Chance McCall Read Online Free PDF Page A

a ghost,” he said. His words were harsh and angry.
    “Well,” she announced, “I don’t believe in ghosts.”
    Chance stood silently, stunned as her words sank in. When he finally answered, there was no one left to hear. “I wish to hell I didn’t.”

2
    He moved with grace and power. Bare to the waist in the noonday heat, his jeans loose and beltless so that a scant inch of white from his briefs showed, reminding Jenny that there was more to him than the eye could see. His hat hung on the corner post of the corral, his denim shirt draped between the rails.
    His dark hair curled slightly at the neck, a reminder that he’d missed his last two dates to get a haircut. Sun blistered down upon his bare back, turning his skin to an even deeper shade of brown. Sweat poured down from his hairline, over his sharp, chiseled jaw and down the tight band of muscles across his belly. A powerful man, thirty years old, and in his prime.
    Hidden by the shrubbery that bordered the yard, Jenny watched him move, mesmerized by the sensual pull that existed between them…always. She licked her lips; an unconscious movement that mimicked Chance when he tried to catch a drop of sweat that hung at the corner of his mouth. He missed, and Jenny swore softly to herself as she watched the errant perspiration hit his chest and flow down into the waistband of his jeans.
    In the old days, she would have been right beside him, laughing, talking, offering suggestions that he would gently ignore. Jenny blinked back tears. She missed the old days. And she missed Chance.
    She’d learned over the last few years that whenever she appeared, Chance disappeared. At first she’d been dumbfounded. While she’d been growing up, he’d been her rock, her dependable companion. Hurt and anger had followed on the heels of being ignored. Confrontation between them seemed inevitable until Henry, an aging wrangler who’d been more father figure than her father’s employee, had delicately pointed out in his sparse vernacular that Chance didn’t hate the sight of her. She just reminded him of things he couldn’t have.
    “What can’t he have?” Jenny remembered asking.
    “You,” Henry had answered.
    Suddenly everything had fallen into place. Jenny had lived with the love of Chance McCall for so long, it had become familiar property in her heart. She’d taken it for granted that when he finally realized she’d grown up, his reciprocation would be automatic. The idea that Chance saw boundaries between them was appalling to her. She lost sleep at night trying to figure out ways to get past his overdeveloped sense of propriety but it was useless. The more she tried to get past his walls, the higher they became.
    Finally, in despair and disgust she had begun to ignore him. It had been the single most difficult thing she’d ever done in her life, and it accomplished nothing. She had circles under her eyes and had begun to lose weight she couldn’t spare. Juana had noticed Jenny’s pallor and had sent her outside into the sunshine to soak up some of the Texas summer. All that did was put her right back in the vicinity of the man who had stolen her heart. And so she watched him, mesmerized.

    Chance held the long length of water hose in one hand and a soft, soapy sponge in the other as he moved back and forth along the length of his pickup truck, methodically washing away the week’s worth of dust and grime from the exterior. It was Saturday, the fourth Saturday of the month. Tonight he would go to town and lose himself in the wild atmosphere of a local bar. He had no preferences. One time it would be one club, the next month another. Sometimes he’d meet a woman, sometimes not. They weren’t important, but at times, necessary. He’d spent the better part of the last seven years trying to forget that he’d fallen in love with the boss’s daughter on her sixteenth birthday. And he’d lost sleep at night wishing that it was Jenny beneath his hot, aching