Ambush at Heartbreak Ridge by Colleen Thompson

Author:Colleen Thompson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2022-04-26T13:37:53+00:00

* * *

As Hayden led Moonlight to a hitching post just outside the tack room, Kate noticed how troubled he looked. With the sun burning through the cloud layer, she wondered if the afternoon’s brightness would be more than he could manage.

“Are you doing okay, Hayde? If your head’s bothering you too much, I can drive you home, and we can do this later.”

“It’s not that,” he said, patting the mare’s neck before tying her to the post and adjusting his hat to better shade his face. “I was just thinking. There’s nothing I’ll ever be able to say or do to change your mother’s mind about me, is there?”

“I don’t know what to tell you.” Reaching up to brush the gray back, Kate said, “Mom’s generous and loving with everybody else, but there’s this association in her mind, between you and everything that happened that day.”

“It was a terrible time for all of us,” he said, pain shading his voice. Pain she would have thought he’d put behind him years before. “Especially you, I’m sure. I only wish I’d done things differently back then. Fought harder to—”

“To be honest, I don’t really remember any of it.” She spoke quickly, her words clipped as she focused on brushing the dust from the mare’s hide. “They had me on so many painkillers—The doctors told me later it can play havoc with a person’s memory.”

“So you don’t recall the accident itself?”

“The last thing I remember is you kissing me for luck just before I mounted Cloverleaf for my run,” she said, heart twisting at the memory of the sweetness of that final kiss—and last time she had climbed aboard her beloved palomino, whose own injuries that day had been beyond Kate’s father’s—or any vet’s—capacity to heal. “I don’t remember anything about that ride. I’ve heard, of course, what happened—how that new greenhorn had misunderstood the instructions he’d been given about keeping that gate open.”

“I wanted to kill the idiot,” Hayden admitted, his words roughened by long-steeped anger. “If my brothers hadn’t held me back...”

“It wouldn’t have changed anything, and the guy was practically a kid himself. He was devastated over his mistake, I understand, nearly suicidal. I’ve long since forgiven him. I had to.”

“But never me,” Hayden said bitterly. “No more than your mother has. Isn’t that right?”

At the challenge, her heart skipped a beat, and Moonlight shifted, stamping a rear hoof. Stepping back to avoid a bruised toe, Kate said, “I do remember you tried to talk me out of riding that day.”

“Not hard enough. I damned well should have forced the issue. If I had, you’d have never—never lost—”

He stopped himself there, apparently unable to finish. She realized she’d been wrong all these years, believing that day had cost him nothing. But he had walked away from the wreckage of her life. There was no forgetting that part.

Still, she took a deep breath, shaking her head. “Let’s not talk about it anymore, okay? The girls will be out soon.”

Hayden pulled a hoof pick from the tack box.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.