Finding Stefanie Read Online Free Page A

dark family room, but Haley hung back, staring up at Gideon. She swallowed, and he had the strongest urge to bend down, put his arms around her, and tell her that it would be okay.
    But despite their great luck—the bedding, the food, the car, the house, the absence of flashing red lights and sirens in their wake—and regardless of how much he begged and bargained and even sacrificed, Gideon wasn’t sure if fate would be that kind.

CHAPTER 2
    “I F WE DON’T find a home for them soon, they’ll have to be destroyed.”
    Stefanie barely heard Joe Bob—JB—Denton’s words, watching as twenty or so thin and sickly draft horses milled around the holding lot of the Billings fairgrounds. Last month she’d helmed the rescue of thirty-some horses discovered in a dilapidated corral behind an old trailer home on land tucked deep in Custer National Forest. A cross between draft and quarter horses, most of the animals had a chance of survival if they found the right owners.
    She’d taken three of them. One carried the flu that had killed Sunny.
    She should have quarantined them longer before bringing them home.
    Negligent. The word ramrodded through her brain even now as she watched JB’s weight shift from one worn boot to the other. He didn’t look at her, pulling his battered brown Stetson low over his eyes, hunkering into the wind with his dirty down jacket over his lean, work-toned frame in a posture that screamed hurt. Funny howthe recklessness of his bad-boy high school persona had drained from his eyes over the years, leaving only desperation.
    She wondered if she bore a similar look.
    However, desperation was a poor matchmaker, and Stefanie knew better than to be taken in by JB’s smile. Even if he did have a way of making a girl believe she might be lucky to be in his shadow, he also had a jealous streak as wide as Montana. She hadn’t given him so much as an encouraging smile lately, but even so, the cowboy seemed to think he had dibs on her—according to the scuttlebutt at Lolly’s Diner.
    She probably would have never noticed JB’s occasional social drive-bys, the once-in-a-while phone calls—albeit for the purpose of rescuing abused horses—or conversations down at Lolly’s Diner in town if Rafe hadn’t announced his engagement to Katherine Breckenridge after taking home the gold buckle at last year’s GetRowdy bull riding championship.
    Because although Stefanie hadn’t finished college, she could do the math. Her mother, at this age, had not only had three children but also had only fifteen more years ahead of her.
    “I heard about Sunny,” JB said. “I’m sorry, Stef.”
    She stared at the horses, letting the wind from the north skim off the sudden rush of tears over her loss. “Thank you.” She put just enough warmth in her voice to offer peace. Phillips was too small to keep avoiding someone in the canned foods aisle.
    Of course, JB, being the cowboy who never quit, took that as a c’mon-over-for-dinner invitation. “So, I was thinking—”
    “Forget it.” She’d vowed long ago that she’d steer clear of arrogant yet good-looking cowboys. Stefanie didn’t need—or want—a man whose ego needed daily feeding.
    She did a mental assessment of the lot of horses, of their herd behavior. “I put an announcement about the horses on the Internet. We’ll find homes for them.”
    JB followed her to her truck. “Tell your brother we’ll be out to help him with roundup.” He spat out chewing tobacco behind him. Nice. “And if he needs any extra hands . . .”
    The transient life of a cowhand. Stefanie climbed into her pickup and drove out of the fairgrounds, east toward Phillips.
    Nearly a month since Sunny had died, she had yet to find a new horse. Not that she was looking very hard. She’d never find a horse to fill that empty cavern. She’d done a magnificent job of setting up a barbed wire perimeter around her grief, and JB’s words had only dug that fencing into her heart. She