Summertime on the Ranch by Carolyn Brown (leveled readers txt) 📗

morning glories climbing the porch posts were starting to open with the approach of dawn. She unlocked the front door. Coming home early and grabbing a few hours by herself after a gig was just what she needed that morning. She’d wanted closure, but she sure hadn’t gotten any. If anything, she was more agitated than ever.

She boiled a kettle of water, poured it over green tea leaves in a ceramic pot, and waited for the tea to steep. She propped up her feet on the hassock beside the cold fireplace and watched the sun come up through the French doors leading out onto the patio. As it topped the well house, she could see the silhouette of her first oil well, now standing as a silent sentinel to all that was hers, and the beginning of the successful enterprise known as Conrad Oil, which had grown so fast it still didn’t seem quite real.

Dawn was gone and a new Sunday was born as she poured her tea into a cup and put a slice of Hilda’s homemade bread in the toaster. Granny would have liked this house. She would have fussed about the cost of it, but she would have grinned that big smile that made her eyes disappear in a face so full of wrinkles it looked like a road map. And she would have turned over in her grave if she knew Angel paid a gardener these days to keep the roses blooming and the morning glories watered, and had a housekeeper. But when Granny had inherited this property from her father and moved with Angel to the original three-room house on this twenty acres, Angel hadn’t owned an oil company.

Angel buttered the bread with sweet butter. Someday she might have to watch fat grams and calories, but not today. She liked real butter on her toast, just as her granny had. Thoughts of the past flitted through her mind.

She and her grandmother had arrived with all their belongings in the back of that old rusty green truck that looked like an accident waiting for a place to happen. The old house had only three rooms—a small living room and kitchen, a tiny bathroom, and one bedroom where she and Granny put their twin beds. They’d lived there happily enough until four years later, when her granny had died peacefully in her sleep.

The preacher had read a poem and the Twenty-third Psalm at the graveside service, and a few church members showed up along with the girls in her band. Three months later, Angel had mortgaged the property and drilled a gusher. From there, she’d taken one giant step after another, until today she was the major stockholder and president of her own oil company, based in Denison, with branch offices in Oklahoma and Louisiana as well.

Angel closed her eyes. She had all the money she could spend in a lifetime…all the excitement of unexpected success…all the peacefulness of a country home to enjoy for the rest of her life…but none of it would ever ease the cold, blue loneliness in her heart.

Secrets in the Sand

On sale July 2021

About the Author

Carolyn Brown is an award-winning New York Times and USA Today bestselling author and a RITA finalist. She is the author of more than one hundred novels and novellas, and her books have been translated into nineteen foreign languages.

She was born in Texas but grew up in southern Oklahoma where she and her husband, Charles, a retired English teacher, make their home. They have three grown children and enough grandchildren to keep them young.

When she’s not writing, Carolyn likes to plot new stories in her backyard with her tom cat, Boots Randolph Terminator Outlaw, who protects the yard from all kinds of wicked varmints…like crickets, locusts, and spiders. Visit Carolyn at carolynbrownbooks.com.

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