Eileen Wilks is a fifth-generation Texan. Her great-great-grandmother came to Texas in a covered wagon shortly after the end of the Civil War—excuse us, the War Between the States. But she’s not a full-blooded Texan. Right after another war, her Texan father fell for a Yankee woman. This obviously mismatched pair proceeded to travel to nine cities in three countries in the first twenty years of their marriage, raising two kids and innumerable dogs and cats along the way. For the next twenty years they stayed put, back home in Texas again—and still together.
Eileen figures her professional career matches her nomadic upbringing, since she’s tried everything from draughting to a brief stint as a ranch hand. Not until she started writing did she “stay put,” because that’s when she knew she’d come home. Readers can write to her at PO Box 4612, Midland, TX 79704-4612, USA.
This book is dedicated to my editor, Mary-Theresa Hussey, who is as extraordinary in her own way as the story’s heroine. At its best, the writer-editor relationship is a partnership that deepens over time, resulting in stronger, richer stories. I’ve been lucky. I’ve worked with the best.
One
I wasn’t thinking about dying. I wasn’t thinking much at all, this being one of those nights when a man didn’t want to listen to the noise in his head. I’d turned the radio up loud in an effort to drown out any stray thoughts, but that may have been a mistake.
Damned country music. Every other song was about loving and losing. So why did I keep listening to it?
I grimaced and drummed my fingers on the steering wheel. The wipers were slapping sleet along with rain from the wind-shield, and the wind was blowing hard. But I knew this road almost as well as I knew my own street. And I’d lived there all my life.
All my life…forty years now. Most of those years I hadn’t lived in the big old house alone, but I was alone there now. Forty years old and alone.
And getting dumber instead of smarter, apparently. I scowled at the strip of highway pinned by my truck’s headlights. Why had I let Sorenson talk me into hanging around for a drink after we shook on the deal? I wasn’t a complete idiot, though. Despite Sorenson’s good-ol’-boy bonhomie, I’d limited myself to a single drink.
“Come on, have another one,” the resort owner had urged. “On the house.” He’d tried to make out that the weather wasn’t a problem. We hadn’t even had a freeze yet.
Yet being the operative word. I’d held on to tact by the skin of my teeth—the man was a jerk, but he was the jerk who’d just agreed to use my company for a major renovation job.
“Hey, a man your size ought to be able to handle his liquor. You don’t want me to think you’re a wimp, right? Might start wondering if you’re man enough for the job.”
I’d just looked at him, bored beyond courtesy. “Anyone who has to drink to prove he’s a man isn’t one.”
I snorted, remembering that conversation. Yeah, I was some kind of man, all right. The stupid kind. The temperature was hovering just above freezing, visibility sucked, I had to be at a site at seven-thirty tomorrow morning and here I was, winding my way down a mountain road at ten minutes before midnight.
A sharp turn loomed. No shoulder along here. I took my foot off the accelerator and tapped the brakes. I intended to creep around that turn like an old man with palsy—an attitude reinforced when I saw the sign about guard-rail damage.
I hit ice halfway through.
My wheels were cut to the left, but me and half a ton of pickup kept sliding forward. The tops of a couple of pines whipped around in the wind behind the guard rails. Their roots would be thirty or forty feet below
