The Hopechest Bride Read Online Free PDF Page A

her hands to her sides once more. “I should have tried to contact you, shouldn’t I? I mean, you have a right to know what happened that night. Toby…Toby saved my life.”
    â€œYeah, so I’m told. And to reward him for that service, you left him bleeding on the floor and took off. Left him alone to die. You have a strange way of saying thank you, Miss Colton. Well, that’s enough for now, isn’t it? I’ll be seeing you again. Again and again. You can sort of consider me your conscience, Miss Colton. Your guilty conscience.”
    â€œNo!” Emily yelled at his back, for Josh Atkins had turned on his heels and was already climbing into the truck with Rollins Ranch painted on the door of the cab. “No, it wasn’t like that! I didn’t— Oh, God,” she ended, all but collapsing against the fence rails as the truck drove out of the stable yard, toward the main gate. She hugged herself as she watched the truck drive away, tears running down her face. “It wasn’t like that…it wasn’t like that.”
    Â 
    Josh pulled to the side of the road about a mile from the Colton ranch and cut the engine, pounded his gloved fists against the steering wheel.
    â€œDamn,” he said once, then twice, then over and over for as long as his breath held out. “Damn, damn, damn! ”
    Well, wasn’t he the hero? He ought to get out of the truck, see if he could round up a couple of fuzzybunnies, then stomp on them. Pull the wings off a few butterflies, drive to town and grab a lollipop out of the mouth of some defenseless baby.
    Had he ever seen such hurt in anyone’s eyes? Even before he’d said a word, opened his dumb mouth, he’d seen the despair in the way she’d stood at the fence, the defeat in her posture, the weight of the world dragging at her slim shoulders. He’d seen injured animals, plenty of them, and could almost smell them, smell the fear. Emily Colton had been drenched in fear and hopelessness, even before he’d stepped up behind her and made his presence known.
    So then he’d kicked her. Hey, she was already down—so why not? She deserved it, didn’t she?
    â€œOh, God,” Josh breathed, shaking his head. “I must be losing whatever’s left of my mind.”
    He lay his head back against the headrest, closed his eyes and saw Emily Colton’s face. She was just as Toby had described her a million times in his letters. Small, but not too small, with good shoulders for a woman, and straight long legs that looked damn good in jeans.
    She’d had on a denim jacket lined with sheepskin, the hem of the jacket just nipping at the top of her small waist, giving her an air of fragility belied by her clothes.
    But it was her face that gave away the whole game, even as he’d refused to see what was there. Those sad blue eyes, that flawless yet too-pale skin, the way she sort of hunched her shoulders protectively, as if prepared for life to give her a punishing whack—another whack, because she’d already had a few, hadn’t she?
    And that hair. God, how Toby had all but waxed poetic about that thick mane of chestnut hair. Toby had once had a chestnut mare just about that same color. He wondered if Toby had made the connection, and doubted it. Emily Colton was one hell of a cut above a rangy old mare that was all Josh could afford to buy his baby brother for his fifteenth birthday.
    So, okay. So she was pretty. Beautiful. As beautiful as Toby had said in his letters. And she was hurting. Was she hurting about Toby? Josh wondered….
    â€œIt doesn’t matter, damn it! She killed him,” he said, sitting up once more, reaching for the key still in the ignition. “She killed him as much as if she put the bullet in his chest herself. And I’m not going to let little Miss Blue Eyes forget that. Not for a very, very long time.”

Three
    M eggie James had all the