Cowboy with a Cause by Carla Cassidy Read Free Book Online Page A

steeled himself for whatever was about to come.
    “What are you doing?” she repeated.
    “I’m building a ramp.”
    “Why?” There was an unmistakable belligerence in her voice.
    He thought she’d never looked so gorgeous, sitting so straight and tall in the chair, with her bright blue eyes blazing.
    “Because you need one.” He picked up a nail and hammered it into the wood, acutely aware of her continuing to glare at him.
    “I’m not reimbursing you for whatever you spent on such nonsense,” she yelled to be heard over his pounding.
    He stopped hammering and straightened up once again to look at her. “I didn’t intend for you to. I just figured if you had to get out of the house, say, in the case of an emergency, a ramp would make it possible. From the end of the wood you have nice sidewalks that will take you anyplace you want to go in town.”
    “I don’t want to go anyplace in town!” she exclaimed and then backed up and slammed the door to punctuate her sentence.
    Her response didn’t deter him from the task at hand. It took him a little over two hours to build an adequate ramp and finish it off with strips of nonskid material, which he placed every twelve inches to assure her safety in the rain or snow.
    When he was done, he leaned back against the side of his truck and looked at the work. He was satisfied. The ramp was solid and wide enough and had a gentle slope that would make it easy for her to maneuver in the chair. If she ever decided to try it, he thought ruefully. Eventually, if she wanted, he’d put up solid railings on either side.
    He cleaned up his tools and stored them in the back of his truck and then went inside and up the stairs to shower and change clothes. As he passed through to the stairs, there was no sign of Melanie. She’d probably retreated to her room to have a private temper fit.
    At least she hadn’t asked him to stop building or to tear down what he’d done, he thought as he stepped into the shower spray.
    He’d heard her laughter only once and it was a beautiful sound that he wished he heard more often. She broke his heart just a little bit, not because she was in a wheelchair, but rather because she had decided to stop living.
    Just like Adam had done when Sam was arrested. Yes, Adam knew all about hiding from life, denying a reality too painful to endure.
    But what he was slowly discovering was that sometimes you just had to adjust your expectations of the way you thought your life should go and grab onto happiness wherever and whenever it could be found.
    Sick of his mental journey into the philosophy of life, he got out of the shower, dressed in a pair of clean jeans and a long-sleeved button-up shirt and headed downstairs to face the music.
    Music. Funny that she didn’t want the sound of music in the house. It was a fleeting thought as he found her in the living room, at the window, staring out at his masterpiece.
    “It looks steep,” she said, her voice just short of grumpy.
    “It’s not at all.”
    She turned around to look at him and her eyes were a troubled midnight blue. “I don’t want to go out. I don’t want to see people. When I left here, I bragged about all the things I was going to do.... I was going to be a professional dancer and work on Broadway, and now I’m back where I started and a complete failure.”
    Adam pointed to the pictures hanging on the wall. “That’s not failure,” he replied. “That’s success. You did what you set out to do and then you suffered a physical injury. You’re like a football player who won the Super Bowl but then blew out his knee and can never play again. It’s simply time to readjust your goals.”
    She looked down at her hands in her lap. “I don’t want to see the pity in people’s eyes.”
    Adam walked over to her and crouched down in front of her. He could smell her, a seductive scent of spice and floral that momentarily dizzied his senses. His heart banged as he reached out and took one of