Almost A Bride (Montana Born Brides) Read Online Free

maintaining the trees and running a small law practice in Marietta, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t demanding work. Depending on the season, the trees needed pruning, spraying, fertilizing. And then there was harvest time...
    The four hundred apple trees that made up Dalton Orchards were in the low-maintenance phase of the growing cycle at the moment, however ; the fruit was barely budding on the trees. There was no reason for his father to be risking his health by climbing up and down ladders, even if he was worried about the outbreak of apple scab he’d been trying to eradicate for a few months now.
    “ I’ll talk to him,” Reid said.
    “ Fat lot of good that will do. You’re both as bad as each other.”
    Reid eyed his mother. He wasn ’t sure what he’d done to earn himself a share of her bad mood, but he wisely chose to retreat rather than investigate further. She’d be over her crankiness by dinner time, no doubt.
    He tracked his dad down to the barn, where he found him tinkering with the apple press, the contents of his tool box spilling across the dirt floor. At sixty-three, Ross Dalton still had a full head of salt and pepper hair and a face that was worn from too many hours in the sun. He ’d lost weight since the accident, and his worn jeans hung from his hips, making him look as though he was wearing borrowed clothing.
    “ Don’t want to hear it,” he said as Reid approached.
    “ How do you know you don’t want to hear it when you don’t know what I’m going to say?”
    “ Did she tell you about the ladder?”
    “ Yep.”
    “ Then I don’t want to hear it.”
    “ You could have waited for me to get home,” Reid said mildly.
    “ I’m fine. You saw my last X-rays. Everything’s solid.”
    “ Your reflexes are shot. You know that.” Not to mention his father was still trying to rebuild his strength after months of reduced activities. “If you slipped or the ladder fell, there’s no way you’re fast enough to do anything about it. But I’m not going to lecture you.”
    “ What do you call this, then?” his father asked sourly.
    “ A conversation.”
    His father grunted in response, but his mouth curled up at the corners. They ’d always got along well, which was a good thing, since Reid was an only child.
    “ How’d your game go?” his father asked.
    “ All right.”
    His father shot him a searching glance, obviously picking up on the heaviness in Reid ’s tone.
    “ Something happened on the way home,” Reid said. He needed to decompress after breaking the news to Tara, and he knew his words wouldn’t go any further. “The guys and I spotted Tara’s fiancé leaving the motel up on the freeway.”
    “ I take it he wasn’t with Tara?” his father asked.
    Reid shook his head.
    There was a short silence as his father processed the news. “You told her yet?”
    “ Yeah.”
    “ How’d she take it?”
    Reid remembered the way she ’d fumbled for the seat when he’d broken the news about Paige. She hadn’t cried, though. Hadn’t shed a single tear.
    “ She’s pretty tough,” he said.
    “ Still. She must be upset.”
    Reid glanced out the door of the barn, remembering the tense set of her shoulders as she left the salon. “Yeah.”
    “ You tell her if she needs any legal advice, it’s on the house, okay?”
    His father had been forced to wind up his practice after the accident, but he still took on odd jobs for neighbors and friends.
    “Thanks, I will.”
    Reid knew that Tara and Simon had been together for three years, but he had no idea how complicated their financial arrangements were. He frowned as he thought about all the crap she was going to have to wade through. Moving Simon out of the house, canceling wedding plans, dealing with the inevitable gossip around town and at the station ... all of that on top of the hours she already put in helping out her mother.
    If he could make it all go away for her, he would. But he couldn ’t.
    “ I need a