CHAPTER ONE

      GRANT DODGE WAS ALONE. And that was how he liked it.

      He had spent the entire day out in the cold mountain air conducting roping demonstrations and leading trail rides. Not that he minded any of those things in isolation. It was the addition of people that made them somewhat challenging.

      Worse than having to deal with people in a general sense was dealing with people who recognized him.

      Not the typical small-town recognition; he was used to that. Though he could live without getting sad widower face from people he barely knew in the grocery store, but even then, at least it was people who knew him because he’d lived in Gold Valley all his life.

      What really got to him was the people who recognized him from the news stories.

      Eight years hadn’t done anything to make those moments less weird. People often couldn’t place where they knew him from, but they knew they did. And they would press, and press, until he told them.

      The woman who had recognized him today had been a grandmother. A great-grandmother, even. Sweet and gray-haired and looking at him with sympathetic eyes that made him want to jump off the nearest bridge.

      It always seemed worse around the holidays. Perhaps because of the sentimentality people seemed to feel that time of year. And tried to inflict on him.

      He didn’t really know.

      Whatever the reason, he seemed to have an uptick in well-meaning-but-irritating interactions.

      Maybe that was why he always wanted to drink more this time of year, too.

      He shook his head and settled down into his chair, looking around the small, cozy cabin that he called home. And then he looked into the full, inviting whiskey glass he called salvation.

      He didn’t have a problem or anything. He was functional. He considered that the benchmark. Low though it might be.

      He was functional enough that his family mostly joked about his drinking, which meant it was probably fine.

      But the one thing he didn’t want to do was get in bed at night stone-cold sober. Sometimes he could. When the long, hard day of work came inside with him, resting on aching shoulders and the lower back that was getting touchier with each passing year—because age. Not that thirty-four was