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An excerpt from
EVENING HOURS
Life was good, and Kaylee had learned early to treasure such moments. After nearly losing her life at such a young age, nothing had ever been the same, and she never wasted one precious moment.
That thinking gave her all the more reason not to waste one second contemplating a particular man. Her heart did a sudden somersault as she admitted to herself that she had thought about that cowboy off and on all night.
Unsettling?
Absolutely.
Crazy?
Absolutely.
A waste of time?
Absolutely.
Lethal.
Absolutely.
So why couldn’t she get him off her mind?
Evening Hours
Mary Lynn Baxter
This book is dedicated to my
friend and gym buddy Walter Bates who should be writing instead of running. Thanks for all your plotting expertise.
Contents
Prologue
She looked dead.
For a second Edgar Benton’s heart beat uncontrollably against his chest cavity. When he leaned forward and placed a trembling hand on the exposed arm and felt her warm flesh, a breath of relief seeped out of him. Thank God she wasn’t dead. Not yet anyway, he reminded himself as fresh tears dribbled down his face.
This was the first time he’d seen his daughter since she’d been whisked away to surgery several hours ago. His precious sixteen-year-old lay like a beautiful corpse on the sterile hospital bed. Panic seized him and his knees buckled.
He pulled a chair close to the bed, his eyes never leaving her face. Edgar took several deep gulping breaths, then whispered in a garbled voice, “Please, Kaylee, hang on. I can’t bear to lose you, too.”
No response.
His baby, his only child, remained unmoving and unresponsive. His tears kept coming. What had he, they, done to deserve such an awful tragedy? His twisted, angry face looked toward the ceiling, silently cursing God. He couldn’t fathom how he was going to survive without his wife. As he thought of her lying on a cold slab in a morgue, another onslaught of pain ripped through his gut.
How would he tell his daughter that she might not ever walk again and that her body would always be scarred?
“Oh, God, why?” Deep sobs racked his body.