Jesse didn’t know what time it was or how long they had all been sitting around laughing and talking together when she first smelled the smoke. At first it was the drifting sort of scent that made her think of fall and fire pits and maybe even camping. Then it got more pungent and harsher.

“Hey!” Jesse struggled to disentangle herself from Cal. “Smoke. I smell smoke!”

Cal was up in a flash. He and Laredo headed for the front of the house, no doubt to stick their heads outside to check the barns. Everyone else jumped up as well. They rushed out onto the porch and into the gravel parking area in front of the house. The shadows were just starting to stretch long. It looked like three o’clock or after with the sun’s rays striking the pasture with enough heat to curl the grass. The sky was blue, but Jesse could see a fine smoke filtering through the atmosphere. It was still full daylight, and that was why Jesse immediately noticed that there was an extra vehicle out front that had the wrong brand on the door.

“Cal!” Jesse shouted. She pointed emphatically to the Flying W truck parked behind their vehicles. “He’s blocking us in!”

“I’m calling the fire department.” Aria pulled out her phone. She and the other girls were standing just off the porch now as the men still tried to locate the source of the fire.

“Shit!” Cisco started shouting from around the side of the house. “Back here! Back here!”

Jesse ran for the hose. Cal was already there. She didn’t stand around to watch him drag the thing toward the sight of Cisco’s alarm. She turned the hose on full blast and then ran to the next faucet down at the barn. If they could get a hose long enough, they could have a second one spraying the fire.

“Don’t bother!”

The words echoed around the property while seemingly coming from everywhere and nowhere at once. The voice was immediately recognizable. Adam Connolly sounded like his half-brothers just as much as he physically resembled them.

Everyone seemed to freeze as they looked around to see where Adam’s voice was coming from. Cal continued jogging with the hose toward the flames licking up the back of the house near the kitchen. “Why are you doing this? What does it matter? Why would you destroy something that you think is yours?”

“Because it isn’t mine.”

Jesse drew back in surprise as Adam seemed to materialize right in front of her. He was about twenty yards from the fire’s point of origin. He was staring right at her. Jesse felt exposed and horribly frightened. This young man was not balanced. There was something very bitter and horribly dangerous about him. There was no doubt in her mind about it.

“You have my ranch,” Adam told Jesse. He pointed right at her. “Everything you have should have been mine.”

“Why?” Jesse demanded. “You’re a Hernandez. I’m a Collins. We have the same mother but not the same father.”

Something flickered behind Adam’s eyes. “You’re Joe Hernandez’s daughter. That’s what Avery told Paul Weatherby.”

“When?” Jesse called out to him. “When did she tell him that?”

Behind Adam, Jesse could see her family trying their best to fight the fire. The fire department would take ages to get there. This was most definitely the country. Met had run for the water truck they used to water stock during the dry months. Laredo was bringing in a tractor to throw dirt on the flames using the front-end loader. They were ranchers. They did for themselves even when the odds seemed impossible. Right now, Jesse’s job was to keep the criminal contained, keep him busy, and keep him away from everyone she loved.

“Does it matter when?” Adam scoffed. “Our mother was as much of a whore as our father!”

“If that’s true,” Jesse said with a shake of her head, “then neither of us gets that ranch. It didn’t belong to our mother. It never belonged to our father. It belonged to Rawling Collins. That ranch was in Rawling’s family since one of his ancestors applied for the original parcel at the assay office in Denver.”

The words seemed to sink into Adam’s brain, but they did not appear to make any sense. He shook his head. “Joe Hernandez owns that place! He always has.”

“No.” Jesse wondered what Joe had told this man. What had Joe said? What had Joe tried to promise him all those years ago in a motel room? “My parents left that place in trust for me until I turned twenty-one. Joe had the right to run cattle on it because he leased the land from my trust.”

“You’re lying!” Adam shouted. “You’re a damned liar!”

“No, I’m not.” She shook her head. “Is that what Joe told you? All those years ago, when you were still a teenager, did he tell you that he would give you the Collins ranch if you came home?”

