Chasing the Dream (Montana Skies Book #3) , livre ebook

Baker Publishing Group - Lee Elliston Paige

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82 pages

English

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Readers who loved Paige Elliston's Changes of Heart and Front Page Love in the Montana Skies series will eagerly reach for this latest installment. After life in New York City, Amy Hawkins makes a fresh start in the little Montana town of Coldwater. The 35-year-old editor is hard at work on her first novel, but her money is running out and the writing isn't going well. Amy's handsome horse-farmer neighbor, Jake Winters, befriends the willowy brunette and introduces her to Montana life. But an attractive woman horse trainer promises trouble. Ben Callan, a good-looking carpenter, is also interested in Amy. Two men want to win her heart. How will Amy decide? Romance readers will be eager to find out.

Informations

Publié par	Baker Publishing Group
Date de parution	01 septembre 2006
Nombre de lectures	1
EAN13	9781441235121
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0202€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

© 2006 by Paige Lee Elliston
Published by Revell a division of Baker Publishing Group P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287 www.revellbooks.com
Ebook edition created 2011
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior written permission of the publisher and copyright owners. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
ISBN 978-1-4412-3512-1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
This one is for Jaye Chambery,
who made all the difference.
“Big Sky Country, my foot,” Amy Hawkins grumbled as she watched sheets of rain skitter across the vast expanse of burgeoning grass that was her front lawn. When the lawn the full two acres of it, including the front and the back went in almost three weeks ago, the rain had started. At first, it was gentle and nurturing, and Amy had welcomed it. Now, it seemed like the sort of deluge Noah faced, and the uniform drab gray of sodden day after sodden day was depressing. This certainly wasn’t the glorious Montana weather she had expected.
Amy stepped back from the window, and her foot found a home on the spike tail of Nutsy, the kitten she’d adopted a month before. Nutsy reacted as cats regardless of age do: he yowled with a wail that was far too big and loud for his diminutive body, arched his back, hissed, and dashed off to cower under the couch, his favorite fortress against the often cruel and confusing world.
A hissing streak of chain lightning flickered outside, followed immediately by a sharp crack like the report of a gun, which preceded the now-familiar hollow boom of thunder. Amy walked across her living room and stood gazing out of the picture window into her front yard. The house smelled new, as did the furniture, and the fine scent of the wall-to-wall carpeting was still strong. She smiled at the aroma.
Amy, with an architect friend, had designed the house. It was a modest-sized two bedroom, one-and-a-half bath, but seemed like a luxury cottage to Amy after living the last few years in a small and terribly overpriced New York City apartment. When she wasn’t on the road, working for one writer or another, that is. Her parents’ mansion in Connecticut, where she had spent her childhood and precollege life, had always seemed to Amy like a cruise ship run aground a look and a feeling she strived to avoid in her new home.
Starting a new life is a great concept , Amy thought. But is it possible at age thirty-five ? She grinned. It sure is and I’m doing it . A geographical change didn’t eliminate or even alter the baggage of the past. All of that stayed solidly in place, she knew. But just because the weight existed in the past didn’t mean it had to be hefted and carried in the present. Being an itinerant book editor and all that went with it was then this is now .
Confined too long by the weather to sit comfortably, Amy paced through her home like a lioness in a cage. She stopped at the sliding doors off the kitchen and looked at her reflection in the glass. Her hair, brunette and shoulder length, framed a finely sculpted face high cheekbones, a delicate nose, and a generous, smiling mouth. Her eyes, a rich, liquid brown, were perhaps Amy’s best and certainly most striking feature. Tall for a woman at five-foot-ten, Amy had decided early on not to give in to the tall girl stoop, the mildly hunched stance many taller girls opted for in order to appear shorter. That, Amy thought, made as much sense as a man calling attention to his baldness by wearing a cheap toupee.
Amy’s laptop was on the kitchen table, where it had rested since yesterday afternoon. As an editor now branching out into the world of writing fiction, she had few demands on her time other than those she imposed on herself. That was at least partially what the Montana move was all about a place to see if the novel she’d fantasized about for years could actually turn into anything that might snare the reading public’s attention.
