Parker Read Online Free PDF Page B

the morning or in the evening.
    Felt like someone had shrink-wrapped her
brain.
    Her gaze traveled to the window, where the
sun poked through filmy sheers. “Morning,” she said. Okay, so she
was starting to get her bearings straight.
    Scooting toward the edge of the sofa, trying
to kick the footstool under her feet down in the process, she spied
the wooden chair across the room.
    Ah. Parker McKenna. Where might he be
now?
    She called out his name. Silence.
    Pushing off the couch, she winced, sore from
her ribs to her shoulders. A small pain shot through her left
arm.
    Dammit. This was surely going to cramp
her style for a few days. She needed her arm and her hand and her
fingers.
    Dammit. Dammit.
    Her calendar. Where had she left it? What was
on her agenda for today?
    The kitchen, of course. That’s where she kept
everything. After all, her kitchen was her livelihood.
    She ambled through the door to her favorite
room in the house and immediately started feeling better. She’d
been happy to find when she’d arrived a few weeks earlier that the
kitchen—even though this was a log cabin—was bright and airy. A
very large bay window faced the back of her property and framed the
mountains in the distance. She paused to glance about, pleased with
her recent renovations. Her new stainless professional gas stove
and oven was the biggest splurge, but she justified it as needing
the proper tools to do her job.
    A job that she needed to get to this
morning.
    Calendar . She spied it across the room
sitting open on her desk and made her way toward it. But a paper on
the kitchen table, fluttering slightly from the overhead ceiling
fan, caught her attention. She reached for it.
     
    Reba,
    Had to get back to the ranch. Called my doc
and shared your symptoms. Says you are likely fine but should check
in with your doc ASAP. Let me know if you need help getting to
Livingston.
    Parker
     
    He’d added his phone number by his signature.
Well then, Mr. Parker McKenna. Thank you very much, but I’ll take
it from here.
    That was a relief. It gave her some breathing
space to figure out her next steps. It gave her some space from the hunky cowboy she had kissed.
    Gah! What got into her?
    There was no room in her life right now for a
relationship. She’d just spent the larger part of the past three
years caring for a dying man—a man she loved very much. Her
husband. And she had no desire to spring forward so quickly into
another man’s arms.
    She needed time. And healing. And the means
to find herself in the aftermath of losing herself.
This was her time, and she needed to be stingy with it.
    Parker McKenna would be an infringement upon
that promise she’d made to herself and to her husband on his
deathbed.
    The promise to fulfill her dreams, whatever
they may be.
    She never told Jack what those dreams were.
She simply nodded and told him she would. After he passed and the
details were worked out with the insurance company, she realized
Jack had more than amply provided for her financially—and that
reaching her dream of quitting her going-nowhere administrative
assistant job of fifteen years was definitely a possibility.
    No, it was reality.
    So she had. And she’d bought the Crandall
cabin and decided to kick-start her small business into a higher
gear.
    Her dream. Her gift from Jack.
    Parker McKenna didn’t fit into this picture.
Too much like a love triangle. Having Parker in her head, and maybe
heart, would compete with Jack’s memory, which was very much still
alive in her spirit.
    No. Not happening.
    At her desk, she carefully opened her laptop
with her right hand and pulled her planner toward her. Focus on
work, Reba.
    Just as she thought. A blog post was due up
in forty-five minutes, a recipe to the Iron Pizza Chef Bake-off
Competition was due by noon, and some edits still needed to be done
on the Making Fondant the Fun Way tutorial to upload to her
YouTube channel by tomorrow afternoon. And that was only today.
    No time for