Fired Up Read Online Free PDF

eyes red-rimmed and gritty. The side of her face bleeding. The same side as he’d gotten scraped raw. He needed to doctor her.
    â€œI’ve got carbolic acid in my office. We need to swab our wounds with it.”
    â€œWhat’s that?” Glynna shook her head violently and wrinkled her nose. “Acid eats things away, doesn’t it?”
    â€œThis is something real new I read about and ordered. I had it shipped all the way from England. It’s supposed to stave off infection.” Dare lifted his head, and his stomach lurched so dramatically he lowered it again. “I want some on my back for sure. Stitches can get infected easily.” He wondered if his face looked as bad as hers.
    She was sitting up, riding, while he was lying flat on his face. Even so, she needed a few days to heal. “You’re not going to be able to run your diner tomorrow. You’ll bleed into the food. Even starving cowpokes’ll balk at that.”
    A tiny sigh caused his eyelids to open. He glanced at the children. They both looked strangely relieved. Dare wondered why they didn’t want their ma running a diner.

Chapter 3
    When she woke up the next morning, Glynna hurt so bad it was like she’d taken a beating.
    She knew what that felt like.
    Just as well she’d put off opening her diner yet again. This time she had a good reason, but there’d been plenty of lesser reasons, all conjured up by her children. They just wouldn’t cooperate and were forever coming up with delaying tactics.
    They must want her to themselves for a while longer. The diner, with its rooms upstairs, had come to her free. Abandoned and with no one to buy it from, she just moved in. Kindling kept showing up at her back door, along with haunches of antelope and bags of potatoes and buckets of milk. There was something new there nearly every morning. She’d gotten flour and sugar and just anything she might need to live. No idea who was leaving it, but she suspected it wasn’t one man but in fact several of them. Every one of the men in town had taken the opportunity to greet her and tip their hats.
    Dare Riker had even given her a stack of clothes. Hesaid they’d been left in his home by whoever moved out, or maybe by several families who’d moved away from Broken Wheel and hadn’t been able to haul everything.
    He’d brought clothes in many sizes for her and the children, as well as some furniture and assorted other things, and he’d done it all as if she were doing him a favor to take it. Considering there were a fair number of women’s and children’s clothes, perhaps he was telling the truth.
    Between the food and the firewood and the clothes and all the things left behind by the former owner of the diner, Glynna and the children wanted for nothing. So there was no rush opening the place. It appeared she could live there forever for free.
    Still, she should open the diner and stop depending on the kindness of others—and she would, just as soon as she stopped hurting.
    She dressed with excruciating slowness and thought of poor, battered Dare. Maybe she should cook a meal and take it over to him.
    The children were nowhere to be seen, so she headed downstairs. Paul was reading one of the Leatherstocking Tales to Janny. Glynna remembered when she was a child, her father had held her on his lap and read that very book to her, and then later she’d read it to Paul. Now Paul was reading it to Janny. The books were the one thing Glynna was glad to have from Flint’s house. They belonged to her. Not Flint, and not her first husband, Reggie. Neither of those two nitwits had done much reading.
    Paul closed the book. “How are you, Ma?”
    â€œI’m feeling like a mountain slid down on my headyesterday.” She smiled and found that it was a true smile. Despite the avalanche, she thought maybe her family was going to be all right. She wondered if she ached too