A Real Cowboy Knows How to Kiss Read Free Page B

to an engine-coughing death on the edge of the Wyoming dirt road.
    "Oh, come on. Please don't do this to me." She tried the ignition again, but there was no response from the vehicle that her best friend, Josie Mayers, had named "Faith" because the truck had gotten her out of so many sticky situations.
    Well, Faith had bottomed out in a big way, and was so not living up to her name.
    Erin grimaced as she flexed her hands around the steering wheel, trying not to freak out and collapse in a wail of self-pity at this latest sabotage to her attempts to make this day work out okay. She glanced at her watch, her heart sinking when she saw what time it was. It was almost six. It had been over an hour since she'd received the frantic call to stitch up a horse that'd had a trailer mishap.
    As tempting as it was to surrender to Faith's refusal to move, she needed to get to the ranch, not sit by the side of the road awaiting the first Wyoming sunset she'd seen in over a decade.
    Six weeks ago, it had sounded like a fantastic idea to use her upcoming sabbatical to run the Wyoming vet clinic so Josie could go to Chicago and help her mom recover from surgery. Erin had happily envisioned snuggly dogs, soft kittens, and long conversations with devoted pet owners, a situation that seemed so much more appealing than her stressful equine surgery practice in Virginia. She'd been excited to use her training to help animals that weren't under deep anesthesia all the time, and the thought of returning to the area she grew up in had sounded wonderful. She'd been struggling so much in her day-to-day life, and she was excited to reconnect with a life that used to make sense to her, hoping that maybe she'd be able to figure herself out in the process.
    Today was her first day on the job. As she'd expected, she'd gotten conscious animals and the opportunity to drive around her old town, but other than that, it hadn't been anything like she'd hoped and expected, not by a long shot.
    In the last twelve hours, she'd been knocked down and nearly impaled on the horn of a massive bull. She'd also been flattened into a mud puddle by a six-year-old girl practicing her barrel racing skills on whatever happened to be near her and her pony, which, at that time, had been Erin.
    Her last stop had gone long when the sheep had escaped from the holding pen just before she'd arrived, necessitating almost an hour of watching sheepdogs do their stuff, which was incredibly cool, she had to admit, but not very helpful with her timing. She'd spent over two hours cumulatively being lost, since the spotty cell service in the region had rendered her reliance on her phone's GPS a poor decision. None of the landscape looked familiar to her, and she felt like a complete stranger in the land that had once been her home.
    Except this life hadn't been her home. When she'd been a kid, she'd never been canvassing dirt roads, trying to locate assorted ranches. She'd been cloistered in the library, or at school, or at ballet class, or any of the proper training classes that her parents had thrust upon her. Everything about her return was wrong, nothing was as she'd imagined, and there was nothing she could do about it now.
    Josie was gone, there was no one else to run the clinic, the engine was dead, and a horse named Ox's Ass needed stitches. A passing glance at her phone confirmed she had no reception, so there would be no white knight galloping to respond to a call for help. Grimly, she yanked open the glove box and pulled out the tattered spiral notebook that Josie had stashed inside as a makeshift owner's manual. She flipped the first page, quickly scanning Josie's notes. On the second page, she found a note stating: "When the engine dies while driving, there are three possible causes." Erin scanned the rest of the page, and her heart sank.
    "Really? She wants me to connect wires in the engine? Seriously?" Josie's instructions seemed incredibly complicated, and Erin felt like tossing