Laredo Hernandez put his hands flat on the smooth marble top of the sink. It was cool to the touch. He leaned forward and kept his head bowed so that he couldn’t see his reflection in the bathroom mirror. Nobody wanted to see that, least of all him. He knew he looked like hell. He felt like hell. He’d felt that way for years now. Ever since Helena had left him for that no-good saddle tramp Jerome.

Laredo reached for the shining chrome tap and flipped on the water. It took almost no time for steam to rise from the hot liquid spraying into the stainless steel sink bowl. He had paid the extra money for a top-of-the-line hot water heater. Growing up with eight people in an old ranch house and not enough hot water had taught Laredo that he never wanted to be without that one necessity.

Reaching for a fluffy washcloth, he soaked it underneath the tap and lifted it to his face. The searing heat seemed to leech the crud from his pores. Laredo wondered if the bathroom smelled of vodka since that’s pretty much what he had been drinking nonstop the night before. He couldn’t smell it, but then he couldn’t smell much these days. It was a side effect of the binge drinking. Or maybe he was just getting very old. God knew he felt like it.

Finally, he looked up and caught a glimpse of his reflection. The bathroom lights were off, but that didn’t do nearly enough to make him look better. Even in the dim glow of dawn seeping through the blinds, he looked ancient. His black hair wasn’t just curly or tousled. It was literally sticking up at all angles. The right side of his hair was mashed to his head, and he had red marks from his bedsheets creased all over his cheek and half his forehead. His blue eyes were dull and flat, and his face looked slack. Hernandez men were graced with an olive complexion that made them look tan all year round, and yet Laredo still managed to look pale.

“If I died tomorrow, I’d look the same,” he muttered.

“What?”

Laredo leaped into the air and came down hard on the side of the bathroom sink. His hip banged painfully into the marble, and he had to throw out his arm to keep from hitting the floor. His heart was hammering against his ribs, and he felt as though a gallon of adrenaline had just been poured into his unprepared veins.

Swinging around, Laredo glared at his nine-year-old daughter. “Bella! Knock or something, kiddo! You scared me half to death.”

But instead of being contrite, Bella only laughed. If Laredo looked horrible, then Bella looked amazing. The kid had his curly black hair and bright blue eyes, but her hair was bouncy and her eyes were sparkling. She had just started using ponytail holders to put her hair up on her own, and the lopsided ponytail was so damned cute that Laredo would bet she’d get a dozen compliments on the mess at school today.

“Sorry, Daddy!” Bella was bouncing from foot to foot. “But I stood at the other door knocking for like—ever! You never answered. So, I came in!”

The energetic little girl was already wearing her plaid school jumper, and if the crumbs on the front were any indicator, she’d had her breakfast downstairs with Mrs. Naranjo. The housekeeper arrived at the house every day at six in the morning to start cooking breakfast. It cost Laredo a fortune to keep Mrs. Naranjo there pretty much seven days a week, but he considered it a worthwhile expense. Besides, it wasn’t like he had money problems.

“Daddy needs a few minutes to get ready, kiddo.” Laredo figured a few minutes and a few hours were the same thing at this point. It didn’t matter either way.

“We got to leave in three minutes,” Bella informed him. “You always say we have to be in the car at seven fifty-five in the morning, and it’s seven fifty-two.”

Shit. He was that late? Where was the damn sun? Was it raining outside or something? And what day was it? Bella needed to have all her crap ready for her after-school activities, and right now, Laredo really didn’t feel like he gave a shit if she went to dance class or not.

“Daddy!” Bella sang out as she started doing pirouettes in his bathroom. “Hurry!”

“Get out of my bathroom and I will,” he groaned.

Why, oh why, did kids have so much damn energy? And why was he doing this fatherhood shit by himself? That had not been his intention. He hadn’t wanted to be a single parent. Did anyone claim to want that thankless task? Parenting was supposed to be a tag-team event. In fact, Laredo’s own parents had made a sport out of it.

“Okay, I’m going to get in the car,” Bella informed him. Then she turned around and pointed her index finger at him in the most accusing manner a nine-year-old could muster. “But you better not forget me again! You did that last week, remember?”

Like he could ever forget. Laredo waved her out of his bathroom and started stripping out of his baggy pajama bottoms and plain white T-shirt. He didn’t feel like himself anymore. When had he started wearing pajamas to bed? What had happened to the man who used to sleep in a bedroll out in the open in front of a fire? He used to stare at the stars all night and make jokes with his brothers about the constellations looking like sparkling genitalia in the sky. Now he was nothing but a desk jockey. Even his brothers poked fun at him for that. It was pathetic.

Laredo managed to pull on his suit, but when it came time to get his boots on, he sank down onto the bed and felt as though he were going to lose last night’s liquid dinner all over the plush rug in his bedroom.

He looked at the clock. Seventy fifty-seven. He wasn’t doing so well on time. It was going to take him another twenty minutes to get his damn boots on. Maybe he’d give up. Maybe he would just wear loafers or something. Businessmen did that, right? Not usually in the offices of the Hernandez Land & Cattle Company, but why was his company the trendsetter in Western fashion?

Yes. Loafers. That was the answer. Laredo got to his feet and threw his tooled cowboy boots onto the floor. For some reason, he actually felt angry with the damned things. They were some kind of sign. He didn’t know what, but they made him feel older and more tired than he really was. They reminded him of too many things that were no longer part of his life. Horses and Helena and all of those things about ranching that Laredo Hernandez avoided like the plague.

His dress shoes were sitting innocuously on the floor of his palatial walk-in closet. Laredo placed his hand flat against the closet wall and stuffed his feet inside the shoes. His boot socks were a little thick for these, but nobody was going to notice that. The socks were black knee-high affairs. At least they weren’t those patterned, neon-colored things that Helena had always worn underneath her boots.

