“It’ll be all right,” Helen Lafferty had said, her chin held high, her nose and eyes red from endless nights of crying. Mason had heard the fights, listened to his mother beg his dad to stay—to keep the family together, to stay with them. She’d forgive him the drinking. Forget the other women. Ignore his gambling.

But he’d left just the same.

“You go on to bed, Mason,” she’d said, swiping at her tears. “I’ll rock Patty to sleep out here on the porch.”

Only years later did Mason realize that Albert Lafferty couldn’t handle responsibility, a family, or just plain settling down. He’d never seen his father again and hadn’t missed him.

“Yeah, right,” he told himself now. His mother had never remarried and when she’d discovered she had breast cancer the year that Mason turned eighteen, she’d taken matters into her own work-roughened hands. Without insurance or a nest egg, she couldn’t afford the operation that probably wouldn’t have saved her life anyway. So, stoically, with no word to her children, Helen Lafferty had opened a bottle of sleeping pills, swallowed every one, and never woken up. She’d left Mason and Patty a simple note asking them to forgive her and begging Mason to look after his younger sister.

Well, he’d made one hell of a mess of that. Patty, he suspected, was in more trouble now than she’d ever been, and trouble, it seemed, was her middle name. As for Mason himself, his life had never been more complicated. He was considering suing Terri for custody of Dee Dee, Patty and old Isaac Wells were missing, he’d bought half the ranch and had old John mad as a hornet at him and, to top matters off, now Bliss Cawthorne, “the princess,” had strolled right back into the middle of his life.

His back teeth gnashed together as he locked the door of his apartment behind him.

He wouldn’t have believed that seeing her again would bring back a rush of memories he’d hoped to have forgotten. It seemed unfair to be haunted by the past, but then, he’d learned a long time ago that life was neither fair nor easy. Growing up in poverty, he’d developed a keen understanding of the fact that in order to even out the stakes in this life, a man had to have money and lots of it. His old man, when he’d been around, had taught him well. A few years later John Cawthorne had only reinforced that theory.

“Jerk,” Mason growled and wondered where was the sense of satisfaction he’d been hoping to feel, why had the warm knowledge that he was finally getting even escaped him. Somehow, he suspected, this all had something to do with Bliss and how he felt about her, how he’d felt about her in the past and what the future might hold for them.

Snorting in disgust at the turn of his thoughts, he headed down the stairs and to a space near the street where he’d parked his rig. Traffic was sparse on the quiet streets of town.