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my best friend.”
    “You were gone for seven months!” She gritted her teeth against the old hurt. “You never called or wrote, but I watched that damned talent show every week and cheered you on. Then the next thing I heard, you were dating Amanda Lang from the show. I figured you made your choice. You wanted no part of me or my baby. So, I made mine.”
    “Amanda and I were and are just friends. The media blew that whole duet thing out of proportion. It wasn’t until I found out you were married and gave away my little girl that we became friends with benefits.”
    The memory of watching them together on the show churned inside her. Maybe the media had taken an innocent friendship of two teenagers and attached a connotation that wasn’t there. Still, he couldn’t deny he and the blond, green-eyed pop star started dating two weeks after he returned to Nashville after his winning the show and had been in an on again-off again relationship for years.
    He looked into his glass of whiskey. “I’m sorry I didn’t call or write. I was eighteen and scared shitless. I had to concentrate on winning, but the whole time I was thinking about you.”
    She laughed, but instead of coming out bitter, it scratched and resounded with too much raw pain. “You were scared? What the hell do you think I was? I was seventeen and pregnant. My father was dying with a brain tumor, and I had a ranch to run.”
    He grabbed her arm when she spun away. “I had to sing in that competition. Otherwise, it would’ve taken ten years to get to the kind of success I got from winning America’s Rising Star . If I ever got that chance again. My mother never did. This place killed her. I couldn’t let that happen to me. Or to you and our baby.”
    She swallowed but couldn’t work her constricted throat.
    “I wanted you to come with me.” His voice dipped low enough it might have been on the verge of cracking. “I wanted you and our baby, Abigail. You are the one who turned your back on me. You’re the one who couldn’t wait to fall into bed with my best friend.”
    Oh, how she wished she could tell him the truth about her and Mike, but she wouldn’t. She glared at his hand on her upper arm, then at him. “You’re drunk. Let go, now.”
    He stepped back, letting go. She was amazed at how calm she’d sounded, because inside her a twister had taken up residence. Her heart raced and her jaw and hands ached from clenching tightly. “You knew why I couldn’t run off to Nashville with you and live on dreams and fairytales. Mike understood, and he was here when I needed him. He gave me what you wouldn’t.”
    But neither of them knew the real reason she didn’t go with Seth.
    When she reached the grass again, she turned toward him and folded her arms in front of her. “If you’re thinking about staying here, you can forget it. I don’t want you around. My being divorced has nothing to do with you. Mike is still Emily’s father, and that’s how it’s going to stay.”
    She blinked against the burn in her eyes. Damn, if she didn’t soon get out of here, she’d start bawling. “Go back to your fast cars and even faster women. Go back to your stadiums full of groupies and your high life as a Grammy-winning superstar. McAllister, Texas, has nothing for you. It never has.”
     

 
    Chapter 2
     
    Seth walked up the stone pathway to the front of the Spanish style house of the Circle R Ranch. He had a lot of fond memories of the old place. Carolann always had a way of making him feel welcome and wanted.
    Dear God, how he’d wished his mother could have been more like her when he was little. Then after his father had changed and become mean and started hitting him, he wished he could have moved in with the Ritters. That he and Mike were real brothers and he wouldn’t have to go home ever again.
    He looked past the barn. New white paint reflected the late afternoon sun. Black Angus cattle fed on the grass and sleek horses stood in the