LITMIR.BIZ

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of putting down his own roots in the dry, hardpacked dirt.

      His opinion hadn’t changed when he arrived at his parents’ house on Miners’ Pass. Of course, that house had never been his home. Sure he’d stayed there on his infrequent visits, in the room his mother had designated as his and filled with his childhood trophies and buckles, but he’d never lived there.

      In Spencer’s opinion, the three-story stone-and-brick mansion was a ridiculous and ostentatious display of wealth and status. Which was undoubtedly why Ben and Margaret Channing had built it. With three of their four adult children living independently, they certainly didn’t need six bedrooms, seven baths, a great room with a twelve-foot ceiling and a soaring river-rock fireplace, or three more fireplaces around the house.

      On the other hand, if it made his parents happy, who was he to judge?

      But now, as he turned off the highway and onto the access road that led to Crooked Creek Ranch, he felt a tug of something in his chest. Because as eager as he’d been to escape from Haven, he did have some good memories of the town—and almost all of them had happened at the ranch.

      A lot of them involved some kind of chore, too, because Gramps didn’t tolerate laziness. But Spencer didn’t mind the work, and mucking out stalls, grooming horses and cleaning tack at least gave him something to do in a town that, at the time, offered little in the way of entertainment beyond the two screens at Mann’s Theater. And when he did his chores well, Gramps would let him saddle up one of the horses and ride out with him to count the cows.

      Because even after gold and silver had been discovered in the hills and the family had turned their attention away from ranching and toward mining, Gramps had continued to raise cattle. It was a small herd that he managed—nothing comparable to that of the Circle G—but it was his and he took pride in the routine of breeding, calving, culling, weaning. There were more lean years than profitable ones, but he didn’t care. Of course, now that the family was making its fortune in gold and silver, his interest in the market price of beef was mostly academic.

      Whenever Spencer returned to Haven, he tried to visit the ranch and ride out with Gramps. But today’s visit had another purpose—to check on Copper Penny.

      He didn’t have a trailer hitch on his truck and, truthfully, he hadn’t felt up to wrestling with a thousand-pound animal on the eight-hundred-mile journey, so he’d arranged to have the mare delivered. He’d received confirmation that she’d arrived that morning, and he was eager to ensure that she’d suffered no ill effects from the journey, which was why he’d headed to the ranch as soon as he’d completed his first therapy session with Kenzie.

      He was on his way to the barn when he spotted her grazing in the nearest corral. The sun shone on her chestnut coat so that she gleamed as bright as her name, and her tail flicked leisurely back and forth. If she was at all distressed by the recent travel or the change in her environment, she gave no evidence of being anything but perfectly content.

      “She’s a beauty,” Gramps remarked, joining him by the fence.

      Spencer nodded his agreement. It had been the mare that caught his eye first, five years earlier at a barrel racing event in Cherokee, Iowa, before he’d noticed the pretty girl hunkered low over her back. As horse and rider raced the familiar cloverleaf pattern, he’d been impressed by their form and their speed. Afterward, the girl who’d introduced herself as Emily had proven that she was just as fast outside of the ring.

      “Where’d you pick her up?”

      He was taken aback by the question, until he realized that Gramps was asking about the horse.

      “Denver,” Spencer told him.

      “Any particular reason you decided to buy a horse?”

      “I didn’t buy her,” he said. “She was a gift.”

      His grandfather’s pale gaze shifted to the horse again. “Heckuva gift,” he remarked.

      “Yeah. And that’s not the half of it.”

      The old man’s bushy white brows lifted. “I didn’t figure you came home just to deliver the horse.”

      “I’m also rehabbing my shoulder, hoping to be ready for the National Finals.”

      “It’s a good thing you can usually manage to stay on the back of a bull for eight seconds, because you’d never make any money at the card tables in Vegas,” Gramps noted.

      “What’s that supposed to mean?”

      “It means you can’t bluff worth the stuff that comes out of the back end of those beasts you ride.”

      Spencer felt a smile tug at his lips. Though Gramps had never been one to mince words, his wife had disapproved of coarse language. Widowed now for more than three years, the old man still lived by her strict rules.

      “We both know you could rehab that injury anywhere,” Gramps said, calling his bluff.

      “Maybe I wanted to do it at home.”

      “And maybe those cows out there are gonna sprout wings and fly away.”

      Spencer shifted his gaze to the far pasture, dotted with the thick bodies of his grandfather’s cattle—no wings in sight.

      “I decided to take some time to reevaluate my life and my priorities.”

      Gramps shifted the toothpick he held clenched in his jaw from one side to the other. “You knock up some girl?”

      Though he was often amused by his grandfather’s characteristic bluntness, this time, Spencer couldn’t even fake a laugh.

      His body was hurting, his mind was spinning and nothing about his current situation was the least bit amusing.

       Chapter Three

      Seven years was more than enough time for a girl to get over a silly crush. And when Kenzie had been at lunch with Megan earlier that day, she’d been confident that any feelings she’d had for Spencer Channing had been trampled into dust a long time ago. Of course, that was before she’d walked into her treatment room and found him waiting for her.

      Well, not waiting for her. Waiting for a therapist to work on his injured shoulder, and she just happened to be that therapist. She’d studied hard and trained carefully so that she knew how all the muscles in the body worked, how they were affected by various types of injuries and how she could manipulate the tissue to release tension and ease pain.

      She’d treated the same kind of shoulder trauma in other patients, but when Spencer had removed his shirt, all that experience had faded from her mind. She’d been mesmerized by the taut bronzed skin molded to hard, sinewy muscle. She’d wanted to press her lips to his shoulder, drop kisses across that broad, powerful chest, then slowly lick her way down those washboard abs.

      She didn’t entirely trust herself to continue to touch his body and maintain a professional distance, which meant that she should ask one of her coworkers to take over Spencer’s treatments. Therapists traded patients all the time and for various reasons, but she had no intention of admitting that being near Spencer, touching the exquisitely sculpted body that her hormonally-driven teenage-self had lusted for with every fiber of her being, had reawakened long dormant feelings inside her and started the playback of memories in her mind.

       She’d always liked hanging out at Crooked Creek Ranch, and she never missed an opportunity to go down to the barn and visit with the horses that were stabled there. Brielle’s grandfather had taught her to ride, and she remembered how hard her heart had knocked against her ribs the first time she’d sat in the saddle astride the black gelding with white markings for which he’d been named Domino. She’d been equal parts excited and terrified, and she’d felt the same way waiting for Spencer to show up.

       He’d been dating Ashleigh Singer for the past few weeks. Of course,

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