Total pages in book: 248
Estimated words: 236036 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1180(@200wpm)___ 944(@250wpm)___ 787(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 236036 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1180(@200wpm)___ 944(@250wpm)___ 787(@300wpm)
Find Addy here:
https://books2read.com/ap/xdkVkQ/Adaline-Raine
Newsletter:
https://dl.bookfunnel.com/zzvw5juwbm
Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/Raine.Adaline
TikTok:
https://www.tiktok.com/@adalineraine
BookBub:
https://www.bookbub.com/profile/adaline-raine
Reader Group:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/allieaddysecret
Hand-Me-Down Heart
By Maggie Ryan
She’d never wanted a knight and has never been drawn to shiny armor. She much prefers the denim and leather worn by her Cowboy Daddy.
A pink tornado brought an incredibly feisty woman back to me.
All I had to do now was prove to her that she was not only finally home, but that she belonged to me.
@2026 by GTB Publishing LLC and Maggie Ryan
All rights reserved
No parts of the book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without express written permission by the publisher.
Without in any way limiting the author’s exclusive rights under copyright, any use of this publication to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Published by Dirty Daddies Publishing, an imprint of GTB Publishing.
Chapter One
Lincoln
A breeze heavy with the scent of churned earth and the promise of rain brushed across my face and lifted the hair of Zephyr’s mane. The unsettled lowing of anxious cattle surrounded me.
Normally, the fields were painted in the golden glow that occurred as the sun began to tuck itself behind the mountains for the night. Instead, the vista appeared pierced by spears of angry flames. The only thing worse than being stuck out in a rainstorm was being surrounded by cattle ready to scatter like an upturned bag of Skittles.
I rode up to where Luther was standing in his stirrups on Duke, his lips moving to indicate that he was counting. Again.
“Still short?” I asked even as I did the calculations in my head to verify his answer when it came.
“Yeah. Three.” Luther looked at me before tilting his head toward the herd. “You can stop recounting and just listen to what they’re telling us.”
I removed my hat to run my hands through my hair as a memory surfaced. As boys we’d believed the herd held actual conversations, and we had tried to one-up each other by decoding their secret language. As an adult I’d left childhood imagination behind. These days all I listened for was the timbre of that lowing changing in a way which could indicate agitation. And that was the sound now filling my ears.
I gazed over the animals who milled about each other before moving to mingle with another grouping almost as if holding those very discussions. “So, what are they saying?”
Luther leaned forward in the saddle, his brow furrowed and eyes closed . When I began to speak, he shushed me with a single finger before he opened his eyes.
“So?” I coaxed when he remained silent.
“How the hell would I know, I’m not a cow.”
“No? Then why are you so full of bullshit?” I slapped his arm with my Stetson before resettling it on my head.
He grinned. “Still, you gotta admit, it’s like the others always seem to know when one of their own is missing, right?”
I shrugged. “Nothing’s impossible.”
“This weather’s not helping. They look about ready to bolt.”
I couldn’t argue with that. I just prayed it was jitters about the upcoming storm and not something more ominous.
“They probably wandered down into the gully,” Luther said, all joking aside.
I took the time to look in the direction he indicated and nodded. “Maybe, though I’m not counting on it, especially not the pregnant one. Not sure why they seem to choose to isolate themselves from the herd, but you can damn well bet she’ll go into labor in the dead of night.” I looked out across the land and sighed. “You take the gully and I’ll head toward the river.”
“That’ll work. Let’s just hope they’ve not decided to climb back up the mountain.”
My gaze automatically lifted to where the foothills began to rise into one of the highest mountain ranges this side of the Mississippi. The Cascades were nothing to joke about. We’d had a lot of rain recently and water eroded soil, turning boulders that had stood as sentinels since the beginning of creation into rolling stones capable of knocking cows off their feet and crushing them like flies.
“Let’s not borrow trouble.” I didn’t bother pulling my phone from my pocket. Service was spotty at best in good weather. In a storm it sucked. “If we find them, we’ll fire shots to let the other know how many so we’re not looking for no reason.”
“And if we don’t?”
Once again, I looked toward the hills. “If we don’t find them within a couple of hours, we’ll meet up at Old Hairy and head up the mountain together.”