Running Blind by Linda Howard Read Free Book Online Page B

sometimes long after sunset, getting ready for winter. Hay became the most important thing in his life, and a bad growing season could spell disaster for the ranch. The ranch hands traded horses and four-wheelers for tractors. Every night he’d pray for good weather, because any rain caused a delay he couldn’t afford. His hay fields weren’t counted in acres, but in square miles; that was alot of hay that had to be cut, dried, and baled. When he’d come dragging in at ten o’clock at night, after an eighteen-hour day, Rachel had wanted attention and he’d wanted a shower and then sleep, another thing that had made his wife very unhappy.
    Another truth: he missed Libby way the hell more than he’d ever missed Rachel. This morning he’d discovered—again—that he was out of clean socks. Maybe he’d have noticed beforehand if he’d folded his laundry and put it away in the dresser drawers the way Libby had always done, but this was summer and all he had time for was taking the clean clothes out of the dryer and dumping them in a laundry basket. That was his system: dirty clothes on the floor, clean clothes in the laundry baskets. Unfortunately, in the tangle of underwear, he hadn’t noticed that there were no more clean socks. He’d taken the time to throw a bunch of clothes in the washer and turn it on, and he just hoped to hell he remembered to transfer them to the dryer when he dragged himself back to the house tonight.
    Come to that, he hoped he’d put detergent in the washer, but he couldn’t remember if he had or not. Shit. Maybe he’d be able to tell by smelling the wet clothes whether or not they’d been really washed, or just rinsed. If not, he guessed he’d have to run the washer again, just to be sure. He sucked at this housekeeping stuff.
    He swung the hammer and it glanced off the heavy nail, catching him on the side of the thumb. “Fuck!” He said several more swear words, shaking his hand. That was what happened when you let your mind wander while you were trying to hammer something. Good thing he hadn’t been on a horse, or he might have ended up sitting on his ass on the ground.
    But thinking about his domestic arrangements—or lack of them—wasn’t exactly letting his mind wander. Since Libby’s departure, all of that crap had been an ongoingproblem. He and the men worked hard; they needed meals prepared for them, he needed clean clothes, by now it would probably take a pitchfork to clean out the house, and all of that made running the ranch harder than it needed to be.
    But damned if he knew what the solution was. In the months since Libby had left he’d hired three different women to take her place. Well, no one could take her place; all he wanted was someone to cook, clean, and do laundry. Was that too much to ask of a decently paid employee? Apparently so, because none of the three had stayed. One had sat on her ass watching TV most of the time instead of getting things done. Another had said it was driving her nuts to be so far away from everything. In Zeke’s opinion, that particular drive hadn’t been a very long one. And the third one had caused trouble between the men, which had taught him a lesson about hiring a young single woman who was even remotely attractive.
    So they were back to eating Spencer’s cooking again, and Zeke had been doing his own laundry, when he happened to remember it. As for cleaning the house … well, it would get done, eventually.
    Aggravations aside, Zeke was a man who knew his place in the world and was happy in it—as happy as a man who didn’t have any clean socks could be, anyway. While other ranches were losing money, being sold, even turned into—God forbid—dude ranches or summer homes for movie stars with more money than sense, he worked hard to keep his corner of the world the way he liked it. Maybe the cash didn’t flow in nonstop, but he always found a way to get by, to keep his accounts in the black. It didn’t hurt matters