Read One Night with a Cowboy (Paint River Ranch) (Entangled Indulgence) for Free Online Page B

hands against her middle. She’d been tired since arriving in Montana, it seemed. Both her brain and her body refused to settle in. Sleep could easily wiggle in as she succumbed to the quiet around her and the cloud-like softness of the cushions. Her brain began a slow decent into barely-there awareness, the kind that teetered between awake and asleep.
    A few blissful minutes passed where she processed nothing except the work of her chest as she breathed. Her thoughts slid into a breezy daydream where Tucker was wearing a highway construction worker’s bright orange vest and a hard hat. He was bleeding from his arm, and Sophie leaned over him with gauze pressed to his wound as traffic sped by on I-35. He tipped his hardhat back a little, a toothpick jutting cockily from the side of his mouth.
    She smiled; recognized the gesture in her hazy state. Tucker was in her world, back when she was working as a medic and had something that resembled a future ahead of her. When she had something to offer a partner and herself besides uncertainty…
    “Good god, Sophie, sit up straight!” Carla whacked her on the knee with a newspaper. Sophie looked up to see a coffee cup thrust in her face. “Were you sleeping? We can go in now.” Without waiting for an answer, Carla hurried off. Sophie took three big breaths, holding the hot white ceramic mug in her hands while her brain fog cleared. She wasn’t going to think about Tucker or what-ifs. Those things were the least of her worries today. Today, it was all about her mom.
    Taking a scalding sip from the mug, Sophie went to her mother’s room. She’d come every day since arriving in Missoula, yet the impact of her mother’s condition still felt like a frying pan to the face. Violet Miller had been a preschool teacher for almost thirty years, an avid gardener and hiker, and stubborn enough to beat skin cancer and a breast tumor. She’d raised two girls alone, absorbing the trials of teenage PMS, boy-drama, dance lessons, and prom with a steady grace that Sophie relied on so much. It took stepping in the wrong place while snapping pictures in Glacier National Park to bring Violet Miller down. The rocks beneath her hiking boots had given way, pitching her over a cliff. Five seconds and twenty feet robbed her of the most vibrant years of her life, and left Sophie and Carla with a shell of the mother they knew.
    Violet never made it back to her home in Minnesota. Massive head trauma left her in a near-vegetative state, making a thirteen-hundred-mile transfer back to St. Paul risky. Instead, Violet settled into a care facility near Carla’s home in Missoula. Sophie stayed in Minnesota, working and taking care of what she could of her mother’s loose ends. Even now, almost two years since the accident, there were accounts to settle, insurance claims to fight, and a never-ending stream of medical bills that weren’t touched by health coverage.
    And Sophie missed her mom—her best friend—relentlessly.
    She sat next to her mother’s bed. Violet was upright, her head lolled to one side, eyes closed. In the past year, her shoulder-length brown hair had gone completely gray. Sophie never imagined her mother would gray so early in life, she was only fifty-eight, and the shocking white seemed like another play of fate to strip Violet of her essence well before her time.
    Carla bustled around the bed, straightening the sheets and smoothing the duvet. She checked to be sure Violet had the hand-knit bootie slippers on that her teacher friend from back home had made, and that her pink flannel gown was properly buttoned.
    “Can’t trust anyone to do a good enough job, right mom?” Carla asked, sitting opposite from Sophie. Violet moaned, her eyes rolling to Carla for a second before dropping back to the left. Sophie froze when her mother’s eyes seemed to focus on her face. During her other visits the past two days, her mom hadn’t made any indication that she even realized Sophie was