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his mother’s hands and the bass baritone of his father’s voice. Pappy and Nana, grieving over the loss of their only child, had raised him not as their grandson, but as another beloved son. The loving, totally functional household he’d grown up in had prepared him for his position as the last branch in the Ashton family tree. He took responsibility for living up to the family name and running the spread seriously.
    In addition to what the family had always called the Homestead, a ten-acre lot consisting of the house, barns, paddocks, garages, bunkhouse and guesthouse, the Ashton holdings included outright ownership of ten thousand acres of prime grazing land and a perpetual lease on five thousand more. It made him, by default, one of the biggest ranchers in the area. That and his sterling family name had gotten him elected to his current position as Sheriff more than anything he’d done while wearing a badge in L.A. It had been that family name and the responsibility that went along with it in this county that had brought him home. And shockingly returned him to bachelor status.
    Caitlin had been the center of his world, his one true compass. She had only visited Mariposa once, and from that date on emphatically refused to return to the hills he had called home.
    That aversion to small-town life, even just visiting, seemed almost to be a phobia. Or so he had thought at the time. So he’d humored her, seeing his grandparents in short solo visits dissatisfying to everyone involved…but Caitlin.
    Bill didn’t think of those wasted years often, but when he did it was with a saddened remorse totally unlike his usual good humor. He’d been so taken by her drive, her ambition to be something other than the small town girl she was that he’d missed the inherent streak of cruelty and selfishness running through her. Missed her need to control everything in her environment, and most of all, to control him. Oh sure, he knew she manipulated him with her sweet words and long, searching looks. He’d known it from day one. But he loved her, loved the idea of being married to an exciting, sexy woman.
    When the time had come for him to come home, take up the mantle of tradition and family, to uphold and defend a ranching dynasty that stretched back almost a hundred and fifty years, his wife, the love of his life, had laughed.
    If her laugh had held anything but derision for the path he’d chosen for their lives, he might have shrugged it off, found another way to approach her, warm her to the idea. But her laugh had not been kind or even sarcastic. It had been cruel, and the words she’d said after had finished their marriage with the speed and precision of a rusty chainsaw. No man liked being told that the city held more charms than he did. No man liked being valued less than an address.
    At least the divorce hadn’t been too messy, he thought with an inward grimace. Pappy’s will stated that the ranch couldn’t be touched by anything other than blooded Ashton hands until the last in the family tree perished. Period.
    Bill couldn’t really remember all of the legalese surrounding it, but apparently it had held up in court, and Caitlin had been left to stew and fret over the fact that she had no right to anything except half of their joint holdings. With the judge’s decision still echoing in the courtroom, Bill had retreated to the mountains he’d grown to both love and disdain throughout the turbulent years of his youth and young adulthood.
    Like most teenagers, he’d gone through the stages of angst and rebellion that defined adolescence. He’d been contemptuous of his heritage, scoffed at the idea of staying in Mariposa, and been downright abusive to his grandparents. All part of being seventeen in America.
    He’d left home two days after his eighteenth birthday, looking for that undeniable something that footloose teenagers seem to see with the clarity of a mystic. He had seen the football scholarship to San Jose