Blame It on the Cowboy Read Online Free PDF Page A

fingers.
    The doctor nodded, came in and eased the door shut. He glanced around the nearly empty room and frowned. Perhaps because of the junk-food stash.
    â€œYou’re not going to die in a hospital,” he said. “At least, not in the next week or so from an inoperable brain tumor.”
    Reese was still on the page of thinking the worst. “Does that mean I’m going to die even sooner?”
    He huffed, glanced around as if this were the last place he wanted to be. “There was a glitch with the new electronic records system. Your images got mixed up with another patient. When I realized the mistake, I had a look at yours, and other than an enlarged left sinus cavity, you’re fine.”
    Reese couldn’t speak. She just stared at him, waiting for the other shoe to drop. The doctor didn’t look like a prankster, but maybe this was his idea of a really bad joke.
    â€œDid you hear me?” he asked.
    She had. Every word. And Reese was desperately trying to process something that just wasn’t processing in her mind.
    â€œSo, there’s really nothing wrong with her?” Jimena asked.
    â€œNothing. She’s as healthy as a horse.”
    Reese hadn’t been around too many horses to know if they were especially healthy or not, but she would take the doc’s news as gospel.
    Right after she threw up, that is.
    God, she was going to live.
    * * *
    L OGAN SLAMMED DOWN the phone. Jason Murdock, his friend and the rancher Logan had been buying stock from for years, had just given Logan a much-too-sweet deal on some Angus.
    Hell.
    Much more of this and Logan was going to beat the crap out of somebody. Especially the next person who was overly nice to him or gave him a sweet deal on anything.
    For the past three months since the mess with Helene, nearly everybody who called or came into the office was walking on sonofabitching eggshells around him, and it not only pissed him off, it was disrespectful.
    He’d run McCord Cattle Brokers since he was nineteen, since his folks had been killed in a car crash, and he’d run it well. In those early years people had questioned his ability to handle a company this size.
    Silently questioned it, anyway.
    But Logan had built the image and reputation he needed to make sure those questions were never spoken aloud. He’d done that through ball-busting business practices where nobody but nobody walked on eggshells. Yet, here they were all still doing just that. After three months.
    Not just his family, either.
    He’d halfway expected it from Riley, Claire, Lucky and Cassie because they’d been at the scene of what Lucky was calling the great proposal fuckup. Logan expected it, too, from his assistant, Greg Larkin, since he was the sort who remembered birthdays and such shit.
    But everybody in Spring Hill who’d had a reason to come to Logan’s office door had looked at him with those sad puppy-dog eyes. He could only imagine how bad it was when those puppy-eyed people weren’t right in front of him. All the behind-the-hand whispers were no doubt mumbles about poor, pitiful Logan and what Helene had done to him.
    Logan tried to make a note on the business contract he was reading and cursed when his pen didn’t work. He yanked open his desk drawer with enough force to rip it from its runners, and got another reminder he didn’t want.
    That blasted gold watch.
    Why he still had it, Logan didn’t know, but every time he saw it he remembered his night with Julia. Or whatever the hell her name was. She should have been nothing but a distant memory now and soon would be once he found her and returned the blasted watch. Until then, he moved it to his bottom drawer next to the bottle of Glenlivet he kept there.
    Of course, if it hadn’t been for the Glenlivet, he probably wouldn’t have slept with Julia and wouldn’t have had the watch in the first place.
    Logan moved it to the bottom drawer on the