Her Mistletoe Cowboy. Marie Ferrarella

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СКАЧАТЬ Stan echoed. He permitted himself a dismissive snort. “More like the whole damn bushel. Open your eyes, Lee, and take in the whole picture. I’m giving you a chance here.”

      Kim tightened her hands on the armrests and pushed herself up to her feet. She knew Stan. She wasn’t going to get a better offer no matter how much she battered him. It was up to her to turn what really sounded like a fluff piece to her into something golden. “Then I guess I’m off,” she told him.

      The phone on his desk was ringing. Stan covered the receiver with his wide, spidery hand, waiting to pick it up.

      “Yes, you are,” he acknowledged just before he picked up the receiver.

      * * *

      THIS WASN’T JUST another state, Kim thought as she drove the compact tan Toyota she’d rented at the airport, it was another world. Some parallel universe that perversely coexisted beside the modern, sophisticated one to which she had not only been born, but where she thrived and definitely preferred being.

      San Francisco had been home to her for all of her twenty-eight years, and while some of the people she knew claimed to actively love “getting away from it all” by doing things like going camping and hiking in the mountains, the thought of being somewhere where sidewalks were only a theory, not a genuine fact of life, seemed somehow barbaric to her.

      Even in her teens, she had never had a desire to be “one with the earth” or to even mildly pretend to be “roughing it.” To her, roughing it meant doing without her cell phone or her laptop for half a day and even that made her feel more than vaguely uncomfortable, as if she had lost her hold on civilization, her connection to the outside world.

      Which was what she was beginning to feel as she traveled down what she supposed amounted to a two-lane road to this town that seemed to mean so much to Saunders. A town that some of the maps didn’t even have listed.

      Kim could feel a sense of desperation beginning to build up within her.

      “Brigadoon, Stan is sending me to Brigadoon,” she muttered under her breath, thinking of the village in the musical revival her mother had all but dragged her to when she was only about nine.

      Looking back, she recalled that her mother was always trying to infuse a love of music and culture into her three daughters. Monica and Maureen had lapped it up. She remembered feeling that a play about a town that popped up every hundred years for a day’s time before disappearing again was dumb, not to mention scary. Her mother had called her hopeless; her father had come to her defense, calling her a free thinker. But eventually, even he had given up on her.

      Both her parents, she knew, wanted her to “be somebody.” Her sisters had both followed their example, or at least their father’s example. David Lee was a well-respected neurosurgeon at the prestigious UCSF Medical Center and each of her sisters had their own surgical specialties and enjoyed surgery privileges at the same hospital, making her father exceedingly proud.

      Her mother was a law professor at the University of San Francisco. Her classes were always in demand. Which made her, with her BA in Liberal Arts—emphasis on English—the official black sheep of the family.

      “You’d think, with an Asian-American father and a mother whose grandparents hailed from Ireland and Scotland, and came here eager to make something of themselves in their adopted county, you’d have some real drive, some kind of ambition to become someone,” her mother had lamented when she had informed her parents that she was not applying to either medical school or law school.

      Well, she had drive. Only her drive just happened to be in another direction than her parents and sisters had taken.

      A drive that was stalling, Kim thought in disgust, with this detour to write a story about a town that was barely a visible dot on the map.

      She would have been tempted to say that Stan had made the whole thing up, playing some really bizarre belated April Fool’s prank on her two weeks before Christmas—except that she had actually managed to find the damn hole-in-the-wall on her GPS when she’d gotten into the car she’d rented at the airport.

      The airport at Laredo had been all right, she supposed. Nothing like what she was used to in San Francisco, but compared to what she was looking at now on her way to Forever, the airport seemed like an absolute Shangri-la.

      How did people survive in places like this? And why would they even want to if they had to live out their whole lives here? Kim couldn’t help wondering. There were miles and miles of miles and miles, nothing else in either direction.

      All she knew was that if she’d been born in a place like this, she would have saved every dime she could and the moment she graduated high school, she would have been gone—maybe even before then if the opportunity presented itself—but definitely the second she graduated.

      There was nothing out here except for desolation, with an occasional ranch thrown in between, but she hadn’t even seen one of those for an hour now.

      People who lived in this part of the country probably looked like dried-up, wrinkled prunes by the time they were thirty-five, she estimated, glancing up toward the sky through her windshield.

      Not wanting to usher in the dust, she had her windows rolled up and soon discovered that it was warm in her car. The weather down here was a lot warmer than she was accustomed to this time of year. She shouldn’t have wasted her time packing heavy sweaters and jackets, she thought.

      You shouldn’t have wasted your time coming here at all, a nagging voice in her head that sounded suspiciously like her sister, Monica, whispered to her. Mom and Dad would have been more than happy to lend you the money—or better yet, have you move back into the house. It’s way too big for just the two of them.

      Great, now she was hearing voices. More specifically, Monica’s voice.

      That was all she needed, to get heatstroke out here, Kim thought in exasperation. Next, she would start hallucinating.

      Damn it, she should have held out. There had to be some other story on Stan’s docket, something she could have worked on that was a lot closer to home than this. Union-Post Publishing owned a theater magazine, didn’t it? Stan could have easily sent her to do some puff piece on the new theater season that was coming next fall. Anything other than this Sagebrush Cowboys Save Troubled Teens thing he wanted her to write.

      With every passing minute, she grew more irritable.

      She should have stood her ground and dug in. Now it was too late and she was stuck out here. Stuck going to some stupid town called Farewell, or Forever, or Four Miles From Nowhere—

      Kim’s eyes widened as she stared at the small rectangular screen on the dashboard that had, until a moment ago, been her GPS monitoring unit.

      Except now it wasn’t.

      It wasn’t anything.

      The screen had gone blank. Desperate, Kim hit the blank screen with the heel of her hand, trying to make it come around. It remained blank.

      That was what she got for renting a compact car, she upbraided herself.

      Trying to figure out what to do, she pulled the car over to the side of the road—although if she just kept on going, what was the difference? she asked herself. It wasn’t as if she’d hit anything. СКАЧАТЬ