CHAPTER 1

Scowling and warm behind the ears, Landry Sutton picked himself up off thehoof-hardened ground of Walker Parrish's main corral. Stubbornly setting his jawand squaring his shoulders, he laid silent claim to his dignity and finally bentto retrieve what remained of his hat. The bronc, a gelding aptly named PureMisery, had stomped it flat in the brief but hectic process of throwing him thatthird and—for today—final time.

Landry reckoned he should be glad his skull hadn't met the same fate as hisheadgear, but he couldn't quite make the philosophical shift fromadrenaline-fused annoyance to gratitude. He was frustrated, embarrassed andpissed off—and those were just the emotions he had names for.

Arrogance on four legs, the sweat-lathered horse took a few prancing turnsaround the corral, moving outward in ever-widening circles. He snorted once ortwice, nostrils flared, neck bowed into a curve, head held high and proud, earslaid so far back they were almost flat against his hide.

Finally, the gelding came to a purposeful halt about a dozen yards away fromLandry, hind legs planted firmly in the dirt, flanks quivering with a barelycontained strength that seemed about to bust loose in a whole new way, like aprimeval thunderstorm.

Go on, cowboy—try it again. That was the message.

Slowly, Landry became aware of their immediate surroundings, his and thehorse's—that son of Satan—though most of what lay beyond their battleground wasstill a dust-roiled haze, a void with its own heartbeat. Landry did register thepresence of his brother Zane perched on the top rail of the corral fence. Heknew his sibling was looking on with charitable, even benign, interest, waitingto see what would happen next.

Was Landry fool enough to get back on that crazy cayuse, he might have beenwondering, or would he finally see reason and call it a day?

"Anything broken?" Zane called, in a jocular drawl. He was only thirteen and ahalf months older than Landry, but the gap might have been wider by a decade,considering the dynamics between the two of them. Zane tended to come from theplace of older-and-wiser, like a father, or a venerable uncle—or a justice ofthe Supreme Court.

Stung anew, Landry merely glared in Zane's general direction for a few moments,then slapped his ruined hat against one thigh to vent some of the steam stillbuilding inside him. A handful of ranch workers—all employed by Walker Parrish,local rodeo-stock contractor and older brother to Zane's wife, Brylee—duckedtheir heads briefly, in half-assed attempts to hide their grins of enjoyment.

It was no big stretch to figure out what the other men were thinking, of course.After nearly a year in Montana, Landry was still an outsider, still thatdandified greenhorn from Chicago, still the perennial dude. Still and always thegreat Zane Sutton's kid brother.

And not much more.

Six feet tall, smart as hell and a self-made man, an independently wealthy oneno less, and a ranch owner in his own right, Landry normally didn't sweat thesmall stuff. The fact was, he'd never failed at anything he set out to do, inall his thirty-plus years of life, unless you counted his efforts to staymarried to Susan Ingersoll without committing murder, that was. To him, theill-fated marriage had been a disaster, yes, but he wouldn't have described itas an actual defeat. He and Susan never should have tied the knot in the firstplace, if only because they hadn't wanted the same things, even in thebeginning.

Now, aching in every muscle, bones seeming as brittle as if he'd aged by twentyyears since breakfast, his pride chafed raw as a sore with the scab ripped offtoo soon, Landry watched glumly as one of the ranch hands roped the bronc, ledhim out of the corral and turned him loose in the adjoining pasture.

Zane stood next to Landry now, there in the slowly settling dust. "Buy you abeer?" he said quietly. He started to raise one hand, as if to slap Landry onthe back, perhaps in brotherly reassurance, but he must have thought better ofthe gesture in the end, because he refrained.

It was just a beer, and Landry wanted one badly, but his first impulse was torefuse the offer, all the same. He and Zane had been close as kids, and right upthrough their late twenties, but then, around the time their mom died ...

Well, things had just gone to hell. Some kind of chasm had opened between thebrothers, and there didn't seem to be a way across. For the most part, they'dgone their separate ways, Zane taking to the rodeo circuit and eventuallywinding up in the movies, of all things, while Landry headed for Chicago, aplace that had always intrigued him. By going to night school and working daysand weekends as a barista at one of the coffee franchises, he'd gotten hisdegree, taken a job with Ingersoll Investments, originally landing in the mailroom. He'd climbed the corporate ladder and eventually met and married theboss's daughter, Susan.

Certain he'd found his niche at long last, Landry had pushed up his figurativesleeves and proceeded to make money—a shitload of it—for the company and,through bonuses and finally a partnership, for himself, as well.

