Rocky Mountain Dreams & Family on the Range by Danica Favorite (summer beach reads txt) 📕

Her savior stepped past her. “That you, Bart?”

Bart. Now she had a name for her father and the sheriff.

“Just a misunderstanding.” Bart gave a grin that made her stomach turn, then headed in the opposite direction.

The man nodded and looked over at Annabelle. “You’re all right now. Bart don’t mean no one no harm.”

Oh, yes, he did. But she didn’t need to belabor that point with this stranger.

“Thank you, sir.” She offered a small smile as she nodded and turned toward the direction of Gertie’s cabin.

No one was at Gertie’s cabin, making her more grateful the unknown man had come to her rescue.

She sat on one of the logs and examined the damage to her boot. The heel had been torn clean off. Her foot... For the first time since the initial pain of twisting it, she realized that it throbbed. And was swelling rapidly.

“Gertie?” She called the woman’s name but received silence in return.

Annabelle leaned back and closed her eyes. Maybe if she took a few deep breaths it wouldn’t hurt so bad.

The crunch of shoes on gravel jolted her out of her tiny rest. If the men had been following her, they probably realized she was completely alone.

“Please. I’ve already told you I don’t know where the silver is. So just leave me be.”

Maybe she truly was a coward, but she couldn’t bear to open her eyes and face the victorious sneers of evil men who were going to triumph because Annabelle hadn’t truly embodied the Christlike behavior she had been supposed to model.

“What happened?” Slade’s soft voice jolted her, and she looked up, but not directly at him.

“Some men accosted me.”

He had no reason to take up her cause, so the less she said the better.

“About the silver?” He knelt before her and touched her broken boot. “How bad is it?”

Pain shot through her. “Ow!” She jerked out of his grasp.

“Yes, about the silver. That ridiculous metal that has blinded everyone to decency.”

His face contorted as though he’d been wounded more than her ankle hurt.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”

“Yes, you did,” he said quietly. “You’ve been seething in hate for months now. But I’m going to fix your ankle anyway.”

Tears rolled down her face.

He took her foot, not at all gently, and attempted to unlace her boot. Even Slade was ignoring what she had to say based on the prejudice she’d expressed.

She should have listened to his side of the story. “What happened that night?”

Something glittered in Slade’s eyes when he looked up at her. If she hadn’t been so stubborn, they’d have had this talk long ago.

“When I got to Doc Stein’s house, he was passed out drunk. So I went to the hospital to see if they could spare someone. But they were busy with the influx of their own patients. I was told to bring everyone there.”

Slade shook his head slowly, fumbling with the lace. “I’m going to have to cut this off. I know you prize these boots, but there’s no other way.”

“It’s all right. They’re just boots. And they’re ruined anyway.” Annabelle shrugged, then looked at him.

Really looked at him. Pain filled his face, and she realized that all this time, all the hurt she’d been feeling over her family’s deaths, Slade had been feeling, too.

Everyone was hurting. But all Annabelle had been able to see was her own pain.

“I want to hear the rest. About the silver.”

He pulled a knife out of his boot as he nodded slowly. “On my way back, I headed to the livery to get a wagon to take everyone to the hospital. I took a shortcut through State Street and got caught in the middle of a gunfight between two men arguing over a poker game. One got away, but the other...”

Pain filled his face, and for a moment, Annabelle forgot that she’d vowed to hate Slade forever. He’d been her brother’s best friend, and until she’d decided to blame him for Peter’s death, a good man.

“I did the best I could for him, but...”

Slade’s hand stilled on her foot. “He pressed a bag of silver in my hand and asked that I send it home to his wife. It was the last thing he said before he died.”

He had been doing a kindness for a stranger. She’d hated him for his selfishness when all he’d been doing was a good deed. Annabelle hadn’t thought it possible to feel more shame over her actions, but it was so strong she thought she might burst of it.

“I didn’t—”

“Don’t.” He looked up at her with watery eyes. “Somehow I thought it would make a difference if I stayed with him until the sheriff came. I was worried about a dead man, when I should have been getting Peter to the doctor. I never imagined he would go so quickly. Your pa has told me over and over that it probably still wouldn’t have saved him, but I can’t help but wonder if I’d done it any differently...”

All this time, she’d been casting stones, when poor Slade had been casting them at himself. He hadn’t needed her to make him feel bad when he was already doing a fine enough job of it himself.

“You did what you could,” she told him quietly. “And I apologize for saying otherwise.”

Slade nodded slowly. “What you saw that night was me giving the silver and information about the dead man to your pa so he could track down the family. Frank was going crazy with grief and I thought that giving him something to do would help. I never realized how much I would hurt you.”

Her chest ached, and the weight of her actions pressed on her shoulders heavier than any of the boulders in the area. “I should have heard you out.”

“Well, now you have.” His lips twisted in a sort of grimace, and he finished taking off her boot. As he turned his focus to her injured ankle, she realized the injustice she’d done him. Her family had adopted Slade