Chapter 1

      “I hate you! I hate this place. I want to go home.”

      “I know. Just do it.”

      Jordan Price threw down the rake, scattering the leaves he’d just gathered. His father chose not to point out that he’d just guaranteed himself more time spent in the task he loathed.

      “I’m never going to be such a jerk to my kids.”

      Wyatt Blake smothered a sigh, but managed to keep his tone reasonable; he remembered thinking much worse thoughts about his own father. And at younger than thirteen, too.

       So that’s how you want you and Jordan to be? Like you and your father?

      He fought down his gut reaction and spoke calmly.

      “If you don’t learn to finish what you start, your kids won’t listen to you anyway. If you can even find a woman who’d have them with a man who doesn’t keep his word.”

       Yeah, right. You’re such an expert on keeping promises.

      “I don’t know why Mom married you anyway.”

      “It’s a mystery. Finish.”

      The grumbling continued, with a couple of words muttered under the boy’s breath that Wyatt decided not to hear. He had enough on his plate at the moment, trying to keep the kid out of serious trouble, without expending energy on his language. If he didn’t straighten around soon, a few obscenities would be the least of his problems.

      Later, when after another battle Jordan had gone to bed, Wyatt went through his nightly ritual at the computer that sat in the corner of the den. Jordan wasn’t allowed to have it in his room, another bone of contention. But tonight something disrupted the usual process; a message alert window popped up. One he had hoped he’d never see.

      He went still. Maybe it was a mistake, a computer glitch. They were prone to that, one-time, inexplicable weirdness.

      For a long moment he did nothing, postponing the inevitable. A measure of how far he’d come, he supposed, that he didn’t dive in instantly.

      Finally, knowing he had no choice, he began the digging process that would take him to the program buried deep within the computer’s file structure. There was no convenient icon for this one, no listing on the menus, no easy way to get there. And once he was there, the encryption was so deep it would take him five minutes to work his way through