Free Sun Kissed by Catherine Anderson

win tonight. An occasion like this calls for a toast.”
    Samantha left the table to get wineglasses and a bottle of merlot. As she set the bottle on the table and started to open it, Parker snatched the corkscrew from her hands. “Here, let me.”
    “I do know how to open a bottle of wine,” Samantha reminded him.
    If Parker heard her, he gave no sign of it. She circled the table to resume her seat. The wine was soon poured, and Frank passed her a glass.
    “To the finest breeder and trainer this side of the Mississippi,” her dad said with a lift of his goblet. “Congratulations, sweetheart. Blue Blazes is a horse to be proud of.”
    “Hear, hear!” her brothers said, and each took a swallow of merlot.
    “Present company excluded, of course,” Zach said with a grin. “About you being the finest breeder and trainer, I mean. On that count, I think we all run neck and neck.”
    Another toast was made to Blue, the finest cutting horse this side of the Mississippi, which prompted Zachto once again say, “Present company excluded, of course.”
    There followed hoots of laughter when Parker said, “Speak for yourself. I’m not a horse.”
    Clint seconded that with, “Me, neither.”
    When the laughter abated, Clint was complimented yet again on the soup.
    “It’s all that cheese he puts in it,” Quincy, the health nut, complained. “You can make anything taste good if you put in enough cheese.”
    “You ever stop to think that God gave us cheese?” Zach protested.
    “Not to mention our taste buds,” Parker tacked on. “They regenerate every four days. Seems to me we’re supposed to enjoy the taste of our food.”
    “You can enjoy your food without clogging all your arteries,” Quincy countered. “Do you have any inkling how much fat is in just one of those sausages?”
    And so it went, the members of her family arguing good-naturedly back and forth as they enjoyed the meal. The tension eased from Samantha’s shoulders, and a slight smile touched her lips as she attended the conversation. There would be time enough later to worry about her difficulties with them. Tonight she wanted only to relax and enjoy being together.

Chapter Five
    T he log walls of Jake’s living room shimmered in the light like polished amber. Tucker, replete after a fabulous steak dinner, relaxed from being pampered, and kicked back in a leather recliner with an ice pack on his nose, was considering the possibility of a short nap. With half his face covered and still partly numb from the Novocain injections, he couldn’t comfortably engage in the after-supper conversation taking place between his dad and elder brother, so he stared at the open rafters above him instead, only half listening to the debate on all the possible causes of mad cow disease. Occasionally when Harv and Jake were both dead wrong, he thought about putting in his two cents’ worth, but the wine he’d had with his meal was making him feel too sleepy.
    That was one of the things he liked about Jake’s log house: its relaxed atmosphere. Shortly after Jake’s marriage to Molly, a cute, whiskey-haired woman no taller than Tucker’s mother and almost as round, the original structure had burned to the ground. Tucker had expected the identical new house to take on a different characterwith Molly in charge of decorating. But somehow she’d managed to put her stamp on every room without altering the rustic theme. Handmade furniture, an array of Western paintings by local artists, and a collection of antique farming and ranching implements worked together with more feminine accents to create an appealing space where a man could sprawl in a comfortable, oversize chair and not worry about his boots soiling the upholstery.
    Tucker liked his own house, a two-story Victorian surrounded by English gardens and a white picket fence. He’d had the spacious interior professionally decorated, and every room was the antithesis of what he’d known as a kid. The furniture had