Not that Slade had asked for any advice as he’d loaded his pickup with a sleeping bag and duffel before whistling for Bo.

“Just take care of things. I shouldn’t be gone long,” Slade had said as the dog, with his perpetual limp and gnawed ear, leaped into the cab. Slade had slammed the door shut and felt the heat of his siblings’ sullen glares.

“How long?” Zane had asked.

“Don’t know yet. It depends.”

“Just be smart,” Trask had advised.

“Why start now?” Slade had flashed a grin to lighten things up, but the joke had fallen flat. Neither brother had cracked the hint of a smile; they just glared at him with their jaws set.

Great.

That hadn’t been too much of a surprise. Neither one of them had liked Valerie before the marriage, and their opinions hadn’t changed much over the years.

Slade had tried to let it drop as he climbed behind the wheel. Through the open window, he heard that crickets had taken up their evening chorus and saw the western hills had been silhouetted by the brilliant shades of orange and gold.

Trask hadn’t been ready to give up the fight. “You plan on bringing her back here with ya?”

“Valerie?” he said, just to get under his brother’s skin. As if there was anyone else. “Don’t know yet.”

“If ya do hook up with her again,” Trask said, “then you’re a bigger fool than I took ya for.”

“She wouldn’t be willing, even if I asked.” That was the truth.

“She’s bad news,” Zane reminded him.

“Don’t I know it.” But he’d cranked on the engine of the dusty rig anyway, executed a three-point turn in the gravel drive without a second look at the weathered two-story ranch house he’d grown up in, and hit the gas. He didn’t bother watching the setting sun light the sky ablaze behind the barns with their creaking wild-mustang weather vanes. His old Ford had bounced down the rutted lane, dried sow thistle and Johnson grass scratching the underbelly of the truck as it rolled past acres upon acres of fields dotted with cattle and horses, land he and his brothers had inherited from their father.

A red-tailed hawk had swooped through the darkening sky as he drove past the old windmill that sat solitary and still in the dead air. A good omen. Right?

He’d snapped on the radio, then turned the truck past the battered mailbox onto the county road. He drove through the small town of Bad Luck until he came to San Antonio, where he cruised onto I-10, the long strip of asphalt cutting dead east. He’d left his brothers, Texas, and the sun far behind him.

To chase down a woman who didn’t want him.

He had the divorce papers in the glove compartment of his truck to remind him of that sorry fact.