“That place is mine. He promised!” Adam’s tone was rising until the shrill quality of it made Jesse shudder with revulsion. “Then Paul promised I could have my inheritance if I helped him get what was his.”

“Paul is a liar. Joe was a liar too. He lied to our mother. He claimed that he was going to leave his wife and his other family so that he could be with our mother. But in the end, our mother loved her real husband too much to fall for that.”

“Why would Avery lie?” Adam demanded. He swiped his hand through the air as though he were pointing to the other Hernandez men. “She has no reason to lie about you. Why would she want you to be her husband’s illegitimate child?”

“Anger and jealousy,” Jesse said softly. “She’s a very, very sad woman who can’t accept the truth.”

Finally, there were sirens coming down the road. In the distance, Jesse could see sheriff’s deputy cars along with the fire trucks. Aria had certainly gotten them to move. Jesse had never seen the volunteers get out here so quickly before.

“Where is Paul Weatherby?” Jesse suddenly asked Adam. “You’re driving his truck. Where is he?”

There was something in Adam’s manner that sent a chill down Jesse’s spine. She could see Cal and Laredo perhaps thirty or forty yards away still trying to put out the fire. The roof was in flames now. The old wood shingles weren’t doing themselves any favors when it came to holding up against the flames.

“Paul Weatherby was a liar,” Adam reminded her. “You said it yourself.”

“I won’t deny that,” Jesse told Adam. “I’ve told him that to his face. Why would I try to hide it?”

“He told me that this was going to be easy. He said that it was legal and it was my right.” Was Adam trying to convince himself or her? “I got tired of his lies. Then he got a phone call from Internal Affairs because of the investigation about my mother’s death.”

It was interesting to see that Adam did not truly consider Amelia to be Jesse’s mother too. His processing was off. There was something very wrong with him. His mind was not normal. Jesse took a deep breath and hoped that she was wrong. “What did you do to Paul?”

“I got rid of him.” Adam gave a nonchalant shrug as though it were the most obvious thing in the world. “He was a liar. He tried to use me to get what he wanted. He thought I was stupid enough not to know what was going on, but he didn’t know that I’ve spent my life dealing with people who want to take advantage of me.”

“I’m sorry for that, Adam.” Jesse swallowed the thick lump that wanted to choke her. “Nobody should have to grow up like that.”

“What would you know about it?” he asked bitterly. Then he moved closer. “You didn’t get raped in a foster home by some sick fuck who liked teenaged boys. You didn’t get thrown to the curb and blamed for trying to come onto that guy when his wife found out. Nobody blamed you for anything. You were the princess.”

Jesse didn’t argue. How could she? This young man—her half-brother—had been brutally assaulted as a youth. That kind of thing changed a person for good. It created anger and resentment and bitterness that could not always be dealt with in a healthy manner.

“What?” He twisted his face into a mask of nastiness. “You’re not going to tell me you’re so sorry and you know how I feel?”

“That would be a lie.” She shrugged. “My life was not all wine and roses. But I don’t know how you feel because it never happened to me.”

“Damn right it didn’t!”

“That didn’t give you the right to hurt Paul Weatherby,” she pointed out.

Adam scoffed. He looked over at the house. There were still flames licking up the back wall. The siding was blackened, and the roof was smoldering. The damage would be considerable.

Then Adam pointed at her. “You can’t tell me that you wouldn’t have hurt him if you had the chance.”

“Maybe that’s the difference between you and me,” Jesse suggested. She knew she was walking a fine line between being sympathetic and really pissing him off, but she couldn’t stop herself from being honest. “I wouldn’t have hurt him because that would have made me just like him. You, apparently, don’t care what hurting Paul Weatherby does to your prospects or your soul.”

Adam stopped for just a moment, and she could have sworn he was about to show remorse. Then he started to laugh. He wrapped his arms around his middle and howled like a crazy man. There was something almost animalistic about the sound coming from his mouth. It disturbed her deeply, and she began to back up.

“Freeze!”

Both Adam and Jesse froze on the spot. But it was Adam that the sheriff’s deputies were targeting. The two men had their guns drawn. Adam began to laugh again.

