Without a Past Read Online Free Page A

Maybe you were a teacher,” she suggested.
    Ida Jane wasn’t the first person to comment on his less-than-impressive performance as a cowboy. At his doctor’s suggestion, Harley had pored over lists of other professions to see if anything jumped out at him. So far, nothing had.
    â€œI don’t think I have the patience to work with kids,” Harley told her. “But I do like to write. The doctor I saw at the Gold Creek Clinic when Lars first brought me into town suggested I keep a journal. She said sometimes the mind heals so slowly we can overlook signs because we become comfortable with the way our lives are —not what they could be.”
    â€œMy, my,” Ida Jane said. “A local doctor told you that? Most of the ones I’ve known couldn’t prescribe their way out of a paper bag without directions.”
    Harley chuckled. Dr. Franklin had been gentle and kind, but in the end there wasn’t much she could do. She was a general practitioner who said her lone brush with amnesia had come on a psych rotation in medical school sometwenty years earlier. Although curious and concerned, the best she could say was that he was in overall good health, and there was a chance his memory would return.
    â€œDr. Franklin wanted to run some tests and consult a specialist, but I don’t have the cash,” Harley admitted.
    â€œDoesn’t Sam give you health insurance?”
    He nodded. “It works if you break a leg. But the lady at the clinic said most plans would consider this a preexisting condition and would probably deny coverage.”
    Ida Jane was silent for a few miles then said, “Like I said, you don’t talk like any cowboy I’ve ever known.”
    Harley remembered that her grandniece had expressed the same opinion the day they met.
    â€œHe’s no cowboy,” Andi had said moments after being introduced to him. She’d looked at Jenny and Sam as if waiting for the punch line to a joke.
    When Sam confirmed that Harley was indeed his newest employee, Andi had remained unconvinced. “No offense, Harley, but you walk like an accountant, talk like a politician and smell like a pothead,” she’d told him.
    Harley had been offended. At first. But then he realized her observation was amazingly accurate. He hadn’t taken the job at the Rocking M out of any sense of familiarity. He didn’t know a halter from a heifer, but he’d felt even less affinity with mining. Closed spaces made him uncomfortable, and he’d been almost sick to his stomach the first time Lars tried to get him to climb down a twenty-foot ladder.
    When the old miner suggested ranch work as a possible source of employment, Harley had jumped at the chance.
    His peculiar body odor could be attributed to his recuperation period in a tiny cabin shared with the pot-smoking loner named Lars Gunderson. Brusque. Isolationist. A renegade from society, Lars smoked ten to twelve joints a day and still managed to work his gold mine by hand.
    â€œWell, you may be right,” Harley had told Andi, impressed by her shoot-from-the-hip manner. She didn’t cut him any slack, but she didn’t treat him like an invalid, either. “My past is a closed door, the future a blank slate and I’ve chosen to be a cowboy. Do you have a problem with that?”
    Harley couldn’t say how much of his macho swagger came from leftover personality traits and how much came from listening to Lars’s nonstop antiestablishment ranting, but his lack of memory made one thing clear—the only person Harley could depend on was himself.
    She’d met his challenge with a grin that seemed to call his bluff. The tilt of her lips had sent a tangible jolt of awareness right through the center of him. Harley would have sworn nothing like that had ever happened to him before, but he had no way of knowing for certain.
    â€œThere’s home,” Ida Jane said, cutting into his