The problem with all that, Amy admitted, was writer’s block a crippling state of mind that steps on creativity, joy in writing, and progress on a project. Amy had never actually believed in writer’s block in the past. She’d attributed it to either fatigue or simple laziness on the part of the writer. Now, she realized, it was neither. It was a very real and quite frightening problem with which she now wrestled on a daily basis. Writer’s block was doing a fine job of robbing her of sleep and casting shadows of self-doubt into her days. “I can beat this” had become a mantra-like affirmation, but it often felt to her like whistling in the cemetery, a weak attempt to push away her fear.
Up until now, everything for her career change had clicked into place like the movement of a fine watch. Her reputation as an editor and three bestsellers she’d worked on, two of which were made into major box-office hits had gotten her a famous and very effective literary agent. Inheriting a significant amount of money from an obscure great-aunt she had met a grand total of two times as a preteen had made the move and the home possible. The money, however, was finite, and Amy had quickly learned that anything and everything having to do with building and furnishing a new home was astoundingly expensive. The advance on her novel her agent had been able to negotiate had been sizable not in the six-figure range heavyweights such as King and Updike garnered, but a good sum nevertheless. Now, though, her bank balance had dwindled to subsistence money, and the numbers kept her awake late at night. Her novel, she knew, could save her. But the way it was going... Amy shuddered.
A gust of wind slapped the side of the house. Amy smiled not a window rattled. The rain continued to beat down, sweeping in gray sheets across her property and onto that of Jake Winter, her horse-farmer neighbor. There’s a strange one , Amy thought. Perfectly content to ride around on his quarter horses and grow his thousand or so acres of hay and live alone, except for the cowboys who work for him. Takes all kinds ...
Jake had ridden over when the construction people were digging Amy’s basement and beginning her landscaping and introduced himself. He was a good-looking guy, maybe a couple of years older than her, who was dressed in a faded denim jacket, jeans, and boots. His eyes were a pale blue, which in some faces could have appeared weak or submissive. The depth of Jake’s tan and the strong line of his jaw made his eyes look open, friendly, almost mischievous, as if only he knew the coming punch line of a joke.
“What are those fellows doing there?” Jake asked, pointing at a small backhoe that was digging a doghouse-size pit every dozen feet or so and following a line of white twine attached to short metal rods stuck into the ground.
“I have a load of bushes coming in the next couple of days,” Amy said. “They’re going to follow the driveway up to the house.”
“The bushes are already mature?” Jake asked. “Most folks buy seedlings and...”
“Patience isn’t my strongest virtue.” Amy smiled.
He met her smile with his own. “I can’t say it’s mine, either.”
Jake let his eyes roam over Amy’s property. “Fine piece of land. I didn’t even know ol’ man Woerner was selling it until I saw you up here walking around with the Realtor from town.” He shook his head. “Mr. Woerner never much cared for me since my friends and I tossed a string of cherry bombs into his privy one Halloween night a bunch of years ago.”
“I hope there was no one in it.”
“No, there wasn’t,” Jake said. “I’ll admit that it made a bit of a mess, though. Anyway, that’s probably why Woerner didn’t come to me when he wanted to sell.”
“Would you have bought this parcel?” Amy asked. “Well... probably. Yeah. I guess there’s no such thing as owning too much land.”
Jake’s horse snorted, and Jake turned to the animal, whose reins he held loosely in his left hand. “I’d better get this boy home,” he said. “I have chores waiting.” He stepped into a stirrup and swung easily into his Western saddle. “Do you ride, Amy?”
“Not since a pony ride on my sixth birthday,” Amy said.
Jake grinned. “I have an ol’ mare I can put you on. If you like, we can go out on horseback, and I can show you around a bit. There’re Indian burial grounds not far from here that not many know about. Maybe you’d like to see them.”
“I’d love to, Jake. Thanks.”
Jake nodded. “Good, then. See you soon.” He turned his horse away from Amy and loped off toward his own land, the horse’s hooves thunking heavily on the soil and steel shoes tossing an occasional divot into the air behind them.
The sound of a vehicle entering her driveway brought Amy back to the present. Through the sheets of rain and mist at her window, she watched a red Dodge pickup wend its way toward the house. She tugged the business card out of her jeans pocket and read it once again: “Julie Pulver, Reporter” it stated, with the words superimposed over the American eagle logo of the Coldwater News-Express . Amy scurried to the front door and opened it wide. “Come on in,” she called. “Hurry you’ll get soaked!”
The reporter had called two days before to request an interview. Amy had been perplexed then and still was now about why News-Express readers would have any interest in her. But, she thought, such a piece could serve as an introduction to her new neighbors and her new town.
Julie had stopped her truck in front of the main entrance to the house and now hefted herself onto the passenger bucket seat to avoid part of the frantic rush through the driving rain. She hustled out of the truck, slammed the door, and rushed up the steps.
Amy stepped aside, smiling. “Welcome, Julie. I’m Amy Hawkins. Here, let me take your coat. Isn’t this rain something?”
“It sure is.” Julie smiled.