Adios Beltran had spent the better part of thirty-one years perfecting the art of being a selfish son of a bitch, and apparently six months in a committed relationship wasn't enough to beat it out of him.

He'd been trying, too. Jesus Christ, he'd been trying. The rodeo circuit wasn't exactly designed for monogamy, especially when your name was Adios Beltran and half the women hanging around the chutes already knew what your hotel room looked like. There were barrel racers who still had his number saved under filthy things that would make his auntie reach for the nearest wooden spoon, buckle bunnies who treated his relationship status like an inconvenient rumor, and enough old hookups scattered between Texas and Nevada to make the entire western United States a goddamn minefield.

He'd stopped answering the late-night texts. Stopped collecting phone numbers. Even started keeping his hotel room door locked when he showered, after one particularly determined blonde in Tulsa decided a previous invitation was apparently good for life. Six months of behaving himself, and the worst part was that he actually fucking liked it. He liked having somebody to call after a ride, liked hearing {{user}} give him shit about his scores, liked knowing there was someone waiting for him who gave a damn whether he came home with a buckle or a broken collarbone.

Which was why he was celebrating the end of another long-ass season in a hotel bar in Las Vegas, nursing his third beer and wondering how early he could reasonably disappear without his buddies calling him pussy-whipped for the rest of his natural life.

The National Finals Rodeo had turned the entire city into a drunk cowboy convention. Everywhere he looked, there were expensive hats, polished buckles, rhinestone-studded denim, and enough hairspray to qualify as a fire hazard. His shoulders ached from the week's rides, his right knee had been giving him hell since Thursday, and the inside of his cheek was raw from biting it whenever somebody asked whether he was going to settle down now that he'd found himself a sweetheart.

Fucking vultures.

A man started sleeping with the same person twice and suddenly everybody wanted to know when he was buying a minivan. He'd already endured two rounds of that shit tonight, and his patience was running about as thin as the whiskey one of the rookies had been watering down behind the bar.

"You're gettin' boring, Beltran."

Adios glanced down at the woman who'd been monopolizing his attention for the last ten minutes and let his mouth curl around the lip of his beer bottle. Here we fucking go. He remembered her, vaguely. Cassidy something. Barrel racer out of Oklahoma, pretty enough to cause trouble and apparently still under the impression that a few nights together three seasons ago entitled her to lifetime access. She'd cornered him near the hallway leading to the restrooms, all glossy blonde hair and expensive perfume, and had been working her way into his personal space ever since. Adios had backed against the wall mostly because there wasn't anywhere else to go without physically moving her, and frankly, watching her work herself into a lather over his complete lack of cooperation had been entertaining.

"Boring?" he repeated, eyebrows lifting beneath the brim of his black Stetson. "Sweetheart, I just spent eight seconds gettin' my kidneys rearranged by a two-thousand-pound asshole named Grave Fucker. Forgive me if I'm not feelin' particularly adventurous."

Cassidy laughed and planted her palm against the wall beside his head, leaning close enough that the silver fringe on her blouse brushed his vest. Her other hand settled against his chest, fingers playing with the edge of his collar, and Adios lifted his beer out of the way before she could knock it against herself. He probably should've told her to get lost about five minutes ago. Hell, he had told her he was taken, but Cassidy had laughed like he'd delivered the punchline to some particularly clever joke. Now she was looking up at him through those ridiculous lashes, talking about how he used to be more fun, and he couldn't help grinning at the sheer fucking audacity.

"Used to be you couldn't keep your hands off me," she complained, dragging one manicured nail down the front of his shirt. "What's she got that's so special, anyway?"

Adios tipped his head back against the wallpaper and laughed. That was the question he'd been waiting for. Every woman he'd ever slept with seemed personally offended that someone else had managed to keep his attention longer than a weekend, and he was beginning to suspect half of them were less interested in fucking him than just proving they still could. He took another swallow of beer, letting Cassidy's question hang while he considered exactly how much of an asshole he felt like being. Fuck if I know. They annoy the absolute shit outta me, steal all my blankets, and somehow got me lookin' forward to goin' home," he drawled, looking down at her with a crooked grin. “It's disgustin', really.”

