Chapter One
There were ghosts in the house. Rachel Austin could feel
them. She walked through the upstairs, going from dark,
empty room to dark, empty room. Remembering. Once this
house had been filled with laughter. But that was before,
when Daddy was still alive. Before that last rodeo ... and
that last bull. When he died, the laughter died with him.
Afterward her mother, Christine, had died, too. It just
took her seven years longer to quit breathing.
Rachel needed to cry, but there were no tears left in her
to shed. Tomorrow was the auction. Tomorrow this house and
the eighty acres that Pete and Christine Austin had owned
would be overrun with people. By sunset tomorrow it would
all be gone.
Rachel's footsteps echoed as she moved from the doorway of
what had been her parents' bedroom to the bedroom down the
hall. A faint moan drifted through the house. She wrapped
her arms around herself and shuddered. It was only the
wind blowing through a partially open window.
She pushed the door open, then walked into her room. She'd
never noticed how small it really was. She walked to the
single window overlooking the back pasture and stared into
the darkness, imagining she could see the lights of
Houston Bookout's home.
Houston. Just his name made her ache. It seemed that she'd
loved him forever. If she closed her eyes and thought real
hard, she could still remember the sound of his voice and
the feel of his fingers around her wrist when he'd first
asked her to dance.
Seventeen. She'd been seventeen to his twenty-six years.
Before the night was over, she'd been wild, crazy in love.
Nothing had changed. But that was three years ago. All the
while she'd been planning to leave, he'd been waiting for
her to grow up.
Her legs began to tremble as she turned her back on the
night. She couldn't think about Houston right now, or
about the fact that he assumed they would marry. There was
tomorrow to get through.
Her thoughts drifted back to her childhood. For years
their neighbors had predicted Pete Austin would go broke.
That he couldn't manage a dollar, let alone a small ranch.
Basically, they had been right. Every penny he had made
he'd put back into rodeo entry fees and travel expenses.
Now and then he would put by just enough to keep the bank
off their backs. The next bull ride was always going to
put him in the money. The next bull ride was always going
to be his last.
Then one day it was. It took Christine Austin seven more
years of struggling to pay debts before the bank finally
called it quits. But cancer beat the bank to Christine.
She died before the foreclosure notice came. Rachel got
it, and the bill for her mother's funeral, on the same
day. It had been a long time coming, but tomorrow it would
be over. Tomorrow she would also be homeless.
Suddenly panic struck. She bolted from the room and down
the hall, feeling her way in the dark. Then she was at the
stairwell and running down the stairs, stumbling once,
then again, in an effort to get out of the house.
But maneuvering on the lower floor was not as easy as it
had been upstairs. In preparation for the auction,
furniture was all out of place. Tables were piled high
with dishes and linens and pictures that had once hung on
the walls. Even the painting of the great Native American
Sequoyah, her Cherokee mother's ancestor, was lumped in
with everything else to sell.
The ghosts were closer here, hovering over the tangible
artifacts of a life they no longer needed, yet unable to
move on because of the daughter they'd left behind.
Rachel pushed her way past a chair, then two lamps, then
the old, battered desk where her mother had sat to pay
bills. Shaking, she pushed the screen door open and then
moved out to the porch, gasping for air. The need to move
beyond the miasma of failure in which she'd been raised
was overwhelming. When her feet hit the dry Texas earth,
she started to run. Past the split-rail fence separating
yard from pasture, toward the barn, then past the broken-
down gate hanging on the corral, toward the moon hanging
low in the sky.
Pain was everywhere now. In her legs, in her belly, in her
heart, in her mind. Finally she stopped and looked back
toward the ranch, to the barn and the house and the ghosts.
Tonight was the end of it all.
She started to scream.
Houston Bookout had been driving back and forth from Emery
Feed and Seed in Mirage to his ranch for more than twelve
years now. He'd started working for Dale Emery at the age
of seventeen, putting in a few hours after school and on
weekends. Loading fifty-pound sacks of feed for Dale
Emery's customers had put muscles on his body that no
fancy gym workout could match. At the age of twenty-one
he'd gotten a commercial driver's license and gone from
loading sacks to hauling them. For the last eight years
his job had consisted of driving an eighteen-wheeler for
Emery Feed and Seed. Although his work was steady, there
was no chance of advancement. Except for owning the store,
which on a ten-dollar- an-hour paycheck wasn't going to
happen, Houston had reached the apex of his employment
opportunity. It was enough money to get by on, but not
enough on which to grow.
By sheer guts and determination he held on to the 160
acres of hardscrabble land on which he'd been raised. In a
good year he could run about twenty head of cattle ...
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