The Cowboy Read Online Free PDF Page A

brought to the union—in a divorce.
    That didn’t explain why his mother stayed with his father. Trace had asked her, after his parents’ most recent shouting match, why she didn’t divorce Blackjack. Her answer had surprised him.
    “
I love him. I always have.
”
    He understood all too well the pain of loving someone who didn’t love you back. Which was why he had no intention of marrying Callie Creed Monroe.
    “You’d do well to hog-tie that little filly before some other cowboy figures out what a prize she is and steals her out from under your nose,” his father said. “I’d give my left nut to see Jesse Creed’s face the day my son married his daughter.”
    “I’m not—”
    “Imagine the bitter bile of knowing a Blackthorne will own Three Oaks when he’s gone,” Blackjack continued. “That parcel of Creed land smack-dab in the middle of my ranch has been like a stone in my boot for as long as I can remember. I’ll be damned glad to get rid of the irritation once and for all.”
    During the course of his father’s speech, Trace was remembering the first time Blackjack had suggested he court and marry Callie Creed. He’d been a senior in high school, Callie a freshman. At the time, Blackjack hadbeen enraged at having been thwarted yet again in his attempt to buy Three Oaks from Jesse Creed. During an angry tirade, he’d suggested that if Trace got Callie pregnant, her father would have to let them marry. Then, when Jesse died, Trace and Callie would inherit Three Oaks.
    The result of his father’s suggestion had been to make Trace keep his distance from Callie Creed. He wasn’t about to be forced into marrying some girl just so his father could spite her father. Besides, at eighteen, he was determined to run his own life, free of his father’s meddling.
    But because of that tirade, he’d taken his first good look at Callie Creed. Although they’d gone to school together their whole lives, he’d never paid much attention to her, because she was four years younger. But once he’d let himself look, he couldn’t keep his eyes off her. Perhaps because he’d forbidden himself any contact with her, she became even more attractive to him.
    He spent his entire senior year resisting the urge to ask her out on a date. He refused to give his father the satisfaction of thinking he’d been manipulated into it. He went away to college without ever speaking to Callie Creed, without running his fingers through her tawny hair, without looking deep into her sky-blue eyes or kissing her bowed, pouty lips.
    Four years later, she’d asked him for directions to the LBJ Library, looking lost and scared and more lovely than any female had a right to look. He’d fallen hard and fast. And she’d left him high and dry.
    “I’m not marrying Callie Creed Monroe,” he said in a hard voice. “I’m starting a quarter horse breeding program.”
    “The hell you are!” his father retorted.
    His mother looked up at Trace, then over her shoulder at his father, as though she’d just noticed the antagonism between them. “Please don’t argue,” she said.
    His father patted his mother on the shoulder. “We’re just having a friendly discussion, Eve.”
    “I could hear you all the way in the kitchen.”
    All three of them turned to find his sister standing in the open doorway to the library.
    “Get out and close the door behind you,” Blackjack said.
    Summer strolled in, leaving the door opened wide. Her naturally curly blond hair was falling out of a ponytail, and her tailored Western shirt showed signs of having been nuzzled by a grass-eating horse. She wore skin-tight jeans that made Trace wonder how she could get her leg up over the saddle and scuffed boots that had to be almost as old as she was.
    “You can’t keep ordering Trace around, Daddy, without giving him a chance to do anything on his own,” Summer said.
    “Thanks, Summer. But I can fight my own battles,” Trace said, both exasperated and