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  Cinderella Cowgirl

  Cinderella Cowgirl

  Leslee Green

  Published by Leslee Green, 2018.

  This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.

  CINDERELLA COWGIRL

  First edition. December 21, 2018.

  Copyright © 2018 Leslee Green.

  Written by Leslee Green.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

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  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  BONUS CONTENT

  THANK YOU FOR READING

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  NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

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  CHAPTER ONE

  Blake Lockwood loved winning.

  The raging, 1,700 pound bull between his legs had other plans for him.

  His heart had been racing since the chute boss had announced he was on deck, and now the tail of his bull rope was wrapped firmly around his hand with hot, tacky rosin sticking to his glove. The gateman was ready to release the furious animal into the arena with him on it. Everything was ready to go.

  The sound of the riotous crowd was growing. He could feel the power of the bull beneath him as his feet spread into the sides of the chute with every breath from the animal.

  “Lose your feet, lose your seat,” he repeated to himself, along with other bull riding mantras that ran through his head, and adjusted his spurred boots for the twentieth time, just to be sure.

  Blake, the champion who would one day go on to take home the grand prize at the famous National Stock Show in Laramie, Wyoming, would first have to cut his teeth at a small, nameless amateur rodeo near his Montana hometown of Stagecoach.

  This was his first professional bull ride. He was eighteen years old.

  In the stands, the crowd was as riled as the bull he was about to try to stay attached to for a full eight seconds, but not one person nor animal could match the excitement of one little girl sitting on an aluminum bench among many others, gripping an ice cream cone so tightly it was cracking.

  Her teeth bit down in anticipation and her eyes were wide. She just knew that this man from the same tiny, hole in the wall town as her could win the prize.

  Her name was Linda.

  Her father, who was still alive at the time, had given her a straw cowboy hat and a dollar for an ice cream cone and taken her to the rodeo, and told her that this was the boy who had gone to the same elementary school as her.

  With ice cream all over her face from a cone that was dripping onto a funny looking home-made dress, she cheered for the boy as if he were her own brother.

  When the nod was given, the gate opened and the crowd erupted. Others had laughed when they saw the lanky, awkward teenager mount the impressive animal, but as the timer hit three seconds, then four, the cheers switched to his favor.

  At six seconds, the crowd was on its feet, and at just past eight seconds, the bull leapt off the ground and tossed Blake onto the dirt, and the bullfighters distracted it away while Blake crawled over to the gate, unconcerned with the flailing, enormous animal still kicking behind him. He knew that he had come close, but he had probably just given up the trophy.

  Sadly for Blake, his score was not enough to bring him the top prize he coveted so badly, but when his second place finish was announced and he received a ribbon, Linda stood up on her seat and cheered as loud as she could.

  Soon after the show, Blake remained standing in the dirt of the arena after the ribbon and trophy ceremony had ended, but the small, enthusiastic crowd that jumped the barricade and ran to the center was not focused on him. Their favorite rider, Kody Davis, had once again secured the local title and would surely make the neighboring town of Tumbleweed proud as he toured around the country taking on bulls and broncs at the major rodeos of the west.

  The world around Blake became a muffled mess, with the sound from the crowd blending together and fading away as it hit his ears, filtered away by his sagging, broken spirit. He had wanted that trophy more than anything. He had risked life and limb for it. His head hung and he kept his hands at his hips as drunken fans stormed the arena to Kody and picked him up into the air.

  Women jumped around and bounced in front of Kody, trying to get his attention, while Blake received a hand or two clapped against his back and some offhand encouraging words, but no rambunctious crowd, and no women. There was, however, one little girl.

  Linda came into view under the brim of Blake’s lowered cowboy hat, her two wide eyes staring up at him.

  He saw that she had the dirty fingernails of a young cowgirl, and the grime from her hand that had been petting livestock all morning was mixing into the ice cream as streams of it melted down over her sticky fingers.

  “Blake Lockwood!” she screamed at him, startling his eyes open and the sound back into his ears. The smile on her face spread like a contagion onto his. “YOU’RE GOING TO BE THE ROOTIN-TOOTINEST, BEST BULL RIDER IN THE WEST!!” With her mouth open and grinning, she shoved the flat, melted cone up towards her hero. He glanced over at the large, golden trophy the champion and his crowd were carrying away, and then turned back to the prize that was being offered to him.

  He removed the glove from his right hand and took the cone from the girl, and she squealed and covered her mouth at how funny it was that he had. He took a bite from the top of the cone so that he could get some of the ice cream inside it, and the sticky mess gathered in droplets on the awkward, clear peach fuzz on his chin.

