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work.
    Dean seemed to be taking a long time just to get showered and changed. He had driven the truck back to the house instead of walking because he said he didn’t want to take too long, yet he was taking too long. She was trying to be good and not let her need to do something make her go start pitching some hay too, but the longer she sat there the more antsy she became.
    Fortunately, before she lost control of her restraint she saw his truck pulling up. “Got the horse saddled, Dave?”
    “Yeah, it was taking you so long that I saddled it for you,” he laughed. “You’re going to miss lunch.”
    Dean didn’t say anything, he just nodded. Maybe he wasn’t planning on being out there that long.
    Lunch was at noon and it was almost eleven thirty now. “Come on, Zoe.” He helped her up onto the horse before mounting behind her. “See you guys later.”
    “Don’t rush on our account,” Guy chuckled.
    “So where are we going?”
    “My property is twenty-five thousand acres, so we’re just going to explore some of it.”
    “Twenty-five thousand acres?” She gasped. “My goodness…that’s a lot of acres.”
    He laughed behind her as the horse galloped at a leisurely pace. “I bought fifteen thousand of it. At the time it joined with my father’s property. When this went up for sale it was dirt cheap. I was getting married and I decided I wanted it, so I took my savings and bought it. I was young and stupid, thinking Daisy would want to live out here.”
    “She didn’t like it?”
    “Oh she loved it—after I built a house for her to live in.” He laughed hard. “I brought her out here and told her this was going to be our home and all I had up was a tent.”
    Zoe started laughing. “Yeah, I could see where that would be a problem.”
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    A Rancher’s Love ~ Capri Montgomery
    “She told me I was out of my mind crazy and she went to stay with my parents until we had our little shack built near the property line. That’s where Jasper lives now. It’s not a shack, it’s just small. Big enough for a family of four because we always thought we would have kids.”
    “That’s not small. A family of four requires space. Did you ever have the kids?”
    “No,” the pain in his heart was evident in his voice. “I wanted them, God knows I did, but Daisy had some problems with tumors growing on her ovaries. The doctors gave her a hysterectomy to try to prevent any cancers from forming. They found out when they biopsied the tumors that most were benign…she had over sixty tumors growing inside of her, and only one of them turned out to be cancerous. The doctors said it had already spread. They started treatments, but she…she died from the complications of the treatment. I always say the cancer and the method for the cure killed her. If she hadn’t had the cancer, she wouldn’t have had the treatments and she wouldn’t have died.”
    “I’m so sorry, Dean. I can’t even imagine the pain you must have felt.”
    “It was difficult. I moved out of that house because I couldn’t deal with living there without her.
    Then I built the place I have now and as the years passed I brought some of our things over, but I put most of it in a storage unit on the property. When my parents passed they left their land to me and that’s why I have so much of it.”
    “It’s beautiful—what I saw of it anyway.”
    “I hope you’ll see a lot more of it.”
    “Dean?”
    “Yeah?”
    “What’s that?” She pointed to their left. “Over there…what’s that?”
    “A bale of hay.” There was definite laughter in his tone. He probably had a smirk on his face too. He was teasing her.
    “Not that,” she said as dryly as she could given her own sense of humor threatening to ruin it.
    “Beyond that, just off to the other side.”
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    A Rancher’s Love ~ Capri Montgomery
    “Let’s go see, shall we?” He turned the horse and started trekking a little faster toward it. By the time he got closer she