Beloved Wolf. Кейси Майклс
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Название: Beloved Wolf

Автор: Кейси Майклс

Издательство: HarperCollins

Жанр: Современные любовные романы

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isbn: 9781472086501

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СКАЧАТЬ put it behind her, look forward to the surgery that would finish the job the doctor had begun and her healthy body had taken from there. After all, her knee was already so good that the J-brace and crutches were gone.

      She’d been in physical therapy in San Francisco almost from the beginning, and now that she would soon be putting aside her cane, the therapy could begin in earnest, building up muscles grown weak from disuse.

      Sophie was fine. Fine. And she was going to be even better.

      River told himself that every night. She was healing. She was back with her family, who would do everything in their power to help her heal. She’d soon be his own laughing, happy, optimistic Sophie again.

      Please, God.

      River busied himself in the tack room, making up excuse after excuse not to leave the stables, not to head up to the house. See Sophie.

      She’d be too busy for him anyway, with everyone else crowding around, hugging her, kissing her, welcoming her back. Why, he might even take dinner out here with the boys rather than go up to the house for the evening meal. That wasn’t so unusual; he did it all the time.

      “Coward,” he muttered under his breath as he hung up the bridle he’d just inspected. “What do you think she’s going to do, buddy? Bite your head off?” He lowered his head and sighed. “Ignore you?”

      Okay, so now he was finally getting down to it. She might ignore him—or worse, treat him the same as she did her brothers and sister, her foster siblings. Happy to see him, polite, even loving. But not special.

      Not the way they’d been, years ago.

      He wouldn’t have made it without Sophie, wouldn’t have survived. He knew it, even if she didn’t.

      River had come to the ranch a rebellious teenager—alternately hotheaded and morose, a teeming mass of hate and anger and, often, despair. He lashed out at anyone who came near him, tried to help him, although he didn’t realize until many years later that he kept people at arm’s length because he was too afraid to let anyone into his world, for fear they’d leave him.

      He’d been born to a white rancher and a Native American mother whom his father had married only because he’d been careless and put a child in her belly, River. His father resented his Native American wife, and Rafe, her son from a previous marriage, but that didn’t mean he kept his hands off her.

      River’s earliest memories were of his mother’s love and his father’s undisguised disgust.

      And then his mother left him, died in childbirth when he was only six. His new sister, Cheyenne, was taken in by her maternal grandmother, to be raised on reservation land. Rafe, River’s protector, also stayed on the reservation, because their father didn’t want him, couldn’t control him. But not River. Oh, no, he wanted River. He was six years old now. Old enough to “help” eke out a poor living on that small, decrepit excuse for a ranch. Old enough to do a “man’s” work. Rafe, on the other hand, was old enough to talk back, and so he was left behind, considered worthless, too much the savage for his stepfather to have to face every day.

      All the love went out of River’s life when his mother died, when his sister and brother had been taken away. His own life was reduced to caring for and avoiding the slaps from a rotten drunk.

      School was a place River went when his father was passed out drunk on the couch and couldn’t stop him, saddle him with another chore. It was at school, when River was nine, that one of his teachers had seen the bruises.

      Now his father was gone, left at the ranch while River was removed from his not-so-tender care and placed at the Hopechest Ranch, a haven for children from “troubled homes.”

      He’d hated it there. Hated the kindness, the caring, the promise that he was safe now, had nothing to worry about anymore. What did those do-gooders know? He was alone, that was what he was. His mother gone, his Native American family unwilling or unable to take him, his father a brutal drunk who could show up at any moment, drag him back to the ranch.

      River found some solace with the horses at Hopechest Ranch, a project initiated by Joe Colton, a charitable contribution he believed would help the children who cared for the horses, learned responsibility through that care, and in return were given something to love.

      That was how it began. River James, half-breed and teenage menace, and Joe Colton, rich man, senator, and a man stubborn enough to ignore River’s animosity, his rebuffs, and finally take the troubled teen into his own home.

      Joe and Meredith tried their best, they really did. So did the other Coltons. But River held out, held himself aloof from them all, ignoring their kindness while spending his days cutting school and hanging out at the stables. Hacienda del Alegria wasn’t exactly a working ranch, but Joe Colton did raise horses, and that was enough for River.

      Except he couldn’t shrug off Sophie Colton, because the girl simply refused to go away, to leave him alone. God, how he’d tried to send her away. Called her names, ignored her, let her know her company wasn’t welcome.

      For all the good it did him.

      Just entering her teens, Sophie had been skinny as a Popsicle stick and just as physically two-dimensional. Bright silver braces on her teeth. Silly pigtails in her hair. With a curiosity that drove him nearly insane as she tagged after him asking “Why?” and “How’dya do that?” and “Can I ride him next, huh, huh, can I?”

      He longed to strangle her, because she wouldn’t give up. Her tenacity infuriated him, right up until the moment he realized that Sophie Colton was special. All the Coltons were special, but Sophie was extraordinary. She had a heart so big it included the whole world, even him. She wore him down, wormed her way through his defenses, and the two of them became friends, more than friends. Inseparable.

      And then she had to ruin it all and grow up, start seeing him as her boyfriend, her first love. God, that had been hard. Especially since River felt like her boyfriend, wanted to be the one who awakened Sophie to love, then held her in his arms forever.

      He’d been a fool to agree to escort her to her senior prom, more of a fool to kiss her.

      And then she’d gone away, and his last sight of her had been the tears in those huge brown eyes when he’d told her to go away, to grow up, to leave him alone.

      He should have left then, left the ranch, left the Coltons. He was old enough to be on his own, legally free to leave. But then there was that mess with Meredith, the marital separation that had so unsettled everyone, and Joe’s unhappiness over these past nine years.

      How could River leave the man who had given him so much? Even as word of River’s expertise with horses traveled far enough to have ranchers from Colorado to Texas making him offers, River had stayed with Joe and built up the Colton stud.

      He had stayed with Joe and waited for Sophie to come home, knowing she never would. Not with her successful career in San Francisco. Not with that damned ring on her finger. And most especially not to revisit the strained unhappiness that hung over the ranch.

      “River? You back there?”

      River walked out of the tack room, toward Joe Colton, who was standing in the stables, looking lost and defeated. “Senator? Is everything all right? I saw you drive up a while ago with Sophie.”

      River retrieved two soda cans from a small refrigerator СКАЧАТЬ