  “Well thank you kindly, little lady. We’ll get ‘em next time.”

  “Yeah!” she replied eagerly, “We’ll get ‘em all!” She raised her hand for a high five and he smacked it with the gloved hand that the ice cream wasn’t in. He thought for a second about giving her one of his gloves, but was moved enough by the enthusiasm of his very first fan to do one better.

  He picked up the goofy, straw hat off her head and removed the deep brown Stetson from his own. Her eyes widened more than humanly possible as he placed his hat on her head, and then she laughed as he put the little straw hat atop his own.

  “Guess I’ll see you in the stands,” he said.

  �
�No, you’ll see me in the arena! I’m going to be a barrel racer!”

  Blake nodded, believing her. “I’ll see you in the arena then.”

  Pleased, and no longer broken hearted, he handed the ice cream cone back to her, and turned and walked off, disappearing through one of the gates with some hop left in his step, still wearing her hat, as Linda stared in wonder and wriggled with excitement. She turned and found her father, and her father was happy for her.

  She loved her father dearly and made him promise to take her to see Blake the next time he was riding in Montana.

  Her father promised but, little did he know, this had been his last rodeo.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Carl did not seem concerned with Linda’s presence as he relieved himself on the floor right next to her.

  “Would you mind doing that somewhere else?” she asked him, but he responded with a huff and by passing gas and then, with a mouthful of food, nonchalantly passing a pile of excrement onto the floor.

  “I don’t understand why you have to come into the stall that I’m cleaning to do that,” she said to Carl in her frustration.

  Carl was a mule, and they were standing in a horse stall, which made his actions somewhat socially acceptable, but this did not damper completely the annoyance it caused Linda. She gripped her snow shovel by the neck and scraped the fresh clots into it and tossed them on a nearby wheelbarrow.

  Less than a decade had passed since she had seen the wonders of the rodeo with her father and, in that time, Linda had grown into a lovely young lady who, like her father before he passed, now cared for the horses at the Stagecoach Stables.

  Carl relieved himself of another, larger pile of heavy waste matter onto the floor while he dipped his head into a trough filled partially with oats. Linda took his actions as an insult aimed directly at her. “Yeah well,” she responded as she scooped more of the mule chips into her shovel, “your mother was a donkey.”

  Carl seemed immune to her attack, perhaps because he was unashamed of his heritage, or perhaps he was too busy filling up on another animal’s oats to be bothered. Lastly, it may have been due to the fact that he was a mule and did not have a grasp of the English language, though Linda highly doubted this.

  “You know, if you didn’t steal all of Mary’s food all the time, you wouldn’t be so fat,” she said to him and gave him a loving pat on his back, which bowed down slightly because of how fat he was.

  But she only wasted a moment petting Carl before she returned quickly to cleaning the stall. Tonight was the most important night in a very long time, and a lot was at stake. She had a big job to finish if things were going to go as planned.

  “Look at how hard she’s working,” a jeering voice said nearby and Linda looked up to see her two stepsisters approaching, already laughing at her.

  “You had better work faster, Linda, you know the deal. You have to finish all of this or you can’t go to the dance tonight.”

  Linda’s sisters, in their unblemished clothes and manicured hair, who obviously had not been helping her, knew, though she had never told them, that she yearned with all her heart and about half of her soul to go to this year’s dance more than any other in the years before it for one very specific, compelling, and noble reason.

  His name was Blake Lockwood.

  Unfortunately for her, every girl in town wanted to go to the dance just as badly for that same exact reason. And some, as it turned out, were willing to stand directly in her way.

  Over the years, Blake had risen to stardom with wins and finishes at increasingly prestigious rodeos, and his fan base had grown and grown. The young women who had ignored Blake in his awkward, acne-ridden early years, one by one, began to take a great interest in him. But for Linda, it was different.

  To her, the famous rodeo star returning triumphantly to his hometown to commemorate his championship victory at the National Stock Show was more than just a prize to be won. She was, since his very first amateur rodeo, his biggest fan.

  She had waited years for a chance to meet Blake for a second time, though she doubted he’d recognize the grown woman she’d become. She wanted to tell him, without seeming creepy, that since that first rodeo, she had followed him through his whole career. She had no means to attend the out-of-state rodeos he competed in, or even a way to transport herself to the bigger cities of Montana when he rode in them, but she always kept herself updated on his escapades, and had waited all these years for the chance to confront him and tell him that she had seen it all, and had always known he’d be a champion.

  She was not going to let her evil stepsisters ruin it for her.

