April, Dani - Raven's Ranch (Siren Publishing LoveXtreme) Read Online Free PDF Page A

killed in a car accident. They hadn’t been married very long, and she was pregnant at the time. He sold his own ranch then and came out to work for us. Poor guy has never gotten over it.”
    “My God, that’s really sad,” Raven exclaimed. “I used to know Tyler. I remember him from when I was a kid. He had a small ranch to the northwest of the Lazy L.”
    “That’s the one.”
    “I think he was about ten years older than me. I remember he was, like, the youngest rancher around at that time. I always had a schoolgirl crush on him. I thought he was the handsomest man I’d ever seen. I remember he had a girlfriend back then, and I wanted to grow up to be just like her someday.”
    “Yeah,” Connor said, his voice tinged with regret. “He married his girlfriend, and she’s the one who died.”
    “Help me to fit in with these guys, Connor,” she said, gripping his chest. “I want to fit in with them. I want to be a part of the family.”
    “The guys will love you, Raven,” Connor said, and his voice took on a serious tone. “I’m just afraid they’ll love you too much.”

    Before sunset, they pulled into the valley where the Lazy L had been located for five generations of her family. The ranch was practically in the mountains. It was at a higher elevation than what she was used to, and the oxygen became thinner, and her mind relaxed, and she felt at peace with the world.
    To both the north and south were five-thousand-foot mountains, and further to the west, rolling foothills built up to a six-thousand-foot giant only ten miles away. The sky above had never looked so big, and away from the city smog it became a rich blue with every white fluffy cloud rolling across it, taking on the vestige of a passing angel walking across heaven.
    Raven remembered when she had been out here before as a girl, how she had always been amazed at how far she could see in the distance, and the stark colors of the ground, green and brown, sometimes black, broken in places by passing creeks and uneven hills. Mostly wide open land for the cattle, the one or two little patches of light forest contrasted with the flat, rolling plain, and brought beautiful shadows across the meadows as the sun made its daily trip across the sky overhead.
    They pulled up in front of her grandfather’s house. It was not at all as she had remembered it. Dilapidated was the word that came to mind when she first saw it. It was badly in need of paint. Weeds covered the front yard at unruly angles, and one side of the roof looked as if it might cave in at any moment.
    Climbing out of Connor’s truck for the first time in four hours, Raven stretched her legs and walked around the ruin of the old home.
    “What happened?” she asked him. “Did a tornado hit it or what?”
    “Sorry,” Connor told her, stepping up to her side. “I forgot to mention that. Your grandpa wasn’t real good about keeping his place up, mostly because he hadn’t lived there in years.”
    “Why would he let it get like this?” she asked, the disappointment flooding her voice. “This place is terrible.”
    “He told me the place held too many painful memories for him after your grandmother died, and then your mom died, and you abandoned him for life in the city. He said he felt lonely when he was inside that house, and so he never came here. I think it had probably been ten years since he laid eyes on this place.”
    “Well then where did he live?” Raven asked, starting to feel desperate.
    Connor coughed and cleared his throat. “He lived down the road a spell. You got to remember that the Lazy L covers more than thirty miles.”
    “I’m almost afraid to ask, but what about the rest of the ranch?”
    “Don’t worry,” Connor tried to reassure her with a smile. “The rest of the ranch is actually in top-of-the-line condition. It’s just this old house here that needs to be put to the wrecking ball.”
    “So tell me where I’m going to stay?” she asked, not