Desert Angel Read Online Free

fully furnished library.
    Just another of the many fundamental differences between them, Jim thought as he sat down in the leather chair behind his desk. He seriously doubted that she had read a book since leaving the expensive boarding school she had attended.
    Leaning his elbows on the desk, Jim rubbed his forehead with the heel of his hands, hoping the pressure would eradicate the pain building behind his eyes. Every bone and muscle in his body ached in needless reminder of the physical labor involved in spring roundup. His tired body reminded him that he should have been asleep hours earlier. But concern for Melanie vied with regret and guilt to keep him wide-awake.
    Where was she? Could someone, perhaps a passing renegade, have taken her? Most of the Apache had been settled on the reservation, but occasionally a young buck broke free of the constraints and went on his own private warpath. Geronimo left the reservation at whim, sometimes taking several dozen people with him, and rumors of the trouble he caused grew like wildfire. But in all the years Jim had been in Arizona, he’d never seen the famous war chief.
    Thoughts of Melanie lost in the desert plagued him through the longest hour of his life. She was so meek, literally scared by her own shadow. She was terrified of snakes and spiders. What would a night spent alone in the desert do to her?
    He refused to let his thoughts wander to the very real fact that she probably wouldn’t survive the night. And never once did he acknowledge that if she died, so would their child.
     
     
    Even before the first traces of daylight, when inactivity became impossible, Jim saddled his horse. Waiting impatiently for the final minutes of night to pass, he rolled a cigarette, struck a match against his denim-covered thigh, and inhaled the aromatic smoke.
    “Want company?” Hank asked, his weathered features showing that he’d had little sleep.
    “No.” Jim dragged deeply on the cigarette. “I need someone to go to town for Doc. She’s going to need medical attention.”
    “It’ll be done,” the older man replied, keeping his thoughts to himself, that Melanie would be more in need of the undertaker than the doctor.
    Woods came out of the bunkhouse, a cup of steaming coffee in his hand. “Drink, boy. It’s gonna be mighty dry out there.”
    Jim gratefully accepted the cup, hoping to derive some energy from the liquid. He was wideawake, but his eyes felt as gritty as a dust storm, and his head ached with tension.
    Slowly the landscape escaped the shadows of darkness. It was time.
    Grinding the remainder of the cigarette into the sand and finishing the last of the coffee, Jim grabbed the reins of his horse and walked toward the house.
    Hank found the first tracks a hundred feet from the front door; shallow prints, obviously made by a feminine foot. The trail was so easy to follow that even an inexperienced tracker would have had no trouble.
    Jim walked his horse for a short while, mounting when the bloody track became painfully easily to see from the back of the animal. The steps went in no specific direction, twisting and turning, doubling back on itself.
    An abandoned slipper, its satin shredded beyond repair, fluttered in the light morning breeze.
    When the trail led to a large saguaro, he flinched at the bloody evidence of Melanie’s passing. Numerous pieces of material matching the dress he’d last seen her wearing clung to smaller cacti.
    Before the sun had warmed the morning air, less than a mile from the house, Jim found his wife. Dismounting, he grabbed the blanket from the back of the saddle, refusing to think whether it would provide her with much-needed warmth or become her shroud.
    She lay on her side with her arms wrapped tightly around herself. As he knelt, his jaw tightly clenched at the sight of her burned and lacerated flesh. Carefully rolling her onto her back, Jim felt for a pulse in her neck, surprised to find a feeble quivering beneath his