Boneyard Ridge. Пола Грейвс
He wanted to argue with her, the urge to spill the whole ugly tale so powerful it felt like poison in his gut.
His leg was bad. It couldn’t do the same things he’d once asked of it. But he was stronger now than he had been in the middle of that burning hell.
He’d never known that level of utter helplessness before in his life. He prayed to God he’d never know it again.
He willed Susannah to step back from him, to take away her soft warmth, her sweet scent, her gentle, disarming gaze.
Of course, being Susannah, she stepped closer, her hands lifting to his cheeks, ensnaring him. “I have no idea what to say to you,” she said, her voice a whisper. “I don’t know what you need.”
You, he thought with growing dismay. I just need you.
Boneyard Ridge
Paula Graves
Alabama native PAULA GRAVES wrote her first book, a mystery starring herself and her neighborhood friends, at the age of six. A voracious reader, Paula loves books that pair tantalizing mystery with compelling romance. When she’s not reading or writing, she works as a creative director for a Birmingham advertising agency and spends time with her family and friends. She is a member of Southern Magic Romance Writers, Heart of Dixie Romance Writers and Romance Writers of America. Paula invites readers to visit her website, www.paulagraves.com.
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For all the wounded warriors who put their lives and their bodies on the line every day to make the world a safer place.
God bless you, and thank you for all you do.
Contents
Smoky Joe’s Saloon had never pretended to be anything more than a hillbilly honky-tonk, a hole in the wall on Old Purgatory Road that served cold beer, peanuts roasted in the shell and a prodigious selection of Merle Haggard hits on the ancient jukebox in the corner.
At the moment, “The Fightin’ Side of Me” blasted through the jukebox’s tinny speakers, an apt sound track for the bar brawl brewing around the pool table in the corner.
Two men circled the table like a pair of wary Pit Bulls, eyes locked in silent combat. The older of the two was also the drunker, a heavyset man with bloodshot eyes and a misshapen nose, mottled by red spider veins. He seemed to be the aggressor, from Alexander Quinn’s vantage point at a table in the corner of the small bar, but the younger, leaner man had shown no signs of trying to de-escalate the tension.
On the contrary, an almost frantic light gleamed in his green eyes, a feral hunger for conflict that Quinn had noticed the first time he’d ever laid eyes on the man.
His name was Hunter Bragg, and he’d finally found the trouble he’d been looking for all night.
“Come on, Toby, you know he’s going to beat the hell out of you the second you take a swing. Then I’m going to have to call the police and you’ve already got a couple of D and Ds on your record this year, don’t you?” The reasonable question, uttered in a tone that wavered somewhere between sympathy and annoyance, came from the bartender, a burly man in his early sixties with shoulder-length salt-and-pepper hair and a gray-streaked beard. He was dressed like most of the patrons,