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Sophie’s fiancé. And then, before he could remember that he was, for the mostpart, a highly civilized individual, he planted his right fist square in Chet Wallace’s face.
    Chet went down on his backside, holding a hand to his bloody nose.
    â€œProblem? I don’t have a problem,” River said, settling his worn cowboy hat lower over his flashing green eyes. “Not anymore.”
    Then he turned on his heels and headed for the elevator. He was not a happy man, definitely. But he was feeling somewhat better. Definitely.
    Â 
    For the next week, Joe Colton was never far from his daughter’s bedside. His many businesses didn’t suffer, because he’d been slowly withdrawing from those businesses, from his family, withdrawing from life itself. He’d allowed life to defeat him, again. Had it taken almost losing his daughter to wake him up, shake him up, force him to look at his life, possibly begin taking steps to fix it?
    And when had it all begun to go so wrong?
    Michael. Joe sighed, his heart aching as he remembered Sophie’s words that first day, her garbled thoughts that, to anyone else, would have seemed as if she were talking crazy because of her concussion.
    But Joe knew differently. He knew what his daughter had meant, and was devastated that, as she struggled with her attacker, her thoughts had been of Michael. Of Meredith and himself. Of the family, and of how the Colton family couldn’t take another tragedy. Couldn’t lose another child.
    In a way, Michael had saved Sophie, and that washow Joe was going to look at the thing. It was the only way possible to look at it.
    Still, he had to look further than that, and he knew it. As he sat in the chair beside Sophie’s hospital bed, holding her hand, watching her sleep, he had to acknowledge that Sophie had been slowly slipping away from him these past years. All his children had been slipping away, visiting the ranch less and less, avoiding the family that was no longer a family.
    At least not the family it had been, the family he and Meredith had brought into the world, added to with adopted and foster children after Michael’s death, family they’d formed into a solid, unbreakable, unshakable unit.
    So when had it all begun to change? With Michael’s death? Should he at least start there?
    Probably.
    Joe and Meredith had been raising five children. Rand, the oldest. The twins, Drake and Michael. Sophie and the baby, Amber. Life was good, better than good. Joe Colton was a rich, self-made man, with oil and gas interests, major investments in the communications industry. Meredith had even convinced him that it was time he gave something back, so that he’d run for the United States Senate and been elected to represent California.
    Life was so good. So very good.
    And then Michael and his twin had taken their bikes out for a ride, and Michael had been run down by a reckless driver. Dead, at the age of eleven, and while his father was away in Washington, instead ofbeing home where he belonged. Home, keeping his children safe.
    Joe pulled a handkerchief from his jacket pocket and wiped his forehead. His body was hot, his muscles tired, his brain stuffed with memory toppling over memory, few of those memories good.
    Joe had resigned from the Senate, come home and made a jackass out of himself. He didn’t see Meredith’s grief. He didn’t see Drake’s special loss, the loss all his children had suffered. All he saw was his own pain, his own guilt. And when Meredith finally suggested they have another baby—not to replace Michael, surely, but because having another child to love might help them all heal—another bomb had dropped into Joe’s shattered life.
    He was sterile. How could that be? But it was true. He’d caught the mumps from a child at the nearby Hopechest Ranch, a home for orphaned children he and Meredith often visited, and now he was sterile. He could not give