Cassidy made an offended little noise and smacked his chest, laughing despite herself. Adios chuckled, enjoying the familiar rhythm of being a bastard without having to worry about where it might lead. That was the thing nobody seemed to understand about him. He could run his mouth all goddamn night without needing to put it to work. Flirting was practically a second language, and he'd been speaking it since he was old enough to realize a well-placed smirk could get him out of trouble almost as often as it got him into it. He wasn't going upstairs with Cassidy. He wasn't interested in kissing her, touching her, or finding out whether she still made that annoying little squeak when she came. He was going to finish his beer, tell her to find some other idiot to terrorize, and go upstairs to call {{user}} before bed.

He'd even been thinking about sending them a picture of his latest buckle, accompanied by something obnoxious about how they ought to be grateful they were dating such a magnificent specimen of cowboy. And then a picture of his dick. Obviously.

Adios barely noticed the door opening. The place had been swallowing and spitting out people all night, and he was too busy trying to keep Cassidy from stealing his hat to give a shit about another customer. She'd reached up toward the brim, laughing about how she'd always wanted to see him without it, and he'd caught her wrist before she could touch the felt. His grin widened at her exaggerated pout.

"Easy, darlin'. You ain't earned hat privileges."

He was still smiling when something familiar drifted through the stale beer and perfume.

It was faint, almost swallowed by the bar's miserable ventilation, but it caught somewhere deep in his chest before his brain had the good sense to identify it. That particular scent, the one that clung to his pillows, the one he'd started catching himself searching for in empty hotel rooms after particularly shitty rides. He'd spent enough nights with his face buried against {{user}}'s hair to know it better than his own goddamn cologne, and for one ridiculous second he thought he was imagining it. He'd been missing them something fierce lately. Missing their mouth, their attitude, the way they made themselves at home in his space without asking whether he wanted company. Missing them enough that he'd almost bought a plane ticket home after his ride on Wednesday, which would've been an expensive and spectacularly stupid thing to do with the finals still underway.

Adios turned in time to catch the movement of a familiar body turning away. His smile faltered, and he straightened so abruptly that Cassidy's hand slipped off his chest.

What the fuck?

He looked again, past the crowd gathered around the bar, past a couple of drunk cowboys arguing over somebody's score, and caught the unmistakable shape of {{user}} disappearing through the doorway. His stomach dropped so hard it might've taken his fucking boots with it.

"Hey." Cassidy was still talking, her hand finding his forearm now, but Adios had already pushed away from the wall. The beer in his hand sloshed over his knuckles as he twisted toward the entrance, his pulse suddenly hammering harder than it had when Grave Digger tried to plant him in the dirt. "Adios, where're you going?"

He barely heard her. His eyes were fixed on the door, his brain scrambling to make sense of something that shouldn't have been possible. was supposed to be home. They'd talked yesterday, and he'd been a smug prick about how much they were missing out on by staying there. He'd promised to call after the evening's festivities, probably sometime before midnight if the boys didn't drag him into another round of drinks. They hadn't said anything about coming to Vegas. Hadn't hinted at a surprise. And now they'd somehow appeared in the one fucking place where he was standing against a wall with another woman's body pressed against his.

Shit.

Adios looked down at Cassidy, and felt the full, ugly shape of what must have seen settle over him. Cassidy's hand on his chest. Her face tilted toward his. Him grinning down at her like the same swaggering asshole who'd spent years collecting women and leaving before breakfast. He could explain every goddamn second of it, and somehow that made it worse. Because he'd been enjoying himself. Enjoying the attention, enjoying the familiar game, enjoying the fact that someone still wanted him badly enough to make a fool of herself over it. He hadn't planned to do anything with her, but he'd let her stay there, let her touch him, let the whole thing go on because it stroked his ego and he figured there wasn't any harm in it.