Then Adam turned and pointed at Jesse. “See? I’ll be much better off if I just let them shoot me dead. Don’t you think?”

“Adam Connolly! You are under arrest for the murder of Paul Weatherby.”

Jesse recognized Deputy Perkins and hoped that Adam wouldn’t do something horrible and try to commit death by cop. Fortunately for Adam, or Perkins, or maybe both, Cal and Laredo both tackled Adam to the ground just one breath later. All three Hernandez boys hit the ground in a tangle of arms and legs.

It was almost immediately apparent that Adam knew what he was doing in a fight. He managed to slam his elbow into Cal’s gut and push his hand into Laredo’s nose. But Cal and Laredo were used to wrestling angry steers. They avoided the flailing limbs and managed to wrench the man’s hands behind his back.

At that point, the deputies pounced. They cuffed his hands and had him belly down on the ground. Adam was struggling like a crazed beast and shrieking angrily about injustice. Cal stood up, and Jesse ran to him. She flung her arms around his neck.

The two of them stood in a brief moment of silence and watched the firemen work on the house while the deputies tried to load a still struggling and screaming Adam Connolly into the back of a squad car. It was like a scene from some horrible movie.

“Are you all right?” He touched her face as though he needed to assure himself that she hadn’t been hurt. His lips brushed her neck, her jaw, and then her nose before they settled on her mouth.

She kissed him back and let that be her reassurance that everything was going to be all right. Wrapping her arms around his neck, she held tight and let her fingers sift through his hair. The familiarity of Cal was soothing as nothing else ever would be.

“I love you. I love you,” she whispered against his lips.

“And I love you.”

He gently pressed his forehead to hers. For just a moment, the whole world around them receded and nothing existed but the two of them. It was blissful for those five seconds before everything came rushing back in. The smell of smoke was permeated with the spicy scents of burning plastic and rubber. The sound of glass shattering filled the air. The whole scene was dominated by the shouts of the firemen calling to each other and the noise from the big water tanks spewing every last ounce they could onto the flames belching black smoke into the sky.

“Are they going to be able to save it?” Jesse wondered. “My mother’s box is still upstairs.”

“That’s on the opposite end of the house,” Cal assured her. “It’ll be fine. They’ll get the sucker under control. You’ll see.”

“What are we going to do?” She watched the chaotic scene play out before them.

Cal might have been going to come up with another answer, but at that moment, Deputy Perkins appeared, looking more than a little frazzled. Cal reached out and grabbed the man’s shoulder in a brotherly gesture of appreciation.

“Thank you,” Cal told Perkins. “I don’t know what we would have done if you guys hadn’t shown up on scene.”

“Us?” Perkins chuffed out a huge sigh and put his hands on his hips. “You and Laredo are the ones who tackled him. That man is crazy. Can I just tell you that? I’m talking certifiable.”

Jesse felt a horrible weight in her belly. “The crazy part is that Paul Weatherby went to the trouble of finding Adam and bringing him here because he thought it was going to get him something.”

“It certainly did that,” Perkins said darkly. “I sent another car of deputies over to the Flying W. Paul was shot execution style and left out in the ditch by the end of the driveway almost directly under the ranch sign.”

“That’s sick,” Jesse muttered.

Cal shook his head. “No. That’s karma.”

Perkins only shrugged. “With what IA was saying about the guy, I think this might actually be the better option for the poor guy.”

“Poor guy?” Jesse asked incredulously. “You act like he’s a victim.”

Perkins and Cal were both looking almost uncertain. Finally, Cal was the one to speak. “The man put everything he had into one venture and then dedicated his entire existence to making that happen. He was the victim of his own single-minded pursuit of something that wasn’t really meant for him.”

“Then, I guess, in the end, he got what was coming to him,” Jesse whispered.

Cal wrapped her in a warm hug. “I don’t care about him. I care about you. Adam is put away. Paul Weatherby is no longer a threat. I think, finally, we can all focus on the good parts of our life.”

“I’m ready for that,” Jesse agreed. Then she wrinkled her nose and sighed. “As long as we can put this stupid fire out and get through your dad’s funeral. After that? We’re golden.”

“Golden,” he agreed.