Jenna's Cowboy Hero Read Free

mimic.
    â€œTimmy, mind your manners,” Jenna warned, smiling down at him.
    â€œOf course you don’t, and that’s good.” Adam Mackenzie turned his attention to the smaller of her two boys. “And what about you, cowboy?”
    â€œI’m David.” He didn’t suck his thumb. Instead he pulled his left hand free from hers and shoved his hands into his pockets. He looked up at the tall, giant of a man walking next to him. “And we have a big uncle named Clint.”
    A baritone chuckle and Adam made eye contact with Jenna. She smiled, because that light was in his eyes. It hadn’t been a trick of the camera, or her imagination. She had to explain what David had meant tobe a threatening comment about her brother. Leave it to the boys to think they all needed to be protected from a stranger.
    â€œMy brother lives down the road a piece.”
    â€œClint Cameron?” Adam’s gaze drifted away from her to the ramp at the side of the porch. Her brother had put the ramp in before she came home from the hospital last fall.
    â€œYes, Clint Cameron. You know him?”
    â€œWe played against each other back in high school. What’s he doing now?”
    â€œRaising bucking bulls with his wife. They travel a lot.”
    Jenna grabbed the handrail and walked up the steps, her boys and Adam Mackenzie a few steps behind, watching her. The boys knew the reason for her slow, cautious climb. She imagined Adam wondering at her odd approach to steps. In the six months since she’d been home, she’d grown used to people wondering and to questioning looks. Now it was more about her, and about raising the boys. She was too busy with life to worry about what other people were thinking about her.
    It hadn’t always been that way. Times past, she worried a lot about what people thought.
    She opened the front door, and he reached and pushed it back, holding it for them to enter. She slid past him, the boys in front of her.
    â€œDo you want tea?” She glanced over her shoulder as she crossed the living room, seeing all of the things that could make him ask questions about her life. If he looked.
    He stood inside her tiny living room in the house she’d grown up in. A house that used to have more bad memories than good. For her boys the bad memories would be replaced with those of a happy childhood with a mom who loved them.
    There wouldn’t be memories of a dad. She wasn’t sorry about that, but then again, sometimes she was.
    The walls of the house were no longer paneled. Clint had hung drywall, they’d painted the room pale shell and the woodwork was white now, not the dark brown of her childhood. The old furniture was gone, replaced by something summery and plaid. Gauzy white curtains covered the floor-to-ceiling windows, fluttering in the summer breeze that drifted through the house.
    Everything old, everything that held a bad memory, had been taken out, replaced. And yet the memories still returned, of her father drunk, of his rage, and sometimes him in the chair, sleeping the day away.
    Adam took up space in the small house, nearly overwhelming it, and her, with his presence. As she waited for his answer to the question about iced tea, he took off his hat and brushed a hand through short but shaggy sandy-brown hair.
    â€œTea?” He raised a brow and she remembered her question.
    â€œYes, iced tea.”
    â€œPlease. And the phone book?”
    â€œThe number for the garage is on my fridge.” She led him down the hall to the kitchen with a wood table in the center of the room.
    She loved the room, not just the colors—the pale yellow walls and white cabinets. She loved that her sister-in-law, Willow, had decorated and remodeled it as a way to welcome Jenna home. The room was a homecoming present and a symbol of new beginnings. They had worked on the rest of the house as Jenna recovered.
    Jenna poured their tea while Adam dialed the phone.