The Rancher's Dance Read Online Free PDF Page B

scrubbed his hand down his face, his gaze on the ballerina drawing.
    He didn’t want to be reminded about Lucy Buchanan.
    Not by his daughter’s drawings and certainly not by his own thoughts.
    She’d been in pain.
    That fact had been as visible as the swelling and faded scars had been on her leg.
    That incredibly…lithe…shapely…leg that seemed much too long for someone so small.
    He pinched his eyes closed, forcing the image out of his head before shoving back from the table.
    Too bad he couldn’t forget about that pain she’d been suffering.
    It nagged at him through a cold shower, when he pulled on a clean pair of cargo shorts and a T-shirt afterward, and particularly when he sat on the side of his bed and picked up the framed photograph that sat on the floating shelf beside it.
    Harmony’s face stared back at him.
    His wife had always found the best in people, even when there wasn’t a lot of “best” to be found. He was a perfect example of that. She also couldn’t have turned a blind eye to someone’s pain even if she’d wanted to.
    Harmony hadn’t been just the name that had graced his wife. It had been who she was.
    He’d learned that when he’d met her when he was sixteen years old.
    He’d been the local drunk’s son who preferred getting in fights over trying to make friends. Who failed classes for the sheer pleasure of flouting his teachers’ efforts.
    She’d been the new girl in school who didn’t look at him with pity in her eyes. And when she’d sat down beside him at lunch one afternoon, ignoring the silent warning thatscreamed from his pores and smiled that smile of hers, he’d been a goner. Two years later, barely out of high school, she’d been pregnant with Nick and they’d eloped.
    He rubbed his thumb over the photograph, as if he could still feel the thick ends of her vibrant hair.
    But the only thing his thumb felt was cool, smooth glass.
    Echoes of the angry kid he’d been still lingered in the man he’d become. He’d lost his wife and the harmony she’d created in his life. And no matter how badly he wanted to, now he couldn’t even recall exactly how it had felt to run his fingers through her hair.
    He pushed the frame back onto the shelf and stomped downstairs. Shelby and his dad were already sitting down to their dinner plates, which were situated around the breakfast bar in the kitchen rather than the dining room’s long wood-planked table that Beck had commissioned from a wood artist he knew back in Denver.
    When he’d packed up his family, he hadn’t packed up the house he’d shared with Harmony.
    Every stick of furniture that she’d chosen to fill the home he’d built for her had been left behind. Sold off or given away by the company that Beck had hired the day he’d realized that staying in that house without his wife was going to be the end of him.
    He ate the spaghetti, which was better than usual, and watched Shelby suck in noodles through her pursed lips and giggle at her grandpa when he did the same.
    Just another night in the Ventura household.
    There was no reason—other than the looming anniversary of his wife’s death—that Beck should feel like he was ready to climb out of his skin.
    But he did.
    And before either his daughter or father had finishedeating, he was pushing back from the breakfast bar. “And you think there’s plenty of leftovers, even considering Nick’s appetite when he gets here?” He headed toward the stove to look into the pot. Typically enough, it still held a whopping amount. Stan might have developed a penchant for cooking, but he still figured he might as well be expedient about it and get at least a few meals out of each effort.
    â€œYeah.” Stan supped another string of spaghetti into his mouth, every bit as messily as his granddaughter was doing.
    Beck left them to their