Rescue My Heart Read Online Free Page B

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hunting
as an excuse to be alone—his favorite state—and everyone she’d approached in her worry had assured her that he was fine. He’d always been fine. “I can’t explain it,” she said. “I just have a really bad feeling. And you’re the only one I know who can track. Please,” she added, hating that it was Adam she was having to beg. “Something’s wrong, I know it.”
    “Has something happened, did something change that would make this trip different from his others?”
    Fair question. “Two days before he left, Deanna broke up with him,” she said. “I don’t know the details, but he was upset.”
    “He’s got other women.”
    Holly squelched a grimace. Her dad was a known womanizer. But this thing with Deanna had hit him hard. Her dad was a cowboy at heart, a good old boy who’d never shown much in the way of emotion unless it was about his horse or dogs. He loved women, too, and his family, of course, but he’d never been one for needing them around, not like his animals. “Yes, he has other women,” she said, “but apparently Deanna was his favorite. We had dinner together and he wasn’t himself. He left the next morning, taking his usual gear and the two dogs he’s fostering for you. They got into his ATV, so I know he was planning onoff-roading to wherever he was going. And then he didn’t come back.” She caught Adam’s slight head shake and hastened to go on before he refused her like everyone else had. “I know, nothing unusual. But he’s rarely gone this long without at least checking in, and we’ve heard nothing. Not a single radio or cell call, nothing.” The words rushed out of her in a worried river, and embarrassed her. She’d managed to be cool and calm while talking to Red, her dad’s ranching manager, to Kel, to her dad’s friends…everyone.
    But now, with Adam, she was falling apart. She drew in a deep breath, willing herself to keep it together.
    Adam studied her for a long beat. “Donald goes out all the time,” he finally said. “He’s been doing so for years. Is there anything besides the Deanna thing that makes you think he’s in trouble?”
    “This morning there was a board meeting, and he missed it. Didn’t even call in to check on how it went.”
    Adam nodded. They both knew Donald loved business, all of it. He had great employees and wasn’t required for any day-to-day action, but he kept up on everything. He’d turned sixty-five this year and still insisted on attending all the important meetings. Just as he also insisted on riding the wildest of his horses, herding cattle, wining and dining too many women, four-wheeling into the wilderness to go hunting…
    Until last year, Holly had run the business side of things from New York. She’d grown up in New York under the watchful eyes of her mother, who’d passed away five years ago, one of the many women Donald had gone through in his heyday. Holly had remained on the East Coast, an arrangement that had worked well for everyone. She got her beloved freedom, and her dad got the same.
    But then he’d pressured her to move to Sunshine, reminding her that he wasn’t getting any younger, and with Grif still overseas, he wanted her—his only other family—nearby.
    It had been a blatant manipulation of Holly’s emotions, but she’d come, anyway. Maybe because her personal life had been in the toilet. Maybe because the memory of the one summer she’d spent here as a teen made her nostalgic for the last time she’d felt truly happy.
    “And there’s something else,” she told Adam. “Deanna called me looking for him as well. If she’s been calling him like she says, he’d have answered.”
    If he could…
    Adam’s dark eyes never wavered from hers and she felt a most annoying pull of the same sexual magnetism that had always been between them. His state of undress didn’t help, he was sex on a stick—not that she intended to go there. She didn’t. Not ever again. She’d been burned