Read Online Fearless by Diana Palmer - Free Book Online

turned toward Glory.
    “The mosquitoes will eat you alive,” he cautioned.
    She’d already killed two of the pesky things. “If they’re willing to sacrifice their lives to suck my blood, let them.”
    He chuckled. He walked toward her and paused at the porch rail, looking out over the flat landscape in the distance. “It’s been a long time since I had time to worry about mosquitoes,” he mused. “Do you mind?” he indicated the empty place beside her.
    She shook her head and he sat down, jostling the swing for a few seconds before he kicked it back into a smooth rhythm.
    “Have you always worked on the land?” she asked him conversationally.
    “In a sense,” he replied. He blew out a puff of smoke. “My father had a ranch, when I was a boy. I grew up with cowboys.”
    She smiled. “So did I. My father took me to the rodeos and introduced me to the stars.” She grimaced. “My mother hated such people. She gave my father a bad time when he invited them to come and have coffee. But he did all the cooking, so she couldn’t complain that he was making work for her.”
    He glanced at her. “What did your mother do?”
    “Nothing,” she said coldly. “She wanted to be a rich man’s wife. She thought my father was going to stay in rodeo and bring home all that nice prize money, but he hurt his back and quit. She was furious when he bought a little farm with his savings.”
    She didn’t mention that it was this house where they lived, or that the land which now produced vegetables and fruits had produced only vegetables for her father.
    “Were her people well-to-do?”
    “I have no idea who her people were,” she admitted. “I used to wonder. But it doesn’t make any difference now.”
    He frowned. “Family is the most important thing in the world. Especially children.”
    “You don’t have any,” she said without thinking.
    His face set into hard lines and he didn’t look at her. “That doesn’t mean I didn’t want them,” he said harshly.
    “I’m sorry,” she stammered. “I don’t know why I said that.”
    He smoked his cigar in a tense silence. “I was on the verge of marrying,” he said after a minute. “She had a little girl. They were my life. I lost them to another man. He was the child’s biological father.”
    She grimaced. His attitude began to make sense. “I’ll bet the little girl misses you,” she said.
    “I miss her, as well.”
    “Sometimes,” she began cautiously, “I think there’s a pattern to life. People come into your life when you need them to, my father used to say. He was sure that life was hard-wired, that everything happened as it was planned to happen. He said—” she hesitated, remembering her father’s soft voice, at his trial “—that we have to accept things that we can’t change, and that the harder we fight fate, the more painful it becomes.”
    He turned toward her, leaning back against the swing chain with his long legs crossed. “Is he still alive—your father?”
    “No.”
    “Any sisters, brothers?”
    “No,” she replied sadly. “Just me.”
    “What about your mother?”
    Her teeth clenched. “She’s gone, too.”
    “You didn’t mourn her, I think.”
    “You’re right. All I ever had from her was hatred. She blamed me for trapping her into a life of poverty on a little farm with a man who could hardly spell his own name.”
    “She considered that she married down, I gather.”
    “Yes. She never let my father forget how he’d ruined her life.”
    “Which of them died first?”
    “He did,” she said, not wanting to remember it. “She remarried very soon after the funeral. Her second husband had money. She finally had everything she wanted.”
    “You would have benefited, too, surely.”
    She drew in a slow breath and shifted her weight. “The judge considered that she was dangerous to me, so, with the best of intentions, she put me into foster care. I went to a family that had five other foster kids.”
    “I know