first pet had been an eighty pound bull calf. It wasn’t such a weird pet to have when your daddy bred bulls for the rodeo. Once he even had a bull that ranked in the WBRP, that was the World Bull Riding Professionals circuit. That bull’s name had been Dark Storm, and he had been a beast in the ring. Outside the ring? Total softie. It happened like that sometimes though. Some of the animals just knew that they were there to perform and they stepped into the ring to play their parts like Oscar winning actors.

I’d been a kid when Dark Storm had made it big in the WBRP. I’d watched guys try to ride him, not even conquer him, but be one with him for all of eight seconds. That was when I knew that I wanted to be a bull rider. In the middle of the ring, just me and a beast made of nothing but pure muscle.

I’d been nine at the time.