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She’d been the one thing he’d been forbidden way back when the world had handed him everything and so, naturally, she’d been the one thing he’d wanted most.
    Then, he reminded himself.
    Because he’d been a wet-behind-the-ears eighteen-year-old. Selfish. Entitled. Out of control.
    Just like his old man.
    No more.
    He’d spent the past several years battling his impulses and perfecting his self-control. He’d learned the hard way that it took work and effort to make it in this world. And self-discipline. Lots and lots of self-discipline. Never again would his damnable urges win out over his good judgment. He wasn’t his old man.
    Wanna bet?
    The doubt niggled at him, but he pushed it away. He hadn’t come back to Rebel after all this time to face his own demons.
    No, he’d come back to face his pappy’s.
    Brett tried to remember that all-important fact as he headed up the drive and pulled to a stop in front of the main house.
    The place had been built back in the 1950s and still stood as a shining example of his pappy’s excessive taste. The house was a sprawling one-story that stretched clear across two acres. A porch wrapped from the back all the way to the massive double doors that sat in the middle of the front steps. But while the size and architecture were more than impressive, the house itself had seen better days. The trim was peeling. Several of the window screens were frayed and cut. A massive storm had sent a tree crashing into the far corner of the house and a gutter hung down, touching the ground near an overgrown flower bed.
    It was nothing like the house he’d walked away from all of those years ago and he still marveled at how ten years could cause so much deterioration.
    With the house and his grandfather.
    Climbing out of the truck, he hit the decaying porch steps and headed inside. The place was big. Quiet. His pappy was probably taking his afternoon nap. He thought about looking in on the old man and stalled just shy of the door at the far end of the hallway. The door sat half open, the shadows inside still and overwhelmingly silent.
    There was no Willie Nelson drifting from the CD player. No fishing show blaring on the TV. No crinkle of the newspaper. None of the sounds he remembered so well from his childhood.
    Brett’s mind shuffled through memories of the past night, of the man’s agitation as he’d sat on his knees and dug through his closet looking for a pair of boots that had long since been tossed out.
    Thirty years ago, as a matter of fact.
    But to Pappy, the boots had been brand new and he’d been the fifty-year-old ready to get dressed up in them and take his wife out to dinner. A wife who’d been gone for the past twenty-nine years, lost to complications with pneumonia when she’d been only fifty-one.
    But in Pappy’s mind Brett’s mawmaw had been alive and well and, damn, but he’d needed to find those boots.
    That had gone on into the wee hours until Dolly, the cook/housekeeper who lived in the main house with Brett and his pappy, had managed to soothe the old man and get him back to bed.
    Sleep. That always calmed him down and made him feel more like his old self. And after last night, Pappy needed all he could get.
    Brett stalled a moment more before he turned on his heel and headed for the study. He found the ranch foreman waiting for him.
    Pepper Goodman was a sixty-two-year-old Vietnam vet who’d been working at Bootleg Bayou since his discharge back in ’72. Like most of the hands at the ranch, he’d been born and raised in Rebel. A descendant of the Sawyers, he was Brett’s cousin four times removed and one of the few people besides Brett who actually cared that the ranch was headed straight to Hell.
    Bootleg Bayou was Pepper’s home and so he’d been busting his ass to help out over the past few months. He worked from sunup to sundown and then some, but it still