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bowl flew from his hand. Cheerios and milk splatted onto the floor. Brady looked down at the mess and laughed.
    â€œGuess you are interested.”
    Ridge grabbed a roll of paper towels and handed it to Brady. “Clean up the mess,” he said. “And then you need to do those dishes. Shane and I are sick and tired of cleaning up after you.”
    Brady knelt and began cleaning up the cereal, grinning the whole time. “I’m thinking you’re the one who’s a mess, big brother. There’s finally a woman worth chasing in this town, and you’ve got all the time in the world to do it, but are you going to go after her? Nope. You’d rather go out there and play with that damned feebleminded horse.”
    â€œMoonpie’s not feebleminded. And what I do is my business,” Ridge said. “But Sierra’s a nice girl. Way out of your league.”
    He strode out of the room, surprised and relieved that Shane hadn’t had anything more to say about the volunteering issue. But when he snuck a glance over his shoulder, his older brother’s eyes were on him, dark and contemplative. Something was going on in his bossy big brother’s scheming brain.
    Ridge headed for his bedroom. The house hadn’t changed much since they were kids, so he, Shane, and Brady still had their boyhood rooms. His was a festival of all things cowboy, including old rodeo photos signed by past stars like Jim Shoulders and Jim Charles; a rope and a riding glove hanging on the back of his desk chair; and a pine bedstead that looked like it was made from a wagon wheel.
    Shelley’s cowboy novel lay on the bed. He thought about picking it up and giving it another try, but instead, he pulled an old-school composition book from a desk drawer. It fell open to a numbered list penned in the painstaking printing of a teenaged boy who took himself way too seriously.
    He’d enumerated all his goals at fourteen, just three months after arriving at Decker ranch. He remembered the night he’d written them out. Up to then, his only goal had been to survive each day, and he hadn’t even been sure why that mattered. That night, he’d been overwhelmed with the excitement of finding something he loved, something he was good at.
    The list started with learning to ride a horse “as good as Bill” and ended with winning the PRCA All-Around Cowboy title at the Wrangler National Finals, which Bill had told him was the pinnacle of cowboying. Beside each goal was the age when he meant to accomplish it and a box to be checked off once it was accomplished.
    Shane and Brady were wrong. Rodeo wasn’t about buckles and babes.
    It was about Bill. About giving back to the man who’d believed in him when he was a skinny, rebellious kid nobody cared about. Bill was gone now, but that didn’t matter. Ridge still wanted to make him proud.
    He ran his finger down the list. He’d actually won two championships before he was thirty, in bareback and saddle bronc. All the items were checked off but the last one, and until the wreck that destroyed his hand, he’d been on track to accomplish that too.
    Looking down at his hand, he opened and closed the fingers, opened and closed. It looked like he was barely moving, but he was giving it his all. There was no way he’d ever win the All-Around now.
    His biggest accomplishment of the evening was resisting the temptation to slam his injured hand into the desk and cripple himself some more.

Chapter 11
    Sierra felt like she’d spent her morning managing a herd of rampaging bull calves. It was such a relief to finally put the boys on the school bus, she thought she might melt into a puddle of exhaustion and relief right there on the sidewalk in front of Phoenix House. That would get the neighbors talking.
    Not that they weren’t already. Instead of assimilating into their new school in the nearby town of Grigsby, her boys were clinging together as