"I wouldn't mind a beer right about now," Landry heard himself say, instead ofthe "No, thanks" instinct dictated. The more sensible thing would have been totake his sorry self straight home, of course, back to his half of Hangman'sBend. There, he could have tossed back a Scotch or two, gulped down some aspirinand maybe stood in a hot shower until his muscles stopped screaming.

So it was that they walked out of the corral together, Zane and Landry, passingthrough the gate, shutting it behind them. Zane waved a farewell to the othersas he and Landry headed for his rig, a silver extended-cab truck so covered indried mud that it might have been any color in the spectrum. Zane's adoptedmutt, Slim, waited patiently in the bed of the pickup, panting in the brightJune sunshine, perfectly content to be just what and where he was.

A person could learn a lot from a dog, Landry reflected silently. Stepping uponto the passenger-side running board, he paused long enough to pat the critteron the head and ruffle his floppy ears. "Hey, dog," he said, with gruffaffection. "How ya doin'?"

Talk about your rhetorical question.

Slim wagged his tail, appreciative but, at the same time, taking the greeting ashis just due, and then settled down for the short ride over to neighboringHangman's Bend.

Without pausing, Zane climbed behind the wheel, pushed the ignition button andlooked back over one shoulder, acknowledging the dog with a grin. He loved thatgoofball canine, no question about it, would have let him ride in the cab if thecritter had shown any inclination to do so. Slim had recently developed apreference for the back, though, seemed to like riding with a pile of feed sacksand whatever else Zane happened to be hauling at the time, and he showed nosigns of changing his mind anytime soon.

"You ought to get yourself a dog," Zane remarked, maneuvering the truck into aslow, wide turn. "They're real good company, you know."

His brother, the authority on loneliness, Landry thought, with an ironic inwardsigh. As if Zane had ever suffered any lack of "company," even before he'dsettled on the run-down, abandoned ranch outside Three Trees, Montana, the onehe and Landry had bought together, sight unseen, a few years before. These days,Zane had his beautiful bride, Brylee, first and foremost. And then there was theformidable but ever-faithful Cleo, their housekeeper—and Nash, Zane and Landry'shalf brother, a rowdy thirteen-year-old with a childhood behind him that madetheir hardscrabble upbringing look downright pampered.

"I'll get around to it," Landry allowed, still distracted by other thoughts."Getting a dog, I mean." A pause, followed by an irritated "There's no hurry, isthere?"

Zane didn't answer, and that was all right, because sometimes—and this was oneof them—they didn't feel a need to talk. The rig bounced down the long, rutteddriveway, dog and gear rattling in the back.

Walker's place, called Timber Creek, was a prosperous spread, to put it mildly,but the dirt trail leading to the main gate was in little better shape than acow path after a month of pounding rain followed by a ten-year drought. Out herein the wilds of Montana, Landry had observed, folks weren't overly concernedwith either convenience or appearances, whether they had two nickels to rubtogether or not. It probably wouldn't have occurred to most of them to smooththe way with a layer of asphalt. Sure, one or two showy types might have sprungfor a load of gravel, if the bills were current and the price of beef wasdecent, he supposed, but nobody paved a driveway.

Nope, even ranchers as successful as Walker Parrish seemed content to cope withwhatever conditions presented themselves—waist-high snow in the winter, thesticky mud of spring, which the locals called "gumbo," or the deep, dry dirtfurrows of summer and fall.

There were times, usually short-lived, when the lure of the place eluded Landrycompletely—like now.

Still cheerfully pensive, Zane drove on. The living quarters on his share ofHangman's Bend Ranch were relatively modest, considering the size of his bankaccount. He'd been what amounted to a modern-day John Wayne before he suddenlydecided to leave movie stardom behind for good, go back to the land andsubsequently reinvent himself. Now he and Brylee shared a nicely renovated stonehouse, large and comfortable, but certainly nothing fancy, by Hollywoodstandards at least. The barn was sturdy and the old-fashioned garage wasdetached, with a dented aluminum door that had to be raised and lowered by hand.Neither a tennis court nor a swimming pool marred the landscape.

Brylee was weeding the vegetable garden when Zane and Landry drove in, herever-present German shepherd, Snidely, supervising from the sidelines.

Zane's bride wore a floppy straw hat, her rich brown hair stuffed fetchingly upinside, a sleeveless blouse and denim jeans, frayed where she'd cut them offabove the knees to make shorts. Brylee's long legs were sun-browned, like herarms, and her feet were probably muddy and probably bare.

