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CHAPTER ONE
ALL HIS LIFE, Jake Wilde had been a man women wanted and men envied.
At sixteen, he was a football hero. He had his pilot’s license. He dated the Homecoming Queen … and all the princesses in her court, one at a time, of course, because he had scruples—and because, even then, he understood women.
He was smart, too, and ruggedly good-looking, enough so that some guy had once stopped him on the street in Dallas to ask if he’d ever considered heading east to sign as a model.
Jake almost decked him until he realized it wasn’t a come-on but a serious offer. He thanked him, said, “No,” and could hardly wait to drive his truck back to his family’s enormous ranch so he could laugh about it with his brothers.
In a word, life was good.
Time blurred.
College. Three years of it, anyway. Then, for reasons that made sense at the time, he’d enlisted.
One way or another, all the Wildes had served their country, Travis as a hotshot fighter pilot, Caleb as an operative in one of those alphabet-soup government agencies nobody talked about. For Jake, it had been the army and a coveted assignment, flying Blackhawk helicopters on dangerous missions.
Then, in a heartbeat, everything changed.
His world. His life. The very principles that had always defined him.
And yet—
And yet, some things did not change.
He hadn’t quite realized that until a night in early spring as he tooled along a pitch-black Texas road, heading for home.
Jake scowled into the darkness.
Correction.
He was heading for the place where he’d grown up. He didn’t think of it as home anymore, didn’t think of any place as home.
He’d been away four long years. To be precise, four years, one month and fourteen days.
Still, the road seemed as familiar as the back of his hand.
So had the drive from the Dallas-Fort Worth airport.
Fifty miles of highway, the turn onto Country Road 227, the endless length of it bordered on either side by fence posts, the cattle standing still as sentinels in the quiet of night and then, almost an hour later, the bashed-in section of fence that seemed to have always marked the juncture where a nameless dirt road angled off to old man Chambers’s spread.
And he’d only stopped to check for IEDs once.
A record.
Jake made the turn onto the road, even after all these years automatically steering the ‘63 Thunderbird around the pothole by the bashed-in fence that marked the Chambers boundary. It was on the old man’s land, which was why nobody had filled it in.
“Don’t need nobody messin’ with my property,” Elijah Chambers would mumble if anyone was foolish enough to suggest it.
Jake’s father despised the old guy but then, the General despised anybody who wasn’t into spit and polish.
Even his own sons.
You grew up with a four-star father, you were expected to lead a four-star life.
