LITMIR.BIZ

      PROLOGUE

       Early May

      “You miserable piece of horseflesh,” Matt McCafferty growled as he climbed to his feet, dusted the back of his jeans and glowered at the wild-eyed Appaloosa colt. There was a reason the damned beast was named Diablo Rojo, the orneriest two-year-old on the Flying M Ranch. A challenge. In all his thirty-seven years, Matt had never met a horse he couldn’t tame. But he was having second thoughts about Red Devil. Major ones. The horse had spirit. Fire. Not easily tamed. Like a lot of women Matt had run across. “Okay, you bastard, let’s start over.”

      He reached down and picked up his hat. Slapping it hard against his thigh, he squinted into the lowering Montana sun as it started its slow descent behind the western hills. “You and I, Devil, we’re gonna come to a reckoning and we’re gonna do it this afternoon.”

      The colt tossed his fiery head and snorted noisily, then lifted his damned tail like a banner and trotted along the far fence line, the empty saddle on his back creaking mockingly. Damned fool horse. Matt squared his hat on his head. “It isn’t over,” he assured the snorting animal.

      “It may as well be.”

      Matt froze at the sound of his father’s voice. Turning on the worn heel of his boot, he watched as Juanita pushed John Randall’s wheelchair across the parking lot separating the rambling, two-storied ranch house from the series of connecting paddocks that surrounded the stables. Matt didn’t harbor much love for his bastard of a father, but he couldn’t help feel an ounce of pity for the once-robust man now confined to “the damned contraption,” as he referred to the chair.

      John Randall’s sparse white hair caught in the wind and his skin was pale and thin, but there was still a spark in his blue eyes. And he loved this spread. More than he loved anything, including his children.

      “I tried to talk him out of this,” Juanita reprimanded as she parked the wheelchair near the fence where Harold, John Randall’s partially crippled old springer spaniel, had settled into a patch of shade thrown by a lone pine tree. “But you know how it is. He is too terco…stubborn, for his own good.”

      “And it’s served me well,” the old man said as he used the sun-bleached rails of the fence to pull himself to his full height. Lord, he was thin—too thin. His jeans and plaid shirt hung loosely from his once-robust frame. But he managed a tough-as-old-leather smile as he leaned over the top bar and watched his middle son.

      “Maybe you can talk some sense into him,” Juanita said, sending Matt a worried glance and muttering something about loco, prideful men.

      “I doubt it. I never could before.”

      The older McCafferty waved Juanita off. “I’m fine. Needed some fresh air. Now I want to talk to Matt. He’ll bring me inside when we’re through.”

      Juanita didn’t seem convinced, but Matt nodded. “I think I can handle him,” he said to the woman who had helped raise him. Clucking her tongue at the absurdity of the situation, Juanita bustled off to the house, the only home Matt had known growing up.

      “That one,” John Randall said, hitching his chin back to the wayward colt. “He’ll give ya a run for your money.” He slid a knowing glance at his second-born. “Like a lot of women.”

      Matt was irritated. He wiped the sweat from his forehead and swatted at a horsefly that got a little too close for comfort. “Is that what you came all the way out here to say to me, the reason you had Juanita push you outside?”

      “Nope.” With an effort the older man dug into the pocket of his jeans. “I got somethin’ here for ya.”

      “What?” Matt was instantly suspicious. His father’s gifts never came without a price.

      “Somethin’I want ya to have—oh, here we go.” John Randall withdrew a big silver buckle that winked in the bright Montana sun. Inlaid upon the flat surface was a gold bucking bronco, still as shiny as the day John Randall had won it at a rodeo in Canada more than fifty years earlier. He dropped it into his son’s calloused hand.

      “You used to wear this all the time,” Matt observed, his jaw growing tight.

      “Yep. Reminded me of my piss-and-vinegar years.” John Randall settled back in his wheelchair, and his eyes clouded a bit. “Good years,” he added thoughtfully, then squinted upward to stare at his son. “I don’t have much longer on this earth, boy,” he said, and before Matt could protest, his father raised a big-knuckled hand to silence him. “We both know it so there’s no sense in arguin’ the facts. The man upstairs, he’s about to call me home…that is, if the devil don’t take me first.”

      Matt clenched his jaw. Didn’t say a word. Waited.

      “I already spoke to Thorne about the fact that I’m dyin’, and seein’ as you’re the next in line, I thought I’d talk to you next. Slade…well, I’ll catch up to him soon. Now, I know I’ve made mistakes in my life, the good Lord knows I failed your mother….”

      Matt didn’t comment, didn’t want to even think about the bleak time when John Randall took up with a much younger woman, divorced his wife and introduced his three sons to Penelope, “Penny” Henley, who would become their stepmother and give them all a half sister whom none of them wanted to begin with.

      “I have a lot of regrets about all that,” John Randall said over the sigh of the wind, “but it’s all water under the bridge now since both Larissa and Penny are dead.” He rubbed his jaw and cleared his throat. “Never thought I’d bury two wives.”

      “A wife and an ex-wife,” Matt clarified.

      The old man’s thin lips pursed, but he didn’t argue. “What I want from you—from all my children—is grandchildren. You know that. It’s an old man’s dream, I know, but it’s only natural. I’d like to go to my grave in peace with the knowledge that you’ll find yourself a good woman and settle down, have a family, and that the McCafferty name will go on for a few more generations.”

      “There’s lots of time—”

      “Not for me, there ain’t!” John Randall snapped.

      Feeling as if he was being manipulated for the umpteenth time by his father, Matt tried to hand the buckle back. “If this is some kind of bribe or deal or—”

      “No bribe.” The old man spit in disgust. “I want you to have that buckle because it means something to me, and since you rode rodeo a few years back, I thought you might appreciate it.” He wagged a finger at the buckle. “Turn it over.”

      Matt flipped the smooth piece of metal and read the engraving on the backside. “To my cowboy. Love forever, Larissa.” His throat closed for a minute when he thought of his mother with her shiny black hair and laughing brown eyes, which had saddened over the years of her marriage. From a free spirit, she’d become imprisoned on this ranch and had sought her own kind of solace

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