Rescue Me Read Online Free PDF

not to mention his own parents’ divorce, he’d just never met a woman who made him want to risk it. Of course, that could have something to do with his preference for women with low expectations. “What’s on your mind?”
    “Your daddy told me he called you.” Luraleen set the cigarette in the ashtray and a curl of smoke trailed upward.
    “Yeah. He did. About four months ago.” After twenty-six years the old man had called and evidently wanted to be a dad. “I’m surprised he called you, though.”
    “I was surprised, too. Shoot, I haven’t talked to Big Vin since he left your mama.” She took a drag off her cig and blew it out in a thick stream. “He called ’cause he thought I could talk sense into you. He said you wouldn’t hear him out.”
    Vince had heard him out. He’d sat in the old man’s living room and listened for an hour before he’d heard enough and left. “He shouldn’t have bothered you.” Vince took a long drink from the bottle and sat back in the chair. “Did you tell him to fuck himself?”
    “Pert near.” She grabbed her mug. “Is that about what you told him?”
    “Not about. That’s exactly what I told him.”
    “You don’t want to reconsider?”
    “No.” Forgiveness wasn’t easy for him. It was something he had to work at, but Vincent Haven Senior was one person who wasn’t worth the hard work he’d have to put into it. “Is that why you called me to come here? I thought you had a proposition for me.”
    “I do.” She took a drink and swallowed. “I’m getting old, and I want to retire.” She set the mug on the desk and closed one eye against the smoke curling from the end of her cigarette. “I want to travel.”
    “Sounds reasonable.” He’d traveled the world. Some places were pure hell. Others so beautiful they stole his breath. He’d been thinking about going back to some of those places as a civilian. Maybe that was exactly what he needed. He had no strings now. He could go wherever he wanted. Whenever he wanted. For however long he wanted to stay. “What can I do to help?”
    “You can buy the Gas and Go, is all.”

Chapter Three
    H e’d turned her down. She’d asked a stranger to take her to her young cousin’s wedding and he’d turned her down flat.
    “Don’t own a suit,” was all he’d said before he’d walked away. Even if she hadn’t seen his driver’s license or heard the lack of twang in his voice, she would have known he wasn’t a native Texan because he hadn’t even bothered with a good lie. Something like his dog died and he was grieving or that he was scheduled to donate a kidney tomorrow.
    The setting sun bathed the JH in bright orange and gold and filtered through the fine plumes of dust disturbed by the Saab’s tires. He’d made the offer to repay her, but of course he hadn’t meant it. Asking him had been a dumb, impulsive idea. And dumb, impulsive ideas always got her into trouble. So, if she looked at it that way, Vince the stranded guy had done her a favor. After all, what was she supposed to do with a huge, enormously hot stranger all night long once he’d served her purpose? She clearly hadn’t thought it through before she’d asked.
    The dirt road to the JH took ten to twenty minutes depending on how recently the road had been graded and the type of vehicle. Any moment, Sadie expected to hear mad barking and see the sudden appearance of half a dozen or so cow dogs. The ranch house and outbuildings sat five miles back from the highway on the ten-thousand-acre ranch. The JH wasn’t the largest spread in Texas, but it was one of the oldest, running several thousand head of cattle a year. The ranch had been settled and the land purchased on the Canadian River in the early twentieth century by Sadie’s great-great-grandfather, Major John Hollowell. Through good times and lean, the Hollowells had alternately both barely survived and thrived, raising purebred Herefords and American paint horses. Yet when it came to