For The Children

Leaning forward, she pressed her bosom to the steering wheel and slowed the pickup for a better look-see at the stranger running like a skinned cat from her neighbor’s pack of coonhounds. Suit tails flapping in the wind and tie ringing his neck, the “cat” was losing ground fast. Served the man right if the pack treed him.

She’d been taught from a young age not to trust flatlanders—anyone not born on the mountain. She’d never understood the clan’s suspicion of strangers—until she’d attended the University of Kentucky in Lexington and discovered that people weren’t always what they appeared to be.

Some lessons had to be learned the hard way.

As she pulled the pickup even with the stranger, she noticed his face was redder than a prize-winning tomato and his cheeks puffed like a steam locomotive. The poor idiot was plumb tuckered. After retrieving the shotgun from under the bench seat, she pointed the barrel out the passenger window, then blasted the truck horn.

The stranger glanc ... read full excerpt from For the Children ebook