CHAPTER ONE

      IN THE WESTERN SKY, an orange sun sank slowly toward the hazy net of trees low on the distant horizon. It reminded Beau McCain of a large basketball sailing toward a basket. Bam. Three points. The light was gone and a shadowy dimness crept over central Texas.

      He gazed through the beam of his headlights, a slight grin on his face. He’d been playing too much basketball with his brothers. He changed lanes and shifted uncomfortably in his seat. The grin faded. He was returning to Waco after visiting a law firm in Dallas where he’d been offered a senior partnership, an offer he had no intention of refusing.

      It was a drastic move. Living all of his forty-two years in Waco, except for a law internship in Dallas, he had his own firm practicing family law and was doing quite well. His personal life was the problem. All because of Macy Randall. He was tired of waiting for her to see him as more than a friend.

      At his age, he wanted a home and a family and he had to finally acknowledge that wasn’t going to happen with Macy. He had to move on, start a new life and forget her. Moving to Dallas was a big step in that direction.

      Taking an exit off I-35, he turned by a McDonald’s then onto the street leading to his subdivision. He and Macy lived next door to each other and Beau had known her all her life. She’d lived down the street when they were kids. He was eight years older, but he was a sucker for those big blue eyes and her sad little stories. Single-handedly, she was trying to save every animal on the planet.

      Macy was a neonatal nurse who worked nights and Beau had babysat her strays more than once. She was never going to love a man as much as her animals. Beau wasn’t sure she saw him as anything more than a very good friend. She cried on his shoulder, told him her problems, but not once in all the years he’d known her had they progressed beyond friendship. He kept waiting, though. Like a lovesick fool, he kept waiting.

      Not anymore.

      Beau McCain was moving on.

      He turned onto a cul-de-sac that housed several condos. When he’d bought the place, he’d no idea Macy lived next door. She’d married and moved away to Dallas, but now she was back—without a husband. He’d asked her about it, but in the last seven years she’d only said the marriage hadn’t worked out. They talked about everything else, but her marriage was a subject she avoided.

      He remembered her wedding vividly. He, his younger brother, Caleb, and their parents had attended. Though he’d acted like a normal friend, all the while his heart had been breaking.

      Everyone in the neighborhood knew the scrawny, curly-haired girl who was always searching for a home for the endless array of animals she rescued. When Beau returned after his internship, the scrawny girl had turned into a leggy beauty with alabaster skin he’d never noticed before. But he knew where the freckles were on her nose, even though makeup hid them flawlessly.

      Following the divorce of her parents, he’d become her confidant, her friend. That was his first big mistake. The next thing he knew she was engaged—someone she’d known in college and had met again. Beau had never told Macy about his real feelings and he never planned to. Their lives went in different directions, then a short two years later they were living next door to each other and the cycle started again.

      His brothers teased him all the time about Macy and her ability to wrap him around her finger. He was too good for his own well-being—that’s what his brothers said. But that’s not how he felt. His father, Joe McCain, had called him “the bad son”