Stevie Lee Read Online Free PDF

Tiva to keep him from freezing.
    Another moment of standing there made him realize something else. She’d also stoked up his old wood stove. Was there no end to the lady’s good deeds? A particularly painful sequence of throbs convinced him otherwise. She wouldn’t get any gold-plated references from him. But as long as she had the stove going, he might as well start some coffee brewing. Maybe a gallon or two would clear the fuzziness from his brain.
    Still holding his head, he moved to the sink, turned on the tap, and immediately felt like an idiot. Of course, nothing came out. When he’d left for his tropical sojourn, he’d closed the cabin up tight, which included draining the pipes and having the power turned off. Sometimes he wished he wasn’t so thorough.
    A sharp bark from the husky startled him into a painful jerk. Right, he thought wearily, let the dog out. He took two more steps forward, opened the door, and was blasted in the face with pure Rocky Mountain sunshine, a hundred volts of it. His eyes snapped closed so fast and with such force that for a second, Hal was afraid he might not ever get them open. No such luck.
    Squinting through a tiny slit, he forced himself outside, one arm raised in front of his face. Yessiree, the Rockies were beauties all right. Young and majestic, they jutted into a cornflower-blue sky scudded with clouds, one hundred and eighty degrees of Continental Divide stretching across the horizon. A rolling, wildflower meadow sloped down from his cabin to a forest of lodgepole pines. Facing to the south, it was almost bare of snow. Even through his pain, he appreciated the pastoral scene, and for the first time was glad he’d come home.
    The realization carried him off the front porch and into knee-high grass and sage. It helped him lower his arm and take a good look around. His gaze tracked the edge of the meadow, down one side and up the other, to a two-story, A-frame sitting at the top. He knew right away it was Stevie Lee Brown’s—and suddenly his thoughts weren’t quite so bucolic.
    Considering all the trouble she’d gotten him into the previous night, he figured she still owed him. A cup of coffee and a hot shower were a good place for her to start, but it was only a start. By the time he’d organized a clean set of clothes and his toothbrush, he’d tacked a couple more requests onto his list, favors he’d meant to ask, the very vital innards of his plan for getting out of his financial mess, and closer to sweet Stevie Lee. The lady hadn’t seen the last of him, not by a long shot.
    * * *
    Stevie nursed her third cup of coffee—Mud, her father called it—and continued pushing the numbers this way and that on the profit and loss statement: Kip “TNT” Brown hadn’t done her any favors when he’d left her the bar in their divorce settlement. The equity she still owed him was a major part of her debt problem. She needed a helluva summer, or she and the Trail’s End would really come to the end of their trails. A look at the numbers told her it would take something more along the lines of a miracle for her to scrape together the third installment of Hal Morgan’s taxes.
    Perversely, the thought brought a small, private smile to her face. Toying with her cup, she let her gaze drift out the window to the pine-forested ridge behind her cabin. Halsey Morgan was alive. Or at least he had been when she’d finally gotten him into bed.
    The memory of his kiss and of his entreaties for her to join him in his antique four-poster brought a soft blush to her cheeks. The man sure had a sweet streak in him when he wanted something. In languages she’d never even heard before, let alone understood, he’d whispered his sensual promises in her ear.
    She lifted her hand and absently ran it through the loose tendrils of hair tickling her cheek, unconsciously recalling the softness of his mouth against her skin, the rough timbre of his voice—and her blush deepened. Maybe she had