Chapter One

      Bitter winds whipped through the valley and down the back of Max Delgado’s neck. Twenty years had passed since his last visit to the ranch. The Delgado Ranch, his family’s homestead since the early 1800s. He carried the name of the first Delgado in Texas: Maximiliano Francisco Puentes Delgado. Always sounded a bit pretentious to him.

      Looking over the fence to the vast landscape, he tried to pull up memories of his childhood, but being here didn’t help. He had been told he’d spent most of his early years here with his mother. There was probably a reason they were so elusive, or maybe he just didn’t have a good memory. He tended to live in the moment. It was easy, and he liked easy.

      His focus went back to the broken gate. November was never this cold in the Texas Hill Country. The way his life had been going the last few months, though, he probably shouldn’t be surprised.

      Right on cue, the rotten wood crumbled in his gloved hand, the old hardware now useless. The corral was in worse shape than Max had first thought. He’d need a truckload of panels before he put any bulls in this pen. He had hauled a couple practice bulls along with his favorite horses.

      They were getting restless and needed to be unloaded. He glanced back at the neglected pens and arena. Either his uncle had lied about the condition of the ranch, or the man he’d hired had been cashing the checks without doing the work.

      His father’s voice jumped through his head, calling him useless and lazy. Dropping to his haunches, he planted his elbows above his knees and lowered his head. The memories he tried ignoring bombarded his brain. All those years spent trying to prove himself to a father who didn’t care, trying to gain approval from a man who had written him off when he was ten. A man who was now dead. Any chance of mending that relationship was gone.

      In the past when these thoughts started crowding in, he’d have leaped on a bull or driven until he found a crowd that would help him drown the feelings he didn’t want to deal with.

      But that was getting old. A few months ago, he’d tried something new. He’d sought out Pastor Wayne, the cowboy preacher who followed the rodeo circuit. So now he prayed. He prayed for wisdom and patience.

      “I’m hungry.” One of his new responsibilities interrupted the prayer.

      “Me, too, and I’m cold. Can we go inside?”

      Even though Tomas and Isaac were a year apart at six and five, he wasn’t sure who was who. What he did know was that his half brothers had started grumbling about an hour ago. All three of them. He shot a glance at the teen. Ethan had asked to come along on the road trip. Ethan’s mother, the second wife, had headed back to Chicago and didn’t seem to care that her son wanted to spend the holidays with three brothers he had just met at his father’s funeral. Right now, the only thing that made them family was a last name. On impulse Max had thought this trip would give them a chance to connect before the little ones went to live with their aunt and Ethan returned to school.

      “Max!” they cried out at the same time.

      With a heavy sigh, he made sure to smile at them. It wasn’t their fault, and it wouldn’t be right to get mad at them. He’d seen the boys once, when they were too small to remember him. Now they had lost both parents and were stuck with brothers they didn’t know, other than what they had been told.

      He rubbed one of them on the head. “There are some protein bars in the truck.”

      “We ate them.”

      He glanced over his shoulder. “The whole box?”

      His littlest brothers nodded in unison. That couldn’t be good for their stomachs.

      “Um...then get the chips. There’s beef jerky, too.”

      “Ethan ate all those.” They stood, arms crossed, mirror images of each other. The sixteen-year-old was leaning against the barn, still staring at his phone. The kid hadn’t looked up once all day. Actually, Max couldn’t remember seeing his eyes. Even during the funeral, he’d had his gaze glued to the small screen in his hand.

      Max pinched the bridge of his nose. So far, nothing had gone right on this trip. The temperature had to have dropped twenty degrees since they left Dallas this morning.

      Standing, he arched his back until he heard the popping. He winced at the pain in his shoulder. Who was he kidding? Nothing had been right for the last two months since he was stomped on by Texas Fire. He’d wanted to be the cowboy who finally stayed on that bull for a full eight seconds. He’d done it, too, but at the cost of a healthy body. One broken collarbone and one fractured eye socket were added to his already long list of wrecked body parts.

      “My phone’s about to die.” Ethan looked up for the first time. “I need to charge it. It’s like we dropped off the earth.”

      Max wasn’t sure why the teen had even asked to join them, or why he’d agreed to it. He sighed. The kid’s