The Bride Wore Denim Read Online Free PDF Page A

manpower in North Dakota waned, and it was hard for Sam and Leif to keep help on the ranch for the harsh winters. He didn’t know how much longer the work in North Dakota would last, since oil prices were falling. But it didn’t matter. He was close—within a year or two of having enough money to buy his property back from Paradise.
    And once he did, he wanted to make sure it wouldn’t leave his family again. He wanted a wife someday, one who’d love the land as much as he did. And he wanted kids. A passel of them, like Sam had raised.
    Girls. Boys. He didn’t care. The difference would be, they wouldn’t want to leave.
    So maybe the last parts of his dream were still in the wishing phase. It didn’t make them any less real.
    He still had no right to push anything with Harper—it wasn’t fair to either of them. No matter that the kiss had been more than fun. It had scared him with its honest intensity. And Harper had shied from it like a day-old foal. He didn’t blame her. At the very least, he could admit that a day like today was not the best time to mess with the shaky status quo. Everyone’s heart was broken—his included. He hadn’t lied. He’d believed Sam Crockett would live forever. He’d liked the man despite his iron will and unbending vision.
    And his death was going to throw a wrench into Cole’s goals. Sam alone had known the details of a potential sale.
    He pulled on his favorite old V-neck sweater, ignoring the fraying cuffs and the slightly stretched-out hem. He didn’t need to be formal anymore. He pulled on clean socks and his worn boots, then longingly eyed his everyday Stetson sitting on the small desk by the window. He wished he could wear it—it always made him feel complete. On the job in the Midwest, they’d called him Cowboy, and it had made him unique. Here, it was who he was.
    He didn’t want to go to the meeting Sadie had called. But she’d specifically asked for him and for Leif to attend. He couldn’t imagine what it was about, but he closed the bedroom door behind him and made his way down the stairs.
    H ARPER HESITATED AT the door to her father’s office, trying for the hundredth time to imagine what this meeting was about. She’d changed into jeans, a comfortable tank top, and a thigh-length, loose-knit cardigan that was her favorite “curl-up and get warm” sweater. Her well-loved Uggs would assure that Mia continued picking on her clothing, but she was beyond caring. Too many emotions took precedence over whether her sister thought she dressed like a crazy artist. Like what would Mia think if she knew Harper had just kissed her ex-lover? Did that matter?
    With a deep breath, she entered the room and was swept away from every emotion but the conflicting ones over her father. She might have had her issues with him, but this room embodied everything Samuel Crockett had been—good and bad.
    The office walls were navy blue, the masculine darkness offset by a lighter patterned area rug on the pine floor in blues and creams. The chairs and sofa were burgundy leather, the desk a massive cherry piece handed down from Sam’s father, Sebastian. Her father’s signature pipe tobacco, dark and spicy, had permeated the furniture and fabrics and hung in the air—as if his spirt stood watching in the background. An oil painting of him with his favorite horse, Smokey Jasper, hung in a row with portraits of Harper’s other Crockett relatives: Benjamin, her uncle, who’d died in Vietnam; her grandfather Sebastian, who’d been Sadie’s husband; and her great-grandfather Eli, who’d homesteaded the ranch in 1916. All the men looked alike—tall, broad-shouldered, sandy-haired, intense-eyed.
    Harper turned from the memories and faced the living people in the room. Cole wasn’t there yet, but her mother, tall and regally beautiful in a soft gray dress, smiled with stoic, buried grief. Beside her, leaning heavily on the black-and-red flowered cane, stood stooped-but-indomitable