Read Online Cowboy Heart (Historical Western Romance) (Longren Family series #3, Kitty and Lukes story) by Amelia Rose - Free Book Online Page A

around the ranch.  I'd been in California three weeks and had time to decide what to do, whether to return to Nevada or stay on the ranch and help Sarah.  The latter seemed an imposition; the former, a dread.  Mother had written that her dress shop was doing well and the mine closing down.  John Overton was seeking work with the railroad, or possibly at The Faro Queen with my uncles.  They were planning their wedding for December, she wrote, along with information about Maggie and Hutch and Little John, Matthew and Chloe and The Faro Queen, and Matthew and Chloe's letters about the railroad and the jobs they took so they could travel the western territories.  Her letters should have made me homesick, probably would have if I'd been inclined to be.  Instead, my mother's letters made me panic, feeling my life in Gold Hill and the boundaries Mr. Overton wanted to impose settling around me.
                  I was content in the warmth on Big Sky Ranch, and content enough in the barn, the sunlight and calves around me, to wait when Sarah went to the garden to fetch greens for the calves.  The continuing drought was causing weakness in some, blindness in others, and a number of stillbirths in the spring meant all of the cows needed more greens.
                  I waited, busying myself with equipment in the barn, hanging extra grooming equipment and tack from the horses' stalls that someone had stored here.  When a shadow fell over the entrance, I figured Sarah had returned.
                  "Need a hand?" I asked, without looking.  The calves were gentle and quick to play and I liked being around them, feeding them, although the herds of steers still scared me, especially when Sarah moved so confidently around them.
                  "Came to talk to you, actually," a male voice said, and I spun quickly, surprised, my skirt swirling around my legs.
                  Robert McLeod, tall and backlit by the sun that caught in his hair and highlighted his beard.  He held his dusty hat in his hands.  I spent rather more of each day daydreaming about him than made sense, unless it was to make certain Johnny no longer had room to occupy in my thoughts, but having him right there, I felt breathless, clumsy and tongue-tied.
                  "I was hoping to catch you alone," he said and leaned against the threshold, long and lanky. 
                  I didn't trust myself to speak, so stepped out of the barn into the sunlight, where he could see my features and that I was attentive.  Silly, really, to find myself so ill at ease with a man, simply because I found him attractive.  Once, when I was much younger, I freed a raccoon from a trap and kept the creature in my father's storage locker in the grocery for a week before he caught me.  I wasn't afraid of the sharp-toothed varmint, or of my father's equally likely sharp-tongued response.  Though actually, in the end, my father had discovered the raccoon before it finished healing and, after some quite voluble exclamations of surprise and not especial pleasure, he'd helped me finish nursing the creature and we'd set it free together along the creek outside town, where it quickly lost itself in the willows.
                  So things aren't always what one expects.
                  "Miss Kathryn, I was wondering if you'd like to take a ride out with me this evening.  I have business in Redding and could escort you to a meal at the hotel, if you'd like."
                  He didn't seem to notice my breathing stopping or the way my heart hammered and my mouth went dry.  He looked more handsome than ever and I felt more empty-headed than usual, afraid of squeaking out acceptance before he'd even finished his question.
                  "It's probably not what you're used to—we have a playhouse of sorts, but nothing like the opera house your sister's spoken