Montana Hearts: Her Weekend Wrangler Read Free Page A

barbequed pulled pork sandwiches in front of them. “And I don’t need another horse.”
    Aunt Mary clapped her hands together. “Oh, but you’ll love her.”
    B REE COULDN’T HELP but feel her family had fallen apart as she followed Luke, Delaney, and Meghan down the hospital corridor. She’d been dealt several work-­related blows in thepast week, but finding out Luke had been injured and Delaney had divorced without telling her hit especially hard. Now she had to enter the room where her father lay in a coma.
    Her throat ached just thinking about it. What if her father ended up with brain damage? What would happen to her mother and grandma? Or Collins Country Cabins? Her ma hadn’t given much detail on the phone and what she did say had been disjointed, much like her own thoughts at the moment.
    The nurse at the front desk directed them to the proper floor. Bree had expected to see her mother and grandma sitting by his bedside, but when they arrived, no one was in the room.
    Except him .
    Thin tubes ran from her father’s nose to a machine beside his bed. An IV tube linked his arm to a clear plastic bag ofliquid hanging from a high metal rack. The pulsing monitors and hushed atmosphere served only to enhance the severity of his condition. He looked pale, strange for mid-­May, when his skin should have already held a slight tan. His hair seemed to have more gray than in the photo her ma had sent just the week before. And his eyes and mouth remained closed.
    A quick glance at Luke and Delaneytold her they were as alarmed as she by his present state. This fragile, silent, unmoving ghost of a man was nothing like the robust, loudmouthed, foot-­stomping know-­it-­all they were accustomed to.
    They drew closer, arm in arm, as if by some unspoken agreement they needed each other’s support. No one said a word. Bree tried to swallow the lump in the back of her throat. She wasn’t fondof hospitals with their unnatural sterile smell, nor seeing anyone she knew like this.
    Another step forward and they halted at the edge of his bed. Bree bent toward him, studying his face for several long seconds. What if something went wrong? What if he never woke up?
    “He looks so peaceful when he’s asleep,” she whispered.
    His eyelids lifted. “You think I can sleep with the threeof you staring down at me like that?”
    Bree was so startled she screamed. Luke jumped back. Delaney stumbled sideways and knocked a tray of metal instruments to the floor. The clatter brought in a heavyset nurse, who appeared as surprised as they were when she took in the scene. Meghan began to cry.
    “What’s going on here?” the nurse demanded.
    Bree pointed at her father. “He’s awake!”
    “Of course I’m awake,” he barked, his gruff voice as unforgiving as she remembered. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
    Bree scooped Meghan up in her arms, surprised her niece didn’t protest. The little girl was probably too scared.
    Delaney bent down to help the nurse pick up the scattered instruments at their feet, but the nurse waved her away. Good thing, or their mother and grandma would have trippedover her when they rushed into the room.
    Luke met their mother’s gaze, and pointed to their father’s bed. “I thought he was in a coma!”
    Ma looked almost as pale as their father without makeup and her fair hair pinned in a simple French knot. “After your father fell from the saddle he was unconscious. Within twenty minutes of calling 911, the helicopter flew him from our field straightto the hospital and I didn’t find out he regained consciousness until the doctor talked to me two hours later. Even then he dozed in and out, and there was a discussion about possible treatment plans—­one of them was the possibility of keeping him in an induced coma if his scans showed brain swelling.”
    “Turned out he only has a severe concussion,” Grandma added. “But the doctor decided tokeep him in the hospital twenty-­four hours for observation