Cowboy Heart (Historical Western Romance) (Longren Family series #3, Kitty and Lukes story) Read Online Free PDF

remember seeing on my sister's brow.  She looked worried.
                  "Yes," she said, a bit briskly, then, "Yes, well, he did.  He got the best price he could."  She sighed, propped her chin on her folded arms, and glared at the cows.
                  Another sigh.  "The grass they're eating is dry.  Everything's dry here."  She let her head roll on her arms so she could look at me.  "What you did this afternoon?  That was important.  I didn't mean to not say so.  I was just…"  She shrugged.
                  "Surprised to see me here?"
                  "A little!"  That made her laugh, but not the way Sarah used to laugh.  Pushing herself off the gate, she started walking the perimeter of the pasture, hands tucked into the pockets of the apron she still wore.  "We're in the middle of a drought here and it's making everything so hard.  We have water for drinking, bathing and washing, but the amount of water you need on a ranch, to grow crops, to grow the grain and feed the animals, it's amazing, and the wells come up dry and the streams sometimes dry up and, other times, people upstream dam them."  Her voice was hard right then.  "There's the concern of keeping the animals healthy, so you can either drive them to graze or find water for them."
                  She kicked at the dirt, which spun into a very small dust devil, no higher than her knee.  The ground was dust dry. 
                  "William got a good price for the thousand," she said.  "The animals are still healthy, still have weight on them.  We needed to sell while that's still true."  She sounded angry, probably at having William gone, though I'd have thought that would happen from time to time.  "He's taking them about 100 miles north and that takes about two weeks."
                  Which she'd already told me, more than once.  She missed him.  I couldn't blame her.  I missed Johnny.  The rat. 
                  If only feelings turned off when they're no longer needed.  I'd cared about Johnny for years, as a friend and as a fiancé.  It never occurred to me I'd be without him, at least not for a good many years.  We were the same age, both healthy, both living more or less where we wanted to live.  I thought we had time.  Losing him meant not only losing the man I loved—which kept coming through to me, that I had loved him, as much as he'd been my friend, and that surprised me, every time—but also losing the friend I'd have turned to under other circumstances to talk things out with. 
                  I had girlfriends in Gold Hill and a few who moved when they were finished with school and lived in Virginia City, three miles north of Gold Hill.  They were good friends, like Rachel, but they'd changed after marrying or having children, or, in one case, deciding to teach rather than anything else.  They no longer wanted to do the same things I did and, even though maybe not all of my girlfriends wanted to be outside as much as I did, exploring creek sides and cottonwoods, once they were married, their interests changed so much I couldn't remember what we'd had in common before. 
                  Johnny hadn't done that.  He'd become more serious, of course, buying into his father's concern of horseshoeing,  but he still loved to hike up hills just to see what was on the other side, still loved to race our horses on flat roads.
                  I'd lost a friend as much as a fiancé.
                  I surfaced out of my thoughts to find Sarah had fallen silent.  She was simply walking beside me along the pasture, her hands still sunk deep into her apron pockets.  When she noticed me looking at her, that I was out of my own thoughts, she stopped and put a hand on my arm, then put her arms around me.
                  "I'm glad you're here, Kit," she said, holding me by