Seeing the truck, she beamed like a war bride at the approach of an overduetroop train and came toward them, hurrying but graceful, moving between rows ofcorn and green beans and Bibb lettuce.

Watching Brylee, Landry felt a pang of something sharp and forlorn, bleaker thanloneliness, but not quite qualifying as envy, while Zane jumped out of the rig,strode to meet his wife and, with a laugh, swept her right off her feet,swinging her around in a broad circle of celebration and then kissing hersoundly.

Slim, like any good country dog, bounded down from the back of the truck andrushed toward his master and mistress, barking, delighted by the ruckus, makinghimself part of it.

Brylee had lost her hat by then, and her hair spilled down over her shoulders inglorious, coffee-colored spirals, threaded with gold. Belatedly noting Landry'spresence, his sister-in-law blushed apricot-pink, a modern-day Eve just nowcoming to the realization that she and her Adam weren't blissfully alone in theGarden of Eden after all.

So much for a bout of lovemaking right there in the tall grass, Landry thought.He wouldn't have put it past them, if the circumstances were right. Wouldn'thave blamed them for it, either.

He smiled a "hello" at Brylee, reached for his hat and remembered that he'dtossed it into the back of Zane's pickup, but the words in his head,surprisingly affable, were meant for his brother. You lucky bastard.

"I promised this yahoo a beer," Zane announced, still grinning, cocking a thumbtoward Landry to identify him as the yahoo in question. The taut air around thecouple almost snapped, like a rubber band stretched beyond its limits, and thenlet go. "As you can see, the man's a little the worse for wear."

Although he was sure Zane hadn't meant anything by it, the remark remindedLandry with a wallop that he'd been thrown three times, that his clothes werestiff with dust and dried sweat and a combination of the two and that his bootswere caked with manure. Plenty of good old-fashioned dirt had ground itselfright into his hide, filling every pore, coating every hair on his head.

Again, it swamped him, that sense of selfconsciousness mingled with someindefinable loss, a factor he'd never had to cope with before the move toMontana.

"I'll be fine out here on the porch," he suggested, and instantly wished he'dkept his mouth shut, if only because the offer sounded so lame.

Brylee smiled warmly. Although she hadn't liked Landry when he first arrived inParable County, she'd mellowed noticeably since last Christmas, when she andZane had gotten married. "Don't worry about it," she responded, with a ruefulglance at her own grimy feet. "This is a ranch, and dirt comes with theterritory."

The screen door creaked just then, and Cleo— Zane and Brylee'shousekeeper—trundled through the gap and out onto the porch, her skin aglistening ebony, her dark eyes flashing, her gray hair partially tamed by abandanna scarf. She looked stern, but that was a pose, Landry suspected, theruse of a tenderhearted person trying to hold on to a little personal space.

"Say what, Mrs. Sutton?" Cleo challenged, making it clear that she'd overheardBrylee's statement about ranches and the inevitability of dirt. "I just nowfinished mopping the kitchen floor—it isn't even dry yet—and I don't care howmuch dirt it takes to make up this ranch. You're not setting foot in my cleanhouse until you hose those feet off good." In the next instant, Cleo's gazemoved over both Zane and Landry, sweeping them up into her good-naturedconsternation. "Same goes for the two of you. I don't work my fingers to thebone around this place for my health, you know. And a person's got to havestandards!"

Zane, apparently used to being lectured, simply grinned and gave the woman anaffable salute of acquiescence. The discourse sounded familiar to Landry, too—hecould easily imagine that warning coming from Highbridge, not quite so colorful,but with better enunciation and grammar.

Ah, Highbridge. Yet another reason Landry fit in around here about as well as anextra toe in a narrow-soled boot. He employed a butler. What self-respectingcowboy did that?

"You tell me what you want and I'll bring it out here," Cleo prattled on, handson her hips, elbows jutting. By then, the hint of a grin had appeared in hereyes, and the corners of her mouth twitched slightly. Like Highbridge, sheclearly relished stating her opinion, asked for or not.

"Beer," Zane replied lightly. "And make sure it's cold, if you don't mind."

Cleo narrowed her eyes, then fixed Brylee with a look. "Iced tea or lemonade foryou," she informed her crisply. "If you're not pregnant, it's not for lack ofeffort, now, is it, and we both know alcohol is no good for babies."

Brylee shook her head, but her color was high again. "Cleo," she scolded,laughing a little.