Cassidy Harte and the Comeback Kid. RaeAnne Thayne

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      What else could she have done but stay and try to repair the damage she had brought down on her family? If she had the choice to do all over again, she honestly didn’t think she would change anything she had done after he left.

      She sighed and let herself into the cabin, comforted by the familiar furnishings—the plump couch, the rocker of her mother’s, the braided rug in front of the little fireplace. She had made the cabin warm and cozy and she loved it here.

      Functioning more on autopilot than through any conscious decision, she walked into the small bathroom and turned on the water in the old-fashioned clawfoot tub, as hot as she could stand. When the tub was filled almost to overflowing, she took off her clothes and slipped into the water, desperate to escape the unbelievable shock of seeing the only man she had ever loved, after all these years.

      Taking a bath was a huge mistake.

      She realized that almost as soon as she slid down into the peach-scented bubbles. Now that she didn’t have her work in the kitchen to keep her busy, she couldn’t seem to fix her mind on anything but Zack and the memories of that summer ten years ago, memories that rolled across her mind like tumbleweed in a hard wind.

      The first time she had talked to him—really talked to him—was branded into her memory. He had worked at the Diamond Harte for several months before that late spring evening, but she had been so busy finishing her senior year of high school that she had barely noticed him, except as the cute, slightly dangerous-looking ranch hand with the sunstreaked hair and that rare but devastating smile.

      Matt liked him, she knew that. Her oldest brother had raved about what a way Zack had with horses and how he worked the rest of the ranch hands into the ground. And she remembered being grateful that her brother had someone else he could trust to run things, while he had so many other worries on his mind.

      Melanie had been in the advanced stage of a pregnancy she obviously hadn’t wanted. Never the most even-tempered of women, her sister-in-law had suddenly become prone to vicious mood swings. Deliriously happy one moment, livid the next, icy cold a few moments later. Her brother definitely had his hands full, and she was grateful to Zack for shouldering some of that burden.

      Then, in late May, the week after her high school graduation when the mountain snows finally began to melt, Matt had asked Zack to take a few of the other ranch hands and drive part of the herd to higher ground to graze. Because it was an overnight trip, they would need someone to cook for them, and Cassie had volunteered, eager for the adventure of a cattle drive, even though it would be a short one.

      When she closed her eyes, she could see every moment of that fateful trip in vivid detail….

      She loved it up here.

      With a pleasant ache in her muscles from a hard day of riding, Cassie closed her eyes and savored the cool evening air that smelled sweet and pure, heavy with the rich, intoxicating perfume of sagebrush and pine.

      The twilight brushed everything with pale-rose paint, and the setting sun glittered on the gently rippling surface of the creek. Hands wrapped around her knees, she sat on the bank and listened to the water’s song and the chirp and trill of the mountain’s inhabitants settling down for the evening.

      She would miss this so much in the fall when she moved to Utah for college. The campus in Logan was beautiful, perched on a hill overlooking the Cache Valley, but it didn’t even come close to the raw splendor of the high country.

      This was home.

      So many of her most pleasant memories of her parents were built on the firm foundation of these mountains. Every summer and fall on the way to and from their grazing allotment they used to camp right here where the creek bowed. Her mom would cook something delicious in a Dutch oven and after supper her dad would gather her and Matt and Jesse around the campfire and read to them out of his favorite Westerns.

      She smiled softly. Her memories had begun to fade in the six years since her parents had died in a wintry roll-over accident, but she could still hear Frank Harte’s booming voice ring through the night and see his broad, callused hands turn the pages in the flickering firelight.

      She missed them both so much sometimes. Matt did his best. Both her brothers did. She knew that and loved them fiercely for working so hard to give her a good, safe home for the past six years.

      Matt had only been twenty-two, Jesse seventeen, when their parents died, and she knew a lot of men would have figured a grieving twelve-year-old girl would have been better off with relatives or in the foster care system. Their aunt Suzie over in Pinedale had offered to take her in, but Matt had been determined they would all stick together.

      It must have been so hard for him. She thought of how rotten she’d been sometimes, how often she’d snapped at him when he told her to do her homework or make her bed.

      You’re not my mother and you can’t make me.

      She owed him big-time for putting up with her. Someday she would have to find a way to repay him.

      She sighed, resting her chin on her knees. She was reluctant to leave this peaceful spot, even though she knew she should probably go check on the stew and see if the ranch hands had eaten their boots yet.

      When she walked away from camp a half hour earlier, Jake and Sam Lawson had been snoring in their tent in a little before-dinner nap after beating the brush all day. But they were probably awake now and wondering where she’d wandered off to.

      She smiled at the thought of the two bachelor brothers, who were in their early sixties and had worked for the ranch her entire life. They treated her like a favorite spoiled niece, and she loved them both fiercely.

      And then there was Slater.

      A whole flock of magpies seemed to flutter around in her stomach whenever she thought of the lean, hard cowboy leading the cattle drive. This was the longest she had ever spent in his company, and she had to admit she had spent most of the day watching him out of the corner of her eyes.

      The few times he’d caught her watching him, he had given her that half smile of his, and she felt like a bottle rocket had exploded inside her.

      He made her so nervous she couldn’t think straight. What was it about him? She’d been around cowboys all her life and most of them were simple and straight-forward—interested in horses, whisky and women, not necessarily in that order.

      Zack seemed different. Despite the way he joked with the older cowhands, there was a sadness in his eyes, a deep, remote loneliness that probably made every woman he met want to cuddle him close and kiss all his pain away.

      She rolled her eyes at the fanciful thought. If a woman wanted to kiss Zack Slater, it wasn’t to make him feel better. He was totally, completely, gorgeously male, and a woman would have to have rocks for brains not to notice.

      Well, she couldn’t sit here all night mooning over Zack Slater. Not when she had work to do.

      Just as she started to rise, the thick brush ten yards upstream on the other side of the creek begin to rustle with more than just the breeze. A few seconds later, a small mule deer—no more than a yearling doe, probably—walked out of the growth and picked her way delicately to the water’s edge. After a careful look around, she bent her neck to drink and Cassie watched, smiling a little at the ladylike way the doe СКАЧАТЬ