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deadheads who earned him no points, or crazy ones that slammed him into fences or tried to gore him before he even hit the ground. But this year… this year everything had finally gone his way.
    And now this.
    “Let’s just say I’d like to keep my expenses to a minimum,” he said.
    “Ever been injured before?” she asked.
    “Just minor stuff. Sprains, concussions, dislocations. Broken ribs. Fractured shoulder.”
    “Good Lord. If all that’s minor, what’s major?”
    “Anything that makes them get a stretcher.”
    “Seems like a tough way to make a living.”
    “It was that or become a rocket scientist,” Luke said, turning away again. “It was so hard to choose.”
    But of course she wouldn’t understand about his limited choices. Not when her parents were loaded with money and had given her every opportunity on the planet.
    He hated this. He hated telling Shannon North, of all people, that money was an issue. But even more, he hated that she was right about going to Austin. X-rays were good only for bone breaks and fractures. In his sport, he’d seen knee injuries like this one, and MRI and CT scans were the only way to determine the extent of the tissue damage.
    “Luke?” Shannon said, her hand on the gearshift. “What’s it going to be? Back home, or Austin?”
    He looked down at his knee, then turned away with a huff of irritation. “Austin.”
    She put the truck in gear. “Good decision.”
    “I see you never got over your bossiness.”
    “I prefer to think of it as providing direction to people who desperately need it. I see you never got over your hardheadedness.”
    “I prefer to think of it as a logical reaction to bossy people.”
    “Just because I’m bossy doesn’t mean I’m wrong,” Shannon said.
    “Why didn’t you just tell me you were heading to Austin?”
    “Would you have gotten into this truck if I had?”
    “Nope.”
    “Well, there you go.”
    Now he remembered what a challenge it had been to stay one step ahead of Shannon. Her speech had always been filled with one declarative sentence after another, as if whatever words she spoke instantly became law.
    He looked out the passenger window, thinking about his predicament and trying to get a handle on it. Even if he was sidelined for a few months, he’d already won enough prize money that he’d stay in the top ten bull riders, and that was all it took to qualify for the World Championship. Prize money was cumulative, though, right through the finals, so the higher he was in the standings, the more likely he was to win the title. As long as he was in good enough shape to climb aboard a bull the first week of November, he still had a shot.
    But if the worst happened and he couldn’t compete even then…
    He didn’t want to think about that. He didn’t want to think about starting all over again in January. About following a grueling schedule that put him in a different town every week so he could pile up the prize money and inch up in the standings. About all those younger cowboys coming onto the scene, ones who hadn’t spent the past ten years getting knocked around the way he had. He was hot this year, hotter than he’d ever been, but he couldn’t count on his good fortune lasting forever. If he missed this window of opportunity to win the championship, it might never open up again.
    Forty-five minutes later, Luke and Shannon arrived at the hospital emergency room. But it was another hour before a nurse took Luke back to be seen by a doctor, a bearded guy who was probably in his early forties, who stroked his chin a lot as he talked. After a brief exam, after which a different nurse treated the scrapes on Luke’s leg and removed at least a dozen splinters, the doctor ordered an MRI to diagnose the knee injury. Luke had to endure another long wait for that, and yet another before an orthopedist showed up to evaluate the results. Whenever Luke came back to the waiting room, Shannon questioned him about what was