The man glared hard. "That's enough, woman. Hush."
"I'm not raising this kid. I won't." She walked back and forth across the room. "I've got my own son to raise. Your legitimate son."
Ridge cowered against the couch, rubbing his shoulder. It still hurt from where the woman had jerked him up. He was scared and hungry and had lost the graham cracker.
Then in the middle of the yelling and crying, Ridge heard sirens outside the house-sirens, strobes of flashing red and blue lights, a hard knock at the door. Men in boots and Stetsons and silver stars pinned to their chests marching into the living room.
Stern faces. Low voices. Serious tones.
Single-car accident. Excessive speed. Missed the turn. Hit the cement wall at the cemetery entrance outside Brooklane Baptist Church.
And Ridge never saw his mother again.
Chapter 2
Twenty-nine years later
For the first time in a decade Ridge Lockhart was coming home.
He circled his Evektor Harmony over Silver Feather Ranch-the hundred-thousand-acre spread sprawling across Jeff Davis and Presidio counties-that had been in his family for six generations.
A cheery sun peeped over the horizon, greeting him jovially. Hey buddy! Good morning. Welcome back to the fifth circle of hell.
His jaw clenched and his stomach churned and the old dark anger he thought he'd stamped out years ago by working hard and making his mark on the world came roaring back, leonine as March winds.
He was in town for one reason and one reason only. Do the best man thing for his childhood buddy, Archer Alzate, and then get the mothertrucker out of Cupid, Texas.
ASAP.
Ridge took his time coming in, buzzing the plane lower than he should have. Taking stock. Sizing things up. No matter how you sliced it, this was where he'd been hatched and reared. He could not escape his past.
Miles of desert stretched below his plane, land so dry a man got parched just looking at it. Land filled with cactus and chaparral flats. Land teeming with rattlesnakes, horned toads, and stinging insects. Land that claimed lives and crops, hopes and dreams in equal measure.
This land was a far cry from the cool, green country where he lived in Calgary. But damn his hide if he hadn't missed it. The Chihuahuan Desert. The Trans-Pecos. Cupid. Silver Feather Ranch.
Home.
And that was his personal curse. To hate the very place that called to his soul, the place where he did not belong, but secretly yearned for.
Throat tight, tongue powdery, he reached for the gonzo-sized energy drink resting in the cup holder and guzzled it.
Ah. Much better. Thirst quenched. Caffeine buzzed. Cobwebs chased.
Ready or not, here I come.
His chest knotted up like extra string on a wind-whipped kite. He dipped the plane lower, coming in, coming down.
Their paternal grandfather, Cyril, had left all four Lockhart grandsons two-acre parcels of land on each four quadrants of the ranch, with the stipulation that none of them could sell their places without approval from the entire family. Which was the only reason Ridge had held on to his house.
To the north, he spied Ranger's place. His brother had built an ecofriendly, solar home out of reclaimed wood and recycled everything.
Out of the four Lockhart brothers, he and Ranger were closest in age. Ranger was thirty-one to Ridge's thirty-two, but they were as different in temperament as wind and earth. Maybe it was because they had different mothers. Maybe it was because Ranger was a brainy astrobiologist and Ridge was an act-first-ask-questions-later entrepreneur. Or maybe it was because Ranger was a legitimate Lockhart, whereas Ridge was the bastard.
His two other younger brothers, Remington and Rhett, had the same mother. Lucy Hurd had been his father's second wife and the closest thing to a real mother Ridge had ever had. He'd been devastated by kindhearted Lucy's death from ovarian cancer when he was in junior high.
Army Captain Remington was twenty-eight and currently deployed in the Middle East. He had stuck a travel trailer on his parcel of land on the west side of the ranch for a place to stay when he was home on leave, but hadn't bothered to commit to construction. And the youngest, Rhett, was a PBR bull-riding rodeo star. He had built a rustic log cabin on the south end of the ranch in Presidio County.
Ridge flew over their places, taking it all in, but resisted the urge to buzz the east side of the ranch where his house stood. The house he'd built, but had never lived in. The house he hadn't seen in ten years.
Up ahead, in the dead center of the ranch, lay the landing strip put in for crop dusting planes. Around the landing strip were stables, bunkhouses, three barns, numerous sheds, the foreman's farmhouse where Archer lived, and at the top of a small hill, the extravagant mansion where Ridge had once stood on the front porch and rung that orange bell.