CHAPTER ONE

      THE letter was as terse as a telegram.

      Return to the Broken B. Jess Bodine dying.

       Coulter City Hospital ICU.

      RD

      Caitlin Bodine wasn’t shocked by the news of her father’s grave illness. She’d known he was dying. News had a way of reaching her. It wasn’t that she still had many friends in Coulter City, Texas, but a man as important in ranching and oil as Jess Bodine was news anywhere in ranch country. Even in ranch country as remote as the plains of eastern Montana.

      Caitlin had agonized for months over the news of her father’s worsening health. Agonized, wrote letters, then suffered his inevitable silence when her efforts to mend the breach between them failed as abysmally as always.

      But then, her father had never acknowledged any of her other letters. Five years of utter silence from him should have been enough to convince her that their estrangement would continue to the grave. But that tiny spark of hope—the one she’d carried since she was a small child—refused to die.

      It was a fact that she’d always idolized her father. It was also a fact that her father had rejected her. Her childhood craving to be accepted and loved by him still had the power to torment her, still had the power to seduce her back to Texas for one last colossal heartbreak.

      Perhaps this time things would be different. Perhaps in the face of death, the old man’s thoughts about his only child had become remorseful. Perhaps he’d come to regret exiling her five years before.

      But the bitter reality was that it wasn’t her father who’d summoned her home, it was Reno Duvall. Reno Duvall, the man who hated her.

      Strangely, she dreaded facing Reno’s hatred even more than she dreaded another rejection from her father. Old memories stirred forcefully and panic sent a poison arrow through her insides.

      Reno would never forgive her. But then, Caitlin might never forgive herself.

      Reno Duvall walked down the hospital corridor to the ICU. He remembered Caitlin Bodine as an eighteen-year-old hellion, who’d dogged her father’s footsteps and engaged in a near cutthroat competition with his younger brother, Beau, for her father’s attention. She’d been a solemn, moody adolescent who hid her pain behind temper tantrums and frequent retreats to her secret place on the range.

      She’d been a child perpetually frustrated and injured by her failure to live up to her father’s expectations, a child so pathologically jealous of his younger brother that she’d come to hate the stepbrother—the rival—who’d become her nemesis instead of the rightful member of her family that her father’s marriage had made him.

      Had her jealousy of Beau been so bitter, so deep that she truly had caused Beau’s death, then allowed him to die? Witnesses had testified at the inquest that she’d done everything she could to save him.

      But she’d failed. She’d been the one to put Beau’s life in danger in the first place, running off in another wild temper to hide out on the range. She’d known about the flash flood warnings in the area, but she’d ignored the danger.

      Reno hardened his heart to the emotionally neglected child she’d been. Whatever had caused her tantrum that day, her selfish actions had set the stage for Beau’s death. Eighteen was too damned young to die.

      Though Reno had sent for her to come home to the Broken B, he’d loathed the chore. Loathed the notion of ever coming face-to-face with the girt—the woman—who’d