Читать книгу Tight-Fittin' Jeans - Mary Baxter Lynn - Страница 7

Prologue

Would today be the day he had another heart attack? Could be, Garth Dixon told himself, especially when he felt as if a hippo were sitting on his chest. What bothered him the most was wondering when the “big one” was going to hit. He’d already come face-to-face with his mortality, and he hadn’t been impressed, since he was only forty.

Realizing he was using the rickety post on the porch to hold himself upright, he straightened to his full six-foot-two-inch height. Hell, the doctors might think he had one foot in the coffin and the other on a banana peel, but he was determined to prove them wrong.

His ticker would be good as new if he could just survive this godforsaken place. Ah, Pennington, Utah. If anyone had told him he would end up in this small farming and ranching community, holed up in a rustic cabin, nursing a cantankerous heart, he would have laughed.

Well, he wasn’t laughing now, not by a long shot. He wasn’t sure he would be able to laugh again until he was away from here and back in Dallas, in his corporate of fices. Just thinking about that, and all the work he’d been forced to leave behind, caused a tight squeezing around his chest, something he couldn’t allow to happen.

The problem was, he didn’t have anything else to think about. Work was his life. The only thing in front of him now was the sun setting in the west, perhaps the most beautiful sunset he’d ever seen. But then, he wasn’t into sunsets. If that was all he had to look forward to, then he might as well sit on a keg of dynamite and wait for it to blow.

He needed a challenge. He needed something he could sink his teeth into, which was exactly what he could not do. So what did that leave? Learning to be a connoisseur of sunsets? God forbid.

Yet, like it or not, he had to alter his life-style, or else. It was the “or else” that made the sweat suddenly pop out on his skin as if he were a teenager at his first dance. He would do what he had to do; he always had. He’d had to learn to live with the scars on his soul, but it would be a cold day in hell before he lived with them on his heart.

Disgusted with his thoughts, Garth glared at the sunset once more, with reinforced resentment, then tromped back inside the cabin. He was about to plop down on the couch when the phone rang. He stopped in midaction. This was the first time in a week he’d heard that sound.

Garth grimaced, thinking that before he’d been forced into this change of scenery, he’d come to think of the receiver as a permanent part of his body. He wished it was his office calling, but he knew that wouldn’t be the case. Under no circumstances were they to bother him. His family, however, was. a different matter.

“Dixon,” he said, then realized he didn’t recognize the voice on the other end of the line.

Once the conversation had ended, Garth hung up, a bit disconcerted. The caller was a man who owned a nearby ranch, Jeremiah Davis, whom he had run into on several occasions at Irma Quill’s general store.

Garth paused in his thoughts, a smile relaxing his drawn features as his mind switched gears to Irma, who was in a class all her own. In fact, he’d never met anyone like her, except in books and on TV. With her birdlike features and antiquated way of dressing, bonnet and all, she reminded him of a character straight out of “Little House on the Prairie.”

Since he’d been in Pennington, Irma seemed to have taken a liking to him, though he hadn’t encouraged her. Still, when she insisted on loading him down with homemade bread and jam, he hadn’t turned it down; the smell never failed to revive his appetite.

However, it wasn’t Irma he should be thinking about now, but rather, the favor Jeremiah Davis had asked of him. Jeremiah had told him there had been an emergency in his family and asked Garth if he would keep an eye on things while he was away, explaining that he was leaving his daughter behind with a friend.

Garth had consented, though he wasn’t excited about the neighborly deed, as he didn’t particularly want to be neighborly.

Hell, all he wanted was a one-way ticket back to Texas.