A Texas Chance Read Online Free PDF Page A

the book, frame it as a view through the eyes of someone who nearly died for his work.”
    “What the hell does that mean?”
    “They were thinking it would be a journey through your life, beginning with your first efforts, leading up to your accident and ending with what it feels like to look back on your career and measure it in terms of what you nearly lost.”
    “Bullshit. I’m not baring my soul in print. It’s no one’s damn business.”
    “But it’s a tremendous marketing angle. Sort of like Sebastian Junger’s work, only better because you’re not just writing about someone else who nearly died, you’re relating firsthand experiences. They’ll give you a ghostwriter if you want one.”
    What Cade wanted was to crush the phone in his hands. “No.”
    “Don’t say no yet. They’ll make it worth your while.”
    “Not possible.”
    “Cade, you’re under contract. You’ve missed a deadline. If they decide you’ve reneged on the contract terms, they could make you pay the advance back, and it’s a sizable chunk of change.”
    “I don’t care. Tell them to go to hell.” He was not reliving the last several months or using his friend’s death to make more money, not for anything. “They have no right.”
    “Not to your story, maybe, but to what you promised them when you signed the contract? Absolutely.”
    “Then I’ll pay them back.”
    “And then what? They’ve been financing your expeditions for ten years now. You torpedo your relationship with the publisher and your career will be over.”
    I can’t do the work . And I’m nothing without it .
    “Just think it over, Cade. Not while you’re mad, but later.” She hesitated. “I’ll need your answer within two weeks. I can hold them off that long, but no longer.”
    How could two weeks, hell, two years make any difference? He’d been physically well enough to work on the original concept for a while now, but that wasn’t the problem.
    Maybe if he believed the shots he’d have to weed through wouldn’t turn out to be the last good ones he’d ever take, or if he didn’t have to stumble over memory after memory of Jaime… “I gotta go, Karen,” he said.
    “Cade…”
    “Not now. I’m…I’m sorry.”
    “You can call me anytime to talk,” she responded. “You know that. I care about you, Cade, and not just as your agent.”
    He ended the call as politely as he could, only too aware that she’d been a friend as much as a business partner and that she deserved better than for him to behave so unprofessionally. He’d never done anything like this before.
    Then again he’d never been trapped in a cage of his own fear before. He’d been in countless hairy situations all over the world and never blinked an eye. But he’d never nearly died before, either, or been haunted by the death of someone whose only crime was being a friend to Cade. Nor had he ever faced losing the most essential element of his existence.
    Sick to death of stumbling around in the labyrinth his mind had become, Cade jammed his phone in the top drawer and clenched his jaw. Dodging and doubting…who the hell had he become?

CHAPTER THREE
    A FEW FRIENDS … RIGHT . Cade should have remembered that Jenna did nothing by halves and had never met a stranger in her entire life. He hung around the edges of the crowd for as long as he could stand it, letting himself be introduced to a whole bunch of people whose names he would never remember, and didn’t care to.
    But none of them had been called Sophie, he was positive. So where was she, his sister’s latest charity case? Not that most of the people present couldn’t qualify for that same status. She’d invited several families for whom her nonprofit organization was building homes, as well as unemployed workers she thought needed a good meal or a chance to find jobs, the old lady next door, a waitress she liked…
    He had to hand it to her, though. Everyone brought something, even if it was only a bag of