High Stakes Bride Read Online Free PDF Page B

she lowered herself onto an upturned bucket, for the moment comfortable with the dimness and the quiet.
    She’d known he’d had to come back some time—she had expected him sooner than this—but still, seeing him had knocked her sideways, and finding out he had been injured had been a shock. Ever since he’d joined the army she’d nursed the fear that he’d get hurt, and now it had happened.
    She shifted position and the faint twinge of stiffness in her own leg registered, and other even more unwelcome memories flooded back.
    Six years ago she had been involved in a car accident that had killed both her mother and Robert Galbraith, and injured her. She had been home from Mason, taking a break from her first full year in physiotherapy practice. She had volunteered to drive Susan and Robert into town and drop them at the golf club for their weekly golf date before continuing on to pick up David, who had spent the night at a friend’s place. Out of sheer practicality they had taken Robert’s car, since he had had a trunk large enough to hold both sets of golf clubs. She could remember trying to avoid a large truck, the wheels of the car sliding in the layer of gravel on the verge. The car had fishtailed and the truck had slammed into the side of the vehicle. They’d rolled, ending upside-down in the ditch.
    Dani had broken a leg and received cuts on her face and arms from the shattered windshield. Her mother, who was seated in the rear, had received the brunt of the impact from the truck and had died instantly. Robert Galbraith hadn’t lasted much longer. The ambulance medics had tried to resuscitate him on the way to the hospital, but without success. When the car had rolled, he’d sustained head injuries that meant that even if they had managed to generate a pulse, it was unlikely he would regain consciousness.
    Dani hadn’t been judged to be at fault. The accident had happened on a narrow dirt road that was closer to one lane than two. There had been little room to manoeuvre, but even so, she had never been able to accept the verdict.
    She had been an experienced enough driver, but most of her driving had been done on city roads, and in her own small sedan—not Robert Galbraith’s large automatic. At the time she had been feeling her way with the unfamiliar car and the road, which had recently had a new load of gravel spread on it. She had always believed that if either Robert or Susan had been behind the wheel, they would have managed the car and the slippery conditions better and so survived the crash. She wouldn’t have lost her mother and Robert—who had been the closest thing to a father she had ever known—and her much younger half-brother, David, wouldn’t have lost both his parents.
    To compound her guilt, she knew that if Robert Galbraith and her mother were still alive, Galbraith Station wouldn’t be in such a shaky financial position.
    With the help of a hired hand, Bill Harris, and Aunt Ellen, who had moved out of her townhouse in Mason and into Galbraith, Dani had quit her physiotherapist’s job and taken over the running of the farm while she sorted out the financial tangle of Robert Galbraith’s affairs.
    Despite an outward appearance of wealth, neither Susan nor Robert had had a lot of money to spare, nor had ever imagined dying before their time—certainly not in a car accident on one of Jackson’s Ridge’s sleepiest country roads. They’d had insurance but only enough to cover the short-term debt owing on the property. Although it had been in the Galbraith family for generations, it had become heavily mortgaged through Robert’s various business ventures.
    The investment structure, which had been solid while Robert was alive, had collapsed like a house of cards when he died. A kiwifruit orchard he’d had shares in had proved successful, but fluctuations in the market had eaten away the slim profits,