Finally heading downstairs, Laredo avoided the kitchen. He didn’t care to see Mrs. Naranjo’s disapproving glare right now. He would get enough of that later on. The woman was there to make sure Bella got her breakfast and that someone packed Bella a lunch to take to school since she didn’t like the cafeteria food at her private school. Beyond that, Laredo didn’t need a woman fussing over him and bossing him around. If he had wanted that, he would have begged Helena to come back.

Laredo’s keys were not where he had left them. He stood and stared dumbly at the wall of his laundry room while his sluggish brain tried to remember where he’d hung the keys when he came in the night before. Unfortunately, Laredo couldn’t even remember having the keys, much less where he had hung them up. He couldn’t even remember coming home. Obviously he had, so where had he put his keys?

“Daddy!” Bella was shouting in the garage. “Daa-dd-eeeee!”

Laredo yanked the garage door open and leaned out into the cool interior of the cavernous space. “What?” he shouted irritably. “You’re yelling so loud I can actually hear you inside the house. What are you doing…?”

Laredo trailed off as he got a good look at his truck. He had a feeling that the keys were still in the ignition. Not that the truck was running. It was parked. Sort of. The front end was buried in his workbench. There were tools scattered across the painted cement garage floor. His motorcycle was lying on its side. And the back end of the truck was lodged underneath the garage door. Apparently, he had taken out the sensor on his way in, so the thing did not go back up as a safety measure. Nope. It was just sitting on his vehicle.

There was a honk from the direction of the street out front as someone drove by. No doubt his neighbors were enjoying the hell out of this. There wasn’t a resident of Denver that didn’t like it when a Hernandez got taken down a peg or ten.

“Daddy?” Bella was staring up at him with her hands on her hips. Oddly enough, in that moment she reminded Laredo almost too much of his adopted sister, Jesse. “How am I supposed to get to school?”

Laredo fumbled his smartphone from his pocket. “Let me text Uncle Darren. He’ll come get you.”

“Woohoo!” Bella started jumping up and down over and over again, and she did a bouncy little jig in front of his wrecked truck. “I love going to school with Uncle Darren! Gym Teacher Man to the rescue! Oh oh! Oh oh!” She was swinging her hips around in a fair imitation of the crappy shows he’d seen her watching on television lately.

Her howling was making Laredo’s teeth chatter and his head throb. Should he be glad or pissed as hell that his daughter loved his younger brother so much? Only a few months ago, Darren had been the loser. He was a washed-up football player with an illegitimate child who had suddenly cleaned up his act, met a wonderful woman, gained custody of his son, and managed to score a PE teacher position at Bella’s prestigious private school.

“Can it, Bella,” Laredo growled. “Go out front and sit on the steps. Uncle Darren will be here in a minute.”

Of course, Laredo needed to figure out how he was supposed to go to work too. If he could manage to pick the motorcycle up off the floor, it might still be rideable. That wouldn’t give him a way to bring Bella home after school though. Maybe that was better right now. It was apparent that Laredo’s recent after-school activities weren’t exactly child-safe in nature.

Between calling his insurance agent and a tow truck, Laredo managed to get his garage door off the bed of his truck by the time Darren showed up to grab Bella on the way to school. Bella was actually dancing around the front yard by the time Darren arrived at the curb. Laredo could practically hear the phone call from one of the homeowner’s association trustees. They hated Laredo anyway. He was a rancher. He might have been living in Denver for a decade or more, but that didn’t matter to them. They hadn’t wanted a cowboy moving into their posh neighborhood, and they didn’t like the fact that he sold land, cattle, and rodeo stock for a living. Of course, that was mostly because it pissed them off that the Hernandez family made ten times what other people did with their “low class” business activities.

“Wow.” Darren slapped Laredo on the shoulder. “I would say something else, but there just aren’t any words.”

“Shut up.” Laredo shoved his brother away. “Just get my kid to school and bring her home.”

“Will do,” Darren murmured. “You might want to seek help, Laredo.”

“Shut up, Gym Teacher Man.”

Darren only laughed off the insult. In fact, Laredo didn’t feel like that moniker had any sting left these days. Darren was just too damn happy with the way his life was going to care.

Laredo watched his daughter ride off with his brother before sinking down onto one of the decorative benches Helena had placed on his front porch. He wasn’t sure how long he’d been sitting there when the police car pulled up.

Great. That’s just what I need.

The officer was already smirking by the time he started the walk up to the front porch. He pulled out the little handheld electronic machine that spit out citations. “Well, Mr. Hernandez, we’ve had some complaints from your neighbors in the last twenty-four hours.”

“Twenty-four hours?” Laredo raised an eyebrow. This wasn’t exactly what he’d expected to hear.

“Well, more like the last twelve.” The name on the left breast pocket read JONES. “You took out four brick mailboxes and several shrubs on your way in last night.” Officer Jones was punching information into the machine at a furious rate. “Then you’re going to have to reimburse your homeowner’s association for the monument up at the entrance to the subdivision.”

“Excuse me?” Laredo was aghast. “Are you claiming that I took out the subdivision sign in the center median?”

“We have footage of you on the security camera. Do you remember when your subdivision voted to put in those closed circuit cameras? It was last year sometime, I believe. They thought there were local kids messing with the monument at the entrance, so they put it under surveillance.” Officer Jones dropped his little ticket machine just long enough to grin at Laredo. “Sucks for you.”

Laredo heaved a giant sigh. What did it matter anyway? He was already horribly late for work. He had thoroughly embarrassed himself in front of his kid and his brother. Now he was going to be the neighborhood pariah. Might as well pay his dues while he was at it. What else did he have to lose?