Maybe because as good as his brothers had been at bronc riding, they hadn’t risen to the top the way that he had. They hadn’t had the passion for it. He had no doubt that if Jacob and Caleb put their minds to it, and decided they wanted to really compete with him, they would have.

But they didn’t want to. The same way he didn’t want to camp around fire lines in burning wilderness for a month at a time.

“You know...brooding or whatever.”

“Damn.” Gabe shook his head and took a long pull on his beer. “How long is he going to carry this?”

Caleb shrugged. “Clint was like a brother to us. And he left behind a hell of a lot more than either one of us would have. Jacob carries that. He can’t let go of it.”

“He takes living with guilt to another level,” Gabe commented, shaking his head.

It shocked Gabe that Jacob had responded to Clint’s death the way he had. Not because it wasn’t a tragedy, but because Jacob had taken living life with no responsibilities to a whole other level.

Gabe knew people thought rodeo cowboys were adrenaline junkies—and they were, no doubt about it—but Jacob was something else.

He’d been a paramedic, a rodeo rider and then a firefighter. Rodeo hadn’t had the life-or-death stakes Jacob seemed to look for.

But then Clint had died in a helicopter crash during one of the wildfires, and Jacob had changed. Completely.

His brother pushed his baseball cap back on his head, a black one emblazoned with a logo for the Logan County Fire Department.

“Clint was another Dalton brother, as far as I’m concerned,” Caleb said, his voice rough. “He meant the world to me, and to Jacob. Having to tell Ellie what had happened...” Caleb shook his head. “That was the damned worst thing I’ve ever had to do. I miss Clint. I hate that he’s gone. But I think Jacob feels responsible. Responsible for getting Clint hooked on the firefighting. And because he was supposed to be at that fire...”

“Sure, and if he’d been in the helicopter he would be dead. And we wouldn’t even have a kid of his to remember him by. I miss Clint, too.” Clint Bell had spent every day after school at their place, running around in front of their house, in the fields. Everywhere. He ate at their table almost every night, and slept over whenever he could.

He truly had been a Dalton in many ways. The lack of him now was something Gabe felt every time they sat down to a holiday dinner. Every time they had a barbecue.

He’d never lost a person he’d loved before, and the gaping hole it left in everything sometimes took Gabe’s breath away.

When Clint had married Ellie, she’d become part of their family, too, and she still was.

Jacob and Caleb were the closest brothers, and they’d always shared everything. They seemed to have split their pain over Clint’s loss in half. Jacob bearing some kind of burden of responsibility that had turned him into a gruff lone wolf. And Caleb doing everything he could to care for Ellie and her daughter.