PROLOGUE

      San Antonio, Texas October

      EIGHT SECONDS.

      Outside the world of rodeo, it was hardly any time at all.

      Add two thousand pounds of ticked-off bull—aptly named Buzzsaw—to the equation, though, and eight seconds could seem a whole lot like forever.

      Standing at the bar in a little backstreet, hole-in-the-wall dive a more prudent man would likely have steered clear of, Austin McKettrick reflected on the ride he’d made a few hours before and wondered why he didn’t feel more like celebrating.

      For months now, ever since the first go-round with that particular bull, when he’d nearly been killed, Austin had thought about little else except riding Buzzsaw.

      Now that he’d done it, and laid a demon or two to rest in the process, he was fresh out of worthy objectives.

      A flicker in the mirror behind the bar drew Austin’s attention; he adjusted his hat and scanned the shadowy width of the glass with an imperceptible movement of his eyes.

      Shit, he thought as he watched his brothers, Tate and Garrett, approach.

      They were both cowboys, lean and tall, with broad shoulders and Clint Eastwood attitudes. Folks just naturally stepped out of their way.

      Without turning around, Austin lifted his mug and took a long, slow sip of beer.

      Tate, the eldest of the three, bellied up to the bar on Austin’s right, while Garrett took the left side, both of them crowding into his space. As if he might not have noticed them otherwise. He grinned to himself and adjusted his hat again.

      Pinky, the bartender, a woman in her mid-seventies with her hair plaited into a long gray braid and skin that glowed with good health behind a veil of wrinkles, appeared right away.

      “What’ll it be?” she asked, her gaze moving from Tate’s face to Garrett’s, but slipping right on past Austin’s as if he weren’t there.

      Once married to one of the wranglers on the Silver Spur, Pinky was still a friend of the family. The wrangler, on the other hand, was long gone.

      Tate, always a hand with the ladies, tugged at the brim of his hat, gentlemanlike, and favored the woman with that famous white-toothed smile of his. “Nothing for me, thanks,” he said, exaggerating the drawl. “How’ve you been, Pinky?”

      “I’m holding up okay,” Pinky allowed. She smiled, nodded to Garrett. “I hear there’s going to be a double wedding out there on the Silver Spur come this New Year’s Eve. That true?”

      “Sure is,” Garrett answered easily. “Your invitation will be along in the mail, Pinky.”

      “So you’re both getting hitched?” Pinky said after clucking her tongue at the marvel of it all.

      “Yes, ma’am,” Tate replied. “I’m marrying Libby Remington, and Garrett’s tying the knot with her sister, Julie.”

      Pinky gave a long, low whistle of exclamation through her teeth. “Brothers marrying sisters. Don’t that beat all? Your kids will be double-cousins, won’t they?”

      “Yep,” Garrett said.

      At long last, Pinky fixed Austin with a look. “Tate’s taking a wife,” she said, cutting straight to the chase. “So is Garrett. What’s keeping you single, handsome?”

      Tate and Garrett both leaned in a little, putting the squeeze on him.

      Austin felt heat climb his neck, and he was glad for the dim, smoky light, because there were a few things he wanted to keep to himself.

      Nobody needed to know he was embarrassed.

      “I’m too young to get married,” he told Pinky, employing his most endearing grin.

      “Nonsense,” Pinky blustered. “Marriage might settle you down a little. And you could do with some settling down, if you ask me.”

      Austin refrained from pointing out that he hadn’t asked her.

      It was right about then that he felt a strange squeezing sensation in his lower back, and his left leg went numb to the knee. He shifted his weight to the right, hoping to relieve some of the pressure, but it didn’t help much.

      “Tate and I couldn’t agree more,” Garrett chatted on. “Austin definitely ought to settle down. Quit bumming around the rodeo circuit, start a family, do something constructive with his life.”

      Privately, Austin scoffed at his brother’s remark. Garrett had a hell of a nerve making a speech like that. Up until a few months ago, when Julie Remington had roped him in and then hog-tied him for good, Brother Number Two had worked for a United States senator and had his pick of smart, beautiful, willing women.

      Tate hadn’t exactly lived like a monk either, back in the wild days after he and Cheryl divorced and before he’d fallen back in love with Libby, his high school sweetheart and Julie’s older sister.

      The way they talked now, a person could almost imagine that they’d been living saintly and celibate lives right along.

      Austin took a long swig of his beer and waited for the feeling in his leg to come back.

      “Do you know what he did tonight?” Tate asked, on a roll now, resting an elbow on the bar and leaning earnestly in Pinky’s direction.

      “No tellin’,” Pinky said with a shake of her head. “Could have been just about anything.”

      “He rode Buzzsaw,” Garrett informed the bartender, as though Austin weren’t standing right there between his brothers, both of them shoulder-mashing him. “Managed to draw the same bull that tore him apart last year. Took a whole team of surgeons to sew our baby brother back together, and what does he do?”

      Pinky’s blue eyes grew round. She stared at Austin as though he were seven kinds of a fool and then some. “Well, I’ll be damned,” she said. “Always said you had more looks than good sense, and now here’s the proof.”

      Austin didn’t have an answer handy, and he wouldn’t have gotten the chance to use one, anyhow. Suddenly, the