How to Handle a Cowboy by Joanne Kennedy Read Free Book Online Page A

some staid businessman in the fifties. It was darkened by age and stained with mold, and made dark-eyed, olive-skinned Frankie look like a Little Rascal playing gangster. Isaiah sat beside him in the passenger seat, while Jeffrey and Carter slouched in the back like a couple of junior mob enforcers. All they needed was cigars all around and a body in the trunk.
    â€œHow come you’d go to Vegas?” That was Isaiah, challenging everyone’s ideas as usual. He had a quick intelligence that would take him far if he ever had the opportunity to use it for something other than finding trouble. “Why don’t you go to New York or LA?”
    â€œâ€™Cause I could make it in Vegas,” Frankie said. “I could be a dealer.”
    â€œA drug dealer? Man, you’re stupid,” Isaiah said.
    Sierra resisted the urge to do a fist pump. Isaiah’s father was in prison for dealing drugs, and like most of the boys, he clung to a fierce love for his absent father. She’d been worried he’d follow his dad down that dead-end road, but maybe the system had succeeded in breaking the cycle for once.
    â€œYou need money to be a drug dealer, and you don’t got any money,” Isaiah continued.
    Sierra’s shoulders sagged. So much for breaking the cycle.
    â€œNot drugs,” Frankie said. “I’d deal cards. Blackjack, in a casino. Or I could be a bouncer.”
    â€œYou’re too much of a punk to be a bouncer. You’d probably be a backup dancer. For Cher ,” Carter teased. He was a big boy, not fat but large, and he probably wanted the bouncer job for himself. Jeffrey, who sat beside him, never seemed to take up any space at all. The boy was so quiet Sierra was afraid he would disappear someday, just fade away. She didn’t know what kind of tragedies festered in the boy’s memory, but something had stolen his voice.
    â€œI hate Cher,” Frankie said. “I want to do backup for somebody hot. Rihanna, maybe.”
    The boys jeered as Ridge and Sierra struggled not to laugh.
    â€œMy mom likes Rihanna,” Carter protested. “We’re maybe going to go to a concert sometime when she gets out of the center.”
    â€œYour mom’s never getting out,” Frankie scoffed. Sierra winced at the casual cruelty—although from what she’d read in Carter’s file, Frankie was probably right.
    â€œShe is too.” Carter squared his shoulders and thrust out his jaw. “She’s really committed to her recovery this time.”
    Other boys knew baseball stats or rock lyrics. Sierra’s boys knew the language of therapy and addiction. Sometimes it seemed as if they’d been the caretakers and their parents the children, living in an upside-down world.
    Frankie draped one hand casually over the steering wheel, like a bored commuter, and turned to Isaiah. “Where would you go?”
    Sierra gripped the fence, her knuckles whitening. This was an answer she wanted to hear. She wasn’t sure what Isaiah wanted out of life, and that made it hard to motivate him. Pudding Snacks would only get her so far, and she was eager to hear what his dream destination would be.
    â€œNo place.” His dark brows arrowed downward, turning his delicate, almost elfin face into the embodiment of a bad attitude. “I’d just drive. Drive and drive and drive. Away from here.” He scrunched down in his seat and stared out the window. “Away from all of you.”
    â€œI’d go back to Millersville.” Sierra glanced down at Josh, who was whispering his own answer to the question. He seemed to be talking to the fence posts, oblivious of Ridge and Sierra beside him. “I’d go help out my dad, ’cause there’s a lot of work to do around the place.”
    Sierra felt her heart break a little. Josh’s dad had done everything possible to kill his son’s affection and maybe even the boy himself. But children