LITMIR.BIZ

       Chapter One

      Captain Trace Rafferty of the Thirty-First Fighter Wing out of Aviano Air Base was coming home for good, much sooner than he’d expected.

      Since leaving Italy, where his squadron had flown F-16s critical to operations in NATO’s southern region, he’d been in Colorado Springs, Colorado, for the past few days talking with the higher-ups. Having been forced to retire as a jet pilot from the Air Force at twenty-eight due to an eye injury, he’d decided to accept a flight instructor position at the Air Force Academy.

      Trace had been asked to stay on with the Thirty-First as a flight navigator, but after being a pilot, he couldn’t do it. The Academy was giving him time to get his affairs in order before he went to work for them. He would use this time to tell his father about his future plans...plans his father wasn’t going to be happy about.

      Sam Rafferty, known as Doc, was a cowboy and rancher besides being the head veterinarian in White Lodge, Montana. A year ago he’d married Ellen Neerings, a pretty brunette widow from the same town, and they lived in a condo. His arthritic hips had made it impossible for him to live and take care of things on the ranch any longer.

      Ellen’s husband had died several years earlier. With the sale of their small family home, she’d been able to pay off mounting debts because of her husband’s long illness, but she’d been left with little to live on.

      Both she and Trace’s father had sacrificed too much for their families. His dad should have the money from the sale of the ranch to buy him and Ellen a new house of their own in White Lodge with every convenience. She had two married children and needed more space for them and her grandchildren when they came to visit from other parts of the state.

      Since Trace wasn’t going to live in Montana, selling the ranch was the only sensible solution to make his father’s life more comfortable, but he knew it was a subject that would bring his dad pain. The ranch, located in the south central part of the state bordering Wyoming, had been in the Rafferty family for close to a hundred years. Trace hated the fact that his father had done so much for him all his life, virtually supporting him and his mother, even after she’d remarried. It was Trace’s turn to give back.

      His parents had divorced when he was eight years old. His mother had settled in Billings, only forty minutes away, taking him with her. She didn’t like the ranch’s isolation and preferred the amenities of living in town.

      His dad had moved heaven and earth to be with his son as much as possible during those years. After living with such a kind, laid-back father, it had been hard for Trace to adjust to being around the rigid-type man his mother married soon after the divorce. When Trace turned eighteen, he joined the

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