Texas Redeemed Read Online Free PDF Page B

through her mind. At eighteen the lies had been hell to
carry and she’d stood to lose Peyton’s friendship. Now her entire world was
balanced on everything she had to hide. The game had changed. And losing—her
business, her home, her daughter—was not an
option. Protect yourself so you can
protect Lucy—and Anna’s memory.
    With fresh resolve, Valerie threw open the driver’s door
and found Lucy hunched in the passenger seat scrolling through her iPod with one
ear bud in place.
    “Mom.” Lucy half turned toward her, but didn’t stop
fiddling with the device. “Promise I won’t have to see him.”
    “You won’t.” Not tonight, at least, but Valerie figured
this could be hashed out once they returned to the ranch.
    “Good.” She flashed her teeth in a pseudo-smile that was
contradicted by her white-knuckled grip on the player.
    Knowing where Lucy’s loyalties lay was a hollow
reassurance. “Peyton never knew I was pregnant. You need to remember that,
Lucy. He didn’t run out on you and your sister. It just wasn’t like that.”
    “But he ran out on you! ”
Lucy cried, tugging out the ear bud and tossing the player into her hobo. “He
was supposed to be your best friend, right? What kind of guy hooks up with a
girl and then just leaves? Forever?”
    “He’s here now.” Except he wasn’t. Not like he’d been
before—as her friend, her rock … a man who said he needed her as desperately as
she needed him. Even as she said the words Valerie wasn’t foolish enough to
think Peyton had returned to Night Sky for her. In fact, he’d seemed sucker-punched
to see her. “Thirteen years is a long time, but it’s not forever.”
    “Whatevs. It was forever for Anna.” Lucy twisted around
and began doodling with her finger on the foggy car window. “I want to go
home.”
    Even with the radio up and 1970s chart-toppers
reverberating throughout the car, the drive to the ranch seemed uncomfortably
quiet. Having brought her daughter up on a healthy diet of music from
Tchaikovsky to Sinatra to Usher, Valerie tried to coax her into a
guess-the-song-title game. Tried, and failed. The girl was more interested in
watching the cobblestone Square and main road that were the heartbeat of town,
the grungy warehouse district and the smattering of tree-lined residential
streets fading into the wide-openness of hilly terrain and luscious green
forests near their cattle ranch on the outskirts.
    This three-thousand-acre chunk of Hill Country was what
Valerie had fallen in love with as an orphan living under her uncle’s watchful
eye and iron fist. The grasslands, the clusters of pecan and oak trees, the
shadows of whitetail deer and quail moving through the trees and in the sky fit
together to create the brightest spot of her life growing up.
    And Uncle Rhys had known it—known that she’d endure
anything to stay on this land even when he’d talked about selling it or letting
it fold in on itself. To him, a man who’d driven away his own wife and children
before she’d been sent to live with him, Battle Creek Ranch had been a means to
control someone who had nowhere else to go. To Valerie, this place and all it
could be had been her salvation.
    Automatically, her stomach clenched at the possibility of
her livelihood slipping through her fingers because of a past mistake … because
she’d done the wrong thing for the right reasons.
    No question about it. She needed to handle Peyton with
caution, which meant staying midway between befriending him and keeping some
distance between them. And it all started with getting him on her territory,
her safety zone.
    “Do you think he is
at Gramps’s place now? Think Gramps will freak?” Lucy asked as they neared
their completely remodeled brick-and-stone house.
    “Probably, to the first question. Probably not, to the
second.” Nathaniel Turner, a self-made fashion mogul who’d gotten so rich that
he could maintain his California company from the comfort of his Texas