father would say.
Yeah, well that was because Cassidy seldom lost at anything.
Except when it came to Rourke McCall. Blaze had felt not even a twinge of guilt when Cassidy had confessed back in junior high that her dream was to someday marry Rourke McCall.
Blaze had never paid much attention to Rourke before that. He was tall, sandy-blond with blue eyes and a temper. At the time, he’d been a teenager, moody and full of himself. She could tell by looking at him even back then that he would never amount to anything.
But Blaze was already developing and boys were noticing. Cassidy, on the other hand, was two years younger, and a tomboy.
Getting Rourke to notice her had been a piece of cake for Blaze, who hadn’t really liked him but wanted to win just once. As it turned out, she’d not only beaten Cassidy, she’d ruined any chance her cousin ever had of ending up with Rourke McCall.
Blaze stared across the street, catching glimpses of Cassidy as she worked. Blaze still resented her. Probably because Blaze’s father still threw Cassidy up to her.
The worst fight she’d ever had with her father was over Cassidy.
“My whole life you’ve compared me to Cassidy,” she’d cried. “I’m sick of it. I’m nothing like her and I’m glad.”
Her father had nodded ruefully. “No, you’re right, you’re nothing like your cousin. She’s doing something with her life. She doesn’t just live off her parents.”
“Her daddy ran off and her mother is poor,” Blaze had retorted. “We’re not.”
“I’m not,” John Logan had snapped. “You, my daughter, are going to get a job and start growing up.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m cutting you off. No more money. You’re on your own.”
Blaze hadn’t been able to believe her ears. She’d always been her father’s favorite between her and her stepbrother, Gavin Shaw. How could her father turn against her like this? “You’re doing this because of Cassidy.”
He just shook his head. “You’ve always put your cousin Cassidy down, but it wouldn’t hurt you to be a little more like her.”
Well, Blaze thought wryly, she was damned glad she wasn’t Cassidy now. She wouldn’t want to be in that woman’s shoes for anything. Not today. Not with Rourke getting out of prison and coming back to even the score.
No way was Rourke going to let Cassidy Miller get away with what she’d done to him. Blaze was almost rubbing her hands together in her excitement. Antelope Flats had been too dull for too long, but Rourke McCall was about to change all of that.
Unless he was the one who’d changed. Unless all that good behavior that got him released early wasn’t an act. The thought ruined her day. What if he didn’t come back? What if he really had put the past to rest?
No, not the Rourke McCall she’d known, she assured herself. He’d just sold all of that bull to the warden so he could get out early. Good behavior and Rourke McCall…the two had never gone together, she thought smiling again.
Poor Cassidy Miller. Blaze couldn’t wait. Finally her cousin was going to get her comeuppance. It couldn’t happen to a nicer person.
ROURKE MCCALL WALKED out of Montana State Prison, stopped and, looking up at the wide blue sky, took a deep breath of freedom.
Eleven years. Eleven years of his life.
He heard his little brother get out of the pickup and come toward him. Lowering his gaze from the sky, he took Brandon’s outstretched hand and shook it firmly, smiling at the youngest of his brothers. Of his family, only Brandon and their little sister Dusty had kept in touch with him on a regular basis, and Dusty only on the Q.T. since their father had forbidden it.
“You have any plans?” Brandon asked as he led the way to one of the ranch pickups.
Rourke stopped to study the graphic painted on the pickup door. The words Sundown Ranch were printed over the top of the longhorn in a stylized print. New. He liked the old, more simple script that had been on the trucks since his grandfather’s time much better, but he was sure that a lot of things had changed in the eleven years he’d been gone.
“I mean, if you don’t have any plans, I have a few things going I could let you in on,” Brandon said as he opened the driver’s side door and climbed behind the wheel.
Rourke got in the passenger side. Yeah, a lot of things had changed. He tried to remember if he’d ever ridden with Brandon, who was only nineteen when Rourke had gone to prison. Rourke had only been twenty-two himself. “What kind of things?”
Brandon smiled. “Moneymaking.”
Rourke shook his head and leaned back against the seat, adjusting his cowboy hat. “Thanks, but I have plans.”
He could feel Brandon’s eyes on him. Unlike the warden, Brandon wouldn’t even attempt to give him a pep talk about letting go of the past, starting over, looking at this as a new beginning, forgetting he’d been framed for murder and had just spent eleven years of his life in prison because of it.
He closed his eyes and let the sound of the tires on the pavement lull him. He was free. Finally. Free to do what he’d promised himself he would do all those nights in prison.
He didn’t wake up until the pickup left the highway and bumped onto the dirt road. He didn’t need to open his eyes to know exactly where they were. He’d been down this road enough times to remember every hill and turn and bump. How many times at night in his prison cell had he lain awake thinking about the day he would drive down this road again?
He opened his eyes and rolled down his window, realizing he’d forgotten the exact smell of the sage, the sun-baked earth and summer-dried grasses, the scent of the cool pines and the creek.
He’d forgotten too how much he loved this land. The red rock bluffs, the silken green of the ponderosa trees etched against the summer blue of the sky or the deep gold of the grass, tops heavy, bobbing in the breeze.
McCall Country. Miles and miles dotted with cattle that had been driven up here from Texas by his great-great-grandfather when this country was foreign and dangerous and full of promise.
His memory hadn’t done it justice. White puffs of clouds scudded across a canvas of endless deep blue as the pickup raced along the muddy dirt road, still wet from an earlier rain. Chokecherries, dark as blood, bent the limbs of the bushes along the creek as the summer golden grasses undulated in waves over the rolling hills. And above a narrow draw, turkey buzzards circled, black wings flapping slowly over something dead below.
Rourke fought that old feeling of awe and ownership. He stared out, feeling the generations of men before him who had fought for this land, feeling its pull, its allure and the price of that enticement. No matter how he felt about his old man or how Asa McCall felt about him, Rourke was a McCall and always would be.
The pickup dropped over a rise and he saw it. The Sundown Ranch house. It seemed a mirage shimmering in the afternoon sunlight.
Rourke caught his breath, surprised