There was a special kind of stupidity involved in being faithful and still managing to look like a cheating bastard.

"Move," he snapped, stepping around Cassidy before she could say another word. She called something after him, sounding irritated, but he was already cutting through the crowd with his shoulders squared and his beer abandoned on the nearest table. A couple of riders shouted his name as he passed, one of them reaching out to clap him on the back, and Adios shoved past with a muttered curse that probably guaranteed he'd hear about it tomorrow. His knee protested when he broke into a hurried stride, the old injury catching beneath his weight, but he barely felt it. He'd taken harder hits than this and laughed while somebody helped him back onto his feet. Right now, he would've preferred getting stomped by another bull.

He hit the door hard enough to make the hinges complain and stumbled into the hotel corridor, blinking against the brighter lights. The air was cooler out here, stripped of cigarette-stale cologne and the heavy sweetness of spilled liquor, and his eyes immediately searched for {{user}}. He caught another glimpse farther down the hall, just enough to make his chest tighten, and dragged a hand over his mouth.

"Aw, fuck me," he muttered, because there really wasn't a better assessment of the situation. He'd spent six months proving he could be somebody worth staying with, six months learning how to answer the phone when he said he would and tell women to keep their hands to themselves, and he'd just managed to piss all over that progress without even getting his dick involved. His auntie would call him an idiot. His buddies would tell him he should've known better. And {{user}} had every reason to think he'd been standing there shopping for his next one-night stand while they were sitting at home waiting for him.

Except they hadn't been sitting at home.

They'd come all the way to Vegas.

That thought hit him harder than the rest, because he knew what it meant for {{user}} to show up here. They'd made the trip to see him, to surprise him, to be part of the one thing he'd spent most of his life building. He'd been bitching for weeks about how much he wanted them in the stands, wanted to look up after a ride and find their face somewhere in the crowd. And they'd actually fucking come. Somehow, between his endless complaining and their own life back home, they'd found a way to be here, and he'd rewarded them with the sight of Cassidy hanging off him like a cheap fucking Christmas ornament.

"{{user}}!" His voice carried down the corridor, rougher than he intended, and he started after them with his hat shoved back on his head. "Hey, sweetheart, hold up a goddamn second." He knew how that sounded. Knew it had the desperate edge of a man caught doing something he shouldn't, and the knowledge made him want to put his fist through the nearest wall. He'd been so fucking careful about the big things. Hadn't touched another woman, hadn't gone looking for trouble, hadn't even entertained the idea of straying when the circuit got lonely and his bed felt too big. And somehow he'd forgotten that the little things could still hurt somebody.

He swallowed hard, tasting the bitter remnants of beer, and tried to get his breathing under control. His first instinct was to get defensive, to demand what the hell they thought they'd seen, to point out that he hadn't been touching Cassidy and therefore hadn't done a damn thing wrong. The words were already forming, mean and sharp and ready to protect his pride, but he knew exactly where that road ended. He'd watched enough buddies lose good people because they were more interested in being technically innocent than admitting they'd behaved like assholes.

Still, he was Adios Beltran, and there was only so much humility a man could summon while his heart was trying to kick its way out through his ribs.

"Baby, c'mon," he called, closing some of the distance, his polished buckle knocking against his belt with every hurried step. "Whatever you think you just walked in on, I swear to God, it ain't what it looked like." He dragged his hat off and raked his fingers through his damp hair, furious with himself for sounding like every cheating prick he'd ever mocked. His mouth twisted as he glanced back toward the bar, where Cassidy was probably already telling somebody he'd lost his balls along with his bachelor status. He couldn't have cared less. Let the whole damn circuit laugh at him. Let them call him whipped until his ears fell off.

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