“Yes, I am.” Flynn flashed one of the smiles that had always drawn women to him like flies to a jar of honey. He had gotten his brown eyes and dark hair from his Latina mother, but he’d gotten his charm from his father, the girls’ uncle Matthew. His short height he could blame on Nanny Lucy, since she had been barely five feet tall.

All that oozing charm wasn’t necessarily a good thing because, when it came to women, the grass was always greener on the other side of the fence for both Uncle Matthew and Flynn O’Riley. Uncle Matthew was working on his fifth wife these days—Nessa’s brow wrinkled when she frowned—or was it his sixth? The way he changed wives, he would never live long enough to see a golden anniversary. Flynn had followed in his father’s footsteps and had flitted from one woman to another since he was fifteen. The only difference between the two O’Riley men was that Flynn had never married—or stayed with one woman long enough to form a relationship.

They were a far cry from Nessa’s father, Isaac, who had married his college sweetheart thirty-five years earlier and had pastored a huge all-faith church near Canyon, Texas, for the past twenty years. Nessa figured he never even glanced at the grass on the other side of the fence, and if he had, her mother, Cora, would have taken him straight to the cleaners. If religion could be measured on a scale of one to ten, Uncle Matthew would come in at a minus four, and her father and mother would each rack up a score of at least fifteen. Looking back, Nessa figured Uncle Matthew was proud of his only child, since he’d followed right in his footsteps, whereas her father probably had calluses on his knees from praying for his only child, who had rejected his faith and joined a more liberal church.

At that thought she glanced down at her knees. She’d spent plenty of hours herself kneeling beside her bed over not doing exactly what her parents thought she should. They’d tried to shove their religious views down her throat, and she’d rebelled by refusing to date any boy who went to their church. That meant sneaking around with bad boys—sometimes even meeting them at the church and going inside to make out in a Sunday-school room.