  “I think you mean we have to finish all of this or we don’t get to go tonight,” Linda retorted to the younger of the stepsisters, Caroline.

  Emily, the older, said, “Oh, we’ve already finished.”

  “What do you mean you’ve already finished!? Half the stalls are left, can you go get some bedding to put down? I told you’d I’d scrape them all if you guys would just put the clean bedding down. It’s just hay, you won’t even get dirty. You can use the pitchfork if you don’t want to touch it.”

  “Oh,” said Caroline with fake sympathy, “we can’t. We’ve already painted our nails for the dance tonight. We would hate to ruin them.”

  “Why would you go and do that!?” Linda yelled.

  “Um, because we wanted to look pretty?” said one sister.

  “You wouldn’t understand,” said the other.

  “You guys know the deal as well as I do,” Linda said, “if we don’t finish the stables, none of us can go. It’s in your own interests to help me out for once. I’m doing all the hard work anyway.”

  “Well, we thought maybe we would just go and you could stay and finish,” said one sister.

  “Yeah, we don’t see the point in all of us having to suffer,” said the other.

  “We don’t understand why you’d want to go anyway,” said one sister, and then cut straight to the point, “Blake doesn’t even know who you are.”

  “The whole reason I want to go to the barn dance isn’t because of Blake!” Linda said, defensive and embarrassed. “This is the biggest event this town has all year! I want to go!”

  “Oh please,” said one sister, “don’t pretend like you don’t have secret plans for you and Blake Lockwood.”

  “Just give it up, Linda,” said the other, “Blake is world famous now. They probably even know who he is in California.”

  “Well, at least in Arizona,” the more skeptical sister added.

  “No way,” said one sister, “I’m sure by now he’s had plenty of girls from California. Do you have any idea what the girls in California must smell like?”

  Linda, being affected by the insulting attacks of her sisters, began to lose heart and did not respond.

  “Peaches,” said one sister.

  “Delicious peaches,” said the other.

  Linda subconsciously nodded, stopping her work and picturing Blake on a beach surrounded by tan colored, peach-scented blonde women in bikinis, not a flannel shirt or cowboy boot in sight.

  “And do you know what you smell like?”

  Linda knew exactly what she smelled like, but figured it best to just let her sister finish. Caroline walked over and answered her own question by thrusting her finger forward, pointed directly at Carl’s butt. In fact, her finger was awkwardly close to the opening, and Linda thought it unnecessary for her to specify so clearly what part of Carl she was referring to.

  But Caroline hated vagaries, and she held her pointed finger so close to Carl she could feel the heat from his bowels, and with an angry, insulting look on her face, took it away only when she was sure her point was made.

  "There's hardly a reason for you to go at all, all the chance you'd have with him," Emily said.

  “All right guys,” Linda said, disheartened, “I’ll finish the stalls myself and then we’ll go.”

  The two sisters began to leave her to her work when one o
f them turned and said, "And do not think that you’ll be wearing one of my dresses to the barn dance.”

  “Mine either,” said the other.

  “But guys, you have hundreds of dresses. Your closets are full of clothes; you know all I have are a bunch of grubby work clothes.”

  “If you think for one second that I am going to let one of my dresses get ruined by making contact with your body, you have another thing coming, Girl.”

  “We don’t want our clothes smelling like a barnyard. Maybe you enjoy that but we don’t.”

  And with that, they left her alone with her snow shovel and the old mule.

  Linda actually didn’t mind the smell of a barnyard; she had gotten so used to it. She loved horses and hay and western competition, and she did not indulge in buying dressy clothes or fine scents, not that she had the money for them anyway. She supposed she would have to work some magic tonight to come up with something decent to wear.

  The only clothes she owned were flannels and old boots and jeans for working at the stables, which she did seven days a week and was not paid for even half of that. But the Stagecoach meant a great deal to her. It had once belonged to her father, and rightfully would have belonged to her if it hadn’t been taken away.

  Linda did the entirety of the hard work for the business and had very little help from the establishment’s other two employees: her stepsisters.

  But Linda didn't mind hard work all that much and figured she could cut a few corners and finish with enough time left for her and her sisters to head home and get ready before it got too late. So, as volunteers within eyeshot across a nearby field erected a large tent in front of the gigantic barn that would house the event, Linda hunkered down and shoveled horse chips.

  When the manure pile had grown quite large and many bales of hay had been broken into soft, fresh bedding, and Linda’s hands were blistered and most of the horses had been riled up into their stalls, Linda needed to take a break. The sun had set and the music was playing loud and people were already hooting and hollering down at the barn.