CHAPTER ONE

      LINDY PARKER HATED the rodeo. Just in general. The sights, the smells, the cloud of testosterone that covered everything.

      She hadn’t always hated it, but now it all reminded her of her ex-husband. Damien was so firmly part of that world to her. Whenever she’d gone to rodeo events, it had been for the sole purpose of seeing Damien’s work. To see the results of PR campaigns he’d run and to rub elbows with possible sponsors.

      The rest of it didn’t much appeal to her. Dirt and bright lights and overly loud announcers.

      But if there was one thing she hated more than the rodeo itself, it was the bull riders.

      Cocky. Arrogant. Jerks.

      Even her younger brother, Dane, suffered from a bad case of it when he’d been out on the circuit for too long.

      But there was no bull rider who irked her quite like Wyatt Dodge. Her dear ex’s favorite rider. A man who’d made Damien tons of money and inflated his ego beyond the telling of it, which, in her humble opinion, had contributed to the flagrant affair her husband had engaged in with a woman who had—at the time—worked at Grassroots Winery, and had been young enough that she still probably remembered how to get to Sesame Street.

      Not that it was Wyatt Dodge’s fault. No, Damien was responsible for his own body parts and where they wandered. He was the one who had made vows to her, and even if she did feel like perhaps his prolonged exposure to a pack of manwhores hadn’t helped her marriage, she knew exactly where the fault lay for what had transpired.

      With