Home to Hope Mountain (Harlequin Superromance) Read Online Free PDF

her thoughts drifting. Working with trauma victims was rewarding but it was also emotionally taxing. She needed this time to de-stress.
    Today, though, her thoughts refused to drift. Should she take the job with Molly? She was barely skimping by on her income from the Horses for Hope program. What would Leif have wanted? Working in town felt like selling out on their dream, but on the other hand, she had the horses to consider. Blaze was due to foal in a few weeks. There might be vet bills. And all the horses needed to eat. Hay wasn’t cheap.
    Maybe she shouldn’t have refused Adam’s request to treat his daughter as a private patient. But he unsettled her. Partly because of his association with the bushfires and Leif’s death. Partly because he was a stranger. Every man in Hope Mountain was as familiar to her as her Akubra hat. Adam was attractive and sophisticated. Rich. She didn’t know how to act around him.
    A muffled curse on the vehicle track to her right broke into her thoughts. She reined in Bo and peered around a bush. Speak of the devil. Adam Banks had his knees up around his ears as he made wobbly progress on the muddy track. He didn’t look quite so intimidating now.
    He lost his balance and thrust out a leg to brace himself only to end up ankle-deep in mud. Hayley stifled a smile. Bo shifted one of his enormous hooves and a twig broke.
    Adam glanced around. “Hello? Is somebody there?”
    “You need a horse, not a bike,” Hayley called out. She squeezed her thighs around Bo’s barrel-shaped stomach and the horse picked his way through the undergrowth. “Where do you think you’re going, anyway?”
    He was heading in the direction of her property. She didn’t care if people strayed over property lines while hiking or riding. But she didn’t want Adam Banks becoming free with the track between their places. Didn’t want him popping over anytime he felt like it.
    He reached into the saddlebag behind his seat and pulled out an empty plastic container. “I’m coming to beg a cup of sugar off you. Demerara would be ideal, but I’ll settle for plain brown. Or even white, in a pinch.”
    “Sugar.” She looked him over, at the designer jeans, black polo shirt and expensive white running shoes splattered with mud. “Are you making cookies?”
    Was this sugar quest a ploy to talk to her again? He seemed a determined type, used to getting his own way. She wouldn’t put it past him to have another go at convincing her to work with his daughter.
    “Barbecue sauce. So, do you have any sugar? It would be nice to know now before I destroy my clothes and Summer’s bike. I promise to repay it tomorrow.”
    Was that a subtle dig at her obviously straitened circumstances? The other day when she’d turned down a free movie ticket Molly had told her she was too defensive and too proud. It was hard to know anymore where to draw the line.
    “I’ve got sugar. But you’re not going to be able to ride much farther. There’s a creek up ahead and the banks are a quagmire. What on earth possessed you to try to come through here on a bike?”
    “I do a lot of cycling at home.” Hands on hips, he surveyed the dense forest and muddy track as if wondering how he’d come to be there. “Admittedly this wasn’t the brightest move.”
    “Are you one of those MAMILs we get up here on the weekend?” She smirked. “They come through town in packs of twenty to thirty.”
    “I beg your pardon?”
    “Middle-Aged Men In Lycra.”
    “I confess to Lycra, but thirty-six is hardly middle-aged.”
    She’d been joking, of course, calling him a MAMIL. He was nothing like the pot-bellied weekend warriors who puffed up the mountain, red-faced and sweaty, to collapse in the café with a piece of cake. And now that she knew he was a cyclist, she could see how he came by his lean, muscled physique. An image flashed through her mind of him in a tight-fitting jersey stretched across a hard chest, and shorts that clung like a second