Chapter 1

      “Hello, Wyatt. How are you?”

      The woman’s low, melodic voice hypnotically wove its way into his bloodstream.

      Wyatt Colton stood in the doorway of the Crooked C ranch house, completely speechless and trying to remember if he’d somehow gotten drunk last night without having any memory of it.

      But he knew he hadn’t.

      He’d cleaned up his act several years back, substituting work to numb himself instead and to blanket the hurt he’d felt when she’d left him. Last night, like so many other nights, he’d been dead tired and had just fallen into bed, still dressed with his boots on.

      The same way he’d woken up this morning.

      But a hallucination was the only way he could explain why he was suddenly seeing Bailey, tall, golden-brown-haired and beautiful, standing on his porch, talking to him as if it was just any other day.

      As if nothing had ever happened.

      As if she hadn’t ripped his heart out of his chest, breaking it into a million pieces when she’d suddenly walked out on him and on their marriage without giving him even a single warning regarding her intentions.

      He felt as if he’d been torpedoed when the divorce papers had arrived in the mail.

      “Stunned,” Wyatt finally said, answering his ex-wife’s question when he was finally able to find his tongue and get it to work.

      His tongue might be working but his brain was another story.

      The first year after Bailey had left, he’d kept fantasizing about situations like this one. Scenarios in which he would open his front door—the door of the ranch house they had begun to build together—and find Bailey standing there. Sometimes repentant and contrite, other times smiling through tears, but always telling him that she’d been wrong to leave him. The scenarios would always end with Bailey throwing her arms around his neck and him forgiving her as he lost himself in the sweet taste of her lips.

      As time went on, the fantasies occurred less and less frequently until he was finally able to make it through a whole month without aching for her.

      Well, almost.

      However, the pain did ease up and he felt he was almost human again...

      And now here she was, standing in front of him, in the flesh, and Wyatt found himself suddenly catapulted back to the shaken shell of the man he’d been right after Bailey had left him.

      Staring at her now, he couldn’t help thinking she looked almost shy standing there. As if she didn’t know what seeing her like this was doing to him.

      “May I come in?” Bailey asked in a quiet voice, shifting and feeling somewhat awkward standing there on the front porch.

      Her fingertips were cold, colder than even the Colorado January air warranted. Wyatt looked almost like a stranger, not at all like the man she had loved and lived with six years ago. His shaggy, dark brown hair, bits of gray just coming in at the temples, framed dark blue eyes and a left cheek with a slight hint of a dimple.

      Had she made a mistake, coming back? Was he going to turn her away after all?

      For a moment it seemed as if Wyatt wasn’t going to answer her question. And then, when he opened his mouth, she could feel her heart squeeze in fear, afraid that he would say no and then close the door on her.

      So when Wyatt finally said, “Sure,” and stepped back to allow her access into the house, Bailey felt the corners of her eyes growing moist.

      Willing her tears not to fall, she walked into the wide, warm, inviting living room.

      “I like what you’ve done with the place,” she told him after a beat. She slowly looked around and took in the room in its entirety.

      Initially they had worked on this room together but hadn’t gotten nearly finished when she’d suddenly taken off.

      It all came flooding back to him, every detail, every feeling, as if it had been just yesterday.

      “It needed furniture,” he told Bailey with a careless shrug.

      Bailey looked around again, taking more in. They had only finished building half the ranch house before she’d made her mind up to leave.

      “Well, you did a nice job, Wyatt,” she murmured and then added, “Really,” in case he thought she was just mouthing empty words.

      Wyatt frowned. His guard was up, but even so he could feel her getting to him.

      She always could.

      His resolve kicked in. He wasn’t going to allow himself to be set up for another bout of mind-numbing disappointment, he thought fiercely. He’d barely survived the last time and had just gotten to the point where he was breathing regularly.

      He couldn’t go through all that again.

      He wouldn’t be able to survive it.

      His dark blue eyes narrowed as he looked at the woman he had believed would be by his side forever. The joke was on him, he thought bitterly.

      In the beginning it seemed as if Fate had purposely thrown them together when he’d left home and embarked on making a name for himself outside the oppressive Colton sphere of interest.

      All of his life he’d been overshadowed by his family and his last name. When his father, Russ, wouldn’t allow him to do what he’d wanted to do—insisting instead that his oldest son get a business degree so he could take over the family business—Wyatt had abruptly dropped out of college, left his family and taken to the road.

      His father had all but gone into a rage when he’d learned that his firstborn was following the rodeo circuit.

      It was on that same circuit that Wyatt had met Bailey-Ann Norton.

      A rodeo brat whose father took her with him as he went from town to town, following the circuit, Bailey had never known another life. Eventually she’d become a barrel racer.

      Their attraction was immediate and strong, but she hadn’t thought there was any serious commitment on his part. That hadn’t happened until Wyatt had learned his