Autumn Lover Read Online Free PDF

ranch this size could use four times that many hands.”
    “Finally we agree on something,” Elyssa said beneath her breath. “I will treasure the moment.”
    Hunter looked at her over Bugle Boy’s back.
    “Did you say something?” Hunter asked, his voice bland.
    Elyssa cleared her throat and decided that baiting Hunter was tempting, but not very bright.
    “I agree that the Ladder S could use more men,” Elyssa said. “In fact, when Mother and Father were alive, we had thirty hands for the busiest times of the year. In the winter we had fewer, of course. It dependedon how many cattle we were holding over.”
    Hunter was silent for a moment. Then he pinned Elyssa with night-dark eyes.
    “Do you have enough money to hire at least seven more men at gunfighting wages?” he asked bluntly.
    Elyssa’s stomach tightened again. Money wouldn’t be a problem if the cattle and horses were delivered to the army on time.
    If they weren’t, she would be bankrupt.
    “I can pay,” Elyssa said tightly. “But the men will have to work cattle, too.”
    Hunter nodded. The brush moved in long strokes over Bugle Boy’s bloodred hide.
    “The kind of men I’m looking for won’t mind pushing cows,” Hunter said.
    “There is a problem.”
    “Just one?”
    “Until this one is solved, the rest can’t be,” Elyssa retorted.
    “I’m listening.”
    “Another moment to treasure,” she muttered.
    Hunter’s head came up.
    Elyssa started talking. Fast.
    “The Culpeppers are scaring away the men who would normally look for work here,” she said.
    “So I’ve heard.”
    “Even the Turner clan off to the south is staying away, and Turners have worked autumn and spring roundups on the Ladder S for years.”
    Hunter nodded.
    “That doesn’t worry you?” she asked tartly.
    He shrugged.
    “But how will the men get through the Culpepper gang to be hired by the Ladder S?” Elyssa demanded.
    “Same way I did. By using their heads. Or in a group, using their guns. Either way, they’ll come.”
    “You sound very certain.”
    “Cash jobs are hard to come by out here. A man can make more money in a month at fighting wages than he can in a season of pushing cows.”
    Elyssa sighed and rubbed her arms, feeling the night chill through the heavy silk shawl. She wished she had the shawl’s cost in plain old homespun wool.
    But she didn’t. There was no money for more suitable clothes for her or paint for the house or for anything else that wasn’t essential for the ranch’s survival. The Ladder S was all she had in the world.
    And she was very much afraid she had already lost it.
    “I wish Mac were still here,” Elyssa said unhappily. “He liked women even less than you do, but—”
    “Smart man.”
    “—nobody knew the Ladder S the way he did,” she said, ignoring Hunter’s interruption. “Every ravine, every spring, where the grass was good and in which season, even the marsh. He knew all of it.”
    “Didn’t do him much good against the Culpeppers, did it?”
    Hunter lifted one of Bugle Boy’s big hooves and began cleaning it with swift movements of a hoof-pick.
    Slowly Elyssa shook her head, blinking against the tears that burned at the back of her eyes.
    “I tried to find Mac,” she said in a husky, ragged voice. “As soon as I heard shooting, I grabbed the shotgun and rode Leopard out of here at a dead run.”
    “Don’t blame yourself,” Hunter said. “It probably was all over before you even tightened Leopard’s cinch.”
    “I didn’t bother.”
    “I beg your pardon?”
    “With a saddle,” Elyssa explained. “Or a bridle.”
    “Girl, only an idiot would ride—”
    “I didn’t even find where Mac had fallen,” Elyssa said, not hearing any words but her own. “I searched until a thunderstorm broke and washed away the tracks. Then I quartered the land until it was too dark to tell trees from rocks.”
    “You are a fool! What if the Culpeppers had found you?”
    “I was afraid Mac was lying