The three of them, Eli, J.P. and Cord, had gotten into a jealous brawl, and they might have done each other some genuine damage if several members of the football team hadn’t hauled them apart.

Reba had quietly sneaked away, and none of them had ever seen her again.

They’d gotten their hearts broken good and proper, the unholy trio, and it had been months before they’d been forced into talking things out at a Christmas get-together. Cord’s grandfather had shut them up in a storage closet and refused to let them out until they’d set things straight.

After that, their friendship had recovered, albeit slowly, and they’d forgotten about Reba and all the trouble she’d caused, over the coming years.

Forgotten, that is, until Carly showed up in the back room at Sully’s that rainy night, when they’d gathered for their weekly poker game.

Carly’s arrival had changed things for Eli, as well as for Cord and, he suspected, J.P., too. Even after learning that Cord was the girl’s biological father, not him, Eli still felt oddly disoriented.

Before, he’d been complacent, comfortable in his own skin. He’d known who he was—or thought he did: Eli Garrett, sheriff of Wild Horse Country, best friend of Cord Hollister and J.P. McCall, brother of Sara Worth, uncle of Eric and Hayley Worth. And so on.

Finding out he might also be the father of a young woman, well, that had thrown him. And the discovery that he wasn’t Carly’s bio-dad, oddly enough, had rattled him even more.

He’d been deeply disappointed, in fact. Examining that disappointment as dispassionately as he could—not very—he’d come to the realization that he wanted a wife and family of his own, among other things.

That had highlighted his loneliness; he was still plumbing the depths of that, and that snowy night, alone in his house, except for the dog, it seemed bottomless.

He ached with it.

Felt as if he might actually drown in the simple sorrow, just go under and never resurface.

Festus made a whimpering sound and rested his furry head against Eli’s right leg. His eyes, one blue and one green, were raised to his master’s face, full of sympathy.

“You’re a good friend, old buddy,” Eli said, his voice thick, the backs of his eyes smarting suspiciously. He patted the dog’s head and chuckled, a husky sound, partly choked. “I think we’d better do something constructive right about now,” he went on, scanning the room.

His gaze landed on the bedraggled Christmas tree in the corner of the living room. Sara and the kids had put it up, right after Thanksgiving, and decorated it, too.

There were still unwrapped gifts beneath it—a good woolen shirt, fur-lined leather gloves, a plaid bathrobe Eli wouldn’t have been caught dead in.