Chapter One

      Folding up the collar of his insulated, sherpa-lined denim coat, Ryder pulled the door of the big barn shut and lifted his shoulders in an attempt to close the gap between the brim of his black felt hat and the edge of his woolly collar. It was the cowboy’s lot to freeze his ears in winter and burn his skin in summer, but neither the summers he and his brothers had spent at Loco Man Ranch nor a childhood in his native Houston had prepared Ryder Smith for an Oklahoma winter. An impending ice storm to bring in the new year was just one of the unusual weather events he’d experienced since he and his brothers had taken up permanent residence on the two-thousand-acre ranch they’d inherited from their late uncle. Still, in the past nine months, Ryder had found ranch life more to his liking than he’d expected, especially when it came to the horses.

      His guilt at having been the initial cause of this move from Houston to Oklahoma had waned as his older brothers had both found wives and established their own families. Wyatt and Jake were happy, and that helped, but a mountain of guilt remained.

      Taking comfort from the whickers and thumps of the feeding horses tucked into their cozy stalls, Ryder pushed away thoughts of guilt and tragedy as he set out through the cold of early January toward the recently remodeled old ranch house. While the ranch belonged to the Smith brothers, the ranch house had been inherited by their late uncle’s stepdaughter, Tina, who had intended from the beginning to turn the place into a bed-and-breakfast. As Tina was now his sister-in-law, that was not as much of a problem as Ryder had feared it would be.

      His oldest brother, Wyatt, plus Tina and Tina’s seven-year-old son, Tyler, occupied the house. Jake, the middle Smith brother, along with his new wife, Kathryn, and his son, Frankie, now four, lived in War Bonnet, the small town just to the west of the ranch. That left the modest, remodeled bunkhouse as Ryder’s private domain, though he took his meals in the kitchen of the main house with the family.

      Drawing near the expansive carport, Ryder saw that two of the extra bays were filled with pickup trucks. One, a double-cab dualie, he recognized as that of their good friend and nearest neighbor, Stark Burns, the local veterinarian. The other, also a double-cab with dual rear wheels, bore Texas plates and looked brand-new, despite the mud and dust insulting its shiny black paint.

      Ryder had been thinking about buying his own truck, but they already had half a dozen vehicles on the ranch, including two trucks, Tina’s hulking SUV, two ATVs and the little sedan his sister-in-law had brought with her from Kansas, which had been given over to him. He appreciated the gesture, but at six feet three inches and 225 pounds, he found the compact car a tight, uncomfortable fit.

      Deliberately walking between Stark’s truck and the black dualie, Ryder took careful stock of the new vehicle. When he spied the chrome emblem just above the wheel well next to the driver’s door, he stopped. He’d seen that emblem before, on the rodeo prize trucks exhibited at the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo. That event wasn’t scheduled until the end of March, but the national rodeo finals had taken place in Las Vegas less than a month ago. Looked like they had some sort of rodeo royalty visiting.

      Ryder took the steps up to the backdoor stoop in two long strides and let himself into the warm, fragrant kitchen that was the heart of the house. Jake’s wife, Kathryn, rolled out a piecrust on the stainless-steel island. As expected, Wyatt and two others sat hunched over coffee cups at the rectangular wrought-iron table at the back of the large, completely remodeled kitchen, while Wyatt’s wife, Tina, relaxed in her chair, her hands folded over her distended belly. The shock of her pregnancy coming so soon after their wedding had given way to the shock of learning she was carrying twins. Ryder couldn’t help worrying about her, but at the moment his attention was focused on the others at the table.

      One of the visitors was indeed Stark Burns, whose long, lanky frame could not be mistaken. The other was markedly more petite and shapely, with long dark hair flowing down her back from beneath a brown felt hat with the tall, pinched crown and sharply folded brim of what was known as the rodeo crease. The hat was a little ornate for daily wear, the brim being