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      To Judy Duarte and Sheri WhiteFeather—finally, our Byrds find life!

       Chapter One

      “Whoa there, Lady Bird, let me give you a hand with that.”

      As Donna Byrd heard the deep, drawling voice behind her, she kept on lifting the hand-carved rocking chair that she’d barely been able to liberate from the bed of one of the Flying B’s pickups.

      But just as she got the furniture under control, she looked over her shoulder to see who was calling her such a name as “Lady Bird,” and her grip faltered.

      Dimples.

      That was what she saw first. Then the light blue eyes that pierced her with an unexpected shock. A shock that she hadn’t felt for… Well, a long, long time.

      A shock that she really didn’t have time for with everything that was going down at the Flying B Ranch.

      The owner of those dimples didn’t seem to care about Donna’s bottlenecked schedules or Byrd family scandals as he grabbed the wobbling rocking chair from her and deftly swung it on to one of his broad shoulders. Then he flashed that smile at her again, his cowboy hat now shading his face from the early July sun. “Where do you need me to put this…?”

      “You can call me Donna Byrd,” she said, correcting him before he could get too cute and call her Lady Bird again. She gestured toward the main house, with two separate wings spreading out from its core and a wraparound porch. It was the very definition of Texas cattleman’s domain to her. “You can set the rocker in the living room, if you don’t mind.”

      “I don’t mind a bit.”

      He gave her a long look that covered her all the way from head to toe and sizzled along every inch of skin.

      By the time his gaze burned a trail back up her body again, Donna’s breath had completely stopped.

      Even though she was trying to tell herself that she didn’t know him from Adam, she vaguely remembered him. She’d seen him one time, a few months ago, back when her cousin Tammy had injured herself and this same ranch hand had been there to help her out.

      He hadn’t smiled at her this way, though… At least, Donna didn’t think so. She’d been too focused on Tammy’s injury to remember. Plus, there’d been a million other things distracting her, like turning the main house and surrounding cabins into a bed-and-breakfast business. She, her sister, Jenna and Tammy had inherited the property from a grandfather none of them had ever met before. Besides that, there were all the personal issues that she’d been trying to deal with.

      Even if she had noticed this guy’s dimples, she wouldn’t have had time for more than a passing glance.

      Now he winked at her and carried the rocker up the steps and through the front door she’d already opened. She took a moment, getting her first official good look at him, his worn Wranglers cupping his rear end, his white T-shirt clinging to the muscled lines of his back.

      That shock she’d felt before returned with a blast of heat, and she chased it away by shutting the pickup’s tailgate, the slam like a punch of reality.

      She was thirty-one, too old and too wise to be ogling cowboys. Besides, after she, Jenna and Tammy finished up with all the logistics of the B and B, there would be a big marketing push for Donna to carry out—a task that she had embraced wholeheartedly, since she could accomplish it from New York, where she planned to rent a less costly apartment than she’d had before her grandfather’s impending death had summoned all of the Byrd family to Texas. And when she got back to the city, she could return to real life—taking up where she’d left off after her online magazine, Roxey, had collapsed. She had ideas for a relaunch under a different title and premise in this new economy….

      As she went into the main house, she tried not to think about how the stock market had taken a hit, and how her finances had made her magazine tank. Her wonderful life, her stylish apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side and nights spent prowling all the new, hot restaurants nearby—it’d all fallen out from under her until Tex Byrd had called.

      She silently thanked her grandfather for thinking of his grandkids during his last days. He’d at least been successful in introducing all of them to each other, even if his big hope of reuniting his estranged sons hadn’t come true just yet.

      In the living room, she found the cheeky ranch hand standing over the rocking chair, which he’d set near a stone fireplace. It was right where she’d been thinking of putting it.

      “I appreciate your help,” she said, thinking this would be the end of him and she could get back to work.

      Yet, he wasn’t leaving. No, he was running a hand over the mahogany wood of the high-backed Victorian rocker, making her wonder what it would feel like to have his long fingers mapping her with such slow deliberation.

      “Where’d you find this beauty?” he asked with that lazy drawl.

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