Dancing in the Moonlight - Harlequin.com

30 DANCING IN THE MOONLIGHT
taken advantage of her father’s naiveté and his imperfect
command of English. Thinking he was taking a big
step toward expanding the Luna, Abel had paid the Cold
Creek thousands of dollars for water rights that had
turned out to be virtually useless. Abel should have
taken the bastard to court—or at least stopped paying
each month for nothing.
But he had insisted on remitting every last penny he
owed to Hank Dalton and, after a few years with poor
ranch returns, had been forced to take on two jobs to
cover the debt.
She barely saw him from the age of eleven until his
death five years later. One night after Abel had spent all
day on the tractor baling hay then turned around and
driven to Idaho Falls to work the graveyard shift at his
factory job, he’d been returning to the Luna when he had
fallen asleep at the wheel of his old Dodge pickup.
The truck rolled six times and ended up in a ditch,
and her kind, generous father was killed instantly.
She knew exactly who should shoulder the blame.
The Daltons had killed her father just as surely as if
they’d crashed into him in one of the shiny new pickups
they always drove.
She sipped her coffee and shifted her leg as the constant
pins-and-needles phantom pains became uncomfortable.
Was there room in her life right now for old bitterness?
she wondered. She had plenty of new troubles to
brood about without wallowing around in the mud and
muck of ancient history.
Now that she’d come home, she saw no reason she and
the Daltons couldn’t just stay out of each other’s way.