She’s coming back.

Whitney Gable . . . the only girl I ever wanted to see walk down the aisle in white.

And then she did. To someone else.

Ten years ago, she fucked my world six ways to Sunday when she walked into that bar . . .

Two

Lincoln

The past

I got called home like a fucking dog. And like one of the obedient retrievers Commodore uses to fetch his birds, I came when I was called. That didn’t mean I had to like it. What twenty-five-year-old man worth his salt packed up everything and skipped home when his grandfather snapped his fingers?

That’s right. Me. It was what a good heir to a family fortune did.

But I didn’t just do it for the money. No, I did it because Commodore had hammered the family motto into me since I was four years old—Preserve and protect the legacy. That’s what Riscoffs did. We filled the family coffers with even more money than was there when we took the reins, and then passed it on to the next generation.

My father was doing a shitty job of living up to Commodore’s rigorous standards, based on the reports I’d been getting in New York. Apparently, he spent more time with his mistresses than he did in the office. This last message made it clear that Commodore had had enough. According to him, it was time for me to come back to Gable and pick up the slack.

I came, but I didn’t have to like it. Just because I was an obedient heir didn’t mean I wasn’t a pissed-off one. Which explained why I was sitting in a hole-in-the-wall bar outside of town, glaring at the tequila in front of me.

I could handle whatever responsibilities Commodore threw at me, but I wasn’t ready to come back to Gable. Not by a long shot. New York was in my blood, and I was climbing the ladder in a company where no one with my name sat in a corner office. I was proving myself and my worth.

Gable might be my home, but it had never been comfortable to live here. It was an enclave tucked into some of the most beautiful mountains I’d ever seen, but it was a town divided.

My family had seen to it over the years.

The Riscoff-Gable feud was the stuff of legends, and it wasn’t dying anytime soon. Everyone had chosen sides, especially with the latest incident last month when Commodore bought the Gables’ family farm at auction when they lost it for getting behind on taxes. Commodore didn’t need or want it. He just enjoyed taking something from the Gables.

A day after the sale, the house and big barn burned to the ground. The cops didn’t know if Commodore did it out of spite or if the Gables torched it because they couldn’t handle the Riscoffs owning it.

I didn’t fucking know the truth, and I didn’t want to know. The only thing that mattered was that I couldn’t go anywhere in this town without people looking at me and knowing exactly who I was, and half of them hated me. The anonymity I’d enjoyed in New York was stripped away the minute I stepped off the company jet.