The Rodeo Queen by Marcella Bell

Author:Marcella Bell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HQN Books
Published: 2022-10-14T16:00:31+00:00

CHAPTER TWELVE

Miami, Florida

IT WAS IMPOSSIBLE not to see parallels to The Hunger Games as Diablo led his horse into the arena the following evening.

Rather than the large circle of dirt that rodeo fans knew and loved, Miami’s Hard Rock Stadium had been transformed into a small version of the Everglades, re-creating the dramatic landscape Florida was famous for outside with shocking and undoubtedly expensive realism inside.

Wet and hot and filled with foliage, the set’s creators appeared to have actually drained the swamp right into the arena.

From Sierra’s announcement the night before, Diablo had deduced that, even in the face of all of the drama and set effects, the first challenge was essentially a team-roping exercise.

His suspicions were confirmed when, upon arriving at his assigned call time, the greenies had informed him that his task was to enter the arena, find his partner and with them, both rope and guide a set of four steers into a designated holding pen that he had been assured “he could not miss.”

It wasn’t not being able to locate the holding pen that he was worried about, however.

It was the partner part.

Most roping teams worked together for at least weeks, if not years. He and his college partner had been paired up as freshmen and had competed with each other exclusively in the team-roping event for the next four years.

Thank God The Closed Circuit was obsessed with rank—in terms of both bulls and scores—and his partner for the challenge was Julio.

Somewhere in the fake swamp, he would find the older man as well as what he guessed would be some stressed-out steers.

Observing the mini Jurassic Park in front of him as he tuned out the sounds of the audience around him, he supposed that The Closed Circuit had also included a few booby traps.

Like all summer reality shows, they could hardly resist booby traps.

Why should they? Slapstick made good TV.

As far as roping went, though, Diablo was confident in his skills.

Years as a star college rodeo athlete had ensured that not only did he have the necessary know-how and precision, he also had had the benefit of four years of intensive rodeo education and training from one of the best college programs in the country. And if occasional coaches and teammates had been resentful or reticent about working with a Black Dominican kid from the city, Diablo compensated for it in the same way he always had—by taking the shit they dished out and spinning it into gold—or, more specifically, shiny buckles and college records.

Gingerly leading his horse into an environment that very clearly made it nervous, he could also acknowledge that as a collegiate athlete, he had also always benefited from competing in so-perfectly-controlled-and-cultivated-that-they-were-almost-sterile environments—nothing like the wild cacophony he made his way into now.

But having had the precollege experience of riding in atypical urban environments with the CityBoyz—environments that were just as prone to unsettling a mount—he was more than prepared to manage a nervous horse.

The sights and sounds of a city, the

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