The Cowboy SEAL Read Online Free PDF Page B

needed to bail me out of the county jail come morning.”
    “There you go. So see? She admitted she was partially to blame. Do you honestly think that just because of your cantankerous father she’d have expected you to carry this ache inside you for all these—”
    A crash of metal erupted from the back bedroom where Clint was supposed to be sleeping. Then came a gut-wrenching growl.
    “What was that?” Cooper asked, already on his feet, heading in that direction.
    Her stomach knotted. “I would imagine,
that
was your father....”
     

Chapter Four
    “Go see him,” Millie said. “You can’t avoid Clint forever.”
    Cooper knew she was right. Sooner or later he’d have to make peace with his father. Or at the very least, for Millie and her kids’ sake, forge some semblance of civility between them. But how did he start? It wasn’t as if the walls of grief standing between them could be broken with a mere apology.
    Another growl rose above the stove’s crackling fire and wind rattling the shutters.
    “Cooper...” His sister-in-law’s condemning stare made him feel all of twelve. He’d felt more comfortable staring down a shark. Her intense stare conveyed more than a day’s worth of words. It told him loud and clear that until he at least spoke with his father, she wouldn’t grant him a moment’s peace.
    “Aw, hell...” He brushed past her, hating the cramped space forcing them together. His arm didn’t stop tingling from where they’d touched till he reached the end of the hall.
    Cooper forced a deep breath then knocked on the closed door of his mom’s old sewing room—the only possible downstairs place where Millie and his sister could have stashed his ailing father.
    Rather than wait for an answer, his pulse taking the cadence of a rapid-fire machine gun, Cooper thrust open the door. He’d literally dreaded this moment for the past twelve years. “You still got a problem with me, old man?”
    Clint launched a new series of growls then pitiful, racking coughs.
    “You’ve got to calm down,” Millie said, already tidying the mess her patient had made by toppling his rolling metal tray. “I meant to tell you earlier that Cooper had come for a visit, but it must’ve slipped my mind.”
    The cantankerous old man thrashed as best he could then settled when Millie took a plastic water cup from the nightstand and held the straw to his dried and cracked lips.
    Cooper had readied himself for a fight with the man he used to know. The barrel-chested, ham-fisted, mean-as-a-cornered-rattler father who’d sent him packing. What he faced was a pathetic shadow of Cooper’s memories. Make no mistake, judging by his scowl and dark glare, Clint still wasn’t a teddy bear. But he had lost a good fifty pounds, and his complexion was as pale as the threadbare sheets and quilts covering his bed.
    Clint’s current condition left Cooper’s eyes stinging.
    He’d steeled himself for battle with a lion, not a lamb.
    “There you go,” Millie soothed. “It’s medicine time, and I’ll bet you thought I forgot you.” After kissing the old man’s forehead, she fished three tablets from three different prescription bottles, patiently helping Clint one at a time down them all with more water. When he signaled that he had drunk his fill, she covered his lips with ointment. “Feel better?”
    The old man had his dry-erase board slung around his neck. With his good hand he wrote
O-U-T
then underlined it twice before pointing in Cooper’s general direction.
    Instantaneously, Cooper’s anger was replaced by profound sadness. And a jolt of something he never in a million years would’ve expected—a fierce longing to make things right with this man he’d once so deeply loved. His mind’s eye no longer replayed their last night together, but flashes of Clint patiently teaching him to change his truck’s oil or beaming with pride when Cooper won his first rodeo. Then came a myriad of shared holidays and ordinary