Unspoken Read Online Free PDF Page B

car.
    “Great,” Shelby muttered under her breath, her hands clenched over the wheel.
    So this was where Nevada had ended up. A scrap of a ranch with a cabin that defied the definition of rustic and a few hundred fenced, dry acres. A smattering of longhorns ambled through the fields and a few horses sporting dusty hides tried to graze while their tails switched at the ever-present flies.
    Not exactly heaven on earth.
    She ground the Cadillac to a stop by a small pump house and rammed the car into park. While the dust from her car was still settling and before her confidence could flag, she dragged her briefcase with her and climbed out of the car.
    Nevada was waiting for her.
    So was the dog. He started barking his fool head off.
    Nevada leveled his shaded eyes in the animal’s direction. “Crockett, hush ! It’s all right.” The mutt of a dog stood, legs apart, the hairs at the scruff of his neck bristling, his teeth flashing as he growled low in the back of his throat. “Enoughl” The snarling abated, but dark, suspicious eyes didn’t leave Shelby. Every muscle beneath his rough black-and-white coat was still stiff and taut, ready should he be given the command to spring. “I mean it,” Nevada warned, then reached down and scratched the dog behind his ears. “Come on in,” he said, opening a screen door. The mesh had been patched and the paint was beginning to peel.
    Shelby walked into a house that wasn’t any cooler than outside. The furniture was worn and tossed haphazardly around a rag rug that covered a linoleum floor. Nothing matched. Everything was secondhand. If Nevada Smith had a dime to his name, it wasn’t invested in creature comforts. A few magazines were strewn across a coffee table that had seen better days but didn’t have enough class to be called retro.
    He walked her past a postage stamp of a kitchen and through a back door. The porch was shaded, enclosed with screens and gratefully cooler by at least ten degrees. A faded Burma-Shave sign that had to be over seventy years old was tacked to the siding on one side of the door, and next to it a thermometer, starting to rust, registered a sweltering ninety-three degrees.
    . “Sit,” he suggested, and she slid into a plastic chair near a small table. “Iced tea?”
    “You got?” She was surprised. She really didn’t want any bit of hospitality from him, but her throat was parched and she was as nervous as a bumblebee landing on a Venus flytrap.
    “I can make it. Instant.”
    “Fine.”
    He disappeared inside and Shelby had a chance to scan the backyard, where scattered patches of dry grass surrounded a horseshoe pit and a stone barbecue that was beginning to crumble. A clothesline stretched from a comer of the house to a pole in the yard. Beyond the fence a couple of horses, coats gleaming in the sun, were drinking from a cement watering trough. The screen door creaked, the old dog thumped his tail and Nevada emerged from the kitchen. He carried two mismatched glasses filled with ice and a cloudy amber liquid that she doubted most people would consider any relation to tea.
    He handed her a glass. “Now, you were telling me about your baby.” Expression unforgiving, he settled into a chair and rested the worn heel of his boot on the top of a barrel near the door. “Our daughter.”
    Shelby’s shoulders stiffened a fraction. She wasn’t going to be intimidated and plowed on. “That’s right, Nevada. As I said, I thought she was dead.”
    “Weren’t you there—didn’t you see her delivered?”
    “I ... I was medicated.”
    “Hell.” He tossed her a look that said volumes, then rotated his wrist quickly, indicating that she should continue.
    Shelby cleared her throat. “I have copies of a birth certificate and a death certificate.”
    “Who gave ’em to you?”
    “I got both signed by Doc Pritchart at the hospital.”
    “The guy’s a crook.”
    “The guy’s missing,” she replied, then took a sip from her tea.