Read Her Heart for the Asking (Book 1 - TEXAS HEARTS) for Free Online Page B

how much she'd loved
him.  He'd made it clear the day he'd said good-bye that he'd
never really loved her. 
    Mandy would have thought sleep would be easy
after working 48 hours straight on the Hill Crest Industries ad
campaign.  She'd allowed herself only an hour or two to sleep
on the small sofa in her office after the people from Hill Crest
Industries left before she hightailed to the airport to catch her
flight to Texas.  She should have slept like the
dead. 
    Instead of getting much needed sleep, she'd
watched the shadows from the moonlight stretch across the
room.  And what sleep she had managed to catch last night in
her old room on the second floor had been fitful, filled with
dreams of Beau.
    It wasn't the same as when he'd first left
for the rodeo circuit without her.  It was as if something
inside her had died when he left.  Even as angry as she was
with him for his betrayal for saying the things he'd said, she'd
mourned the loss of him.  She'd missed him desperately.
    The dreams she'd had last night were
different.  She didn't want to go there and examine what it
all meant.  It was better to keep her distance.  She
wasn't staying in Texas and neither was Beau.  As soon as she
succeeded in convincing Hank to have his surgery both of them would
be going back to their separate lives again.  And that was
just fine with her.
    Mandy pulled herself from the twin canopy
bed she'd slept in during her youthful stays at the ranch. 
Corrine had kept her room the same as the last time she'd been
here.  No wonder she still expected her to look nine years old
every time she saw her aunt and uncle.  The ruffled canopy bed
and gold trimmed white dressers looked as though they belonged to
an elementary school girl.  Maybe no matter how much she grew
up, they'd always think of her as the little Philadelphia girl who
learned to ride a pony with ease from a handful of real Texas
cowboys.
    She laughed with the memory as she padded to
the 2nd floor bathroom in the hallway with a pair of clean
underwear and some toiletries in her hand.  She knew from all
her years at the Double T that you could count on most days being a
simple routine that never changed.  Breakfast was after most
of the hands had already done a few hours of work.  Aunt
Corrine did most of the cooking in the house and prepared a picnic
lunch for the men to take out on the range if that was where they
were going to be that day.  Many days the hands never bothered
to stop for lunch at all.  When they were driving the herd,
she'd go on ahead and set up a camp so that a meal was hot and
filling when the day was done.
    Mandy had heard the stories, but had never
been around for a real cattle drive.  She’d always left to go
back to school.
    Downstairs Mandy heard voices and recognized
one as being the housekeeper they'd had for years.  Alice had
always reminded Mandy of the housekeeper from the Brady Bunch
series, except the Double T's Alice was an Apache woman who lived
on the reservation not too far from the Double T.
    Uncle Hank, being half Apache himself, had
met Alice while he’d visit his mother who'd lived on the
reservation until she died the year after Mandy starting coming to
the Double T.  He’d met her a few times when Hank had taken
Mandy to the reservation for a Powwow or the Sundance festival.
    Alice had a daughter named Sara, who was a
few years older than Mandy.   She would bring Sara to the
ranch to play with Mandy while Alice worked.  Mandy hadn't
thought of Sara in years.  She wondered now how her childhood
friend was doing.  She'd have to make a point of asking Alice
when she went downstairs.
    She quickly scrubbed her body clean and
shrugged into a clean pair of blue jeans she'd just purchased for
the trip.  They were crisp and didn't give the way her old
favorite pair had when they were broken in just right.  Once
Mandy started working for her father, she'd tried to develop a
professional appearance.  But she needed